Yes, a permanent obstruction is an existential risk. There is some discussion of ways in which a nuclear war could permanently obstruct our reaching the stars, but I’m not sure the risk is that high.
Full-on runaway global warming is absolutely an existential risk—it will do more than delay us if the planet turns into Venus. Again this isn’t considered a very likely outcome.
It seems extremely unlikely that we’ll have Venusian style runaway global warming anytime in the next few thousand years assuming no major geoengineering occurs. A major part of why that happened on Venus is due to the lack of plate tectonics on Venus. Without that, there are serious limits. Earth could become much more inhospitable to humans but it would be very difficult to even have more than a 20 or 30 degree Farenheit increase. So humans would have to live near the poles, but it wouldn’t be fatal.
A more serious long-term obstruction to going to the stars is that it isn’t completely clear after a large-scale societal collapse that we will have the resources necessary to bootstrap back up to even current tech levels. Nick Bostrom has discussed this. Essentially, many of the resources we take for granted as necessary for developing a civilization (oil, coal, certain specific ores) have been consumed by civilization. We’re already exhausting the easy to reach oil and have exhausted much of the easy to reach coal (we just don’t notice it as much with coal because there’s so much). A collapse back to bronze age tech, or even late Roman tech might not have enough easy energy sources to boot back up. That will be especially likely if the knowledge of how to make more advanced energy sources becomes lost. I suspect that there are enough natural resources now still left that a collapse would not prevent a future rise again. But as we consume more resources that becomes less true. And even if we develop cheap alternatives like fusion power, if we’ve already exhausted the low-tech resources we’re going to be in very bad shape for a collapse. Indeed, arguably a strong reason for conserving energy now is to keep those resources around if things go drastically bad.
The big question for these issues is how much ‘slack’ we had over our development trajectory. A new civilization could cultivate biomass for energy, and hydropower provides a fair amount of electricity without steady use of consumables. I’d say probably but not very confidently we could recover after intense resource depletion and collapse.
Right, and in some respects we’d actually have tiny advantages the second time around, in that a lot of metals which are hard to separate from ores are already separated so humans who know where to look will have easy sources of metal. This will be particularly relevant for copper and aluminum which are difficult to extract without large technological bases.
Yes, and let’s keep in mind that no civilization with colonial-era tech has ever collapsed to a pre-industrial level, and it isn’t at all clear that such an event is possible. You’d have to kill more than 99% of the population and keep the survivors from forming town-sized communities for a couple of generations, and even then the knowledge is still available in books. To me this just looks like reasoning from fictional evidence—there are lots of stories about primitive survivors of lost civilizations, so people assume that must be a plausible outcome.
That may be using a bad reference class. We know that slides backwards have happened for other tech levels. I don’t see an intrinsic reason to think it couldn’t happen for a society at or near our tech level.
When low-tech societies collapse, the reason is typically that they lose access to some resource that’s essential to their way of life, and they can’t adapt because their technology base doesn’t include anything they can switch to as a substitute. Since the number of potential substitutes for any given resource grows steadily as technology advances we would expect more advanced societies to be more resistant to that type of problem, and indeed that’s what we see in the historical record. If you can’t keep the nuclear power plants working you can always fall back on oil, or natural gas, or coal, or hydro, or windmills, and so on all the way down the chain to bronze age power sources. Then, once you find a level you can sustain in your new situation, you can start rebuilding transportation and industry to get back to where you were before the disaster.
Which is why I say that the “big disaster causes civilization to collapse” scenario is fictional evidence. AKAIK it has never happened to any society that had even colonial-era tech, and there are good reasons to think it can’t unless you posit such a high casualty rate (>99%) that instant extinction becomes an equally plausible outcome.
In evaluating existential risks it’s essential to focus our attention on actual predictions and realistic scenarios, instead of fanciful ‘worst imaginable case’ scenarios. Earth could be destroyed by a giant asteroid made of antimatter moving at 99% C tomorrow, but since there’s no reason to think such things actually exist it would be a waste of time to worry about them. Better to focus our attention on the scenarios that are actually plausible, so we don’t waste our efforts.
