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We are solely responsible for the existence of that problem:

nuclear war

Some calculations have been done at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in which a five-thousand-megaton war occurs in July ... the prompt effects might kill almost half the people on the planet ... those conditions kill not just people and agricultural plants and domesticated animals but the natural ecosystem as well ... the effects are global, they last for months, possibly years ... many biologists believe that massive extinctions are likely of plants, of animals, of microorganisms, the possibility of a wholesale restructuring of the kind of life we have on Earth. A number of scientists have said that under those circumstances they cannot exclude the extinction of the human species.

Now, extinction seems to me serious. Hard to think of something more serious, more worthy of our attention, more crying out to be prevented. Extinction is forever. Extinction undoes the human enterprise. Extinction makes pointless the activities of all of our ancestors back those hundreds of thousands or millions of years. Because surely if they struggled for anything, it was for the continuance of our species. And yet the paleontological record is absolutely clear. Most species become extinct. There's nothing that guarantees it won't happen to us. In the ordinary course of events, it might happen to us. Just wait long enough. A million years is quite young for a species. But we are a peculiar species. We have invented the means of our self-destruction. And it can be argued that we show only modest disinclination to use it.

Carl Sagan: The varieties of scientific experience, A personal view of the search for God, The Penguin Press, New York, 2006.

"mushroom" above the town of Bol

 2008-09-21 

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