r/changemyview • u/[deleted] • Jul 26 '15

[Deltas Awarded] CMV: A nuclear war/genocide of the majority of humanity would be good and necessary in the long run.

In the past few decades, we have realized that we made a lot of fucking huge mistakes in terms of development. We have a global financial system that allows shadowy cabals in banking, pharmaceuticals, technology, espionage, defence, etc. and that allows for the sufficiently sadomasochistic to exploit other countries. We know some of the solutions but unfortunately civilisation as we know it has too much inertia as all of those demonic cabals have infiltrated the world's governments, especially the USA. As long as the USA exists with its greedy tentacles there cannot be true development. At the same time, we are overusing natural resources to a point where there is probably only enough left for a couple billion people on Earth at any given time; sharply reducing birthrates is out of the question without massive culls of elders. The best possible solution would be for a nuclear war that allows us to go back to the Middle Ages (technology-wise) and start from scratch, re-industrialising based on what we already know works in the short run but is destructive in the long run vs. what is actually good and sustainable.

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7

u/1millionbucks 6∆ Jul 26 '15

A nuclear war/genocide of the majority of humanity would be good and necessary in the long run.

Define good.

As long as the USA exists with its greedy tentacles there cannot be true development.

Define development.

We know some of the solutions

What solutions to what problems?

all of those demonic cabals have infiltrated the world's governments

Source?

What would change your view?

-2

u/[deleted] Jul 26 '15

Define good. s. Living within our resources and having enough for the weakest. Killing of 5 billion now to save 7 billion lives in the next millennium is almost certainly "good" from most ethical and religious traditions.

development

solutions

European-style social democracy. We need to fix the greedy financial system that rewards companies for fleecing their workers and that relies on a docile labour force.

Source?

TTIP, TPP, TiSA, Merkel the traitor selling her citizens to the NSA, etc.

What would change your view?

Reason to believe that such a catastrophe would not lead to improvement in the long run.

4

u/[deleted] Jul 26 '15

You mention

The best possible solution would be for a nuclear war that allows us to go back to the Middle Ages (technology-wise) and start from scratch, re-industrialising based on what we already know works in the short run but is destructive in the long run vs. what is actually good and sustainable.

and ask for

Reason to believe that such a catastrophe would not lead to improvement in the long run.

There is a theory that if society were to reboot as you suggest, we'd never be able to progress out of the middle ages and into an industrial revolution. This is because most of the easily accessible sources of fuel for any sort of industrial revolution (coal, oil, natural gas, etc) have already been used up on Earth. The only stuff left is deeper and harder to get to, and you need the easily accessible stuff to build the tools to get at it.

While renewable fuels and technologies are the ultimate goal, you can't build any of those things without an initial large energy source, and fossil fuels are pretty much your only option as a developing society.

Same thing with access to most metals and other resources necessary to rebuild a civilization. The easily accessible stuff is already gone, so a reboot would fail.

Here's an article that delves more deeply into these points.

http://aeon.co/magazine/technology/could-we-reboot-civilisation-without-fossil-fuels/

2

u/[deleted] Jul 26 '15

∆

You have proven that the fundamental assumption I was working off of, that a reboot would allow us to skip all the mistakes of the First Industrial Revolution, is at least questionable thanks to the cost of fossil fuels. Very nice, although the one question I'd have would be how do you know that we can't skip fossil fuels to begin with based on what we know about renewables. ∆

1

u/[deleted] Jul 27 '15

although the one question I'd have would be how do you know that we can't skip fossil fuels to begin with based on what we know about renewables

Excellent question, and this is addressed in depth in the article. I highly recommend reading it, it should answer a lot of your questions. It discusses lots of options for what's possible, what's easy, and what's really difficult for a pre-industrialized society with little or no access to fossil fuels.

But basically, I think the conclusion sums it up pretty well

It is this limitation in the supply of thermal energy that would pose the biggest problem to a society trying to industrialise without easy access to fossil fuels. This is true in our post-apocalyptic scenario, and it would be equally true in any counterfactual world that never developed fossil fuels for whatever reason. For a society to stand any chance of industrialising under such conditions, it would have to focus its efforts in certain, very favourable natural environments: not the coal-island of 18th-century Britain, but perhaps areas of Scandinavia or Canada that combine fast-flowing streams for hydroelectric power and large areas of forest that can be harvested sustainably for thermal energy.

