L.F. Richardson was a British
meteorologist interested in war and wanted to understand its causes. In the years between 1820 and 1945, he collected data on the hundreds of wars that had then been fought on our planet. Richardson's results were published
posthumously in a book called 'The Statistics of Deadly
Quarrels'.
He found that the more people killed in a
war, the less likely it would occur, and the longer before you would
witness it, just as
violent storms occur less frequently than
cloudbursts. His results can be
graphed and simple
extrapolation suggests that, a war in which most of the world
population is killed will not be reached for about a thousand years (1820 + 1000=2820).
However, the
proliferation of
nuclear weapons has very likely moved the curve down and the waiting time to
Doomsday may be
ominously short. The shape of Richardson's curve is within our control, but only if humans are willing to embrace nuclear disarmament and dramatically restructure the planetary community.
(taken directly from
Carl Sagan's "
Cosmos")