By RUBEN BAUER NAVEIRA*
The only thing that can be said with absolute certainty about post-nuclear war is that every human being on the face of the Earth will be affected.
Faced with the tragic historical moment we have reached, this article proposes to think about the unthinkable – what our lives will be like in a post-nuclear war – and it is composed of five parts, to be published in five consecutive weeks, always on Fridays -fairs.
A setback that could last centuries or millennia
The only thing that can be said with absolute certainty about a post-nuclear war is that every human being on the face of the Earth will be affected. Many millions will die, many more millions will be seriously injured, but even those not directly affected by the bombs will also suffer greatly.
Everyone will lose a lot, which is why this discussion is taboo. It’s one thing to watch a movie like “The next day” (“The Day After”, 1983) at a time when mutual deterrence was still a dogma. People might be shocked by the film, but it was still taken for fiction. Another completely different thing is to postulate that nuclear war will most likely come (as was done in second of this text) and then go on to discuss its effects, and what we could do to try to manage them.
Faced with the prospect of loss, which will be real for everyone, the vast majority of people will refuse to even admit the possibility of a nuclear war, much less consider what their life (or their survival) will be like in a post-nuclear world. . They will simply refuse to come into contact with this perspective, and this is perfectly understandable, there is no point in judging them in any way.
But, if all we take into account are these individual positions, this text was not even supposed to be written. May the war then come if and when it has to come, and, at that time, each one must deal with his destiny – as it has been until now, each one for himself and God for all. We are, however, parts of a greater whole, whether we are aware of it or not. We are part of nature, we are part of the planet and we are part of the universe. We are, above all, part of the human species, and so we should realize that we all have responsibilities towards it.
Of course, there is a risk that humanity will end up extinct, but, quite possibly, it will continue its journey, even in the midst of unspeakable pain and suffering. There will continue to be human lives in the future, with laughter and crying and everything else that makes us human, if not ours, those of our children and grandchildren, and their children's lives, and their children's children's lives. I hope I'm wrong, and that a nuclear war never happens. However, if there is, it will be our duty to be able to deal with the consequences, and move forward.
What would happen to Brazil then, in a nuclear war? Well, let's believe our country wasn't bombed. And let's assume that there is no other incident effect, such as nuclear winter or electromagnetic pulse (treated as follows). third part of this text). If this is the context, can we then move on with “normal life”? But no way.
The economy is divided into primary (agriculture, livestock, mining), secondary (industry) and tertiary (commerce and services) sectors. There is also the public sector.
Agriculture, livestock and mining exist in Brazil basically to serve exports. The main markets are China, the United States and Europe – all devastated (as well as others such as the Middle East for meat, etc.). Companies in this segment go bankrupt the next day.
The industry is globalized (Brazil is not even close to a country with a closed economy, like North Korea – in fact, since colonial times, the country's economic vocation has been to export raw materials), and so, even Although part of the national industry is focused on the domestic market, it is dependent on global supply chains. That will no longer exist. Bankruptcy as soon as stocks run out.
Services. The banks, few and large in Brazil, completely dependent on the internet, and interdependent with the financial markets in the United States and Europe, will not support their disappearance. Bank failure, general collapse of companies. Much of the other services as well as commerce (which is also a reseller of agricultural and industrial production, and also of imports) is also highly dependent on the internet – which will no longer exist (submarine cables will have been cut, satellites will have been knocked down, data centers of large technology companies will have been destroyed by bombs, or there will be no electricity to run them, which is the same thing).
Will the public sector continue to function? For how much longer, without collection (collecting from whom?), that is, without more new money, and with the money that still leaves the Central Bank devalued to almost dust?
As Fred Reed said (in an article transcribed in third part of this text), “a country is a system of systems of systems, interdependent and interconnected”. The economy can support the sudden disappearance of one or a few sectors, but it cannot support the sudden disappearance of practically all of them. The country will continue to have its infrastructure intact, but it will still collapse.
Firstly, what collapses? The companies. With companies, jobs. With the jobs, the salaries. With salaries, the purchasing power for families' subsistence. Fear and despair will come and, soon, hunger and chaos. Will there still be any food production? Yes. But, even assuming that people have money (and that that money is worth something), how will that food reach consumers, especially in metropolitan regions and large and medium-sized cities? Will there be road freight transport companies operating? Will there be gas stations on the roads? Will there be supermarkets in operating cities? Will urban mass transport be operational in cities?
