[ChicknLittle]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('smallpoxgirl', '
')Dude. You are an idiot.You are a human. An organic creature. Your lot in life is to eat, drink, poop, have sex, and otherwise entertain yourself. You are not on some grand quest to explore the stars....

[Eddie_lomax]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('kochevnik', ':')!:

....

So here's my admittedly horrible thesis: Global Thermonuclear War may be the very best thing that could happen to us as a species. A sudden and catastrophic reduction in population could have two crucial benefits - first, it will reduce the rate of usage of metals on this planet. No metals, no space - no space, no chance of continuing as anything other than just another primitive animal species. Second, such an event might FORCE the great masses of humanity to concentrate on what is truly important as a species - long term survival. It's possible that widespread radiation may actually preserve some areas of the planet from further exploitation until we develop enough as a civilization to utilize them in a truly intelligent way - because we sure as hell aren't doing that now.

I don't want to die in a global conflagration, and I don't particularly relish that fate for anyone else - but humans are hard-wired for survival, especially for the survival of our descendants. If most of the earth had to get irradiated so that a new civilization of future humans could get off this rock and make it to a higher Kardashev type level - I think the price is well worth it, even if it were to mean my personal death. It sure would be nice if humans weren't quite so stupid as to make this option necessary - but I haven't seen any sign of that yet.

1983 was almost 25 years ago - back when we could have still done something about all the problems we now face. Maybe poor Stanislav didn't really do us that much of a favor - maybe, in fact he just sealed our doom as an intelligent species.

[rogerhb]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('kochevnik', 'A')s for those of you who think the survival of the species is unimportant or we should accept it's inevitable demise, I say bollocks !

[Wildwell]

The Hiroshima bomb was tiny, just 12.5 kilotons…Its code name was even ‘Little boy’! The Nagasaki bomb wasn’t much bigger, 22 KT. A couple of small bombs dropped at the end of world war two bare no comparison to an all out exchange with today’s weapons. Typical ICBMs have multiple warheads of around 400 kK-3 megtons each, 9 megaton is not unusual. The largest is the Russian SS-18, which has an explosive yield of 20 megatons. There's thousands of them..

If the blast, crop failure, grid failure and the contamination of water didn’t get you, the nuclear winter would. I think the whole idea that worldwide nuclear war would do anyone on the planet a favour needs no further consideration, it wouldn’t.

[AirlinePilot]

Typically older Russian warheads were larger and still are. The US arsenal is considered to be far more accurate and therefor we use much smaller yield weapons. They are safer to have sitting around in Silos etc. Russian designed delivery vehicles were not accurate enough to use small yield weapons so you have more of those weapons being larger .

While Im not positive, I dont believe there were a very large percentage of warheads that have yields over 1-3 megatons, with most being smaller than that. There are larger weapons but I am guessing many of those are not fielded any more and the newer more accurate types are what prevail. I very much doubt there are more than a small fraction of all nations weapons larger than 5 megatons. Thats one of the reasons there was so much testing in the late 60's and early 70's before it was banned. Better warhead design and more accurate delivery systems meant smaller warheads overall.

[dissimulo]

Some people would be unwilling to drive a mile less every day in order to save civilization.

Some people would be willing to set the world on fire in order to "save civilization".

Both extremes are expressions of a world view that only increases my doomerosity.

[AmericanEmpire]

If it hits I want to be at ground zero. I want to be one of the first ones gone. No time to even think about what happened.

In fact its preferable to starving to death post peak. I'd have lots of time to think about that.

I don't want to stick around anyway. Humans are a big failure in my mind. All this advancement and technology don't mean shit because its going away.

[entropyfails]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('lateStarter', 'I')'d have to agree with 'Mesuge' and others that anyone else that made it past our level would probably just quarantine anything from "EARTH'. In other words: let's not get infected with that again (been there, done that). They would probably treat us like the latest strain of Avain Flu. Maybe that is why there is no response.

Shhh. Be quiet for a moment until they go away (disappear)...

[entropyfails]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('MicroHydro', '
')In the most extreme (hubristic fantasy of Bob Zubrin) technologically optimistic scenario, controlled fusion might allow creation of a craft that could go 5% of lightspeed. Humanity would have to be very, very lucky for another earth to be found as close as 50 light years. If both of those things happened, colonists would 'only' face a 1000 year journey. This was never a possibility.

[Omnitir]

I don’t understand why people feel the need to envision a future that is either one extreme or the other. Either we colonise space and everyone is saved, or each and every one of us starves to death. Looking at these extremes, both are very unrealistic, so I can see why people think space is just a fantasy. But this view seems to be based on fantasy ideas like Star Trek (radical technology saves us all) and so is dismissed as fantasy. A more realistic expectation is to accept that both extremes can and likely will exist side by side.

The world is full of extreme contrasts – in one place people are starving to death, in another they are blowing the hell out of each other, in another place they are dining in luxury, and in another place they are developing high technology like spacecraft. This has always been the case, and PO won’t change that. So decades from now, there will probably still be many people starving, maybe even the great majority (though personally I doubt it), but there will still be those dining in luxury and there will be those developing spacecraft. In a hundred years there will probably be people starving in one part of the world, people dining in luxury in another, and people building colonies on Mars. In a hundred thousand years, there will probably be people starving, people dining in luxury, and people living in massive artificial worlds slowly travelling to other stars.

I completely agree in the importance of our survival. It’s a completely natural and logical thing after all to want ones own species to prosper. But I don’t think destruction is necessary, or a good idea (in fact it’s a terrible idea!). At the same time, I believe that the notion of a complete powerdown is also a bad idea and in the long term equally destructive to our species as an all out nuclear war would be.

Our best chance of long-term survival IMO, is a combination of approaches. We need to powerdown certain wasteful aspects of our lives, so that we can powerup (or continue to power) other aspects such as high-tech development, in order to utilize the bountiful resources of space that’s right on our doorstep, and ensure that humanity, which may possibly be the only intelligence the galaxy will ever know, survives well into the future.