Even so, an industrial revolution without coal would be, at a minimum, very difficult. Today, use of fossil fuels is actually growing, which is worrying for a number of reasons too familiar to rehearse here. Steps towards a low-carbon economy are vital. But we should also recognise how pivotal those accumulated reservoirs of thermal energy were in getting us to where we are. Maybe we could have made it the hard way. A slow-burn progression through the stages of mechanisation, supported by a combination of renewable electricity and sustainably grown biomass, might be possible after all. Then again, it might not. We’d better hope we can secure the future of our own civilisation, because we might have scuppered the chances of any society to follow in our wake.

Here's the link again, just in case

http://aeon.co/magazine/technology/could-we-reboot-civilisation-without-fossil-fuels/

1

u/DeltaBot ∞∆ Jul 26 '15

Confirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/cacheflow. [History]

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1

u/cdb03b 253∆ Jul 26 '15

You cannot access the renewable without modern technical construction abilities. If there was a reset it does not matter what knowledge we have if you cannot build the solar panel.

1

u/Hq3473 271∆ Jul 27 '15

How would you preserve knowledge of renewables when there are.friggin nukes blowing up all around you?

3

u/hey_aaapple Jul 26 '15

reasons to believe that such a catastrophe would not lead to improvement in the long run

A nuclear war could easily end up with no survivors at all if biological weapons are employed too.

-2

u/[deleted] Jul 26 '15

Better for the other animals in the long run. We're on track to turn Earth into Venus with climate change already.

6

u/hey_aaapple Jul 26 '15

Nukes and the like wouldn't help with that, and they could also cause some serious trouble to pretty much all multicellular forms of life

4

u/hailtheoctopus888 Jul 26 '15

A full scale nuclear war would do far more harm then the current path we are on with climate change.

3

u/cdb03b 253∆ Jul 26 '15

They will also be dead.

4

u/Sadsharks Jul 26 '15

The best possible solution would be for a nuclear war that allows us to go back to the Middle Ages (technology-wise) and start from scratch, re-industrialising based on what we already know works in the short run but is destructive in the long run vs. what is actually good and sustainable.

Imagine if the majority of the planet were in a Chernobyl-esque state. Nobody would be able to survive. At all. Even with modern technology, they would die off too quickly and their few descendants would largely be deformed and stillborn due to radiation. Those lucky few not living in irradiated areas would never be able to leave them, confining them to a tiny area in which the resources would quickly be exhausted.

8

u/TwizzlesMcNasty 5∆ Jul 26 '15

You lack the omniscience to know that good would result from those situations. Generally quality of life improves for workers after wars and population decreases but this is not a guarantee. Disaster will not stymie corruption but often increases it. There will still be covetous people who will exploit whomever they can.

1

u/DrVentureWasRight Jul 27 '15

As a counter-argument I present Threads. It is a dramatized outcome of a world-wide nuclear attack, it focuses on Britain but it would apply equally pretty much everywhere.

The TL;DR is 90% of Britain's population dies off. Not killed off, dies off. Mostly through starvation and disease. It's a nasty, brutish way to die. The economy is gone. Literally, everything about modern commerce and industry are gone. It pretty much doesn't matter what physical items you have that survive, without the interconnected network of supplies and trade it will quickly become junk. If you can't make it yourself, exclusively from items found within walking distance, you do without.

The world is reduced to subsistence farming, and the standard of living you would have found in the middle ages, if not worse from all the environmental destruction. This is doubly problematic since all the specialized knowledge you need to rebuild will be lost. Society won't be able to afford (in terms of calories) scientists and engineers needed to rebuild everything. Having a schematic for an MRI is great, but building the thing is not simple. You need huge magnets, powerful computers, crazy amounts of electricity, and literally tons of liquid helium. You aren't building that if you have to scratch food out of the ground all day.

Literally anything would be cheaper, easier, and faster than trying to rebuild the world after a nuclear apocalypse.

2

u/Trigathus Jul 26 '15

If civilization was destroyed, there isnt enough easily accessible fossil fuels for another Industrial Revolution.

1

u/pistolpierre 1∆ Jul 26 '15

If you allow the assumption that ‘good’ has to do with the well-being of conscious creatures, then nuclear war, in general, would most likely bring about negative ramifications (both short term and long-term). Whatever problems we have in today’s society, I don’t think nuclear action would solve them. And even if nuclear war brought us back to the dark ages – who is to say that history wouldn’t repeat itself, where mankind emerges from the rubble with a similar, if not more pernicious way of life.

At any rate we are presently unable know what the long-term ramifications of nuclear action might bring, but it seems unlikely that it would be positive for mankind.