Would be nice if they also included estimates on ejecta, and how much of the world would be under nuclear winter for how long. The destruction of NYC would clearly be tragic, but the scope of the impact on humanity would make that something of a footnote by comparison.

I do agree that unilateral disarmament is a difficult thing to achieve, but there are other arguments as to why it should be pursued. I am sure we agree on a lot of things on this subject, but let me at least put the other side out there:

1. America as the over achieving nation in the world has a duty to lead by example. How can the country with the largest nuclear arsenal expect other countries to start the process that we all signed up to? Hey France, why didn't you get rid of your 87 nukes? Well America, why haven't you touched that pile of 500? (making up numbers here to illustrate the point)

2. The US isn't worried about Best Korea nuking them because they would need a staging platform and a functional ballistic missile. They can be launched from subs, but NK isn't really your worry there. The most developed nations are the concern, and if you could get an agreement it could happen, with peacekeepers and mutually open inspections, and pressure on smaller countries to abide or be trade embargoed to stop them (which the west does/has done already). Unlikely as things are right now, i agree.

3. We have ageing equipment housing extremely dangerous explosives. They require a huge amount of maintenance and whatnot, costing billions. The UK has to replace their system soon to the tune of hundreds of billions of pounds. Imagine what kind of alternative modern anti-nuclear defence system we could develop using all that money and all our technology? That way we could be safe from nukes without using nukes and it would cost less in the long run.

Also if you claim your weapons as part of a defence, it's a bit of a giveaway that you're bullshitting if you then go off around the world antagonising other countries, knowing that they can't really fight back. So i think in fairness we should crack open that self-defence argument and see what percentage of it is referring to "a good offence".

Having said all that, binning all the US nukes overnight wouldn't be a great idea. The UK would be less of a target and safer without nukes imo, but the US would probably make the world a lot safer just by having less.

Let's be honest here, the amount of nukes we have is preposterous. No one could possibly have any reason to use that many, the potential for absolute worldwide devastation is far too high to need that many - you could potentially finish the world off in a nuclear winter, according to the average figures given, in about 100 'small' nukes. Not 100 each per country, but 100 total worldwide.

And remember, that doesn't mean you can use 90 and be safe. The figure 100 was enough to likely cause a global famine by causing temperature drops leading to crop failures. That doesn't account for extinction of animals and the devastation of the natural balance (which would lead to our eventual extinction) which can be wildly unpredictable. You could shoot 40 at a country, win the conflict, and cause the starvation of millions+ in your own (and other) countries for the next 20 odd years..... or worse.

Your video, Could Humans Survive a Nuclear Winter?, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

Yusss! I win nuclear winter!

In your face, rest of humanity!

No I am not. Science totally relies on cause & effect.

Science has methods to distinguish correlation from causality. Causality means repeatable results, possibility of practical use and my hypocritical benefit. Correlation means randomness and no reason to invest.

Im not against the notion of global warming or nuclear winter.

As far as nuclear winter is concerned I dont think there is much difference between a frozen planet and one that is merely a "few" degrees colder than normal for a couple of years. In either case humans are done for. So while the hype was overdone, reality is just as frightening.

Global warming is a projection into the future, and the future is one of the hardest things to predict. I am happy to agree that we are f*cking up our planet and need to stop ASAP. There are measurable indicators that are clearly out of bounds, conclusively because of human activity.

The political hype (of climate change) is a big risk - if the climate straightens out because of external factors humans might be tempted to not stop f*cking up their environment.

Lets stick to facts and not overemphasize various projections.

I'd agree with the nuking but I recently watched the Nuclear Winter video on here

Your video, RetroReport - Nuclear Winter, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

It became obvious that the calculations supporting the idea of nuclear winter were fudged. Same with climate change -- I'm not saying that it does not exist, just that there is a strong and pervasive incentive to maximize hysteria without regard to science or facts, which leads, eventually, to climate fatigue.

Climate change will be remembered as one of the more striking popular delusions or madnesses of crowds.