“It all depends on workers continuing to show up for work rather than trying to save their families” (Fred Reed again). Well, there won't be.
Ultimately, even if we are not directly bombed, we will suffer collapse. And what will collapse, beyond capitalism, will be civilization itself.
About ten thousand years ago, humanity discovered agriculture and men stopped being nomadic hunter-gatherers and settled on the land, which became the primary factor in civilizational advancement (call it progress, development, prosperity, generation of wealth or any other name). From then on, land was the most important of all for men (who even killed themselves for it).
About six hundred years ago (we are arbitrarily considering the beginning of the era of Genoese bankers in the 15th century as a time frame), this primordial factor moved from land (something physical) to capital (immaterial), and capitalism began. . In contemporary times, when money is no longer backed by gold or anything else, we know that its value comes from its credibility, socially presupposed.
The only difference between a one hundred reais banknote and a two reais one is the value attributed to them by everyone, because physically both are ink on paper, and the cost for the Mint to manufacture them is the same. When someone dies, however, the money and wealth they have saved do not disappear, they remain to be appropriated by others.
About sixty years ago there was a new transition, and the primary factor for the advancement of societies became knowledge. The critical difference is that knowledge only exists within people.
According to the theory of autopoiesis, examined at first part of this text, knowledge records such as books or computer databases are not knowledge, they are mere elements of the environment. Living beings (in this case, people in search of knowledge) compensate for disturbances in their environment (in this case, the records of knowledge to which they are exposed) through an update of their internal regularities, and it will be this update that will correspond to the knowledge, and in a necessarily individualized way – and not records such as books or computer databases.
In other words, knowledge records such as books or computer databases are only useful for people to access them and develop the knowledge they hold (if a book is not read by anyone it will be useless). When someone dies, the knowledge held by that person dies with it. A piece of land or a currency is independent of people to be what they are (land and capital, respectively). A book is not knowledge, knowledge is what happens inside each person who reads the book.
But, since when a person dies, their knowledge dies with it, why isn't knowledge lost? Because people circulate it all the time, either by acquiring new knowledge (which is what you are doing right now, not only because you are reading this text, but mainly because you are reaching your own conclusions about everything you are reading ) or passing them on to third parties (in infinite ways: chatting, posting a comment, recording a video or audio, writing and publishing, etc.). This immense web is what makes knowledge as a whole advance, despite the fact that the people who hold it are dying all the time.
The problem is that the almost complete social rupture that will follow a nuclear war will practically completely undo this web, interrupting the processes of circulation and renewal of knowledge. Suppose you are a knowledge worker specialized in your field of activity. You know where to look for knowledge, where to research, who to look for, who to talk to. And you know how to put your own knowledge into practice as well as disseminate it, whether in your work environment or elsewhere.
After a nuclear war, if you manage to cope in the most satisfactory way possible, you will be planting vegetables to feed yourself and your family. You still have your own knowledge, but how do you get it to those people who could benefit from it? The web broke.
Without educational systems, the level of training that each person has on “day zero” will remain stagnant, and over time will degrade (knowledge needs to be exercised – think about what happens to mathematical knowledge after years without a job). As the years go by, illiteracy will increase. Children in particular cannot remain without education for long periods, as there are learning “windows” depending on their age that cannot be missed without harm to the child's cognitive development. Books, handouts, manuals, catalogs, notebooks, etc. they mold and rot or, worse, they will be used to light fires.
Most knowledge nowadays is stored digitally, requiring specialized personnel to maintain the respective systems, in addition to being susceptible to lack of electricity. Everything that has been stored “in the cloud” or anywhere else on the internet (YouTube videos, for example) will have already been irretrievably lost. The batteries of cell phones, tablets, laptops and notebooks, even if electrical power is restored for recharging, will eventually run out and will not be replaced. Or worse, an electromagnetic pulse bomb could instantly destroy them all. Over the years, people will die and take their knowledge to the grave, without having passed it on.
The knowledge held by humanity as a whole will be lost, and there will be a significant civilizational setback – we may go back to the Middle Ages, which will then take something around five centuries to relearn everything again and return to where we are today, or, worse, to the Copper Age – and then it will be five millennia.
