11 ms·

We're Underestimating the Risk of Human Extinction

202 points by ca98am79 15y ago

shingen 15y ago
I'm always fascinated by the extremely long term horizon concerns that people bring up in discussions about the future of humanity. 200 to 300 years out there is no humanity as we know it today. Whatever we are at that juncture, it won't be "human" as we now define it. Our self directed evolution has long since taken over, and it's accelerating at an extraordinary clip. You can debate the merits of that, the details of it, but it's happening either way. In the next two or three decades we'll have begun to completely take over genetic alteration / evolution / improvement / etc, of our species. Within a few decades after that, we'll be severely altering what we are. Within 150 or 200 years, it'll be very hard for modern humans to relate to the ancestor humans from 2012. Concerns about asteroids or global warming and so on are moot. We won't be here as a species pumping CO2 into the atmosphere or waiting around helplessly for a rock to crash into the surface. It's not an issue of if, it's just an issue of how long it takes and how many competing models of our self directed evolution become options. The sole threat to that future is super virus / disease, most likely man-made. It's the only thing that could stop our evolution and wipe out our species in that couple hundred year time frame. Even nuclear war isn't a threat to species survival, you could detonate thousands of nukes simultaneously and it wouldn't come close to killing us off.
- locopati 15y ago
  On what basis do you make this statement "Even nuclear war isn't a threat to species survival, you could detonate thousands of nukes simultaneously and it wouldn't come close to killing us off."
  - Someone 15y ago
    Accoridng to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba, Tsar Bomba was over 1400 times as powerful as (Hiroshima+Nagasaki), and that was not even remotely close to killing us of. Thousands of modern devices would be different in many ways: bombs would likely be more powerful on average than the '45 ones, but they could also be cleaner, and they would likely not be used all in the same place. I would guess the species would survive it, if only because the ones starting it would likely be in a good shelter.
    - ericd 15y ago
      Saying that they'd likely be more powerful on average than the '45 ones is a huge understatement. Fat Man was 20 kt, every Trident II missile can carry 12 475 kt warheads. Also, if you distribute nuclear explosions across the world, it's much different than having one meganuke in terms of its effect. Meganukes are very inefficient with their power due to the diameter of an explosive sphere relating to the cubic root of the power. I think the original commenter is way off in their proclamation that we couldn't nuke ourselves to extinction.
    - eCa 15y ago
      It also created a shock wave measured at over 5 on the Richter scale, despite being detonated 4km above the Earth, that travelled at least three times around the globve. What would it have done if it had been detonated at touch down. What would happen if you detonate 10 of those at the same time? I think it would take worse than that to kill the species, but our civilization is more fragile.
      - Someone 15y ago
        I agree about the civilization part, but this was about the huge gray area between "surely to not make homo sapiens extinct" and "surely to make homo sapiens extinct". I am an optimist, so I keep thinking that 'we' would survive. I also think we will not be that stupid to do that 'experiment'.
  - lnp 15y ago
    Speculations, see for example: http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2009/how-i-learnt-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-bomb/ http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2009/how-i-learnt-to-s... http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/nuclear/nuclearwar1.html http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/nuclear/nuclearwar1.html It may be possible if you ask "given this arsenal, how do I destroy humanity?" but that is not how wars work.
  - nl 15y ago
    http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/nuclear/nuclearwar1.html http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/nuclear/nuclearwar1.html is the best paper I've read about potential consequences of a nuclear war. It estimates that a nuclear war in 1988 would have dropped world population from ~5 billion to ~3 billion (this includes estimates of death due to famine etc). You can argue with each individual estimate, but it's hard to argue that a nuclear war would actually kill off the human race. (As noted elsewhere, you can argue that it would be possible to kill off the human race if someone with control of a super-power nuclear arsenal tried to do it. That's a different argument, because you'd have to discuss the likelihood of that circumstance occurring)
- nollidge 15y ago
  I think you vastly overestimate our ability to understand genetics. The genome (any species' genome) evolved so haphazardly and with such deep and interconnected causal spiderwebs I think it's going to take centuries to understand it to the extent that we'll be able to intentionally influence it more than genetic drift and selection currently do. NINJA EDIT: Regardless, the certainty with which you seem to regard your claims is hardly justified (unless you've got some concrete evidence you can share). If you're wrong, we'll have wished we were thinking about these things all along.
  - tomkin 15y ago
    > I think it's going to take centuries to understand it to the extent that we'll be able to intentionally influence it more than genetic drift and selection currently do If this process can be understood mathematically, computers at ever-increasing speeds can come to these understandings for us.
    - nollidge 15y ago
      Unless we come up with a way to completely simulate genetic chemistry and embryonic development in order to link phenotypes with genotypes, I don't see how it's a computable problem.
  - mattmanser 15y ago
    Given that we're doing it right now to plants and animals right now I think you're very wrong.
    - angersock 15y ago
      Strictly speaking, we've been doing it to plants and animals--in one way or another--for hundreds if not thousands of years. That's an entirely different problem than engineering humans.
    - refurb 15y ago
      What we're doing now is a pretty haphazard introduction of non-nature genes into plants and animals often with unexpected effects. Look up histone acetylation and DNA methylation. We're barely scratching the surface of how gene expression works. To say we're going to rebuild the human genome in the next 100 years is a little fanciful. Reminds me of the "trains to the moon" that Popular Mechanics said we would all be riding in the 1980s.
- ken 15y ago
  > The sole threat to that future is super virus / disease, most likely man-made. I remember reading somewhere (maybe one of Cliff Stoll's books?) that the author, a computer person, thought that a biological virus was the greatest threat to humanity. He mentioned this to a biologist friend of his, who assured him that the popular doomsday scenario is essentially impossible, and that his greatest fear was a computer virus!
- angersock 15y ago