With that in mind, I’ll point out that even the worst-case IPCC scenarios do not come remotely close to posing an existential risk. The predicted climate changes are only somewhat larger than what we experienced in the 20th century, and the predicted effects are mostly an increase of suffering in countries that are too poor to adapt easily. As near as I can tell global warming is only included in this kind of list because so many people have it in their mental ‘scary global bad stuff’ bucket, and don’t notice that crop failures and malaria outbreaks are in a completely different league than the end of all life on Earth.
Resource shortage (as JoshuaZ raises) is the discussion I was thinking of. Thanks for the link to that essay—I hadn’t read it, and it’s worth reading as is so often the case with him.
I’d also remark that the asteroid risk seems like it might be worth thinking about, not because it’s at all at the top of the list of things that might go wrong, but because it might be cheap to dispense with. I don’t have relevant subject matter knowledge but am friends with an applied physics graduate student who suggested that it might cost 100 million dollars or less. Maybe even around a mere 10 million dollars.
Carl expresses skepticism that working against asteroid strikes is cost-effective here.
Asteroid risk is a good “poster child” for existential risk in general, since it’s easily understood and doesn’t provoke skepticism the way other risks can. To some extent, this means I’m less worried about it, since I’m more optimistic that if I don’t campaign about it someone else will.
I read in Influence that people are much more likely to identify with a cause once they’ve made a small commitment to it. Perhaps the best thing we can do for existential risk is to track down people who seem like intelligent, rational sorts and ask them to make very small contributions to preventing asteroid risk?
I wish. Last time I read about it the U.S. gov wasn’t inclined to spend the few million necessary for an all-sky survey to register all potentially dangerous objects.
Is it only expected to be a few million? This could easily be privately funded with a good advertising campaign. For example, a project which might have a similar audience, SETI, is entirely privately funded and has a budget of a few million a year.
Still no joy I’m afraid. Is it possible your sender IP is listed by zen.spamhaus.org? I’ve checked my junk folder for things titled “asteroid” and found nothing. If you can tell me the sender address I can tell you if it’s showing up in my mail logs. Sorry!
Yes, a permanent obstruction is an existential risk. There is some discussion of ways in which a nuclear war could permanently obstruct our reaching the stars, but I’m not sure the risk is that high.
Full-on runaway global warming is absolutely an existential risk—it will do more than delay us if the planet turns into Venus. Again this isn’t considered a very likely outcome.
It seems extremely unlikely that we’ll have Venusian style runaway global warming anytime in the next few thousand years assuming no major geoengineering occurs. A major part of why that happened on Venus is due to the lack of plate tectonics on Venus. Without that, there are serious limits. Earth could become much more inhospitable to humans but it would be very difficult to even have more than a 20 or 30 degree Farenheit increase. So humans would have to live near the poles, but it wouldn’t be fatal.
A more serious long-term obstruction to going to the stars is that it isn’t completely clear after a large-scale societal collapse that we will have the resources necessary to bootstrap back up to even current tech levels. Nick Bostrom has discussed this. Essentially, many of the resources we take for granted as necessary for developing a civilization (oil, coal, certain specific ores) have been consumed by civilization. We’re already exhausting the easy to reach oil and have exhausted much of the easy to reach coal (we just don’t notice it as much with coal because there’s so much). A collapse back to bronze age tech, or even late Roman tech might not have enough easy energy sources to boot back up. That will be especially likely if the knowledge of how to make more advanced energy sources becomes lost. I suspect that there are enough natural resources now still left that a collapse would not prevent a future rise again. But as we consume more resources that becomes less true. And even if we develop cheap alternatives like fusion power, if we’ve already exhausted the low-tech resources we’re going to be in very bad shape for a collapse. Indeed, arguably a strong reason for conserving energy now is to keep those resources around if things go drastically bad.
