I recently went to the Hiroshima museum. I had originally thought that people simply vaporized when the bomb hit, but that is not the case. The museum shows how people's skin simply sloughed off and some were holding parts in their hands as they walked around to find their loved ones.
But the worst part was radiation poisoning. Many that did not initially get hit and burned directly went towards the center of the city to find their families and over the course of days, months and years, they almost always died a slow, painful death, with their teeth falling out and their skin and organs becoming necrotic.
Truly, everyone should visit Hiroshima or Nagasaki at some point, if only to understand what true horrors nuclear weapons create. And those are only atomic weapons of the 1940s, the hydrogen bombs we have today that fuse instead of fiss are orders of magnitude more powerful, but at least those under their effects (near the epicenter) will die a quick vaporized death instantaneously.
As an addition (and correction) to this, powerful thermonuclear weapons don't vaporize anyone either. They are targeted for high-altitude airbursts and kill through a combination of burns and building collapse, plus secondary fires, infection and breakdown of emergency services. The majority of the victims would not die an instant death.
There are multiple lethal effects from nuclear weapons, and a person inside the 100 million Celsius fireball itself (TK-radius), yes, will be vapourised.
Fireball size depends on weapon yield. For a 1 MT weapon, the radius is roughly 870m, at 5 MT ~1010m, at 150 KT, about 250m.
Most US nuclear weapons yield between 600 to 2,200 KT (0.6 to 2.2 MT).
Whether or not individuals are within the fireball radius depends on the height of detonation, parameters of the nuclear explosion itself (shaped nuclear charges are theoretically possible, though I'm not aware whether any present weapons are designed as such), and of course the local population density.
Outside the fireball, the principle lethal mechanism is the shock wave, though thermal pulse can still provide severe burns, and initial and fallout radiation can also be lethal, though over longer periods (hours, days, weeks, or more).
Effects generally fall with the inverse cube law. Larger weapons also experience an inverse cube effect, such that a one thousandfold increase in weapon yield delivers only a tenfold increase in effects at a given distance.
People may be vapourised, though most within a blast effect area will likely not. They may however be severely burned if directly exposed to the thermal pulse. Near in, other lethal effects, which may be delayed by a few seconds, principally from the blast wave, should predominate.
Air-burst attacks would likely decrease vapourisation. Penetrating / shaped charges would have markedly different and highly directional effects.
Regardless of how big a bomb is, there's going to be a distance at which it's no longer immediately lethal. Inside that radius you die quickly, outside you die slowly.
I had a similar experience, looking at the contorted metal lunchboxes and other household items was more terrifying, I always used to think things just go poof.
I’ll assume that you are American, so you obviously don’t understand how tone deaf that suggestion is to the current thread. Imagine someone commenting on horrible Auschwitz’s is after they visit and someone commenting “you should visit the Reichstag building to understand what lead to it all”, or a thread about 9/11 and someone suggest visiting a museum about the conflict in the Middle East to learn what lead to the events.
Obviously we are talking about completely different types of events and magnitudes of death and destruction, and the very notion that you should try to find justification for murder by events you can correlate to people who share ethnicity or nationality with the victims is just a cruel insult to anyone with a hint of human decency.
Indeed. I did find it interesting that the museum made no mention of the atrocities committed by the Japanese military in China as well, or even any discussion of Pearl Harbor beyond a mere mention that Japan attacked it. But then again, that doesn't really have anything to do with the suffering experienced by the populace, as the sins of the government should not be atoned by the governed.
This is indeed a very timely award. I sometimes feel like the world has forgotten that nuclear weapons still exist and are still on hair-trigger alert to obliterate major cities. Maybe the end of atmospheric testing and the success of (now defunct) weapons reduction treaties has blunted public perception to the ongoing threat that they represent, and to the need to tread carefully where nuclear powers are involved.
If I put a hammer over your head that can fall any minute you'll be worrying, but if you're born with the hammer over your head and your parents before you as well, it becomes less of a thing.
