> A limited, regional nuclear war between India and Pakistan in which each side detonates 50 15 kt weapons could produce about 5 Tg of black carbon (BC). [1]
That's 5 million metric tons. The footnote on the Wikipedia article [2] says the oil fires produced:
> 16,000 metric tons of actual soot is produced from 220,000 metric tons of oil burned every day.
They started doing this in January and they didn't finish putting out the fires until November, or almost 300 days. But let's use 200 days as a reasonable approximation, given that some of the fires were out earlier than that. Multiplying 16,000 by 200 gives 3.2 million metric tons of soot, so the nuclear war soot is about 1.5 times worse than the oil fire soot.
Also, consider that humanity has actually performed some 520 atmospheric nuclear explosions (including 8 underwater) with a total yield of 545 Megaton [3]. And yet this 0.75 Megaton conflict is going to plunge the world into winter? I'm not buying it.
For those who are curious: Here's Sagan's original prediction.[1] I'd also recommend reading the Gulf War section of wikipedia's article on nuclear winter.[2]
Sagan later admitted he was wrong, but only because smoke from the oil fires didn't reach the stratosphere.
Reading that I'm left thinking that perhaps nuclear war wouldn't be so bad, well except the billions dead and the radioactivity. But we don't have to worry about global warming and water scarcity so we have that going for us.
Can we try to reproduce Nuclear Winter in case of runaway global warming? Seems that we do have the emergency brake here. Won't even take nuclear weapons - introducing soot into higher layers of atmosphere doesn't seem to hard.
However, this will decrease carbon dioxide consumption by plants and might allow unsafe buildup in the atmosphere.
There is a school of thought that suggests that if we've already hit the climate change tipping point, we should put more efforts at this sort of terraforming-type approach instead of playing the long game by slowly curbing emissions.
A somewhat less popular cultural reference could be The Road from McCarthy.
Human scavengers roaming what's left, true, but mostly famished and trying to find food before anything else.
Maybe this time is the time we will renew the fear of nuclear annihilation. With Trump elected, Europe is turning to itself for its defence, and is already considering a common nuclear deterrence. Depending on its implementation, this could mean the end of the non-proliferation treaties.
A few years back I started watching Schindler's List and I decided I wanted to watch something a bit less depressing and stumbled onto an evening on Channel 4 that was showing The War Game, The Day After and then Threads.....
Edit: The War Game is worth watching - the BBC refused to show it as "the effect of the film has been judged by the BBC to be too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting":
Not really. There are definitely scenarios (likely to more probable one) where the nuclear war is not "USA vs Russia/China nuking the entire planet".
The article itself suggest a nuclear conflict between India and Pakistan would result in 2 billion death (supposedly mostly around India/Pakistan), which means the majority of the worlds population will survive.
Indeed. There was a great article which I can't find now about all the missiles still pointing from the US to Russia and vice versa, where after the fall of the Soviet Union a General formerly in charge of the Soviet arsenal met his British counterpart and assured him that in the Soviet nuclear war preparedness plans, the entire UK was a complete overkill zone.
For reasons I'll never understand our biology teacher in secondary school decided to show it to us as the traditional end of term video one year, suitably traumatising a room full of 15 and 16 year olds. There are scenes from that film that will stay with me the rest of my life, I should really rewatch it sometime and see if its quite so powerful to an adult mind.
> scenes from that film that will stay with me the rest of my life
I bet that's the most persistent thing you remember from that teacher. Effective education! And probably tipped you away from the idea that a nuclear war might be winnable, and towards disarmament.
I think the UK government has always realised that any level of nuclear war was not survivable let alone "winnable" - estimates from the 1950s suggested that it would only take 3 H-bomb strikes to cause a total breakdown in the UK (and some UK diplomat had a drunken debate with Khrushchev over that very point).
I think there was significant effort devoted to making sure there could be some sort of "continuity UK" in the event of that happening; the Trident at-sea deterrent, the PYTHON project, all sorts of subterranean bunkers, and so on. It would clearly be pretty desperate, but there was real money spent on it. A bleak version of "thinking the unthinkable", I suppose.
I doubt any of the UK bunkers would have survived an all-out attack - their locations were fairly well known and none of them were designed to resist a direct attack. In fact, nobody has bunkers that can resist a direct attack - not even Cheyenne Mountain.
Alas, Babylon has a good bit about that. One of the characters is stationed at strategic air command in Nebraska. He warns his brother about an impending nuclear war, and that is the last that is heard from him. The other characters speculate about whether he survived, given the fact that strategic air command is sure to have a very sturdy bunker. It turns out the base ended up being a very large radioactive hole. A bunker is, after all, a very static target, and it just ends up being hit by many bombs.
That's my recollection anyways. I read it in 6th grade, so it's been well over a decade since I read it. I really ought to re-read it.
The novel Arc Light has an account of a fairly limited "counterforce" attack by the Russians against the US. Cheyenne Mountain, Omaha and Raven Rock Mountain are all destroyed:
Speaking of warnings about a nuclear war, there's a great 80's movie that centers around one such warning and how ordinary people react to it: Miracle Mile.
The Dover facility (which in case of an imminent all-out nuclear exchange supposedly would've accommodated the Royal Family as well) was shut down (or never really commissioned) in the early 1970s because someone found out that chalk rock is permeable to nuclear fallout ...
So, I'm sure that despite the effort the UK Government was well aware of its futility.
There were preparations for such a case in West Germany: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_bunker_%28Germany%2...
The english article also mentions Fallex 66, where for the first time, politicians were involved in a (favorable setting of a) NATO war game.
I think some civil servants realised this. That's not the same as the entire government realising it. It's certainly not the same as specific Prime Ministers understanding it.
There are maps from the early 1950s - pre H-Bomb - which show large areas of the UK reduced to radioactive desert after a relatively small attack.
Unloading tens or hundreds of larger weapons on the UK would do very little to increase its survival prospects.
From that POV, Threads is terrifying but optimistic. It's not clear anyone at all would survive a full exchange. Spending a few years in a bunker would simply delay the inevitable.
"Spending a few years in a bunker would simply delay the inevitable."
All of life could be said to be merely delaying the inevitable.
I am reminded of the story of a man running away from a tiger when he reaches the edge of a cliff and falls over, managing to grab hold of the edge and hanging by one hand. Below him is certain death from the fall, above him is death by the tiger. The man notices some sweet dew dripping from a blade of grass by his face. With moments left to live, he licks the dew.
'Now, we shall receive four minutes warning of any impending nuclear attack. Some people have said, "Oh my goodness me — four minutes? — that is not a very long time!" Well, I would remind those doubters that some people in this great country of ours can run a mile in four minutes.' - Peter Cook, Beyond the Fringe, 1960
Part of the UK preparation for nuclear war sound like black comedy - my favourite being that we were too cheap to build a dedicated communication network to allow the PM to launch the V-bombers when out and about so the AA radio network was to be used:
The national air raid sirens were controlled over random POTS lines[1]. The theory was that a dedicated system would need proper upkeep and testing, but when a telephone line goes down the customer at the end of it will notice and file a complaint.
Sounds more like child-abuse to me. If the video is indeed as shocking as most people here claim it is then it isn't age-appropriate for younger adults and especially children.
As adults, we can choose to not see it. As children, in a classroom, we are generally not. Peer pressure and adult authoritarian rule should not be taken lightly. Especially when used to scare children into compliance and leave them lasting marks into adult-hood.
-Speaking as someone that still has irrational issues with being alone, or being alone in the dark. After watching age-inappropriate movies as a child.
> Sounds more like child-abuse to me. If the video is indeed as shocking as most people here claim it is then it isn't age-appropriate for younger adults and especially children.
You'd be amazed at the kinds of films that were shown to young people in an effort tochange their behaviour (with no evidence that it would actually do so).
My favourite example was of a UK tv show Nationwide that got a studio full of young people to watch US style shock films about road and rail safety. The films were so gruesome they couldn't be shown on broadcast tv at that time of the evening. There were shots of young people throwing up and feinting and having to be taken out of the studio, weeping.
(This is mentioned on a TV discussion forum somewhere, but I can't find it. :-/)
I should probably clarify that the teacher in question hated the film, and spent the entire lesson pointedly not watching it. Some of the other students in my class had heard of it from another teacher and were determined to see it.
I'm pretty sure while it could be considered mildly negligent to give into that pressure, I'm also confident it doesn't constitute child abuse. At least some of us were old almost enough to enlist with the army, I think its good to balance that out with an idea of just what that might entail.
I saw that movie around the same age, back in the day. Good for your biology teacher! There's a really worrying trend in recent years of politicians and the media carrying on like they'd stopped being scared of nuclear war. How the fuck is that something you stop being scared of?
Probably to make whatever grain-sized impact he or she could possibly make towards preventing the scenario described in that movie from ever happening.
I miss the Cold War (during which I also had teachers like this).
I watched Threads last year. Maybe because it is set in the north of England in the 1980s, a region and a era that I grew up in, but I found it very distressing. I don't frighten easily, but I honestly did not sleep well for a couple of nights afterwards.
All national leaders should somehow be legally compelled to watch it. We need them to be as scared as possible of nuclear war.
I don't think it's just you - I found it deeply disturbing as did many other people I knew.
Charlie Stross has a vivid account of his feelings on the subject:
"I'm a child of the 1970s and 1980s; I grew up under the shadow of the mushroom cloud. Prior to the end of the cold war in 1989-91, I don't believe I ever lived more than 10 kilometres from a strategic nuclear target."
I think a lot of people who grew up in the Cold War and who contemplated what might actually happen still have that lingering "Lovecraftian horror" from the whole business.
I spent the first eighteen years of my life living in a major port city, only a couple of miles from the docks. Everyone, even children, knew the city would be flattened if a war went nuclear.
Its hard to remember now what the constant subliminal awareness of imminent destruction felt like. Seems that we just don't think about it anymore, even though Russia and the US still have ~2000 active nukes each.
The thing is, there are still thousands of nuclear missiles pointed from the USA to the states of the former Soviet Union, and vice-versa. There are other nuclear states as well, which could use their nukes if push came to shove (Pakistan/India, North Korea, China). We are still very much under threat of a nuclear war breaking out, and the cold war is showing signs of starting up again.
Trump is making pro-Russia noises, but anti-China noises, and he could easily change his mind on a dime and go ballistic over some perceived slight from Putin. Many people feel complacent about it because the Soviet Union has collapsed and relations between the USA and Russia are relatively peaceful, but this is a false sense of security.
The risk with Trump isn't so much that he might blow his top (which of course he very well might). It's that (if Joe Scarborough's not entirely substantiated disclosure -- he hasn't named the "foreign policy expert" he claimed to have heard this from, which is unfortunate) he apparently doesn't seem to have a solid grasp of what nuclear weapons are for, and what their limitations are -- or even we actually still had them:
He said on his Morning Joe programme: “Several months ago, a foreign policy expert on the international level went to advise Donald Trump.
“And three times he [Trump] asked about the use of nuclear weapons. Three times he asked at one point if we had them why can’t we use them.
Presumably you'd be happier if he didn't ask? And he just assumed that he knew?
I assume you think you know what they are for. How do you know you're right if you don't ask?
I don't know the name of it, but there is a fallacy among some people that equates asking for more information with a lack of knowledge. But actually it's the opposite: Ignorant people tend not to ask for information, while those who actually understand ask a lot, because unlike the others they know what they don't know. Foolish people confuse this for ignorance.
I'd be happiest if he didn't exist, quite frankly.
But either way -- it's fine for him, as a human being, if he still needs to look up in an encyclopedia, or "ask an expert" what nuclear weapons are really useful for -- or whether the U.S. still has access to them.
But if he's that far out on the "happy-ignorant-foolish" spectrum -- then I'd greatly, greatly prefer that he not be placed in charge of the disposition of such instruments.
I'm not happy with everything he's said and done. But unlike you I'm not so quick to dismiss people as "happy-ignorant-foolish" just because they don't agree with me.
