Surprising isn\’t it
(5 votes, average: 1.80 out of 5)You need to be a registered member to rate this post.
Loading ...
Add to favorites Tags: Politics, Weapons
Processing your request, Please wait....
Leave a comment ?
(5 votes, average: 1.80 out of 5)You need to be a registered member to rate this post.
Loading ...Add to favorites Tags: Politics, Weapons
August 30, 2009 at 9:10 pm
I may be interpreting this wrong, but I think its not very accurate.
It doesnt consider the density of different locations, i.e. better to nuke New York City than some remote place in Alaska. You are going to wipe out a lot more than stated if you target high density areas.
August 30, 2009 at 9:18 pm
This fails to account for alot of things, like fallout, dust clouds, killing off food supplies, power loss, ect.
August 30, 2009 at 9:19 pm
This fails to account for alot of things, like fallout, dust clouds, killing off food supplies, power loss, ect. To be fair I bet I could get the job 90% done with 5 and then 5 years time of letting the remnants die out.
August 30, 2009 at 10:28 pm
I agree… Certainly if we wanted to blast every square inch of the surface of the planet, yes, maybe, but to simply destroy humanity, you would need only a fraction of this. A few well placed nukes, in strategic parts of the globe would easily wipe out humanity, perhaps not instantly, but between the factors you mention, the dust cloud that would block out the sun, and other secondary effects, it could be done with much, much less.
August 31, 2009 at 8:35 am
There has already been over 500 above ground nuclear explosions that have taken place (with over 2000 total nuclear explosions) since 1945 and all of those explosions haven’t caused the planet any noticeable effect. They haven’t slowed our population growth, food production or life expectancy, in fact over the same period, all of those of greatly increased. The problem is the fear of the word “nuclear”. As soon as someone says it, all rational thought seems to go away and the mind is filled with outrageous ideas with no link to reality.
August 31, 2009 at 8:58 am
Not true at all. They have had an immediately noticeable effect. Carbon dating–the most common and effective way to determine the age of an organic object, is completely useless for objects that died/stopped uptaking atmospheric carbon after we started testing nukes. That’s because the atmospheric levels of Carbon-14 are no longer constant and known.
Nor does your position account for the effects of a large number of nukes 1)targeted at population centers, 2)set for groundburst in a fashion to do as much damage as possible, 3)happening in a massive number of locations, 4)all at once.
So yes, if a nuke was used in war once in a while, it would have no great impact (no more than an above ground test). What people fear is that once using nukes in war is “allowed,” they will become commonplace, which would have devastating consequences.
In other words, your argument = fail.
August 31, 2009 at 10:06 am
“Not true at all”? Everything I said is accurate and to the point.
The assertion was that 5 nuclear weapons would destroy 90% of the population due to “fallout, dust clouds, killing off food supplies, power loss, ect”. I clearly showed that over 500 weapons (which most happen in a 20 year period, an average of 25 a year) have been exploded with no immediate effect on the human race. Just because far future scientist won’t be able to use Carbon-14 for dating doesn’t equate to “fail”.
I agree the commonplace usage of nukes would have devastating effect, but that wasn’t the point of rundinj’s statement.
August 31, 2009 at 6:04 pm
Your point is well taken, limiting ourselves to only 5 nukes to destroy 90% of humanity would definitely be beyond the capabilities of our current nuclear weaponry.
However on the other hand, I don’t think using the past 500 nuclear detonations is necessarily a good predictor of what it would take to destroy 90% of the human population.
Many of those detonations were not of the same yield we can produce today, and none were specifically intended to effect the annihilation of humanity. Up till this point, all of the the ones that have been detonated in anger were designed to destroy only specific population centers, not wipe out civilization.
The landscape becomes a little different when you apply current, extremely high yield nuclear technologies, and tactical placement of nuclear strikes for the specific goal of annihilation.
I agree that 5 would definitely be too few, however, I think 1 million nukes would be some serious overkill. Unless, of course, we are trying to turn the earth into a radioactive asteroid…
With 10,000, on the other hand, probably even less, I think wiping out the vast majority of human life could be achieved.
August 30, 2009 at 9:25 pm
Well… not really. It’s all about placement. What we have now is certainly enough to wipe out all of western civilization just by crudely bombing every inch of the soil, and that alone would lead the rest of the world to some very destructive scenarios, but let’s look at this like we wanted to kill everyone in the world right now.
