Doomsday count-down clock replaced with a count-up clock.

Tags

A-Bomb timing, Alamogordo, Coeval time, Coevil time, Doomsday Clock, JuilanA, Julian Day

The old Doomsday Clock created in 1947 for the cover of the journal Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists makes an effort to predict the risks of a Doomsday by showing a clock with the hands approaching midnight. There is another and rather obvious way in which similar information about Doomsday could be presented. Have a clock presenting how many days it has been since Doomsday began, and that beginning point could be labeled the detonation of the first atom bomb at Alamogordo, New Mexico on July 16th 1945 at 8 AM. This clock could be put into universal time or better yet into astronomical time—the decimal days calendar called Julian Date. For example the Trinity A-bomb at Alamogordo exploded at:
1945-07-16=12\29\45t which converts to JD decimal days 2431653.02066
Or using the new JulianA indexing system which indexes the time and location it would be presented as:
JulianA~event,first atomic bomb explosion, 2431653.02066, +33.6773, -106.4754, +1499,~

What would be visually interesting would be a JavaScript driven clock which would show the number of days since the beginning of modern time i.e. the explosion of the first atom bomb. At the current moment this may not seem so momentous as it will seem at some time in the future after Doomsday has come and gone and perhaps other Doomsdays have come and gone also, but after those super tragic events Alamogordo will be remembered as the true moment for the beginning of coeval time. (Coeval is defined by http://www.thefreedictionary.com/coeval+ as: one of the same era or period; a contemporary.) This usage for the post Doomsday time meaning after Alamogordo is slightly derivative of the old meaning, but it is easily understood as co-evil which is quite accurate for that measure of time. One of the interesting qualities of this usage is that it clearly puts us presently into that evil period the co-evil period. Dating from that instantaneous event might be called After Alamogordo, AA or perhaps CEP for CoEval Period. The way the AA clock is created is to take today’s date found at the United States Naval Observatory USNO which gives an exact instant that you click  it. The moment I did this I got ( 2454764.04012 ). and from that number subtract the Alamogordo A-bomb explosion 2431653.02066 to get the exact number of days and decimal days since the beginning of After Alamogordo Time.

2454764.03109 -2431653.02066 = 23111.0104
So, the moment of this post is 23111.0104 AAT

It needs a nice presentation such as:

The Doomsday Clock keeps moving forward.

My current time is 23,111.01040 days past The Doomsday Clock’s midnight.

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Doomsday may bring on another Doomsday.

Tags

Doomsday, Humanities 1000 year survival, nuclear war

How bad can it get? One Doomsday was bad enough, but that may not put an end to the madness of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction). The current super powers are generally considered to be those nations possessing atomic weapons. Usually that term has been limited to the United States and the USSR (now called Russia), but most rational people would consider anyone holding H-bombs to be a super power, because a few of those weapons detonated at one time over the most combustible targets might bring on a nuclear winter. That level of disaster might develop without any response from the other H-bomb possessing powers, but there almost certainly would be a response.

What prevents the various super powers from using their weapons, at present, is the MAD policy of annihilating anyone who does use them. The problem is that there may already be over 30,000 H-bombs. No one really knows how many but one low end estimate is: US~5,535, Russia~16,000, UK~200, France~350, China~160, India~120, Pakistan~80, North Korea ~10, Israel 200. That makes nine different known nations that could choose to ignite a nuclear conflagration. With modern technology such as supercomputers it is possible to construct reliable bombs without testing them, so there is a good chance that quite a few other nations possess them already, who have chosen to keep it a secret. The original implosion type A-bomb was designed using slide rules, and it was at that time an unknown technology, and it exploded perfectly over Alamogordo. The deployed bomb at Hiroshima was of a gun barrel type that was so simple in construction that didn’t need testing, even in 1945, and it worked all too well, also. Therefore, any modern high tech country could probably build, and stockpile a few bombs without anyone knowing about it. Possibly a really rich person could do it in a salt mine. This is pure speculation of course, and I have no information you can’t get off of Wikipedia.

