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Global Catastrophe, Even Human Extinction, Isn't All That Unlikely (theatlantic.com)
HughPickens.com writes: Robinson Meyer writes in The Atlantic that in its annual report on "global catastrophic risk," the Global Challenges Foundation estimates the risk of human extinction due to climate change -- or an accidental nuclear war at 0.1 percent every year. That may sound low, but when extrapolated to century-scale it comes to a 9.5 percent chance of human extinction within the next hundred years. The report holds catastrophic climate change and nuclear war far above other potential causes, and for good reason citing multiple occasions when the world stood on the brink of atomic annihilation. While most of these occurred during the Cold War, another took place during the 1990s, the most peaceful decade in recent memory. The closest may have been on September 26, 1983, when a bug in the U.S.S.R. early-warning system reported that five NATO nuclear missiles had been launched and were bound for Russian targets. The officer watching the system, Stanislav Petrov, had also designed the system, and he decided that any real NATO first-strike would involve hundreds of I.C.B.M.s. Therefore, he resolved the computers must be malfunctioning. He did not fire a response.
Climate change also poses its own risks. [PDF] According to Meyer, serious veterans of climate science now suggest that global warming will spawn continent-sized superstorms by the end of the century. Sebastian Farquhar says that even more conservative estimates can be alarming: UN-approved climate models estimate that the risk of six to ten degrees Celsius of warming exceeds 3 percent, even if the world tamps down carbon emissions at a fast pace... Any year, there's always some chance of a super-volcano erupting or an asteroid careening into the planet. Both would of course devastate the areas around ground zero -- but they would also kick up dust into the atmosphere, blocking sunlight and sending global temperatures plunging.
Natural pandemics may pose the most serious risks of all. In fact, in the past two millennia, the only two events that experts can certify as global catastrophes of this scale were plagues. The Black Death of the 1340s felled more than 10 percent of the world population. Another epidemic of the Yersinia pestis bacterium -- the "Great Plague of Justinian" in 541 and 542 -- killed between 25 and 33 million people, or between 13 and 17 percent of the global population at that time. The report briefly explores other possible risks: a genetically engineered pandemic, geo-engineering gone awry, an all-seeing artificial intelligence. "We do not expect these risks to materialize tomorrow, or even this year, but we should not ignore them," says Farquhar. "Although many risks are addressed by specific groups, we need to build a community around global catastrophic risk. Cooperation is the only way for global leaders to manage the risks that threaten humanity."
Climate change also poses its own risks. [PDF] According to Meyer, serious veterans of climate science now suggest that global warming will spawn continent-sized superstorms by the end of the century. Sebastian Farquhar says that even more conservative estimates can be alarming: UN-approved climate models estimate that the risk of six to ten degrees Celsius of warming exceeds 3 percent, even if the world tamps down carbon emissions at a fast pace... Any year, there's always some chance of a super-volcano erupting or an asteroid careening into the planet. Both would of course devastate the areas around ground zero -- but they would also kick up dust into the atmosphere, blocking sunlight and sending global temperatures plunging.
Natural pandemics may pose the most serious risks of all. In fact, in the past two millennia, the only two events that experts can certify as global catastrophes of this scale were plagues. The Black Death of the 1340s felled more than 10 percent of the world population. Another epidemic of the Yersinia pestis bacterium -- the "Great Plague of Justinian" in 541 and 542 -- killed between 25 and 33 million people, or between 13 and 17 percent of the global population at that time. The report briefly explores other possible risks: a genetically engineered pandemic, geo-engineering gone awry, an all-seeing artificial intelligence. "We do not expect these risks to materialize tomorrow, or even this year, but we should not ignore them," says Farquhar. "Although many risks are addressed by specific groups, we need to build a community around global catastrophic risk. Cooperation is the only way for global leaders to manage the risks that threaten humanity."
There were many close calls during the cold war, roughly 10 to 20 serious ones, depending on how you score them.
I suspect we are still here out of a kind of anthropic principle luck: if those close calls triggered WW3, the vast majority of us wouldn't be here pondering our good luck. Dead people don't ponder.
Table-ized A.I.
I have heard either indirectly or from the horse's mouth about all kinds of close calls. Birds appearing like a hailstorm of missiles, errors, flights off course, etc.
Then there are the scarier stories about Stalin in his last days 100% sure that the US was going to order a first strike, and thus he should beat them to the punch. I would also not be surprised if some US military advisors over the years thought that a US first strike would somehow have been a good idea. Assuming this to be true, how few people did they have to convince to make it so?
Then we have the classics like the Cuban missile crisis.
Importantly many military analysts have pointed out that if the NATO and the Soviets had ever started to go toe to toe in some actual conflict, such as NATO stepping in for Hungary that it would have resulted in one side or the other beginning to lose, this might have escalated to local tactical battlefield nukes, which might have escalated to strategic nukes.
