Disaster expert says what will happen to humanity in the event of a nuclear war

Such global catastrophes as, for example, a nuclear war, a global pandemic or artificial intelligence that has left obedience, can have more serious consequences for the future of civilization than we think, writes for Air force catastrophic risk expert Seth Baum.

Фото: Depositphotos

My father's family moved to the USA in the 1930s. Jews, they fled from the Nazis. My life went well, and I think I should be grateful that it all happened so.

Nevertheless, I cannot help but think about how our world would look if the Second World War and the Holocaust did not exist.

All those people who died then - would they have had descendants who would still be alive today? And their life would have turned out as successfully as mine? Perhaps I would even be friends with some of them or be their neighbor? And would I have been born in that supposed version of the world without war?

When people think about disasters with many casualties, they almost always think about the immediate damage: more than 50 million people died in World War II, about 15 million in World War I, and about 2010 in the 160 Haiti earthquake.

But these numbers say nothing about the long-term damage - about the people who could continue to live but do not, about what our world would be like without global tragedies.

Such consequences are more difficult to document. However, this does not make them less important.

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Indeed, if we step back and look at long-term circumstances, we see that some disasters—the biggest of them—rank with the most important events in human history.

66 million years ago, the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction (Cretaceous-Tertiary, Cretaceous-Cenozoic, KT extinction, one of the five so-called “great mass extinctions”, on the border of the Cretaceous and Paleogene periods. - Translator’s note) wiped out all dinosaurs and has made room on our planet for mammals - including us humans.

Long before this, about 2,5 billion years ago, the so-called Oxygen Catastrophe (a global change in the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere that occurred at the very beginning of the Proterozoic, during the Siderian period. - Translator’s note) destroyed almost all anaerobic organisms and created conditions for us, breathing oxygen.

If these two catastrophes did not happen, then people and many other species that now exist on Earth, most likely, simply would not exist.

That is why I and other researchers studying global catastrophic risks believe that one of the main priorities in the XNUMXst century should be to prevent such a development of events.

Human activity has turned our era into one of the most dangerous in the history of the planet. And when we look at the impact we'll have millennia into the future, it's not just about preserving people's lives today, it's about protecting our future, our potential, and the billions of our descendants whose lives could be changed forever.

In a sense, today's human impact on the planet is like the rapid growth of organisms that once led to the Oxygen Catastrophe.

That disaster was caused by oxygenic photosynthesis of widespread cyanobacteria. During the process of photosynthesis, oxygen is released into the atmosphere. Cyanobacteria did this on such a scale that there was too much oxygen in the atmosphere - anaerobic organisms simply could not cope with it and died.

People became the first creatures on Earth to develop science, technology, agriculture and industry. And we are doing this on such a scale that we have already destroyed many other species. And if we are not careful, then we will destroy ourselves.

The list of human-dependent catastrophic risks is familiar to everyone: nuclear weapons, global warming along with other environmental shocks, pandemics created in biotechnology laboratories, artificial intelligence that has gone out of control of a person, and some others, the consequences of which are known only to us from science fiction films.

In fact, this is not just a list - it is a network of interconnected risks. For example, global warming can destabilize our civilization, weakening it in the face of other possible disasters (more on this below).

And all this is in addition to the constant risk of natural disasters, such as an Earth collision with an asteroid, a volcanic eruption, or all three (a combination that may have killed off the dinosaurs).

In most catastrophic scenarios, it is difficult to predict what they will turn out for humanity.

We are now 7,6 billion, we are scattered all over the planet, we have learned to adapt to a variety of circumstances and conditions, so it is likely that at least some of us will survive.

But what life will be like for these survivors is a big mystery. My colleagues and I worked to solve it and recently published the results of a study called “Long-term trajectories of human civilization.”

The essence of the study was to try to understand how our civilization (and the life of our direct descendants) will look like in millions, billions and even trillions of years.

And although it is impossible to accurately predict what form human civilization will take in such a huge (and not so huge too) number of years, we can nevertheless come to some general conclusions.

If humanity can avoid disasters (or we can quickly recover from them), then we have a bright future ahead of us. A future enriched by transformative technologies and beyond the Earth.

But if we cannot avoid a real catastrophe, the harm from it can be irreversible.

The catastrophe that will lead to the extermination of humanity will naturally mean the end of our civilization. But even if some people survive, humanity as a whole is unlikely to reach the same level of development as it is now.

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Agriculture and industry are especially important for recovery. To better understand how a disaster can change the future, let's look at one example: a global nuclear war involving all the nuclear powers - China, France, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, the UK and the US.

Only a very large-scale war can draw all these states into hostilities. A more likely scenario is that only Russia and the United States, which together own more than 90% of the world's nuclear arsenal, will participate.

