Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[wierd]

No, he created a mechanism to deal with this impulse in human kind.  It's called natural selection.  Humans are just defiant that it does not apply to them, and then things like this happen.

It is self-correcting. No need to worry.

[smjjames]

No, he created a mechanism to deal with this impulse in human kind.  It's called natural selection.  Humans are just defiant that it does not apply to them, and then things like this happen.

It is self-correcting. No need to worry.

Until it attempts to self-correct the entire human species via nuclear fire.

[wierd]

Mostly effects high population center areas.

People in timbuktu dont normally get much more than the fallout.

[smjjames]

Nuclear winter. Although the exact severity of it is debated and it turns out we survived Toba super volcano eruption just fine. If Toba didn’t put much of a dent in human population then a nuclear winter probably won’t extinct us. Not that it’d be pleasant of course.

[bloop_bleep]

Nuclear winter. Although the exact severity of it is debated and it turns out we survived Toba super volcano eruption just fine. If Toba didn’t put much of a dent in human population then a nuclear winter probably won’t extinct us. Not that it’d be pleasant of course.

It'd probably wipe out the majority of human knowledge, records, and infrastructure, and would probably prevent (or significantly stymie) efforts to expand these again for at least a century, leading to what is essentially a reset of humankind. Which might be what God would go for, if He exists and things got bad enough.

[wierd]

Also, our shameless exploitation of all the shallow and easy to tap fossil fuels assures that another hightech revolution wont happen for a *VERY* long time.

[SalmonGod]

Just finished Season 4 of Black Mirror.  Love the show.  It's a heck of a ride.  The WTF is how to feel after the last episode.  Sooo much horror with a powerful bittersweet at the end.

[Harry Baldman]

Nuclear winter. Although the exact severity of it is debated and it turns out we survived Toba super volcano eruption just fine. If Toba didn’t put much of a dent in human population then a nuclear winter probably won’t extinct us. Not that it’d be pleasant of course.

Didn't that reduce the human race to a population possibly as low as 600?

[wierd]

Yes. However the initial population was both geographically constrained, and had primitive tech.

[Harry Baldman]

Yeah, but still a bit interesting to say it 'didn't put much of a dent' under those circumstances. There's what you might call survivor bias in there somewhere when you consider the fate of literally every other kind of hominid across natural history.

[wierd]

I am implying that neither of those circumstances are currently true.

This means that it is highly unlikely that the human population will be as extremely impacted as it was by that particular mass extinction event. Humans are now in such geographically diverse circumstances, that some populations might actually BENEFIT from the alteration of climate.

[Egan_BW]

Would the yellowstone supervolcano going off have more of an impact than a nuclear exchange or less? Because that's a thing that's likely to happen eventually, and unlike (or very much like, depending on how much faith you have in humanity's self-control) nukes, it's not really something we can prevent. Maybe we aught to start placing our technology and energy in places both likely to survive something catastrophic, and easy to rediscover. Because at some point it seems inevitable that something will knock all civilization down while we're still around, so all we can do is make sure it's easy to prop back up, rather than nearly impossible.

Something like using solar energy to make some fuel, then burying that fuel in tanks underground so they can be found later.

[wierd]

nuclear winter has ancillary effects, what with lingering radiation that can be absorbed and transmitted through the food chain, causing severe ecological disruptions even in places that would have otherwise been mostly spared if it were just from ordinary dust in the upper atmosphere.

Take for instance, ocean life.  People don't properly appreciate the dangers of ocean acidification as it pertains to long-term habitability of the planet.  Radioactive oceans would be damn bad for human long-term survival, unless you relish the idea of using all your solar power to process the air the oceans current process for free, and things of that nature.

Even still, now that humans are a very advanced technological species, we have this as a potential solution to an otherwise insurmountable problem.

I remind that it would take ASSLOADS of nukes to pollute the entire biosphere to that kind of extent though. Given that disarmament happened, and that world nuclear arsenals are now much reduced from what they were in the 70s, I doubt we have that kind of ordinance just laying around.  It isn't like we just happen to keep things like tsar bomba in a cupboard or something.

[scourge728]

It is however, entirely possible to rebuild those.... and last I checked, both the U.S and Russia have enough nukes to cover the entirety of the continents humans normally inhabit in fallout, not sure about that ATM tho... also, I remember hearing that the U.S does (or at least, did) provide lots of food/help to other nations, which if the Yellowstone super-volcano erupts, could have... negative consequences outside of the Americas... and at the very least, those countries that rely on the dollar to stay stable for economy would DEFINITELY have a problem if a good chunk of the U.S got covered in volcano effects, and the rest started entering famines and other effects that come with that area being covered in ash and volcanic winter and such...

(as for my W.T.F, inhabit is spelled with an i instead of an e)

[Khan Boyzitbig]

So much for it being spring. Looks like winter out there to me.