  I really wish that I could share your optimism. Any claims about our "self-directed evolution" seem to either: define it so loosely as to include purely social conventions or uses of technology (we keep our information in the twitterspheres!, or to assume some magic breakthrough in bioengineering that overnight allows us to start jailbreaking our genome. The sad, sorry fact of the matter is that in the time it takes to accomplish that, we could blow ourselves up. Or, we could blow enough of ourselves up to render that future unachievable. The nations that are capable of carrying out this research, and supporting the societies that can support this sort of thing logistically and culturally, are very precarious in their positioning. As a thought exercise, consider how far food on your table had to travel, how many things had to work correctly for that to happen, and how fucked you are if they don't (and how tricky it is to find a replacement, and how many other people would be doing the same). It would not be unreasonable to believe that a collapse of civilization could set back your scheme several hundred years--for example, consider how difficult it would be to get back to a point where you could use existing machines, much less make new ones. A semiconductor foundry--required for computers, in turn required for any meaningful engineering these days--would be practically unattainable in dire times, even if you find people alive who still knew how to run it! Or, even more likely, nothing goes wrong, and simple social forces render stagnation even with advanced bioengineering. Read "The Calorie Man" by Paolo Bacigalupi for a recent take on this. There is no reason to expect that we're going to fare any better. So, no, this isn't an unreasonable pessimism on the rest of our parts.
  - bwldrbst 15y ago
    Hah! i read The Calorie Man two days ago and I was thinking of it as I was reading this thread.
- shiny 15y ago
  Tim Ferriss, on the Joe Rogan podcast [1], predicts a pandemic in the near future (around 28:45). Basically, he knows a guy who runs a biotech company who claims that they, if they wanted to, could engineer a virus within six months that could wipe out humanity. I wouldn't say that it's the sole threat, however. Yudkowsky seems to take the threat of runaway AI quite seriously. These are crucial times. [1] http://blog.joerogan.net/archives/3531 http://blog.joerogan.net/archives/3531
  - astrofinch 15y ago
    Link for those interested in reading about the runaway AI scenario: http://facingthesingularity.com/ http://facingthesingularity.com/
- bdunbar 15y ago
  Concerns about asteroids or global warming and so on are moot. We won't be here as a species pumping CO2 into the atmosphere or waiting around helplessly for a rock to crash into the surface. Unless a rock the size of Texas hits tomorrow. Extinction only a generation before it's possible to avoid it. It would be ironic except there won't be anyone left to appreciate the irony.
growt 15y ago
"... we humans will destroy ourselves. ... Most worrying ... human technology" no shit! breaking news everybody! I hate to break it to him but there are 10 million science-fiction books out there dealing with every possible way humans could wipe themselves off the earth. (and maybe just as much real science)
- angersock 15y ago
  I don't know why you are getting downvoted... Maybe people don't read as much speculative fiction as they used to (or books in general, for that matter, but I digress...) but it seems like lately I've run into more than a few people acting surprised about concepts that, frankly, have been explored to death in books as recently as half a century ago.
mseebach 15y ago
There are so many people that could come into existence in the future if humanity survives this critical period of time---we might live for billions of years, our descendants might colonize billions of solar systems, and there could be billions and billions times more people than exist currently. Therefore, even a very small reduction in the probability of realizing this enormous good will tend to outweigh even immense benefits like eliminating poverty or curing malaria, which would be tremendous under ordinary standards. It's really an interesting moral discussion - it's like an extension of the "sacrifice one person to save five" classical dilemma, but I really can't agree with his flippant assertion that our moral obligation to the unborn future billions eclipses that to our obligation to help our contemporaries. And he's not even talking about preserving the planet for the future generations, he's merely concerned with them being born in the first place. Also, his argument has the same short-coming as the "sacrifice" dilemma: We cannot know for sure that a certain action will have a certain outcome - or that any action taken was actually the cause of the outcome.
- rudiger 15y ago
  Just like there's a time value of money, there should be a time value of people. The unborn future billions should be discounted to the present value so that we can accurately compare them. What's the discount rate?
  - jerf 15y ago
    It has to be very high, because our uncertainty about the future is absolutely enormous. I'd put the discount rate even higher than the monetary discount rate, which with fairly standard numbers is already effectively 0 in 20 years.
    - onemoreact 15y ago
      It takes a ridiculous discount rate to effectively become 0 in 20 years. 5%/year * 20 years = (1-.05)^20 = 35.8%. 10%/year * 20 years = (1-.1)^20 = 12.6%. Still, 100 years is often considered a reasonable limit on such things as 5% * 100 years = 0.6%.
akkartik 15y ago
I was reminded of Bill Joy's article from 2000: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html
PaulHoule 15y ago
uh, the risk of human extinction is 100% the main question is do we have 8 months left or 8 years, 80,000 or 800,000.
- funkah 15y ago
  Thanks for commenting!
- Symmetry 15y ago
  I'm hoping we'll make it to 80,000,000,000 but your general point is correct. There's only so many computational cycles that can be extracted from the universe before you run out of places to sink entropy.
  - uvdiv 15y ago
    That's a bit pessimistic. If you can do 10^10 years, you can go out to a red dwarf and stick around 10^13-10^14 more. And with a few small mods you can go further. For example, should you want a "small, slow" world, consider what what would if you "turned off" a star (e.g. tore it apart until it could no longer sustain fusion) and burned its fuel more slowly, in engineered fusion reactors. The sun has a natural lifespan of a few billion years; but consumed at a relative trickle of 10^17 W (the part that strikes the earth), there's enough fuel for about 10^21 years. (Conversely, you could grow your world until it matches the power output of a star, like a Dyson sphere. Urban planning decision.) The part that humans actually metabolize is barely 10^12 W (10^26 years in bubble chambers), and non-organic human simulations could do better. And there's a lot more hydrogen where that came from... and human knowledge of this universe's physics is clearly incomplete (what the hell is dark energy?)
- pjscott 15y ago
  Sure, but worrying about "expected time to human extinction" doesn't make for nearly as good a headline.
cletus 15y ago