With Kent Brockman
a mere 15 million years ago CO2 levels were 4 times higher, average temperature was several degrees warmer, and seas were 200 feet higher.
The earth was an unihabitable wasteland!
no, wait, it was lusher and more fecund than now.
It's a reasonable hypothesis that returning the CO2 levels to their prehistoric norms could raise temperatures back to the previous levels. That it would cause extinction level events for humanity is ridiculous chicken little bullshit.
Because of modern sanitation, and the understanding of how to deal with quarantine, the chances of a catastrophic pandemic are really low. For comparison, think how we've eliminated malaria from most places, without actually curing it.
In fact, most of these scenarios are more of the type, "imagine the worst thing that could happen" instead of rationally estimating the probabilities.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
O sweet oblivion, where art thou?
The thing with low probability events that could wipe out humanity is that there are so many of them. It is impossible to eliminate them all. We deal with high probability risks first for a reason.
All Intelligent life is doomed, not just humans.
Given the size and age of the galaxy, there should be intelligent life on many planets and it should have been there for a very long time. Long enough that we should have detected evidence of it. But that hasn't happened. Unless estimates of the age, size, or number of planets in the Milky Way are vastly overstated, and no new knowledge suggests anything of the kind, then there really is one other likely cause: Advanced intelligent civilizations don't last for millions of years.
If it was possible, then it would have happened, and it hasn't.
Which really isn't all that surprising. The last few thousand years have been an exponential orgy of consumption. Not just fossil fuels, but phosphate deposits for fertilizers, reachable metal ores, ocean fish stocks, forest products, etc. It's all going to run out, and then what? And what happens if any disaster, including the inevitable and unavoidable ones like a meteor impact or super-volcanism, sets our technology back even a few hundred years? How do you frack for oil with 1700s technology? How do you build a nuclear reactor with no copper? How do you made food production efficient enough that everyone isn't dedicated to it without phosphates?
Human technological advancement was a one time deal. Once it's stops, that's it for this planet, never again.
I'm not sure the extinction of the human race would be a catastrophe for the rest of the earth ecosystem.
UN-approved climate models estimate that the risk of six to ten degrees Celsius of warming exceeds 3 percent, even if the world tamps down carbon emissions at a fast pace......Any year, there's always some chance of a super-volcano erupting or an asteroid careening into the planet...but they would also kick up dust into the atmosphere, blocking sunlight and sending global temperatures plunging.
This is why all right thinking individuals support an increase in global warming efforts because the slight chance of a rise in the earths temperature due to anything mankind does offsets the same chance of climactic decline from meteors and nuclear war.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The summary is misleading. No article mentions extinctions due to climate change. A huge temperature change would cause migration towards the poles, and may cut food supply and kill some people, but not all.
The article that mentions the 10% figure (The Atlantic article) says that a pandemic is the most likely to cause extinction, eg. the 521AD plague killed 13 to 17% of the world's population. But that didn't make it into the sensational summary.
"an accidental nuclear war at 0.1 percent every year"
What does classifying a nuclear war as accidental add? What does that even look like? "Oops"?
And this is the problem with climate change. How can we take this very serious issue to heart when you get garbage like this predicting global extinction and the end of the human race.
Humans are the most resilient species in the world. We live in Siberia. We live in the Sahara. The notion that we'll go extinct due to climate change is laughable. Unless "extinct" in this context means a few hundred million displaced simply because they want to keep the lifestyle they are accustomed to (i.e. move because of weather, move because their water front property is now an under water property etc).
I rate the chance of human extinction this century at zero percent. 9% chance of humans being greatly impacted due to their own activity is believable, but that doesn't make for a very exciting headline.
I think the estimate is MUCH too low for two reasons:
One, artificial pandemics are ignored. Just because we haven't had one yet is NOT evidence. At this point, a well funded research lab could probably create a doomsday virus or fungi, and as genetic technologies continue to advance, the threat will soon be within the economic capabilities of individual madmen. Unfortunately, we've never had a sufficient shortage of madmen.
Two, the Fermi Paradox. Any intelligent and long-lived (on the order of 100,000 years) species could (with our own pitiful level of technology) create a radio beacon that would have spanned the entire Milky Way Galaxy by now. Either they want to want to be quiet (and presumably have good reason) or no technological society lasts that long.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Do the math.
The 9.5% figure comes from the simple statistical calculation of surviving 100 events that are 1 in a 1000 (0.1%) and independent; 1 - (0.999 ^ 100). If the events in question are not independent then the presumption is false. Surviving N years of global warming has no impact on the probability of surviving the N+1th year? I think not (regardless of what you believe the impact or survivability of global warming is).
