So a Newsweek article https://www.newsweek.com/overlooked-superfood-farming-world-war-scientists-1864818 says
"Concerns of a nuclear "Armageddon" followed by global food shortages have left many searching for more resilient food supplies."
Mucho eye rolls because anyone who thinks there will be any life above microbial left after WWlll is living (for now) in la la land. There is no such thing as a limited nuclear war. Once the first nuke is launched it is all out. No life will survive.
@NorthernInvader No, there will be a relatively lengthy period of suffering and death for small numbers of humans and other critters.
Everyone's not going to die in blasts or in the first few days. Lots of people will just starve, freeze, and die of radiation sickness.
But then after that, nobody will survive.
@CoyoteConscious Depends on how many nukes are used and their dispersal pattern but yes there will be some short term survivors. The resulting nuclear winter will destroy any remaining agriculture and what radiation poisoning doesn't kill quickly starvation will. Regardless, the 6th great extinction will happen.
@NorthernInvader @CoyoteConscious I think there would be some species that could survive for much longer such as tube worms. But they ain't evolving into anything resembling intelligent life...
@NorthernInvader @CoyoteConscious also, cockroaches could live in Twinkies and fruitcake for centuries! 😂
@hallmarc @NorthernInvader Those actually do go bad, and to be honest, I'm not really rooting for "cockroaches survived, mostly" as a "success" condition.
When people say "Life will find a way! There will still be some microbes!" I just keep going "Wow. We killed ourselves down to roaches and slime. Awesome."
: p
Where's my basic biomods! Where's my flying car! Where's my post-scarcity society!
@hallmarc @NorthernInvader Yeah. To me, saying that your tube worms lived when the rest of your ecosystem got ruined is sort of like saying "well, we saved one of the patient's toenail beds. So that will live slightly longer than the rest of the body."
I want the future with super powers and flying, talking cats. Not the one with the dead planet except for worms.
@NorthernInvader It's possible but not a given. Why would anyone target a rural area with a nuke? They will target military bases, population centers, and industrial centers.
@danielbsmith first - the blast zones are enormous, second a lot of nukes and facilities for them are located in rural areas, third, between the US and Russia there are enough nukes to totally obliterate all life on the planet - once the first one flies they all fly.
@NorthernInvader
Yep
I was born in 1950, so Cold War threats of nuclear war were real and present. All cities had shelters. One day my dad was approached by neighbors wanting to build a large bomb-shelter, he refused to help. Being an engineer with top security clearance. He knew the folly. He told us kids, "If you hear the sirens, go up on the roof and watch the flash. You do not want to live in world after a nuclear attack. Death will be slow and very painful."