Civil war in China + WW3 with the US + Singularity -- how?

[CrisisEraDynamo]

Hey Prof. Xenakis, it's me again.

Once you made your big prediction of war with China, I looked around the internet and saw no reason to doubt you. Considering how immensely destructive a war with China would be, I saw no reason to keep coming back -- the US will cease to exist (and I'll disappear in a puff of nuclear smoke), so what more do I need to know?

Naturally, this development has me nervous. It's like China and Japan are getting ready to go to the mat, and we'll be pulled into that stupidity.

But one of your stranger predictions is of a civil war within China. How would you get a civil war within China when it is unified against a US bound and determined to destroy them, just like how do you plan to pull a Singularity out of nuclear Armageddon that will bomb most of the advanced countries to the Stone Age with radioactive fallout everywhere?

Any answer would be much appreciated. And don't let the naysayers get you down.

[thomasglee]

I'm not John, but don't forget. China was fighting a civil war during the last crisis war (World War II). It can happen again.

[Trevor]

It doesn't necessarily mean that a civil war and external war was fought at the same time. The two sides in China had a truce during the invasion of Japan and resumed their war once they were beaten.

[thomasglee]

It doesn't necessarily mean that a civil war and external war was fought at the same time. The two sides in China had a truce during the invasion of Japan and resumed their war once they were beaten.

Yes and no. They still had their own little skirmishes. Not sure what you're trying to convey.

[Trevor]

I mean that even if China will have both a civil war and an external war, it doesn't necessarily mean that they'll have them both at the same time. They might fall into a civil war when the main war with the United States is concluded. Alternately, they could have a civil war first, have a new leader take power, one that builds up and attacks the United States and their neighbors.

[Reality Check]

Once you made your big prediction of war with China, I looked around the internet and saw no reason to doubt you. Considering how immensely destructive a war with China would be, I saw no reason to keep coming back -- the US will cease to exist (and I'll disappear in a puff of nuclear smoke), so what more do I need to know?

If I understand the predictions on nuclear war correctly, they are that both the United States and China will use every last nuke they have, but nukes are not really as destructive as most people think and only about half the people in the United States will be killed.

Which sort of puts it into a glass half full, versus a glass half empty perspective.

I am one of those people who agree that nuclear weapons are not as destructive as most people think.

But on the other hand most of the deaths will come from starvation and disease, so the total death toll is hard to predict.

I suspect it might be more than half empty / less than half full.

The predictions about artificial intelligence and robots removing man from being the dominant life form on earth are what scare me the most.

From a programming perspective, and looking at the advances in drones as killing machines, it looks like predictions that this will not occur until 2030 might be a little too optimistic.

The only thing the U.S. government appears to agree on in a bi-partisan manner is the need to fast track putting 10s of thousands of drones over American.

[Tom Mazanec]

I once said to John (in an email) that I expected "every last nuke" to kill five or six billion people, and that would abort the Singularity. John replied that even if that many died, it would leave one or two billion to continue on to reach the Singularity. Well, maybe...I don't know. But WWIII+Singularity is not obviously nonsensical.

[Trevor]

I admit, I'm skeptical of the Singularity. Haven't ruled it out entirely, but I've seen and heard countless predictions of technological growth. Like everything else, we'll have to wait and see.

As for WWIII, there are currently around 18,000 nuclear weapons at the moment, about 1/4 of its peak. Now I would assume that the ballistic missile defenses on both sides will shoot down a sizable percentage of them, particularly since everyone would be improving them to the best of their ability when the war actually starts.

At the same time, we'll also be constructing nuclear weapons for tactical and strategic use. Being that a lot of the production plants have been neglected, it would take some time for it to really start producing. According to my calculations, we built around 8 nuclear weapons a day when the nuclear arms race was at its peak. I don't know how quick it would be this time, but I'll use that number.

Unfortunately, even if we manage to shoot down, say, 90 percent of them, the ones that get through will still kill millions of Americans, tens of millions if our defenses are insufficient for the job.