The bigger problem is the idiocy of the 0.1 percent per year number.... Given that in the entirety of human history (and I am aware of the tautology) there have been precisely 0 extinction events, even nuclear war is not an extinction event, none of the cold war modelling considered the outcome extinction (example critique https://www.uow.edu.au/~bmartin/pubs/82jpr.html). A supervolcano (let's assume of the size of yellowstone) probably a number of multiples of Mt. Tambora, which is regarded to be the largest in recorded history probably isn't even an extinction event for an iron age human society with the size and distribution of our current population, yet alone one with our current level of technology, so you're talking a geological period event; unmeasurably small in any given year. Pandemic again unlikely for all the kind of epidemiological reasons that have precluded one so far.
Realistically the only likely extinction event is interplanetary. So we are down to the likelihood of a strike with an interplanetary body of sufficient size to catastrophically change the earth, perhaps of the scale of the moon formation (if you support that narrative). So now we are turning to interplanetary timescales and so the likelihood of one even being measurable in any given year is absurd since in the billions of years of Earth's existence we have seen, er 1.
So the orifice from which they extracted the 0.1% has probably got the head of the author of the number well and truly inserted.
You now have me thinking about the possibility of humanity creating a solar powered radio beacon (orbiting the sun at a good distance) with a decade long dead-man's switch, set to begin with a low powered signal (in case we forget about it somehow) for a few years before going full power.
The galactic equivalent of "We were here" scribbled on the bathroom stall of Sol.
Just in case we go missing and someone else somewhere else is stuck trying to solve that pesky Fermi Paradox.
Two, the Fermi Paradox. Any intelligent and long-lived (on the order of 100,000 years) species could (with our own pitiful level of technology) create a radio beacon that would have spanned the entire Milky Way Galaxy by now. Either they want to want to be quiet (and presumably have good reason) or no technological society lasts that long.
The birth rate of practically every industrialized nation is below the replacement rate. At the current rate practically all of the world will become industrialized in a few hundred years at which point the earth's population will stabilize or even start declining. The idea that advanced civilizations are destined to spread through a galaxy like locust if they just survive long enough, seems rather silly to me.
when extrapolated to century-scale it comes to a 9.5 percent chance of human extinction within the next hundred years.
This assumes that every year will be the same as the year before, with some random chance of the disasters happening. But the world and progress doesn't work like that.
Things change
So the factors that give rise to a 0.1% chance today will be subtley different next year, and the next and in 50 years time will have altered drastically. Just like the risk factors today are much different from those of 1966, when climate disasters weren't even a consideration. We are all probably worrying about the wrong things.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Donald will sell you the 3rd digit of the launch codes for $1B. But he built a wall around the 4th digit, so you can't get it.
Learn to love Alaska
The maths says that a 0.1% risk of annihilation is a 99.9% "risk" of survival. So to get to 1,000 years in the future needs 1000 consecutive years of non-annihilation, i.e. 0.999 raised to the 1000th power. That comes to about 36% chance. While not a certainty, it's a lot better than zero.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
> But that chance compounds over the course of a lifetime.
Money does that. Other things do that.
I am not a statistician, but that seems not to be the case to me.
For instance, this was mentioned recently on the radio (10 years is recent when you're old): the more you live, greater is the chance you live more. So, let's say someone has a life expectancy of 70 years. Just by living to 40 will raise the expectancy to 80 years -- numbers cooked just as an example... your mileage may vary (for once this phrase applies literally!). This is kind of Bayesian, me thinks.
To be specific, I had a chance to die in 2015 which fortunately didn't happen. My chance of dying in 2016 can be greater (if I acquired some disease), the same (another year, same chance as previous) and smaller (e.g. in case of a medical breakthrough).
Now, this is not to say we're not working hard to become extinct for a variety of causes: hunger (by killing bees), natural disasters (by gently pushing the climate down the abyss), diseases (by globe trotting every year through dangerous places) etc. etc. But this is not compounding risk in time, this is simply being stupid.
Increasingly stupid, BTW.
Israel will be the country that brings the world to and end with it's 'undeclared' stockpile of nuclear weapons. It's only a matter of time.
when extrapolated to century-scale it comes to a 9.5 percent chance of human extinction within the next hundred years.
The author doesn't understand statistics enough to extrapolate fud coming out of the Global Challenges Foundation.
If "extinction" is the level of catastrophe we're looking at, then most of these events won't meet that high a bar.
I mean, even after a major asteroid impact or even all out nuclear war there are going to be some survivors; maybe in unlikely places (nuclear submarines*, the ISS, Iceland, Antarctica). Likewise, almost every "natural" pathogen will leave resistant survivors even if there is no vaccine or cure. As long as enough are left to breed they could restart humankind (but perhaps at a very reduced level of technology/civilization). Whether or not they would ever be able to recover to our current state due to exhaustion of most easily exploited resources is another question but forever is a long time. If there are a sufficient number of survivors and IF there is a repository of knowledge that has survived (archived wikipedia perhaps?) it is probable that decades or centuries of technological development can be skipped (like going directly from wood burning furnaces to photovoltaics or wind power).