The advent of computers was the factor that triggered the shift from capital to knowledge as the main driver of the world, around sixty years ago. A computer operates at its electronic, or “machinery” level so to speak, with only two states (off or “zero” and on or “one”) for each of its cells, and all that computers do is perform with these cells are successive sequences of a single numerical operation, the sum.
However, they do this so much faster than the human mind that any other mathematical operation, however complex it may be, can be decomposed (that is, programmed) into an infinite number of summation operations, and yet the calculation will be carried out very quickly. The computer, by freeing scientists and engineers from the task of carrying out mathematical calculations, led to an extraordinary increase in their productivity.
Subsequently, a series of other tasks that had always been done manually by people, such as writing texts and documents and printing them, were also the object of programming (that is, they were converted into infinite sequences of sums, in what was then called “machine language”), due to which the volume of knowledge records held by humanity began to advance exponentially.
It would not be long before access to this entire knowledge base was itself automated, as well as for people to automatically identify other people who could be contacted according to their needs or their common interests. As a result, knowledge production exploded.
As processing capabilities advanced rapidly, in the space of a few years, small and compact computers, which were also relatively cheap, began to have capabilities corresponding to those of the so-called “large computers”, which were expensive. With the vast proliferation of these smaller computers, the need for a universal standard for interconnection between computers arose, replacing the exclusive networks (then called proprietary) specific to different manufacturers, a need that was resolved in the 1990s in favor of the network called World Wide Web or internet, an evolution of Arpanet, which had been created in the 1960s within the scope of the United States Department of Defense.
From then on, it proved to be more advantageous for practically all computing in the world (which here we can call “generic” since it is a mere processing capacity, turned into a commodity) to start operating in a distributed manner over the internet, universalizing access to locally generated or processed data, but in practice making computing hostage to the internet. The other side of this coin are the niches of what we can call “specialized” computing, which continued to occur in a centralized way, in what are now called supercomputers (for example, for meteorology).
The hitherto unnoticed counterpart to all this dizzying scientific and technological advancement of humanity in the so-called “age of knowledge” was the vulnerability resulting from the extreme dependence of people and societies on computers and their unique network, the internet. In a post-nuclear war, this vulnerability will exact an unimaginable price.
Around 1970, the advent of electronic calculators (which are computers pre-programmed to carry out mathematical operations) had promoted a silent revolution – until then, all those professionals who needed mathematical calculations did them manually, in a process that was both time-consuming and subject to errors.
Likewise, in schools students were taught to carry out complicated calculations “by hand” (paper, pencil and eraser), at most using trigonometry tables and logarithms. The fact is that the immense advantage that calculators (and, after them, computer spreadsheets) provided in terms of speed, reliability and precision had as its counterpart the disadvantage of leading people to abstract this “how” the results of calculations are obtained. .
In a post-nuclear war, in a world in which there will be practically no more calculators (the “pocket” models, such as those powered by solar energy, are practically disposable, with a short useful life; batteries will run out; the more durable models such as laptops or notebooks are dependent on electricity to recharge their batteries, are subject like others to the risk of an electromagnetic pulse, and in any case will stop working when the batteries are exhausted), people will have immense difficulties in carrying out calculations beyond the basics.
A related setback will occur with the activity of computer programming (with the maintenance of today's existing systems also being a programming activity): today's programmers no longer program from hardware (in “machine language”), decomposing everything into successive sequences of sums of “zeros” and “ones”, they now program over programming made in the past and already consolidated that were being incorporated into the hardware – layers upon layers upon layers of previous programming. Just like the layers of calculations incorporated into the advanced functions of calculators and spreadsheets, these layers of pre-given programming are abstracted by programmers (an online game programmer, for example, sticks only to the aesthetics of the elements on the screen, ignoring the thousands of hours of pre-programming behind every animation command it triggers).
Just as today's engineers no longer understand the mathematical principles behind their calculations, today's programmers no longer have the ability to program from scratch. hardware.
*Ruben Bauer Naveira He is a pacifist activist. Book author A new utopia for Brazil: Three guides to get out of chaos (available here).
To access the first article in this series, click https://aterraeredonda.com.br/a-guerra-nuclear-causas-e-consequencias-i/
To access the second article in this series, click https://aterraeredonda.com.br/a-guerra-nuclear-causas-e-consequencias-ii/
To access the third article in this series, click https://aterraeredonda.com.br/a-guerra-nuclear-causas-e-consequencias-iii/
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