Humanity can likely be assumed to, under those conditions, balloon out to its former proportions (following the pattern of population increase to the point that available resources can no longer support further increase).
One possibility is that this would represent a delay in the current path and not much else, though depending on the length of time needed to rebuild our infrastructure it could make a large difference in efforts to establish humanity as safely redundant (outside Earth, that is).
Another possibility (the Oryx and Crake concept) is that due to shallow metal mining, oil depletion et cetera the current level of infrastructure would in fact not be regained, in which case the approximately-dark-ages humans would exist across the planet until it became inhabitable and they all died (even if six billion years from now).
Another (granted, comparatively unlikely) is that the various fallout from the war would prevent humanity from bouncing back in any form, in which case even the survivors would disappear relatively quickly.
One can hope that any long-term prevention for the overpopulation consequences that might have been used in that future could also be used in our future. (Personally, hoping for the Singularity approach, which seems much harder to achieve without an Internet and with a much smaller population slowly spreading out and starting to rebuild the ruins of empire.)
The Oryx and Crake idea has been discussed seriously by Nick Bostrom. One thing to keep in mind is that for some metals things will be easier the second time around. The really prominent example is aluminum. It takes a lot of technology and infrastructure to refine aluminum (for most of the 19th century its price rivaled or exceeded that of gold). But, aluminum once it has been purified is really easy to work with. So one would have all sorts of aluminum just left around ready to use. Nuclear war makes that situation slightly worse because a lot of the aluminum will now be in radioactive cities. But overall, you’ll still have easily accessible quantities of a light, strong metal that no one in the middle ages had anything like.
The Oryx and Crake idea has been discussed seriously by Nick Bostrom.
Link? A Google search and a sitesearch (nickbostrom.com) doesn’t turn up anything for me.
(And aluminum is nice, but compared to ‘all oil everywhere being inaccessible except with a highly developed oil industry with centuries of refinement’...)
He mentions it www.nickbostrom.com/existential/risks.html. I think he has mentioned before that this is an aspect of existential risk that should be more closely evaluated and I think he’s briefly talked about it in other locations but I don’t have a citation.
Re: Aluminum, yes true, but don’t underestimate the helpfulness of having a really light and strong metal. Much of modern technology depends on that. And aluminum isn’t the only example of such a substance which will be easier to work with now that it has been refined. Titanium falls into a similar category. Both of them can be worked with at temperatures one can reach using coal.
Re: Aluminum, yes true, but don’t underestimate the helpfulness of having a really light and strong metal. Much of modern technology depends on that.
I ask because a lot of that modern technology seems predicated on cheap oil and all its derivatives like plastic or lubricants etc., such that aluminum is only a small benefit and nowhere even close to a bit of oil.
What’s the signal use of aluminum? Airplanes, but how are you going to economically power aluminum-built airplanes? Or skyscapers—but what’s the point of such dense expensive buildings if you are in an Industrial Revolution which is stalling out because the forests have been burned, the easy coal mined out, and oil completely unavailable? (Checking Wikipedia for aluminum, the lede highlights… ‘aerospace’ and ‘transportation’. And a lot of the other cited uses seem like they have viable alternatives, like copper—also available easily in the corpses of cities.)
A old comment of mine that seems somewhat relevant:
If a form of civilization based on agriculture is maintained after the technological fallback the next time around it seems plausible that we may also have a higher IQ and be generally better adapted to life in mass society. Human brains are pretty good at finding substitute resources.
Good observation that easily accessible energy is what makes technological machine based civilizations go. Speaking of which in the long term there would still be wood to burn, wind and water power, animal and human muscles. Also remember you can use selective breeding to make animals (and plants) better suited to human purposes.
Much better.
Maybe no industrial revolution, but at the very least given enough time… Also there is still coal, lots of coal, much of it hard to reach though.
If the human brains adapted that much genetically during the existing relatively fast ramping up of civilization, powered by cheap accessible energy sources, then it can unadapt in the event of collapse and subsequent slower ramp up, starved of cheap energy.