If you are incapable of understanding why people act in a certain way when it differs from yours then that's your failure, not theirs.
PS. It's clear from your reply that you did not understand what I wrote in my previous message, in fact you seemed to understand almost exactly the opposite of what I wrote. Is that my fault for not being clear? Or are you uninterested in understanding Trump any other way?
I'm not so quick to dismiss people as "happy-ignorant-foolish" just because they don't agree with me.
I'm quick to dismiss them in that way based on what they say and do -- for example, running or the office of President of the United states, whilst not possessing even a middle-school level knowledge of whether the country you wish to govern actually has nuclear weapons or not; let alone what they are actually useful for -- not because they "disagree with [me]".
I made the mistake of watching The Day After a few years ago while not wanting to go to sleep one night. Suffice it to say, I didn't sleep well that night and I am still somewhat traumatized by it. It's my go to reference for life will be like after such an event. There's also been a lot of talk of EMPs lately and I have to imagine that the result would be something similar.
"The Americans" [1] had an eponymous episode (S04E09 "The Day After") [2] about the broadcast of "The Day After" [3] on November 20, 1983.
As portrayed in that episode, everybody watched it, everybody talked about it, and it changed how everybody thought about nuclear war.
I don't remember a thing about the TV event in the title of the previouis episode of "The Americans" (S04E08 "The Magic of David Copperfield V: The Statue of Liberty Disappears" [4]), but I sure remember seeing "The Day After" in 1983.
Radio Announcer: "Warsaw Pact forces are close to announcing a cease-fire along the German border. There are still no eyewitness accounts to substantiate the rumor that low-kiloton range nuclear weapons were detonated this morning during the conflict, resulting in the reported destruction of Wiesbaden and the outskirts of Frankfur..."
[electronic alarm cuts in]
EBS Announcer: "This is the Emergency Broadcast System. All persons currently in transit in the Kansas City metropolitan area are advised to proceed immediately to the municipal shelter facility in the community or township closest to your current location. While there is no immediate danger to the Kansas City area, the Federal Emergency Management Agency urges you to learn the steps to be taken in the event of a probable attack."
The premise revolved around there being no copies of probably the most printed book on the planet, yet there other books. Even a collective, whose mission is to find all the books and knowledge it can (someone read Asimov), can't find a bible. They found a Torah, but couldn't find a bible.
Because as part of the plot, it is explained that those were specifically burnt for years (if I remember correctly, because religion was what started the war or something)?
Movie's still not great, but there are reasons they don't find Bibles :)
I enjoyed it :-) But in this context I am talking specifically about the post-apocalyptic world, the way the few remaining mass-produced items from before, are now valuable commodities (he says something like, people will kill you now, for something we used to just throw away before The Flash), the barter economy (eg. how he gets his battery recharged), the water, the hand-shakes...
Indeed, it is not explicit, but it is akin to a nuclear winter: soot everywhere that obscured the atmosphere, killing crops and making farming impossible.
It could be other events (supervolcano eruption for example), but a nuclear holocaust would be similar if not too many bombs are used.
From the film, even the crazies theories of a nuclear winter weren't close.
Nuclear war doesn't do much.
I think a meteor or supervolcano is also impossible from the scenes in the film, not having lots of things growing within a month doesn't fit really, but it'd be an interesting discussion.
Obviously this is why it's not mentioned, so people don't get wrapped up in the details about how it happen but the story.
Yeah, I can't dig up the source now, but I remember a super-volcano (probably Yellowstone) being widely accepted as the most likely source of the disaster.
That's very interesting, I read the book a few years ago and then watched the film after. Both have stuck with me, particularly some distressing scenes from the book, and yet I never put too much thought into what could have caused the disaster. Given their plight I suppose it didn't matter.
I remember a scene from the book where he recalls bright lights in the distance? I thought it was a subtle hint that it was nuclear war, but its been awhile. That was my initial interpretation at least.
You're right, there's a bit about (paraphrasing) the clocks stopping at 11.30, bright lights in the distance and several low concussions in the ground.
Having said that, in the movie the protagonist awakes at night to an orange glow outside, implied to be wild-fires on the horizon. He rushes to the bathroom to begin filling the bathtub with water.
If I'm not mistaken the movie ends with a group who has children and least one dog, implying they haven't resorted to cannibalism or eating their pets(yet).
I thought this was pretty realistic portrayal of how some sort of global winter may play out. The sun is blocked by dust or debris or whatever, plant life dies, the rest of the biosphere dies, and all that's left is some humans who scavenge and end up eating each other.
I guess rotting plant matter like trees might provide nutrients for some sort of meager ecosystem composed of fungi and insects for quite some time. Maybe a few small mammals and birds. The book didn't really touch on that, though.
I want to quote the whole section that gives the most info, just because McCarthy's writing is so great & ominous:
"The clocks stopped at 1:17. A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions. He got up and went to the window. What is it? she said. He didn't answer. He went into the bathroom and threw the lightswitch but the power was already gone. A dull rose glow in the windowglass. He dropped to one knee and raised the lever to stop the tub and then turned on both the taps as far as they would go. She was standing in the doorway in her nightwear, clutching the jamb, cradling her belly in one hand. What is it? she said. What is happening?
I was under the impression it could have been a nuclear winter. There's seems to be some disagreement about how severe and long nuclear winter may be, so maybe McCarthy was making some false assumptions.
Didn't even bother to look at the maps, did you? Some of those bases are inside territorial waters allotted to the the Philippines by UN rules, within spitting distance of the main Phillippine islands, and also within easy striking range of Malaysia and Brunei.
I'm often disappointed in Fantasy/SF settings that completely ignore the most critical question "what the hell do people eat"?. It's one of the most basic functions of life, but because we're blessed to be removed from the frustrating process of avoiding starvation, so many works just ignore the question altogether when discussing a "life is hard" setting.
I'm reading "Farnham's Freehold" by Robert Heinlein which is basically a thought experiment in how to build a pioneer-like society in a post-nuclear war world. It's not a great book, honestly, but it has a lot of material on building shelter and finding food.
Farnham's Freehold was the book that made me lose a lot of respect for Heinlein. I started reading him as a 13-14 year old - books like "Have Space Suit, Will Travel", "Farmer in the Sky", and "Starman Jones" - and ate them up. I got older and my dad recommended "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" and "Starship Troopers"; I really liked reading him alongside Asimov, who did such a great job of going into __how__ people/societies would exist in the future; Heinlein was much better at going into the __why__. The ideas he put forward in "Starship Troopers" and "Stranger in a Strange Land" formed the basis for some of the best conversations I've had with friends.
However.
Farnham's Freehold was just ubermensch porn coupled with some really weird racism. He used more hackneyed "I can do everything" stereotypes than an Ayn Rand novel, which is something he was always guilty of but it really came to a head here. The multiculturalism and openness that was so explicitly prevalent in Starship Troopers, Stranger, and Harsh Mistress (the main character of Starship Troopers is a bisexual South American) vanishes, replaced with this weird fear of black people - "they seem nice, but they'll turn on you when they get the chance" is the message the Joe character imparts.
Freehold was about trying to get into the mind of a post-apocalyptic survivalist - life in lower states of humanity and tribalistic instincts. The other books were about life in higher states of society and humanity. You can't assume that Heinlein was making a value judgement pro diverse militarism or pro racial survivalism in either book. It's science fiction. The only common attitude that his stories seem to clearly reward and respect is grit.
Point taken, and yes, that is a big difference, but specifically the actions of the black elites were super weird. More weird than you would expect from someone who just postulates that when the chips are down, we run with our race brothers.
It was the weirdly sexualized race and gender based cannibalism that I think puts it over the line, not the actions of Joe, except in the context of the former.
I mean I see what he was trying to do, but rather than basing his African elites on anthropological evidence, or on real white cultures that were horrible to other races, (which would have gotten his point across better, I think,) he based them on the most disturbing (and to me, last believable or sympathetic) racial fears of the time, and because of that, it is kinda uncomfortable.
Curious to read it now, especially in the context of its time.
1964 was the same year the Civil Rights Act was passed. I imagine ideas of baser racial instincts were different when there were still lynchings and fear of sexual racial mixing. :(
Reading this reminded me of another great author who had an episode of weird racial views - Stephan King, in The Stand (which is absolutely one of my favourite books), had a chapter where he's detailing the horrors of society breaking down, and one of the events he catalogued was the mutiny of a bunch of black soldiers who then started killing their white compatriots in a grotesque gameshow. That very explicit fear of militant black men dates the book more than anything else.
As someone born in the very early 90's, it's weird seeing evidence of people taking seriously these thoughts I've only seen caricatured.
I'm not sure if Johnny Rico of Starship Troopers was bisexual. I have read the book, and i cannot recall event hints of this. Could you provide some citation/reference?
Did i fall victim of some form of censorship?
IIRC there was a throw away line about him not being a virgin - "slept with women and a few men" or something along those lines. I'll look it up when I'm not at work.
Tbf, I viewed Farnham's Freehold as being intended to be as explicitly anti-racist as Henlein said he was (cf. I've never agreed. The racist son is an utter imbecile whose racist comments are repeatedly shot down by the hero protagonist, and the ultra-civilised future black society they run into that assumes that white people are less than human (and tasty!) but are otherwise very congenial is obviously a clunky parody of Jim Crow era America rather than a depiction of impending threat posed by black people (it's been made abundantly clear that the white people wiped their own civilization out, and the Joe character even gets to explicitly point out the enslaved white folks really aren't treated that much worse than a household servant in 1960s Alabama.)
Of course, it's done with the subtlety of a sledgehammer, but somehow it's far more forgivable in its consistently tone deaf naivety than if it appeared Henlein actually had a decent understanding of race relations.
(like the District 9 filmmakers ruining their perfect race-relations satire with comedy savage Nigerians...)
The daddy who's such an ubermensch even his own daughter wants to sleep with him, whilst he's actually busy screwing her best friend is much harder to accept, of course.
So, I'd suggest a few different books on that topic--Farnham's Freehold not being one of them.
Lucifer's Hammer by Niven and Pournelle goes into a bit of the politics and aftermath of a comet striking the Earth. It talks about survival, civil defense, and a few other things that would be spoilers to mention. That said, it has some points that are weirdly racist when viewed decades after publication--if you can look past those, though, it's a solid read.
One Second After by William Forstchen talks about the aftermath of an EMP first-strike on the US. Perhaps the one of the more interesting things is that he does specifically pay attention to both the food and medicine logistics--specifically, what happens when we lack ability to run refrigerators and move around grain. It's a bit cheerful in the end, but a good read.
Warday by Strieber and Kunetka takes place 5 years after a "limited" nuclear exchange with the USSR. The premise of the novel is that a pair of researchers are traveling through the US and interviewing folks, reading documents, and generally piecing together both the initial conflict as well as the efforts to survive and recover. It's a really good bit of speculative fiction, but is pretty depressing.
~
One of the biggest things that makes nuclear war difficult to imagine today is that we have the Internet and cell phones, things which at once are utterly integral to most of the non-rural folks and which are completely vulnerable to any sort of honest nuclear strike. The lack of books, CB radios, and basic practical knowhow and repairable goods brought by the rise of technology and international trade might well yield a situation where a theoretical 2020s United States would have a more difficult time recovering than a 1980s US.
At least as far as the 'net stuff goes, the short story "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth" by Doctorow is maybe one of the only ones that treats the tech angle seriously in a modern light.
Yeah, I'm pretty disappointed with Farnham's Freehold. I picked it up at a used book store for a dollar - Heinlein! Post-apocalyptic society! - but I haven't enjoyed it very much, and yes, it does get weirdly racial as it goes on. The other books you mention sound much better! Heard great things about Lucifer's Hammer - that'll go to the top of the list.
"The Road" has already been mentioned as a piece of fiction that focuses almost exclusively on food and starvation. Not sure it's explicitly about nuclear war, however. It's also way too hopeless for me. I can't say I enjoyed reading it.