A real problem is that once a few of these bombs explode over random cities a general military reflex will probably set off a bunch more, and then an uncontrolled chain reaction to where each nation ultimately deploys about half of their personal arsenal against their favorite enemy of the moment. There isn’t much sense in using more than half their weapons because they will run out of targets. This “war” will take place in less than a day. After that the world may pause for a while, (days, maybe years) to see what happened, and let the dust settle. Most scenarios from this level of war suggest a massive amount of smoke, and several years before there is a return to an approximate ecological normalcy.

The big problem during this period is that each of these original powers only expended half of their arsenals, and they still have the other half available. Whoever now controls any of those weapons is now holding everyone else hostage, especially their own former homeland where the weapons were stored. Before this first Doomsday the number of weapon controlling people may have been ten or so heads of national countries, but after the Doomsday events there may literally be hundreds of individuals with the power. They would be formed from the small formerly military groups who somehow during the war got hold of the weapons, and the release codes. They would then possess these immensely powerful monsters, and have no nation to represent and no constraints. This brings about a second Doomsday, and a third, and a fourth, and so on for who knows how long until all of the known weapons are used up. Some weapons would be destroyed in the first day, but some of those may only have been buried in the earlier attacks,and may be found later, and dug up much later and used.

Even the Lifehavens will become hostages to these rogues. And the Earth Ark will be simply captured, and exploited until some other rogue succeeds in capturing it or destroying it in an attempt to capture it. The misery will be long, and the suffering will be great, and the guilt will be parceled out in the survivors’ imaginations to the creators, and users of these monsters, but these guilty ones will be long gone, and only their names will be condemned forevermore.

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East German Doomsday movie – The Silent Star – reviewed.

Tags

Der Schweigende Stern, Doomsday, East German cinema, sci fi, The Silent Star

UC Berkeley’s Department of German –  Film Club presented the 1960 East German science fiction movie Der Schweigende Stern – (The Silent Star).

An international space team finds a vital message for all mankind in this sci-fi adventure by East Germany’s legendary DEFA studios. When an extraterrestrial object is uncovered in the Gobi desert, the multiracial crew heads to Venus to learn more about the artifact’s meaning. They discover that the planet’s population was wiped out by a horrific event — one that could easily occur on Earth.

This movie is reminiscent of the American TV series Star Trek 1966-69 or rather vice versa as The Silent Star was made six years earlier. But the full cast is here in all of their corniness with their names changed, and their roles scrambled a bit. The Doctor is a beautiful Japanese woman, and the love interest of several of the crew. The Captain Kirk role looks like a Werner Von Braun clone with his early 60s blond hair cut to a super expansive mode. The Mr. Spock guy is just as quirky, but without pointy ears. Scotty the engineer crawls around in the various power stuff trying to keep the thrusters, and gravity repulsion gear more or less under control. And almost a clone of the Enterprise TV screen of the various things going on outside of the ship like clouds of asteroids menacing the ship.

Once they make it to their strange new world, in this case the planet Venus, and fuss around in orbit for a few scenes, they make a perilous descent to the surface. They lacked a Teleporter, and had to actually descend in various spaceship-airplane-helicopter things. The surface is quixotically alien with strange coral tree semi life-forms, and it’s all radioactive of course with big electric sparks Van de Camping about. There were clouds aplenty and icky fluids too, of many different descriptions, coursing about. They had a fine R2D2 stand-in in the form of a little tractor that talked, played world class chess, and usually did as it was told. Except things got difficult then it chose to run over people and crushed their ribs.

This movie was made in East Germany during the Cold War and was loaded with transparent political nonsense. The woman whom all of the guys under age seventy fall in love with couldn’t have children, because she was a Hiroshima survivor, so by the end of the movie they were leaving her alone. Early in the movie there was a Dr. Strangelove like character, but he didn’t make it on to the ship’s crew so that was a dead end which was taken up later, and fleshed out in the American movie with a German doctor Dr. Strangelove which is discussed in my blog, The Doomsday Trilogy – Dr. Strangelove, On The Beach and FAIL SAFE. Another take on Doomsday is the English movie No Blade of Grass made in 1970.