On an individual level, we all have a variety of hammers over our heads. Cancer has killed far more people prematurely than nuclear weapons. Something like 500,000 people a year are murdered. Traffic/bicycle/pedestrian accidents also kill more than nuclear weapons. Even compared to a once-in-a-century nuclear war that perhaps kills a billion people, cancer will kill roughly a billion in the next century anyway. So, for the rational/selfish person, the nuclear threat isn't worth worrying about.
My parents had no problem reminding us that we all live with a nuclear sword hanging over our heads.
It just so happens that most people in the West are comfortable, are completely insulated from the consequences of war, and can't even imagine a regular war happening to them.
And nuclear war is so much more horrifying and its consequences are so much beyond the pale, that people can't even think of what it would mean.
No, it’s simply the end of the cold war that made it a possibility less present in the media. The cold war was cold because making it hot would have meant going nuclear. So the possibility was always closely linked to the state of cold war. Globalization has blurred the picture considerably.
maybe your parents aren't old enough to remember how much of the population could expect to die in wars before nuclear weapons (i.e. mutually assured destruction) existed
The entire purpose of nuclear armaments is to make certain wars too nasty to fathom engaging in. If their organization didn't exist at all, we'd still have exactly the same number of nuclear war casualties since the 1940s.
The net result of this has enabled nuclear powers to engage in asymmetric wars against countries that don't have nukes, or to engage in proxy wars between nuclear superpowers. Meanwhile, we heave come perilously close to nuclear armageddon, with Stanislav Petrov standing in the way.
Totally agree this is very relevant today. We have heads of state in the EU and to some degree people in the USG with very cavalier approaches to the ideological war between the West and the BRICS.
I really don't know what the F* they are thinking but they keep pushing further and further and hope there is no elastic snap. It's like they forgot about diplomacy with enemies --at the height of the cold war, at its Apex in the Cuba Missile Crisis, we had communication with the enemy --it was inconceivable we would not have communications with them but now it's a wild west of bluster and provocation. I'm not saying were not right in tamping down aggression, but you have to be cognizant of the perils that exist.
Quite striking is strident opponents of the Hiroshima/Nagasaki decision have few qualms about the prospects of current escalation. It's insane.
BRICS? What ideological war is South Africa, India, and Brazil waging against the west? Members of Brics such as India and China are closer to war with each other then they are to war with the West.
I'm not sure why this got downvoted. The point is not to bow to Putin in all matters, but to treat the matter with extreme seriousness: Take time to do proper background research, evaluate your sources, give serious consideration to the Russian narrative -- without necessarily agreeing of course, allow for a margin of error both in your own judgement and for stray missiles entering the detection radius, etc. If it still seems like a good idea to take a stand afterwards, OK. But let's please not cause a nuclear war over Facebook likes and political brownie points.
I don't know why you're bringing BRICS into this. Brazil and South Africa aren't nuclear powers (at least not anymore, and South Africa is an irrelevant failed state anyway). India isn't engaged in any sort of ideological war with the West. Their nukes are purely defensive to deter China and Pakistan.
That leaves China and Russia. We learned during the Cold War that a policy of aggressive containment is effective and this should continue. Don't give them an inch.
In "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Rhodes, a poignant point was made, originating from people like Bohr, who were definitely on the peaceful side: without demonstrating the effect of the atomic bomb, the "nuclear taboo" would not have come into existence, and the first large conflict between nuclear powers would have seen a terrible outcome. The use of the bomb was inevitable, so it was sadly better to use it in a restricted war, before the US and the CCCP would use them against each other and the rest of the world.
> And to the others he said in mine hearing, Go ye after him through the city, and smite: let not your eye spare, neither have ye pity:
> Slay utterly old and young, both maids, and little children, and women...
Ezekial 9:5-6
> Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.
1 Samuel 15:3
> And every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground, both man, and cattle, and the creeping things, and the fowl of the heaven; and they were destroyed from the earth: and Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark.
Genesis 7:23
Two and a half thousand years later, human nature is unchanged. How easily we make peace with wholesale slaughter.