A better -- and recent favorite of mine -- sci-fi book about scarce resources and food is "The Windup Girl" by Paolo Bacigalupi. It's not about nuclear war either, but not only is the actual story very engaging, it focuses on how energy is generated and stored, what people eat, and how food is delivered in a post-oil world. Bacigalupi calls this crisis "the Contraction". Warning: more than a few digs at Monsanto as well, not so much from the "transgenics are bad" angle but from the "copyrights and patents on food oppress people". Strongly recommended!
Windup girl was an amazingly imaginative extrapolation. I do have a bit of a problem with how fatalistic most post-apocalypse works are. I think what would actually emerge would be very messy, but still far more hopeful than depicted. For example, in a The Walking Dead scenario, the first real settlement they found that was semi-secure would have probably grown into a fairly stable city-state. They work hard on that show to keep the rollercoaster going. IMO, tiring and not very realistic.
I first saw that question in MrBtongue's YouTube video comparing Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas (relevant to discussion of post-nuclear war settings). New Vegas is the better game, and one of the reasons is that it actually does answer the question of what people eat. The rest of the video is also interesting, but "what do they eat?" discussion starts here:
The grimmer your story, the smaller the market. Thus even though famines are often disastrous human events that can mean the death of millions and frequently alter the course of history, hardly anyone makes movies about them because watching people starve unnecessarily is hardly anyone's idea of a good time. At least in war stories someone gets to be winner, even if it's temporary. In a famine everything gets worse and the only people likely to profit are the people who were already winning at the outset, so there isn't really a story arc.
You can do movies like this (The Road, Schindler's List, Dallas Buyer's Club, Hotel Rwanda are all good examples) but if the world of the story is crushingly awful then you're basically reduced to one plot - moral individual risks/sacrifices self to provide glimmer of hope to others. Offhand I'd say you can only put out a truly grim a-list movie about once every 5 years.
I've always thought this is one of the reasons the zombie survival genre is so popular.
For all the dramatic hand wrangling over finding supplies, the survivors are essentially living in a world of plenty -- enough arms, ammunition, canned food, and supplies for a world population, >50% of which presumably no longer have an interest in such things.
It's the antithesis of all that "we should compromise for the good of all, saving the planet, etc" (because how does that sound fun?).
From a writer's perspective the problem is a story that mostly consists of people scrabbling for food isn't very interesting, so either you ignore the question or you create a story element that allows you to ignore the question - giant roaches, say, or some kind of food-from-algae technology.
> Are you really trying to say that Trump, and not Putin, is the primary reason for this?
Sure. The NATO of old was facing off against much stronger opposition than Putin today, without even the slightest trace of doubt in commitment coming up. Trump is certainly not the only factor that erodes trust in NATO deterrence (Brexit, Erdogan and NATO overexpansion are other important contributors to the general uneasiness), but he is the most visible one. Visible cracks are bad because there will always be people (on all sides!) who see personal incentive to widen them and if they succeed, the mere thought that limited scope wars could be possible will endanger peace.
> Are you really trying to say that Trump, and not Putin, is the primary reason for this?
Not sure why you're being downvoted, it's a good question.
The way I see it, it's an overall pandemic of malaise, a regression to a more primal state, affecting the "West" primarily, but certainly influencing the whole world to some extent.
Brexit is a symptom. The Trump madness is a symptom. Le Pen is a symptom. Putin has been a symptom and an instrument and an agent for a long time. ISIS is an example outside of the West of the same thing.
Fear and lies. Facts don't matter anymore, truth is being trampled into the ground, and the world's state of mind is gradually turning dark. Where violence has an opportunity, it breaks out. Fortunately, not much of this has been translated into material consequences (except for ISIS and so on), but at the psychological level it's really bad. If it stays mostly on that level, then perhaps there is a way out eventually.
How do you alleviate this primal state in people? Give them everything they need to live comfortably and decently? Isn't this the result of the whole post-Cold War project called Capitalism (capital C)? What do people need in order to have them desire peace and cooperation with all of humanity without qualifications? There are so many questions that still need to be answered.
I must watch Threads given all the talk about it in this thread, but I guess I'll be the lone dissenter that will come out and say that The Road was an absolutely horrible movie. I found it so drawn-out, boring, interminably long. I realize it was presenting life in a post-apocalyptic future, but that's no excuse to have no plot to truly speak of in its 111 minutes of runtime.
Then again, I hated Mad Max and only sat down to watch it at the theater because of the ridiculously-good critical reviews it had amassed. I found it a pointless exercise in hedonism and a testosterone-fueled car chase filled with gore and nudity for their own sake.
I think many would agree that The Road movie isn't good, which is why I highly recommend reading the book. McCarthy's unique writing style lends itself to the material in a way movies can't capture.
I'm glad I'm not alone in hating Mad Max. When the credits rolled I was left wondering what the plot even was. It felt like nothing more than an excuse to blow stuff up and chase around cars. Absolutely no idea how it got such high marks.
I feel a little silly needing to defend it, but the plot is pretty simple IMO. Max himself is more of an observer of the plot than an central character, which is a little confusing, but everything else is a pretty straight-forward hero story. What didn't you understand specifically?
That's the thing, I don't know what I was missing. I'm usually a perfect audience for sit back and enjoy the ride kind of movies but in this one, I just didn't connect at all.
It got such high marks because mainstream audiences love action and violence. This is crystal clear if you consider the content of blockbusters, excluding dramas and comedies. They're virtually all filled with action and violence. That's what most audiences want.
There's a really blatant subtext: about guys blowing shit up, exploiting women, and in general driving the world into total destruction. On its face, it's an exercise in radical feminism.
Except, it isn't. Below that, there is the layer showing that women are equally capable of destruction, and that they in fact need to rely on that destruction to reach "the green place".
And that's flipped on its head again, because that war machine runs on a mixture of fuel and mother's milk. Max is pretty much annointed with it when he uses mother's milk to wash the blood of his face, after a selfless act. There's a huge "war turned into a nurturing thing" there. It's echoed by the fact that part of Furiosa's body is partially mechanized. (Her replacement arm)
Which leads up to what I think is the final message, where the realization strikes that there is no separate, women-only feminist utopia. There is no "women peaceful, men violent" dichotomy. Instead, the world is finally improved by the women reintegrating themselves into the world they left, but on their own terms.
It's pretty much a post-modernist deconstruction of war movies and feminism at the same time. It's incredibly heavy-handed about it - all those things have about the subtlety of a hand grenade as a can opener - but it tackled a topic that was important and little talked about.
That is why it was a good movie. If that message doesn't speak to you, I'm not surprised you didn't like it. You were not the target audience. (Neither were people who like chase-and-blow-stuff-up movies, and they were vocal about the fact they didn't like it)
That doesn't necessarily make it a good movie, but if one liked both the subtext and blowing things up, they had a great time watching it.
> I found it a pointless exercise in hedonism and a testosterone-fueled car chase filled with gore and nudity for their own sake.
Ironic, since pre-Road Mad Max can only be described as a criticism of consumerism & car culture. After the apocalypse caused by oil wars, the world is littered with cars, they're the only technology anyone understands, so basically everything is hacked together w/ car parts. Everyone is still fighting over oil and acting like macho idiots whose identities' are closely linked with driving to point of being a cult.
TBQH in this context making it about water and not oil doesn't make a lot of sense, but I understand why they would try to update it this way to make it more topical.
I wouldn't describe personal vehicles in such base terms, it's more that cars, trucks, off-road vehicles, etc are the only form of manufactured goods that are both suitable to the world portrayed in the films and widespread enough to be accessible to everyone.
All complex manufactured goods in such a world would be irreplacable, at least within the lifetime of anyone living in that time period. Radios and other electronics are also widespread and suitable enough to be considered a necessity but they'd be destroyed by the EMP effects of nuclear warfare (hence why every vehicle in Mad Max appears to be from the carburetor/pre-electronics era).
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistuingishable from magic and although the mechanicals of a car are well understood by laymen, their existence carries an air of magic/reverence as they cannot be replicated by the society which possesses them. IMO, the closest comparison is that of a Cargo Cult rather than an extreme extrapolation of existing car culture.
"I'll be the lone dissenter that will come out and say that The Road was an absolutely horrible movie. I found it so drawn-out, boring, interminably long."
No Country for Old Men was the movie that convinced me that Cormack McCarthy wrote overhyped garbage. I didn't even bother watching The Road, as I expected it would be just more of the same.
Cormack McCarthy writes books. He has a particular style of language that many people enjoy. You can't really evaluate his work from the movies. He didn't even write the screenplays.
From everything I've read, the film version of No Country for Old Men was pretty faithful to the book, so I think I have a pretty good idea of what to expect from the latter. No thanks.
> With Trump elected, Europe is turning to itself for its defence...
wait, what?... Europe wasn't paying for its own defense before Trump, because why, they just liked the US presidents?! Was it something about them, or were they just these big suckers and Europeans were like "hey free defense!"? Quite frankly, you're making Trump sound better.
Europe does have its own defense, but Germany does not because of the whole Nazi thing. Also, strategically, the US has lots of valid reasons to be want to be the dominant military player in the area. We much rather be fighting a shooting war on that continent than ours. If you take a very shallow view, we are "paying for" or "subsidising" European defense, when in fact we are doing what we always do - engaging in what's best for us. The dollar cost is insignificant next to the value theater access and regional support.
> With Trump elected, Europe is turning to itself for its defence,
Wouldn't it have to turn itself more to defense if the other candidate was elected, who didn't seem to mind setting up No-Fly zones for aircraft for a country which has more than 1000 nuclear warheads ready to launch (not counting those in nuclear subs).
I've always liked Alas Babylon by Pat Frank. They focus on food, and it really captures the terror the people were feeling and how a community might end up forming.
Well, the first one assumed that almost all oil suddenly disappeared, there
were no industrial grade methods of producing it from coal, and no alternative
propulsion methods were available, all at the same time. Which is silly, if
one thinks about it, but still good enough to establish a background story.
Seneca Curve / Cliff is the concept that the higher the technology level, the more horizontal the growth curve and the more vertical the decline curve. The decline rate of frack'd well is pretty staggering. I'd have to look it up to be sure but I'm pretty sure we've passed the point where the majority of wells that have been frack'd are now no longer producing. Same story with horizontal drilling decades ago etc. If we're not at the technology level today where the decline rate could be extremely sharp, we're certainly working toward it via ever higher technology in that field.
Are you sure that we have no technology at all that would produce gasoline
from heavier fractions of oil? I think we have, only they're not as cost
efficient as simple distillation, which can rapidly change if lighter
fractions become less available.
As far as I know, we neither exploit nor track the deposits of heavier oil.
I think the point of the Mad Max plot was not that you couldn't extract oil from other sources, but that the damage had already been done to the economy and society so it was past the tipping point and already on to pure chaos.
By the way, we exploit oil sands which are about as heavy as you get. The stuff is basically asphalt.
My point is that Mad Max assumed a very sudden and unrepairable damage that
can't be worked around.
It's hard to believe that people would panic if the oil price went high, or
even sky high. It wouldn't be pretty, sure, probably several industry sectors
would die, but I don't see how it would end our world.
Most of the oil we use today is consumed by transportation, but there are
plenty of other propulsion systems than just internal combustion engine (to
name a few: electric ones, pneumatic, flywheel, external combustion (that can
run on burning guano; e.g. Stirling engine)). Then there is the thing that we
can still produce gasoline artificially from coal, it's just more expensive
than how we get the gasoline currently.
I don't question the vision of collapsed society shown in Mad Max (I don't
know if it makes senese or not, I just don't think about it). But how and
why the society collapsed (MM1 version) doesn't stand the basic scrutiny.
> All of our food is produced and distributed using oil.
