Oxford University Researchers List 12 Global Risks To Human Civilization

An anonymous reader writes The 12 greatest threats to civilization have been established by Oxford University scientists, with nuclear war and extreme climate change topping the list. Published by the Global Challenges Foundation, the report explores the 12 most likely ways civilization could end. "[This research] is about how a better understanding of the magnitude of the challenges can help the world to address the risks it faces, and can help to create a path towards more sustainable development," the study's authors said. "It is a scientific assessment about the possibility of oblivion, certainly, but even more it is a call for action based on the assumption that humanity is able to rise to challenges and turn them into opportunities."

Comments

Lists

[sycodon]

I think Lists are the real problem.

How many times have they found Lists in bad guy's pockets?

1. Steal some cash
2. Beat up old lady
3. Shoot up a crowd.
4. Go home and chill with some Jamaican...and not the kind with dreadlocks.

Peak oil?

[Anonymous Coward]

We're now forty years after the first oil shock, and, for lack of a valid alternative, oil still runs 98% of transportation.

How come peak oil isn't listed?

Re:Peak oil?

[Rei]

"We're now forty years after the first oil shock ... How come peak oil isn't listed?"

Your post contains its own answer.

People have been screaming "peak oil" since the late 1800s. Meanwhile, oil resource estimates just keep rising.

It's a naive perception of how the world works that envisions that mineral resources are like some cup with some fixed, limited quantity of a resource, and once you take it all it's gone. The reality is that for every resource, there's unthinkably, mind-bogglingly vast quantities available in total. The ease of extraction generally follows an exponential curve: the easiest stuff is incredibly rare, the next easiest an order of magnitude more common, the next easiest yet another another order of magnitude, and so forth. The amount you can produce depends on your technology and your current price point. Any hike in your price point or increase in your technology consequently puts exponentially more resource onto the market. Likewise, any hike in price leads to significant increase tech research to develop new types of resources, as the potential payoff becomes massive. The exponential scaling factor of difficulty of extraction versus availability strongly discourages supply peaks.

Now, the sort of resource availability curves aren't completely smooth - some order of magnitude transitions can be easier to achieve than others. Likewise, resource markets are always going to be inherently vulnerable to long-term price swings because you have such a long lead time between the start of new projects and the reaching of full production, and even longer time periods before the start of work on new technology and it becoming commercially viable. But regardless of the swings, the long-term picture is never one of scarcity. Making the scarcity bet is not a good idea.

Now, minerals can and do peak - but rarely from supply peaks. Rather, demand peaks are far more common. The stone age didn't end because people ran out of stones.

Re:Peak oil?

[blue trane]

The only real scarcity is our knowledge.

Re:Peak oil?

[itzly]

We're probably already past conventional peak oil. People haven't noticed because of the glut of shale oil, but shale oil only provides a very short term solution.

Re:Peak oil?

[renergy]

Making the scarcity bet is not a good idea? Quoting from wiki: "...However, economists later showed that Ehrlich would have won in the majority of 10-year periods over the last century,[2][3] and if the wager was extended by 30 years to 2011, he would have won on four out of the five metals..."

Re:Peak oil?

[BlackPignouf]

+5 Insightful?
No :
-5 for bullshit, willful ignorance and not reading the article you link to :

However, economists later showed that Ehrlich would have won in the majority of 10-year periods over the last century,[2][3] and if the wager was extended by 30 years to 2011, he would have won on four out of the five metals.[3]

You might want to take a look at this article about the energy trap : http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...
You're talking about extraction price, you should talk about the energy return on investment : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
Once it costs more energy to retrieve oil than to leave it in the ground, we'll have a big problem, and that hasn't been mentioned one bit by TFA.

Re:Peak oil?

[Rei]

EROEI is only relevant when looked at as an entire system perspective.

The Luftwaffe in the latter part of WWII was largely fuelled with aviation fuel made from coal. The primitive coal to liquids technology they used was very inefficient tech consuming way more energy of coal than it produced jet fuel (highly negative EROEI). Yet it kept the Germans in the air until the plants were bombed.