However, if there is an Intelligent enemy that is pursuing us, then our chances are much lower. A sentient A.I. that wanted to wipe out humanity could track down and eliminate those in shelter or get them when they come back out of hiding. I guess the long-living product of an intelligent enemy (like mindless "grey-goo" nanobots) could do the same thing by continuously and systematically breaking down the biosphere (and anything that re-enters it from space, the deep ocean or the polar regions). Then, unless we've recreated another biosphere somewhere else (is that why you're going to Mars, Elon Musk?) we're all dead. Of course, WE are our own intelligent enemy and a deliberate attempt to wipe ourselves out (super weapons, resilient viruses) or even big "oops!" ("gene-drive", mini-black holes, large asteroid mining near earth gone wrong), might readily succeed.
We have met the enemy and it is us.
*Okay I know that the crews of nuclear submarine are (nearly?) all men. But if there are any women left at least they'll have a good gene pool to dip from!
Aren't the launch codes 00000000 anyway?
Oh wait, they have probably been changed to 12345678 since then.
...which of 3 possibilities this article represents:
1) an attempt to spread fud to advance some agenda
2) an attempt to "strawman" fud by conflating actual real things with uncontrollables (like an asteroid strike) to advance some agenda
Or
3) just some bloviating "experts" repeating what we mostly already knew to garner attention
The odds that it's simply a well intentioned genuine warning are too small to realistically consider.
-Styopa
If you get that Indian superbug infection, chopping off legs/arms/amputations is the only thing that may work.
Thanks to dodgy kidney donor? transplants - those bugs are and have spread globally. They are bad.
My bet is life expectancy will drop from 88 for rich people to 75 in 20 years time.
Plus a lot of leg amputations when knee procedures pick up said super-bug. Sporty types deserve it anyway.
You and have X strains of Russian? Tuberculosis, that we now know 'cure' is not and it hide deep in bones,
I worry less about nuclear war, and more about hospital acquired infections.
The thing is ridiculous patent laws? mean drug companies will not share a *&^% nor will the best an brightest look at things because
some company has ring fenced that territory. The rate of true non-ever greened genuine new blockbuster discoveries has NEVER been lower .
Time for the politicians to make tangible physical drugs #1, not computer generated abstracts that block the breakthrough we will be needing.
One way or another we WILL go extinct. The universe is not eternal and be it heat death or something else at some point it will be unviable for biological being. Heck The sun will rise in luminosity and in a few hundred million year earth will be not viable anymore. Then meteor strike utterly killed dinosaurus. You think that could not happen to us if a manatan sized bollide collide with earth ? And illness evolve with time, and some of our way to fight them get obsolete. So yeah, we WILL all die sooner or later and humanity will go extinct. Now whether climate could do it is a question of assessement. if we go on like that not caring about CO2 , at some point in a few hundreds year it could be that climate become so chaotic due to the added heat, that our infrastrructure become unmaintanable. So that's back for us to low maintenance stuff. And then that is the point where high tech can be simply too costly to maintain, and that disaster CAN strike. If we can't maintain biological research and basteria/virus evolve, and they will continue unless you disbelieve evolution in addition to climate4 change, THEN disaster can strike.
If you think our tech advance can go and solve everything and we cannot fallback to lower tech , then that is fiction. Climate change could very well bring us to the brink of stress to tech and infrastructure, and somehting else make us go ovber the brink.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Why was this modded down ?
How the fuck do you think the extinction level nuclear war is going to start ???
Protip: Russia and the US arent going to start lobbing nukes at each other. Itll be Saudi Arabia and Iran, or maybe Pakistan once the Islamists take over.
Islam and its pedophile worshipping death cult followers will be the death of us all.
Movie fans have enjoyed disaster movies, so much so that there is even a "faith-based" collection if movies.
obviously some would enjoy it ( survivalists, those who want a tribal-based society ).
So what if there is a finite chance of extinction? No one can stop some of these ( natural pandemic, Yellowstone eruption, asteroid strike ),
but the others are in the hands of big government. They claim all sorts of things, as a means to pass legislation that has no bearing on the problem,
to maintian power. The possibile catastrophies are the boogeyman they claim is to be fought/controlled by their legislation....
And media push more tripe and poop than the politicians/bureaucrats. Documentaries with a message and agenda...
Meanwhile, power moms burn up more than I thought possible. As do politicians, billionaires, and Gore....
Chemicals dumped into the ocean, floating waste islands, and contaminated aquifers are real possible contributors to the likelyhood of disaster...
Mad Max, Soylent Green and such.....
Don't forget the biggest threat to civilisation; Islam. They live in the dark ages and want to force everyone else to do the same.