I went to this movie because it is part of my preparation for Doomsday, and what can be done about it. The concluding minute was a wimpy plaint that we should all live together in peace, and not destroy our planet like the Venusians did. That movie was made 48 years ago, and since then the population has way more than doubled and the CO2 level has doubled from its libration level of 1850, and the number of A-bomb possessing countries has doubled. We are clearly on a collision course with catastrophe, and it isn’t because people were oblivious to the threat; it’s because it is one of those types of problems called Tragedy of the Commons where everyone benefits from exploiting the limited common source, and the greatest exploiters are the greatest benefactors. Until there is an equitable way for coping with that problem effectively there is no hope of averting Doomsday.

Life after Doomsday? Maybe.

Tags

Argentina, Chile, Doomsday, New Zealand, Southern Hemisphere for survival, Tasmania

When Doomsday arrives it is almost certain to be in the form of H-bombs exploding over thousands of targets throughout the world. When this happens many will be killed on the first day or two, but almost everyone will die within a year of the big day. The Northern Hemisphere will be particularly hard hit because that is where most of the high value military targets are, and where most of the industry is located, and where most of the people reside. Food production will come to a complete halt, and only those who have access to over a year’s supply of stored food will have any chance of survival. It is impossible to say much about the Northern half of the Southern Hemisphere because there isn’t much reason to attack any countries south of the equator but since WW III is an act of absolute suicidal madness by the contending parties, and they are in a particularly maddened state of mind their actions will become totally insane.

If many attacks occur in the south they will probably be where the population resides because there are few really super high value targets requiring an H-bomb for their destruction. Attacks of this type upon a population center are an absolute war crime, and we must condemn them, and their perpetrators now because we will not have much of a chance later on. All of that being said there is still the hope, a feeble hope, that those residing fairly far south in the Southern Hemisphere might survive unscathed, and even live normal lives during, and after the Doomsday events. Below is a map of where these survivors will be residing on that day.

Earth’s Doomsday survival zone is between the lines.

A quick glance at this squeezed but equal area map shows how very little land mass there is in the natural low impact survival zone. The land masses are limited to Tasmania -42.88 +147.33 population about 494,000, South New Zealand -46.41 +168.36 about 2,000,000, Southern Chile about 242,000 people and Southern Argentina -45.88 -67.52 with about 710,000. There are a few islands sprinkled in this zone—Chatham Islands -43.95 -176.55 with about 1,000 people and Falklands -51.70 -57.84 with about 3,000, but beyond those 3,450,000 people in the survival zone there are fewer than a thousand living in that vast oceanic area. The Antarctic is placed below the natural survival zone because it is nearly impossible to live there without a substantial outside supply of food, and that would be interrupted after  Doomsday. Even the tip of South America is so far south it is all but uninhabited. Falkland Islands are to be avoided because they may be a target of aggression as there is a major effort to maintain a military presence there since the Falklands war. Chatham Islands are good, but are militarily undefended in this Doomsday situation, but are unlikely to need defending.

South South America

Punta Arenas -53.15 -70.91 and  Ushuaia -54.80 -68.30 are big towns, and plenty far south, but they might be targeted just because they are choke points between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans just like the Panama Canal. When Google Earthing from 42° south and on down there were surprisingly few towns. They were pretty, but they didn’t seem to have much in the way of food producing potential for a large community, and therefore would be dependent upon imported food which will not be arriving. There are vast areas out in Argentina with little apparent economic development, and therefore that location will probably not be adequate to survive in when things get even tougher. Chili Chico -46.54 -71.72 looks like it might be self sustaining, food wise because they have some farms right beside the town, but it is hard to know their import of basic foods.

Tasmania looks like a wonderful place to live at present, and the area around Hobart -42.88 +147.33 is cosmopolitan with surrounding farmland, and it would be a excellent choice.

New Zealand is wonderful, and has lots of farms apparent in the Google Earth images even to the far south near Invercargill -46.41 +168.36 so it appears that it is self sustaining. It may be the most likely place on Earth to have a future untroubled by Doomsday. Their current political policy is friendly, but very defensive of their local rights so it is unlikely to be attacked directly. They are far enough away from fallout zones not to be crippled by radiation or nuclear winter overcast. They are economically sound at present, and would enter a near future Doomsday in good economic health. Of course, the extreme problems will reach there too, but they may be survivable.

