Quote from: K-Dog on Sep 06, 2023, 07:43 AMAll humans are going to do is make the Earth incapable of feeding our population when the oil runs out. Then wars make us extinct and the earth gets green again.
I don't think even Global Thermonuclear War will exctinctify (new word, I get the credit for coining the term if it goes viral! ;D ) Homo Sap, at least not right away.
There are both Goobermint built and Billionaire built bunkers as well as some individual smaller ones for say 10 or so Doomers that will survive a full exchange of ICBMs between the major powers. In said bunkers are long lasting foods with shelf lives up to a century or so, although I don't think they will stay underground more than a few years while the atmosphere clears the dust particles with a few cycles of rainy springs and winter snow melt. This will wash most of the radioactive heavier elements out to sea, diluting it. Background radiation will be higher, and after survivors emerge cancer rates will increase substantially as well as birth defects, but again you will get some survivors who do reproduce and some normal births. These are people with higher tolerance for exposure to radiation, just as some people have more resistance to viruses. These pathogens like radiation cause cancer by breaking DNA and messing up growth rates and metabolic functions. Some people have greater ability to repair these breaks and errors, so they don't get sick as easily. Of course, if you are close enough to Ground Zero and get a huge exposure nobody can tolerate that, but after a while the radiation just isn't that strong. Plenty of wildlife now lives right around Chernobyl, and you would probably have similar levels within a few miles of an impact from a nuclear missile, but this would dissipate over time with exposure to the elements.
So, left in the wake of a GTW you likely have your typical post-apocalyptic movie scenario, with bombed out and deserted cities, army bases, power plants, ammunition manufacturing factories and other major targets, as well as mostly deserted suburbs and rural areas where the unprpepped will die off fairly quickly from radiation poisoning and starvation, though they probably will go so fast they won't have time to scavenge everything.
The few people left in any given area after say a decade will be quite small, and wildlife will rebound faster than the Homo Sap population. Before long there will be mice, squirrels and pidgeons running around, along with deer and feral dogs and cats. Plenty of food for the few Homo Saps with good resistance to meat that glows gently in the dark. lol. Said pockets of HS will be around not just in the FSoA, but China and Russia as well. Also remaining will be a few Sherps in the Himalayas, a few Cannibals in Africa and New Guinea and a few Tlingit north of the Arctic Circle.
Said survivors of Armageddon may die out after a generation or two, or they may evolve in some way as some radiation induced Mutations end up being beneficial and begin to grow the population exponentially again for a while, until the pockets of surviving Mutants start bumping into each other and fighting for territory. Even if they manage to do that though, there will never again be huge reserves of fossil fuels that allows one group to dominate all others and take over the world as the Europeans did after the invention of the Steam Engine. After that happened, we simply overan every other culture and kept reprocing until all the fossil energy got burnedf up. That won't happen again.
Remember, the mitochondrial DNA record shows that 75,000 years ago there were only 10,000 human souls or 1000 breeding pairs left after the Genetic Bottleneck. The cause of that bottleneck is disputed now, it might have been the Supervolcanic eruption of Toba or maybe a climate shift or disease. Whatever it was, it only took 75 millenia to bring the population to about 600M, where it was around ~1500 at the time of the Black Plague. After the disesases ran their course through the population it stayed fairly stable, but starting in the late 1600s exponential growth returned and we ballooned it up to the current 8B. We'll never get there again, but 500K is conceivable a millenia from now after the Rapture takes all but a few to the Great Beyond.
Anyhow, i don't think we'll last a millenia to Party like it's 2999 and welcome in the year 3000.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rblt2EtFfC4
My bet is we make it to the Year 2525 before the last Homo Sap goes to the Great Beyond and the Crows take over. New version with video featuring Scarlet Johanssen. I like the original by Zager & Evans better, but I drool over Scarlett. lol.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNbUUSuiEho
Here's the original by Z&E.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yesyhQkYrQM&t=111s
One hit wonder back in the summer of 69 as I recall, I was 12 years old. Those were the best days of my life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9f06QZCVUHg
RE