Human brains are pretty good at finding substitute resources.
We demonstrably are not pretty good at finding substitutes! Look at how well the existing highly experienced and technically sophisticated civilization has done at the task!
If the human brains adapted that much genetically during the existing relatively fast ramping up of civilization, powered by cheap accessible energy sources, then it can unadapt in the event of collapse and subsequent slower ramp up, starved of cheap energy.
If a form of civilization based on agriculture is maintained after the technological fallback
Cheap energy had very little to do with our massive changes. We are talking about consistent trend of people getting more adapted to civilization from the Neolithic through the Iron age and up until the 19th century. Freeze technology in any point between, humans would keep adapting to that level. And as long as populations continued to rise and new long distance trade links where being established, according to the 10k explosion hypothesis, faster. But I see your point, eventually as humans reached a new equilibrium and became decently adpated to life in static civilization and since there wouldn’t be a lot of change, intelligence may no longer be needed for stuff like farming, human evolution would start slowing down and veering into odd directions. I’m just not sure this [stagnant civ] would actually happen given the absence of say fossil fuels.
Arguably genes for high IQ became maladaptive basically at the same time when we got cheap energy and launched the industrial revolution. Sure there is the possibility that evolution goes ahead and changes us into something like farming, herding mammalian ants in the absence of cheap energy, but why is this so much more likley than say the idiocracy scenario of Azatoth doing horrible things to us in the presence of cheap energy? (depending on how one interprets history we may have evidence in favour of both btw)
We demonstrably are not pretty good at finding substitutes! Look at how well the existing highly experienced and technically sophisticated civilization has done at the task!
On a time-scale of what, a century? In the absence of oil and coal I can’t imagine say 18th century European civilization stagnating on a time scale of millennia. These are cosmic eye blinks. Canals, wind-power and watermills had already basically created a mini industrial revolution in some places. I also can’t imagine say Aztec civilization stagnating in the absence of easily obtainable gold or copper.
On the grand scale, over time carrying capacities will generally rise as the crops and animals used are improved, people will get better at living in cities, merchant and priestly casts will keep getting smarter, farmers and herders will keep getting more resistant to infectious diseases and better adapted to their diets. And this should accelerate as long as population keeps getting larger.
Writing will be developed and continental scale empires may rise, if no earlier (because of say lack of iron) then when horse/camel/animal X riding hordes start extracting tribute from cities, or very very virulent religious memeplexes arise. The Mongolian peace and the Arab golden age where basically what happens when you tap into and connect a whole bunch of lands with differing intellectual traditions and make trade safe between them.
Eventually civilization will spread to harsh places like say parts Africa or Siberia where gold, silver, gems and even iron are still to be found. If scrap metals have been something known for millennia, and have probably become very high status items, how long before these smarter, perhaps more profit minded humans (at least their merchant caste) don’t eventually find a way to smelt them?
And you still have human selecting animals and plants. Combine this with an 19th or even 18th century of knowledge of heredity and you will be able to do really amazing things with domesticated animals on time scales of millennia. I wouldn’t put things like dogs breeds that specialize in sniffing out cancer, or parrots that are very very good at simple arithmetic and can be trained to communicate this beyond such a civilization. Not to mention all manners of beasts of burden or very fast birds with very good sense of direction that deliver messages across vast distances. And remember like dogs have been all these animals would basically be developing a human friendly user interface (behaviour a very simple understanding of how humans behave) over time. All of these examples are things that have sort of been done with animals, but we barley got started on before they became obsolete. Remember given enough time speciation would have occured between the breeds. What exactly are the limits?
Even places where not many animals where available for this such as the Americas, things like guinea pigs where domesticated. As long as you have at least one domesticated mammal or perhaps bird, your options are huge on the time-scale of a few thousand years (thing for a second of how dogs in various environments and of differing breeds have been used for everything from food to source of energy for transportation). So the process could easily eventually get started and I think once it does sooner or later, given writing and decent IQs, the knowledge of heredity will follow.
