P(doom) = 50%. It either happens, or it doesn’t.
Lao Mein | Statistics is Hard. | Patreon
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Currently doing solo work on glitch tokens and tokenizer analysis. Feel free to send me job/collaboration offers.
DM me interesting papers you would like to see analyzed. I also specialize in bioinformatics.
Depending on the country you live in, you may be able to order GE organisms from specialist companies or universities, with higher likelihood of success if you do so on behalf of a company/university.
I don’t think I’ve seen a full counter-value nuclear exchange scenario where most of the deaths come from the initial nuking itself. The highest risk of death actually comes from radioactive contamination of food supplies (America bases much of its strategic nuclear arsenal in sparsely populated farmland) and maybe nuclear winter reducing crop yields. This means that as long as you don’t starve to death in the first few years, you’ve mostly made it.
Therefore, having a year’s worth of food and water per person should be the cheapest way of hedging your bets against a nuclear holocaust. That comes to 100-200kg of grains and beans in a sealed container, which Amazon says is ~$200. Water may be a bigger issue, but fortunately, most people live near a well or river. Water purification tablets are something like $50 for 300 gallons, which should be enough for a year of drinking per person. Obviously, bottled water would be also be needed to wait out the first few weeks of fallout, but a lot of people already buy their caffinated drink of choice in bulk, and 100 Monster Energy in a corner works just as well.
That’s most of what you need to survive hunkering down for a full year. Maybe also buy a gun and join a militia for your security needs? Honestly, it doesn’t seem too hard to achieve, even for someone living in an urban apartment. Biggest concern may be keeping your provisions secret, since your starving neighbors will get jealous eventually and you can’t feed your entire building.
Bulk rice and beans in vacuum-sealed bags, plus multivitamins. You won’t be having fun, but you’ll survive the year. It’s pretty easy to stockpile if you’re going to be eating those anyways. The main takeaway should be to buy non-perishables you normally consume in bulk when you think there is an elevated risk of nuclear war and draw down those provisions when you think the risk has passed. This means that the cost of preparing for nuclear war is the interest you would otherwise earn on <$500, which is pocket change per year. The needed storage space for a person-year of food and water is also under a cubic meter, so that shouldn’t be too much of a concern.
https://www.amazon.com/Royal-Basmati-Rice-15-Pound-Bag/dp/B00I330QEQ
https://www.amazon.com/Dried-Navy-Small-White-Beans/dp/B00BXM6GFC
https://www.webstaurantstore.com/riceland-white-long-grain-rice-50-lb/112WHTLG50.html
These are a bit more than $1 per pound for Amazon and half that for the bulk supplier. Dried rice is around 3700 calories per kg, and even a fit adult male on bed rest only needs around 1500 a day (I think). So 300 pounds should be enough for a year. My math was a bit off since I confused pounds for kilograms initially, haha.
What are your market positions? What bets have you made in response to this knowledge?
Thanks for reminding me. I did, and it’s under moderator review.
By sheer coincidence, I wrote an analysis of that exact paper earlier today.
The United States has anywhere between 1.5-5+ years of food supplies in grain storage alone, depending on the time of year. And that’s not counting anything in the fields. In addition, the paper you cited makes some very bad assumptions (no change in crops to account for different weather, no increase in land cultivated, not taking into account existing food stores after year 1) that make the conclusions effectively useless.
It actually is that bad. If that was the sketchy thing in the paper, I would have given them the benefit of the doubt, but it wasn’t. So many basic assumptions, like land under cultivation, which crops were planted where, ect., were bad. If you read a paper that concluded 99% of people in a building will die in case of a fire without fire alarms, because an assumption of the simulation was that people will continue to sleep while they are on fire, that’s not an honest mistake. That’s something a fifth grader can point out is nonsensical. Whoever wrote that is not acting in good faith.
If this was published in a low-impact journal or written by a first-time author, I would have ignored it as publication pressure induced padding. But the people who wrote it are good scientists. The primary author did a bunch of well-regarded models with aerosol modeling. Most importantly, Nature should have noticed something was wrong immediately. Everyone involved should have known better.
Fusion bombs don’t produce much fallout from airbursts—the worry of fallout is the large-scale use of ground-burst bombs designed to target hardened facilities like bunkers and missile silos. Dirt would then absorb much of the resulting radiation, become radioactive, and get carried by wind.
