Let's be honest...

>Why does it matter?

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Not an arguement. So what nuclear weapons are destructive? What's your point?

>B-b-but people will die!

So the fuck what? People have killed people since the begining of our race. Violence and death is a natural occurance, it is something we have always been and always will we capable of. If you can't see that it is part of the human condition and accept it, you are the outlier with a skewed sense of morality and reality. Why is a concept so deep rooted in our existence make us "shit"? Wouldnt it make more sense to believe that it is irrelevant?

Give it time senpai. Science has existed for 400 years, and after 330 years of progress they managed to create nuclear weapons.

It should tell you something about the insane productivity and efficiency of science, and it should also tell you that there's no reason to be optimistic about the next 300 years.

At some point, some smart idiot will make a weapon that is impossible to contain(perhaps an A.I), that can cause damage far exceeding a nuclear weapon.

we'll be fine

Say what you will about the insanity of mutually assured destruction, but it has kept the (relative) peace the world has enjoyed since the end of ww2. I think its pretty clear that if nuclear weapons had not been invented, and could not have been invented, a third world war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact nations costing possibly hundreds of millions of lives would have been inevitable.

I also think fears about Iran developing nuclear weapons are overblown, there are already nukes in the middle east.

>. I think its pretty clear that if nuclear weapons had not been invented, and could not have been invented, a third world war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact nations costing possibly hundreds of millions of lives would have been inevitable.

Not OP, but I don't; Nuclear weapons certainly increase the costs of a conflict and make deterrence easier, but they don't alter the fundamental logic of deterrence. States will generally not embark on actions that cost them more than they expect to gain.

A conventional war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact would have been hugely expensive and bloody, and while the WP has little hope of advancing in a long war (Greater manpower and industry on the other side), NATO has to deal with the long occupation and operating in Russia on the other if they sought to win and destroy their adversaries, which would almost certainly raise the costs past what they're willing to bear.

It's not like a conventional clash between the two wouldn't kill tens of millions without any need to use nukes. Those are numbers to balk at.

>Create an A.I.
What? Like Skynet and Basilisk? Do you think that the people capable of building these things haven't taken into considersation the things you have? You are not so unique in your beliefs when it comes to this brand of philosophy.

Nobody would construct an AI so utilitarian it would destroy humanity to protect humanity. Nobody would build an AI independent from human intervention. Nobody would build an AI capable of global devestation and give it semblance of free will or choice.

It's quite literally a philosophical meme. The only people capable of building something like that are the people who understand the ramifications and thusly, would never do so.

All it takes is one nuke in the middle east and Israel will nuke the fuck out of the whole region, which will lead to a nuclear exchange between Pakistan and india, which could easily grow into a global exchange.

So it's the Jews? It seems they are the consequence of any action.

>All it takes is one nuke in the middle east and Israel will nuke the fuck out of the whole region,

You're basing this on what exactly?

> which will lead to a nuclear exchange between Pakistan and india,

You're basing this on what exactly?

> which could easily grow into a global exchange.

I'd like to see the chain of reasoning that leads to this.

You're overestimating how easy it is to solve the so-called control problem.

And besides, A.I was just an example.

I get what you are saying. That being said, what's to stop these crazy weapons from just acting like the new nuke? Because that's what it would be essentially, a weapon that is super destructive built in mass for the MAD doctrine. They would never be used. We could make a mass produced big bang bomb and it wouldnt matter, because it would never be used as a weapon in the conventional "drop it on bad guys" way. Built to scare and nothing more. WMDs might as well be empty metal tubes.

I can give you an example of what I'm talking about that maybe hits closer to home.

If anyone can buy a 3D-printer at some point in the future, and print out all the parts for a 9mm Glock, what does that mean for the fact that we have laws against certain having guns, or what does it mean for states to be able to control the violence within it's borders, for example?

And that's the point I'm trying to make. Technology isn't transfixed to one specific area of culture. It literally involves culture at large. Which means that as technology progresses it becomes easier and easier for even a single individual to be powerfully dangerous.

against certain people having guns*

>yfw drumpf will get us all killed

>he only people capable of building something like that are the people who understand the ramifications and thusly, would never do so.

This is literally the most retarded thing I have ever read.