Regarding distribution:
- we had working short-distance transportation with no oil whatsoever for
ages literally, and for mechanical transport, there are alternatives to
burning gasoline, it just won't be at the speed of 60mph
- long-distance transportation using rails is much more energy efficient than
anything we use today, barring maybe moving by rivers, and rail infrastructure
only sucks such heavily in the USA
Production, too, is not that reliant on oil. Most of the gain of modern
agriculture is not due to mechanization, but due to fertilizers and
pesticides. It's chemistry what brought us prosperity in this field, not
mechanics.
Every single thing you're describing here is catastrophic and world-ending.
The world without oil looks like North Korea. The world with oil looks like South Korea.
Without fertilizer there will be mass starvation, this is absolutely assured. It doesn't matter about production or transport. There won't be any food in the first place.
> Every single thing you're describing here is catastrophic and world-ending.
I fail to see how replacing a Diesel engine that burns diesel oil inside its
cylinders with a Stirling engine that burns dried guano in an external
combustion chamber is world-ending.
Not to mention that old style diesel engines usually can run on cooking oil(!)
or ethanol(!), so the migration to alternative propulsion wouldn't need to be
that immediate. Transportation of goods critical to survival (e.g. food) could
still be secured.
And we aren't discussing the world where fertilizers disappeared. We were
talking about the world without gasoline.
Cracking is not a net energy gain... However, if you're refining more asphalt than you know what to do with and have a shortage of shorter chain hydrocarbons, you can at considerable cost (economically and energeticaly) crack them and turn a useless pile of asphalt into burnable gasoline.
Coal to gas is convoluted. Coal to methanol somewhat more reasonable. Methanol being quite toxic is no laughing matter but then again benzene and mystery meat in gasoline is no laughing matter, probably "methanol causes blindness" would be all over the clickbait but it wouldn't be much larger of a problem than cancer from gasoline at a societal level.
All you need to end the world is about three days without food deliveries. That's about a factor of a hundred faster than the NIMBY permitting problems preventing installing steam engine rail between food warehouses and retail stores or whatever.
Fertilizer IS natgas. There's no such thing as a natgas or oil well, there's just wells with different ratios of natgas to oil, ranging from admittedly near 99% of one or the other to darn near 50:50 (by mass or volume). Its really quite problematic and dangerous. Yes the average chain length of crude oil is a nice stable diesel fuel but the std deviation is quite high leading to amazing explosions and fires due to 1% by mass being butane bubbling out catching fire then setting the rest of the plant on fire. Crude oil really is annoying and if it weren't so energetically valuable I donno if we'd use it as a feedstock for everything else, just TDP natural oils or something. Not to mention crude oil is full of "stuff" vanadium and sulfur and whatnot.
Basically you mix steam and natgas to get hydrogen, then you mix hydrogen with atmospheric nitrogen (under immense pressure and high temp) to make ammonia, quite an important nitrogen fertilizer directly, but also indirectly via acid plants and much hand waving the other fertilizers kinda sorta depend on ammonia and there's no other industrially viable nitrogen source.
For fun if you really want to trigger "hydrogen economy" enthusiasts you can point out ammonia is a better hydrogen storage technology than any other tech we have and its still ridiculously impractical.
"It's hard to believe that people would panic if the oil price went high, or even sky high. It wouldn't be pretty, sure, probably several industry sectors would die, but I don't see how it would end our world."
You might be interested in watching "The End of Suburbia":
Please explain to me -- how could 50 measly “Hiroshima-size nuclear weapons” (in TFA) have an effect multiple factors of ten worse than Krakatoa, with ca 200 MT...?
WW2 non-nuclear devastation was larger than 100 hiroshima sized bombs, with explicit firebombing burning so many cities to the ground - we have seen the effect of enormous fires, and it doesn't come close to what is described.
In part because the author is exaggerating the scientific results - click on the link for "mostly black" skies, and you'll get a gif/video showing (after equilibrium is reached a few months after the event) light absorption of 5-8%. Significant for the climate, for sure, but not what the writer is claiming.
Does the whole world really look like that in Fury Road? I haven't seen it, but in the original I don't recall any suggestion that it's global, or even that there was a nuclear war. It was just collapse of society in Australia, which is mostly desert or semi-arid climate.
That was always one of the weird things in both the original and Fury Road to me: there are sort-of hints that there are lush (or at least non-desert) lands within a few days, or weeks at most, driving. Why do they spend all their time wasting fuel by driving around in small local circles?
Mainly, because that's where you go, if you're a bandit.
The first movie showed a relatively normal city, bordered by a no-mans land. Max + family vacationed on the coast. The last scene, before Max drives out into the desert is basically in a forest. Max's job was to keep the bandits out of the relatively normal area of civilization.
The third movie showed a paradise hidden from most people, cut off by a lifeless desert. It was only by using a plane that they were able to get to a former city with enough resources to build families, again.
It sounds like there's islands of habitable land, and difficult if almost impossible distances between them. No one knows what's happening outside their sphere, except rumors.
Trying to make all of the Mad Max timelines fit into a single-generation timeline is hard at best.
Think about the kind of timescale needed for those War Boys to exist as an entire subculture, or for the Green Place to be populated and well-known before withering up and disappearing. The only way it makes sense to me is to consider it happening over generations - and yet in the first movie, the collapse of society is still only in progress.
The implication of the "great salt wastes" or whatever in Fury Road, I thought, was that they were driving over the Pacific- that the oceans had literally disappeared.
I don't think that was ever really the case - there was a vast amount of over targeting where the same location would be hit tens or even hundreds of times (notably Moscow - apparently due for ~400 warheads in the worst days of the Cold War).
I have to imagine the only way to really get nukes dropped on you, is to have nukes aimed at someone else... or have a large standing army. Or basically be a threat in some way.
It's not like someone says, "I want to kill all the humans..." they presumably just want to destroy their enemies and threats to their safety.
With that in mind, these nations are probably fucked... but that's only a fraction of nations.
Russia has, generously, an 8k nuclear arsenal (but only about 2k of those are considered active). If they sent everything they had ever built at Texas, they'd still barely be able to drop one bomb per every 30 square miles... Assuming they were all Tsar Bombs... that might take out one state.
I think there are a lot of rural places in the US that would be mostly safe from being directly targeted and potentially far enough away to also avoid fallout. And also... like all of Canada. Who's going to waste nukes on Canada?
And let's not forget these are all government contracts to build the nukes were awarded to constituents as kickbacks or were built by the lower bidder -- and many are very old at this point. I have to think the failure rate is more than 0; so unless they're doubling up likely there will still be places targeted and still left unscathed due to delivery or ordinance malfunction... or just human malfunction, "Golly Gee, Sarge, I meant to target New York, but I typed in New Braunfels instead because of the auto-complete."
It's actually very hard to imagine a true extinction level event now. Despite the comments in this thread, it's unlikely to be nuclear (there's just not enough power there - the Earth is really big).
If the Earth's population is around 8 billion, even if a series of events killed 99.99% of us - there'd still be 800,000 people left. More than enough to repopulate in time.
Water shortages is a weird topic. The article focuses on finite underground aquifers, but how much world water consumption depends on that (I actually would like to know)?
From what I gather many (most?) cities have water "systems". Dirty water is flushed, evaporation and human processes clean it, then we drink it on the other end. It's a continuous renewable cycle. We are reusing the same molecules, not consuming a limited resources. In many cities, water is nearly unlimited. The system just has to be able to cycle enough for the pipes to be full at any given moment.
Some places like California have too much demand, for the rate at which their water cycles, so they have to be careful. But places like NYC or Chicago have nearly unending supplies of sewage to process.
The amount of water on earth today is the same as 4 billion years ago. It doesn't disappear, it just gets dirty.
The water problem is actually an energy problem. There is more than enough water on earth for probably a trillion people. The problem is it's salty, and desalination is extremely energy intensive. If we figure out cheap renewables, or fusion, or just have to pay a greater percentage of our salaries for water, we're really not going to run out.
I know tfa talks about nuclear holocaust but I wanted to discuss regular water issues/fears.
Use of sewage for potable water is still pretty rare.
New York City famously has tunnels up into the mountains for most of their water supply. One of them was featured in Die Hard III, where it was used (while under construction and dry) to smuggle dump trucks full of gold.
Chicago draws water from Lake Michigan and discharges sewage into (artificial) headwaters of the Mississippi.
Folks in upstate New York hate NYC for the water supply. Much of the economy of the "southern tier" region is crippled by the requirement to keep water quality pristine (NYC being one of few cities that doesn't significantly process incoming water), and to manage water flows (including that of the Delaware River itself) to optimize the reservoirs, at the expense of fisheries and stuff.
I don't know about the rest of the US, but I know in the midwest a pretty decent portion of the population get their water supply from the Ogallala Aquifer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer). According to that link it's as much as 82% of the High Plains population.
Globally, the planet won't run out, but local populations might.
There are many factors influencing availability. Salinity, as you mention, and water that's "locked up" in other organisms, or in the geology. And don't forget power/political structures that limit access. Then there's cleanliness: ensuring that water is safe is a complex problem requiring infrastructure, energy, transportation, education, governance, etc.
Increasing temperature will evaporate more water, forcing us to implement new ways to harvest it. If locations of water harvesting become increasingly disparate, then we are faced with an increasingly thorny logistics problem: transporting the water to where it's needed.
With these practical factors, accessible clean water may indeed become limited for an increasing percentage of the population.
Energy supply would seem to be a key to survivial in a nuclear wintr. Not just in water supply but food production (artifical light) and heating. Although use of coal and oil may be simpler than renewables.
Depends on how you define "consumption". If you include agricultural and industrial use, then a lot comes from aquifers. An no those aren't used in short, local cycles; a lot of (polluted) water is moved overland (in rivers) to locations and distributed far and wide. I don't have any numbers at hand on sources of domestic consumption for major cities across the world, but I do know that most cities in Europe rely on a combination of surface and aquifer water to fill their treatment plants and supply systems. When you open the tap, it's not the same water you flushed down the drain when you showered last week. (I've worked on water modeling but not on a fine enough scale to be able to remember an exact answer to your question).
But, when talking 'water shortage', the image the media paints is inaccurate. The California water shortages are not a (representative) example of the long term problems. A more realistic (but abstract, which is why it doesn't make a nice story in the newspaper...) scenario is that of drought in less developed countries. Climate change makes summer hotter and monsoons more intense. Land is degraded due to lack of planting when plants die off in summer heat. Rain in winter then flushes away because there is nothing to hold to water (soil erosion). Crops fail, war erupts. Wars in Africa or Asia influence the rest of the world as well, but yeah that's not the same story as 'water shortage! Your tap in California will stop working!'. And if Africa or Asia are too abstract - southern Europe faces the same problems, albeit in a less severe form (and with better options to control).
In the aggregate, what you say can be said of any resource. "We don't have an oil problem, just the energy problem of converting airborne carbon into a liquid combustible form." When I put it like that, it's obviously a ridiculous reduction; and while the water issue isn't prima facie ridiculous when phrased like you do, the underlying dynamic is the same. It's true that we have no less water than 10k years ago; but it's in different places, is put on land through different forces, is contaminated with other chemicals making it unsuitable for direct use.
Even in areas of plentiful cheap water, it takes electricity to make chlorine for sanitary treatment, and it takes relatively much larger amounts of energy to successfully process sewage, so when the grid inevitably goes down, war or not, there will be lush supplies of irrigation grade water that will sicken or kill anyone who drinks it.
Food equals water for all practical purposes so higher water costs equals higher food costs. Right when the transportation infrastructure is likely to be overloaded...
A lot of places "cycle" water via the rain cycle and often above-ground reservoirs and rivers, which is potentially a huge problem if that rain and/or those reservoirs or waterways are suddenly affected by radioactive fallout or less dramatic factors, like droughts.
So it's a absolutely a real problem.
Closing that cycle in any way that'd even remotely remove contamination would be a massive amount of work.