Does it matter? It was probably obvious to the scientists working on the bomb that other countries would get it too sooner or later, including countries at odds with each other.
Japan was better off in the long run being occupied solely by the US instead of a split occupation with the Soviets like Germany. If we hadn’t dropped the two bombs, the Soviets were set to invade northern Japan.
They were allies by necessity, but I don't think there were a lot of illusions about where things age heading. After all, the official doctrine of the Communist Party has always been that every non-communist regime has to be violently overthrown and replaced by a communist one. USSR didn't have the bomb not because they didn't want one, but because they were incapable of building one by themselves, and stealing all the details by means of vast spy network they had in the US, and then recreating them on their side, took time. If they had the capacity, they'd do it as fast as possible.
Phenomenal choice. While 80 years is nice- it's a blip on the timescale of history.
I personally think we're a button click away from going back to the stone age. I know others will disagree, but it's not something you wanna take a gamble on.
I think it's one of the reasons we have to be self sustaining on other heavenly bodies.
And also why wars or proxy wars between nuclear powers are extremely foolish and should be stopped with great urgency.
> I think it's one of the reasons we have to be self sustaining on other heavenly bodies.
I think this is a very naive take.
* We can't really live on another planet in the solar system.
* Look at how far the next star is and realise that we won't get there anytime soon (probably at all).
* What's the point of surviving on another planet, without any other species?
* Without considering the risk of nuclear war, we are in the process of destroying life on Earth.
The resources we put on that project are mostly wasted. We should try to live on Earth, I hear it's a nice place.
I don't personally believe we should colonize other heavenly bodies because of a potential nuclear apocalypse, but the negation of that is no reason to abandon space travel either. Every time we have launched a mission into deep space we have learnt more as a species about what makes Earth 'tick'. We can also do a lot without actual space travel - maybe if more people had heeded the observations of the greenhouse effect on Venus in the 60s, for instance, we would have less of an issue cleaning up our own atmosphere now.
I'm not confident that our place is in the stars, but it would be narrow-minded not to give living out there a go.
>> I think it's one of the reasons we have to be self sustaining on other heavenly bodies.
This is not a joke. But every time anybody brings it up a mob shows up saying that we must make it work here on Earth, and we should all go to hell if we can't. But we only need a few madmen in power for the rest of us to not matter.
The point is that making it work on Earth is orders of magnitude easier than making it work on Mars (or wherever). And by that I don’t mean that it’s easy by any stretch, but that establishing a self-sustaining colony on another planet is so much harder. In addition to the extremely challenging extraterrestrial environment (much more challenging than anything we have on Earth, including in the case of terrestrial nuclear catastrophe), all the problems that we have on Earth due to human nature will travel with us to any other planet if we don’t manage to solve them here.
I am more worried that we do not have that many attempts at rebuilding, because coal and oil are finite. OTOH a slower 2nd iteration might actually work better than this one.
If we lost access to electricity, we'd be completely screwed; we can't even get drinkable water in many places without electricity.
For example where I live there is water around 10-20m depth, but it's polluted (it may be usable for agriculture but not for human consumption); you'd have to dig a well over 100m below the surface.
> I personally think we're a button click away from going back to the stone age.
One reason to use less oil now is to perhaps preserve it in case we need to 'reboot' civilization in the future in case of a future cataclysm.
We were only able to reach beyond (near-)subsistence living because of cheap energy, first coal and later petroleum. All the easily accessible stuff is now kind of gone, so if there's another collapse (which may be more likely to be global in nature: see pandemics), then depending on how much knowledge we lose it could be hard to get back to the say level without the previously cheap/easy energy.
In past collapses (Europe: Western Roman Empire, Black Death) we were able to eventually recover because we at a simply technological level that could keep going even with the loss of a lot of knowledge.
> I think it's one of the reasons we have to be self sustaining on other heavenly bodies.
I think this will be impossible given advanced countries can't even be self-sufficient on Earth.