On the grand scale, over time carrying capacities will generally rise as the crops and animals used are improved, people will get better at living in cities, merchant and priestly casts will keep getting smarter, farmers and herders will keep getting more resistant to infectious diseases and better adapted to their diets. And this should accelerate as long as population keeps getting larger.
Carrying capacities may increase, but so what? You don’t see a whole lot of innovation out of Africa. Per capita is what matters, and per capita there is no long-term upwards trend. To quote Clark’s Farewell to Alms:
The wage quotes from 1780–1800 do seem to confirm that technological sophistication is not the determinant of wages. English wages, for example, are above average in the table, but not any higher than for such technological backwaters of 1800 as Istanbul, Cairo, and Warsaw.7 English wages in 1800 on average were about the same as those for ancient Babylon and Assyria, despite the great technological gains of the intervening thousands of years.
On a time-scale of what, a century? In the absence of oil and coal I can’t imagine say 18th century European civilization stagnating on a time scale of millennia. These are cosmic eye blinks. Canals, wind-power and watermills had already basically created a mini industrial revolution in some places. I also can’t imagine say Aztec civilization stagnating in the absence of easily obtainable gold or copper.
I disagree. 18th century Europe (by which I mean, of course, England, as the starter of the Industrial Revolution) was already dependent on non-renewable energy, and had been since roughly the late 1650s. Look at the charts in http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/6781 and notice where ‘coal’ exceeds firewood+water+other-renewables. (Firewood began falling in absolute terms; Easter Island comes to mind.)
I just realized we may be arguing about different things. I tought we where arguing about technologically progressing civilization that eventually leads to an intelligence explosion or life leaving Earth, while you may have thought we where arguing about escaping the Malthusian trap and increasing average living standards beyond sustenance.
Carrying capacities may increase, but so what? You don’t see a whole lot of innovation out of Africa. Per capita is what matters, and per capita there is no long-term upwards trend. To quote Clark’s Farewell to Alms:
Carrying capacities matter because according to the 10k model, larger populations in novel environment > faster biological evolution.
More people > more brains > bigger economy
And this should accelerate as long as population keeps getting larger.
I was referring to the speed of their adaptation.
Carrying capacities may increase, but so what? You don’t see a whole lot of innovation out of Africa.
Don’t see why Africa matters here. India and China created plenty of innovation. Higher IQ in the priestly and merchant classes will drive technological, scientific and memetic innovation. It will not be as explosive as the historic development of European civilization, but then again that’s pretty anomalous.
You say we aren’t good at finding substitute resources. This may be so.
In the absence of civilization bigger brains where a robust trend among hominids for millions of years. Bigger can be better when it comes to smarts.
And the whole idea of transhuman intelligences being so dangerous is that they are so because intelligence is overpowered in our universe. Would you feel safe dumping say an AI that was quite a bit beyond genius level on a resource starved rock (if stripped of all knowledge beyond that of stone age humans)?
And were you aware that your trend broke down 30,000 years ago, and the brain has shrunk?
Since the Late Pleistocene (approximately 30,000 years ago), human brain size decreased by approximately 10%; yet again, this decrease was paralleled by a decrease in body size
And were you aware that your trend broke down 30,000 years ago, and the brain has shrunk?
Yes. (“Dataset: all measurments of moninin cranial capcity available in the literature as of September 2000, for skulls older than 10,000 years old”).
Bigger can be better when it comes to smarts.
It was part of a overall argument that humans have probably been getting smarter for the past few million years. And that this trend had nothing to do with the availability of fossil fuels or iron until perhaps very recently. It seems likely that this would have continued in their absence. And it seems likley that bigger brains would translate into better tools and more complex social organisation as they tended to have in eons past.
I think it would basically fill the role of mithril. Neat very very expensive weapons/armour held as a royal treasure. A status symbol far too valuable to actually be used. With the occasional exception (radioactive hobbit stumbling into some in the swamps of N’ork).
Well, if one was using it for armor it wouldn’t be that hard to get a lot from the old cans and cars lying around. And the melting point isn’t that high. So it might actually be a common form of armor.