Survival, Survivalism, Lifehaven, Doomsday, Armageddon.

Tags

A-Bombs, H-Bombs, Lifehaven, Northern Hemisphere, Southern Hemisphere, Survival strategies

Survivalism automatically gets a bad reputation by sticking that ism on an otherwise fundamentally reasonable idea; after all if you don’t survive you aren’t going to be doing anything else, and in a larger sense if humanity doesn’t survive then it isn’t going to be doing much of anything either. Back in the 1950s the US government got interested in the idea and supported a lot of fallout shelter programs. This was mostly done on the cheap by putting up signs pointing to local public basements where some water, and leftover WW II food supplies were stored. That may have made some sense up until about 1965 when our possible enemies had so many H-bombs that no one in an American city was going to survive anyway. The US and USSR then gave up on the hope of surviving, and went for a mutually assured destruction policy, (MAD) for short, and the world has lived precariously on the brink of Doomsday ever since.

Some other countries like England and France seem to have hoped that having only a few A-bombs would make everyone hesitate to attack them while appearing not excessively threatening. Switzerland has had a policy of making their country extremely difficult to conquer by having methods of dispersed heavy weapons made readily available to the public. Thus, even if an army were to move into their country they would have to fight a guerrilla war faced by an guerrilla army equipped with very sophisticated weapons, and not just improvised explosive devices (IEDs).

There are some survivalist groups with newsletters, and blogs such as survivalblog.com and Survive Club which I am in basic agreement with for disasters up to DISS~9 (Click here for a nice printable PDF DISS~ chart.), but beyond that survival in the Northern Hemisphere where most survivalists seem to live is improbable. However, if anyone does survive there, it will be some of these well prepared people.

My basic approach to this survival of humanity problem is that when WW III starts everything living in the Northern Hemisphere is dead, and only those in the Southern Hemisphere have any chance whatsoever. If it is a particularly bad conflict where most weapons are actually exploded then going south is one’s best hope, and the further south the better. Southern Argentina and Chile, become the last to die or to put it a bit more positively the last to survive. The graphs resulting from that major war would look like this:

Doomsday population crash with food shortfall as a precursor.

Note that in this scenario the quantity of food tops out and begins to decline before WW III begins. This graph postulates a Doomsday of DISS~10 or 11 with quite a few people surviving, but they will probably be only those very far south. The people, even the prepared survivalists, in the Northern Hemisphere will be under a dark cloud for over a year, and will have no new crops, and no new food. That combined with all of the other problems will probably make life in the Northern Hemisphere unsurvivable. The most realistic plan for decent survival of humanity in the one hundred year, and beyond range is the Lifehaven strategy of setting up large storage facilities filled with recovery materials in remote Southern Hemisphere locations.

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A Doomsday scenario limited to major combatants.

Tags

atomic bomb, Doomsday, Doomsday aftermath

What if we suppose a major atomic war which is limited to the atomic weapon possessing powers being the only ones involved in the attacks, and counter attacks and they left the rest of the world out of the conflict? In such a war all of those powers would be threatened to the ultimate, and would use up much of their available stockpile before they, and their stockpile would be nullified. How can we estimate where the A-bombs would fall, and how can we estimate what would happen to the non-combatants?

Above is the population of the Earth which I projected to a latitude view, but it is a stand in proxy for where the bombs would fall because where the people are is where the industry is located, and where the people, and industry are located is broadly speaking where the A-bombs are located, and where the enemy bombs will therefore fall. The astonishing thing is how very few people live south of the equator and almost no one below 45° S. More people live north of 45° N than live below the equator which is a much larger area. Because there are so few people down south, and at present none of them are acknowledged to possess A-bombs (there is some question about South Africa having a few) it is possible for a major war to occur in which no bombs were exploded south of the equator. Not likely but possible. In that case the plot lines would be quite different from a complete global nuclear spasm where essentially everything of value gets attacked or alternatively an accidental or limited war where only a few countries are involved.

