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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."
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.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
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?
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.
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.
Extreme climate change /karmawhoring>
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
Kind of weak list, IMHO. For example, where is "overpopulation?"
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?
Which ones follow the Quran?
The "extremists" are the ones who DON'T want to kill nonbelievers.
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?
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
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*
My work here is dung.
18. TV show is cancelled before the plot lines are resolved leading to angry aliens storming the planet demanding to see the ending.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
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.
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...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
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.