But consider the worst case scenario. Even with him, most of the planet will still avoid destruction.

In particular, in Africa and Latin America there are many countries that are not allies or enemies of any of the current nuclear powers.

Citizens of these states are likely to remain unharmed, as are those who live in countries that exchanged nuclear strikes, but in places far from military installations or large cities.

The world in which the survivors end up will change very quickly. In addition to social and political confusion, many key elements of the economy will be lost.

Global trading networks feel confident in a well-established scheme of actions under normal conditions, but are lost at the slightest system failure. And disruptions from a nuclear war cannot be called “minor.”

In the very first weeks (and maybe even days) after nuclear strikes, the Earth’s population will feel a shortage of consumer goods, spare parts and many other elements of normal life, without which the industrial infrastructure will be paralyzed.

Soon enough, the consequences for the global ecology will begin to appear. Nuclear explosions are so powerful that dust and ash from burning cities rise into the stratosphere (the second layer of the atmosphere is 7 km above the Earth’s surface at the poles and 20 km at the equator).

The stratosphere lies above the clouds, so that everything that rises there can no longer be washed away by rain. Within a few months, pollution will spread throughout the planet and remain for years.

It will block sunlight, cooling the Earth's surface, reducing precipitation - all of which is very bad for agriculture.

Many people around the world will die from starvation caused by nuclear war, perhaps even more than from the nuclear strikes themselves. But someone will survive here too.

Mankind has food supplies that will help some stay alive and wait for the time when the heavens above the planet clear.

This, of course, provided that the reserves remain intact during the strikes.

On the subject: A simulation from American scientists: what a nuclear war between the US and Russia will look like. VIDEO

The combination of world famine and destruction after the war is a serious test for civilization. However, it is possible that survivors will be able to maintain a lifestyle close to what we are used to now.

But, taking into account all the circumstances in which people find themselves, it will be entirely understandable if our civilization falls into decay and disappears, as has already happened with previous civilizations, from Egypt to Easter Island.

As you can see, disasters are often interconnected. The consequences can last for many years.

Nuclear war is not just nuclear war. This is devastation in the economy and agriculture.

The degree of resistance of a civilization to destructive factors also depends on how much it has already been weakened - for example, by global warming and other environmental degradation.

A nuclear war could trigger further catastrophes, such as a pandemic (by collapsing the healthcare system) or a geoengineering disaster (causing climate change to accelerate). My colleagues and I called this scenario a “double disaster.”

Therefore, it is important to study disasters not separately, but in their combination with each other.

I am often asked what risk of disaster is highest, but this is the wrong approach. We are facing a system of interrelated catastrophic risks, and not a set of individual risks.

To assess the system and to develop the most effective ways to resist it, my colleagues and I developed the concept of a comprehensive assessment of catastrophic risks.

Regardless of what this or that disaster entails, the question arises: what will happen next? If humanity becomes extinct, then answering, of course, is easy: our civilization is over.

But if someone still survives, the answer is not so simple.

If civilization stops functioning, then the survivors will be left to their own devices - they will have to take care of their health and everything else.

Today, most people live in cities, it will be difficult for them to learn, say, grow bread. (Ask yourself: do you know how to survive in a world where there are no familiar shops, electricity, heating, etc.?)

Фото: Depositphotos

The irony of the situation is that the most successful peasants in the post-disastrous world will be subsistence farmers, now belonging to the poorest people on Earth.

One of the main tasks of the surviving part of humanity will be reproduction. The remaining population should be large enough and united enough to ensure the emergence of new generations of earthlings. Otherwise, people will die out sooner or later.

Scientists estimate that 150 to 40 people are needed to maintain a genetically viable population. The more favorable the conditions, the less people are required.

Life in the post-catastrophic world will be complicated by the fact that most of the natural resources and other resources have already been selected and used by mankind. And industrial pollutants will remain in the atmosphere and soil for a long time (in addition to the consequences of a nuclear war).

Megacities, meanwhile, can be considered as a warehouse of useful materials - for example, steel.

On the other hand, some energy resources are here to stay, such as wind and hydropower.

Planning for future disasters may look like an abstract activity, far from the problems that we have to solve today.

But it is important to recognize: the actions that we take today can influence in the long run on the path of our civilization.

In fact, today we choose who will have a chance to survive, and what this life will be like.

To make it easier to understand the importance of this, imagine that there has never been a Holocaust or World War II in the world.

In such a world, people who died in the crash of the middle of the XNUMXth century would be alive and, perhaps, would have lived a long, happy life. In our world, these people are not.

Of course, we cannot go back in time and change events. But we can change what we're doing right now to avoid future disasters. Especially those that can affect the future of all human civilization.

For our descendants, it is important that we succeed.

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