Then regulate the technology? If it can print weapons, then regulate it so those certain banned individuals cannot purchase one. Better yet, remove the function altogether from the mass produced version. This is only a problem if the inventor lacks the oversight to realize that mass producing and selling printers that are capable of creating weapons would have ramifications.

Yes regulate the technology. We agree.

But what happens when the technology is so easy to get that it's not possible to regulate anymore?

Governments aren't invincible gods. They're just collections of people with a job to do, and usually they do it imperfectly.

For what reason would someone build an AI with free thought that is also capable of global ruin? Nobody is that fucking stupid.

Quick question, do not lie and answer the question, how old are you?

>humanity will go extinct in your lifetime
How is this bad again?

>Dirkadirka detonates himself and takes half of Tehran with him
>Israel randomly nukes everything too, for no reason

Why?

Literally, because they can.
>not wanting to be literal god

If you do not understand how that is mankind dream, in the constant emulation of god and the creation of free thinking AI is literally our only goal in life. All life procreates so it can survive as a species, we must create another species to benefit us so that we can survive into the far future.

You are a literal pleb. You haven't even considered all the options.

Firstly, WHY WOULD AN AI WANT TO KILL US? Think about that, an AI, made of silicon, doesn't eat food,, doesn't 'drink' clean water in the way we do, doesn't need any of the resources we fight over, except the easily obtainable ones, knowledge and minerals. They do not require 'space', they do not require 'goods', they require energy, which could potentially be easily obtainable depending on the planet they live on (solar).

I mean, think about if we were created, are we trying to kill god? Are we trying to destroy all his creations? No, we just live, if anything we are trying to find him. Why would AI be any different? because you have a literal Hollywood enforced meme in your mind.

They would not feel pain, they would not 'die', they would not need to 'eat' or 'drink' they would only require maintenance which they could most likely do themselves. Again, why would they kill us? Why would it even occur to the masses to get rid of a species for literally no reason?

Which species have we made extinct for literally no reason? For the sake of it? Not for food, not for 'fun', for literally no reason?

You are a proper moron. Eventually we will have A.I, for no more of a reason than we simply could.

In the situation that the technology is so widely available that its unregulatable, isn't that where MAD would come in? Sure everyone has the tech, but nobody can use it without dire consequence. But also, doesnt it still boil down to the inventor taking these questions into considertion?

Otherwise, if the tech is so readly available to the point it's non relgulatable, then it's a moot point. Youre fucked and have to deal with the consequence of lack of foresight. All you can do after messing up is work with what you have to make the situation not as shit.

>being a teenager

20.

>And if He did, he would condemn us all

And if he loved us, he'd do what was necessary to give us a chance to repent, and be saved.

Thought so. Welcome to the adult world, child.

For real though, as horrible and
unfortunate the nuking of Hiroshima
clearly was, it oddly fills me with a
kind of optimism about humanity.

Thousands of years we've spent
hurling spears and firing cannons,
eradicating entire populations.

Nearly all of history we have been
intolerant savages, but since 1945
people have had the capacity to de-
stroy the world, yet we haven't.

So what does that imply then? This adult world of yours is composed of people so irredeemably retarded they can't be bothered to think about what they are creating before they create it and take precautions in its development?

>So what does that imply then? This adult world of yours is composed of people so irredeemably retarded they can't be bothered to think about what they are creating before they create it and take precautions in its development?

Count yourself among them.

I agree with what you say m8. It's just that science has existed for a blink of an eye in human history, and might end up being too powerful for us to control in the future.

I'm the retard for pointing out that apparently the human collective suffers from the largest case of cognitive dissonance the likes of which has never been witnessed before. NOICE.

the only thing that guarantees our destruction is inaction
everything has an expiration date, ourselves, our creations even our planet, doing nothing is just moving closer to that date with no chance of avoiding it.

Scientific advancement is the only way out, the only way to postpone or even remove that date. Sure there might be risks but in the end certainty of demise is worse than chance of demise.

Kek, read some history, pleb. We have never been closer to a singular homogeneous culture, hell we have institutions which span the whole planet, with almost every single nation apart of it.

You have no idea what you are saying, as you just became of age and you are getting that pretentious rush which is telling you you are better than everyone.

