If the world were a village of 1,000 people | Hacker News Reader

If the world were a village of 1,000 people

gdrc.org

36 pointsmdup9 comments

Published in 1990. Quite a few things have changed in the past 25 years. But interesting nonetheless.

I think everything except this is true:

> The village has buried beneath it enough explosive power in nuclear weapons to blow itself to smithereens many times over.

1/6,000,000th of the worlds nuclear stockpile[1], or approximately 1/500th of the explosive yield of an average warhead, will not be enough to cause any serious damage to 6000 acres.

1. http://fas.org/issues/nuclear-weapons/status-world-nuclear-f...

To get a better feel of how it would affect an area, you can use this:

http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/

I wonder how small you can scale a nuclear weapon -- what's the smallest yield you can actually produce?

The smallest weapon the US ever produced is the Davy Crockett atomic gun which yields 20 Tons which you can also simulate using the above url.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davy_Crockett_%28nuclear_device...

Does that mean that the world's current stockpile is not enough to destroy the earth's population?

Yes. See this infographic: http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2009/how-i-learnt-to-s...

"We only actually have 0.83% of what’s required to completely wipe out civilisation."

But we could cause enough radioactive fallout to make a lot of people sick.

Yes, we lack the capability at this time (1990 and even today). I'm not sure why a followup post said "No" as if there's any evidence to support that we can destroy human life on earth...much less habitable or even just inhabited lands. I immediately stopped and thought, oh jeeze, now I know some of these numbers are made up.

I thought the feat was of a huge amount of fallout permanently changing the climate and putting tons of radioactive dust into the upper atmosphere where it would eventually fall down in everything. Fallout would be less of a problem with a smaller nuclear war.

Remember, more than half the earth's population is concentrated in urban centers. It would be possible to kill that many people covering relatively little land area.

No, it means that if you scaled the world's current stockpile by a factor of 1/6x10e6 (the scaling to get 6B people to 1K people) then it would not be as dangerous. Although it would be able to wipe out the village if everyone lived together.

Clearly in this world the job with highest demand would be translators/interpreters.

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