It's worth bringing up The Most Important Video You'll Ever Watch [1], which the lecturer characterizes as humanity's biggest problem is our inability to understand the exponential function. Watch all 8 parts. I have come to the conclusion that there simply are too many of us. We can probably sustain our current levels for a century, maybe two, but at some point scarce resources (and their subsequent cost) will have a devastating effect. Basically, we need to correct our population before nature does. As much as people point to space being our future, I simply (sadly) do not agree. While there might be plentiful resources in the asteroid belt (and on other bodies) nothing compares to how cheaply we can pull things out of the ground here on Earth. Our society is predicated on cheap, plentiful resources such that it can't survive them being several (or even one?) order of magnitude more expensive. As far as interstellar space goes, even if we solve the reaction mass problem and have perfect (100% efficient) conversion of matter to energy, it will still be prohibitive to go to even the nearest stars. Perhaps the simplest explanation of the Fermi Paradox is that potential growth for a starfaring civilization is geometric (being a sphere ultimately limited by the speed of light) while growth rates are exponential. And exponential will ultimately "win". [1]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY
- astrofinch 15y ago
  That video is a joke for anyone who has more than a superficial understanding of math. Just because a process has fit an exponential curve does not mean exponential growth is going to continue forever. Past growth patterns are fairly weak evidence of future growth patterns. ("Housing prices always go up!") That's not to say we shouldn't fear a process that is inherently exponential in nature, like the reproduction of bacteria or a nuclear reaction going supercritical. But if the process only appears from the outside to have been growing exponentially, that's only a weak indicator that it will start behaving in an insane fashion. In any case, it seems that as nations become more developed people stop having kids: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/11/fertility-the-big-problem.html http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/11/fertility-the-big-prob...
  - pbhjpbhj 15y ago
    The demographic transition might slow population growth, but for how long? http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v460/n7256/abs/nature08230.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v460/n7256/abs/nature08... suggests that populations passing through the DT eventually recover and begin to grow again. There's not a clear causality either.
uvdiv 15y ago
"Even with nuclear weapons, if you rewind the tape you notice that it turned out that in order to make a nuclear weapon you had to have these very rare raw materials like highly enriched uranium or plutonium, which are very difficult to get [a]. But suppose it had turned out that there was some technological technique that allowed you to make a nuclear weapon by baking sand in a microwave oven or something like that. If it had turned out that way then where would we be now? Presumably once that discovery had been made civilization would have been doomed." It works both ways; technology could find simpler ways to build superweapons, but it could also lower the entry barrier to complex, resource-intensive projects. Look at the consequences of even mild singularity predictions for robotics and AI -- things that lower industrial "costs" by orders of magnitude, things like 3D-printers, self-replicating machines, cheap and ubiquitous fab robots. Anyone could build incredibly sophisticated machines in their own homes -- including sports cars, jet engines, and giant TV screens, but equally, compact laser enrichment cascades [b] and nuclear weapons. Perhaps it's lack of knowledge on my part, but I don't see what will stop atomic bombs from being as common as handguns in 30-100 years. Fissile material is ubiquitous [c]; there's no barrier beyond economics and engineering, of exactly the sort near-term AI could unpredictably disrupt. [a] (Tangential silliness: terrestrial uranium WAS weapons-grade material a few billion years ago -- U-235 decays with a 0.7 billion year half life, compared to 4.5 billion years for U-238, so in geologic history the fissile fraction used to be extremely high. Another one for the "anthropic principle" bin: earth's intelligence must have evolved now, and not earlier, because if it had it would have trivially nuked itself...) [b] Check out [NYT][APS] -- it's actually a mainstream position among arms control experts to consider shutting down US research in laser enrichment, to prevent the knowledge from being developed at all. To me this plan sounds about as airtight as have suggested to close the NSA, to keep mathematical secrets like RSA from being discovered. [c] Here's a blogger who goes hiking and brings back uranium ore by the bucket [Willis], for his own hackery experimenting. Uranium ore occurs everywhere [Cameco]; even common granite is a low-grade ore containing 5-50 ppm (parts per million) U [AZGS]; and research suggests it's even feasible to extract it by bulk from seawater [NBF]. [NYT] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/science/earth/21laser.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/science/earth/21laser.html... [APS] http://aps.org/units/fps/newsletters/201007/slakey.cfm http://aps.org/units/fps/newsletters/201007/slakey.cfm [Willis] http://carlwillis.wordpress.com/2008/02/20/uranium-chemistry/ http://carlwillis.wordpress.com/2008/02/20/uranium-chemistry... [Cameco] http://www.cameco.com/uranium_101/uranium_science/uranium/ http://www.cameco.com/uranium_101/uranium_science/uranium/ [AZGS] http://repository.azgs.az.gov/uri_gin/azgs/dlio/414 http://repository.azgs.az.gov/uri_gin/azgs/dlio/414 [NBF] http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/09/uranium-from-seawater-on-large-scale.html http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/09/uranium-from-seawater-on-la...
Tangurena 15y ago
We're underestimating the risk because we're using Net Present Value to determine the value of future events. While it can be useful in business to determine profitability of future endeavors, it isn't useful when we are unable to correctly calculate all the other things that get wrapped up into the word "externality".
astrofinch 15y ago
If you buy Bostrom's arguments, you could make a donation to his research group: http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/donate http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/donate I still can't believe that "trying to save the human race from destruction" is being allocated such a tiny fraction of the world GDP.
- rwallace 15y ago
  The scare quotes are well placed. The problem with Bostrom et al. is not that they are spending money. It's not even the fact that they are wasting their time on imaginary risks. It's that, by trying to bend policy around those imaginary risks, they are increasing our vulnerability to real-life risks.
  - MBlume 15y ago
    Interesting assertion -- explain?
    - rwallace 15y ago