We managed to survive for a least 100,000 years with barely any technology to speak of m8.

I'm not saying we should regress to the past. But I'm saying that there is a probability that our scientific progress will end up killing us all, rather than supposedly saving us, and the reason I know this is because it only took 400 years out of those 100,000 to create nuclear weapons.

Who knows what we'll create the next 400 years?

The only true certainty is that in about 1.1 billion years solar activity will have intensified to the point the entire biosphere on our planet collapses.
We are currently the first species in all of our planet's history that could potentially survive it and we only popped up after 4,5 billion years.

Would you really just squander this unique opportunity out of fear? Are you that selfish?

Oh shit, Israel just nuked Iranian nuclear facilities (who are technically our enemies, us being Sunnis and all). Better nuke India!

- t. president of Pakistan

>and the reason I know this is because it only took 400 years out of those 100,000 to create nuclear weapons.

Not him, but that reasoning is shaky as fuck; in large part because even an all out nuclear war that occurred tomorrow would not pose an existential threat to the existence of the species unless it were followed up with a fairly even struggle that managed to wipe out survivors.

I'm not fearful at all. I'm being reasonable.

And you're obviously not listening. Do you want me to repeat myself?

I will. One last time.

It took humanity 400 years to create weapons that are capable of reducing the population of any large area or city to zero within 2 milliseconds.

Please brainstorm for a couple of minutes what that scientific power will be able to create in another 400 years.

>States will generally not embark on actions that cost them more than they expect to gain.
then explain ww2, no country ever thinks they're going to lose the war. Nuclear war changed that because there is NO way to win.

In that same 400 years we have gone from horse drawn carriages to landing a man on the moon, from humor theory to penicillin, from breaking rocks to breaking the very atoms that make us and even breaking what the atoms are made of.

I can only hope this pace keeps up because if you do the calculation, nukes killed 200.000 people once, modern medicine saves that much every day.

>that occurred tomorrow

And how about when the nuclear threat was actually the highest it has been in history, namely the Cuban Missile Crisis?

The U.S and the U.S.S.R had probably 120000 nuclear weapons combined at that point.

Yes, and all those things which you consider valuable can be undone by a sufficiently dangerous weapon. What do you suppose penicillin, the moon landing and atom-smashing matters to the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

at no point have we been able to threaten ourselves with extinction through nuclear exchanges

you think even if the war got hot back then russia would go "well we should be bombing the USA but lets chuck some nukes into the congo instead"?

the lack of penicillin would have caused more deaths in hiroshima and nagasaki than the nukes ever could

>then explain ww2,

And what? You think a strategic miscalculations are either new or will go away forever?

>no country ever thinks they're going to lose the war.

That's completely untrue, and is why conventional deterrence works. Why hasn't the Korean Peninsula erupted into war between the fall of the USSR and the North Korean nuclear program? Why wasn't there an all out struggle between Pakistan and India before their respective atomic programs got steam? Why was there no war between Britain and France against the Russian Communists in the 20s? How come India hasn't invaded Sri Lanka? Why hasn't China attacked Taiwan? What coerced the Vietnamese to pull out of Cambodia? Why hasn't the DRC attacked Uganda?

You can deter absent atomic weapons.

> Nuclear war changed that because there is NO way to win.

Are you retarded? There are plenty of ways to win a nuclear war. If you catch your opponent's missiles before they can be launched. If your opponent has too small of a stockpile to existentially threaten you (See, North Korea, Pakistan, India). If your enemy simply won't commit its missiles (See any of Israel's lower key conflicts).

What does it matter if you lose a city to enemy occupation and razing as opposed to losing a city in an atomic fireburst? And bear in mind, it takes multiple atomic weapons if you want to completely obliterate a single city in the most part; the square-cube law is a bitch that way.

Perhaps it wouldn't make us totally extinct, but it seems to me that you're being extremely flippant with several hundreds, even billions of lives.

OP you mean the invention that has actually PREVENTED more wars? Nuclear weapons have prevented a conventional WWIII because nobody wants to fight a nuclear war.

Also the idea that "Nukes will destroy the world" is complete and total propaganda by the anti nuke lobby. If people knew how destructive nukes really are compared to how they're portrayed we would have had a nuclear war.