How can that possibly be? How could a negative EROEI work? Simple: because the net energy picture was still positive. Energy from coal in, less energy from jet fuel out. And the economic picture worked because you can't stick coal in a jet's fuel tank and fly it.

Oil doesn't have to be some super high EROEI fuel to work. It doesn't even have to be a positive EROEI fuel to work. So long as you can put it in your gas tank, and so long as the world can produce energy to make it, it can get alone just fine.

Even as it stands, oil is already a fuel whose value is many times higher than its raw energy value. Compare the per-BTU costs of coal or natural gas to that of oil - even in our current low oil price regime. Oil's value isn't it's energy value. It's the ability to drive an engine with it that makes it valuable. Changing other forms of energy into oil is a perfectly realistic economic proposition.

That said, in reality, oil is far, far from a negative EROEI, and won't be going negative for a long, long time, if ever - not that that matters.

Re:Peak oil?

[funwithBSD]

It is, but probably not for the reasons most people think.

The biggest issue is food security. There are probably 2 or 3 Billion people that cannot be fed unless we have oil for food production. More if you assume transportation is down, as there are concentrations of food where there are not concentrations of people.

 

I'm surprised by number 1 on the list.

[Anonymous Coward]

1) Systemd

I wasn't expecting it, but now that I've thought about it more, it does make perfect sense. Systemd is perhaps the most harmful thing to have ever happened to the Linux community. It has caused more strife, discontent, anger, animosity and uncertainty than even Microsoft or SCO ever managed to cause.

It was forced, through slimy political means, upon all Debian users. This has ruined the reliability and stability of Debian, which in turn has torn apart the Debian community.

And since Linux is the most important thing to all of humanity, anything that harms Linux in such a manner is clearly harmful to the entire world and human race. So, yeah, it does make sense why systemd would be the number one threat.

You've got to hand it to them

[gdr]

From the article:

Finally, the researchers warn of “unknown unknowns” and call for “extensive research” into “unknown risks and their probabilities”.

Scientists researching field A call for more research into field A. Also, as there will always be "unknown unknowns" that funding should continue indefinitely.

Not too hard

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Putin
2. Putin
3. Putin
4. Putin
5. Putin
6. Putin
7. Putin
8. Putin
9. Putin
10. Putin
11. Putin

and I bet you thought I would put Putin in 12.

12. Putin

YOu were right!

So humans are the biggest problem.

[The Grim Reefer]

If you look at this list, the majority of these problems are man-made. Other than a super volcano and an asteroid impact, the solution seems pretty simple. We must abandon all technology and kill all but a small percentage of the population. And those that are left must live in isolated groups. That way there will not be a world wide disease outbreak.

Re:So humans are the biggest problem.

[invid]

Growing up in the 70s and 80s I always thought that by this time I would be driving along in some barren post-apocalyptic wasteland in my cobbled-together hot-rod fighting off mohawked motorcycle gangs and saving busty babes from mutant frog-people. Instead I'm reading slashdot in my cubical as my code compiles. Sigh.

TLDR - here's the list

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

Extreme climate change
Nuclear war
Global pandemic
Major asteroid impact
Super volcano
Ecological catastrophe
Global system catastrophe
Synthetic biology
Nanotechnology
Artificial intelligence
Future bad global governance
Unknown consequences /karmawhoring>

Kind of weak list, IMHO. For example, where is "overpopulation?"

Re:TLDR - here's the list

[XxtraLarGe]

Future bad global governance

Unlike current bad global governance, which isn't a threat at all...

Re:Islam

[Anonymous Coward]

The Islam that marches people to the beach and cuts off their heads?

Or burns people alive in a cage in a public square?

Or sells women and children in sexual slavery?

Or flies airliners into office buildings?

Or blows up buses, cafes, churches, synagogs, government buildings, hotels, or anything place else innocent people gather?