      For example, there has been a lot of talk for the last few decades about bioterrorism. In 2001, it finally happened; a bioterrorist attack occurred. It killed five people. In the meantime, natural infectious diseases kill several million people every year, and far worse is possible. In 1918-1919, a flu epidemic killed two or three times as many people in a single year as the First World War had killed in four years. In 2002-2003, a SARS outbreak killed a thousand people before it was stopped by quarantine measures. We got off _very_ lightly; SARS is at least as infectious as the 1918 flu, is no more curable, and has nominally roughly twice the lethality rate. The real lethality difference is higher, for the 2002-2003 outbreak was small enough that most of the victims could receive oxygen treatment, which significantly improves survival; in a pandemic, of course, there would not be enough such treatment to go around. And there have been historical plagues deadlier by far than SARS. Terrorists have political goals relative to which the weapon that killed their own communities and families would be counterproductive. The forces of mutation and natural selection working on disease organisms have no such reason for restraint. Now what exactly do the bioterrorism criers think is going to happen if they start being taken seriously enough to influence policy? It's only too obvious what's going to happen, because it's the same thing that always does: more regulation on biotech research, more red tape, more of the sort of field day for the paranoid and bureaucracy gone mad that we already see in the security theater at airports. It's hard enough to fly to Disneyland in those conditions, let alone do cutting-edge research. And so when - not if - something deadlier and more insidious than SARS does come along, whatever chance we might have had of being prepared for it may end up being thrown away. It's not difficult to understand why our instinctive assessment of threats is so wildly irrational. In the ancestral environment there was plenty of disease, to be sure, but almost no medicine, so little selection pressure to be sensitive to that threat. Violence was the main cause of death _that you could do something about_. The human brain is wired to assume our fellow man is the primary threat, regardless of the facts. But we can sometimes override even hardwired assumptions, once we understand that we live in a world in which they are no longer true. We had better learn to override this one, and quickly.
rquantz 15y ago
1) Almost all civilizations like ours go extinct before reaching technological maturity. 2) Almost all technologically mature civilizations lose interest in creating ancestor simulations: computer simulations detailed enough that the simulated minds within them would be conscious. 3) We're almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It seems like there's a fourth possibility here, which is that a full simulation of the universe is not possible. Anyone care to comment on the computability of something like that?
- jerf 15y ago
  There's no reason to believe our universe is uncomputable. It may require vast resources, in excess of what our universe possesses (by definition, in some sense), but we have no ability to say that there can exist no other possible universe that may not only possess these resources, but consider our entire universe the moral equivalent of a homework problem running on a toy computer. Even if our universe is in some sense based on real numbers (in the math sense), there's no apparent reason to believe that arbitrarily accurate simulations couldn't be run of it. (Or, alternatively, our host universe may also have real numbers and be able to use them for simulation purposes.)
- Cieplak 15y ago
  Perhaps the "real" civilization could run the simulation slower than real-time. For instance, while a whole hour elapses in the real world, only a half hour might elapse in the simulation. To the person observing the simulation, everyone inside the simulation appears to be going slowly, while time flows normally for the people inside the simulation. I think that this would reduce the computational intensity by a factor of 2.
  - rquantz 15y ago
    This brings up an interesting question (or possibly interesting): how would one observe the simulation? Would we not be able to detect evidence of the observation?
    - FreeFull 15y ago
joseph4521 15y ago
Many people see technology as one of the biggest threats but don't forget about our growing stupidity: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMkrJOOTjj4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMkrJOOTjj4 It may be what will kill our civilization after all, if not mankind itself.
bdunbar 15y ago
You don't have to be a Velikovsky to appreciate that the solar system is a giant game of billiards, humanity is in a fragile aquarium perched on the eight-ball. To put it another way: I have fire insurance, but I've never had a fire. I have a gun (or four) but I've never had to shoot anyone. Prudent folk recognize that life is risk and prepare accordingly.
hristov 15y ago
Wow an entire article about human extinction without a single mention of global warming or climate change. The Atlantic are such reliable whores.
- pjscott 15y ago
  We could totally survive any climate change that we've ever seen in the geological record. Even if famine claims billions of lives, it wouldn't be a species-ending event. Bostrom is worried about things that have considerably more destructive potential.
gwillis13 15y ago
Oh... I do love everyone's opinion about this topic. It's interesting, but I think everyone can agree that "human evolution is a train with no tracks". Thinking there is a formula to solve it's equation by humans is pretty amusing.
pjscott 15y ago
Human extinction sounds a lot less plausible since it's never happened before.
koningrobot 15y ago
The one thing that's always skipped over in this kind of article is... Why? The universe doesn't care whether we're around or not. It sure as hell doesn't affect us whether people are around even as nearby as a thousand years from now. If you're worried about future generations suffering, then don't make them. That's a lot cheaper than spending fortunes on a technological solution. The money saved can be used to help those suffering now.
tianshuo 15y ago
I'm bringing up an equation that needs consideration. PotentialDamage=NxP1xP2xP3xMaximumDamage Where N=Population of World P1=Percentage of people with knowledge and access to Dangerous Technologies P2= Percentage of Personalities who are destructive P3=Percentage of People who actually act MaximumDamage=The Number of Casualties that can be caused by a single person While P1,P2,P3 is relatively stable, and N is almost linear, MaximumDamage is exponential. You can imagine weapons accessible to normal evolved from sticks, to axes, to guns and explosives. At the present moment the main reason that nuclear weapons are not in exploded by terrorists is not because of technology but because of scarce resources. But for bio-warfare, technology cost will exponentially shrink and impact will exponentially grow. This means if this goes on, PotentialDamage will one day be larger than our population, and extinction will occur. By estimating these parameters we can even predict a data.
alexro 15y ago
Maybe. On the other hand, which risks we estimate properly? What if humans are incapable of properly estimating risks, especially related to themselves? It all comes down to the ability to predict future, and we are really bad at it.