Actually, up-to-date modelling suggests that even a “minor” nuclear war between only two combatants, with 50 warheads apiece would be enough to render global agriculture impossible for a year or longer. The concomitant effects on hunter-gatherers are probably similarly devastating.
If some portion of humanity does survive that first year, I wouldn’t be so very optimistic they’re close enough to each other to make rebuilding a minimal viable population easy, let alone that the memories of the recently-destroyed global infrastructure are sufficiently present and relevant to be worth carrying forward to their descendants as anything other than a cautionary tale. What you’re looking at is basically a remote chance that some really isolated group in say, the Far North or an island in the Pacific manages to hold it together in a hunter-gatherer kinda way and do so for long enough that their population doesn’t collapse.
I’m betting you still don’t see them expand in any meaningful way for centuries after the fact, and the environmental damage may constrain even that for a lot longer.
Either clarification or citation humbly requested. The United States alone has conducted over 1000 nuclear tests, without rendering global agriculture impossible.
Nuclear testing in the old days was done in deserts, or in remote polar areas (mostly the Soviet Union there, though many of their tests were conducted in desert areas of Central Asia). Those sites were chosen partly because they avoid massive vegetation burnoffs. Underground tests don’t have that problem at all (and they became standard practice for the biggest players in 1963 with the signing of the Limited Test Ban treaty, which permitted only underground tests—China and France didn’t sign it, and continued with other forms of testing afterwards, but even they ceased above-ground tests by the 1980s).
The issue is basically creating huge, massive areas of rapid conflagration all at once. One or two aren’t going to produce a nuclear winter, but “one or two cities bombed” hasn’t been a realistic expectation for nuclear warfare since 1945. Cities burn, and inhabited areas often sit near heavily-vegetated areas like grasslands or forests, which also burn. Get enough of these burnoffs going at once, and the predicted behavior can’t be reasoned out from analogies to oil fires in Kuwait. Too much stuff is burning, too fast, in too many places over too wide an area.
With only two countries (an unreasonably small number in real-world terms given the actual geopolitics involved) using only 50 weapons each (a ludicrously small number if you look at actual strategic warfare scenarios) in airburst configuration (minimizing fallout, as the fireball doesn’t touch the ground) you get frosts during “summer” for most of the planet, and persistent effects for up to a decade. Lest you be concerned about privileging the hypothesis, note that In nuclear warfare terms, this is an extremely convenient possible world for the “nuclear winter isn’t an issue” camp, and there are essentially no realistic strategic-level nuclear conflicts which can be modelled in those terms.
The history of nuclear testing in the 20th century involves a great deal of planning specifically to prevent runaway wildfires; that’s why testing over 1000 bombs in deserted areas with little plant life hasn’t touched off nuclear winter.
Humanity can likely be assumed to, under those conditions, balloon out to its former proportions (following the pattern of population increase to the point that available resources can no longer support further increase).
One possibility is that this would represent a delay in the current path and not much else, though depending on the length of time needed to rebuild our infrastructure it could make a large difference in efforts to establish humanity as safely redundant (outside Earth, that is).
Another possibility (the Oryx and Crake concept) is that due to shallow metal mining, oil depletion et cetera the current level of infrastructure would in fact not be regained, in which case the approximately-dark-ages humans would exist across the planet until it became inhabitable and they all died (even if six billion years from now).
Another (granted, comparatively unlikely) is that the various fallout from the war would prevent humanity from bouncing back in any form, in which case even the survivors would disappear relatively quickly.
One can hope that any long-term prevention for the overpopulation consequences that might have been used in that future could also be used in our future. (Personally, hoping for the Singularity approach, which seems much harder to achieve without an Internet and with a much smaller population slowly spreading out and starting to rebuild the ruins of empire.)
I’ve wondered whether landfills could be viewed as extremely high-grade ore compared to what’s naturally available.
Yes, that’s been suggested at least once before (may’ve seen it in a Vinge interview).
