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Ask HN: What other low-probability high-impact events are we ignoring?
The gulf oil spill is a canonical example of a "low-probability, high-impact event." Everyone who cared knew that this sort of thing could happen, but the risk was widely perceived as tolerable.
What other high-impact scenarios are out there that are likely to create a meaningful "event" at least once in the next 30 years? How are we currently mis-pricing the risk?
[Edit for clarity. Low-probability, in this instance, means risks that are low when taken in discrete units. Getting on an airplane is low-risk. With 14M scheduled US flight per year, though, it is almost certain that one plane will crash once in awhile. We're looking for events here that have a perceived low risk (correctly or not), and that are likely to surprise people when they actually happen. In hindsight, it will be clear to us that the event was actually likely given the extended circumstances.]
- pavel_lishin 16y agoHow low-probability is an event if it's likely to happen in the next 30 years? Isn't that kind of like asking "What's an unlikely event that's likely to happen"?
- brazzy 16y agoI suppose by "low-probability", tc means "unlikely to happen at any particular time, in any particular place". Think serious car accidents: unlikely enough that most people never have one, yet many thousands happen each year. The effects can be devastating to the people involved, but everyone keeps telling themselves that "it won't happen to me", and many people forego actions that would decrease or mitigate their risk, or even engage in actions that increas it substantially.
- ErrantX 16y agoThis is the problem with the whole concept of risk: because your chances of suffering a car accident are actually relatively high when compared with all sorts of other risks. On a scale of things unlikely enough that most people never have one a car accident is pretty near the bottom.
- bdr 16y agoAt the risk of sounding crazy, I'll say fascism in a Western country.
- timwiseman 16y agoSadly, that is not crazy. Remember it was not that long ago in historical terms that fascism did hold a Western country. Even now, while it is unlikely, it is very possible for it to happen. It is even possible for it to happen through the democratic process (in fact, that may be more likely with the current makeup of the West). People tend to turn to absolutes when they become desperate and it is quite forseeable that some combination of economic, military, political, or natural disasters will make some country so desperate they will once again try anything.
- btmorex 16y agoTo call that realistically possible, you'd have to believe that World War II and the invention of nuclear weapons didn't fundamentally change the Western world (I think they did. World War II because we saw the results of fascism going unchecked in a major power. Nuclear weapons because realistically another world war would be close to Armageddon)
- jokermatt999 16y agoIt Can't Happen Here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Cant_Happen_Here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Cant_Happen_Here Edit: corrected link, sorry. Edit 2: Or...not. Apparently I can't have a URL with an apostrophe.
- RevRal 16y agoHere you go: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Can%27t_Happen_Here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Can%27t_Happen_Here :)
- jarin 16y agoAsteroids?
- apowell 16y agoHow about a major earthquake along the San Andreas fault in southern California? We've had a couple little shakes this week. There isn't much we can do to prevent it from occurring -- we can only reduce the impact. Build strong and keep emergency supplies on hand.
- mechanical_fish 16y agoI'm upvoting this because (a) I know that a huge percentage of you live directly on top of the San Andreas fault; (b) I've seen the upcoming earthquake mentioned a few times on this thread, but always in a list with things like "the Singularity". For god's sake. The difference between a major Northern California earthquake and the effing Singularity is that one of these has happened in the last century and is guaranteed to happen again. Lay in an emergency supply of drinking water and strap your heavy shelves to the wall.
- jlgosse 16y agoI think what's brewing on the Korean Peninsula is a great example of a potential low-probability, high-impact event. Things are heating up further and further, and the potential outcome could be devastating.
- aristus 16y agoAn airliner crashing into a building that houses a major intercontinental cable landing, an e911 datacenter, and a dns root node. Beleive it or not there are several such in the world.
- korch 16y agoI find it hard to believe this is true! Maps or GPS coordinates, or it didn't happen!
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- razzmataz 16y agoEarthquake along the New Madrid fault. Almost nothing in the midwest is built with earth quakes in mind.
- btilly 16y agoNew York's construction is even more vulnerable, and there are a lot of fault lines there. Another very real possibility is that the Cascadia zone could have a megathrust earthquake. This would be a 9.0 hitting cities like Seattle, Victoria and Vancouver that are completely not prepared for it. The last one in 1700 gave Japan a really nice tsunami as well. That could also potentially trigger the lahar that is waiting on Mt Rainier. Which brings to mind all of the volcanos listed at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decade_Volcano http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decade_Volcano - the eruption of any of which would qualify as low probability high impact event.