202 points by ca98am79 15y ago

I'm always fascinated by the extremely long term horizon concerns that people bring up in discussions about the future of humanity. 200 to 300 years out there is no humanity as we know it today. Whatever we are at that juncture, it won't be "human" as we now define it. Our self directed evolution has long since taken over, and it's accelerating at an extraordinary clip. You can debate the merits of that, the details of it, but it's happening either way. In the next two or three decades we'll have begun to completely take over genetic alteration / evolution / improvement / etc, of our species. Within a few decades after that, we'll be severely altering what we are. Within 150 or 200 years, it'll be very hard for modern humans to relate to the ancestor humans from 2012. Concerns about asteroids or global warming and so on are moot. We won't be here as a species pumping CO2 into the atmosphere or waiting around helplessly for a rock to crash into the surface. It's not an issue of if, it's just an issue of how long it takes and how many competing models of our self directed evolution become options. The sole threat to that future is super virus / disease, most likely man-made. It's the only thing that could stop our evolution and wipe out our species in that couple hundred year time frame. Even nuclear war isn't a threat to species survival, you could detonate thousands of nukes simultaneously and it wouldn't come close to killing us off.

locopati 15y ago
On what basis do you make this statement "Even nuclear war isn't a threat to species survival, you could detonate thousands of nukes simultaneously and it wouldn't come close to killing us off."
- Someone 15y ago
  Accoridng to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba, Tsar Bomba was over 1400 times as powerful as (Hiroshima+Nagasaki), and that was not even remotely close to killing us of. Thousands of modern devices would be different in many ways: bombs would likely be more powerful on average than the '45 ones, but they could also be cleaner, and they would likely not be used all in the same place. I would guess the species would survive it, if only because the ones starting it would likely be in a good shelter.
  - ericd 15y ago
    Saying that they'd likely be more powerful on average than the '45 ones is a huge understatement. Fat Man was 20 kt, every Trident II missile can carry 12 475 kt warheads. Also, if you distribute nuclear explosions across the world, it's much different than having one meganuke in terms of its effect. Meganukes are very inefficient with their power due to the diameter of an explosive sphere relating to the cubic root of the power. I think the original commenter is way off in their proclamation that we couldn't nuke ourselves to extinction.
  - eCa 15y ago
    It also created a shock wave measured at over 5 on the Richter scale, despite being detonated 4km above the Earth, that travelled at least three times around the globve. What would it have done if it had been detonated at touch down. What would happen if you detonate 10 of those at the same time? I think it would take worse than that to kill the species, but our civilization is more fragile.
    - Someone 15y ago
      I agree about the civilization part, but this was about the huge gray area between "surely to not make homo sapiens extinct" and "surely to make homo sapiens extinct". I am an optimist, so I keep thinking that 'we' would survive. I also think we will not be that stupid to do that 'experiment'.
- lnp 15y ago
  Speculations, see for example: http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2009/how-i-learnt-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-bomb/ http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2009/how-i-learnt-to-s... http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/nuclear/nuclearwar1.html http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/nuclear/nuclearwar1.html It may be possible if you ask "given this arsenal, how do I destroy humanity?" but that is not how wars work.
- nl 15y ago
  http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/nuclear/nuclearwar1.html http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/nuclear/nuclearwar1.html is the best paper I've read about potential consequences of a nuclear war. It estimates that a nuclear war in 1988 would have dropped world population from ~5 billion to ~3 billion (this includes estimates of death due to famine etc). You can argue with each individual estimate, but it's hard to argue that a nuclear war would actually kill off the human race. (As noted elsewhere, you can argue that it would be possible to kill off the human race if someone with control of a super-power nuclear arsenal tried to do it. That's a different argument, because you'd have to discuss the likelihood of that circumstance occurring)
nollidge 15y ago
I think you vastly overestimate our ability to understand genetics. The genome (any species' genome) evolved so haphazardly and with such deep and interconnected causal spiderwebs I think it's going to take centuries to understand it to the extent that we'll be able to intentionally influence it more than genetic drift and selection currently do. NINJA EDIT: Regardless, the certainty with which you seem to regard your claims is hardly justified (unless you've got some concrete evidence you can share). If you're wrong, we'll have wished we were thinking about these things all along.
- tomkin 15y ago
  > I think it's going to take centuries to understand it to the extent that we'll be able to intentionally influence it more than genetic drift and selection currently do If this process can be understood mathematically, computers at ever-increasing speeds can come to these understandings for us.
  - nollidge 15y ago
    Unless we come up with a way to completely simulate genetic chemistry and embryonic development in order to link phenotypes with genotypes, I don't see how it's a computable problem.
- mattmanser 15y ago
  Given that we're doing it right now to plants and animals right now I think you're very wrong.
  - angersock 15y ago
    Strictly speaking, we've been doing it to plants and animals--in one way or another--for hundreds if not thousands of years. That's an entirely different problem than engineering humans.
  - refurb 15y ago
    What we're doing now is a pretty haphazard introduction of non-nature genes into plants and animals often with unexpected effects. Look up histone acetylation and DNA methylation. We're barely scratching the surface of how gene expression works. To say we're going to rebuild the human genome in the next 100 years is a little fanciful. Reminds me of the "trains to the moon" that Popular Mechanics said we would all be riding in the 1980s.
ken 15y ago
> The sole threat to that future is super virus / disease, most likely man-made. I remember reading somewhere (maybe one of Cliff Stoll's books?) that the author, a computer person, thought that a biological virus was the greatest threat to humanity. He mentioned this to a biologist friend of his, who assured him that the popular doomsday scenario is essentially impossible, and that his greatest fear was a computer virus!
angersock 15y ago
I really wish that I could share your optimism. Any claims about our "self-directed evolution" seem to either: define it so loosely as to include purely social conventions or uses of technology (we keep our information in the twitterspheres!, or to assume some magic breakthrough in bioengineering that overnight allows us to start jailbreaking our genome. The sad, sorry fact of the matter is that in the time it takes to accomplish that, we could blow ourselves up. Or, we could blow enough of ourselves up to render that future unachievable. The nations that are capable of carrying out this research, and supporting the societies that can support this sort of thing logistically and culturally, are very precarious in their positioning. As a thought exercise, consider how far food on your table had to travel, how many things had to work correctly for that to happen, and how fucked you are if they don't (and how tricky it is to find a replacement, and how many other people would be doing the same). It would not be unreasonable to believe that a collapse of civilization could set back your scheme several hundred years--for example, consider how difficult it would be to get back to a point where you could use existing machines, much less make new ones. A semiconductor foundry--required for computers, in turn required for any meaningful engineering these days--would be practically unattainable in dire times, even if you find people alive who still knew how to run it! Or, even more likely, nothing goes wrong, and simple social forces render stagnation even with advanced bioengineering. Read "The Calorie Man" by Paolo Bacigalupi for a recent take on this. There is no reason to expect that we're going to fare any better. So, no, this isn't an unreasonable pessimism on the rest of our parts.
- bwldrbst 15y ago
  Hah! i read The Calorie Man two days ago and I was thinking of it as I was reading this thread.
shiny 15y ago
Tim Ferriss, on the Joe Rogan podcast [1], predicts a pandemic in the near future (around 28:45). Basically, he knows a guy who runs a biotech company who claims that they, if they wanted to, could engineer a virus within six months that could wipe out humanity. I wouldn't say that it's the sole threat, however. Yudkowsky seems to take the threat of runaway AI quite seriously. These are crucial times. [1] http://blog.joerogan.net/archives/3531 http://blog.joerogan.net/archives/3531
- astrofinch 15y ago
  Link for those interested in reading about the runaway AI scenario: http://facingthesingularity.com/ http://facingthesingularity.com/
bdunbar 15y ago
Concerns about asteroids or global warming and so on are moot. We won't be here as a species pumping CO2 into the atmosphere or waiting around helplessly for a rock to crash into the surface. Unless a rock the size of Texas hits tomorrow. Extinction only a generation before it's possible to avoid it. It would be ironic except there won't be anyone left to appreciate the irony.