EDIT: see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landfill_mining
The Oryx and Crake idea has been discussed seriously by Nick Bostrom. One thing to keep in mind is that for some metals things will be easier the second time around. The really prominent example is aluminum. It takes a lot of technology and infrastructure to refine aluminum (for most of the 19th century its price rivaled or exceeded that of gold). But, aluminum once it has been purified is really easy to work with. So one would have all sorts of aluminum just left around ready to use. Nuclear war makes that situation slightly worse because a lot of the aluminum will now be in radioactive cities. But overall, you’ll still have easily accessible quantities of a light, strong metal that no one in the middle ages had anything like.
Link? A Google search and a sitesearch (nickbostrom.com) doesn’t turn up anything for me.
(And aluminum is nice, but compared to ‘all oil everywhere being inaccessible except with a highly developed oil industry with centuries of refinement’...)
He mentions it www.nickbostrom.com/existential/risks.html. I think he has mentioned before that this is an aspect of existential risk that should be more closely evaluated and I think he’s briefly talked about it in other locations but I don’t have a citation.
Re: Aluminum, yes true, but don’t underestimate the helpfulness of having a really light and strong metal. Much of modern technology depends on that. And aluminum isn’t the only example of such a substance which will be easier to work with now that it has been refined. Titanium falls into a similar category. Both of them can be worked with at temperatures one can reach using coal.
I ask because a lot of that modern technology seems predicated on cheap oil and all its derivatives like plastic or lubricants etc., such that aluminum is only a small benefit and nowhere even close to a bit of oil.
What’s the signal use of aluminum? Airplanes, but how are you going to economically power aluminum-built airplanes? Or skyscapers—but what’s the point of such dense expensive buildings if you are in an Industrial Revolution which is stalling out because the forests have been burned, the easy coal mined out, and oil completely unavailable? (Checking Wikipedia for aluminum, the lede highlights… ‘aerospace’ and ‘transportation’. And a lot of the other cited uses seem like they have viable alternatives, like copper—also available easily in the corpses of cities.)
A old comment of mine that seems somewhat relevant:
Good observation that easily accessible energy is what makes technological machine based civilizations go. Speaking of which in the long term there would still be wood to burn, wind and water power, animal and human muscles. Also remember you can use selective breeding to make animals (and plants) better suited to human purposes.
Much better.
Maybe no industrial revolution, but at the very least given enough time… Also there is still coal, lots of coal, much of it hard to reach though.
If the human brains adapted that much genetically during the existing relatively fast ramping up of civilization, powered by cheap accessible energy sources, then it can unadapt in the event of collapse and subsequent slower ramp up, starved of cheap energy.
We demonstrably are not pretty good at finding substitutes! Look at how well the existing highly experienced and technically sophisticated civilization has done at the task!
Cheap energy had very little to do with our massive changes. We are talking about consistent trend of people getting more adapted to civilization from the Neolithic through the Iron age and up until the 19th century. Freeze technology in any point between, humans would keep adapting to that level. And as long as populations continued to rise and new long distance trade links where being established, according to the 10k explosion hypothesis, faster. But I see your point, eventually as humans reached a new equilibrium and became decently adpated to life in static civilization and since there wouldn’t be a lot of change, intelligence may no longer be needed for stuff like farming, human evolution would start slowing down and veering into odd directions. I’m just not sure this [stagnant civ] would actually happen given the absence of say fossil fuels.
Arguably genes for high IQ became maladaptive basically at the same time when we got cheap energy and launched the industrial revolution. Sure there is the possibility that evolution goes ahead and changes us into something like farming, herding mammalian ants in the absence of cheap energy, but why is this so much more likley than say the idiocracy scenario of Azatoth doing horrible things to us in the presence of cheap energy? (depending on how one interprets history we may have evidence in favour of both btw)
On a time-scale of what, a century? In the absence of oil and coal I can’t imagine say 18th century European civilization stagnating on a time scale of millennia. These are cosmic eye blinks. Canals, wind-power and watermills had already basically created a mini industrial revolution in some places. I also can’t imagine say Aztec civilization stagnating in the absence of easily obtainable gold or copper.