A Doomsday war in the Northern hemisphere

The above chart is total speculation on almost every level, and yet it is based on some obvious public facts, and obvious conclusions which may be inferred from the facts. In this scenario all of the A-bombs fall in the Northern hemisphere, and although everyone isn’t killed in the first couple of days by the end of two months there would be almost total annihilation. After the bombs stopped falling the surviving people would try to flee to some safe haven, but for the first two weeks this would be counter productive for most people because it would expose them to more radiation than if they simply dug in where they were when the fallout came. A few people would try, and fly out by air but that would save only a very few, and probably be limited to those already at airports when the conflict started. Driving out by car, but to where? The local areas that could be easily driven to would be just as bad as right where most people found themselves at the beginning. Those few people with boats who had them seaworthy, and loaded with food might make a long journey south but most of the time they would be more exposed than if they sought out an underground shelter.

After the first month the radiation would ease up, but the dust in the air would make the sky so dark that no agriculture could proceed to grow a substantial new crop. Thus only food that was stored in the pre-existing distribution centers, and supply chains would become available for possible consumption. Now consider the five billion people of the Northern hemisphere eating only stored food for a few months without any new food being created, and you see we will soon run short, and have a famine. Of course the food would last a little longer because many people would have died already, and there would be fewer mouths to feed.

Because the air circulation called Hadley cells keeps most Northern hemisphere air in the Northern hemisphere the radiation, and darkness would be largely confined to that half of the planet. The Southern hemisphere, at least in this scenario, is largely free of these extreme pollutants at least for a month or two, and by then the worst of it has decayed or settled out. Thus in this case almost everyone in the north is dead, and almost everyone in the south is still alive. The curves on the chart above are drawn to show the food collapse soon followed by the population collapse, but this happens so quickly the two curves are superimposed. The pollution curves were already rocketing before this Doomsday, and for a year are totally off scale in the north, but in the south they wouldn’t be quite so bad, and crops could be harvested the next year. The oil curve which was already becoming difficult before the war would plummet for a while, but then they would return to producing a sufficient quantity for the much reduced demand because in a few years much of the infrastructure which is made of rugged material could be refurbished. Industrial output will fall drastically, but it wouldn’t matter too much because after a few months a huge salvage industry would provide an abundance of recovered durable goods, and surviving industry would concentrate on less durable consumables like paper. Life expectancy would plummet for the first year to pre-industrial levels, but then it would slowly climb back to the low end of current normal for given life style situations. Overall availability of resources would plummet right after the war, but would return to reasonable availability for most items.

The overall effects for this type of war would be absolutely deadly for nearly all the people living in the Northern hemisphere, and almost unnoticeable for many people living in the Southern hemisphere.

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Top Ten reasons not to worry about Doomsday.

Tags

psychology, survival

Most people don’t think much about Doomsday even though it will probably be an important event in their life, like a birthday, or having a child, or dying. Because it seems like a worthwhile topic I have brought the subject up many times with my coffee shop friends, but most of the time people soon tune out or just walk away. Here are some of the usual responses to Doomsday.

1. “Oh NO why didn’t someone tell me about this before …” ahhhhh … actually that never happened.
2. “Those dirty warmongering arms dealing rats! They will do anything to make money.” That happens quite a lot. It always works to blame somebody else.
3. “This is an unpleasant topic so let’s talk about something more interesting. Where are we are going to have dinner. Or the coffee doesn’t taste as good as it used to. Did you see … ???” Insert a movie or book or silly political silliness.
4. “A major atomic war will never happen because no one is stupid enough to do that.” Yes, like Hiroshima never happened or even Nagasaki.
5. “Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) prevents wars so we haven’t had one and never will.” To say the least there is lots of luck involved in this strategy.
6. “The world is just too big, and too important to be destroyed.” On these subjects there is no one doing the measuring.
7. “God wouldn’t permit it, because he loves humanity, and besides I am going to heaven when I die because I believe in – blat.” We all might wish this were true, but it would be helpful if there was some reproducible corroboration.
8. “Our President has all the facts, and isn’t worried so why should I worry.” Our leaders are scared all the time, but they are carefully protected from showing fear, because it makes the public behave irrationally, and they start thinking.
9. “Outside problems don’t interest me, when I am fully involved in my own thing.” That works quite well, until you and your thing vanish.
10. “We will all be dead in a hundred years anyway, so why worry about the exact date or reason.” Actually a more realistic number is ten years.
11. “I can’t do anything about it anyway, so why waste time thinking about it.” Actually there is quite a lot you can do, but it requires some thinking about it.
12. “I focus on the good stuff, and I have some really good pot.” If that fails there is always some religious person to help you, for a small fee—like all your money, and your soul.
13. “We have plenty of problems already, and don’t need to worry about that one until we get to it, and don’t bother me while I’m thinking about riding my skateboard down this staircase railing.” Duh.
14. “I will do my job, and if everyone does their job, everything will be all right.” That’s a nice sentiment but millions of people’s jobs is to kill other people, they are called soldiers.
15. “The Lifehaven project will give us a second chance.” OK but you have to do it, for it to work.

