Sunday, May 29, 2011

Nuclear War Saves Humanity

What if we had failed in the Cold War and a nuclear exchange between the USSR and the USA resulted in large tracks of both countries a nuclear wasteland and earth’s climate became a nuclear winter and many species driven to extinction? Humans survives, but just barely and earth’s human population returns to what it was when humans first walk out of Africa – only spread out in small groups all over the globe.

What if our chances for survival as a species where better in that scenario than the one we are living. The degradation of our environment with industrial waste, loading greenhouse gases into atmosphere, and yet to be determined changes brought on by an over populated world is going to bring more long term changes to this planet than the damage caused by a major nuclear war.

Only with in the last few generations, earth was way big enough to handle whatever we threw at it, but that is no longer true. While you never pee in your own tent, what happens when your tent is all there is? Our little world is now the world. We have reached a point when the whole world is our community, and like any good citizen, we need to maintain and keep our community healthy.

One of my earlier blogs, back in the days of weekly blogging, I wrote in praise of global warming. That we are capable causing global warming seemed a good thing when considering what climates the planet had experience in the past, naturally without any help from humans.

However, that argument stood on a foundation that we would wake up and realize we could control things and begin to do so. The longer we wait, the more damage is done, and next generations will have way more struggles ahead than if our generations was trying to come back after a nuclear war.

Who would have though that something so terrible would be better than where we currently headed?