- Alex3917 16y agoOil spills aren't really that low probability when you don't follow any of the safety procedures and you use broken equipment.
- jswinghammer 16y agoAnd rare events always seem like they could obviously happen in retrospect.
- whimsy 16y agohttp://www.fastcompany.com/1658137/infographic-of-the-day-bps-horrifying-safety-record http://www.fastcompany.com/1658137/infographic-of-the-day-bp... With such a flagrant history of safety violations, I'm surprised it didn't happen sooner.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- d_c 16y agoFault in a nuclear power plant?
- pjscott 16y agoA lot lower-impact than people generally think. Those things are safe nowadays.
- tedunangst 16y agoSolar flares. Magnetic pole reversal. The Yellowstone caldera going boom again.
- randombit 16y agoI'm confused by the 'likely to create an event in the next 30 years' part - either it's unlikely or it's likely. There are events that are quite likely, but with a low _perception_ of risk. Oil spills happen all the time, it's just been a while since one has happened in a rich Western country. Why? Because we've already tapped almost all of our oil - most of the worst spills happened long before we were born! Now the spills happen in places like the Middle East and Nigeria, but because only poor people live there, nobody notices or cares. Other events that were or will be likely to occur, but have a low perception of risk, include the recent financial crisis, and, looking forward a decade or two, ocean level rise flooding major cities, and a US debt default. Some interesting events that (seem to) have a genuinely low probability, but would really change the world if they happened: * Asteroid hit (either a big one, or a smaller one that hits just right). * A 'supervolcano' eruption that puts us into nuclear winter * Solar flares fry every piece of electronics on the planet * Sudden tipping point in the Antarctic or Greenland ice sheets that raises ocean levels by a few meters over a year. * A strong 'godlike' AI (benevolent or otherwise) * A self-replicating nanoassembler * Godzilla attack
- btmorex 16y agoI find it interesting that you would put "US debt default" in the category of things likely to happen in the next decade or two. The reason that the US is able to borrow money for practically nothing is that it has never defaulted on debt. Now, clearly there is a possibility that at some point in the future the US will default, but I don't how you would determine that is likely in the next couple decades. Remember we had a significantly higher level of debt as a percentage of GDP following World War II than we do now. We didn't default then.
- bd_at_rivenhill 16y agoDepends on your definition of default. Since the dollar is a fiat currency there is essentially no chance of the US government skipping an interest or principal payment. However, it seems highly likely that they will attempt to orchestrate some steady devaluation of the dollar to reduce the value of the debt in real terms. The high impact event would be if they mismanage the devaluation and accidentally introduce high (or hyper) inflation for some period of time before they can get things under control. Check out the history of inflation and interest rates in the 1970's to see what this might look like.
- uptown 16y agoMy vote is for the Yellowstone Supervolcano. If you take a look at the image showing potential range of the ash cloud, you can see it might cause a few problems if it were to blow. Maybe not a next-thirty-years type of event, but still an interesting possibility with potential for tremendous casualties, and very little that can be done in the way of prevention. http://www.earthmountainview.com/yellowstone/yellowstone.htm http://www.earthmountainview.com/yellowstone/yellowstone.htm
- ErrantX 16y agoEveryone who cared knew that this sort of thing could happen, but the risk was widely perceived as tolerable. There are billions of things that could happen, that might happen or that will eventually happen given enough time. We should reasonably ignore those or it starts to get silly :) I think what you are really talking about are "Elephant in the Room" problems. Things which shouldn't happen, or are low probability, but end up being caused by bad management or human error. If someone had asked this question 6 months ago would anyone have brought up deepwater oil drilling? I somehow doubt it. Finding these scenarios is difficult, if not impossible, because they rely on things that don't get reported till it has happened.
- abreckle 16y agoMost low-probability, high-impact events are un-predictable by definition. Only in hindsight do they appear obvious. This has to do with many factors such as the narrative fallacy and confirmation bias, which Taleb describes as the Black Swan. That being said, here a few high-impact (moderately low probability) events that could be on the horizon. * Northern California Earthquake * Israel v Iran Nuclear Conflict that triggers WW3 * Singularity
- smanek 16y agoThe 'Singularity' (in the sense of a super-human intelligence, for example either augmented human or purely machine) comes into being and, basically, gets to exert influence over humanity's future.