But more than that, even though many - certainly not all - sewage treatment plants output water that is clean enough for consumption, the bigger problem is psychological and political. No politician wants to be on the front page for having ok'd pumping "toilet water" into peoples drinking supply.
So you're right, in a way: It's "weird". But at the same time, it's a deeply ingrained disgust that has a rational basis given how many disastrous diseases have historically spread via fecal contamination of drinking water, for example.
As far as I know, the post-nuclear world is most accurately described in the 80s UK movie "Threads". It's the bleakest and most depressing movie I've ever seen, like a never ending nightmare. Don't watch it, unless you like being in a bad mood for days.
If any of you want practical advice on how to rebuild after a nuclear (or other) apocalypse let me recommend The Knoweldge by Lewis Dartnell. It's interesting if you're just interested in the history and theory of technology, even.
>“But global warming would be over.” Why? “Because CO2 production would stop with the destruction of civilization.” Man-made climate change, and the drought conditions that come with it, would cease.
I find this is just ignoring reality. CO2 content in atmosphere is the result of a balance in the world. It's a result of processes that bring more CO2 there, and process that remove it.
There's plenty of CO2 production that happens without civilization. And almost all of CO2 removal is not the result of civilization. The balance is not quite solid, but it is there.
The man-made climate change is about changing that balance (and the balance with some other gasses like methane). Annual man-made CO2 emissions are however only a small portion of the total CO2 currently in atmosphere, and of total CO2 removed. Even if civilization wouldn't make any CO2 emissions, the CO2 content of atmosphere would not go to zero.
For CO2 levels in atmosphere, there is an annual fluctuation of about 3–9 ppm which is negatively correlated with the Northern Hemisphere's growing season. [1]
Thus, a far more important factor in the CO2 balance of Earth after a nuclear winter would be how vegetation and seawater plankton survive. If large areas of forests were destroyed, and if seas would be poisoned, then the conversion of CO2 to oxygen and absorption of carbon to plankton would change drastically. The impact of that would be vastly larger than the CO2 output of any human industries.
Climate change would not be over because of lack of civilizsation; climate change would be unpredictable because we wouldn't know what are all the things that blew up in the air and what impact they have.
The death of human race would mainly come via climate change. No nuclear war will directly kill all people, nor will radioactive fallout of even an extensive one. But if the climate would get really much colder, then the human race might be in danger.
For the majority of existence of anatomically modern human being (50 000 years to 200 000 years, depending on definition) the world population has been less than 5 million people (the population of world 10 000 years ago). I think it is quite likely that a similar population could be maintained today, with today's technology, by building artificial environments, running on nuclear power and other modern technology. Think of Caves of Steel. Major powers surely have done some preparations towards that.
It would be what was attributed to Stalin having called "statistics", of course [1], but it wouldn't be the extinction of the human race.
I am curious as to why you think "No nuclear war will directly kill all people" and then after that climate change would be a problem.
I agree a limited exchange might leave people in hardened bunkers alive. But a full exchange, we have sop many weapons[1] it seems entirely that only the luckiest in hardened bunkers would survive and largely they would emerge in a polluted radioactive wasteland.
There are only about 3,000 cities[2] with more than 10,000 people, and only about 19,000 cities in total. We very nearly have a warhead per city, but a city does not need a warhead to hit it to die, irradiating the farmland will kill off everyone just fine. They will have trouble growing food because of pollution levels, radioactivity.
I guess you could call a spontaneous transformation in a barren wastes "climate change" but I think that would be underselling the problem. I also think doing that does a disservice to the modern political about climate change.
There are lots of smaller cities and towns, and not all people live in cities or towns. Nuclear attacks would not cover all land areas where people live. Thus the detonations would not kill all people directly.
Would the radioactive waste kill people? That is something which is harder to calculate. But the dangers of radiation are much exaggerated, and humans are generally more resilient than most people think.
But nuclear winter, drastically reduced temperatures, particles in the air that prevent vegetation from growing and which thus changes the composition of the gasses in atmosphere? That sounds a real threat.
I agree that radiation dangers are exaggerated for most things. The amount of radioactive material left over in most nuclear detonations is staggering. Most fission bombs consume only a tiny percent of their fuel and scatter the rest as particles. Unlike a simple meltdown like Chernobyl there is no container to hold this. Put another way all nuclear weapons are also immensely powerful dirty bombs.
To contrast further, I am well aware of stories of survivors in Japan, even the one survivor who is still alive (last I heard) who was thrown tens of meters twice, once per blast. He and most others only survived because of immediate medical attention and then sustained infrastructure that could not survive a doomsday scenario.
Uranium and Plutonium are some of the most dangerous materials to ingest tiny particles of and these are exactly what will be launched and scattered into all the food supplies. The radiation of being near tiny specks of dust can consume the safe dose of a person for the year and likely do nothing more than increase their chance for cancer in 30 years. Eat that same dust and die of horrible cancer and burns in a few months. It will be in all the food because we have enough warheads, as stated in my previous post, to erase most cities, the resulting damage and fallout would leave no on the planet untouched because the dust would scattered high into the upper atmosphere [1] and it will settle every where
The preposterous devastation of a total nuclear war cannot be understated and again I say that comparing it to climate change does climate change a real disservice. CO2 based climate will disrupt industry and cause wars, but it cannot exterminate humanity. The first volley in a nuclear exchange can exterminate all of humanity before the the next planting of crops. Any comparison to nuclear extinction makes it easy for climate change deniers to claim climate change is hyberbole.
I've been to Ground Zero at both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and I've spent a lot of time in Nevada - and I'm just fine.
People grossly, grossly overestimate the long-term effects of fallout. The main negative effects of nuclear warfare would be infrastructure destruction and the collapse of food/medicine distribution - fallout wouldn't even register.
At the height of the Cold War, a full-on strategic exchange between the US and the USSR wouldn't have ended human civilization. Things would've been unpleasant in parts of North America and Eurasia for a time, but all these extreme scenarios that are sensationalized wouldn'tve come to pass.
Look at Chernobyl - it's essentially a thriving wildlife reservation, now.
Concerning Chernobyl, maybe humans societies adopt a new threshold against thyroid type cancers, but it's still not considered safe for humans.
Hiroshima is not the reference for later generation nuclear bombs, which were magnitudes above them by payload and blast energy and different in isotopes emissioned. Bikini Atoll is still uninhabited as it deemed unsafe even though the population was originally re-relocated.
Problems might also arise from incomplete reactions which might happen with cheaper, less sophisticated bombs or intentionally with dirty bomb types meant for scorched earth tactics or to maximize economic impact due to radiation related sicknesses.
You grossly overestimate the relevance of your own experience to the discussion of modern nuclear weapons. Those explosions were all either airbursts, purposefully designed to avoid fallout, or very low yield weapons when compared to modern weaponry.
All of which is of very little relevance to discussing modern nukes intended to cause fallout.
An airburst not only minimizes fallout, it also maximizes the damage done by a nuclear weapon. I would expect a nuclear exchange to be primarily airbust weapons, considering the intent is to destroy the enemy's infrastructure and fighting capability.
Mutually Assured Destruction refers to the combatant countries, after all, not to the human species.
With a full scale nuclear exchange we would have a nuclear winter for a the first few years (when the radiation would be the highest). This is an interesting read that looks at actual US government procedures following and exchange. It's a bit dated, but was written during the height of the cold war. https://www.amazon.com/Day-After-World-War-III/dp/0670258806
The whole article and not one mention of radioactive fallout? The radioactivity from a thermonuclear bomb spreads through the regional atmosphere and remains in contaminated soil for centuries...
> So why the clear, blue skies, George Miller? Perhaps the once smoke-filled air in Max’s world has already cleared. But Robock predicts that process would take around 30 years. Why, then, does Max still look so young?
I think they accidentally a word. 30 years == young.
It's worth noting that nuclear winter is just an educated guess about what would happen; we obviously don't have any data on how a large-scale nuclear exchange would affect the climate, and there may be other climatic effects that are harder to predict.
I'm skeptical that we would see much effect from an exchange of 50 weapons; the year 1962 saw 178 detonations.[1]
You also aren't considering the strength of the nukes. Back in 1962 nuclear bombs were relatively low-yield (especially those used in tests). Today, a single nuke can decimate the entire DC area.
The trend in nuclear weapons has been for lower yields over the last 45 years or so. The reason is that advances in CEP precision due to better guidance systems means than huge yields are no longer necessary in order to ensure destruction of the intended target(s).
'Nuclear winter' is a completely unsupported theory pushed by Carl Sagan and the Union of Confused Scientists. Recall that these same people pushed 'the coming Ice Age' in the 1970s, 'global warming' until even their jiggered data was so obviously wrong that they renamed it 'climate change', and also predicted 'nuclear winter' effects from the burning oilfields during the first Gulf War - which never materialized, of course.
* The total energy of all explosives used in World War Two (including the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs) is estimated to have been three megatons of TNT
* The total global nuclear arsenal is about 30,000 nuclear warheads with a destructive capacity of 7,000 megatons or 7 gigatons (7,000 million tons) of TNT
And TFA talked about a nuclear winter from burning cities when using a hundred Hiroshima bombs, not the US/Russian arsenal. We ought to have learned about those effects, just from WW II.
So why the clear, blue skies, George Miller? Perhaps the once smoke-filled air in Max’s world has already cleared.
I'm not sure which Fury Road the author saw, but there are many scenes where there is little daylight coming through, for a variety of environmental reasons.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 95.1 ms ] threadIn what way is this model any better?
> A limited, regional nuclear war between India and Pakistan in which each side detonates 50 15 kt weapons could produce about 5 Tg of black carbon (BC). [1]
That's 5 million metric tons. The footnote on the Wikipedia article [2] says the oil fires produced:
> 16,000 metric tons of actual soot is produced from 220,000 metric tons of oil burned every day.
They started doing this in January and they didn't finish putting out the fires until November, or almost 300 days. But let's use 200 days as a reasonable approximation, given that some of the fires were out earlier than that. Multiplying 16,000 by 200 gives 3.2 million metric tons of soot, so the nuclear war soot is about 1.5 times worse than the oil fire soot.
Also, consider that humanity has actually performed some 520 atmospheric nuclear explosions (including 8 underwater) with a total yield of 545 Megaton [3]. And yet this 0.75 Megaton conflict is going to plunge the world into winter? I'm not buying it.
[1] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2013EF000205/full [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuwaiti_oil_fires#cite_note-37 [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_weapons_tests
We actually sent them to fight those oil fires. Who will be fighting nuclear fires when nukes start flying?
Sagan later admitted he was wrong, but only because smoke from the oil fires didn't reach the stratosphere.
1. http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1991-01-23/news/1991023131_...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Kuwait_wells_in...
However, this will decrease carbon dioxide consumption by plants and might allow unsafe buildup in the atmosphere.
Soot partly is a problem now. It lands on the ice/snow and makes the ice melt much faster (due to being black/brown)
Human scavengers roaming what's left, true, but mostly famished and trying to find food before anything else.
Maybe this time is the time we will renew the fear of nuclear annihilation. With Trump elected, Europe is turning to itself for its defence, and is already considering a common nuclear deterrence. Depending on its implementation, this could mean the end of the non-proliferation treaties.
Time to watch Threads again.
Edit: The War Game is worth watching - the BBC refused to show it as "the effect of the film has been judged by the BBC to be too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_Game
The article itself suggest a nuclear conflict between India and Pakistan would result in 2 billion death (supposedly mostly around India/Pakistan), which means the majority of the worlds population will survive.
I bet that's the most persistent thing you remember from that teacher. Effective education! And probably tipped you away from the idea that a nuclear war might be winnable, and towards disarmament.
Our teacher showed us https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_of_Darkness for similar reasons, I think.
(http://burlingtonandbeyond.co.uk/wp/part-3/ etc)
That's my recollection anyways. I read it in 6th grade, so it's been well over a decade since I read it. I really ought to re-read it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_Light_(novel)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_Mile_(film)
So, I'm sure that despite the effort the UK Government was well aware of its futility.