Okay, so I overshot the Top Ten a bit. It’s easy to do because there are infinitely more than ten reasons why not to worry about Doomsday. Just pick anything ridiculous that comes to mind, and promote it as a reason not to worry about Doomsday, and without doubt you will soon find you have plenty of boisterous supporters of your pathetic whine.

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Doomsday and the McCain-Obama Presidential campaign.

Tags

campaign, Doomsday, Iran, Israel, McCain, Obama, policy, Presidential campaign, US politics

How will Obama and McCain relate to the Doomsday problem in the US Presidential campaign of 2008? The gloom of Armageddon might well spring from the fields of Israel to strike down the intransigent A-bomb builders of Iran during the next administration. If this happens it will be the biggest event of modern history, and if it develops into a world war it would be the end of modern history.

This scenario could have vastly greater impact upon the world than whether or not the US builds a fence along its southern border, and it should be made into a publicly debated issue. There should be some proportional coverage given by the candidates, and by the media to issues based on their  gravity. Therefore, this Doomsday issue should be given top priority during this campaign, but so far it has been totally ignored. It’s an unpleasant issue that no one wants to talk about it because it is like a crazy, homicidal offspring chained, and locked in the basement which everyone fears will escape some day and wreak havoc. We act as if not talking about it will prevent it from happening even though everyone knows that doesn’t do any good, and doesn’t solve the problem, and that not facing this problem will in the long run make it worse, and even more intractable.

Perhaps if we ignore it long enough something will change or someone else will get saddled with it. It is like President Johnson is reported to have said when he left office, that handing over the Presidential Football was the happiest moment of his life. That football is the one with the Doomsday button in it—an encoded and carefully guarded button that is never more than a few seconds away from the Presidential finger. When Johnson gave The Football to Nixon he shifted the horrible Doomsday problem onto his posterity, and that transfer of power has proceeded from one presidential finger to another for many years now, but the risk although mostly ignored is still there, and the weapons are even more formidable.

There is a lot of media coverage about the extreme precision of modern US weapons, but in a major war that won’t mean much when using megaton size weapons that can’t avoid unintended damage. The usual downside of the extreme precision is that an absolute responsibility ensues for all damages done, and what used to be called acceptable collateral damage is now interpreted as intentional viciousness. This same type of responsibility, and accountability will devolve upon whomever uses these super-weapons, and whoever deploys them will be held accountable forevermore. Thus a serious question becomes, who in their right mind would want to be President of the United States or of any other major power. It entails a mountain of problems most of which don’t have solutions acceptable to everyone, and no matter what the solution chosen there will be an ocean of clever criticism from the most talented, and nastiest people in the world. Taking on the job of President converts all of their previous even personal cordial social relationships into weird cartoons of their former selves because everyone is now suspect of currying favor.

No fully sane man would want to be President when he could be like Voltaire’s Candide, and just living peacefully at home enjoying himself, and cultivating a nice vegetable garden. The primary consideration for who is elected President should be who is most likely to bring the Earth through the term of office without precipitating a Doomsday. And, which candidate realizes that no matter how moral or clever he is there is still a real chance that an accident will precipitate a Doomsday, and therefore he should support The Lifehaven project.

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A Doomsday scenario with a limited atomic war.