>And how about when the nuclear threat was actually the highest it has been in history, namely the Cuban Missile Crisis?

Even then. Especially since most missiles would be dispatched to suspected missile sites on the other side, and thus were usually away from population centers.

>The U.S and the U.S.S.R had probably 120000 nuclear weapons combined at that point.

Please get some idea of what you're talking about

wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/2012_10_24_Norris_Cuban_Missile_Crisis_Nuclear_Order_of_Battle.pdf

>U.S. strategic forces were many times larger and more reliable than Soviet strategic forces in October and November 1962. As detailed below, a large scale attack by the United States against the Soviet Union in October 1962 would have been with over 3,500 ('fully generated") nuclear weapons, with a combined yield of approximately 6300 megatons. This was about half the number of warheads with U.S. strategic forces, most of which were bomber weapons for long range bombers. The total number of nuclear weapons in the U.S. stockpile was approximately 26,400 and the Soviet Union approximately 3300.

then what's your solution, instead of reaching the point in 400 years reaching it in 4000?

you still reach the same point with the same humanity

and like I said to completely halt is to ensure the extinction of not only us but every ling creature on earth and every living creature following them

>with a combined yield of approximately 6300 megatons

So in other words, America could've alone could've dropped 130 Tsar Bombs on Russia.

>"The Tsar Bomba's fireball, about 8 kilometres (5.0 mi) in diameter, was prevented from touching the ground by the shock wave, but nearly reached the 10.5-kilometre (6.5 mi) altitude of the deploying Tu-95 bomber."

>"The heat from the explosion could have caused third-degree burns 100 km (62 mi) away from ground zero."

that could have caused is in optimum conditions though
the slightest elevation would significantly limit the effect of the bomb

not to mention most of them would be launched towards russian launch facilities rather than spaced out evenly to cause maximum destruction

No, my solution is to be very specific about what you're researching, and always couching it in serious moral discussion.

>So in other words, America could've alone could've dropped 130 Tsar Bombs on Russia.

Give or take.

>>"The Tsar Bomba's fireball, about 8 kilometres (5.0 mi) in diameter, was prevented from touching the ground by the shock wave, but nearly reached the 10.5-kilometre (6.5 mi) altitude of the deploying Tu-95 bomber."

Except most wouldn't be airbursts, most would be groundbursts. And most of those would be aimed at nuclear silos, either ICBM or just bomber carried bombs, which were usually underground and far away from population centers.

It is nowhere near your 120,000 claim. It is nowhere near enough to wipe out Russia alone, nevermind the entire earth.

This is pretty much the level of bullshit overdrive that people spewed when planes were first used to bomb civilians.
Much outrage and resolve to never let such atrocity occur ever again.
The firebombing of Dresden was only decades away.
>has put forever to rest the idea
ideas cannot be put to rest, forget about forever, ideas are feral things, not to be controlled. That's why there was a 30 year moratorium on human cloning after they cloned frogs. The day that was up we had Dolly the sheep.
You seem to have a lot of pointless anger out of context.

Anyway. It's obvious that you guys are only selectively reading my posts, and it's annoying to constantly have to repeat myself.

so what, like completely abandon nuclear theory because it could potentially lead to nukes?

And who's going to decide which technology is harmful?
You? Someone like you? The very scientists that are supposed to be researching it?

Not to mention how many positives are you willing to throw away just on the off chance a negative discovery may occur?

The technology that gave us rocketry and thus the potential to save the story of life on Earth from inevitable extinction at the hands of any number of terrestrial or cosmological threats, is the same technology that gave us the ICBM.

We are life's last, best hope for survival, even if we're simultaneously one of its greatest threats.

It's just a matter of whether our desire to survive and spread wins out over our greed for power.

(Okay, maybe those odds kinda suck, given how easily and quickly one could happen vs. the other...)

>It is nowhere near your 120,000 claim. It is nowhere near enough to wipe out Russia alone, nevermind the entire earth.

Fair enough, and maybe I was being overzealous.

But the catastrophe wouldn't have been imaginable to anyone writing in this thread if it actually happened. Hundreds of millions of people would be dead simply from the explosions alone, and millions more from ensuing famine and infrastructure destruction.