There are maps from the early 1950s - pre H-Bomb - which show large areas of the UK reduced to radioactive desert after a relatively small attack.
Unloading tens or hundreds of larger weapons on the UK would do very little to increase its survival prospects.
From that POV, Threads is terrifying but optimistic. It's not clear anyone at all would survive a full exchange. Spending a few years in a bunker would simply delay the inevitable.
All of life could be said to be merely delaying the inevitable.
I am reminded of the story of a man running away from a tiger when he reaches the edge of a cliff and falls over, managing to grab hold of the edge and hanging by one hand. Below him is certain death from the fall, above him is death by the tiger. The man notices some sweet dew dripping from a blade of grass by his face. With moments left to live, he licks the dew.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/in-the-eve...
Yes - that AA - the Automobile Association....
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/05/nuclear-missile-cod...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HANDEL
As adults, we can choose to not see it. As children, in a classroom, we are generally not. Peer pressure and adult authoritarian rule should not be taken lightly. Especially when used to scare children into compliance and leave them lasting marks into adult-hood.
-Speaking as someone that still has irrational issues with being alone, or being alone in the dark. After watching age-inappropriate movies as a child.
You'd be amazed at the kinds of films that were shown to young people in an effort tochange their behaviour (with no evidence that it would actually do so).
My favourite example was of a UK tv show Nationwide that got a studio full of young people to watch US style shock films about road and rail safety. The films were so gruesome they couldn't be shown on broadcast tv at that time of the evening. There were shots of young people throwing up and feinting and having to be taken out of the studio, weeping.
(This is mentioned on a TV discussion forum somewhere, but I can't find it. :-/)
Fear is a choice.
Also many people have overcome much greater trauma than 'age-inappropriate movies'... that's absurd.
I'm pretty sure while it could be considered mildly negligent to give into that pressure, I'm also confident it doesn't constitute child abuse. At least some of us were old almost enough to enlist with the army, I think its good to balance that out with an idea of just what that might entail.
Yeah, I was in my 20s when I saw it for the first time. It's powerful.
Probably to make whatever grain-sized impact he or she could possibly make towards preventing the scenario described in that movie from ever happening.
I miss the Cold War (during which I also had teachers like this).
All national leaders should somehow be legally compelled to watch it. We need them to be as scared as possible of nuclear war.
Charlie Stross has a vivid account of his feelings on the subject:
"I'm a child of the 1970s and 1980s; I grew up under the shadow of the mushroom cloud. Prior to the end of the cold war in 1989-91, I don't believe I ever lived more than 10 kilometres from a strategic nuclear target."
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/04/on-the-u...
I think a lot of people who grew up in the Cold War and who contemplated what might actually happen still have that lingering "Lovecraftian horror" from the whole business.
Its hard to remember now what the constant subliminal awareness of imminent destruction felt like. Seems that we just don't think about it anymore, even though Russia and the US still have ~2000 active nukes each.
Trump is making pro-Russia noises, but anti-China noises, and he could easily change his mind on a dime and go ballistic over some perceived slight from Putin. Many people feel complacent about it because the Soviet Union has collapsed and relations between the USA and Russia are relatively peaceful, but this is a false sense of security.
He said on his Morning Joe programme: “Several months ago, a foreign policy expert on the international level went to advise Donald Trump.
“And three times he [Trump] asked about the use of nuclear weapons. Three times he asked at one point if we had them why can’t we use them.
http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/696241/Donald-Trump-asks...
I assume you think you know what they are for. How do you know you're right if you don't ask?
I don't know the name of it, but there is a fallacy among some people that equates asking for more information with a lack of knowledge. But actually it's the opposite: Ignorant people tend not to ask for information, while those who actually understand ask a lot, because unlike the others they know what they don't know. Foolish people confuse this for ignorance.
But either way -- it's fine for him, as a human being, if he still needs to look up in an encyclopedia, or "ask an expert" what nuclear weapons are really useful for -- or whether the U.S. still has access to them.
But if he's that far out on the "happy-ignorant-foolish" spectrum -- then I'd greatly, greatly prefer that he not be placed in charge of the disposition of such instruments.
Are you with me on this?
I'm not happy with everything he's said and done. But unlike you I'm not so quick to dismiss people as "happy-ignorant-foolish" just because they don't agree with me.
If you are incapable of understanding why people act in a certain way when it differs from yours then that's your failure, not theirs.
PS. It's clear from your reply that you did not understand what I wrote in my previous message, in fact you seemed to understand almost exactly the opposite of what I wrote. Is that my fault for not being clear? Or are you uninterested in understanding Trump any other way?
I'm quick to dismiss them in that way based on what they say and do -- for example, running or the office of President of the United states, whilst not possessing even a middle-school level knowledge of whether the country you wish to govern actually has nuclear weapons or not; let alone what they are actually useful for -- not because they "disagree with [me]".
As portrayed in that episode, everybody watched it, everybody talked about it, and it changed how everybody thought about nuclear war.
I don't remember a thing about the TV event in the title of the previouis episode of "The Americans" (S04E08 "The Magic of David Copperfield V: The Statue of Liberty Disappears" [4]), but I sure remember seeing "The Day After" in 1983.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Americans_(2013_TV_series)
[2] http://www.avclub.com/tvclub/theres-got-be-day-after-america...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Statue_of_Liberty...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrHoMSRZOS4
(Warning: not for the faint of heart)
Radio Announcer: "Warsaw Pact forces are close to announcing a cease-fire along the German border. There are still no eyewitness accounts to substantiate the rumor that low-kiloton range nuclear weapons were detonated this morning during the conflict, resulting in the reported destruction of Wiesbaden and the outskirts of Frankfur..."
[electronic alarm cuts in]
EBS Announcer: "This is the Emergency Broadcast System. All persons currently in transit in the Kansas City metropolitan area are advised to proceed immediately to the municipal shelter facility in the community or township closest to your current location. While there is no immediate danger to the Kansas City area, the Federal Emergency Management Agency urges you to learn the steps to be taken in the event of a probable attack."
The premise revolved around there being no copies of probably the most printed book on the planet, yet there other books. Even a collective, whose mission is to find all the books and knowledge it can (someone read Asimov), can't find a bible. They found a Torah, but couldn't find a bible.
Awful film.
Movie's still not great, but there are reasons they don't find Bibles :)
It could be other events (supervolcano eruption for example), but a nuclear holocaust would be similar if not too many bombs are used.
Nuclear war doesn't do much.
I think a meteor or supervolcano is also impossible from the scenes in the film, not having lots of things growing within a month doesn't fit really, but it'd be an interesting discussion.
Obviously this is why it's not mentioned, so people don't get wrapped up in the details about how it happen but the story.
Having said that, in the movie the protagonist awakes at night to an orange glow outside, implied to be wild-fires on the horizon. He rushes to the bathroom to begin filling the bathtub with water.
Only humans survived. No other life. Not at all realistic, but that wasn't the intent.
I guess rotting plant matter like trees might provide nutrients for some sort of meager ecosystem composed of fungi and insects for quite some time. Maybe a few small mammals and birds. The book didn't really touch on that, though.
"The clocks stopped at 1:17. A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions. He got up and went to the window. What is it? she said. He didn't answer. He went into the bathroom and threw the lightswitch but the power was already gone. A dull rose glow in the windowglass. He dropped to one knee and raised the lever to stop the tub and then turned on both the taps as far as they would go. She was standing in the doorway in her nightwear, clutching the jamb, cradling her belly in one hand. What is it? she said. What is happening?
I don't know.
Why are you taking a bath?
I'm not."
> could mean the end of the non-proliferation treaties
So could the US running out of money/power.
Yes, clearly they're building those island bases in the South China Sea just because they feel like they don't have enough oceanfront real estate. /s
https://www.google.com/search?q=china+island+bases+map
Here's a diagram for those who are interested: http://www.abc.net.au/cm/lb/5464158/data/south-china-sea-map.... Note how close the China claim line extends to various other nations.
The context of this thread is "China taking over" meaning venturing a lot further from its borders.
However.
Farnham's Freehold was just ubermensch porn coupled with some really weird racism. He used more hackneyed "I can do everything" stereotypes than an Ayn Rand novel, which is something he was always guilty of but it really came to a head here. The multiculturalism and openness that was so explicitly prevalent in Starship Troopers, Stranger, and Harsh Mistress (the main character of Starship Troopers is a bisexual South American) vanishes, replaced with this weird fear of black people - "they seem nice, but they'll turn on you when they get the chance" is the message the Joe character imparts.
Just a very weird book.
It was the weirdly sexualized race and gender based cannibalism that I think puts it over the line, not the actions of Joe, except in the context of the former.
I mean I see what he was trying to do, but rather than basing his African elites on anthropological evidence, or on real white cultures that were horrible to other races, (which would have gotten his point across better, I think,) he based them on the most disturbing (and to me, last believable or sympathetic) racial fears of the time, and because of that, it is kinda uncomfortable.
1964 was the same year the Civil Rights Act was passed. I imagine ideas of baser racial instincts were different when there were still lynchings and fear of sexual racial mixing. :(
As someone born in the very early 90's, it's weird seeing evidence of people taking seriously these thoughts I've only seen caricatured.
Of course, it's done with the subtlety of a sledgehammer, but somehow it's far more forgivable in its consistently tone deaf naivety than if it appeared Henlein actually had a decent understanding of race relations. (like the District 9 filmmakers ruining their perfect race-relations satire with comedy savage Nigerians...)
The daddy who's such an ubermensch even his own daughter wants to sleep with him, whilst he's actually busy screwing her best friend is much harder to accept, of course.
Lucifer's Hammer by Niven and Pournelle goes into a bit of the politics and aftermath of a comet striking the Earth. It talks about survival, civil defense, and a few other things that would be spoilers to mention. That said, it has some points that are weirdly racist when viewed decades after publication--if you can look past those, though, it's a solid read.
One Second After by William Forstchen talks about the aftermath of an EMP first-strike on the US. Perhaps the one of the more interesting things is that he does specifically pay attention to both the food and medicine logistics--specifically, what happens when we lack ability to run refrigerators and move around grain. It's a bit cheerful in the end, but a good read.
Warday by Strieber and Kunetka takes place 5 years after a "limited" nuclear exchange with the USSR. The premise of the novel is that a pair of researchers are traveling through the US and interviewing folks, reading documents, and generally piecing together both the initial conflict as well as the efforts to survive and recover. It's a really good bit of speculative fiction, but is pretty depressing.
~
One of the biggest things that makes nuclear war difficult to imagine today is that we have the Internet and cell phones, things which at once are utterly integral to most of the non-rural folks and which are completely vulnerable to any sort of honest nuclear strike. The lack of books, CB radios, and basic practical knowhow and repairable goods brought by the rise of technology and international trade might well yield a situation where a theoretical 2020s United States would have a more difficult time recovering than a 1980s US.
At least as far as the 'net stuff goes, the short story "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth" by Doctorow is maybe one of the only ones that treats the tech angle seriously in a modern light.
Yeah, I'm pretty disappointed with Farnham's Freehold. I picked it up at a used book store for a dollar - Heinlein! Post-apocalyptic society! - but I haven't enjoyed it very much, and yes, it does get weirdly racial as it goes on. The other books you mention sound much better! Heard great things about Lucifer's Hammer - that'll go to the top of the list.
A better -- and recent favorite of mine -- sci-fi book about scarce resources and food is "The Windup Girl" by Paolo Bacigalupi. It's not about nuclear war either, but not only is the actual story very engaging, it focuses on how energy is generated and stored, what people eat, and how food is delivered in a post-oil world. Bacigalupi calls this crisis "the Contraction". Warning: more than a few digs at Monsanto as well, not so much from the "transgenics are bad" angle but from the "copyrights and patents on food oppress people". Strongly recommended!
https://youtu.be/wvwlt4FqmS0?t=559
You can do movies like this (The Road, Schindler's List, Dallas Buyer's Club, Hotel Rwanda are all good examples) but if the world of the story is crushingly awful then you're basically reduced to one plot - moral individual risks/sacrifices self to provide glimmer of hope to others. Offhand I'd say you can only put out a truly grim a-list movie about once every 5 years.