You would only need one bomb per major city where the majority of humans tend to flock, also noting that 80% of all people live within 100km of the ocean you could rim all continents and still have some to spare. Targeting areas of food sources would be next. Major farmlands and fisheries. The lack of resources would make the remaining ungoverned masses very likely to turn on one another for sheer and simple survival, not to mention those lost to suicide by being unwilling to live in a post apocalyptic world.
And that’s still not mentioning nuclear fallout carrying far beyond the blast radius of the bomb making even more land uninhabitable. Yes, if they were strategically placed we would have just enough to eliminate 99% of humanity, and make the remainder very uncomfortable for a long while.
Just a bit misleading, is all.
Not that I want to get rid of any of our weapons, either, I love nukes!
August 30, 2009 at 9:28 pm
I’d like to see the sources that the artist used to create this…
August 30, 2009 at 9:35 pm
or make a big one. thatd be cooler.
August 30, 2009 at 10:06 pm
The earth is only 1/4th land. And only 1/10th of that is populated.
Any country has enough to wipe out THE HUMAN RACE.
Nobody has the power to destroy earth…cmon…
August 30, 2009 at 10:10 pm
Nobody you say?
August 31, 2009 at 12:38 am
Did you bring enough for everyone?
August 30, 2009 at 10:10 pm
Well maybe if you dug to the center of the earth and set them all off at once, might get enough of a chain reaction to do some damage on a planet scale.
August 30, 2009 at 10:47 pm
So if any country “has enough to wipe out THE HUMAN RACE”, therefore the worlds nations can bomb the world several times over.
Which would most likely destroy every living thing on earth in the process, therefore destroying the earth.
The term “destroying the earth” is relative.
August 30, 2009 at 10:48 pm
Wikipedia reports surface area of the earth as 148,940,000 square km. 12.5% of this is exactly the figure that they get. I reckon they got the 12.5% from there, too, as in, we inhabit 12.5% of the usable land on the earth. Define “inhabit”, though. Russia is “inhabited”, Montana is “inhabited”, but both have wide open spaces. I second the opinions stated that this is disingenuous at best in saying that we don’t have nearly enough nukes to “completely wipe out civilization”. Again definitions – if you call that as “kill every single last man, woman, and child in one instant”, then maybe it’s true. Otherwise – a few strategically placed Big Ones and it’s all over.
August 31, 2009 at 12:02 am
Not all nukes are the same either. It all depends on the yield. The Tsar Bomba was capable of 100 megatons even though as tested it was 50 megatons, which the mushroom cloud alone as tested was 40km wide. So assuming everything dies atleast in the mushroom cloud and that the radius is half of the width, then you have a radius of 20km which means a death zone of 1,256km^2, rounding down. So then we only need 14,823 of these bombs to cover all of the land mass in the world with a mushroom cloud.
August 31, 2009 at 8:58 am
This chart was based on the biggest nuke we have, 43 times the one that destroyed hiroshima
August 31, 2009 at 6:05 am
You guys are missing the point of this picture.
We need more nukes, humanity is not necessary.
August 31, 2009 at 9:01 am
Finally ! somone got the point of my message,
Seriously though, pretty good point’s, Yes “inhabited” can be a loose term alright, a place could only have 4 people and be the size of a country but it’s still inhabited. It does still present an interesting point though,humans would always survive it’s just built into us, so if a nuclear war did ever happen, even a small landmass (possibly with a dense population) being destroyed probably wouldn’t effect the face of the earth that much, odds are, for the survivors life would still bear some resemblance to current life style (not much but still nothing like fallout etc)
August 31, 2009 at 2:20 pm
“”Most people use statistics the way a drunk uses a lamp post, more for support than enlightenment.”
more: www.onlinemathlearning.com/statistics-math-quotes.html
I never put stock in statistics. They prove nothing.
August 31, 2009 at 2:56 pm
This is not true either. Statistics can be very useful and in many ways can be very accurate ways of seeing trends and verifying observational data.
The problems with statistics lie not in any inherent flaw in statistics itself, but rather the difficulty if applying the appropriate data collection practices for any given study, and equally importantly, the objective (and logical) interpretation of the data.
If these are both done correctly, statistics become an extremely valuable tool.
August 31, 2009 at 5:05 pm
76% of your comment is incorrect.
August 31, 2009 at 10:18 pm
frosted butts.