Is there oil on those heavenly bodies? Probably no, so you're importing your lubricants and seals/o-rings. Advanced fabs? No? Well you're importing your electronics. What kind of silica is there, because if you don't have the right kind of sand, you're mot making your own solar panels. How much radioactive material (uranium, plutonium, thorium, etc) is around if you want to try nuclear power.
So like usual I offer up "what's your alternative" ? Is it to ignore Russian's invasion of countries? Ignore Iran's chaos it wants to sew constantly in the Middle East? It's easy to say "just be peaceful" but history shows that countries are not peaceful towards one another, they constantly want to take other's resources, or force their way of life on others, or settle some vague issue they have with another country (or people there). I think most people would love if countries would just stop attacking others. right now we don't have the tech to live on "other bodies", that is pie in the sky. I would love if nation-states just stopped the nonsense and were good to one another and their inhabitants, but that has never been the case.
Irans wants to sew chaos? The whole conflict with Iran started because the US and UK installed a puppet government (Pahlavi) so they can control the oil. After Pahlavi was ousted, the religious extreme took control, and cut ties with the west as a result. Its more like the west wanted chaos and started this whole mess
The CIA was actively involved in the Maidan revolution, which sought to pull Ukraine out of Russia's sphere of influence and into the EU / NATO. Obviously this is antagonistic towards Russia, especially when they have so few natural barriers to defend against invasion of their land. Look at how quickly the Wagner group reached Moscow after defecting from the Ukrainian front.
If the shoe were on the other foot, and China had supported a revolution in Mexico and was setting up military bases, the American government would not take it lightly. The US would cook up some reason to wage war against Mexico as a continuation of the Monroe Doctrine. These wars are not about good and evil, as much as it's about empires and power.
You realize achieving a compromise is not simply "ignoring" or surrendering to Russia?
Putin and Biden haven't spoken in years. I would say you're proposing ignoring the situation until it becomes even more of a powder keg in a decade or two.
Alternative is accepting some territorial losses, compromising, soldiers go home. Doomsday clock ticks back to 5 minutes to midnight.
You're acting as if this is the first time anyone has annexed territory. Do I like it? No. But you gotta manage with the cards you're dealt and that territory is not worth decades long conflict with two major nuclear powers.
> I think it's one of the reasons we have to be self sustaining on other heavenly bodies.
But who will inhabit those other bodies? Humans? The same species that destroyed earth in your scenario? What makes you think that living on Mars would suddenly make everybody peaceful and enlightened?
Humanity en masse are superficial ignorant pretentious idiots. They are so pretentious that they pretend they are not pretentious and they care a lot ('It is utmost important for us [arbitrary lie here]'). Except Trump kind of people. They honestly and proudly announce that they give no fuck about anyone but themselves.
>Humanity en masse are superficial ignorant pretentious idiots.
Oh I see how I can perfectly fit this role sure, I tell you so as the most humble entity that universe ever spawned.
It was of the outmost importance for me to deliver this lie: I don't care about anyone, humanity can go extinct, self included, and it doesn't trigger any emotion in me.
Yeah, this is also a big concern of mine. Nuclear weapons haven’t been used since ww2, but there also hasn’t ever been total war between two nuclear powers.
The current climate in Russia and the Middle East may change that.
At home I have a book telling stories of Dutch WW2 survivors still living today. One of them was an eye witness account of the Hiroshima bomb. He was a POW and worked in a quarry or mine on the outskirts of town. He saw a single plane fly over. A bomb dropped with a parachute attached. Moments later he was flung to the back of the quarry and the city was gone. I would never have guessed there were eyewitnesses like this, let alone coutrymen of mine.
My opa was also a Dutch POW and I believe he was working in that same mine on the same day. When it happened, he was deep in the mine, which was evacuated because people inside initially thought the blast was an earthquake. Being a POW was without question extremely hard, but it was the bombing of Hiroshima that resulted in PTSD lasting many years after the war. He survived, retiring in Florida, and passed away in the late 80s. Some US government scientists asked if they could study his body, believing radiation exposure affected his long term health. It seems they were correct because his bones were found to have a slightly blue tint to them.