And you’re welcome for reading :^).
I was looking for exactly something like this! Thanks for posting. How were these two papers received in your field?
I’m mostly joking. That being said, the bragging rights for “I got published in Nature” is pretty great.
Would it be possible for you to make a post with a brief summary of what you expect to happen in a nuclear exchange? I think a lot of people would be interested in something like that given the recent talk about the possibility of nuclear war from the Russia-Ukraine war.
No rationale was given for their assumptions. It wasn’t even analyzed. There were no justifications, just single-sentence statements for what assumptions they used. There’s a big difference between “some people die to fires in their sleep”, which makes a lot of sense, and “99% of people asleep during a fire die”, which would require extremely good justification as an assumption in a simulation. You can’t just put that in a paper with no analysis.
This was published in Nature. I’ve seen papers get rejected from impact factor 1 journals for less.
I’ll correct it after I get off work and do a bit more research. Do you know where I can find the projections for a “nuclear war tomorrow” scenario? What is the contingency for ALLFED if it actually happens?
Knocking out rail infrastructure for months doesn’t seem plausible to me. Rail is made of hardened steel. Short of being inside the fireball, I don’t see how it would be damaged beyond repair. Maybe rail stations can be targeted, but that’s still a tiny proportion of the rail that exists in the US. Less-used tracks can be cannibalized and machine shops can probably produce short-term replacement rail to keep critical lines running.
As for fossil fuels, I am unsure of how much they will be targeted, but each warhead that hits an oil rig is one that’s not hitting a city. In addition, the majority of the world’s fossil fuel production is outside of the US and Russia, and won’t be targeted. A major concern is probably oil refineries, which are very concentrated in the US, Russia, and China, but the distillation of crude oil is actually mechanically quite simple, requiring only a heat source and a condenser—you can theoretically build one in your back yard, and people have. The main reason modern refineries are so expensive and time-consuming to build is their heavy focus on efficiency and safety.
Also, there’s the beating heart of American agriculture, the Mississippi River. It branches throughout the Midwest, going all the way up to the Great Lakes. The considerable majority of American people and agriculture are located within a hundred km of either it or the ocean, meaning distribution would be relatively easy, even if land transportation is heavily disabled.
I am unsure about fertilizer and pesticide production, especially in the case of fertilizer export bans by other nations. I think it depends heavily on how well American natural gas production survives, but lack detailed knowledge.
Currently living in Shanghai. Things are… OK? I have to do a COVID test (takes under a minute to 20 minutes, depending on how long the line is; the average is under 5.) every 3 days, and the day before I go to a hospital. While a lot of places require masking and COVID passes in theory, the only places I’ve seen them enforced are at work and in hospitals, where security checks your pass. No one at work wears masks, even if they’re sick. Public masking is pretty rare, but then again I don’t take public transit. This is the new normal, and I can see it continuing indefinitely. Also, people who can’t use/afford smartphones are pretty screwed, since you need like 5 different apps to get by.
The food delivery app has the vaccination status and live body temperature of the delivery driver. I’m not sure how that’s done. Still no updated vaccine that I’m aware of, despite the Red Army deploying their own in June 2020.
Pontooning greatly increases things like accident rates, driver stress (which leads to more accidents and requires higher wages), and reduces flexibility. The fuel savings may be lower than the increased costs of insurance. It seems to me that the same factors which would favor pontooning would also favor rail transport, which is much cheaper and fuel-efficient than trucking can ever be, but has problems dealing with small loads.
Well, this is awkward. Any advice for a Chinese bioinformatics coder interested in finding a well-paying job in the US? I want to go into AI research and went to college in the US if that helps.
Oh, crap, I work in Chinese genetics. If Illumina and other suppliers embargo China, my job will go tits up. Any idea how much BGI Genomics will be affected? I was also considering jumping ship to UAV development, so this has been a really bad month. No one I work with knew any of this was happening when I brought it up earlier this week.
Let’s say that I am willing to do the thing and take public social/legal responsibility. Who would I contact to work out an action plan? I would really appreciate some advice, both legal and technical. Also, is anyone here in contact with people actually working on gene drive field testing? A lot of recent discussion here about why deployment has been delayed seem like conjecture.