growt 15y ago

"... we humans will destroy ourselves. ... Most worrying ... human technology" no shit! breaking news everybody! I hate to break it to him but there are 10 million science-fiction books out there dealing with every possible way humans could wipe themselves off the earth. (and maybe just as much real science)

angersock 15y ago
I don't know why you are getting downvoted... Maybe people don't read as much speculative fiction as they used to (or books in general, for that matter, but I digress...) but it seems like lately I've run into more than a few people acting surprised about concepts that, frankly, have been explored to death in books as recently as half a century ago.

mseebach 15y ago

There are so many people that could come into existence in the future if humanity survives this critical period of time---we might live for billions of years, our descendants might colonize billions of solar systems, and there could be billions and billions times more people than exist currently. Therefore, even a very small reduction in the probability of realizing this enormous good will tend to outweigh even immense benefits like eliminating poverty or curing malaria, which would be tremendous under ordinary standards. It's really an interesting moral discussion - it's like an extension of the "sacrifice one person to save five" classical dilemma, but I really can't agree with his flippant assertion that our moral obligation to the unborn future billions eclipses that to our obligation to help our contemporaries. And he's not even talking about preserving the planet for the future generations, he's merely concerned with them being born in the first place. Also, his argument has the same short-coming as the "sacrifice" dilemma: We cannot know for sure that a certain action will have a certain outcome - or that any action taken was actually the cause of the outcome.

rudiger 15y ago
Just like there's a time value of money, there should be a time value of people. The unborn future billions should be discounted to the present value so that we can accurately compare them. What's the discount rate?
- jerf 15y ago
  It has to be very high, because our uncertainty about the future is absolutely enormous. I'd put the discount rate even higher than the monetary discount rate, which with fairly standard numbers is already effectively 0 in 20 years.
  - onemoreact 15y ago
    It takes a ridiculous discount rate to effectively become 0 in 20 years. 5%/year * 20 years = (1-.05)^20 = 35.8%. 10%/year * 20 years = (1-.1)^20 = 12.6%. Still, 100 years is often considered a reasonable limit on such things as 5% * 100 years = 0.6%.

akkartik 15y ago

I was reminded of Bill Joy's article from 2000: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html

PaulHoule 15y ago

uh, the risk of human extinction is 100% the main question is do we have 8 months left or 8 years, 80,000 or 800,000.

funkah 15y ago
Thanks for commenting!
Symmetry 15y ago
I'm hoping we'll make it to 80,000,000,000 but your general point is correct. There's only so many computational cycles that can be extracted from the universe before you run out of places to sink entropy.
- uvdiv 15y ago
  That's a bit pessimistic. If you can do 10^10 years, you can go out to a red dwarf and stick around 10^13-10^14 more. And with a few small mods you can go further. For example, should you want a "small, slow" world, consider what what would if you "turned off" a star (e.g. tore it apart until it could no longer sustain fusion) and burned its fuel more slowly, in engineered fusion reactors. The sun has a natural lifespan of a few billion years; but consumed at a relative trickle of 10^17 W (the part that strikes the earth), there's enough fuel for about 10^21 years. (Conversely, you could grow your world until it matches the power output of a star, like a Dyson sphere. Urban planning decision.) The part that humans actually metabolize is barely 10^12 W (10^26 years in bubble chambers), and non-organic human simulations could do better. And there's a lot more hydrogen where that came from... and human knowledge of this universe's physics is clearly incomplete (what the hell is dark energy?)
pjscott 15y ago
Sure, but worrying about "expected time to human extinction" doesn't make for nearly as good a headline.