The book Hiroshima by John Hersey has many accounts like this. It’s a short read and follows six people and covers the first year after the bombing. I’d highly recommend reading it if such accounts are interesting to you.
My opa was also a Dutch POW, and his story is one for the books. He was assigned to work at a sake distillery just outside of Hiroshima. When the bomb hit, he was in the middle of taste-testing a new batch—he always claimed he was more of a quality control expert than a prisoner. The explosion sent him flying into a stack of sake barrels, and he ended up with a head full of rice wine and a newfound appreciation for the finer things in life.
The distillery, being built like a fortress to withstand earthquakes, somehow remained standing. Opa used to say that if he ever got nuked again, he'd want to be surrounded by sake barrels—apparently, they make for excellent shock absorbers.
Every New Year, he'd tell us about "the time I survived a nuclear blast with nothing but a sake buzz." He'd chuckle, pour himself a small glass of the weakest beer he could find, and toast to "the power of fermented rice."
Also POW Dutch grandfather here. He was in a giant concrete factory machining parts for airplanes. Bomb destroyed the whole city but the factory (being thick concrete) somewhat shielded the people inside. He had scars on his legs from pieces of a door blasting through the factory
> A resident of Nagasaki, Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima on business for his employer Mitsubishi Heavy Industries when the city was bombed at 8:15 AM, on 6 August 1945. He returned to Nagasaki the following day and, despite his wounds, returned to work on 9 August, the day of the second atomic bombing. That morning, while he was being told by his supervisor that he was "crazy" after describing how one bomb had destroyed the city, the Nagasaki bomb detonated.
> That morning, while he was being told by his supervisor that he was "crazy" after describing how one bomb had destroyed the city, the Nagasaki bomb detonated.
That is one way to win an argument. Not that anyone would prefer that "win".
The Wikipedia article says there were at least 165 survivors of both bombings: "[Yamaguchi] was invited to take part in a 2006 documentary about 165 double A-bomb survivors".
I, too, was shocked to learn this. I only learned about it fairly recently, from my older brother who read a book from the school library on it as a child:
Nine Who Survived Hiroshima & Nagasaki Hardcover – January 1, 1957
The Hiroshimia/Nagasaki situation is one of the best examples I can think of with plenty of evidence of the "history is written by the winners" concept.
It has been justified repeatedly over the years both in terms of relativism ("The firebombing of Tokyo killed more people, yet isn't so controversial"), and in terms of hypotheticals becoming certainties ("The empire was never going to surrender without a massive fight. The US anticipated unprecedented losses from an invasion of the main island, and is still giving out purple hearts printed in anticipation of this invasion")
In the end the historical narrative was that dropping the bombs was necessary to end the war, as written by the winners.
The reality is that we just don't know what would've happened if the US waited. Japan was not an active threat any longer. What was? The Soviet Union that would've certainly "helped" invade Japan, and would've also demanded to carve it up post-war the way they did with Germany.
From evaluating the overall evidence it seems pretty clear that this is what was driving the urgency to drop the bomb, not once, but twice.
The irony is that it's entirely possible that for the population of Japan this ended up a better outcome than having half of it face the "East Germany" scenario for the next 40 years.
And while the "blight" of having actually used nuclear weapons to kill civilians may be on the US forever as the only nation to have done so, the horrors of Hiroshima or Nagasaki almost certainly helped prevent nuclear weapon usage throughout the cold war. If they were never tried, it's almost certain that either the US or the USSR would've been itchy to be the first in some future engagement, and then who knows what would've happened.
So the truth is messy. My position is that the Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombings were NOT necessary to end WW2 and did not reduce the overall bloodshed within THAT conflict. But this action counterintuitively helped improve Japan's prosperity over the rest of the 20th century and may have reduced the likelihood of an actual nuclear war over the rest of the Cold War.
Your last paragraph makes a terrible moral argument: Yeah, maybe I am waging a war today, but's in the interest of the future peace!