On the grand scale, over time carrying capacities will generally rise as the crops and animals used are improved, people will get better at living in cities, merchant and priestly casts will keep getting smarter, farmers and herders will keep getting more resistant to infectious diseases and better adapted to their diets. And this should accelerate as long as population keeps getting larger.
Writing will be developed and continental scale empires may rise, if no earlier (because of say lack of iron) then when horse/camel/animal X riding hordes start extracting tribute from cities, or very very virulent religious memeplexes arise. The Mongolian peace and the Arab golden age where basically what happens when you tap into and connect a whole bunch of lands with differing intellectual traditions and make trade safe between them.
Eventually civilization will spread to harsh places like say parts Africa or Siberia where gold, silver, gems and even iron are still to be found. If scrap metals have been something known for millennia, and have probably become very high status items, how long before these smarter, perhaps more profit minded humans (at least their merchant caste) don’t eventually find a way to smelt them?
And you still have human selecting animals and plants. Combine this with an 19th or even 18th century of knowledge of heredity and you will be able to do really amazing things with domesticated animals on time scales of millennia. I wouldn’t put things like dogs breeds that specialize in sniffing out cancer, or parrots that are very very good at simple arithmetic and can be trained to communicate this beyond such a civilization. Not to mention all manners of beasts of burden or very fast birds with very good sense of direction that deliver messages across vast distances. And remember like dogs have been all these animals would basically be developing a human friendly user interface (behaviour a very simple understanding of how humans behave) over time. All of these examples are things that have sort of been done with animals, but we barley got started on before they became obsolete. Remember given enough time speciation would have occured between the breeds. What exactly are the limits?
Even places where not many animals where available for this such as the Americas, things like guinea pigs where domesticated. As long as you have at least one domesticated mammal or perhaps bird, your options are huge on the time-scale of a few thousand years (thing for a second of how dogs in various environments and of differing breeds have been used for everything from food to source of energy for transportation). So the process could easily eventually get started and I think once it does sooner or later, given writing and decent IQs, the knowledge of heredity will follow.
Carrying capacities may increase, but so what? You don’t see a whole lot of innovation out of Africa. Per capita is what matters, and per capita there is no long-term upwards trend. To quote Clark’s Farewell to Alms:
I disagree. 18th century Europe (by which I mean, of course, England, as the starter of the Industrial Revolution) was already dependent on non-renewable energy, and had been since roughly the late 1650s. Look at the charts in http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/6781 and notice where ‘coal’ exceeds firewood+water+other-renewables. (Firewood began falling in absolute terms; Easter Island comes to mind.)
I just realized we may be arguing about different things. I tought we where arguing about technologically progressing civilization that eventually leads to an intelligence explosion or life leaving Earth, while you may have thought we where arguing about escaping the Malthusian trap and increasing average living standards beyond sustenance.
Carrying capacities matter because according to the 10k model, larger populations in novel environment > faster biological evolution.
More people > more brains > bigger economy
I was referring to the speed of their adaptation.
Don’t see why Africa matters here. India and China created plenty of innovation. Higher IQ in the priestly and merchant classes will drive technological, scientific and memetic innovation. It will not be as explosive as the historic development of European civilization, but then again that’s pretty anomalous.
You say we aren’t good at finding substitute resources. This may be so.
In the absence of civilization bigger brains where a robust trend among hominids for millions of years. Bigger can be better when it comes to smarts.
And the whole idea of transhuman intelligences being so dangerous is that they are so because intelligence is overpowered in our universe. Would you feel safe dumping say an AI that was quite a bit beyond genius level on a resource starved rock (if stripped of all knowledge beyond that of stone age humans)?
The additional marginal value of human-architectured intelligence is questionable outside of a modern context. See http://www.gwern.net/Drug%20heuristics#modafinil
And were you aware that your trend broke down 30,000 years ago, and the brain has shrunk?
“Evolution of the human brain: is bigger better?” (this doesn’t include the bigger-brained Neanderthals either)
Yes. (“Dataset: all measurments of moninin cranial capcity available in the literature as of September 2000, for skulls older than 10,000 years old”).
