Comment by somenameforme | Hacker News Reader

Comment by somenameforme | Hacker News Reader

A highly insightful quote, oddly enough from Jurassic Park:

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John Hammond: I don't think you're giving us our due credit. Our scientists have done things which nobody's ever done before.

Dr. Ian Malcolm: Yeah, yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should.

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Imagine this were possible. You'd have just destroyed what is likely the primary reason that the past ~80 years have been this weird blip in history where there's been no major and unrestrained war between two world powers. The most obvious embodiment of this is the reason that the Cold War is now called the Cold War, and not WW3. There's also the reality that in this new WW3 which we'd near to immediately create, we'd likely see the rapid emergence of the chemical, biological, and other weapons that every major nation totally aren't developing.

Of course we do stand a good chance of destroying ourselves with nukes, but it's not entirely clear to me that we stand less of a chance of destroying ourselves without them. And adding to this equation is that if the nukes are gone on day 1, then WW3 starts on day 2.

> Of course we do stand a good chance of destroying ourselves with nukes, but it's not entirely clear to me that we stand less of a chance of destroying ourselves without them.

The problem with nukes is they're an absorbing state. Once the nuclear war happens there's no retries. Nukes present an x% chance of near-extinction over the next T years. That x% goes up as T goes up, asymptoting to 100% as T becomes sufficiently long, assuming no ground-breaking paradigm shift in global cooperation such as a single world government, which won't happen in our lifetime due to how hardwired nationalism and nativism is. Each generation, we're going to keep rolling the i.i.d. nuclear dice and x% will go from 2% to 10% to higher as T goes up, then eventually it'll happen. Recall that it almost happened in the Cold War, only one random person who stopped it is the reason you're alive.

The main argument I'd accept for nukes is that we need to reduce hot war in the short-term to accelerate economic and scientific progress, which will then reduce other civilization-scale problems (like climate change, pandemics, cancer treatments, diversifying life to other plants) to a point where the perpetuation of the nuke existential risk becomes justified.

FWIW I agree with you on literally every single point. Where we may differ is I also see far more viable threats. It's not just nukes but biological weapons (which could very easily prove a far greater threat than nukes) and then the countless number of ever-creative ways that the universe has to kill us: asteroids, super volcanoes, unfortunate gamma ray burst, etc. It seems fairly safe to say that all those living on any planet, anywhere, will inevitably face an extinction level event.

The only way to beat the game is to expand. We've lost countless civilizations on Earth, but we thrive yet because we spread far and wide. The same will be true on a planetary scale. WW3 will not only likely set back humanity many decades, if not centuries, but it's not like that it will be the War to End All Wars. As we start to regrow, tensions and conflicts will once again emerge, and we'll be back to killing each other en masse soon enough, repeating the cycle all over again.

The fact that our reaching the window in time to viably consider expanding to other planets corresponds basically perfectly to the window in time which we become capable of exterminating ourselves probably goes a long way towards explaining the Fermi Paradox. I doubt power seeking behavior is unique to our species. And war has the allure of power, control, wealth, and all that. And colonizing an inhospitable rock has, to most, all the allure of punching oneself in the face.

There's a decent chance we're already watching the prologue to WW3, we just don't know it yet.

With absolutely no information about the future, there's actually no way to claim anything has a 'decent' chance.

We have the present, where we got:

* Russia showing how to get ahead with invading your neighbors for conquest in 21st century

* Everyone else with expansionist plans taking notes and making schemes

* Russia again, pouring gasoline to every fire they see

* And the usual powder keg that the Middle East is

Meanwhile nationalism is on the increase everywhere, military spending is breaking records in anticipation. Millions of people relocate because of wars and warming climate. So it's looking to me like this one will get a lot bigger before it dies down. How big before it counts as a World War?

Sure, but that "prologue" could a couple thousand years (or more) for all we know. ;)

We aren't though. No current national governments are itching for a WW like they were in WW1 and WW2, plus now we have nukes. Possibly the only outlier is Kim Un who seems to think he can scare S. Korea into joining his clown show.

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