Apocalypse now closest for 60 years

[Super Nova]

A few smart people have place the threat to our on going existence at the highest ever. We are a bloody stupid species.

Does anyone remember this guy.

Glum - We're doomed we'll never make it, we're all going to die.

Apocalypse now closest for 60 years

A Russian Topol-M intercontinental ballistic missile drives through Red Square during the nation’s Victory Day parade in Moscow



The world has not been so close to apocalypse since 1953 when the US and USSR were both brandishing their hydrogen bombs, according to the Doomsday Clock.

Created in 1947 by scientists in the Manhattan Project, which created the first atomic bombs dropped on Japan in World War Two, the symbolic clock has moved to three minutes to midnight – two closer than the last time it changed in 2012.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (BAS) hosted a live conference yesterday, announcing the world was ever closer to catastrophe because of climate change and the growing threat of nuclear war.

“Today, unchecked climate change and a nuclear arms race resulting from modernization of huge arsenals pose extraordinary and undeniable threats to the continued existence of humanity,” Kennette Benedict, the executive director said.

“And world leaders have failed to act with the speed or on the scale required to protect citizens from potential catastrophe.”

The clock has changed 18 times since 1947, ranging from two minutes to midnight in 1953 to 17 minutes before midnight in 1991.

The scientists called on people to demand action from their leaders to curb fossil fuel pollution and to cease developing ever more modern nuclear weapons that are endangering the planet.

The decision to move the clock hands are made by the BAS’s board and 18 Nobel laureates.

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/science/a ... 331973.ece

[Super Nova]

Judgement day nears

Countries race to build armies of killer robots

Robots capable of going to war without any human intervention are being developed by 40 countries in a technological arms race outpacing current weapons regulations.

Sir Roger Carr, the chairman of BAE Systems, said that a new breed of killing machines powered by artificial intelligence underlined the dangers of rapid technological change.

“I am not an advocate of this type of equipment, nor is my company,” the head of Britain’s biggest defence contractor told delegates in Davos. “Lines need to be drawn. It is important that governments draw the line where we move into territory where we risk becoming the architects of destruction, but simply spectators at the event.”

He cautioned that the “risk is that wherever we draw lines, humans find a way to cross them”, citing the development of chemical and biological weapons despite attempts to outlaw them.

Sir Roger said that there were 40 countries working on producing such a machine “in potentially a $20 billion market”. They were understood to include France, America, South Korea, China, Russia and Israel. Major economies needed to be at the cutting edge of such technology to ensure that they understood it, Sir Roger added. He declined to say whether Britain was developing war robots. The risk is that they end up in the hands of rogue states.

Sir Roger distinguished between the levels of robotics. The simplest are used to clear mines. In the next level up, sensors, algorithms and decision-making capability are embedded in devices but responsibility still lies with a human.

“The final level is fully autonomous, and that is a very difficult area — deploying a weapon without any human intervention,” he said. “That places the [artificial intelligence] weapon in an area that is completely devoid of any human responsibility or ethical or moral concern or sense of mercy.”

Angela Kane, of the Vienna Centre for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation, said that the use of drones in warfare, with decisions taken by commanders thousands of miles from the action, “desensitised” the act of killing.

She urged governments and regulators to act fast to bring artificial intelligence into the regime governed by the United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons.

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/technolog ... 671430.ece

[freediver]

I doubt climate change is going to wipe us out. Even nuclear bombs would struggle.

[Super Nova]

What about self serving mechanized killing machines?

[boxy]

I doubt climate change is going to wipe us out. Even nuclear bombs would struggle.

"There are levels of survival we are prepared to accept."

Bombing ourselves back to the stone age, still qualifies as an apocalypse, even if it's not a complete extinction event.

[freediver]

It would be pretty hard to lose all the technology, ideas and lumps of steel we have floating around now.

[Super Nova]

It would be pretty hard to lose all the technology, ideas and lumps of steel we have floating around now.

I think we will not wipe ourselves out.

More likely we will have a major disaster (biologically or nuclear) and some will survive. We end up in a mad max world will some residue of knowledge, over hundreds of years we increase the population. More time not in survival mode will allow learning and education institution to get established. Access to books from the past, should survive any disaster at least in some places, will accelerate restoring our knowledge. Then we are back again, hopefully learning the lessons of our near extinction.

[freediver]

Do you have a pamphlet I can subscribe to?

[Super Nova]

Do you have a pamphlet I can subscribe to?

Survival Pamphlet

[Chard]

Stupid fear-mongering bullshit. We're at less risk of a global conflict then we've been at any point since the begining of the industrial age. If anything, the last 70 years have taught us is that nuclear weapons have only served to promote global peace.

Ok, I see some of you are wanting to say the names of places like Vietnam, or Afghanistan, or Iraq, ect., but lemme explain.

Ok, so we've had a few country brush fires limited in scope to specific regions (e.g. Vietnam was confined pretty much to then South Vietnam, North Vietnam, and Cambodia), and mainly served as proxies for the US/NATO vs USSR/Warsaw pact shenanigans to happen in a controlled manner(i.e non-nuclear). Bloody conflicts to be sure, but nothing near the scale of either of the World Wars.

So why is that the case?

One of the consequences of your nation gaining the bomb is you gain a sudden understanding of exactly how powerful those weapons really are. It's no longer just an imaging of a really, really big bomb. It's a sudden sunrise in the middle of the night followed by searing heat and a blast wave that flattens everything for hundreds or thousands of meters in every direction. You understand that one test weapon represent more energy than every conventional munition in your inventory by an order of magnitude.

A bit of history, the Peoples Republic of China used to be one of the most militarily belligerent nations ever. Remember the hordes of red Chinese communists surging into North Korea during the Korean War despite the threat that we might do to Beijing what we did to Hiroshima? Rememebr PLC military support including PLA/PLAAF regulars in direct combat roles during Vietnam despite the threat that we might do to everything north of the 17th parallel what we did to Nagasaki? They didn't get it until laate 1964, at which point Chairman Mao finally got what a nuke was and what one of the damn things could really do.

China got goddamn quiet for a while after that.

What a nuke really means for a hypothetical nation-state is two things:

1. You no longer have to fear being invaded by a foriegn power. You now have the means to destroy entire armies and lay waste to cites.

2. You can no longer directly engage another nuclear power and need to modify your foreign policy as to make sure you don't come into direct conflict with the same, because while you can no longer be invaded you now know you can be destroyed.

So yeah, the OP article is bullshit.

So what does that mean for a hypothetical nation-state?