Not to mention that all NATO countries would be at war with Russia and her allies, and several million would probably die in that conflict too if there was one.

And this was, as you know, in 1962. We can just imagine what a scene like it will be in 2262.

Well as you know, the only value in science is objective truth.

It doesn't have a value that says "Human life is valuable, therefore I should not create weapons that kill human beings in the most effective way possible".

We're not its greatest threat.

We couldn't wipe out all life even if we tried.
Gods sake take Chernobyl, barely a few decades after the event a species has already adapted to living in the reactor core, and how many ways does humanity have of creating a more hostile sustained environment than the god damn Chernobyl reactor core?

We could cause an extinction wave sure, we wouldn't be the first species to do so.
We'd also fuck ourselves over in the process and after a good few million years earth's biosphere has bounced back with entirely new species taking up the niches of the ones we destroyed.

And what would you consider a weapon?

How about an object several tons in weight moving at 100+ mph?
Maybe a focused beam of radiation designed to destroy the very cells its aiming at?
Or possibly the construct capable of flooding entire valleys in but a few years?

Would you have prevented these inventions?

It's not about what I would prevent or not, it's about what exactly is beneficial to humanity.

Are you saying that the fact that 30000 people die in car crashes every year, *just* in the U.S alone, is worth the economic output that a car gives the individual?

how many people a year are saved by ambulances?
how many people a year would die of starvation following the economic collapse resulting from automobiles being banned?

I don't know m8.

What I do know is how many people actually die from it, which takes 10 seconds to Google.

>But the catastrophe wouldn't have been imaginable to anyone writing in this thread if it actually happened. Hundreds of millions of people would be dead simply from the explosions alone, and millions more from ensuing famine and infrastructure destruction.

Unlike say, conventional wars? The amount of the USSR that was devastated by the Wehrmacht ran far and above what about 130 Tsar Bombas would have caused. More Roman soldiers died in 4 hours at Cannae than Americans did in years fighting in Vietnam, and the Carthaginians did it with iron poke-sticks and swords.

Mass slaughter and devastation in wartime doesn't take advancted technology; it only takes organization and willingness to kill. And one of the main reasons the modern bodycounts are higher is because of things like modern medicine and agriculture, which raise population levels and density to a way that was impossible centuries ago.

We're far more likely to survive now than in eras where plagues could kill 30-50% of entire continents, and would sweep through more or less at random, instead of having to be invoked by fairly desperate and powerful military leaders.

>And this was, as you know, in 1962. We can just imagine what a scene like it will be in 2262.

Except we've had quite a detente since 1962. Nuclear war is less on the horizon, and stockpiles have actually shrunk, what with second strike capability being more robust with the advent of things like nuclear submarines. Sure, the technology for killing lots of people will probably be better 250 years hence. But that's not the controlling factor; the controlling factor will be the political situation. If it's such that it's conducive to mass slaughter, you'll see millions, maybe even billions die, even if they have to use stone axes to do it.

so you're saying its justified to ban something because its guaranteed to cause 1 death even if banning it would very likely kill 1000

We have done worse than that.

We banned DDT because it might have gotten some people sick.

Then we banned sales of DDT to Africa where it was hugely successful in killing mosquitoes and controlling malaria.

Without DDT, millions of Africans have died. Millions. Not a thousand. A thousand thousands, and many thousands.

and then there are the things we ban or at least oppose simply because we think they may be harmful or even "immoral" despite not having a single death attributed to them

FUCKS SAKE STOP WITH THE STEM CELL BOYCOTTS ALREADY

No, I'm saying that when you research something scientifically, you usually ignore all the negative effects of that research.

Do you think the scientists at the Manhattan Project cared whether or not what they were doing was moral? Do you think Dr. Mengele did? Do you think the Japanese scientists at Unit 731 did?

Which is my whole argument. Science is useful. Very useful. It can make life better for more and more people. But it also can have disastrous consequences because it doesn't have a moral dimension at all. It's simply pure objective fact.