That, and democracies and other "run by the citizens" societies last until the "citizens" realize they can vote themselves stuff from the government coffers.
A point at which almost every successful civilization / nation state on the planet has already reached.
Assuming the statistics are true, what are we to do about it?
Move to another planet? Not likely.
Destroy enough nuclear weapons so that life is not threatened by them? Not likely.
Make changes to global energy use patterns so that our climate does not change? Not likely.
The global economic impact of attempting any combination of one or more of the above would likely have huge negative impacts on society while not achieving the goal.
This is more about power over people than anything else. As in "You give me your money and I will protect you from this scary thing, as long as you do as I say."
Look, we are going outside of the borders of recorded climate. That means nobody knows what is actually going to happen. That alone should scare the living fuck out of everyone, because of the very regularity of the cycle we are perturbing. Since CO2 levels haven't been this high since the last mass extinction, we have little to no idea what to expect. Nobody knows if the methane clathrate gun is a real possibility or not. We have simply literally never seen the climate in this condition while there have been humans on this mudball, and that means we don't know what is going to happen. Maybe the system will self-regulate and fix itself. Or maybe we've unbalanced it sufficiently that we're going to have unprecedented weather that really will more or less end us.
In addition, the probability of a comet or other large impactor striking the planet is non-zero, but we don't know what the risk actually is.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
We know for a fact that over 99.99% of species that have evolved on the Earth have become extinct, regardless of mechanism.
Thinking that our species is exempt is pure hubris.
When has human extinction ever seemed unlikely? It wouldn't take much more than what causes other species to go extinct. Climate change, over consumption of resources, or a major disruption in our source of food. We can even add something no animal is capable of doing to itself: nuclear holocaust. We're not as wonderful as we think we are sometimes.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Not that long ago all of Slashdot thought we were just a simulation.
So the real God is some dateless geek, jacked up on Mountain Dew, sitting in a dark room..in the previous simulation.
It's dateless Geeks...all the way down.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Has anyone come up with a reasonable idea of what the optimum temperature should be?
used to have vineyards in england, settlements on greenlands coast.
Of why we can't rely solely on software. Had a human not been there to apply non-linear logic (something math-based software will never be capable of, it can only do a facsimile of it based on what has been put into them) to the scenario, we could all very possibly be living in a wasteland now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas_impact_hypothesis
There was a ridiculous comet impact around 10,500 BC that caused global flooding (sea levels rose three hundred feet in [two weeks?]). Humanity survived, with a great amount of knowledge intact. We will again. There's no need to sink the world in to a deeper morass of immorality with the calls for greater centralized control.
Humans have colonized every habitat on the planet that supports any kind of population of animals, and to a large degree we did this before we had science and engineering. If anything survives, it'll be us and the cockroaches. Therefore I set the chance that humans as an entire species will disappear at zero.
Having known and met many prominent environmentalist thinkers, by in large the threat of the extinction of the entire human species doesn't occupy a lot of their thought. To the degree that they're concerned with human extinction, it's of localized populations.
These are the kinds of things they worry about:
(a) Loss of things that can only be replaced on an evolutionary timescale, like the passenger pigeon.
(b) Degradation of productive biological systems, like the Aral Sea.
(c) Exposure of vulnerable human populations to environmental costs that have been externalized by business, e.g. Bangladeshis to sea level rise or Appalachians to coal tailing dam failures.
(d) Political destabilization due to the creation of environmental refugees (e.g., Syria/ISIS).
As one well-known environmentalist put it to me, "We need to stop living off our ecological capital and start living within our ecological means." In other words rather than liquidating the last two cod in the sea, you need to live in equilibrium with the ocean's ability to generate cod, and manage the resource so that you don't damage that (e.g. limiting the damage to the base of the food chain caused by dragging nets across the sea floor).
If cod disappears, if topsoil disappears, if we develop pesticide-resistant crop pests, if breadbasket regions fail to produce, we won't see the extinction of the entire human race. We'll see localized extinctions. Fishing towns disappear; farm communities age as youth abandon them and move to cities looking for work. In all of these scenarios, some people end up doing well. But even in a global disaster that manages to disrupt our entire civilization (unlikely, but much more likely than total human extinction), there will be places where a few of us will be able to prosper.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
We tend to over-estimate how much damage so called extinction level events do - and underestimate how effective intelligence is in countering it.
My favorite example of this irrational fear is the grey goo of "nanite level von neumann machines taking over the world". Besides the fact that we already have a green goo (organic life) that did that and is far more advanced than the grey goo - the main limitation is POWER. The Green Goo did it mainly on solar power, transmitted to the more powerful green goo monsters via 'eating plants'. Nanites would be very unlikely to be able to compete with the green goo.
Basically, we are the most fearsome monster on this planet and nothing we have ever dreamed of comes close to being anywhere near as terrifying as ourselves.
