Global Thermonuclear War

>>8829064
If the ocean doesnt get irradiated, life would recover in 20,000 years.

>>8829064
Life didn't exist when the Earth was hit by Theia, nothing would survive that impact. I agree with the global point though, detonating the entire nuclear arsenal wouldn't manage to kill off humanity, but it would take thousands of years to restore a civilization.

>>8829119
>>8829213
These.

>>8829213

>Life didn't exist when the Earth was hit by Theia

Back in 2015 it was discovered that life was already around during Earth's Hadean eon (which was in the same eon that Theia collided into the Earth):

http://apnews.excite.com/article/20151019/us-sci--earliest_life-a400435d0d.html

>>8829231
So, what's up with everyone trying to scare us with doomsday and a barren universe?

>>8829239
Anti-war fags.

>>8829261
Even though that seems to be the natural order?

>>8829273
What do you mean?

>>8829289
Strife is a wonderful evolutionary pressure and outside of biology, strife (war) always creates a huge leap forward in technology.

>>8829301
Oh, well yes they typically oppose war in all cases.

>>8829261
How dumb are you people? Just because a nuclear war won't completely eliminate life on Earth doesn't mean that it would be an extinction-level event.

Life didn't just recover instantly from previous mass extinctions, it take millions upon millions of years for life to recover, for organisms to evolve and fill the niches / new niches in the biosphere.

Nuclear war would be on par, if not worse than previous extinctions due to radioactive fallout contaminating large swathes of the Earth. Cancer rates among surviving humans would skyrocket, you wouldn't be able to grow crops, topsoils would have radioactive isotopes in them that wouldn't decay for months / years / decades. The few areas unaffected by radioactive fallout would have to survive through a multi-year long global cooling event as well in the worst case scenarios. Think about all the nuclear reactors around the world that would melt down in a nuclear exchange as well, if they weren't targeted themselves by bombs. You would be creating massive death zones far worse than Chernobyl.

A large scale nuclear exchange would be the end of modern human civilization as we know it, humans would likely survive, in small groups / numbers, but the damage this type of event would have on human progress would be devastating. Imagine all the knowledge lost, the halt of scientific progress and research / technological advancement. No new technologies being created / invented for fuck knows how long it would take civilization to recover.

Then you have the impact on all other organisms on Earth, plus the thread of Nuclear winter (which isn't a meme). Stratospheric ash cooling the Earth's atmosphere for a few years, even a few degrees C, would be absolutely devastating to all life on Earth outside of the extremes like ocean vents.

>>8829412
All the stuff you mentioned is debunked 60s propaganda

http://www.oism.org/nwss/s73p912.htm

File: NORAD Command Center.png (2MB, 1152x922px) Image search: [Google]

2MB, 1152x922px

>>8829412

>the damage this type of event would have on human progress would be devastating. Imagine all the knowledge lost, the halt of scientific progress and research / technological advancement. No new technologies being created / invented for fuck knows how long it would take civilization to recover.

While the digital dark age is already occurring what with various historical electronic documents and multimedia recorded on obsolete file formats gradually becoming increasingly difficult if not impossible to read, efforts are currently being made to preserve any remaining data and to prevent any further data degradation and corruption. Unfortunately, due to film decay, the great majority of films made during the silent film era have already been lost (along with any knowledge from that time that may had been recorded on film.)

But anyway. The human species itself managed to survive through the Toba catastrophe that occurred about 70,000 years ago (which resulted in the global human population being reduced down to around 2,500 individuals.)

While it may very well be that most humans of the 21st century (especially those of first world nations) would be poorly adapted to a post-nuclear world and most likely die off shortly after a nuclear war, there are still millions of humans throughout the world today who have been living exactly as their ancestors did millennia ago.

So there would have to be at the very least 2,500 individuals grouped up together, perhaps with most (if not all of them) living within a government installation (maybe something like the Cheyenne Mountain Complex) to use as a fallout shelter.

I'm not so sure on how many advances have been made in genetic engineering to be used for hydroponics laboratories these last few years, but I think hydroponics may prove to be highly beneficial in such an event.

Those last surviving individuals could help preserve whatever knowledge possible, and pass it down to future generations.

>>8829119

>If the ocean doesnt get irradiated, life would recover in 20,000 years.

Why 20,000 years?

>>8829412

>Nuclear war would be on par, if not worse than previous extinctions due to radioactive fallout contaminating large swathes of the Earth

But as it was mentioned in the OP, the Earth's surface has already been irradiated multiple times causing previous mass extinctions.

When the Earth was impacted by an asteroid about 60,000,000 years ago, the explosion (the asteroid's explosion was the equivalent of 100,000,000 megatons of TNT, by comparison: the Tsar Bomba's explosion was the equivalent of only 57 megatons of TNT) was of such great intensity that it released ejecta off of Earth's surface and far out into the Earth's atmosphere leading into its exposure to infrared radiation. The reentry of the irradiated debris then rained back down as giant fireballs across the entire surface of the Earth, thereby causing global firestorms and creating a sort of nuclear winter effect (effectively killing exposed organisms, and the ancestors of today's mammals lucking out by digging themselves underground.) The global debris layer deposited by the impact contained enough soot to hint that the entire terrestrial biosphere burned, with an implication of this being that this would have caused a global soot-cloud blocking out the Sun. Widespread fires increased the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere and caused a temporary greenhouse effect. Furthermore: rain and ocean water became acidic. Photosynthesis was later inhibited by a dust cloud that blocked sunlight, and resulted in a severe drop of global temperatures.

Also: 400,000,000 years ago, the Earth was hit by a gamma ray burst originating from a hypernova. This basically incinerated and irradiated the entire surface of the planet, killing off most lifeforms of the time.