Jul 10, 2020
EXISTENTIAL THREATS TO HUMANITY
8 or 12 Ways to Die Horribly
Certain types of risks require an aggressive, immediate response.
There’s no risk that we’ll act too aggressively — the primary risk is that we’ll waffle and try to wait until They Do Something. Because the ‘they’ are the people — the industries, entities, and leaders who brought us to this dismal point. We’ll need to wrest control from them.
Dear readers, this is another article that I call a “serious” article. These articles take too much out of me to write more than once — there will be no sequels. Here’s a link to yesterday’s article.
When dealing with 8 or 12 immediate, or potentially immediate existential threats, an article like this is an unusual animal. It isn’t a standard scientific paper. I don’t really know how to evaluate the odds of any one or combination of events that would end humanity's time on Earth. And nobody would read the 88 page PDF anyway. This is not an opinion piece either. I’m reporting as a credentialed mathematician and scientist, but still, I’m only able to play my hunches. That’s why you need a scientist. Hunches are a critical part of the scientific method.
Given the nature of these threats, they can only be dealt with from grass-roots pressure. If we’re all wrong — Me and Cambridge and Oxford and Elon Musk, well, we’re probably going to do a lot of good regardless. I’m not going to feel embarrassed, and truth be told, we’re not likely to succeed at conquering the threats. The threats are horrible. The entities and people who will try to block us are horrible in a different way.
What are these existential threats?
We must not think of these individually. I’m just warning you up front. Be ready for lateral thinking.
Here’s where we benefit from Plato’s method. Consider this a thought experiment in which we ‘discover’ something that we already know, or suspect.
Think about the people’s response to the pandemic lockdowns. People got a little bit cranky, right? Economies have stalled, jobs lost. In this pessimistic air, isn’t it possible, or even likely, that large protests, maybe even small wars might break out? What if, as some risk scientists have pointed out, India and Pakistan detonated 100 nuclear weapons on each other?
Let’s not forget that separately, in its way, we’ve had some climate problems that are serious risks in themselves. And it happens that India and Pakistan have been troubled by shrinking water resources. Could adverse climate and pandemic events drive them to the use of nuclear weapons?
If risks are piled on risks, it might make a kind of perverted sense to launch the nukes. But say that doesn’t happen . . . until another risk rears its ugly head? By which I’m referring to Elon Musk’s concern: that artificial intelligence might hack its way into the nuclear launch consoles and start the war that way. Or even, and why not, some fully human hackers, maybe in Russia, could launch those nukes.
Readers: Can You See What’s Making Me Crazy?
I think I’ll leave you to consider that question. And I’ll leave you a list of the existential threats the various think tanks have come up with.
Ultimately you’ll want to make up your own mind. Which is all I really care about. Remember, I mentioned “grass roots.” That would be you.
Risks — a sampling:
- Volcanic Threats
- Deliberate Misuse of Nanotechnology
- Solar Flare
- Severe Pandemic
- Misinformation and Disinformation Campaigns by Bad Actors
- Employment of Smartphones to Track, Distract and Control People
- Runaway Physics Experiments; Particle Accelerators
- Habitat Destruction and Species Extinctions
- Excessive Use of Fossil Fuels
- “Conventional” Wars
- Genocide
- Ecological Collapse
