Hiroshima's Remarkable Recovery

Other examples of remarkable societal resilience are more recent. We can consider, for example, the atomic bombing of the Japanese city of Hiroshima in 1945. The bomb the United States dropped was 1,500 times more powerful than any previously used.32 The fireball at the hypocenter of the blast reached several thousand degrees Celsius within one-ten thousandth of a second before igniting all flammable material within one and a half miles.33 Ninety percent of the city’s buildings were at leas...

 A Lack of Material Resources Contributes to the Decline o...

First and foremost, the price of war has gone up dramatically. The Nobel Peace Prize to end all peace prizes should have been given to Robert Oppenheimer and his fellow architects of the atomic bomb. Nuclear weapons have turned war between superpowers into collective suicide, and made it impossible to seek world domination by force of arms. Secondly, while the price of war soared, its pro

 Argonauts: Charter on Scientific Responsibility

CHARTER ON SCIENTIFIC RESPONSIBILITY Abuse of science and technology is a major threat to the existence of humankind. Our era has seen destructive climate change, tactical use of nuclear weapons, famine, public health crises, and now, the militarization of space. Our corporate stakeholders and the governments representing them have made inhuman, unwise decisions, and show little sign of changing their behavior. Scientists, technologists, and mathematicians can be an effective voice for resp...

 The Big and the Little

And Mallow laughed joyously, "You've missed, Sutt, missed as badly as the Commdor himself. You've missed everything, and understood nothing. Look, man, the Empire can replace nothing. The Empire has always been a realm of colossal resources. They've calculated everything in planets, in stellar systems, in whole sectors of the Galaxy. Their generators are gigantic because they thought in gigantic fashion. "But we, – we , our little Foundation, our single world almost with...

 Dyson VS Sagan on Nuclear Winter

I do not wish here to get into a technical argument about the details of nuclear winter. I will merely summarize my own struggles with the technical issues. I spent a few weeks in 1985 trying to make nuclear winter go away. The phrase "go away" here is used in the sense customary among scientists. To destroy a new theory, you try to find a simple situation where the theory predicts that something happens and you can prove that the same something does not happen. Then you say that the thing pr...