For all the dramatic hand wrangling over finding supplies, the survivors are essentially living in a world of plenty -- enough arms, ammunition, canned food, and supplies for a world population, >50% of which presumably no longer have an interest in such things.
It's the antithesis of all that "we should compromise for the good of all, saving the planet, etc" (because how does that sound fun?).
Are you really trying to say that Trump, and not Putin, is the primary reason for this?
Also, I thought that political threads were banned on HN now; aren't they?
Sure. The NATO of old was facing off against much stronger opposition than Putin today, without even the slightest trace of doubt in commitment coming up. Trump is certainly not the only factor that erodes trust in NATO deterrence (Brexit, Erdogan and NATO overexpansion are other important contributors to the general uneasiness), but he is the most visible one. Visible cracks are bad because there will always be people (on all sides!) who see personal incentive to widen them and if they succeed, the mere thought that limited scope wars could be possible will endanger peace.
If Trump is part of the mechanism, Putin is still the reason.
No, the "ban" was temporary, and lifted only a few days after it was put in place.
Not sure why you're being downvoted, it's a good question.
The way I see it, it's an overall pandemic of malaise, a regression to a more primal state, affecting the "West" primarily, but certainly influencing the whole world to some extent.
Brexit is a symptom. The Trump madness is a symptom. Le Pen is a symptom. Putin has been a symptom and an instrument and an agent for a long time. ISIS is an example outside of the West of the same thing.
Fear and lies. Facts don't matter anymore, truth is being trampled into the ground, and the world's state of mind is gradually turning dark. Where violence has an opportunity, it breaks out. Fortunately, not much of this has been translated into material consequences (except for ISIS and so on), but at the psychological level it's really bad. If it stays mostly on that level, then perhaps there is a way out eventually.
The ban has been lifted. See:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13131251
Then again, I hated Mad Max and only sat down to watch it at the theater because of the ridiculously-good critical reviews it had amassed. I found it a pointless exercise in hedonism and a testosterone-fueled car chase filled with gore and nudity for their own sake.
Is that such a bad thing?
It had a guy playing electric guitar on top of a giant flamethrower, because that's the kind of movie it was.
Maybe not for everyone, but I thought it managed to do what it was trying to.
I'm reminded of the movie Idiocracy.
There's a really blatant subtext: about guys blowing shit up, exploiting women, and in general driving the world into total destruction. On its face, it's an exercise in radical feminism.
Except, it isn't. Below that, there is the layer showing that women are equally capable of destruction, and that they in fact need to rely on that destruction to reach "the green place".
And that's flipped on its head again, because that war machine runs on a mixture of fuel and mother's milk. Max is pretty much annointed with it when he uses mother's milk to wash the blood of his face, after a selfless act. There's a huge "war turned into a nurturing thing" there. It's echoed by the fact that part of Furiosa's body is partially mechanized. (Her replacement arm)
Which leads up to what I think is the final message, where the realization strikes that there is no separate, women-only feminist utopia. There is no "women peaceful, men violent" dichotomy. Instead, the world is finally improved by the women reintegrating themselves into the world they left, but on their own terms.
It's pretty much a post-modernist deconstruction of war movies and feminism at the same time. It's incredibly heavy-handed about it - all those things have about the subtlety of a hand grenade as a can opener - but it tackled a topic that was important and little talked about.
That is why it was a good movie. If that message doesn't speak to you, I'm not surprised you didn't like it. You were not the target audience. (Neither were people who like chase-and-blow-stuff-up movies, and they were vocal about the fact they didn't like it)
That doesn't necessarily make it a good movie, but if one liked both the subtext and blowing things up, they had a great time watching it.
Ironic, since pre-Road Mad Max can only be described as a criticism of consumerism & car culture. After the apocalypse caused by oil wars, the world is littered with cars, they're the only technology anyone understands, so basically everything is hacked together w/ car parts. Everyone is still fighting over oil and acting like macho idiots whose identities' are closely linked with driving to point of being a cult.
TBQH in this context making it about water and not oil doesn't make a lot of sense, but I understand why they would try to update it this way to make it more topical.
I wouldn't describe personal vehicles in such base terms, it's more that cars, trucks, off-road vehicles, etc are the only form of manufactured goods that are both suitable to the world portrayed in the films and widespread enough to be accessible to everyone.
All complex manufactured goods in such a world would be irreplacable, at least within the lifetime of anyone living in that time period. Radios and other electronics are also widespread and suitable enough to be considered a necessity but they'd be destroyed by the EMP effects of nuclear warfare (hence why every vehicle in Mad Max appears to be from the carburetor/pre-electronics era).
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistuingishable from magic and although the mechanicals of a car are well understood by laymen, their existence carries an air of magic/reverence as they cannot be replicated by the society which possesses them. IMO, the closest comparison is that of a Cargo Cult rather than an extreme extrapolation of existing car culture.
No Country for Old Men was the movie that convinced me that Cormack McCarthy wrote overhyped garbage. I didn't even bother watching The Road, as I expected it would be just more of the same.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threads
wait, what?... Europe wasn't paying for its own defense before Trump, because why, they just liked the US presidents?! Was it something about them, or were they just these big suckers and Europeans were like "hey free defense!"? Quite frankly, you're making Trump sound better.
Wouldn't it have to turn itself more to defense if the other candidate was elected, who didn't seem to mind setting up No-Fly zones for aircraft for a country which has more than 1000 nuclear warheads ready to launch (not counting those in nuclear subs).
As far as I know, we neither exploit nor track the deposits of heavier oil.
By the way, we exploit oil sands which are about as heavy as you get. The stuff is basically asphalt.
It's hard to believe that people would panic if the oil price went high, or even sky high. It wouldn't be pretty, sure, probably several industry sectors would die, but I don't see how it would end our world.
Most of the oil we use today is consumed by transportation, but there are plenty of other propulsion systems than just internal combustion engine (to name a few: electric ones, pneumatic, flywheel, external combustion (that can run on burning guano; e.g. Stirling engine)). Then there is the thing that we can still produce gasoline artificially from coal, it's just more expensive than how we get the gasoline currently.
I don't question the vision of collapsed society shown in Mad Max (I don't know if it makes senese or not, I just don't think about it). But how and why the society collapsed (MM1 version) doesn't stand the basic scrutiny.
Starvation would end our world pretty quickly.
Regarding distribution:
- we had working short-distance transportation with no oil whatsoever for ages literally, and for mechanical transport, there are alternatives to burning gasoline, it just won't be at the speed of 60mph
- long-distance transportation using rails is much more energy efficient than anything we use today, barring maybe moving by rivers, and rail infrastructure only sucks such heavily in the USA
Production, too, is not that reliant on oil. Most of the gain of modern agriculture is not due to mechanization, but due to fertilizers and pesticides. It's chemistry what brought us prosperity in this field, not mechanics.
The world without oil looks like North Korea. The world with oil looks like South Korea.
Without fertilizer there will be mass starvation, this is absolutely assured. It doesn't matter about production or transport. There won't be any food in the first place.
I fail to see how replacing a Diesel engine that burns diesel oil inside its cylinders with a Stirling engine that burns dried guano in an external combustion chamber is world-ending.
Not to mention that old style diesel engines usually can run on cooking oil(!) or ethanol(!), so the migration to alternative propulsion wouldn't need to be that immediate. Transportation of goods critical to survival (e.g. food) could still be secured.
And we aren't discussing the world where fertilizers disappeared. We were talking about the world without gasoline.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cracking_(chemistry)
Cracking is not a net energy gain... However, if you're refining more asphalt than you know what to do with and have a shortage of shorter chain hydrocarbons, you can at considerable cost (economically and energeticaly) crack them and turn a useless pile of asphalt into burnable gasoline.
Coal to gas is convoluted. Coal to methanol somewhat more reasonable. Methanol being quite toxic is no laughing matter but then again benzene and mystery meat in gasoline is no laughing matter, probably "methanol causes blindness" would be all over the clickbait but it wouldn't be much larger of a problem than cancer from gasoline at a societal level.
All you need to end the world is about three days without food deliveries. That's about a factor of a hundred faster than the NIMBY permitting problems preventing installing steam engine rail between food warehouses and retail stores or whatever.
Fertilizer IS natgas. There's no such thing as a natgas or oil well, there's just wells with different ratios of natgas to oil, ranging from admittedly near 99% of one or the other to darn near 50:50 (by mass or volume). Its really quite problematic and dangerous. Yes the average chain length of crude oil is a nice stable diesel fuel but the std deviation is quite high leading to amazing explosions and fires due to 1% by mass being butane bubbling out catching fire then setting the rest of the plant on fire. Crude oil really is annoying and if it weren't so energetically valuable I donno if we'd use it as a feedstock for everything else, just TDP natural oils or something. Not to mention crude oil is full of "stuff" vanadium and sulfur and whatnot.
The wikipedia you want is
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process
Basically you mix steam and natgas to get hydrogen, then you mix hydrogen with atmospheric nitrogen (under immense pressure and high temp) to make ammonia, quite an important nitrogen fertilizer directly, but also indirectly via acid plants and much hand waving the other fertilizers kinda sorta depend on ammonia and there's no other industrially viable nitrogen source.
For fun if you really want to trigger "hydrogen economy" enthusiasts you can point out ammonia is a better hydrogen storage technology than any other tech we have and its still ridiculously impractical.
You might be interested in watching "The End of Suburbia":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3uvzcY2Xug
https://www.dmr.nd.gov/oilgas/stats/historicaloilprodstats.p...
The barrels/well figure has declined, but only by about 25-30% from the peak.
Umm, yeah.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_Max:_Fury_Road#Plot
That was a retcon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krakatoa#1883_eruption
Edit: Also, all the fire bombed cities in WW II should at least be in the neighborhood of a large fraction of 100 small nuclear devices. Then we have this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuwaiti_oil_fires#Oil_fire_smo...
Also it's not 50, it's 100. 50 bombs for India and Pakistan each.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter
The years of WW II ought to play in the same division?
Edit: Also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuwaiti_oil_fires#Oil_fire_smo...
Or those lush lands are highly desirable, and thus heavily fortified.
The first movie showed a relatively normal city, bordered by a no-mans land. Max + family vacationed on the coast. The last scene, before Max drives out into the desert is basically in a forest. Max's job was to keep the bandits out of the relatively normal area of civilization.
The third movie showed a paradise hidden from most people, cut off by a lifeless desert. It was only by using a plane that they were able to get to a former city with enough resources to build families, again.
It sounds like there's islands of habitable land, and difficult if almost impossible distances between them. No one knows what's happening outside their sphere, except rumors.
Think about the kind of timescale needed for those War Boys to exist as an entire subculture, or for the Green Place to be populated and well-known before withering up and disappearing. The only way it makes sense to me is to consider it happening over generations - and yet in the first movie, the collapse of society is still only in progress.
[0] https://what-if.xkcd.com/54/
It's not like someone says, "I want to kill all the humans..." they presumably just want to destroy their enemies and threats to their safety.
With that in mind, these nations are probably fucked... but that's only a fraction of nations.
* List of states with nuclear weapons - Wikipedia || https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_with_nuclear_we...
Russia has, generously, an 8k nuclear arsenal (but only about 2k of those are considered active). If they sent everything they had ever built at Texas, they'd still barely be able to drop one bomb per every 30 square miles... Assuming they were all Tsar Bombs... that might take out one state.
* NUKEMAP by Alex Wellerstein || http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/
I think there are a lot of rural places in the US that would be mostly safe from being directly targeted and potentially far enough away to also avoid fallout. And also... like all of Canada. Who's going to waste nukes on Canada?
