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by
Toby Ord
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January 30 - March 20, 2022
‘Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live in a cradle forever.’
THE PRECIPICE
The scientific revolution that led to the splitting of an atom requires a moral revolution as well.59
THE PRECIPICE & ANTHROPOCENE
2 EXISTENTIAL RISK
It is now time to think more deeply about what is at stake; why safeguarding humanity through this time is so important. To do so we first need to clarify the idea of existential risk. What exactly is existential risk? How does it relate to more familiar ideas of extinction or the collapse of civilisation?
UNDERSTANDING EXISTENTIAL RISK
FIGURE 2.1 A classification of existential catastrophes by the kind of outcome that gets locked in.
Following Bostrom, I shall call these ‘existential catastrophes’, defining them as follows:3
An existential catastrophe is the destruction of humanity’s ...
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An existential risk is a risk that threatens the destruction of humanity...
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LOOKING TO THE PRESENT
LOOKING TO OUR FUTURE
Recognising that people matter equally, regardless of their geographic location, is a crucial form of moral progress, and one that we could do much more to integrate into our policies and our philanthropy.
People matter equally regardless of their temporal location, too.
Considerations like these suggest an ethic we might call longtermism, which is especially concerned with the impacts of our actions upon the longterm future.
For longtermism is animated by a moral re-orientation towards the vast future that existential risks threaten to foreclose.
LOOKING TO OUR PAST
To neglect existential risk might thus be to wrong not only the people of the future, but the people of the past.
CIVILISATIONAL VIRTUES
Our lack of regard for risks to our entire future is a deficiency of prudence.
When we recognise the importance of our future yet still fail to prioritise it, it is a failure of self-discipline.
In his celebrated account of virtue, Aristotle suggested that our virtues are governed and guided by a form of practical wisdom.
as our power continues to grow, our practical wisdom needs to grow with it.
COSMIC SIGNI...
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THE PERSPECTIVE OF HUMANITY
Understanding what the group should do can help its members see the parts they need to play.
Of course, humanity is not an individual. But it is often useful for us to think about groups as agents, gaining insights by talking about the beliefs, desires and intentions of teams, companies or nations.
If we are the only moral agents that will ever arise in our universe—the only beings capable of making choices on the grounds of what is right and wrong—then responsibility for the history of the universe is entirely on us.
UNCERTAINTY
Our view of the future is still clouded by ignorance and distorted by bias.
We in the present day, at what may be the very start of history, would therefore do well to be humble, to leave our options open, and to ensure our descendants have a chance to see more clearly, and choose more wisely, than we can today.53
OUR NEGLECT OF EXISTENTIAL RISKS
Economic theory tells us that existential risk will be undervalued by markets, nations and even entire generations.
When I have raised the topic of existential risk with senior politicians and civil servants, I have encountered a common reaction: genuine deep concern paired with a feeling that addressing the greatest risks facing humanity was ‘above my pay grade’.
Albert Einstein soon became a leading voice and his final public act was to sign a Manifesto with Russell arguing against nuclear war on the explicit grounds that it could spell the end for humanity.
PART TWO THE RISKS
3 NATURAL RISKS Who knows whether, when a comet shall approach this globe to destroy it, as it often has been and will be destroyed, men will not tear rocks from their foundations by means of steam, and hurl mountains, as the giants are said to have done, against the flaming mass?—and then we shall have traditions of Titans again, and of wars with Heaven. —Lord Byron
ASTEROIDS & COMETS
Asteroid Size Total Found Average Century Next Century 1–10 km ~ 920 ~ 95% 1 in 6,000 1 in 120,000 10 km + ~ 4 > 99%* 1 in 1.5 million < 1 in 150 million * Astronomers are confident that they have found all asteroids greater than 10 km across in at least 99% of the sky. Table 3.1 Progress in tracking near-Earth asteroids of two different size categories. The final two columns show the long-run average probability of an impact per century and the probability of an impact in the next hundred years (which all comes from the undiscovered asteroids).18
DEFLECTING IMPACTS
SUPERVOLCANIC ERUPTIONS
The very largest volcanic eruptions—explosions that release more than 1,000 cubic kilometres of rock—have become known as supervolcanic eruptions.
One of the best known is the Yellowstone caldera, which last erupted 630,000 years ago.
When the Indonesian volcano, Toba, erupted 74,000 years ago, it covered India in a blanket of ash a metre thick and traces were found as far away as Africa.
as with asteroids and comets, the truly existential threat comes from the darkened sky.
The dark volcanic dust and reflective sulphate aerosols unleashed by the Toba eruption caused a ‘volcanic winter’, which is thought to have lowered global temper...
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Magnitude Average Century Next Century 8–9 ~ 1 in 200 ~ 1 in 200 9+ (e.g. Toba) ~ 1 in 800 ~ 1 in 800 Table 3.2 The probability per century of a supervolcanic eruption. Note that there are good reasons to think that even the largest eruptions would be very unlikely to lead to extinction or unrecoverable collapse. The probability estimates are extremely rough, with the confidence interval for magnitude 8–9 eruptions ranging from 1 in 50 to 1 in 500 per century, and the confidence interval for magnitude 9+ ranging from 1 in 600 all the way to 1 in 60,000.
NASA recently conducted a very preliminary investigation of the possibility of slowly draining heat from the Yellowstone caldera, but investigations like these are in their earliest stages, and any sort of interference with an active volcano—especially one with a history of supereruptions—would obviously require enormous caution.
FLOODS OF LAVA
