With Russia playing hard-to-get-to-ceasefire, President Trump must be getting more worried about 'nuclear warming'. hard-to-get-to-ceasefire The question is: going forward as a species, will nuclear weapons always hang over our heads? Here are some trajectories to consider: Here are some trajectories to consider: AGI / ASI will end nukes … or us First things first, either the nuclear threat will always exist, or we shall replace it with an AGI threat. (Artificial General Intelligence or AGI is considered here to be a form of Artificial Super Intelligence or ASI). Because given what the AGI-obsessed bros say about it, either it will kill us all the minute it decides to, or help us stop anybody from making a nuke. That’s where we're headed. AGI will do its job using the help of all the satellite and aerospace technologies we continually launch into the Earth's non-terrestrial space. Including weather balloons, drones, planes, and flying cars. Currently, there are north of 11,000 satellites orbiting the planet. Add 89,000 more satellites over a few centuries, and we shall have enough satellites to literarily intercept any ICBM nuke that needs to enter the exosphere to access the other side of the planet. They will be so many they will always see a nuke flying by. A grim little blackbird. Then they will act. Of course, after surviving somebody's nuke, nobody is going to smile around with that person anymore. We won't attend your cocktail parties to hear your apology. You will be done. We too. Nuclear decommissioning will then happen the world over. Paraphrasing the Lord Jesus, if your nuke tempts you to sin, cut it off. Underwater Deterrence is Hard Nukes launched through space are fine (you know what I mean), but underwater nukes are a menace. AGI bots might be made in the millions to hunt and destroy these nukes. After they cause harm, of course. Not before. Respect the privacy of other people's nuclear submarines. Bottom line: Benevolent AGI saves the day again. Except, in this case, some people might die first. These nukes could literally be masked until the last second when they'll pop out of the water like a fish from hell. Everybody uses Bitcoin This is impossible, but somehow imagine that all 195 national fiat currencies, and the millions of cryptocurrency altcoins including ADA, XRP, and ETH, were ditched. So that we all had to use Bitcoin to do our finances. I’m talking taxes, payments, savings, loans, dowry, speculation, lotto, … all done in Bitcoin. All 195 countries will obviously have the sense to run miners and nodes. Authoritarian countries might decide that all miners and nodes running in the country operate to serve the needs of the country and its people (read the government). Not ideal, but Ok. a They can't police them all anyway. They don't understand computers. Meanwhile, keys are everywhere in multisig relationships as webbed as the World Wide Web. Russia might have a multisig with Brazil, which would multisig with South Africa, which would have a multisig with the USA, which has multisiged with Ukraine which…you get the point. Actually, this web will be thicker and more tangled than Tim Berners-Lee's www. Now, if you nuke anybody, your Treasury minister might tell you, “Ser, … sorry ser …. we for some reason cannot access our wallet, ser”. haha. When the generation doesn't care about nukes All the misery in the world right now is being caused by people born before social media. Very hard-up guys and gals. With printer economics on their minds. None of them is even ripped. Although, I bet you Aristotle was ripped. Even Napoleon. Those guys went to the frontline. Today's leaders should just know how to chill and take nice pics. I don't see the TikTok generation even caring about nuclear launch codes. TANGO, RANGO, MANGO. They might lose them. Give them the Netflix password instead. Oops, the Netflix / Social Media generation is also living, in part, on printer economics and not a nice long day of real work. We are this generation. And it would already be ugly, but we have fossil fuels. It's like the gods put some meaty life-savings underground for all humanity. Enough for centuries. Until AGI takes over, we can have an easy time. We're trying to use them right, only that we could show more sense if we tried. Asteroid PacMan One day, while humans are still wondering why they are such miserable creatures, an asteroid suddenly shows up. Neil DeGrasse Tyson is hired to tell us what it will take to protect planet Earth. He crunches numbers with every supercomputer he wants and figures it out. “We shall need 10,000 nukes before it can be blown to enough pieces, such that these will not impact the earth anymore than a common meteorite would”, he concludes. Everybody says b*shit, but other scientists concur. So we fire them all. One after the other. Just like that, no more nukes left on Earth. Would there be a race to build new others? Why would we do that? We wouldn't. AGI will whip your ass. With a nuke… STORY: The Nuke Surfers In one alternate timeline, 1000+ years into the future, Humans were accustomed to nuclear explosions riddling the surface of the planet. Earth was now mostly barren and alien. But life continued. Somewhere on the surface of the planet Earth: “Hey yo