There’s some utility to distinguishing the level of impact individual human actions have, though, and stability/instability seems a good proxy. Either asteroid detection or deflection is a massive undertaking requiring investments on the scale of tens or hundreds of billion of USD (or equivalent), for example, and the smaller decisions or indecisions of an individual politician or NASA administrator are very remotely related to the active event. The popular history(1) of MAD shows several circumstances where the entire system balanced on minutia of policy, technical errors, or the decisions of a single military officer on more than one occasion.
(1) This is a statement about my knowledge, rather than the accuracy of the history, in this case. It’s not a topic I’ve studied in detail.
There’s some utility to distinguishing the level of impact individual human actions have, though, and stability/instability seems a good proxy. Either asteroid detection or deflection is a massive undertaking requiring investments on the scale of tens or hundreds of billion of USD (or equivalent), for example, and the smaller decisions or indecisions of an individual politician or NASA administrator are very remotely related to the active event. The popular history(1) of MAD shows several circumstances where the entire system balanced on minutia of policy, technical errors, or the decisions of a single military officer on more than one occasion.
(1) This is a statement about my knowledge, rather than the accuracy of the history, in this case. It’s not a topic I’ve studied in detail.