Hacker News Reader

I'm worried more about nuclear war, which would very quickly end the human species.

Life on Earth would continue but it would not be sapient.

Other celestial bodies do not have this problem we've self-inflicted.

Why nuclear war? Global warming/heating will cause drastic resource shortages... people go to war when they can't feed themselves. An unstable world increases the probability of nuclear war, especially accidental nuclear war.

View on HN

I argued with a friend of mine about climate change. His first instinct was to dismiss it with a shrug: "So what if sea levels rise a little, we'll just have to move inland".

We really don't know how much instability human civilization will tolerate before devolving into slinging nukes around. Why even fuck with that possibility?

I know war and tension have always been part of the modern era, but it does seem like we're going back to cold war levels of tension again. U.S. vs Saudi Arabia. U.S. and Europe vs Russia. India vs Pakistan. North and South Korea (although it's been like that for a long time). One "Archduke Ferdinand" event and things might get ugly. With as much internal tension that we see inside the US right now, politicians might not be so reluctant to go to war. Giving citizens a common enemy might calm things domestically.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com