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CarlShulman comments on [LINK] Brief Discussion of Asteroid & Nuclear Risk from paper by Hellman - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (11)
The asteroids vs nukes comparison isn't quite apples-to-apples. "Failure of deterrence" does not necessarily imply human extinction, or temporary collapse of civilization, or most people dying. One needs further premises about escalation, spread, nuclear winter, human social resilience, etc.
I agree. If you haven't already done so see my comments at this thread (which I wrote before coming across the article above, HT utility monster). I plan on taking a closer look at the nuclear winter issue in particular (which seems unusually susceptible to quantification).
Nuclear Autumn seems much more likely. This article does a soft comparison of likely nuclear exchange scenarios with the K-T strike. I haven't looked up their references but they sound applicable.
Thanks
That Skeptoid article's references are quite old. Encyclopedia of Earth's nuclear winter article discusses more recent scientific work.
Thanks to you too!
Didn't I tell you about the Hellman piece in SF?
If you did I have no memory of it; maybe you pointed it out to utilitymonster when he was in SF? He just sent me a link to the piece today.
I pointed it out to utilitymonster a number of months ago, when he was not in SF. No worries.
Note also that Hellman's calculation (however rough) is for a Cuban Missile crisis type scenario which would be more likely to escalate/spread than e.g. a terrorist attack.