Is There Life Beyond Nuclear Armageddon?
Bruce Dorminey, Senior Contributor, Forbes, 30 Apr 24
Earth is a very rare jewel of a planet. A completely serendipitous chance encounter with a Mars-sized impactor some 4.5 billion years ago created our anomalously large moon which to this day gives our planet its stable axial tilt. All of which enabled our planet to evolve its current life-rich biosphere.
Yet only in the last 300,000 years or so have we been around long enough to watch Earth’s civilizations come and go. And only within the last hundred years have we created weapons of mass destruction so powerful that if used in anger, they could wipe out billions of years of biological evolution.
Given recent geopolitics, however, in fifty years’ time I wouldn’t bet on there being anybody here to ponder such philosophical musings.
Thus, could life survive a full-scale nuclear war?
A nuclear Armageddon might be broadly similar to the K/Pg impact (the “dinosaur killer”) some 66 million years ago, Ariel Anbar, a geochemist and President’s Professor at Arizona State University in Tempe, told me via email. But in terms of the energy released the impact was thousands of times larger than even an all-out nuclear war would release, he says. Nuclear war also brings with it radiation that can drive mutations, which is a special kind of “nasty” but both scenarios are more than enough to bring down human civilization, says Anbar.
Most if not all of humanity would simply disappear.
My suspicion is that something like 99.9% of all humans would die, and our civilization would never rebound, Bruce Lieberman, a paleontologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, told me via email. Either we wouldn’t survive, or it would be so bad for those few that lived that they would be better off if they didn’t survive, says Lieberman.
But Would Our Biosphere Survive?
Earth’s biosphere would survive even though it would take a big hit, says Anbar. Leaving aside the consequences of radioactive fallout, a nuclear war would be less severe than the K/Pg impact some 66 million years ago, he says. The consequences of nuclear fallout from a global exchange are hard to gauge since there’s a lot we do not know, says Anbar. But plenty of animals would likely survive so evolution is not likely to be “reset” back to microbes, he says.
How would nuclear Armageddon compare to natural planet killers that have befallen planet Earth, such as giant asteroids, comets as well as nearby gamma ray bursts or supernova explosions?
Life eventually rebounded after each of these mass extinctions, though it took at least 10-20 million years for diversity to reach former levels and for ecosystems to return to their pre-extinction levels of complexity, says Lieberman.
Even so, Lieberman says a global nuclear holocaust would cause a tremendous initial loss in biodiversity, perhaps on the order of 70% to 95% of all animal and plant species on land and 25% to 50% in the oceans.
The lesson here is that our planet’s fate can turn on a dime…………………………………………………………………………. more https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucedorminey/2024/04/30/is-there-life-beyond-nuclear-armageddon/?sh=30cdf0a04eb0
TODAY. What’s the connection between the UK Post Office scandal and Soviet Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov?
Well, nothing really. But we need to remember what Stanislav Petrov did. On September 26, 1983, Petrov, in charge of the Soviet Union’s nuclear missile system, received the computer screen order to “Launch”. The system reported that a total of five Minuteman ICBMs had been launched by the USA. Soviet nuclear doctrine called for a full nuclear retaliation. Petrov had to make an instant decision. But he feared that it was a false alarm. He disobeyed the order.
The outcome proved that Petrov was correct, and nuclear armageddon was avoided.
So, faulty technology caused a terrible danger – and one man had the integrity to doubt the digital message, and to act on his doubt.
Contrast this with the actions of Post Office and Fujitsu authorities who covered up and lied about the faulty Horizon IT system. That resulted in 900 false convictions, 4 suicides, and hundreds, perhaps thousands, of lives ruined.
In both cases, it was a failure of digital technology.
Now, as we plunge in to the Age of Artificial Intelligence, there is the frightening potential for more digital failures, – and worse, for human error, or even malevolence, in setting up AI programmes.
We need, as never before, people like Stanislav Petrov – people with the scepticism and the integrity - to not blindly comply with technocratic wizardry. The very recent, and still ongoing British Post Office scandal is a worrying reminder of the prevailing view about “not rocking the boat”. The boat may be sinking.
Antinuclear 