Are we at risk of a nuclear attack?

Imagine. You’re in Japan. It’s August 6, 1945. You are in Hiroshima on a business trip. An American B-29 drops an atomic bomb on the city. You witness the apocalypse. You get burned but you survive and return to your hometown. Nagasaki. And three days later it’s apocalypse again when the second atomic attack in human history is launched. And you survive again.

This is exactly what happened to Tsutomu Yamaguchi, now 93 years old. He just has become the first person certified as a survivor of both atomic bombings by the United States.

Researching for our documentary film THE THAW OF WAR we found that the risk of us witnessing something similar in our lifetime is growing. Peeps who grew up in the 70’s and 80’s remember how aware we were made of nuclear annihilation. But now it doesn’t seem to be on anyone’s radar so much anymore.

Disaster-medicine expert Irwin Redlener reminds us the threat is still real. He looks at some of history’s farcical countermeasures. But he kicks off with the big question: ARE WE AT RISK OF A NUCLEAR ATTACK? Redlener’s presentation is part of the TED series, which I think is just brilliant and worth coming back over and over again.

BTW: If you have any input on who to interview, what other topics to cover and/or research please leave us a note here.

Genocide is not enough?

Why do we humans still engage in war although the next global confrontation will end civilization as we know it? One of the central questions in our doc THE THAW OF WAR.

In our research we’re going back in history – way back – in order to find out how evolution has its share in this. And it certainly does. There are clues that our “team aggression” is something we inherited from our ancestors. And we still act by it on a daily basis.

And I stumbled over something else: It’s very likely that we humans had our share in the extinction of the Neanderthals. This would make the Neanderthals the very first species we “modern” humans annihilated in our history. At least that we know of. So genocide is not where we draw the line? We also go for “specicide”?

I added a video about DID MAN KILL NEANDERTHALS. One thing in this video: Towards the end they talk about determining the genes of Neanderthals. Since they put this video online this process evolved. The Max Planck Institute in Leipzig now completed a first rough draft of the Neanderthal genome just a month ago. The genetic evidence suggests that humans and Neanderthals are very similar, but that the two species probably didn’t interbreed.

By the way if you want to listen to something your and my ancestor has possibly “specicized”:
Using 50,000-year-old fossils from France and a computer synthesizer, a science team has generated a recording of how a Neanderthal would pronounce the letter “e.”