- Unseelie 16y agoSingularity's a fun one, because its got more vectors than just Moore's law. Or, anyway, Moore's law is being played out in a lot more vectors than just IT. Drastic life extension would count, as would 'a mature nanotech', matter edition on any scale,
- sethg 16y agoThe last record-breaking accidental oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was the Ixtoc I, in 1979. I should also note that the Atlantic Empress spill, also in 1979, and the Amoco Cadiz, the previous year, had a combined spillage equal to the Ixtoc I. The record-breaking deliberate oil spill happened during the Gulf War, in 1991. In the past thirty-five years, there have been ten oil spills in which over a million barrels of crude were released. I don’t see how you can classify this kind of thing as “low-probability”, in the same category as asteroid strikes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_spills#Largest_oil_spills http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_spills#Largest_oil_spills
- cia_plant 16y agoOne possibility which seems very much overlooked is that of a catastrophic ecosystem crash. The recent bee die-off gives a hint of the kinds of things that are possible. Another possible catastrophe is a plague or parasite that is resistant to all of our methods of disease control. It could attack either us, or our crops. Our disrespect for complex ecosystems which we still barely understand is the most egregious example of short-term thinking, to my mind.
- jraines 16y agoAre 'they' still saying that all fish could go extinct fairly soon, too? Or at least all tuna? Like the bee example, it just seems like something I dismiss because I can't imagine it actually happening. reference: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/11/02/health/webmd/main2147223.shtml http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/11/02/health/webmd/main2...
- btilly 16y agoA major loss of shellfish is much more likely. The cause is that CO2 in the atmosphere becomes carbonic acid after it dissolves in water, and if the ph of the seas changes even a little bit, then calcium carbonate shells (which is what everything from clam shells to coral is made out of) becomes unstable and starts to dissolve. According to the best current projections this is now hard to stop given current CO2 levels, and a major die-off is likely around the middle of this century. The effects of this on global ecosystems are hard to estimate, but will definitely be large.
- thaumaturgy 16y agoBy "ecosystem crash", what we really mean here is "an environment in which nobody will want to live". I am not at all skeptical towards various warnings about the environment, but we do have to acknowledge that the Earth has supported life for long before we ever came around, and will continue to support life long after we're gone. And, humans are resourceful. It's likely that, even in the worst of scenarios, at least some humans will find a way to survive -- even if it's subsistence living. The question is, would it be an environment that we would want to live in? I think that's an important distinction that might help sort out some of the ecological "debates".
- sharpn 16y agoIn terms of mispriced expectations, it's unprecedented for 1/3 of the world population (<2bn people - India & China) to smoothly transition from 3rd/2nd to 1st world economies without massive internal 'social unrest' (&/or war). Yet that is what we appear to expect... Hope it's the first time.
- aristus 16y agoClimate is what we expect; weather is what we get.
- anamax 16y ago> The gulf oil spill is a canonical example of a "low-probability, high-impact event." I think that what's going on is awareness. There was a much larger deep-water spill in Mexico in 1979. There have been huge on-shore spills, some that ran into the sea. There have been huge tanker spills. And so on. The difference is that this one is off the US coast, we have on-scene video, and folks who claimed to be uber-competent have, arguably, dropped the ball. Yes, they've probably gotten more blame than they deserved, but they've also tried to exploit this incident for political gain, so ....
- istari 16y agoMost of you aren't trying hard enough to come up with things we'll PROBABLY live to see: 1. California earthquake 2. global economic depression 3. war involving developed countries(N Korea vs S Korea, India vs Pakistan, Iran vs Israel, China vs Taiwan, etc) 4. 2 leading into 3(maybe) 5. pandemic 6. The Next Big Thing(biotech? nanotech?) 7. car accident resulting in serious injuries involving yourself or a loved one 8. serious illness involving yourself or a loved one
- btilly 16y agoLet me add a scary possibility, the use of a nuclear bomb on a major city. It is worth noting that India and Pakistan have fought several recent wars, and are now both nuclear armed. Worse yet, everyone's wargame simulations have concluded that their next war WILL go nuclear. As one friend of mine (whose father is high up in India's air force) put it, "The only real question is whether the bomb that Pakistan drops on New Delhi works." To be specific, the likely scenario is that they go to war, Pakistan, lacking reserves, knows it has to win fast. Pakistan throws everything into the battle front, India breaks through somewhere, and Pakistan, with nothing to stop India's breakthrough, drops a nuke on Indian troops in Pakistani territory. (There is a perverse logic to having all of the civilian casualties be your own.) India, having just lost major numbers of troops, has little choice but to escalate to nuclear war against Pakistani military targets. Pakistan, with a more limited supply of nukes, has only one way to escalate. And New Delhi is the easiest to reach major city. There is speculation that the last military coup in Pakistan happened in part because the Pakistani army was scared that Pakistan was escalating into another war with India, and it was the easiest way to force the situation to de-escalate.
