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How About You?<\/strong> It very much makes me not<\/em> want to live in such a world. Everybody would probably agree. Yet few people actually do<\/em> much to reduce the chances of of such a scenario happening. In fact, it\u2019s worse than that; few people even seriously entertain the possibility that such a scenario could happen.<\/p>\n People don\u2019t think about such things because they are unpleasant and they don\u2019t feel they can do anything about them, but if more people actually did think about them, we could<\/em> do something. We might never be completely safe, but we could significantly improve our odds over the status quo.<\/p>\n Danger From Two Directions: Ourselves and Nature.<\/strong><\/p>\n Human technology is becoming more powerful all the time. We already face grave danger from nuclear weapons<\/a>, and soon molecular manufacturing<\/a> technologies and artificial general intelligence<\/a> could pose new existential threats. We are also faced with slower, but serious, threats on the environmental side: Global warming, ocean acidification, deforestation\/desertification, ecosystem collapse, etc.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Looking back and saying \u201cThings have been fine so far, why worry?\u201d is not<\/em> satisfactory. We\u2019ve only recently acquired technologies that can quickly and easily kill vast numbers of us while compromising the viability of the Earth (if only temporarily), and new more powerful technologies (that have huge upsides too) are on the horizon. Also, because of a kind of anthropic principle<\/a>, we know that if we\u2019re sitting here saying \u201cNothing too bad happened before\u201d, it means we\u2019re still alive to think about it; we\u2019re a biased sample.<\/p>\n If we play our cards right, our technology can help us deal with environmental problems while being used to immensely reduce suffering around the world (cures for more diseases, including those of aging<\/a>, bringing more people out of poverty, etc).<\/p>\n But even if we succeed on that side, we can\u2019t ignore natural disasters. As we become longer-lived individually, and stick around as a species, this increases our chances of being victims of a super-volcano<\/a> or an asteroid striking the Earth<\/a>. The dinosaurs didn\u2019t get wiped out because of bad luck, they stuck around for about 160 million years so something was bound to happen sooner or later\u2026<\/p>\n We need to design active and passive defense mechanisms against those threats (the details of those are a whole other post, but you can read something I wrote a while ago about deflecting Earth-bound asteroids<\/a>), as well as make our human civilization more robust. Leaving all our eggs in the same basket for too long is dangerous. I expect that eventually space colonization will become feasible. Not necessarily other planets at first, but maybe giant space habitats made from raw materials harvested from the asteroid belt. With sufficiently advanced nanotech, this wouldn\u2019t be out of the question.<\/p>\n But in the short-term, what matters is understanding the risks better and raising awareness.<\/p>\n This was originally posted on my personal blog<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n For more on global catastrophic risks, see:<\/strong><\/p>\n
I\u2019ve just finished reading Cormac McCarthy\u2019s The Road<\/a><\/em> at the recommendation of my cousin Marie-Eve. The setting is a post-apocalyptic world and the main protagonists \u2014 a father and son \u2014 basically spend all their time looking for food and shelter, and try to avoid being robbed or killed by other starving survivors.<\/p>\n\n