Well, it's not an exact comparison. You see, for us to say climate change is being oversold like nuclear winter, we would have to use the analogy that every year nuclear powers were setting off X number of nuclear weapons and slowly bringing about nuclear winter.

Because that is what we are doing with climate change; we are slowly actually bringing it about, where nuclear winter never happened because we never launched nukes.

Not that funny. It became clear that nuclear winter was oversold. We're seeing the same thing with climate change right now.

Public hysteria cannot be maintained indefinitely.

The funny thing is that we were all so willing to buy into the possible consequences of a "nuclear winter" but we easily ignore climate change.

"It only happened twenty year ago." Let's look at that in real life.

It's been 15 years since 9/11, and something like 1/4 of Americans think it was an inside job conspiracy theory. The fall of the Soviet Union was 22 years ago, it may as well be ancient history to my generation. The fear of WWIII and nuclear winter was never a part of my childhood. Most people my age never give it a 2nd thought. I'm sure my kids will feel the same way about the "war on terror."

MASSIVE LONG POST WARNING: feel free to skip this

I usually like Vsauce a lot, but I disagree with just about every assumption and every conclusion he makes in this video.

Anthropogenic vs external extinction event -
I think the likelihood of an anthropogenic extinction event is low. Even in the cold war, at the apex of "mutually assured destruction" risk, IF that destruction was triggered I think it would have been extremely unlikely to make humans go extinct. The US and USSR might have nuked each other to near-extinction, but even with fairly mobile nuclear fallout / nuclear winter, etc. I think that enough humans would have remained in other areas to remain a viable population.

Even if ONE single person had access to every single nuclear weapon in existence, and they went nuts and tried to use them ALL with the goal of killing every single human being on the planet, I still bet there would be enough pockets of survivors in remote areas to prevent humans from going utterly extinct.

Sure, an anthropogenic event could be devastating -- catastrophic even -- to human life. But I think humanity could recover even from an event with an associated human death rate of 95% or more -- and I think the likelihood of anything like that is real slim.

So that leaves natural or external extinction events. The KT extinction (end of the dinosaurs) is the most recent major event, and it happened 65 million years ago. Homo sapiens have been around 150-200,000 years, and as a species we've been through some fairly extreme climatic changes. For example, humans survived the last ice age around 10-20,000 years ago -- so even without technology, tools, buildings, etc. we managed to survive a climate shift that extreme. Mammals survived the KT extinction, quite possible that we could have too -- especially if we were to face it with access to modern technology/tools/knowledge/etc.

So I think it would probably take something even more extreme than the asteroid responsible for KT to utterly wipe us out. Events like that are temporally rare enough that I don't think we need to lose any sleep over them. And again, it would take something massive to wipe out more than 95% of the human population. We're spread out, we live in pretty high numbers on basically every landmass on earth (perhaps minus Antarctica), we're adapted to many many different environments ... pretty hard to kill us off entirely.


"Humans are too smart to go extinct" @1:17 -
I think we're too dumb to go extinct. Or at least too lazy. The biggest threats we face are anthropogenic, but even the most driven and intentionally malevolent human or group of humans would have a hard time hunting down *everybody, everywhere*.


Doomsday argument -
I must admit that I don't really understand this one. The guess of how many total humans there will be, EVER, seems extremely arbitrary. But anyway, I tend to think it might fall apart if you try to use it to make the same assertions about, say, bacterial life instead of human life. Some specific species of bacteria have been around for way way longer than humans, and in numbers that dwarf human populations. So, the 100 billionth bacteria didn't end up needing to be worried about its "birth number", nor did the 100 trillionth.


Human extinction "soon" vs. "later" -
Most plausibly likely threats "soon" are anthropogenic. The further we push into "later", the more the balance swings towards external threats, I think. But we're talking about very small probabilities (in my opinion anyway) on either side of the scale. But I don't think that "human ingenuity will always stay one step ahead of any extinction event thrown at it" (@4:54). Increased human ingenuity is directly correlated with increased likelihood of anthropogenic extinction, so that's pretty much the opposite. For external extinction events, I think it is actually fairly hard to imagine some external scenario or event that could have wiped out humans 100, 20, 5, 2, or 1 thousand years ago that wouldn't wipe us out today even with our advances and ingenuity. And anything really bad enough to wipe us out is not going to wait for us to be ready for it...


