Honestly, I don't even know what the numbers are supposed to mean beyond smaller numbers are scarier, and there's no indication of what really goes in to changing that number. Yet it's mentioned quite a bit without any real justification.
Instead of that, how about a list of "clear and present dangers" with numbers based on real time where appropriate?
And then there are nuclear weapons. Nuclear proliferation is introducing new actors that must be accounted for when trying to prevent nuclear war. Existing actors can experience a significant change in leadership, policy, and direction - take a look at recent US politics as an example of this. You can imagine maintaining nuclear peace as a weighted graph, with every nuclear state as a node, with vertices to every other node. The graph will only continue to grow over time and the weights can change, sometimes drastically. It just becomes more unstable over time due to the strain of nationalism, climate change, and nuclear proliferation. Then throw in miscommunication and computer glitches into the nuclear mix - events like the Cuban Missile crisis and Vasili Arkhipov, Stanislav Petrov in the 1980s, Boris Yeltsin and the Norwegian Rocket Incident, and unfortunately many others. The risk of large scale nuclear conflict is only growing. Yes, I'm aware of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) and how as a policy it has helped us so far. But MAD is less effective for smaller nation states and rogue groups (who will more easily obtain materials and know-how over time), it works until it doesn't. And MAD does nothing for the miscommunication and computer glitch scenarios I have provided. It's not a magical blanket that will protect us from the consequences of having nuclear weapons.
Sorry for the rant. I think this will be our Great Filter. I hope I'm wrong.
- Links:
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/03/you-and-almost-e...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_rocket_incident
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_nuclear_accid...
I have a friend that hopes there will be war, since we cannot sustain so many humans on the planet.. While I don't want this outcome for moral and idealist reasons, it does seem like a it will be a viable solution in the long run for the species.
I keep thinking about the paper on deep adaptation agenda from a researcher in sustainable development [1], saying climate change is already haywire, and that we will see a societal collapse. As a citizen, I don't even know where to begin with this information. I bet I'm not alone. Based on the premises the author makes, on the current situation on climate change and the lack of action to assess them, it seems the stress will be immense on our society, hence the collapse. I just hope we make it.
[1] www.lifeworth.com/deepadaptation.pdf