I don't think your hypothetical assumption that 20th century peace could not be made without using nukes in WW2 is valid.
Why not even turn it up and say that future peace from nuclear weapons is impossible without living through the global thermonuclear war? Clearly, most people can imagine dangers of that, so they are perfectly capable of imagining dangers of only 2 nukes being used, without them actually being used.
With the information available at the time, dropping the nukes was immoral, and unjustifiable. The public justifications and the ones accepted by the standard western historical narrative do not hold up to scrutiny.
Despite that, I'm claiming that the decision probably inadvertently saved lives.
But that's not a moral argument. There were other means to save lives from nuclear apocalypse, and the US is complicit in its own actions that they've done to ensure a cold war with the Soviet Union.
Readit News
But the worst part was radiation poisoning. Many that did not initially get hit and burned directly went towards the center of the city to find their families and over the course of days, months and years, they almost always died a slow, painful death, with their teeth falling out and their skin and organs becoming necrotic.
Truly, everyone should visit Hiroshima or Nagasaki at some point, if only to understand what true horrors nuclear weapons create. And those are only atomic weapons of the 1940s, the hydrogen bombs we have today that fuse instead of fiss are orders of magnitude more powerful, but at least those under their effects (near the epicenter) will die a quick vaporized death instantaneously.
For more information: https://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq5.html
Fireball size depends on weapon yield. For a 1 MT weapon, the radius is roughly 870m, at 5 MT ~1010m, at 150 KT, about 250m.
Most US nuclear weapons yield between 600 to 2,200 KT (0.6 to 2.2 MT).
Whether or not individuals are within the fireball radius depends on the height of detonation, parameters of the nuclear explosion itself (shaped nuclear charges are theoretically possible, though I'm not aware whether any present weapons are designed as such), and of course the local population density.
Outside the fireball, the principle lethal mechanism is the shock wave, though thermal pulse can still provide severe burns, and initial and fallout radiation can also be lethal, though over longer periods (hours, days, weeks, or more).
Effects generally fall with the inverse cube law. Larger weapons also experience an inverse cube effect, such that a one thousandfold increase in weapon yield delivers only a tenfold increase in effects at a given distance.
People may be vapourised, though most within a blast effect area will likely not. They may however be severely burned if directly exposed to the thermal pulse. Near in, other lethal effects, which may be delayed by a few seconds, principally from the blast wave, should predominate.
Air-burst attacks would likely decrease vapourisation. Penetrating / shaped charges would have markedly different and highly directional effects.
Major Kong would not have felt a thing.
Obviously we are talking about completely different types of events and magnitudes of death and destruction, and the very notion that you should try to find justification for murder by events you can correlate to people who share ethnicity or nationality with the victims is just a cruel insult to anyone with a hint of human decency.
It just so happens that most people in the West are comfortable, are completely insulated from the consequences of war, and can't even imagine a regular war happening to them.
And nuclear war is so much more horrifying and its consequences are so much beyond the pale, that people can't even think of what it would mean.
I don't understand this. Between Iran and the Russia/Ukraine conflict, they seem to be very top of mind for many.
Dead Comment
I really don't know what the F* they are thinking but they keep pushing further and further and hope there is no elastic snap. It's like they forgot about diplomacy with enemies --at the height of the cold war, at its Apex in the Cuba Missile Crisis, we had communication with the enemy --it was inconceivable we would not have communications with them but now it's a wild west of bluster and provocation. I'm not saying were not right in tamping down aggression, but you have to be cognizant of the perils that exist.
Quite striking is strident opponents of the Hiroshima/Nagasaki decision have few qualms about the prospects of current escalation. It's insane.
Dead Comment
That leaves China and Russia. We learned during the Cold War that a policy of aggressive containment is effective and this should continue. Don't give them an inch.
> Slay utterly old and young, both maids, and little children, and women...
Ezekial 9:5-6
> Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.
