27 000 nuclear weapons. Imagine them all detonating within an hour. I don’t know how many megatons of TNT that equals to, but what I do know, is that that would likely ignite the Earth’s atmosphere, and kill 99% of life on Earth.
Got to say, we sure are harmless.
“Meteors?..who says it would destroy the whole planet, the fact is a small number of humans would still survive, but we can’t speculate since we ourselves never witnessed a meteor impact, so all of these theories are quite shaky…”
it wouldnt necessarily take a gigantic meteor,in comparison to the size of the earth anyways to pretty nerf all life on earth. The meteor that “supposedly” killed off all off the flinstones, was only 6 miles wide but it threw enough debris into the atmosphere to block out the sun.
and the only reason i know this is because i watch discovery channel when im trying to sleep =/
Well, what cleared up the debris?
bah, got me >_>
Except that it wouldn’t (ignite the atmosphere), and it wouldn’t (kill 99% of life).
How do you know there are 27,000 nuclear weapons?
Bah, I mean it’d burn a lot of the oxygen in the atmosphere, forgot that the atmosphere can’t actually ignite by a conventional nuclear weapon.
Edit: Synth, I know there are 27 000 because I looked it up. They’re just stockpiled though, but that’s not to say we can’t fire them with a bit of preperation. Most of them belong to the United States. Source: http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2005/YuenHFong.shtml
@ Synth: They have the number of nukes and active nukes listed. There are 27,098 nukes total (that we know of, and using the highest estimated number of nukes per country).
@ Avenger: Any documentation? I’ve never heard of this being a possibility (depleting all of the Earth’s oxygen).
Albert Einstein ****ed us over.
He could be considered the Anti-Christ.
Albert Einstein was one of several people involved. I blame Oppenheimer, as he’s referred to as the Father of the Atomic Bomb.
It would likely not consume all of the oxygen, however, a lot of it would be wiped out. Another factor I forgot is “Nuclear Winter”. With 27 000 nukes it’s a distinct possibility. Sunlight is necessary for any real life to exist on Earth, unless you count tiny little bacteria living off of the remains of a destroyed world.
Oh, and I too blame Oppenheimer.
Seriously, any documentation on nuclear weapons consuming vast amounts of oxygen, somehow killing us by making unable to breathe? I’d actually like to read that.
Nuclear winter wouldn’t end all life. It’s a term that is also applied to the after effects of asteroid and meteor collision on Earth, and since we’re all here right now, it isn’t something that would destroy all life on the planet. Even the dinosaurs weren’t completely wiped out by the asteroid they believe crashed into the planet, and now they’re saying they may have actually die because of the rise of disease-infected insects, which would explain why it took so long for dinosaurs to finally die out.
So yeah. It’d suck, but we’d make it.
I believe he’s referring to the key factor of sunlight in vegetation, which produces our oxygen.
Plants weren’t affected by the nuclear winter the planet endured when that giant asteroid crashed into the Earth?
I’m still looking for the documentation I read a while back, I’ll let you know when I find it. I did however, also base it on logical thinking - imagine 27 000 nuclear blasts for me. Now imagine the amount of oxygen this would no doubt consume? Even several miles outside of the ground zero, a nuclear bomb of only 10 kt would leave the area around it with oxygen-levels far lower than what most oxygen-dependant beings require for living. That, I have a source for: http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/neutronics/todd/nuc.bomb.html
As for your debunking of nuclear winter, don’t forget that today, we have buildings and various other things the world didn’t have in the dinosaur age. If we were to compare soot to volcanic ash, soot would absorb far more sunlight, and soot is what we’d get a lot of if a major city was hit by any nuclear weapon.
No doubt, 99,9999% of humanity would be annihilated within a day of the bombs detonating (well, if they were detonated fairly evenly around the world). Not to say a few people won’t survive, but they’ll be dead within a few weeks at the most unless they have a self-sustaining underground facility with air-filtration.
Edit: Oh, and yeah, I was referring to that as well. Blocking out sunlight alone wouldn’t kill us, but if all our food-sources disappeared, then what?
Isn’t my mass religious suicice plausible? 
The link you showed doesn’t say anything losing most of the planet’s oxygen by using all of our nukes.
You’re making claims and making gross exaggerations but you aren’t really giving us any evidence. 99.99999% of humanity would die within a few days even though it took many centuries, possibly thousands of years for the dinosaurs to die out during their nuclear winter? Every animal and plant in the world would die out, despite that not happening during the last nuclear winter?
You’re acting like we’re cavemen, like we’d be caught totally unprepared and we’d forget everything we’ve learned over the last 3000 years. A nuclear winter would be devastating yes, but there’s no reason to assume we’d be dead automatically or within a few days. Hell, the heat wouldn’t have completely dissipated within a few days and yet we’d still die? That’s preposterous.
I don’t think mass religious suicide is a plausible event. It seems to me more and more tend to stray from their fanatic beliefs, and rather become tolerant, respecting people (although they might be, and probably are still religious at this point).
Edit: Oh and Vox, I wrote “I don’t have the source for that, but I’ll let you know when I find it”, and linked to you why I thought it was logical for a lot of the world’s oxygen to disappear. Search for oxygen in the link I gave you.
Bah, also, you’re neglecting to add nuclear fallout along with radiation to the picture. 27 000 nukes equals to a whole lot of nuclear fallout, along with a whole lot of thermal and other kinds of radiation.
PS: Wouldn’t mind it if you calmed down a bit. You seem angry and annoyed for reasons I fail to comprehend.
I read it and it says available oxygen in the area would be used. Are you saying we’d (we being the nuclear nations working together) take the time to use our supercomputers to find out exactly where nuclear bombs should be placed so that as much oxygen as possible is used, and hope all of humanity dies? Doesn’t that take away from the doomsday scenario since we’re consciously looking for a way to destroy ourselves and no one has a problem with it? That doesn’t sound like a true to life scenario to me, Avenger. That sounds like science fiction.
Meh, you have a point, but nonetheless, at least one or more percent of the oxygen in the air would burn up (this being a whole lot of oxygen in the case that you don’t know how much the atmosphere has).
Nonetheless, the nuclear fallout and radiation would still be too destructive for organic life. Very little of anything that once was, would remain. It would take millennia, if not millions of years for mammals to re-emerge.