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Global Catastrophe, Even Human Extinction, Isn't All That Unlikely (theatlantic.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the out-brief-candle dept.

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."

14 of 349 comments (clear)

  1. Too many close calls by Tablizer · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
    1. Re:Too many close calls by vux984 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      There were many close calls during the cold war, roughly 10 to 20 serious ones, depending on how you score them.

      Hard to say. Nuclear war doesn't necessarily mean "extinction".

    2. Re:Too many close calls by PolygamousRanchKid+ · · Score: 5, Funny

      Hard to say. Nuclear war doesn't necessarily mean "extinction".

      "I would not rule out the chance to preserve a nucleus of human specimens. It would be quite easy... heh heh . . . at the bottom of ah ... some of our deeper mineshafts. The radioactivity would never penetrate a mine some thousands of feet deep."

      "Naturally, they would breed prodigiously, eh? There would be much time, and little to do. But ah with the proper breeding techniques and a ratio of say, ten females to each male, I would guess that they could then work their way back to the present gross national product within say, twenty years."

      "Now, that would necessitate the abandonment of the so called monogamous sexual relationship, I mean, as far as men were concerned. Regrettably, yes. But it is, you know, a sacrifice required for the future of the human race. I hasten to add that since each man will be required to do prodigious... service along these lines, the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature. . ."

      --
      Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
    3. Re:Too many close calls by MrL0G1C · · Score: 5, Informative

      Look up Nuclear winter.

      Nuclear winter is global. If Russia did release every nuke it had at the US, nearly all Russian people would also die because of the nuclear winter that would follow. Latest studies suggest that nuclear winter would last years, that could be years of near zero food being grown, total crop failure because crops need sunlight.

      Nuclear Winter | Retro Report | The New York Times - YouTube

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      Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
    4. Re:Too many close calls by Salgak1 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Yeah, I watched it first-hand in the mid-1980s, when I flew B-52s for a living.

      We were firmly convinced that The Day We Get The Go Order was not an "if", but a "when".

      In fact, in those days, they made SURE no crew had more than two bachelors on it. We noticed that, and assumed that they wanted the crews to want revenge for their incinerated wives and kids when the balloon finally went up. . . (and a crew at Carswell AFB, Texas, got in trouble for their "EWO to Rio" T-shirts, showing a flight of 3 B-52s on a path from Dallas to Rio de Janiero. . . )

  2. too negative by phantomfive · · Score: 5, Informative

    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."
    1. Re:too negative by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      how to deal with quarantine

      We have idiots now who refuse vaccinations that move freely among the population. We have what could be charitably called porous borders. Hell, even at the start of the AIDS pandemic when the mechanisms weren't clearly understood, public health took a back seat to the inference of homophobia.

      Don't underestimate the power of social policy to completely undermine responding to a crisis. When I tested positive for TB eons ago, I was given a choice of 6 months of antibiotics or 4 months locked away. If a largish portion of the population were faced with the same today, you might as well write us off as dead as the coughing protest about the implied loss of dignity, historical prejudice, and freedom of religion lead us down the cliff.

  3. Fermi's Paradox by tap · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Fermi's Paradox by Artem+S.+Tashkinov · · Score: 5, Interesting

      The only chance of "hearing" from an alien civilization is that they keep on wasting absolutely excessive amounts of energy on beaming absolutely useless radio signals to the entire universe. Would we do that for thousands or millions of years? No. Would they? No.

      The current estimates of the size of the observable universe: 93 billion light years across. The age of the universe: roughly 14 billion years. That means there are possible civilizations out there whose broadcasts will never reach us due to the expansion of the universe.

      The fact is there are dozens of reasons for civilizations of the universe to never encounter one another and I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing.

    2. Re:Fermi's Paradox by butzwonker · · Score: 5, Interesting

      There are too many fallacies and hypothetical assessments in this line of argument.

      1. Even if many civilizations existed before ours -- the time frame for this is small on a cosmic scale, because of too much activity in the early universe --, it does not follow from the assumption that they killed themselves somehow that we will suffer the same fate. If there are filters, then it seems more likely that they do not work 100% of all times.

      2. Major civilizations could be cyclic, like they seem to have so far occurred on earth. So yes, our current culture might die some day, but mankind might continue to exist. The same might apply to many alien species.

      3. The evolution of higher life, let alone intelligent life, might very well be quite rare. We really don't know. We could be the first or second or third, or there could be hundreds or thousands of intelligent civilizations similar to ours that are not yet easy to detect for us.

      4. We have only searched a tiny tiny amount of solar systems for life, using extremely limited methods. People tend to forget how gigantic the universe is. With new space telescopes it might in the near future be possible to detect life similar to ours on extrasolar planets directly on the basis of atmospheric changes, so stay tuned. It's far to early to make claims like "We would have detected them so far." Give it another 20 years and we might have a number of good candidates of extrasolar planets that seem to support life. So far, both views are just speculation.

      5. Advanced civilizations might master new sources of energy and protect their environments in a way that may make them extremely hard to detect. The better a civilization is at not polluting their home planet and solar system, the harder it may be detect it -- and the less likely there is a filter that destroys this civilization. Also don't forget that the time frame for radio emissions may be ridiculously small, because advanced coding techniques make them almost indistinguishable from noise (and we don't look for those but rather for the most primitive coding techniques). As an example, Earth has gone almost radio silent due to advances in technology (satellites, optical fibres) and this trend may continue.

      6. Even if somehow FTL interstellar travel is feasible for advanced civilizations, there could be a vast number of reasons why they might not show up on earth: The solar system is in a relatively remote region, there are so many systems, protection of indigenous species, etc.

      7. There is the robot theory that supposedly defuses many of the above points. Any sufficiently advanced civilization would send out machines that replicate themselves in order to map and conquer the whole universe. To me, this is just a silly conjecture. Not even we would do this if we could, and we almost could do it already at our current stage of technology. Uncalculable risks, ethical and environmental concerns speak against this, so why should aliens do it.

  4. Re:pretty poor science by Layzej · · Score: 5, Insightful

    a mere 15 million years ago CO2 levels were 4 times higher, average temperature was several degrees warmer, and seas were 200 feet higher.

    200 foot sea level rise (your words, not mine) would probably count as a global catastrophe.

  5. OMG we're all going to die by thegarbz · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  6. Re:pretty poor science by Sique · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Somehow this post misses the point. Yes, the species Homo sapiens sapiens L. can survive in an environment with 4 times the CO2 levels. No problem with that. What won't survive is the civilisation we built ourselves that eases the survival, and that allows us to be 7 billions and counting. No other animal of more than 10 pound body weight has 7 billion specimens out there with the possible exception of animals we grow for ourselves. What global warming means are large migratory movements of people fleeing higher sea levels and deserts that change their size and location. What global warming means is new distribution fights for ressources. Even small, local climate changes by moving trade wind patterns caused civilisations to collapse, accompagnied by war, pandemics and devastation of large regions. With today's technology and the fast moving climate change globally, we face a global war, and we still have overkill capacity -- even if we don't use the nuclear arsenal.

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    .sig: Sique *sigh*
  7. Re:pretty poor science by drinkypoo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Or are you seriously suggesting that given the choice of drowning or spending money in moving we as a civilization will choose to drown?

    Who is this 'we'?

    I think the elite will choose for you and I to drown, if they can arrange it. If the land area is reduced, the carrying capacity will be reduced.

    --
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