If Something Is Going To Destroy Humanity, It's Going To Be One Of These Catastrophes

Pandemics, asteroids, nuclear war, and sudden, destructive climate change are all unlikely—but not so unlikely that we shouldn't be planning for them.

Global catastrophes—events that wipe out at least 10% of the world population—obviously don't happen very often. But they have happened in the past; the plague in the 14th century, for example, killed as much as 17% of the global population. More recently, the Spanish flu in 1918 killed between 50 to 100 million people—not quite an official catastrophe by this definition, but still as much as 5% of the people in the world.

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