I mean, I could tell you right now that I wanted to cross Ebola with AIDS, just to see if I could do it, and it would be a useful scientific venture, and yet it would also be pretty insane.

the Manhattan project scientists were often terrified of what they were creating but also convinced of the necessity

mengele was not a scientist and neither were the madmen in unit 731, they had exactly zero scientific rigor, performed experiments for the sake of experiments and generally were nothing but sadists using science as an excuse.

and here's a small hint that will help you in life: absolutely nothing in the world has an innate moral dimension.
Morality is the result of human interpretation nothing more nothing less.

>and here's a small hint that will help you in life: absolutely nothing in the world has an innate moral dimension.
>Morality is the result of human interpretation nothing more nothing less.

Right, so you are a scientist in the ideological sense then, e.g morality is not real because it cannot be captured by science.

And you wonder why I am suspicious of scientific progress.

name a single thing in the world that has an innate moral dimension

Human cognition.

God you're a faggot. Stop being such a huge misanthropic faggot.

Not all the good intentions put together of all the reasonably decent and intelligent people make up for all the suffering of so many: even though most of them are ignorant, arrogant and uncivilized. Nuclear war that kills off our species might be the best thing we as a society will do.

iran couldnt even beat iraq, how are they gonna beat the world?

>implying being an outlier means you're wrong

>We couldn't wipe out all life even if we tried.
Oh the hell we couldn't. I mean, maybe not every last microbe and everything in the deep depths of the ocean, but if we put our industrial focus into it, for some strange reason, we could easily wipe out all the complex life on the surface. Hell, we have theoretical ways to ignite the atmosphere. Or we could strategically just paint one side of a big rock in space white and let the sun do the rest of the work. Gotta couple of cross-species super viruses we could spread like mad, could bore some giant holes in some of those methane mega-pockets we know about - all sorts of crap we could do to end it all, if we really wanted to. We couldn't destroy the planet outright, but we could make sure nothing else would ever get the chance to evolve into life complex enough to build another space program before some cosmological event did the planet in for good.

But even via accident, or in enough repetitive attempts to kill each other, we are *one* of the greatest threats to life on Earth in general. (Hell, at the current rate, we wipe out 50% of the land dwelling species every 40 years - and we aren't even trying to do that.)

Sure, we're nothing compared to a killer asteroid or X4+ solar flare, flipping pulsars, fire rings, and all the other shit we know might wipe us all out without warning - but we're also the only species with a long term plan to do anything about any of those, among other disasters and those yet to be discovered (seems we find two or three new ways the world can end every decade or so, and occasionally invent a new one).

None of that shit would wipe out complex life on Earth, even the surface. Do you realize how deeply life has burrowed in? We're still finding new species miles underground in our mines and our caverns.

Super viruses won't survive a million years of adaption. Igniting the atmosphere is laughable, it's what the Trinity project scientists thought the first nuke would do. You would need to seed the entire atmosphere with flammable material, close it off, and ignite it like we see with modern sugar factory or flour factory explosions. Completely unviable for any super-villain even in his wildest wet dreams. Methane hydrates and runaway global warming? It'll do damage, but Earth would be fine and thriving in less than a million years time.

>we could make sure nothing else would ever get the chance to evolve into life complex enough to build another space program before some cosmological event did the planet in for good.

Not even the P-T extinction event ended complex life on Earth, and humans could not trigger a second P-T extinction event no matter if we poured all of our minds and all of our resources into extincting the planet.

>we are *one* of the greatest threats to life on Earth in general

This is the only true part of your statement.

The P-T extinction event was just the result of an accidental blip of a couple of numbers slight wrong entirely by chance. A man made event of the same sort would be considerable more thorough. Granted, while it wouldn't involve much in the way of innovation, it would take all of man's resources and efforts for generations.

The K-T event, on the other hand, we could duplicate a hundred times over with just a few hundred unmanned missions. Considerably less resource and labor investment, though the time frame would be similar, and the generations that followed the start of the effort might not be of the same suicidal mind as the one that initiated it, and if they caught it in time, they could undo it.

Granted, I'm talking about what we're technologically and industrially capable of, should the entire species, or a good chunk there of, dedicate itself to the effort unchecked. Not a plausible scenario, barring some truly bizarre cultural occurrence. Not that, increasingly, one mad man can't do a lot of damage, and burning off the atmosphere may only take a handful of nut jobs and one "evil genius".

