One ray of hope, based on their assigned materials:
The prospect of nuclear armageddon taking down our species at any given moment doesn’t seem nearly as likely or immediate as it did when Doctor Strangelove was released. It doesn’t even seem as big an existential threat as it was when I was a kid growing up in the 80s. If you’d declared in late 1949 that no one would use a nuclear weapon in war for at least the next 75 years most people would have probably think you naive. Somehow our species walked riiight up to the edge of total annihilation… and then took at least half a step back.
What lessons could we take away from that existential threat as we work out ways to buy some time on our other looming problems?
