All of solaire's Comments + Replies

I assume you mean here if Australia escaped any direct attack? Sure. The lesson of I Am A Pencil - no one person (or country) knows how to make a pencil. Australia is heavily integrated into the world economy: to caricature, they mine iron for China, and in exchange they get everything else. Can Australia make an Intel chip fab using only on-island resources? Could it even maintain such a chip fab? Can Australia replace the pharmaceutical factories of the USA and Switzerland using only on-island resources? Where do the trained specialists and rare elements come from? Consider the Great Depression: did Australia escape it? If it cannot escape a simple economic slowdown because it is so highly intertwined, it is not going to escape the disruption and substantial destruction of almost the entire scientific-industrial-technological complex of the Western world. Australia would immediately be thrown into dire poverty and its advanced capabilities will begin decaying. Whether Australia becomes a new Tanzania of technology loss will depend on how badly mauled the rest of the world is, though, I would guess. An instantaneous loss of 10-20% of population and destruction of major urban centers is pretty much unprecedented. The few examples I can think of similar levels of population loss, like the Mongols & Iran or the Spanish & New World, are not promising. But none of those countries were responsible for the Industrial or Scientific Revolutions. Humanity would survive... much as it always has. That's the problem. I've read this paragraph 3 times and I still don't know what you're talking about. You're being way too vague about what experts or what predictions you're talking about or what you're responding to or how it connects to your claims about Australia.

The only one I've personally read is Herman Kahn's On Thermonuclear War, which oversimplifies a lot and generally tries to paint matters as optimistically as possible; as well, people from that era like Samuel Cohen in his memoirs describe Kahn as willing to fudge numbers to make their scenarios look better. Personally, I am not optimistic. Remember the formulation of existential risk: not just extinction, but also the permanent curtailment of human potential. So if industrialized civilization collapsed permanently, that would be a serious x-risk almost up there with extinction itself. I agree that I don't think nuclear war is likely to immediately cause human extinction, but if it destroys industrialized civilization, then it's setting us up to actually be wiped out over the coming millennia or millions of years by a fluke pandemic or asteroid or any of the usual natural x-risks. Coal, oil, surface metals, and many other resources are effectively impossible to extract with low-tech levels like say the 1800s. (Imagine trying to frack or deepsea mine or extract tar with 1800s metallurgy or anything.) Historically, we see that entire continents can go for millennia on end with little meaningful change economically; much of Africa might as well not be in the same world, for all the good progress has done it. Intellectual traditions and scholarship can become corrupted into meaningless repetition of sacred literature (how much genuine innovation took place in China from AD 0 to AD 1800, compared to its wealth and large intelligentsia? why do all acupuncture trials 'succeed' in China and Japan when it's shown to be worthless placebo in Western trials?) We still don't know why the Industrial & Scientific Revolutions took place in Western Europe starting around the 1500s, when there had been urbanized civilizations for millennia and China in every way looked better, so how could we be confident that if humanity were reduced to the Dark Ages we'd quickly recover? Brief re