LF Richardson was a British meteorologist interested in war and collected data on hundreds wars occurred in our poor planet between 1820 and 1945. And with these empirical data produced the curve we can see here.
Richardson was interested in knowing the time to wait for a war that sweeps away a certain number of victims and for this he invented an index, M , the magnitude of a war . So a war of magnitude M = 3 would be a mere skirmish and only kill a thousand people (10 3 ). M = M = 5 or 6 would be most serious wars that killed 100,000 people (5 10) or one million (10 6). The first and second world war had higher magnitudes (in the graph we see that the 2 nd had a value of 7.7).
Richardson found that the more people died in a war less likely they were to occur, and more time would pass before witnessed. He suggested that if the curve extends to values M very small, leading to M = 0, it predicts the approximate global incidence of murders anywhere in the world someone is killed every 5 minutes. According to him, individual assassinations and large-scale wars are the two ends of a continuum, an unbroken curve.
In the diagram the solid line is the time to wait for a war of magnitude M, ie the average time we would expect to witness a war that kills 10 M people (where M represents the number of zeros after the one).
look
when the Richardson curve cuts the vertical bar, we have specified the time to wait for the day of reckoning, the years that will elapse until the entire population of Earth is destroyed in a great war. According to Richardson curve and simple extrapolation of the future growth of the human population, the two lines do not intersect until the 30th century, more or less, and the final trial is adjourned.
But the Second World War was of magnitude 7.7 and it killed about 50 million people. The advanced technology of death so sinister. Was first used nuclear weapons have done, but increase destructive power ever since. Therefore the top of the Richardson curve is moving down an unknown quantity. If your new position has been at some point in the shaded region of the figure, we have only a few decades until Doomsday.
Therefore, the dismantling of nuclear weapons should be the first and principal purpose of humanity if we want it to be safe than it is a real threat to the survival of our species.