cletus 15y ago

It's worth bringing up The Most Important Video You'll Ever Watch [1], which the lecturer characterizes as humanity's biggest problem is our inability to understand the exponential function. Watch all 8 parts. I have come to the conclusion that there simply are too many of us. We can probably sustain our current levels for a century, maybe two, but at some point scarce resources (and their subsequent cost) will have a devastating effect. Basically, we need to correct our population before nature does. As much as people point to space being our future, I simply (sadly) do not agree. While there might be plentiful resources in the asteroid belt (and on other bodies) nothing compares to how cheaply we can pull things out of the ground here on Earth. Our society is predicated on cheap, plentiful resources such that it can't survive them being several (or even one?) order of magnitude more expensive. As far as interstellar space goes, even if we solve the reaction mass problem and have perfect (100% efficient) conversion of matter to energy, it will still be prohibitive to go to even the nearest stars. Perhaps the simplest explanation of the Fermi Paradox is that potential growth for a starfaring civilization is geometric (being a sphere ultimately limited by the speed of light) while growth rates are exponential. And exponential will ultimately "win". [1]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY

astrofinch 15y ago
That video is a joke for anyone who has more than a superficial understanding of math. Just because a process has fit an exponential curve does not mean exponential growth is going to continue forever. Past growth patterns are fairly weak evidence of future growth patterns. ("Housing prices always go up!") That's not to say we shouldn't fear a process that is inherently exponential in nature, like the reproduction of bacteria or a nuclear reaction going supercritical. But if the process only appears from the outside to have been growing exponentially, that's only a weak indicator that it will start behaving in an insane fashion. In any case, it seems that as nations become more developed people stop having kids: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/11/fertility-the-big-problem.html http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/11/fertility-the-big-prob...
- pbhjpbhj 15y ago
  The demographic transition might slow population growth, but for how long? http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v460/n7256/abs/nature08230.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v460/n7256/abs/nature08... suggests that populations passing through the DT eventually recover and begin to grow again. There's not a clear causality either.

uvdiv 15y ago

"Even with nuclear weapons, if you rewind the tape you notice that it turned out that in order to make a nuclear weapon you had to have these very rare raw materials like highly enriched uranium or plutonium, which are very difficult to get [a]. But suppose it had turned out that there was some technological technique that allowed you to make a nuclear weapon by baking sand in a microwave oven or something like that. If it had turned out that way then where would we be now? Presumably once that discovery had been made civilization would have been doomed." It works both ways; technology could find simpler ways to build superweapons, but it could also lower the entry barrier to complex, resource-intensive projects. Look at the consequences of even mild singularity predictions for robotics and AI -- things that lower industrial "costs" by orders of magnitude, things like 3D-printers, self-replicating machines, cheap and ubiquitous fab robots. Anyone could build incredibly sophisticated machines in their own homes -- including sports cars, jet engines, and giant TV screens, but equally, compact laser enrichment cascades [b] and nuclear weapons. Perhaps it's lack of knowledge on my part, but I don't see what will stop atomic bombs from being as common as handguns in 30-100 years. Fissile material is ubiquitous [c]; there's no barrier beyond economics and engineering, of exactly the sort near-term AI could unpredictably disrupt. [a] (Tangential silliness: terrestrial uranium WAS weapons-grade material a few billion years ago -- U-235 decays with a 0.7 billion year half life, compared to 4.5 billion years for U-238, so in geologic history the fissile fraction used to be extremely high. Another one for the "anthropic principle" bin: earth's intelligence must have evolved now, and not earlier, because if it had it would have trivially nuked itself...) [b] Check out [NYT][APS] -- it's actually a mainstream position among arms control experts to consider shutting down US research in laser enrichment, to prevent the knowledge from being developed at all. To me this plan sounds about as airtight as have suggested to close the NSA, to keep mathematical secrets like RSA from being discovered. [c] Here's a blogger who goes hiking and brings back uranium ore by the bucket [Willis], for his own hackery experimenting. Uranium ore occurs everywhere [Cameco]; even common granite is a low-grade ore containing 5-50 ppm (parts per million) U [AZGS]; and research suggests it's even feasible to extract it by bulk from seawater [NBF]. [NYT] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/science/earth/21laser.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/science/earth/21laser.html... [APS] http://aps.org/units/fps/newsletters/201007/slakey.cfm http://aps.org/units/fps/newsletters/201007/slakey.cfm [Willis] http://carlwillis.wordpress.com/2008/02/20/uranium-chemistry/ http://carlwillis.wordpress.com/2008/02/20/uranium-chemistry... [Cameco] http://www.cameco.com/uranium_101/uranium_science/uranium/ http://www.cameco.com/uranium_101/uranium_science/uranium/ [AZGS] http://repository.azgs.az.gov/uri_gin/azgs/dlio/414 http://repository.azgs.az.gov/uri_gin/azgs/dlio/414 [NBF] http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/09/uranium-from-seawater-on-large-scale.html http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/09/uranium-from-seawater-on-la...