Or maybe they Islam that cuts the throat of film makers and then leaves a note attached to their chest with a fucking knife?

Then there's the Islam that breaks into a publisher's office and guns down 12 people because of a cartoon.

There are so many...or, is it really just one Islam that does it all.

The only that's responsible for nearly 300,000 deaths in Syria alone.

Re:What solution?

[Anonymous Coward]

As opposed to our glorious private industry leaders who:
1) Lobby the government to shut down the "competition" they claim to worship?
2) Lobby the government to minimize the "risk" the claim to embrace?
3) Seek rent?
4) Leverage every technology possible to reduce their costs while keeping prices the same?

Re:Islam

[Anonymous Coward]

Which ones follow the Quran?

The "extremists" are the ones who DON'T want to kill nonbelievers.

Re:Fear Mongering FTW

[Penguinisto]

Funny thing... they only mentioned the end of civilization, not the end of humanity - there is a distinction.

Overall, there are only IMHO two that are probable (bad governance, economic/system collapse), and one distant potential (ecological destruction). Then again, it doesn't take a tinfoil-hat wearer or a bible thumper to appreciate them; they seem kind of straightforward.

I'm sorry, but the rest are either stacked with incredible/'winning-powerball-jackpot-two-times-in-a-row' level odds (e.g. asteroid strike), or are obviously driven by ideology more than anything else ("extreme climate change").

Few civilizations have lasted longer than a couple of centuries, and fewer still longer than a millennia or so. Of the small handful that have (China, India, Roman Empire), none of them have lasted too long without going through fundamental changes and a lot of bloodshed. I fully expect our current global civilization to collapse sometime within the next hundred years (sooner if the USD collapses), but it's the very nature of human civilization; there will be a dark period where some (hopefully most) knowledge is saved, followed by a rebirth of sorts lifetimes down the road.

Sounds depressing, but just be glad that you live in such a wondrous time, eh?

Burst Forth, Publish Your Policy Report!

[eldavojohn]

If you look at this list, the majority of these problems are man-made. Other than a super volcano and an asteroid impact, the solution seems pretty simple. We must abandon all technology and kill all but a small percentage of the population. And those that are left must live in isolated groups. That way there will not be a world wide disease outbreak.

Yep, that's the only option. There's nothing between doing nothing and that option. It's all we have. And if anyone starts to talk about mitigation strategies, planning ahead of time or devoting a single cent of taxpayer money toward preparing for it, we are just all going to have a meltdown and throw a tantrum with teabags on our hats. Thank god we have these strawman arguments for what these ivory tower Oxford elitists are telling us to do: eliminate the human race to protect the human race. I cannot believe they would actually come to that conclusion but there it is, right in the article. Those environmentalists will have us starving in mud huts by the end of the month if we just sit by and let this academic report go unabated and without criticism!

*tortured sigh*

Its time for an american solution

[nimbius]

Gentlemen as an american i belive i can lend clarity to this alarmist list of, as you say, poppycock.
1. Extreme Climate Change: not a problem. climate change is actually just a theory, not a fact, advanced by scienists in order to get attention and grant money.
2. Nuclear War: no problem at all. If iraq, afghanistan, and viet-nam are any indication then rest assured America would win a nuclear war by winning the hearts and minds of whatever we were bombing.
3. Ecological Catastrophe: Again, we solved this by offering loans to banks and car companies in exchange for not restroying our ecology and creating more jobs.
4. Global Pandemic: Well obviously Ebola is a great example. Here we have a disease that has existed undetected by american scientists for probably 10 years, and then we cured it through declaring war on it. now theres no more ebola.
5. Global System Collapse: Easily defeated by avoiding taco bell and undercooked meat.
6. Major Asteroid Impact: during simulations and documentary, science has proven bruce willis would defeat the asteroid.
7. Supervolcano: not sure what that one is, but if its not a flavour of frozen confection or a menu item at ChiChis, we've got a war for it.
8. Synthetic Biology: clearly outlawed according to jesus unless we're talking about chia pets.
9. Nanotechnology: in america we have soap with little plastic scrubby beads that comes out of a pump. we're using nanotechnology responsibly and a lemon-scented fresh way.
10. Artificial Intelligence: Was an excellent movie but also did you know? we have self driving cars that use artificial intelligence to get us through the mcdonalds drive through safely without having to get the dashboard all greasy
11. Uncertain Risks: sometimes those are the risks you gotta take, like for example during our patrio-tastic invasion mind saving trip to iraq for freedom...how did we know ISIS would suddenly appear out of nowhere? thats why we have a plan for uncertain risks and a friend in jesus.
12. Future Bad Global Governance: Electing Jeb Bush or Sarah Palin would help the globals by making sure the governance is true and strong. and patriotic. we'd keep a list of baddies too, and probably make an axis of awesome countries that would be in charge of truthiness and justice.