Real total extinction requires astronomical level of death so it most likely means an astronomical cause. Asteroid/comet impact, gamma ray burster, etc. Those are all far less than 0.1% - more like 0.00000000001% per year.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
It rose over 300 feet at the end of the last ice age, ... Sucks if you own beachfront property but not a problem for most of humanity,
New York city is beach front property. Miami is beach front property. How much of humanity lives near the coast? - https://coastalchallenges.com/...
As I said, not an extinction event, but global catastrophe? Could be.
...give this Stanislav Petrov a medal!
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
Multiplying probabilities together works for events that you may reasonably assume to be mostly statistically independent, like asteroid impacts. It doesn't work for events like climate change or even "accidental" nuclear war. Of course, the probability estimates they are using are themselves bogus. The probability of human extinction due to climate change is zero. Climate change may destroy the property values of wealthy owners of beachfront bungalows and NYC sky scrapers, but that's not exactly a threat to humanity. The probability of human extinction from disease are also essentially zero. The probability of human extinction from nuclear war, accidental or otherwise, is likely to be zero as well. Such events may destroy advanced technological civilization, but they won't lead to the extinction of h. sapiens. So, indeed, if you pull bad probability estimates out of your ass and then combine them in a statistically incorrect way, you get scary sounding numbers.
The known events that could cause human extinctions are large impacts, supervolcanoes, and gamma ray bursts. Fortunately, they are rare, otherwise we wouldn't be around. And the only way humanity could survive them would be to accelerate technological development so that we can, in fact, survive on a hostile planet (either our own after a catastrophe or elsewhere in the solar system).
If there was a 90% reduction in human life on the planet it would make HUGE changes for the better.
I have always laughed at people that say, "we are killing the planet!" no the planet is doing great! the only way we could kill the planet is to drill very deep wells and drop and detonate every nuclear weapon we have at the same time very close to the magma so we set up pressure waves that shatter the planet, but even then it would just coalesce into a molten ball and start over again.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The end of all these type of articles always is a recommendation for more power and control by a centralized global state or NGO. No mention of the solution which actually would work,which is decentralization and resilience.
Not a mention of the most recent one, the 1918 flu pandemic.?
not even 100 years ago.
"The 1918 flu pandemic (January 1918 â" December 1920) was an unusually deadly influenza pandemic, the first of the two pandemics involving H1N1 influenza virus.[1] It infected 500 million people across the world,[2] including remote Pacific islands and the Arctic, and resulted in the deaths of 50 to 100 million (three to five percent of the world's population[3]), making it one of the deadliest natural disasters in human history"
source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
TFA certainly doesn't say. Which suggests it's not even a SWAG (Scientific Wild Ass Guess), but an old-fashioned WAG (Wild Ass Guess).
So, some group wants some publicity, and they make a Pronouncement! Which is dutifully published by some idiot with pagecount to fill.
And now we're wasting time nattering about it....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
There is indeed the unknown factor of whether there is something to human nature in the decision-making process that causes the final decision-maker in the chain to be hesitant.
One could argue there is something to human nature that makes most hesitant under such circumstances.
However, my observation of humanity is that each person varies widely, and that different people will react differently. While I agree it's not unreasonable that the majority could be hesitant, it would take a hesitancy rate of about 90% or higher to keep those 15 or so close calls from not likely causing ww3.
There is no definitive study on the issue such that it's opinion either way, but I truly doubt the hesitancy rate is close to 90%. There's just too many aggressive type-A alpha-male types out there in the military command chains.
Look what George W. did to Iraq on flimsy evidence. There's not shortage stupid gamblers in charge, including those in Congress who authorized it.
What if W were in the place of JFK during the Cuban crisis when the generals were urging him to "use it or lose it, you won't get a second chance if they launch first" (paraphrased)?
Table-ized A.I.
Really, so there is a 1 in a thousand chance of humanity exterminating itself next year? Like same chance I might roll a 00 to hit and then roll 10 damage? We face real problems, but I think the assumptions behind these numbers should be examined.
What, you thought the world-as-it-stands would last forever?
We are a bacterium on the surface of this giant geologic testicle. Only a matter of time before the universe gives us a good wash.
Wow.
Simply amazing how many people do not understand how probability works. The author of that article, for example, appears so ignorant that they can't even spell 'Probability'.
"...the Global Challenges Foundation estimates the risk of human extinction... at 0.1 percent every year. That may sound low, but when extrapolated to century-scale it comes to a 9.5 percent chance of human extinction within the next hundred years."
So if we extrapolate out to 1000 years then? what 95% chance? or if we go to 2000 years then 190% chance of extinction? Man we're done for. This is big news!!
!sigh!
I wish statistics were not so blatantly abused.
