Sometimes, the overlords at Seed have good ideas. Scienceblogs for example. The energy blog. Even the new life sciences site.
And other times, they go a bit off the deep end trying to hype up traffic by scaring the bejebus out of readers. Like today. Right now on the Sb homepage related to the latest topic at the life science blog:
What should humanity anticipate from WWIII?
Okay. Now I get bioterrorism is a serious threat. Nearly everyone in my Senate office was on Cipro after anthrax was found in the elevator on our side of the building. But that said, come on... 'WWIII'?
Alarmist some? Sure, the world's a tinderbox lately. Especially in the middle east and yes, many directions we look. But invoking the name of a war I sincerely hope we never see, is just well, irresponsible.
I'm all for Invitrogen (the blog's corporate sponsor). They make good primers for sequencing DNA and this has nothing to do with their business. And I do understand the incentive--of course, the biodefense question will spike comments and pageviews. I just hope in terms of viruses, DNA, and microorganisms, we can do a little better than frightening folks about impending world war.
Besides, our own war on bacteria is pretty darn scary enough.
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Actually WW3 will be boring and innocuous because as Einstein said, it will probably be fought with sticks and stones. Now WW4, that I cannot wait for because it will involve lots of mauling and clawing.
Plenty of other wars to fight ;-)
Einstein was making an important comment about an all-out nuclear war--there will little left of civilization or society afterwards.
If the prospect of an all-out war with nuclear weapons does not scare the hell out of you, you need to read Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth.
Nuclear weapons are terrifying. A thermonuclear weapon is designed to instantly make the air temperature above a city like the center of the Sun, for a brief instant. Anyone within 3 miles (roughly a 10 square mile area) of a 1-megaton airburst would be disintegrated or incinerated. The combined arsenal of the superpowers is enough to kill much of the worlds population instantly, because most people are concentrated in relatively small urban and suburban areas. Science fiction movies and novels that have survivors dealing with fallout suffer from the fallacy that anyone would survive the first minutes. Don't make light of a nuclear holocaust.
First, the short-lived energy blog was a good idea. But there are long-lived energy blogs out there that continue to be at the cutting edge, and no indication that the bloggers-in-chief are aware. It is a source of continuing amazement that the newly released IEA 2008 report and the in-depth follow-up analyses have been all but ignored on this blog.
Nuclear war today is as credible a threat as it was in the days of the cold war. Perhaps even greater if resource wars become more aggressive, which is likely.
I'm afraid that you demonstrate a naivete with regard to both energy and human culture.