And how he responded to all of this -- became a doctor, spent the rest of his life trying to minimize suffering in the world. And still believes dropping the bomb was right.
This goes against the folk-wisdom and fear-mongering present in a lot of popular culture, but it isn't true.
In the developed world fertility rates are below unity. Oil, at it's recent peak was competitive with solar. Resources aren't going to run out, the prices are just going to change – some resources will have to be more aggressively recycled, others will have to be replaced. Billionaires are thinking about asteroid mining. Nobody in the developed world is going to start wars over shortages.
There's a huge amount of arable land which is either unused or grown with only the most primitive techniques. Modern agriculture requires a fairly advanced economy, but it is orders of magnitude more productive.
"Resources are scarce" is a very believable lie, and it's easy to misuse statistics to prove it's true.
Remember "peak oil"? It wasn't true before and now nobody really cares that much.
The best car in the world is American and electric. In a few years they'll be selling one suitable for the middle class. We don't _need_ oil for energy, but we're going to use it until the economies of developing technology overtake the increasingly more costly fossil fuels.
In a generation or two people will stop fearing nuclear, and fusion will become economically viable.
we are no different than then, sure we think nowadays technology seems able to change everything, but before it was the same. Humans have always been innovating and increasing efficiency, yet they have always been fighting.
Modern resource worries would only be made worse through armed conflict over those resources, for basically all parties.
"Most people in both politics and general society think that we need to innovate our way out of the sustainability problems that we're having. What we forget in saying this is that we innovated our way into this problem in the first place."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0101mkOuGE
Transcript/discussion:
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3efobv/sander_...
... and then you wake up.
Note this is explicitly excluding people living in or watering the desert (or situations where this is an apt metaphor).
MAD has worked pretty well so far. It seems almost certain that there would have been a massive third World War by now if nuclear weapons hadn't been invented. But that doesn't mean it can't ever happen, especially since MAD is a lot harder to work with in a multi-polar world (there are currently nine countries with nuclear weapons).
https://medium.com/bull-market/violent-warfare-is-on-the-wan...
Another factor is that the age of commercial airliners and the global transport systems has made efficient global migration & trade a reality for decades now. What citizens would accept attacking their brothers and sisters in another country, attacking their trading partners with whom they make their livings? Perhaps this is now the quintessential limiting factor in making war.
Um, combined with societies becoming more sex-positive, we are edging closer to realizing the mantra Make Love, Not War!
You might want to take a look at the data of import / exports for countries in Europe before WWII. Being someone biggest trading partner didn't stop anyone's attacks.
The bitter truth that Russians have to deal with is that most of the population is so susceptible to being brainwashed, they will gladly turn on their brothers and sisters after a few years of watching state-controlled media.
Deterrence is a good thing indeed, as long as one has nukes...
But is the world really better today?
> a WW2-scale war is essentially impossible,
I don't think so. Mankind never learns. It's just a matter of time before we go back to 'savage' mode on a global scale. it's very easy for governments dehumanize people, and propaganda has never been as powerful as today. Once the 'ennemy' is reduced to something less than human, it's easier to make others torture,enslave or kill him. 1,1000 or 10 millions it doesn't matter.
Historically death from war is the result of a very small percentage of the global population acting violently. It is not the result of a majority of people acting violently.
Simple proof: what percentage of the world population belonged to the side of the aggressors in WW1 or WW2?
You can apply the same premise to any historical scenario. What percentage of Cambodians were involved in the massacres committed by Pol Pot's regime? What percentage of North Koreans are involved in violently repressing their fellow North Koreans? The general answer is obvious: most North Koreans are peaceful, most Cambodians were peaceful, rather than savages.
Yes, the world is getting drastically better.
Living standards are much higher and continue to climb. Child / infant mortality is drastically lower. Our ability to treat, cure, or wipe out diseases is far beyond anything from 50 years ago. Large scale starvation is becoming extremely rare.
War between leading nations hasn't occurred in 70 years, a record likely unmatched in recorded history.
I wish I believed this but I'm convinced that most people are peaceful or at least non-violent because they have no other option. They do not ever find themselves in a position where they have the power to inflict violence and death on others for personal gain without risk of punishment.
I'm convinced that most people, given the right set of circumstances are capable of the most heinous acts of violence and the only thing stopping them is the power and resources to do so.
I feel like truly 'good' people are the exception, not the general rule.
However, to keep things in perspective I have highlight 3 recent wars/genocides:
1. The Great African War/the African World War (1998-2003): 5.4M deaths (some estimates as high as 20M); 2. Bosnian Genocide (1992-1995): 100,000 deaths; 3. Darfur Genocide (2003-ongoing?): 500,000 deaths and counting, 3 million displaced.
While my examples are no where near the scale of WW2, perhaps hidden in there is a much larger human tragedy. Namely how few people are familiar with the existence of these 3 modern events that took the lives of 6M people in the last 20 years.
Basically there is a place in the world that is consistently behind the rest - sub saharan Africa - where all your examples, other than the one in Bosnia, came from.
And Bosnia is arguably a very important exception, at least I don't recall any other genocides in the developed world since 1950.
If like you say "essentially everybody" has heard of these wars/genocides, then I stand corrected the great human tragedy is not that we are ignorant of what is happening in the world but apparently that we should only concern ourselves with deaths/wars/genocides in the "developed world".
Edit: > I don't recall any other genocides in the developed world since 1950.
How about the ingeniousness populations in Brazil, 2 of which I am aware are on the brink of extinction in the last 30 years. Yet, despite being a world top 10 economy, you/some may say Brazil is not part of the developed world, or highlight these genocides are not driven by war so much as "progress"; therefore, you may not consider these genocides.
The Iraqi body count project concluded 174,000 Iraqis died due to the conflict (both the invasion and civil war), between 2003 and 2013 (with between 112,000 and 123,000 being civilians).
The Associated Press reached a similar number, based on the Iraqi Health Ministry.
The reports claiming upwards of a million died aren't even remotely credible, and were all based on extremely small household surveys.
The Iraq Body Count project only counted cases in which individuals killed were specifically recorded in the media. By their own admission this was intended as a lower bound estimation and likely to exclude a large proportion of deaths.
The only scientific peer-reviewed studies ought to be more accurate and estimate much higher numbers of deaths.
I noted that he still (understandably) doesn't forgive the Japanese, but that could be entirely separate from the decision to use atomic weapons against civilians.