Deaths 1 cancer death attributed to radiation exposure by government panel.[4][5]
Non-fatal injuries 16 with physical injuries due to hydrogen explosions,[6] 2 workers taken to hospital with possible radiation burns[7]
I think this puts the incident squarely in the class of minor accidents that the media had a panic about. Unless you think it had a 50 % chance of wiping out japan and we were just lucky, it is irrelevant to the discussion of X-risk.
With CO2, it depends what you mean by buisness as usual. We don’t have 500 years of fossil fuels left, and we are already switching to renewables. I don’t think that the earth will become uninhabitable to technologically advanced human life. A In a scenario where humans are using air conditioners and desalinators to survive the 80C Norwegian deserts, the world is still “habitable”. (I don’t think it will get that bad, but I think humans would survive if it did. )
If the time it takes for a black ball to kill us is more than a few generations it’s really hard to plan around fixing it.
No those are the ones that are really easy to plan around, you have plenty of time to fix them. Its the ones that kill you instantly that are hard to plan around.
I’d be surprised if a chernobyl/fukushima/mayak level disaster every fifty years led to human extinction over 500 years. Why do you think that is the case?
Separate paragraphs, intended to be separate issues.
A 7 on the INES every fifty years means an accident that requires an exclusion zone and long term containment. The chernobyl sarcophagus needs to be maintained, and the accident is not ‘over’. Humans have committed to managing a problem (radioactive waste) that will be around longer than the human race has existed to the present point (100,000 years into the future, current radwaste will be a hazard). We are doing fine so far, whether that holds remains to be seen.
I read somewhere that there is enough ‘fossil carbon’ that if all of it is burned, it will be enough to cause a runaway, venus like greenhouse effect that destroys the biosphere and renders the earth uninhabitable. The timeframe for this I saw is ’500ish years’. Stephen Hawking said something similar and was panned for it: https://www.livescience.com/59693-could-earth-turn-into-venus.html
There’s an anthropic bias here. ‘We are not dead, so therefore we have not already drawn a black ball’. If we had, we would not be around to discuss it, so therefore, we are unlikely to ever be in a position where we look backwards and can say unambiguously ‘yep, that was definitely a black ball, we are irreparably screwed’.
If the current statistics hold of 1 chernobyl/fukushima/mayak level disaster every fifty years, we already drew a black ball.
If business as usual with carbon dioxide pollution continues unabated until earth is uninhabitable in 500 years, we also already drew a black ball.
If the time it takes for a black ball to kill us is more than a few generations it’s really hard to plan around fixing it.
Quote from wikipedia on fukushima
I think this puts the incident squarely in the class of minor accidents that the media had a panic about. Unless you think it had a 50 % chance of wiping out japan and we were just lucky, it is irrelevant to the discussion of X-risk.
With CO2, it depends what you mean by buisness as usual. We don’t have 500 years of fossil fuels left, and we are already switching to renewables. I don’t think that the earth will become uninhabitable to technologically advanced human life. A In a scenario where humans are using air conditioners and desalinators to survive the 80C Norwegian deserts, the world is still “habitable”. (I don’t think it will get that bad, but I think humans would survive if it did. )
No those are the ones that are really easy to plan around, you have plenty of time to fix them. Its the ones that kill you instantly that are hard to plan around.
I’d be surprised if a chernobyl/fukushima/mayak level disaster every fifty years led to human extinction over 500 years. Why do you think that is the case?
Separate paragraphs, intended to be separate issues.
A 7 on the INES every fifty years means an accident that requires an exclusion zone and long term containment. The chernobyl sarcophagus needs to be maintained, and the accident is not ‘over’. Humans have committed to managing a problem (radioactive waste) that will be around longer than the human race has existed to the present point (100,000 years into the future, current radwaste will be a hazard). We are doing fine so far, whether that holds remains to be seen.
I read somewhere that there is enough ‘fossil carbon’ that if all of it is burned, it will be enough to cause a runaway, venus like greenhouse effect that destroys the biosphere and renders the earth uninhabitable. The timeframe for this I saw is ’500ish years’. Stephen Hawking said something similar and was panned for it: https://www.livescience.com/59693-could-earth-turn-into-venus.html
There’s an anthropic bias here. ‘We are not dead, so therefore we have not already drawn a black ball’. If we had, we would not be around to discuss it, so therefore, we are unlikely to ever be in a position where we look backwards and can say unambiguously ‘yep, that was definitely a black ball, we are irreparably screwed’.