Tags

atomic war, Doomsday accident, Doomsday ideological conflict, WW III

The Secretary of Defense under John F. Kennedy was Robert McNamara. Those two men were the ones most in charge of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 when the world came within one hour of a real Doomsday, and therefore McNamara’s opinion on this subject is to be observed carefully. He said that if an atomic war were to begin, he saw no way of stopping it from running its full course. He was referring primarily to a war between the USA and the USSR, but he implied that it also applied to smaller, what was then termed brush-fire, wars. It is impossible to know what would happen today, but it is easy to postulate an infinity of possible sparks that might ignite an absolute conflagration.

The most reasonable, and rational of reasons for a major war is when there is a major food shortfall which results in widespread famine. In that desperate case any starving nations would have little to lose, and potentially much to gain by robbing another country of its food supplies. That of course would mean the victim nation’s people would starve. Those potential victim people would of course realize that, and fight back with absolute ferocity, and use their own A-bombs if they possessed them. Or if they did not possess A-bombs, they would attempt to drag other atomic bomb possessing powers into the battle to aid them.

Local famine is presently avoided because of the very efficient transportation systems moving bulk quantities of material such as food to other parts of the world, and so when a major food shortfall hits one part of the world it can be adjusted to by shipping in large quantities of food from other places where it is more abundant. With the total population of the world continuing to explode there will come a time when the world’s people’s need for food will exceed the supply. Assuming a stable world to exist when this major food shortfall finally happens the graphs resulting from that major war would look like this:

Note that in this scenario the quantity of food tops out and begins to decline, and the population only flattens out. This occurs because even if there were no new babies born the existing population has a 40+ year life expectancy, and would continue to live as long as there is food available to keep them alive. However, as the reserves are consumed there will come a time of worldwide desperation. While this crisis develops there will be great efforts to convert marginally producing farms into quickly producing ones. That will work, but only for a short time, before they become depleted, and a continuing shortfall will move into an absolute crisis mode. A major atomic war triggered by world famine would then have a chart with the general appearance of the one above.

A different scenario might occur with a limited atomic war or an accidental one which was triggered when there was no absolute shortfall of some critical basic material such as food. This might come about because of some long standing political or ideological antipathy. The reasons may seem obscure even irrational to outsiders, but to the the parties involved they tend to be very clearly defined, by various absolute convictions. A war of this type might remain localized, because the reasons for the battles are irrelevant to those outside of the combatant groups. It is just as likely that others outside of the conflict would be drawn into the conflagration such as happened in WW I where over the course of several weeks all Europe became twisted into unrecognizable political knots of deadly interrelationships. The same will likely happen when this type of limited atomic war erupts. However, in this postulated case the results will happen in hours rather than weeks, and months, and the results will immediately be life threatening for everyone on the planet.

Doomsday caused by an ideological conflict or an accident.

Even a local limited modern atomic war will have instant, and sustained consequences for everyone. The instantaneous deaths of many of the combatants, and their civilian populations will be horrible, and quick, but then there will be several months of deaths from radioactive fallout, and then more deaths from disease. These disasters will be relatively localized to zones of death which are well defined within a week or two; except for diseases which may be militarized, and totally uncontrollable, and with unknowable limits. Most of these secondary deaths could be prevented if the infrastructure wasn’t destroyed or people knew what they had to do to save themselves, but for these first few critical weeks there will be chaos, and everyone will tend to keep doing either nothing, or continue doing whatever their life task has been before the Doomsday events occurred, and neither of those will work very well in this catastrophic situation.

This scenario assumes the superpowers do not get involved in the attacks, and that is possible, but unlikely, and the war will be a limited one only if there has been time to prepare for the non-war with Doomsday event avoiding agreements. The superpowers would have to have pre-agreed not to do anything militarily, when the lesser powers decided to go nuclear. But, who can trust anyone to do what they said they were going to do, when these A-bombs start falling.