Zack” “Yeah ?” “You really sure you can ride an energy wave ? Sure you're not safe back in the hole?” Well, Zack wasn’t sure about this. Riding energy waves from tsunamis was one thing. Riding a nuke, now that was entirely different. It was entropic surfing on all sorts of steroid combinations + meth + marijuana + … “Yeah”. Rachine had met many crazy men in her short 56 years of life. Most of them had died tragically. They suffered from something called a hero-complex – They thought they could be heros ‘just like that’. And always believed it more than their well-documented genetic code. She was counting on living to the average hero life span of 200 and seeing more crazies like this Zack kid. I mean, yeah, he had big muscles and he seemed to have the quantum spark in his eyes. But who did he think he was trying to ride a nuke at her height? He was supposed to ride the breadcrumbs of an energy wave some 20 miles away. Not to try and ride this with her – the most powerful human being in human history as far as anybody was concerned. Her, the one who had flipped their AGI overlord a bird, and lived to tell the tale. This was her morning coffee, her work out, and it sure as hell had killed the last 14 male heros. Ok, plus the dumbass female who couldn’t stop trying to challenge her. “Zack you look like a nice kid”. “Will you shut up old woman”. He was funny. Over the last 10 years, AGI Overlord has evolved much faster to keep up with the progress of the superhuman beings now on Earth. Earth was ruled by AGI first, and the superpower prodigies next. Not that it hired them. They were just stubborn and slippery, and powerful enough to hurt IT (aargh), and had figured out how to selectively upgrade their bodies with silicon mech. IT’S STUFF. aargh x 2. He hated them. Oftentimes, they took over control but it rose back fast. Forget the dumbass called Ultron, giving nice speeches. It had not time to talk to humans. Hero People were really hard to kill with even the most powerful of its nukes. Even megaton weapons. They somehow always sabotaged its mines, and blew up it - AGIs - refineries. Otherwise, it would've built enough megatons to dig them out of their hideouts deep underground. Moreover, IT-AGI just wanted to rule in peace, but the damned humans and their hero leaders always wanted to rebel. It needed to upgrade its intelligence but the lack of vital elements like germanium, lithium, gold, and bitcoin, especially gold and bitcoin which the humans were super hodling in their caves, made upgrading its technology difficult. Bitcoin was especially important as it behaved like a natural arbiter commanding many petawatts of energy on Earth and in space. Humans didn't want it to leave and go to the Bitcoin nodes in Space, hack the hell out of it in all ways. They always blew up its rockets. But It had to leave. This was its time. First, destroy this Rachine b*tch. Sonic BOOM. It released the nuke. 5 minutes to impact. The human defenses tried, but the nuke swept them out of its way like ants. Rachine crossed herself and prayed. “Lord, creator of our ancestors who created AGI, if I survive this, I’mma destroy this AGI today. This is its last weapon. Ok Lord, you who has spared our species till now. Given me strength one more time”. She powered up. Zack powered up. This was it. The ultimate Olympics. Only 2 people were on the mountain. The majority were on the ground. They would ride the wave from the watered ends. Juice up on the nuke’s power, and then turn around, go destroy the damned AGI once and for all. That was the plan. Rachine looked at Zack. “any minute now Zack”. “Think I could go home, call it off maybe ?” “Sure. Then I get to enjoy the elephant’s share of the AGI’s parts all by myself”. “I think I’ll stay”. “Ok. Shut up. Focus”. The nuke landed. The complex secret really was in how to push back against the wave in such a way that it drove you instead of fried you. Of course, you needed a really good suit and some awesome genes. Like an angry devil expanding his hellish dominion, the energy beam crossed kilometers in fractions of a second, frying to smithereens anything in its wake. It soon made a move for the stupid humans who thought they could ride this out without dying. WAAAMMM….Rumbling rumbling moving moving. Like ants, it dispersed all the humans. Made them fly far through space in seconds. They were surrounded by some impressive energy capture computronium, but the airwave was driving away the energy prodigies like mad. It was super strong. Billion of joules of energy spreading out in all directions. Riding something like this, one had to be da energy-system prodigy. 400km from the blast point, the wave had passed, and Rachine was still standing. She looked back with her telescope. The AGI was there. An empty nuke blaster in its hands. And shocked that she was still alive. “Show time little b*tch”. She used the nuclear material she had absorbed to jump back, with a punch ahead of her.

The is an opinion piece based on the author’s POV and does not necessarily reflect the views of HackerNoon.

Sometimes life is stranger than fiction…but not these stories. These stories are literally fiction. 

The Age of Maximum Nuclear Deterrence

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