1 Samuel 15:3
> And every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground, both man, and cattle, and the creeping things, and the fowl of the heaven; and they were destroyed from the earth: and Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark.
Genesis 7:23
Two and a half thousand years later, human nature is unchanged. How easily we make peace with wholesale slaughter.
Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRLON3ddZIw#t=15s
[0] first test: 29.08.1949
[1] a year in which the US and USSR were, however tenuously, still allied
https://www.ne.jp/asahi/hidankyo/nihon/english/
I personally think we're a button click away from going back to the stone age. I know others will disagree, but it's not something you wanna take a gamble on.
I think it's one of the reasons we have to be self sustaining on other heavenly bodies.
And also why wars or proxy wars between nuclear powers are extremely foolish and should be stopped with great urgency.
I think this is a very naive take.
* We can't really live on another planet in the solar system. * Look at how far the next star is and realise that we won't get there anytime soon (probably at all). * What's the point of surviving on another planet, without any other species? * Without considering the risk of nuclear war, we are in the process of destroying life on Earth.
The resources we put on that project are mostly wasted. We should try to live on Earth, I hear it's a nice place.
I'm not confident that our place is in the stars, but it would be narrow-minded not to give living out there a go.
We could live on Mars. Just a matter of time. Let engineers iterate.
We would obviously bring species here at home with us to Mars. And then new species would flourish too.
This is not a joke. But every time anybody brings it up a mob shows up saying that we must make it work here on Earth, and we should all go to hell if we can't. But we only need a few madmen in power for the rest of us to not matter.
It is like saying that the solution to all problems is colonizing Antarctica.
Yeah, we must. As in: it's not rational to even consider that becoming self-sustaining on other heavenly bodies is an alternative.
It's fun, it's interesting, it's many things. But it's not an alternative.
I am more worried that we do not have that many attempts at rebuilding, because coal and oil are finite. OTOH a slower 2nd iteration might actually work better than this one.
Far more important than 18th century vs stone age debate is the fact that there are people in charge that would lead us down either path.
For example where I live there is water around 10-20m depth, but it's polluted (it may be usable for agriculture but not for human consumption); you'd have to dig a well over 100m below the surface.
One reason to use less oil now is to perhaps preserve it in case we need to 'reboot' civilization in the future in case of a future cataclysm.
We were only able to reach beyond (near-)subsistence living because of cheap energy, first coal and later petroleum. All the easily accessible stuff is now kind of gone, so if there's another collapse (which may be more likely to be global in nature: see pandemics), then depending on how much knowledge we lose it could be hard to get back to the say level without the previously cheap/easy energy.
In past collapses (Europe: Western Roman Empire, Black Death) we were able to eventually recover because we at a simply technological level that could keep going even with the loss of a lot of knowledge.
> I think it's one of the reasons we have to be self sustaining on other heavenly bodies.
I think this will be impossible given advanced countries can't even be self-sufficient on Earth.
Is there oil on those heavenly bodies? Probably no, so you're importing your lubricants and seals/o-rings. Advanced fabs? No? Well you're importing your electronics. What kind of silica is there, because if you don't have the right kind of sand, you're mot making your own solar panels. How much radioactive material (uranium, plutonium, thorium, etc) is around if you want to try nuclear power.
And that's only after you've passed the fact that it's impossible for us to reach the next star.
The strict interpretation of that foreign policy is that any nuclear nation is free to invade any non-nuclear nation and abuse its citizens.
Where do you draw the line? If for example an ally is invaded by a nuclear nation. Should you intervene or just call peace?
Does the rule-of-law between countries have any relevance?
If the shoe were on the other foot, and China had supported a revolution in Mexico and was setting up military bases, the American government would not take it lightly. The US would cook up some reason to wage war against Mexico as a continuation of the Monroe Doctrine. These wars are not about good and evil, as much as it's about empires and power.
Putin and Biden haven't spoken in years. I would say you're proposing ignoring the situation until it becomes even more of a powder keg in a decade or two.
Alternative is accepting some territorial losses, compromising, soldiers go home. Doomsday clock ticks back to 5 minutes to midnight.