* US States: Area and Ranking - EnchantedLearning.com || http://www.enchantedlearning.com/usa/states/area.shtml
And let's not forget these are all government contracts to build the nukes were awarded to constituents as kickbacks or were built by the lower bidder -- and many are very old at this point. I have to think the failure rate is more than 0; so unless they're doubling up likely there will still be places targeted and still left unscathed due to delivery or ordinance malfunction... or just human malfunction, "Golly Gee, Sarge, I meant to target New York, but I typed in New Braunfels instead because of the auto-complete."
Just for fun:
* Tom Lehrer - Who's Next - with intro - YouTube || https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRLON3ddZIw
If the Earth's population is around 8 billion, even if a series of events killed 99.99% of us - there'd still be 800,000 people left. More than enough to repopulate in time.
From what I gather many (most?) cities have water "systems". Dirty water is flushed, evaporation and human processes clean it, then we drink it on the other end. It's a continuous renewable cycle. We are reusing the same molecules, not consuming a limited resources. In many cities, water is nearly unlimited. The system just has to be able to cycle enough for the pipes to be full at any given moment.
Some places like California have too much demand, for the rate at which their water cycles, so they have to be careful. But places like NYC or Chicago have nearly unending supplies of sewage to process.
The amount of water on earth today is the same as 4 billion years ago. It doesn't disappear, it just gets dirty.
The water problem is actually an energy problem. There is more than enough water on earth for probably a trillion people. The problem is it's salty, and desalination is extremely energy intensive. If we figure out cheap renewables, or fusion, or just have to pay a greater percentage of our salaries for water, we're really not going to run out.
I know tfa talks about nuclear holocaust but I wanted to discuss regular water issues/fears.
New York City famously has tunnels up into the mountains for most of their water supply. One of them was featured in Die Hard III, where it was used (while under construction and dry) to smuggle dump trucks full of gold.
Chicago draws water from Lake Michigan and discharges sewage into (artificial) headwaters of the Mississippi.
There are many factors influencing availability. Salinity, as you mention, and water that's "locked up" in other organisms, or in the geology. And don't forget power/political structures that limit access. Then there's cleanliness: ensuring that water is safe is a complex problem requiring infrastructure, energy, transportation, education, governance, etc.
Increasing temperature will evaporate more water, forcing us to implement new ways to harvest it. If locations of water harvesting become increasingly disparate, then we are faced with an increasingly thorny logistics problem: transporting the water to where it's needed.
With these practical factors, accessible clean water may indeed become limited for an increasing percentage of the population.
But, when talking 'water shortage', the image the media paints is inaccurate. The California water shortages are not a (representative) example of the long term problems. A more realistic (but abstract, which is why it doesn't make a nice story in the newspaper...) scenario is that of drought in less developed countries. Climate change makes summer hotter and monsoons more intense. Land is degraded due to lack of planting when plants die off in summer heat. Rain in winter then flushes away because there is nothing to hold to water (soil erosion). Crops fail, war erupts. Wars in Africa or Asia influence the rest of the world as well, but yeah that's not the same story as 'water shortage! Your tap in California will stop working!'. And if Africa or Asia are too abstract - southern Europe faces the same problems, albeit in a less severe form (and with better options to control).
In the aggregate, what you say can be said of any resource. "We don't have an oil problem, just the energy problem of converting airborne carbon into a liquid combustible form." When I put it like that, it's obviously a ridiculous reduction; and while the water issue isn't prima facie ridiculous when phrased like you do, the underlying dynamic is the same. It's true that we have no less water than 10k years ago; but it's in different places, is put on land through different forces, is contaminated with other chemicals making it unsuitable for direct use.
Food equals water for all practical purposes so higher water costs equals higher food costs. Right when the transportation infrastructure is likely to be overloaded...
So it's a absolutely a real problem.
Closing that cycle in any way that'd even remotely remove contamination would be a massive amount of work.
But more than that, even though many - certainly not all - sewage treatment plants output water that is clean enough for consumption, the bigger problem is psychological and political. No politician wants to be on the front page for having ok'd pumping "toilet water" into peoples drinking supply.
So you're right, in a way: It's "weird". But at the same time, it's a deeply ingrained disgust that has a rational basis given how many disastrous diseases have historically spread via fecal contamination of drinking water, for example.
That would be ironic, because 'salary' was originally money given to soldiers to buy salt, not get rid of it.
This is a work of fiction, no ?
http://the-knowledge.org/en-gb/the-book/
This is because of statements like made here:
>“But global warming would be over.” Why? “Because CO2 production would stop with the destruction of civilization.” Man-made climate change, and the drought conditions that come with it, would cease.
I find this is just ignoring reality. CO2 content in atmosphere is the result of a balance in the world. It's a result of processes that bring more CO2 there, and process that remove it.
There's plenty of CO2 production that happens without civilization. And almost all of CO2 removal is not the result of civilization. The balance is not quite solid, but it is there.
The man-made climate change is about changing that balance (and the balance with some other gasses like methane). Annual man-made CO2 emissions are however only a small portion of the total CO2 currently in atmosphere, and of total CO2 removed. Even if civilization wouldn't make any CO2 emissions, the CO2 content of atmosphere would not go to zero.
For CO2 levels in atmosphere, there is an annual fluctuation of about 3–9 ppm which is negatively correlated with the Northern Hemisphere's growing season. [1]
Thus, a far more important factor in the CO2 balance of Earth after a nuclear winter would be how vegetation and seawater plankton survive. If large areas of forests were destroyed, and if seas would be poisoned, then the conversion of CO2 to oxygen and absorption of carbon to plankton would change drastically. The impact of that would be vastly larger than the CO2 output of any human industries.
Climate change would not be over because of lack of civilizsation; climate change would be unpredictable because we wouldn't know what are all the things that blew up in the air and what impact they have.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth's_atmo...
Just maybe the particles launched into th atmosphere, the radioactive fallout and the death of the human race are more important than CO2
For the majority of existence of anatomically modern human being (50 000 years to 200 000 years, depending on definition) the world population has been less than 5 million people (the population of world 10 000 years ago). I think it is quite likely that a similar population could be maintained today, with today's technology, by building artificial environments, running on nuclear power and other modern technology. Think of Caves of Steel. Major powers surely have done some preparations towards that.
It would be what was attributed to Stalin having called "statistics", of course [1], but it wouldn't be the extinction of the human race.
[1] http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/21/death-statistic/
I agree a limited exchange might leave people in hardened bunkers alive. But a full exchange, we have sop many weapons[1] it seems entirely that only the luckiest in hardened bunkers would survive and largely they would emerge in a polluted radioactive wasteland.
There are only about 3,000 cities[2] with more than 10,000 people, and only about 19,000 cities in total. We very nearly have a warhead per city, but a city does not need a warhead to hit it to die, irradiating the farmland will kill off everyone just fine. They will have trouble growing food because of pollution levels, radioactivity.
I guess you could call a spontaneous transformation in a barren wastes "climate change" but I think that would be underselling the problem. I also think doing that does a disservice to the modern political about climate change.
[1] http://www.icanw.org/the-facts/nuclear-arsenals/ [2] https://www.quora.com/How-many-towns-counties-and-cities-are...
Would the radioactive waste kill people? That is something which is harder to calculate. But the dangers of radiation are much exaggerated, and humans are generally more resilient than most people think.
But nuclear winter, drastically reduced temperatures, particles in the air that prevent vegetation from growing and which thus changes the composition of the gasses in atmosphere? That sounds a real threat.
To contrast further, I am well aware of stories of survivors in Japan, even the one survivor who is still alive (last I heard) who was thrown tens of meters twice, once per blast. He and most others only survived because of immediate medical attention and then sustained infrastructure that could not survive a doomsday scenario.
Uranium and Plutonium are some of the most dangerous materials to ingest tiny particles of and these are exactly what will be launched and scattered into all the food supplies. The radiation of being near tiny specks of dust can consume the safe dose of a person for the year and likely do nothing more than increase their chance for cancer in 30 years. Eat that same dust and die of horrible cancer and burns in a few months. It will be in all the food because we have enough warheads, as stated in my previous post, to erase most cities, the resulting damage and fallout would leave no on the planet untouched because the dust would scattered high into the upper atmosphere [1] and it will settle every where
The preposterous devastation of a total nuclear war cannot be understated and again I say that comparing it to climate change does climate change a real disservice. CO2 based climate will disrupt industry and cause wars, but it cannot exterminate humanity. The first volley in a nuclear exchange can exterminate all of humanity before the the next planting of crops. Any comparison to nuclear extinction makes it easy for climate change deniers to claim climate change is hyberbole.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_nuclear_explosions
During the very brief Russian-Georgian war, some folks under Bush (Bush disagreed with them) actually toyed with the idea of bombing Russia.
And we're still baiting them in Syria.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_days_in_may
After the nuclear fallout these would be the only areas where sustained human life would be possible.
Even a recovering climate wouldn't change much about that.
People grossly, grossly overestimate the long-term effects of fallout. The main negative effects of nuclear warfare would be infrastructure destruction and the collapse of food/medicine distribution - fallout wouldn't even register.
At the height of the Cold War, a full-on strategic exchange between the US and the USSR wouldn't have ended human civilization. Things would've been unpleasant in parts of North America and Eurasia for a time, but all these extreme scenarios that are sensationalized wouldn'tve come to pass.
Look at Chernobyl - it's essentially a thriving wildlife reservation, now.
Hiroshima is not the reference for later generation nuclear bombs, which were magnitudes above them by payload and blast energy and different in isotopes emissioned. Bikini Atoll is still uninhabited as it deemed unsafe even though the population was originally re-relocated.
Problems might also arise from incomplete reactions which might happen with cheaper, less sophisticated bombs or intentionally with dirty bomb types meant for scorched earth tactics or to maximize economic impact due to radiation related sicknesses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bikini_Atoll#Return_to_Bikini_...
All of which is of very little relevance to discussing modern nukes intended to cause fallout.
Mutually Assured Destruction refers to the combatant countries, after all, not to the human species.
I'd expect any MAD plan to include airbursts for big cities and ground bursts for breadbaskets.
With a full scale nuclear exchange we would have a nuclear winter for a the first few years (when the radiation would be the highest). This is an interesting read that looks at actual US government procedures following and exchange. It's a bit dated, but was written during the height of the cold war. https://www.amazon.com/Day-After-World-War-III/dp/0670258806
I think they accidentally a word. 30 years == young.
I'm skeptical that we would see much effect from an exchange of 50 weapons; the year 1962 saw 178 detonations.[1]
[1] https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/nucleartesttally
http://www.nucleardarkness.org/nuclear/highvslowyield/
The trend in nuclear weapons has been for lower yields over the last 45 years or so. The reason is that advances in CEP precision due to better guidance systems means than huge yields are no longer necessary in order to ensure destruction of the intended target(s).
'Nuclear winter' is a completely unsupported theory pushed by Carl Sagan and the Union of Confused Scientists. Recall that these same people pushed 'the coming Ice Age' in the 1970s, 'global warming' until even their jiggered data was so obviously wrong that they renamed it 'climate change', and also predicted 'nuclear winter' effects from the burning oilfields during the first Gulf War - which never materialized, of course.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNT_equivalent
* The total energy of all explosives used in World War Two (including the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs) is estimated to have been three megatons of TNT
* The total global nuclear arsenal is about 30,000 nuclear warheads with a destructive capacity of 7,000 megatons or 7 gigatons (7,000 million tons) of TNT
And TFA talked about a nuclear winter from burning cities when using a hundred Hiroshima bombs, not the US/Russian arsenal. We ought to have learned about those effects, just from WW II.
I'm not sure which Fury Road the author saw, but there are many scenes where there is little daylight coming through, for a variety of environmental reasons.
except CO2 produced by "civilization" is at around 3-4% of the total atmospheric CO2.
http://m.imdb.com/title/tt0090315/
It's a gentle little film I saw as a kid. It left an impression. :(