Tangurena 15y ago

We're underestimating the risk because we're using Net Present Value to determine the value of future events. While it can be useful in business to determine profitability of future endeavors, it isn't useful when we are unable to correctly calculate all the other things that get wrapped up into the word "externality".

astrofinch 15y ago

If you buy Bostrom's arguments, you could make a donation to his research group: http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/donate http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/donate I still can't believe that "trying to save the human race from destruction" is being allocated such a tiny fraction of the world GDP.

rwallace 15y ago
The scare quotes are well placed. The problem with Bostrom et al. is not that they are spending money. It's not even the fact that they are wasting their time on imaginary risks. It's that, by trying to bend policy around those imaginary risks, they are increasing our vulnerability to real-life risks.
- MBlume 15y ago
  Interesting assertion -- explain?
  - rwallace 15y ago
    For example, there has been a lot of talk for the last few decades about bioterrorism. In 2001, it finally happened; a bioterrorist attack occurred. It killed five people. In the meantime, natural infectious diseases kill several million people every year, and far worse is possible. In 1918-1919, a flu epidemic killed two or three times as many people in a single year as the First World War had killed in four years. In 2002-2003, a SARS outbreak killed a thousand people before it was stopped by quarantine measures. We got off _very_ lightly; SARS is at least as infectious as the 1918 flu, is no more curable, and has nominally roughly twice the lethality rate. The real lethality difference is higher, for the 2002-2003 outbreak was small enough that most of the victims could receive oxygen treatment, which significantly improves survival; in a pandemic, of course, there would not be enough such treatment to go around. And there have been historical plagues deadlier by far than SARS. Terrorists have political goals relative to which the weapon that killed their own communities and families would be counterproductive. The forces of mutation and natural selection working on disease organisms have no such reason for restraint. Now what exactly do the bioterrorism criers think is going to happen if they start being taken seriously enough to influence policy? It's only too obvious what's going to happen, because it's the same thing that always does: more regulation on biotech research, more red tape, more of the sort of field day for the paranoid and bureaucracy gone mad that we already see in the security theater at airports. It's hard enough to fly to Disneyland in those conditions, let alone do cutting-edge research. And so when - not if - something deadlier and more insidious than SARS does come along, whatever chance we might have had of being prepared for it may end up being thrown away. It's not difficult to understand why our instinctive assessment of threats is so wildly irrational. In the ancestral environment there was plenty of disease, to be sure, but almost no medicine, so little selection pressure to be sensitive to that threat. Violence was the main cause of death _that you could do something about_. The human brain is wired to assume our fellow man is the primary threat, regardless of the facts. But we can sometimes override even hardwired assumptions, once we understand that we live in a world in which they are no longer true. We had better learn to override this one, and quickly.

rquantz 15y ago

1) Almost all civilizations like ours go extinct before reaching technological maturity. 2) Almost all technologically mature civilizations lose interest in creating ancestor simulations: computer simulations detailed enough that the simulated minds within them would be conscious. 3) We're almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It seems like there's a fourth possibility here, which is that a full simulation of the universe is not possible. Anyone care to comment on the computability of something like that?

jerf 15y ago
There's no reason to believe our universe is uncomputable. It may require vast resources, in excess of what our universe possesses (by definition, in some sense), but we have no ability to say that there can exist no other possible universe that may not only possess these resources, but consider our entire universe the moral equivalent of a homework problem running on a toy computer. Even if our universe is in some sense based on real numbers (in the math sense), there's no apparent reason to believe that arbitrarily accurate simulations couldn't be run of it. (Or, alternatively, our host universe may also have real numbers and be able to use them for simulation purposes.)
Cieplak 15y ago
Perhaps the "real" civilization could run the simulation slower than real-time. For instance, while a whole hour elapses in the real world, only a half hour might elapse in the simulation. To the person observing the simulation, everyone inside the simulation appears to be going slowly, while time flows normally for the people inside the simulation. I think that this would reduce the computational intensity by a factor of 2.
- rquantz 15y ago
  This brings up an interesting question (or possibly interesting): how would one observe the simulation? Would we not be able to detect evidence of the observation?
  - FreeFull 15y ago

joseph4521 15y ago

Many people see technology as one of the biggest threats but don't forget about our growing stupidity: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMkrJOOTjj4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMkrJOOTjj4 It may be what will kill our civilization after all, if not mankind itself.

bdunbar 15y ago

You don't have to be a Velikovsky to appreciate that the solar system is a giant game of billiards, humanity is in a fragile aquarium perched on the eight-ball. To put it another way: I have fire insurance, but I've never had a fire. I have a gun (or four) but I've never had to shoot anyone. Prudent folk recognize that life is risk and prepare accordingly.

hristov 15y ago

Wow an entire article about human extinction without a single mention of global warming or climate change. The Atlantic are such reliable whores.

pjscott 15y ago
We could totally survive any climate change that we've ever seen in the geological record. Even if famine claims billions of lives, it wouldn't be a species-ending event. Bostrom is worried about things that have considerably more destructive potential.

gwillis13 15y ago

Oh... I do love everyone's opinion about this topic. It's interesting, but I think everyone can agree that "human evolution is a train with no tracks". Thinking there is a formula to solve it's equation by humans is pretty amusing.

pjscott 15y ago

Human extinction sounds a lot less plausible since it's never happened before.

koningrobot 15y ago

The one thing that's always skipped over in this kind of article is... Why? The universe doesn't care whether we're around or not. It sure as hell doesn't affect us whether people are around even as nearby as a thousand years from now. If you're worried about future generations suffering, then don't make them. That's a lot cheaper than spending fortunes on a technological solution. The money saved can be used to help those suffering now.

tianshuo 15y ago

I'm bringing up an equation that needs consideration. PotentialDamage=NxP1xP2xP3xMaximumDamage Where N=Population of World P1=Percentage of people with knowledge and access to Dangerous Technologies P2= Percentage of Personalities who are destructive P3=Percentage of People who actually act MaximumDamage=The Number of Casualties that can be caused by a single person While P1,P2,P3 is relatively stable, and N is almost linear, MaximumDamage is exponential. You can imagine weapons accessible to normal evolved from sticks, to axes, to guns and explosives. At the present moment the main reason that nuclear weapons are not in exploded by terrorists is not because of technology but because of scarce resources. But for bio-warfare, technology cost will exponentially shrink and impact will exponentially grow. This means if this goes on, PotentialDamage will one day be larger than our population, and extinction will occur. By estimating these parameters we can even predict a data.

alexro 15y ago

Maybe. On the other hand, which risks we estimate properly? What if humans are incapable of properly estimating risks, especially related to themselves? It all comes down to the ability to predict future, and we are really bad at it.