Re:Some Missing Items...

[Jason Levine]

18. TV show is cancelled before the plot lines are resolved leading to angry aliens storming the planet demanding to see the ending.

Re:Fear Mongering FTW

[Anonymous Coward]

The scariest scenario is that we end up in a stable state similar to how Europe languished for over 1000 years with tiny, feuding dukedoms and duchies, where because of the constant warfare, any attempts at trade would be impossible, since any traders would be killed and their goods taken for a dukedom's coffers... or killed and the goods burned so it doesn't go to the next dukedom on the list. This was a very stable state where no progress could be made in technology or the arts... until the Black Plague make it impossible for the ruling class to have enough backs to flog to keep themselves on top. Subsistance peasants could grow things like olives instead of crops needed for food, and up sprang the Renaissance when before the plague, large nations that had the means to do things were just a pipe dream.

This nightmare can easily hit us again. Europe and the US are a lot like Rome where instead of bread and circuses, it is beard oil and iPhones. The barbarians are already at the gate, and unlike a conquering Rome which "embraced and extended" Greece's civilization, they are interested in nothing but destruction. Knowledge can be saved, but with the ethic that groups [1] like the Taliban and ISIS have (destroying the Buddhist statues for example, as well as burning film archives), it will be a lot harder to preserve items from our current civilization than it was back after Rome fell and a lot of scrolls and libraries wound up in Persia for safekeeping.

Our civilization is robust. Europe was nearly eradicated by WWII, but it is the beacon of light for the world now. However, it wouldn't take much for a global war to start that would involve every nation out there [2].

However, if enough of the world got destroyed, the ability to get back to working on state of the art technology may not happen. One needs the tools to make the tools, ad nauseum. Destroying an energy infrastructure would put things back in a dark age for a long time, since coal and oil are musts to keep the lights on, and nuclear requires a civilization level to keep running. Transportation is also vital, for rare earths, coal, water, food, and other basics to keep a civilization active.

As for decentralized energy, they all have issues. Solar is good, but is one EMP blast away from being history.

Which leaves hydroelectric and geothermal... and those are only usable in only a few regions, which would leave the rest of the world sans power.

Without power and transportation, there would be starvation in the billions, since there is no way a densely packed city like Signapore, Dubai, or even London can support itself by food grown in a nearby radius. Even here in the US, if the trucks stopped going into NYC, in 1-3 days, the entire city will wind up a giant Donner party.

What can one do? Here in the US, one is fairly lucky -- arable land is available with wells to be dug. 5-20 acres can keep a family fed, with a critical mass of available livestock around so life can go on even if anything more high tech than a horse-drawn carriage was rendered inoperable. Getting out of the "hives" is a high priority since one's life is at the mercy of the city's administration if push comes to shove.

[1]: Again, one has to note that Islamic countries were the ones that kept Roman and Greek history from being lost in time while the average European had an average lifespan of a Justin Bieber fan (if they didn't starve to death, they were killed by the nobles for sport.) It is the extreme offshoots from the Wahhabi philosophy that view only setting up a thanatocracy as one's sole goal in life. It is ironic that the group/religion which preserved Western religion and culture for centuries, now has extremist sects devoted to its destruction.