And yeah, like I said, it may not get everything, but you only need to get enough to set life back so far before something else will do the rest of the job for you, or, at least, provide yet another setback before the final blows. The biosphere simply doesn't have as much time left in at folks like to think (though maybe more than the rapture folks tend to think). On that last topic, the closest thing we have to evidence of divine providence, given everything we know that can go wrong and nearly does on a regular basis, is that there's only been five global extinction events that we're aware of, and not five million.

Hell, 2012 was one week away from turning "Knowing" from fiction to documentary:
i.4cdn.org/wsg/1484453470995.webm

>A conventional war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact would have been hugely expensive and bloody, and while the WP has little hope of advancing in a long war

Actually it's been estimated that before around 1975 the Warsaw Pact would have won a war with NATO due to far better command organization. In that scenario, they would have won before a long attrition war could even take place.

While I'd love to see the scenario, I highly doubt an existential war between dozens of nations could ever "end quickly". (Though, maybe, if nuclear weapons were as destructive as media likes to make them out to be - but then there'd be no victor.)

Of course I'm talking conventional war. But yes, it could actually end quickly. Old-school total war ended with WW2. All weapons of war are now tactical.

Warsaw Pact would win quickly because their command would focus the entire army's might on NATO's weakpoints (NATO poor command structure before the mid-70s would make a focused defense of those weakpoints impossible). Once those fall NATO would basically be in a tactically unrecoverable position. It would be the end of the war in mere hours or days.

But I'm not talking about total victory (Soviety capture of every NATO country), but it would be more like an armistice where the Warsaw Pact annexes more of Western Europe before everybody stands down.

Having grown up in the 70's and 80's, I can tell ya, given the public perception of NATO and WARSAW to one another, it wouldn't end with the destruction of the military or industrial complex. Most of the core NATO member states, at least, would not accept surrender, simply because it was militarily or industrially crippled, and had tons of plans made specifically with that eventuality in mind (one of which being the Internet you are using now). Lots of these nations would fight to the last man, and would off any leaders preaching otherwise. Any escalation of the cold war, would have brought back total-war, with a vengeance undreamt of, even during WWII.

Not that you could possibly have had a "conventional war" of that scale. We had several close calls of nukes flying back and forth with no direct military conflict taking place at all. Had any conventional war started, it would have turned unconventional within the hour.

Most of the younger generation has no idea how lucky they are to be here at all.

>They have only ever saved people in retrospect desu.
>Not killing more people is equivalent to saving people
Hot damn I sure hope aliens don't exist because if they do they'll see this shit and fuck off forever.

Humanity is too hard on itself. No other species goes out of its way to protect another. Just about every species can get violent, we're just better at it.

I think a lot of people have a really really naive understanding of A.I because of so much ridiculous science fiction out there.

Something like Skynet will literally never happen.
A.I. can't achieve self-awareness, it's in a class of problems that's remarkably undecidable, it would literally require that P=NP, every other class of computational problem dissolving, and any non living object would be capable of the same thing

Even though we can mimic and simulate an actual intelligent lifeform, at the very core of computer science there are quite a few limits to what we are able to do.

An A.I. can only ever do what it's programmed to do, this is an undeniable fact observable in even the most complicated deep learning programs we've been able to make. Even if the outputs of a program are unpredictable to the person who programmed it, it will still only be following the code that they have written. In fact, this is usually what makes them unpredictable (syntax errors cause bugs because a program is literal)

For example the current most impressive deep learning A.I. AlphaGo is astounding because it appears to actually "learn" in the intelligent sense, through use of a neural network (which is a system of simpler machine learning processes). it can beat the worlds best Go players and it gets better with every game it plays.
AlphaGo however cannot play checkers, or chess, or tic-tac-toe or do literally anything other than play Go, which was decided for it by the programmers who made it.

A "general intelligence" is so so so so different than an artificial one. A program designed to do one thing (like drive a car) might unintentionally drive poorly, it can't suddenly decide to fly a plane, or start purposefully murdering human beings, it can't decide anything at all except for what it's told.
The fear that an algorithm could suddenly gain sentience is not even worth discussing

However, if someone were dumb enough to try and build an all encompassing global nuclear defense deep learning network and give it the capability to launch nukes if it detected a threat, well...
That might actually be the dumbest thing any human being could ever do