BANGOR DAILY NEWS • September x, 2022
Which would be worse: a nuclear “war orgasm” (Herman Kahn’s description of the Pentagon’s nuclear war strategy circa 1960) or a designer plague created in some secret biowar lab? The plague because it could theoretically wipe out the human race, whereas all-out nuclear war probably can’t. The distinction between a 99 percent wipe-out and a 100 percent wipe-out is insignificant if you happen to be one of the victims, but if only 1 percent of the human race survived, they could repopulate the world in only a few centuries. By the way, the climate change problem goes away instantly if you reduce the human population by 99 percent. Whereas if 100 percent of the population dies now, all those potential future lives are also lost. ~ Gwynne Dyer