Fermi paradox -
This is the most reasonable bit of the whole video, but it doesn't present the most common / best response. Other stars, galaxies, etc. are really far away. The Milky Way galaxy is 100,000+ light years across. The nearest other galaxy (Andromeda) is 2.2 million light years away. A living being (or descendents of living beings) coming to us either of those distances would have to survive as long as the entire history of human life, all while moving at near the speed of light, and have set out headed straight for us from the get-go all those millions and millions of years ago. So lack of other visitors is not surprising at all.

Evidence of other life would be far more likely to find, but even that would have to be in a form we could understand. Human radio signals heading out into space are less than 100 years old. Anything sentient and actively looking for us, even within the cosmically *tiny* radius of 100 light years, would have to have to evolved in such a way that they also use radio; otherwise the clearest evidence of US living here on Earth would be undetectable to them. Just because that's what we're looking for, doesn't mean that other intelligent beings would take the same approach.

Add all that up, and I don't think that the Fermi paradox is much cause for alarm. Maybe there are/have been LOTS of intelligent life forms out there, but they have been sending out beacons in formats we don't recognize, or they are simply too far away for those beacons to have reached us yet.


OK, I think I'm done. Clearly I found the video interesting, to post that long of a rambling response... But I was disappointed in it compared to usual Vsauce stuff. Still, upvote for the thoughts provoked and potential discussion, even though I disagree with most of the content and conclusions.

You can demonstrate the effect of carbon dioxide on climate as easily as dropping a ball from your hand? People know that balls will drop because the see it for themselves, not because a former physicist and his dog say so.

In actual fact, the earth has not warmed in nearly 20 years, and the climate models do not help to explain this. They are useless for explaining or predicting changes on the scale of decades, and it's crazy to expect them to somehow predict changes much further in the future.

Warmism, from the start, has been based on obfuscation, concealment of data, dodgy statistics, and overcomplicated computer models that add very little to insight into the real physical phenomena.

Remember the hockey stick? That went the way of Carl Sagan's nuclear winter, which ought to provide a cautionary tale for Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Your child's future will have many problems, one of them being depletion of the fossil fuel supplies that we have come to rely upon for sustenance. Climate will change, as it always has, and some of that change will be caused by CO2.
Climate science could be helpful; it's a pity that it has been distorted into a completely political exercise, and a shame for science generally, which stands to lose a great deal of public trust.

@NetRunner this wall of text of mine was not to defend that teacher but rather to get some answers for some questions I had about MaxWilder's post. But to clarify my stance, using your numbers:

1. Completely agree with you.
2. Completely agree with you again, that is called terrorism iirc.
3. In principle you are absolutely correct. Here though I don't see the implied notion that it is ok as there is not enough context to know how the lesson was and what words were used. If there is a source that I have missed regarding this that shows that he, the teacher, advocates it I will then of course condemn the man/his actions.

I am pro-Obama for the record, I believe he was the best president you could get at the time. If he was assasinated it would be a great loss for not only the US but the world as he has brought the US away from being so isolationistic. If McCain had won you would probably be in 3 wars now and since he is old and frail he might have died in office and I shudder in fear at the notion of Sarah Palin with nuclear launch codes. But then again global warming would probably not be a threat anymore as we would have a nuclear winter to worry about instead but that is off topic...

*edit for trying to get a fubar'ed quote to work. Doesn't seem to work for some reason... maybe it is the @ above that does it?

>> ^NetRunner:

@<a rel="nofollow" href="http://videosift.com/member/LarsaruS" title="member since December 27th, 2009" class="profilelink">LarsaruS you went into wall of text mode to defend a teacher who wanted to give a geometry lesson about how to assassinate the President.
Here's a list of reasons why there's a fuss, since you think this is totally defensible.

1. Killing people is bad
   
2. Using violence to influence politics is bad
   
3. Teaching a bunch of kids that 1 and 2 are actually okay by implication is bad