It was part of a overall argument that humans have probably been getting smarter for the past few million years. And that this trend had nothing to do with the availability of fossil fuels or iron until perhaps very recently. It seems likely that this would have continued in their absence. And it seems likley that bigger brains would translate into better tools and more complex social organisation as they tended to have in eons past.
That’s a good point. I’m probably overestimating the usefulness of aluminum in this context.
I think it would basically fill the role of mithril. Neat very very expensive weapons/armour held as a royal treasure. A status symbol far too valuable to actually be used. With the occasional exception (radioactive hobbit stumbling into some in the swamps of N’ork).
Well, if one was using it for armor it wouldn’t be that hard to get a lot from the old cans and cars lying around. And the melting point isn’t that high. So it might actually be a common form of armor.
Accessible, sure, but what can you do with it once you’ve got it? Aluminum you can’t effectively work is still basically useless.
Aluminum has a lower melting point than copper, so once it’s refined it should be castable with medieval technology.
Actually, up-to-date modelling suggests that even a “minor” nuclear war between only two combatants, with 50 warheads apiece would be enough to render global agriculture impossible for a year or longer. The concomitant effects on hunter-gatherers are probably similarly devastating.
If some portion of humanity does survive that first year, I wouldn’t be so very optimistic they’re close enough to each other to make rebuilding a minimal viable population easy, let alone that the memories of the recently-destroyed global infrastructure are sufficiently present and relevant to be worth carrying forward to their descendants as anything other than a cautionary tale. What you’re looking at is basically a remote chance that some really isolated group in say, the Far North or an island in the Pacific manages to hold it together in a hunter-gatherer kinda way and do so for long enough that their population doesn’t collapse.
I’m betting you still don’t see them expand in any meaningful way for centuries after the fact, and the environmental damage may constrain even that for a lot longer.
Either clarification or citation humbly requested. The United States alone has conducted over 1000 nuclear tests, without rendering global agriculture impossible.
Citations first:
http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/pdf/ToonRobockTurcoPhysicsToday.pdf
http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/nuclear/
Now, to clarify:
Nuclear testing in the old days was done in deserts, or in remote polar areas (mostly the Soviet Union there, though many of their tests were conducted in desert areas of Central Asia). Those sites were chosen partly because they avoid massive vegetation burnoffs. Underground tests don’t have that problem at all (and they became standard practice for the biggest players in 1963 with the signing of the Limited Test Ban treaty, which permitted only underground tests—China and France didn’t sign it, and continued with other forms of testing afterwards, but even they ceased above-ground tests by the 1980s).
The issue is basically creating huge, massive areas of rapid conflagration all at once. One or two aren’t going to produce a nuclear winter, but “one or two cities bombed” hasn’t been a realistic expectation for nuclear warfare since 1945. Cities burn, and inhabited areas often sit near heavily-vegetated areas like grasslands or forests, which also burn. Get enough of these burnoffs going at once, and the predicted behavior can’t be reasoned out from analogies to oil fires in Kuwait. Too much stuff is burning, too fast, in too many places over too wide an area.
With only two countries (an unreasonably small number in real-world terms given the actual geopolitics involved) using only 50 weapons each (a ludicrously small number if you look at actual strategic warfare scenarios) in airburst configuration (minimizing fallout, as the fireball doesn’t touch the ground) you get frosts during “summer” for most of the planet, and persistent effects for up to a decade. Lest you be concerned about privileging the hypothesis, note that In nuclear warfare terms, this is an extremely convenient possible world for the “nuclear winter isn’t an issue” camp, and there are essentially no realistic strategic-level nuclear conflicts which can be modelled in those terms.
The history of nuclear testing in the 20th century involves a great deal of planning specifically to prevent runaway wildfires; that’s why testing over 1000 bombs in deserted areas with little plant life hasn’t touched off nuclear winter.
Sounds good to me! Thanks for the info.
See the top-voted comment for this post.