It would indeed be a strange irony if global warming saved us from a nuclear winter by counter-acting it.
However, I'd hate to be around the right-wingers afterwards: "I told you not to worry about global warming; God knows what he's doing."
I think I'd rather perish than listen to that gloating. Their dumb luck would make them even crazier.
Table-ized A.I.
The UN recently raised the maximum population to 12 billion and gave an 80% chance that human population had no maximum.
In 1972, the limits to growth was published and it listed various limits humans might hit to their growth. It's computer models made some interesting predictions... like CO2 being above 380ppm by now which have proven to be correct.
For example, we might outgrow the food supply, we might pollute ourselves to death, we might run out of industrial metals, etc.
We've done okay with the food supply and pollution but the result is a much higher than projected population. And that is driving us faster towards the limits of industrial metals, ferilizers, and pesticides.
We used more of many industrial metals in 2014 than we did from 1900 to 2000 combined.
For one example, when chromium becomes insufficient for demand, then you have no stainless steel.
The big takeaway is that
a) It's too late to do anything to fix things now (that should have been done back in 1990).
b) An overshoot is the most likely scenario.
c) After the overshoot, the carrying capacity of the earth will be billions lower and have much less industrial potential.
d) Thru recycling we can only get a little bit further because recycling is never 100%.
It's really a "kiss your ass goodbye" situation. It's likely to hit when current children hit middle age (but maybe sooner).
It's an exponential growth problem. If it takes 29 days for algae to cover half a pond, how long before algae covers the entire pond? It's not 58 days... it's 30 days. So by the time you see the problem, it's going to be way too late.
And it won't be a 'fast' disaster either. It'll grind out over a decade with rising prices. By the time things fall over, you won't be able to easily move from where you are geographically.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
We're in the middle of one right now. We're just too stupid to realize it.
As a species, we're fucked and spending a few trillion dollars to colonize mars or the moon isn't going to help.
I think it takes a lot more than just intelligence to do "big things" (for good or ill).
As is usual (also for good or ill) in these kinds of discussions, let's look at our own meager little sample (Earth).
We may or may not be the only intelligent life in this planet's history. Look at other life today and you at least have to accept there are degrees of intelligence. But maybe you're still not all that impressed with dolphins and ravens. Ok. But imagine we had a magic spell (or a genetic alteration) that made their brains bigger. Say you had dolphins or ravens ten times (a hundred times?) as smart as what we have today. Surely they'd be intelligent life, no?
But it still wouldn't be enough. I don't care how smart a dolphin is: it's not going to build a radio or a coal-burning plant or (especially) a spaceship. Or really anything interesting. For all the things we look for in SETI, super-genius-dolphins would remain invisible. Nor will it build a uranium centrifuge, so it's off the hook for self-inflicted doomsday too. It can't do the job.
Even the smartest engineer needs someone with better-than-flippers to build their stuff, storing food surpluses is easier with dry storage (and if you can't buffer food, you'll never have any serious industry), and so on. It's also "too hard" to accomplish certain things if you're physically too small/weak; can you imagine any way a super-genius raven would forge iron? (Ok, fair enough: maybe I'm not smart enough! ;-)
A lot of what-it-takes to build stuff seems to be derived from basic properties of universal reality, where you can't simply think your way out: your body and adapted environment matter a lot. Whatever galaxy you're in, you've got problems and even if you're smart, you might not be able to solve them.
It gets worse (if you're talking about SETI; or better if you're talking about avoiding self-inflicted doomsday). Our ancestors a million years ago weren't that much dumber than us. They should have had what it takes, but nevertheless didn't accomplish much. In fact, when it comes down to getting shit done, we didn't do it even ten thousand years ago, and those people were just like us. Here on our super-convenient Earth where conditions to either kill ourselves or take-over-the-universe seem damn-near ideal, we simply didn't do much until ridiculously recently. That's within an approx two billion year history of life (a significant fraction of the universe's age), and within about 5 million years of hominids, and about a million years of people-about-as-smart-as-us.
So much time.
So much not-building-nukes (or spaceships or Internet or vaccines or ...).
Biologically, they were up to the task. They would qualify as intelligent life no matter how absurdly narrow you define "intelligent" and yet they were still "safe" from the dangers (and advantages) of most technological progress. For nearly all of our species' history, our tech advanced so slowly it was indistinguishable from a standstill. It still wasn't enough, and I'm talking about homo-fucking-sapiens!!
It took some other accident of history (the right grass seed mutation? YOUR HYPOTHESIS HERE), and not that long ago within the ridiculously vast span of history, for our intelligence to become effective engineer intelligence. And even then, most societies weren't on track to discover fission.
