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Post by Hussar on Oct 4, 2003 1:29:25 GMT -5
WHile surfing another gaming site, I came across a little discussion that was going on. Two people were arguing about the destructiveness of nukes. One argued that if the US blew off all its nukes at once, this would destroy the planet. Not just us, but actually take apart the entire planet. Where do people get this kind of crap? It's utterly and completely rediculous. The mountain that caused the KT extinction which killed the dinosaurs exploded with a force of several thousand nuclear weapons. All at a single point of impact. Now, it did kill off most of the life on the planet. I'll agree with that. But, today, it took us centuries just to find the crater. Why do people seem to think we are so much more powerful than nature? Nature has thrown some pretty big stuff at the planet. A very large smack gave us a moon, which is also the largest moon relative to its planet in the solar system. So, it was a pretty big rock that gave it to us. Yet, the planet is still here. How is it that people have this image in their head that we can generate more power than that?
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Post by Dr. Doom III on Oct 4, 2003 13:05:28 GMT -5
People are dumb.  |
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Post by OceanWhysper on Oct 5, 2003 3:27:01 GMT -5
Because they're absolutely clueless. |
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Post by Wyrmfire on Oct 5, 2003 15:04:34 GMT -5
Well, peopel have been scared stiff of nukes since their inception. I would venture a guess that people really look at nukes AS a force of nature at this point, especially since they haven't been used since WWII...
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Post by Chahiero on Oct 5, 2003 15:30:41 GMT -5
Fear, ignorance, and stupidity often go hand-in-hand.
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Post by EK - Shadow of Death on Oct 5, 2003 22:52:33 GMT -5
Funny thing was that it was on a nerd site... like this one... just shows where the wheat got seperated from the chaff, hmm?
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Post by Dr. Doom III on Oct 5, 2003 23:00:21 GMT -5
Funny thing was that it was on a nerd site... like this one... just shows where the wheat got seperated from the chaff, hmm? Hey, hey, hey. Lewd Beholder resembles that remark.  |
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Post by Hussar on Oct 5, 2003 23:10:10 GMT -5
Yeah, it was on a gaming site where a new DM was making a game set after a nuclear exchange. A couple of players started nit-picking and saying that a nuclear exchange would whipe out the world. Sheesh! Don't people realize that there have been hundreds of nuclear explosions in the last 50 years?
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Post by Merkuri on Oct 6, 2003 15:26:43 GMT -5
It's a mixture of exaggeration and conceit. A large number of nukes could bring on the dreaded nuclear winter, this is a fact (... well, as close to a fact as you can get in the world of science). This will almost certainly destroy the human race (or at the very least civilization as we know it). Most people hear that and think "end of the world" instead of "end of the world as we know it". There's a fine distinction. I once heard a quote that went something like, "Mother nature's pretty resilient. We can't blow up the earth. We can, however make it angry enough to shrug us off." The earth'll go on. Life'll go on. We might not.
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Post by CharleHu$$tle on Oct 6, 2003 16:00:40 GMT -5
LOL Comedy at it's finest
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Post by DustinFireblade on Oct 6, 2003 16:05:05 GMT -5
Some people can be described as educated idiot (like some of my supervisors at work).
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Post by Wyrmfire on Oct 6, 2003 19:37:43 GMT -5
Actually, the concept of a nuclear winter was disproven a while ago. It was originally hypothesized by a SF author, and really caught on in popularity, so nobody really payed attention to the actual science behind it...  |
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Post by Hussar on Oct 7, 2003 0:55:12 GMT -5
Really? This is the first I've heard of this. Where did you see that Wyrmy? I thought the idea went, nukes go off, kick lots of crap into the atmosphere, crap blocks sun, earth gets cold, boom many years of winter. I didn't realize that this was being questioned. Can you provide a link?
Oh sure, we can wipe ourselves out. Hell, that's not too difficult. But disintegrate a planet? Not bloody likely.
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agamoto
Soldier
Greetings and salutations one and all!!
Posts: 239
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Post by agamoto on Oct 7, 2003 12:35:42 GMT -5
If we took EVERY atomic device on the planet, and drilled a hole in the right spot at the right depth, we MIGHT possibly be able to crack a small chunk off the surface. maybe.
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Post by Wyrmfire on Oct 7, 2003 23:04:43 GMT -5
Sorry, I can't find a link to it, and I found this tidbit in a newspaper article...  But, the details that I get from various sites are: Carl Sagan came up with the idea of a nuclear winter as an unforseen consequence of numclear war based on the fact that a lot of dust would be throuwn up in the air. Unfortunately, teh guy was never much of a scientist (good author though ), and this wasn't even close to being his field anyway. Basically, the sun would have to be COMPLETELY obscured over the entire Earth for AT LEAST 33 months to result in a nuclear winter, and nukes just don't throw up enough dust for that to happen. The biggest reason why it caught on so heavily is because the dinosaurs were wiped out by a similar event- but remember, the meteor, among other things, left a crater about the size of the gulf of mexico. Nukes are just surface explosions, and Hiroshima ddin't leave a crater at all-just leveled the city. |
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