[2]: This can easily be started. If Russia completely collapsed and neighboring countries started claiming territory, this would bring every single country in, either in hopes of a land grab, or preventing an enemy from doing so. We saw shades of this a century ago when countries came to Russia to fend off others. Even the US did this... and this is still a sore point with Russians, especially when Murmansk and Archangelsk are brought up.

Overpopulation is a myth; abundance a reality

[Paul Fernhout]

See: http://overpopulationisamyth.c...

In general, as Julian Simon wrote, the (educated, nourished, healthy) human imagination is the ultimate resource that invents all other resources, so in general the more people you have, the more imagination you have. For example, woudl we have the internet if someone in the 1600s had decided there were too many people because London was overcrowded and killed off all but a million humans on the planet? The solar system can probably support quadrillions of people living in space habitats that can duplicate themselves from sunlight and asteroidal ore like JD Bernal imagined in the 1920s.
http://www.juliansimon.com/wri...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/...
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...

That list is very similar to what I had listed here in back in 1999 (minus a few fanciful ones):
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
"The race is on to make the human world a better (and more resilient) place before one of these overwhelms us:
        Autonomous military robots out of control
        Nanotechnology virus / gray slime
        Ethnically targeted virus
        Sterility virus
        Computer virus
        Asteroid impact
        Y2K
        Other unforseen computer failure mode
        Global warming / climate change / flooding
        Nuclear / biological war
        Unexpected economic collapse from Chaos effects
        Terrorism w/ unforseen wide effects
        Out of control bureaucracy (1984)
        Religious / philosophical warfare
        Economic imbalance leading to world war
        Arms race leading to world war
        Zero-point energy tap out of control
        Time-space information system spreading failure effect (Chalker's Zinder Nullifier)
        Unforseen consequences of research (energy, weapons, informational, biological)"

But in the end, I think the issue raised in my sig is the biggest challenge: the perilous irony of people using the tools of material abundance in a war-like way as if material scarcity was still a major concern, as well as derivative issues like the moral problem of creating artificial scarcity under capitalism and so on. There are possible solutions to such issues (basic income, expanded gift economy, improved subsistence via 3D printing and personal agricultural robots and indoor agriculture and solar panels and so on, participatory democratic planning supported by the internet), but ideology and existing artificial-scarcity-based power structures stands in the way. Still, the dominant ideology is slowly shifting top a more open and abundance-oriented one. As Buckminster Fuller said decades ago, whether it will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end...

Re:Fear Mongering FTW

[Daniel Hoffmann]

The problem is that globalization means that EVERYONE collapses at the SAME time, all those old civilizations collapsed over an extended period of time and most parts of the world were not affected directly by their downfall. I don't think our retrospective lessons of past events will help much for the future in this case.

Re:Fear Mongering FTW

[HornWumpus]

EMP is overrated as a hazard. In lab tests, typical cars needed to be power cycled to reboot their computers. Electromagnetic emission regulations effectively mean all consumer products are lightly EMP shielded these days. Power grid is another question.

General Jack Pershing made two really ballsy, fantastic decisions in his carrier.

1. He told the English/French high command 'Fuck no! You guys are incompetent jackasses. Just give us part of the front.' (para) when they wanted to use American soldiers as replacements in English and French units in WWI.

2. He told the US congress via the press: 'Get us the fuck out of here, this place is a mess and we are only making things worse' (para) when in command of the 'Allied Expeditionary Force' in Russia after WWI.

It's a safe bet he personally saved a million lives and shortened WWI.

If Russia collapsed, there would be a little nipping at the edges. Mostly nations taking their land back. Nobody want's to try to control Russia proper. Besides which; their nukes aren't going anywhere.

Russia's 'Government' is a show, same as everywhere. The real power there will not collapse in any case.