My claim is no nuclear bomb incident would have killed more than 25% of the population, or 500 million people in 1950, one billion 1970.
Reasoning is trivial—a single nuclear bomb can only kill a maximum of a few hundred thousand people at a time. At the height of the cold war there were a few thousand bombs on each side, most of which weren’t aimed at people but second strike capabilities in rural areas. Knock on effects like famines could kill more, but I doubt they would be worse than WW2, since number of direct deaths would be smaller. It would likely lead to war, but again WW2 is your ballpark here for number of deaths from an all out global war.
Making an anthropic update from something that at worse would have reduced world population by 25 percent is basically identical to reading tealeaves, especially if you don’t update the other way from WW1s and WW2s and other assorted disasters which majorly reduced world population.
Maybe we are the luckiest timeline. But the evidence for that is not enough to update you enough to meaningfully change your plans.
My claim is no nuclear bomb incident would have killed more than 25% of the population, or 500 million people in 1950, one billion 1970.
Reasoning is trivial—a single nuclear bomb can only kill a maximum of a few hundred thousand people at a time. At the height of the cold war there were a few thousand bombs on each side, most of which weren’t aimed at people but second strike capabilities in rural areas. Knock on effects like famines could kill more, but I doubt they would be worse than WW2, since number of direct deaths would be smaller. It would likely lead to war, but again WW2 is your ballpark here for number of deaths from an all out global war.
Making an anthropic update from something that at worse would have reduced world population by 25 percent is basically identical to reading tealeaves, especially if you don’t update the other way from WW1s and WW2s and other assorted disasters which majorly reduced world population.
Maybe we are the luckiest timeline. But the evidence for that is not enough to update you enough to meaningfully change your plans.