- andrewt 16y agoI'm surprised nobody has mentioned anything to do with the structure of the internet. Suppose someone takes out all of the root DNS servers or the bgp system breaks down, or something similar. Even though there might not be any loss of life, this could cause tremendous amount of damage in other areas.
- Unseelie 16y agoI'm suprised that no-one's suggested aliens arriving, an event which can arguably be getting more and more likely as time goes on. The trick to that statement being that we don't know where the baseline is...at .00001% likeliness this year, an exponential increase of 1.0001x every year isn't particularly likely.
- InclinedPlane 16y agoThere are many in the same vein that would have similar impact on society. Aliens arriving, being discovered, or merely communicating with us, there are so many possibilities, many of them with the potential for being as disruptive to human civilization on Earth as an asteroid impact. The mind boggles at the possibilities.
- hop 16y agoA nuclear event would fit that and could certainly happen in the next 20 years -- - Israel bombing all suspected Iranian nuclear facilities. Iran retaliating with a nuke. - Low level or dirty bomb by any number of terrorists groups in the world. India/Pakistan is a pressure cooker right now. Could happen in Europe, the Mid-East or America.
- mixmax 16y agoA major global pandemic seems like a plausible scenario. We've had a few (semi..) close calls with SARS and swine flu but have been lucky that they haven't mutated to be airborne and infectous from human to human. You don't have to go further back than the 1918 global flu pandemic to see an example of what a global pandemic can do. 3% of the global population died. You may think that we have better vaccines and better systems in place now than we did 100 years ago, but you'd be largely mistaken[1]. A vaccine takes so long to develop and produce that when it's ready for the market millions of people will already have died. Pandemics spread quickly. Adding to the problem is that the world is so connected and people so mobile that once the virus is out it could easily spread across the globe in a matter of days. One infected stewardess in Heathrow airport wil lmake sure of that. [1] I'm no expert on biotech so please correct me if I'm mistaken.
- Daniel_Newby 16y agoGovernment regulators tend to choke off vaccine development, but those policies would change in a hurry during a dangerous pandemic. Of greater importance is a disease that there is a vaccine for but which the U.S. government is actively suppressing: smallpox. DNA synthesizers are already at the point where anybody who wants to can resurrect smallpox. It is only a matter of time before that scourge is set loose. The results will be ghastly.
- dkasper 16y agoFunny, last night I watched a West Wing episode where they mention the possibility of a smallpox outbreak. Is it still true that there are just a handful of smallpox vaccines on hand in the US?
- run4yourlives 16y agoVaccines don't have a shelf life of forever, and storing components to defeat a disease that no longer exists beyond a few petri dishes in a military lab isn't really efficient. Odds are there is barely any.
- 16y ago
- Daniel_Newby 16y agoWashington, D.C. being taken over by a competent, efficient government.
- tlrobinson 16y agoI've heard seismologists describe the San Andreas fault in California as "10 months pregnant". There's a good chance there will be a massive earthquake on it in the next 30 years.
- Estragon 16y agoWhy do you believe this was a low-probability event? My impression is that important safety measures were neglected, and this laxity played a key role in the failure. A better question might be "Where else has avarice gotten the better of known sensible precautions?" I hear there are clear risks in the Commercial Real Estate market, similar to the problems which led to the residential housing crisis. Then there is the fact there has been essentially no meaningful regulatory reform of the financial system as a whole (in fact, there has been encouragement of the same bad behavior.)
- RevRal 16y agoEvil cats: http://www.exitmundi.nl/meow.htm http://www.exitmundi.nl/meow.htm ? I am posting this as an example of a "risk that is widely perceived as tolerable." Is it high risk? I think so, judging by all the other examples of non-native animals destroying parts of ecosystems. It is hard to predict how things like this extrapolate. But that is how it is -- we are more likely to observe consequences and infer the origins, and extinction around the world is a pretty big one. The evil cats scenario is just one from that article. A snippet: In the street where I live, there are more cats than people! And that is a problem. All those cats catch lots of birds and mice and rats and butterflies. Biologically speaking, cats are eating a huge hole in the food chain. No, seriously! According to several alarming reports, this is exactly what is happening in countries like the United Kingdom, Sweden and my own country, Holland. Bird species are vanishing, mouse subspecies are going extinct. All because of Molly, and Lizzy, and the other many billions of domestic cats that inhabit the planet today.
