

If the world were a village of 1,000 people - mdup
http://www.gdrc.org/uem/1000-village.html

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WaltPurvis
Published in 1990. Quite a few things have changed in the past 25 years. But
interesting nonetheless.

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hliyan
I think everything except this is true:

> The village has buried beneath it enough explosive power in nuclear weapons
> to blow itself to smithereens many times over.

1/6,000,000th of the worlds nuclear stockpile[1], or approximately 1/500th of
the explosive yield of an average warhead, will not be enough to cause any
serious damage to 6000 acres.

1\. [http://fas.org/issues/nuclear-weapons/status-world-
nuclear-f...](http://fas.org/issues/nuclear-weapons/status-world-nuclear-
forces/)

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sp332
Does that mean that the world's current stockpile is not enough to destroy the
earth's population?

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jack9
Yes, we lack the capability at this time (1990 and even today). I'm not sure
why a followup post said "No" as if there's any evidence to support that we
can destroy human life on earth...much less habitable or even just inhabited
lands. I immediately stopped and thought, oh jeeze, now I know some of these
numbers are made up.

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sp332
I thought the feat was of a huge amount of fallout permanently changing the
climate and putting tons of radioactive dust into the upper atmosphere where
it would eventually fall down in everything. Fallout would be less of a
problem with a smaller nuclear war.

Remember, more than half the earth's population is concentrated in urban
centers. It would be possible to kill that many people covering relatively
little land area.

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antaviana
Clearly in this world the job with highest demand would be
translators/interpreters.