The after effects of a local limited war will drag on for years with its cumulative effects which are caused by the breakdown of the world order. This will happen because shipping, and other forms of commerce will suddenly stop because moving valuable things out of country, or even within it will be risky when the laws, and social order are unknown. If there is no certain way to be paid for a product then that product will not be shipped, nor will it be produced, and then workers will neither be needed nor paid. Soon poor people, and even previously rich ones may find that they have nothing of value which can be traded for the most common of current commodities—food. This food shortage will happen, when food ceases to be shipped around the world, and there will soon be local famines which spread to surrounding areas. Where fuel oil and energy are not available for the farm machinery it will not be operated, and food will not be created, and even that which is created will kept locally, and not be shipped. Thus it is possible that with even a limited war, especially one involving oil producing countries, there will be widespread famine, and the population of the world will plummet.

The chart above shows a vertical drop in all of the plot lines on the day of the war (except for pollution which rockets upward, and off the chart), but food supply continues to drop for a long time afterwards, and it is soon followed by the population curve. The food curve, and the population curve do not stabilize, and start to rise again until available resources especially oil become reliably available. It takes a while to get these industries going again because of the social chaos, and questionable markets. Eventually, after, who knows, ten years the social order will be restored and people can approach again the abundance, and tranquility we now take for granted.

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How Adam Smith’s invisible hand might help us avoid Doomsday.

Tags

Adam Smith, human attention, human nature, human values

Adam Smith’s invisible hand and Charles Scamahorn’s all too visible one.

Adam Smith (1723-1790) was one of the clearest thinkers ever produced by humanity, and perhaps his method of approaching problems might help us get a grip on how to cope with this modern problem of super weapons, and humanity’s current rush toward Doomsday.

Let us suppose that the great empire of China, with all its myriads of inhabitants, was suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake, and let us consider how a man of humanity in Europe, who had no sort of connection with that part of the world, would be affected upon receiving intelligence of this dreadful calamity. He would, I imagine, first of all, express very strongly his sorrow for the misfortune of that unhappy people, he would make many melancholy reflections upon the precariousness of human life, and the vanity of all the labours of man, which could thus be annihilated in a moment. He would too, perhaps, if he was a man of speculation, enter into many reasonings concerning the effects which this disaster might produce upon the commerce of Europe, and the trade and business of the world in general. And when all this fine philosophy was over, when all these humane sentiments had been once fairly expressed, he would pursue his business or his pleasure, take his repose or his diversion, with the same ease and tranquility, as if no such accident had happened. The most frivolous disaster which could befall himself would occasion a more real disturbance. If he was to lose his little finger to-morrow, he would not sleep to-night; but, provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him, than this paltry misfortune of his own.

I hadn’t remembered this Adam Smith statement until this search, but it’s apt and perfectly related to our Doomsday predicament, because it shows clearly that if any idea no matter, how momentous can not be made concrete, and immediately applicable to a person’s life, they will either ignore it altogether or give it a sentimental lip service, and go on about their trivial affairs. At another time Smith says:

Every man is, no doubt, by nature, first and principally recommended to his own care; and as he is fitter to take care of himself than of any other person, it is fit and right that it should be so.

This of course is also true and therefore the problem of impending Doomsday must be made clear as applying to our common man personally. Of course nothing is more difficult to show to someone than something that has never happened before, not a single time in the entire history of humanity. Therefore, it is easy for a perfectly intelligent person to see all of the relevant facts, and be shown the relationship of the facts to each other, and have demonstrations of how similar facts, and relationships have led to certain conclusions, and yet remain unconvinced. Furthermore the Doomsday thing is so dreadful they that they choose to believe that neither would anyone ever start such a thing nor would God permit it. Perhaps, I am more concerned with these issues than others because I have personally known people at every major step of the entire process, and can see each of these decent, and very sane people doing their part—which in combination will bring on these hideous events—in a wonderfully competent way. And then we come to this quote:

What is prudence in the conduct of every private family can scarce be folly in that of a great kingdom. IV.ii.12

It seems that people can behave with perfect prudence, and in every way be the most honorable, and most honored of human citizens and still bring on disaster. I have puzzled over this super weapons, exploding population, imploding resources problem all sorts of ways trying to get a workable handle on it, and as unlikely as it seems the best solution so far is the Lifehaven Project followed up much later with the enactment of The Vital Laws of a high tech humanity.

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