- RevRal 16y agoOkay, this an instance where I would like the downvoters to explain the downvoting. The submitter asked for "low-probability, high-impact" events. Cats destroying local ecosystems is a low-probability, high-impact event and perceived as tolerable. We've seen situations where non-native animals have messed up ecosystems, and there are a lot of cats in the world hunting lower on-the-food-chain prey. Is the word "cat" taboo on HN or something? An article on feral cats and dogs:http://www.bc.edu/schools/cas/envstudies/research/feral.html http://www.bc.edu/schools/cas/envstudies/research/feral.html Sigh Nobody will probably see this. I guess I'll just go upvote a couple of people to make up for it.
- grandalf 16y agoThere are a lot of such events looming in the improbable horizon. Each would be viewed as a total surprise when in fact it's known that there is a nonzero (but small) probability of the event occurring: - a moderately sized meteorite strikes a major city. - the capital requirements set after the recent financial crisis might turn out to be horribly inadequate if just the right series of coincidences occurs. - The US could have significant post-election riots, etc. - With a slight increase in trauma injuries, all ERs and available hospital beds and skilled professionals could be quickly used up within a 1000 mile radius of an event. Many would die in transit, etc. Think back to the superdome. - A significantly noteworthy event could easily overwhelm mobile phone network capacity in any major city making communication nearly impossible, this would be made worse due to the panic that it inspired. - An unsophisticated terrorist group could bring mass transit in the top 5 major US cities to a standstill for a budget of less than $10K. (simply by igniting backpacks full of regular gasoline in buses, subways in some sort of unison). This would probably provoke martial law. - The US could elect a Hitler-esque strongman. Both Bush and Obama are shades of this sort of leader in their own way. That anyone (especially the media) took McCain's candidacy seriously is evidence of this. - Mexico could become a failed state, putting pressure on the US, and sending the US toward a nationalistic strongman leader type.
- vaksel 16y agoLarge Hadron Collider having an accident or creating a black hole. Running out of oil, which will in turn start a whole host of problems. Some genetic disease like the plague, wiping out most of the civilization. An experiment on next level weapons that make nukes look like firecrackers, going out of control. Sun going nova for no apparent reason. America becoming a "christian nation" with science/technology being outlawed. Someone hacking the pentagon or whatever, and detonating all the nukes at the same time. Skynet becomes self-aware(AI/robots taking over) - will probably happen like the irobot movie. aliens
- RevRal 16y ago>Running out of oil, which will in turn start a whole host of problems. It starts getting scary when oil production vs demand becomes disproportionate. Aka, peak oil. >Someone hacking the pentagon or whatever, and detonating all the nukes at the same time. I recently watched Hackers Wanted and one of the interesting things the movie pointed out was that when terrorists start becoming hacker savvy, a new war front will be introduced into the world.
- tremendo 16y agoContrary to the majority of predictions here, this would be a positive change: We should all at one point or another, hopefully not too far into the future, realize we've been led tragically astray in terms of our nutritional health by well meaning but unfortunately ill informed government officials and doctors. The current common wisdom will likely reverse and take with it many of the diseases of civilization: diabetes, coronary heart disease, obesity, maybe even cancer. That out of the way, current debates about socialized medicine and escalating insurance costs would turn into bad memories and we'll think "how could we have been so ignorant?" We'll live better, healthier, cheaper and maybe even longer. Local economies will revitalize, the environment will benefit, and it'll be "easy". Of course, current dogma will fight tooth and nail, proclaiming the new path leads to disaster, but disaster is what we have now, and it'll be soundly defeated. Nostrademus has spoken… :)
- Kaizyn 16y agoAs I understand it, they still haven't fixed the levies around New Orleans.
- pjscott 16y agoHere's a happy one, for a change: the Focus Fusion guys actually succeed, and we get radically cheaper electricity that can be mass-produced in a big way. This would change everything. Aluminum would become a lot cheaper with cheap energy for refining it. The various water shortages in coastal areas would be easier to deal with, thanks to cheaper energy for desalination. We could replace gasoline with carbon-neutral synthetic fuels. I'm probably still thinking way too small here.