There's no reason that tech progress had to be that slow. Oh, there are reasons that it was that slow! In fact, those reasons dominated almost all of history. Even when science advanced, it almost did so begrudgingly. Then something something really weird and "special" happened a blink-of-the-eye ago, and it didn't even happen everywhere, to the detriment of near
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Since the time that the sun circled the earth and astrology was more relevant than astronomy, people individually and in cults have believed themselves to be the center of the universe. The miracles of reproduction, of weather, of eclipses and the stars themselves are simply a demonstration that the universe was created for our amusement. It is easy for a semi intelligent life form to make such assumptions if we assume that that life form is also selfish. A less selfish and more intelligent entity, upon noting the rampant destruction it left in its path, would self-destruct.
But wait! There's an alternative and it's simple indeed: Why don't we evolve into a better being?
We are gaining the tools for making better humans at this moment. According to at least one prognosticator we are approaching 'the singularity' and we will be able to manipulate our environment and ourselves in almost unimaginable ways. We can code for better human adaptation to warm climates. We can code for radiation protection. We can code for less selfish attitudes (like that will ever happen). We will have immense power to enhance our intelligence and awareness.
In this scenario humanity will survive most challenges and may actually become worthy of survival. The universe doesn't really care what we do.
...omphaloskepsis often...
what part of "NOBODY FKING BELIEVES YOU!" do these idiots not get about global [not] warming?
You know, there's like no chance of winning the lottery, but someone usually wins the lottery every week.
H.L. Mencken “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.” YOu have to scare-monger people you want to take rights from. Only scared people are willing to give up their freedom for security, and thereby enjoy NEITHER.
"Continent sized superstorms" - so far storm frequency and power has been in inverse proportion to temperature rising, despite what the Katrinas and Sandy's of the world will claim.
An early investment in real estate there seems warranted...
Interesting point, but I have to stop short of calling it good for several reasons. One is that the death rate also declines over time and may pass the declining birth rate at some point. Another is that naturally evolved Turing machines (such as homo sapiens) may replace themselves with artificial Turing machines (AKA AIs) without completely disrupting the society in question. (My overly optimistic interpretation of the Culture books by Iain M Banks?)
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
If the Cuba attack had been carried out, there wouldn't be eleven million Cubans living in the poverty of communist slavery today. The world would be a much better place.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
"...writes in The Atlantic..."
nuff said. Nothing to see here.
Too much television, video games and zombification by media in general. Most people keep repeating what they are shown/told over and over again. And yet the majority wouldn't even last a few weeks without access to their local grocery stores. How would you survive if you lost food supply? Add to that a toxic air (think super volcano eruption), complete collapse of the economy, resource wars, mass migrations, mass flora and fauna extinction, lack of clean water, etc. It's easy to cope with pandemics when you have a good system in place. What happens when it's gone? Are we just as immune to viruses when hurdled together with no clean water, air, food, vitamins, medications?? Our ancestors were able to survive in harsh environments, but they always had access to virtually unlimited resources (animals to hunt, fruit/berry to pick, etc), plus they had a lot of practice, that wasn't a game, that was real, survival. What would we do now if there are no animals to hunt anymore? Think global warming going exponential. Species will go extinct faster than we can count. How would we then survive if there's nothing to hunt/fish/pick?
Yes, there will be underground facilities with most systems in place. Air/water purification systems, hoards of medications, labs, farms, weapons.Guess who will live there? Exactly. And that's where we are heading to. There will be civil wars, wars for dwindling limited resources, My guess is, about 1-5% will survive underground if lucky, very lucky. But even the lucky ones will have little hope long term if the climate really goes bananas. It's like living in space, a single mistake or system error can destroy the entire colony. We know nothing about the future. The reality is often very different from what you see in Hollywood movies.
Seriously? Does anyone really think this is worth the time to type it? All kinds of things can happen and one thing we know is it is never what we expected. There is no systematic analysis of all the possible risks. There is no analysis of how superstorms would do anything anyway. From 1900-1999 the world reduced the mortality of all natural disasters by 98%. That's right 1/50th the death rate at the beginning of the century. In the first 10 years of this century the death rate has been halved again. That's right. At this rate there will be ZERO deaths from any natural disaster in 2100 and if we have superstorms 1 person will die by accident maybe. There is so much stupidity in this climate scare stuff it's unbelievable and just brings on ridicule. I have a blog at logiclogiclogic.wordpress.com which I talk about the 50+ failures of climate science. So many predictions so many failures. Nobody notices.
Some caveats : Many people will point at the coelacanth as a long-lived species. The present species (genus Latimeria) has no known close fossil relatives until you get back to the mid-Cretaceous (about 100 million years ago, genus Macropoma). The genera are related, but not particularly closely - compare dogs and bears, for example. The longest-lived genus I can think of is Lingula, a brachiopod genus with a fossil record from the Cambrian (500 million years ago) to the present. Those two are extreme examples though. And we'll just not get into the discussion over morphological versus reproductive species, but it's a real discussion.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"