2 ms·

I think the subtext implied in the respondents tone is that they don’t consider millions or even billions of people dying off as existential.

• s1artibartfast 3y ago
  I thought I was pretty explicit in saying exactly that. Many countries lost more than 10% of their population in World War II in the span of just a few years. Some lost more than 50% of the working age men. Even that wasn't an existential threat.
  • merry_flame 3y ago
    It all boils down to what hides behind that word, "existential". Slavs and Jews definitely considered what happened in WW2 an existential threat for instance, but you seem to be arguing that only threats to the entirety of humanity qualify as existential, a view that many others here don't agree with, probably because it gives off the impression that things like the extinction of entire cultures and millions or billions of people are discounted by using a restrictive definition. It seems however that neither view matches the use of the concept of "existential risks" in contemporary discourse, which are understood to be "risks that threaten the destruction of humanity's long-term potential". That's a much lower bar to clear and by that standard, we're clearly collectively cutting the branch we're sitting on, though probably not indeed jumping off the cliff of an absolute total annihilation of the human race.