You're acting as if this is the first time anyone has annexed territory. Do I like it? No. But you gotta manage with the cards you're dealt and that territory is not worth decades long conflict with two major nuclear powers.
But who will inhabit those other bodies? Humans? The same species that destroyed earth in your scenario? What makes you think that living on Mars would suddenly make everybody peaceful and enlightened?
Oh I see how I can perfectly fit this role sure, I tell you so as the most humble entity that universe ever spawned.
It was of the outmost importance for me to deliver this lie: I don't care about anyone, humanity can go extinct, self included, and it doesn't trigger any emotion in me.
The current climate in Russia and the Middle East may change that.
Fun fact the cover image if this edition was kind of a decoy (perhaps to accentuate the shock): https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1946/08/31
The distillery, being built like a fortress to withstand earthquakes, somehow remained standing. Opa used to say that if he ever got nuked again, he'd want to be surrounded by sake barrels—apparently, they make for excellent shock absorbers.
Every New Year, he'd tell us about "the time I survived a nuclear blast with nothing but a sake buzz." He'd chuckle, pour himself a small glass of the weakest beer he could find, and toast to "the power of fermented rice."
There is also Yoshito Matsushige, a survivor and the only photographer who was able to capture an immediate, first-hand photographic historical account: https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/key-documents/yoshito-mats...
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hibakusha
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One thing I was surprised by was the number of survivors and also that there was at least one person who survived both bombs [1]
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsutomu_Yamaguchi
That is one way to win an argument. Not that anyone would prefer that "win".
Nine Who Survived Hiroshima & Nagasaki Hardcover – January 1, 1957
https://www.amazon.com/Nine-Who-Survived-Hiroshima-Nagasaki/...
It has been justified repeatedly over the years both in terms of relativism ("The firebombing of Tokyo killed more people, yet isn't so controversial"), and in terms of hypotheticals becoming certainties ("The empire was never going to surrender without a massive fight. The US anticipated unprecedented losses from an invasion of the main island, and is still giving out purple hearts printed in anticipation of this invasion")
In the end the historical narrative was that dropping the bombs was necessary to end the war, as written by the winners.
The reality is that we just don't know what would've happened if the US waited. Japan was not an active threat any longer. What was? The Soviet Union that would've certainly "helped" invade Japan, and would've also demanded to carve it up post-war the way they did with Germany.
From evaluating the overall evidence it seems pretty clear that this is what was driving the urgency to drop the bomb, not once, but twice.
The irony is that it's entirely possible that for the population of Japan this ended up a better outcome than having half of it face the "East Germany" scenario for the next 40 years.
And while the "blight" of having actually used nuclear weapons to kill civilians may be on the US forever as the only nation to have done so, the horrors of Hiroshima or Nagasaki almost certainly helped prevent nuclear weapon usage throughout the cold war. If they were never tried, it's almost certain that either the US or the USSR would've been itchy to be the first in some future engagement, and then who knows what would've happened.
So the truth is messy. My position is that the Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombings were NOT necessary to end WW2 and did not reduce the overall bloodshed within THAT conflict. But this action counterintuitively helped improve Japan's prosperity over the rest of the 20th century and may have reduced the likelihood of an actual nuclear war over the rest of the Cold War.
I don't think your hypothetical assumption that 20th century peace could not be made without using nukes in WW2 is valid.
Why not even turn it up and say that future peace from nuclear weapons is impossible without living through the global thermonuclear war? Clearly, most people can imagine dangers of that, so they are perfectly capable of imagining dangers of only 2 nukes being used, without them actually being used.
With the information available at the time, dropping the nukes was immoral, and unjustifiable. The public justifications and the ones accepted by the standard western historical narrative do not hold up to scrutiny.
Despite that, I'm claiming that the decision probably inadvertently saved lives.
But that's not a moral argument. There were other means to save lives from nuclear apocalypse, and the US is complicit in its own actions that they've done to ensure a cold war with the Soviet Union.
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