The big question for these issues is how much ‘slack’ we had over our development trajectory. A new civilization could cultivate biomass for energy, and hydropower provides a fair amount of electricity without steady use of consumables. I’d say probably but not very confidently we could recover after intense resource depletion and collapse.
Right, and in some respects we’d actually have tiny advantages the second time around, in that a lot of metals which are hard to separate from ores are already separated so humans who know where to look will have easy sources of metal. This will be particularly relevant for copper and aluminum which are difficult to extract without large technological bases.
Yes, and let’s keep in mind that no civilization with colonial-era tech has ever collapsed to a pre-industrial level, and it isn’t at all clear that such an event is possible. You’d have to kill more than 99% of the population and keep the survivors from forming town-sized communities for a couple of generations, and even then the knowledge is still available in books. To me this just looks like reasoning from fictional evidence—there are lots of stories about primitive survivors of lost civilizations, so people assume that must be a plausible outcome.
That may be using a bad reference class. We know that slides backwards have happened for other tech levels. I don’t see an intrinsic reason to think it couldn’t happen for a society at or near our tech level.
When low-tech societies collapse, the reason is typically that they lose access to some resource that’s essential to their way of life, and they can’t adapt because their technology base doesn’t include anything they can switch to as a substitute. Since the number of potential substitutes for any given resource grows steadily as technology advances we would expect more advanced societies to be more resistant to that type of problem, and indeed that’s what we see in the historical record. If you can’t keep the nuclear power plants working you can always fall back on oil, or natural gas, or coal, or hydro, or windmills, and so on all the way down the chain to bronze age power sources. Then, once you find a level you can sustain in your new situation, you can start rebuilding transportation and industry to get back to where you were before the disaster.
Which is why I say that the “big disaster causes civilization to collapse” scenario is fictional evidence. AKAIK it has never happened to any society that had even colonial-era tech, and there are good reasons to think it can’t unless you posit such a high casualty rate (>99%) that instant extinction becomes an equally plausible outcome.
In evaluating existential risks it’s essential to focus our attention on actual predictions and realistic scenarios, instead of fanciful ‘worst imaginable case’ scenarios. Earth could be destroyed by a giant asteroid made of antimatter moving at 99% C tomorrow, but since there’s no reason to think such things actually exist it would be a waste of time to worry about them. Better to focus our attention on the scenarios that are actually plausible, so we don’t waste our efforts.
With that in mind, I’ll point out that even the worst-case IPCC scenarios do not come remotely close to posing an existential risk. The predicted climate changes are only somewhat larger than what we experienced in the 20th century, and the predicted effects are mostly an increase of suffering in countries that are too poor to adapt easily. As near as I can tell global warming is only included in this kind of list because so many people have it in their mental ‘scary global bad stuff’ bucket, and don’t notice that crop failures and malaria outbreaks are in a completely different league than the end of all life on Earth.
I would want to hear that from a climatology pro who acknowledged other existential risks to be really reassured, but thanks, and I hope you’re right!
I basically agree with your remarks.
What about resource shortage?
Edit: See Scott Aaronson’s remarks under The Singularity Is Far for one perspective.
Resource shortage (as JoshuaZ raises) is the discussion I was thinking of. Thanks for the link to that essay—I hadn’t read it, and it’s worth reading as is so often the case with him.
I’d also remark that the asteroid risk seems like it might be worth thinking about, not because it’s at all at the top of the list of things that might go wrong, but because it might be cheap to dispense with. I don’t have relevant subject matter knowledge but am friends with an applied physics graduate student who suggested that it might cost 100 million dollars or less. Maybe even around a mere 10 million dollars.
Carl expresses skepticism that working against asteroid strikes is cost-effective here.
Asteroid risk is a good “poster child” for existential risk in general, since it’s easily understood and doesn’t provoke skepticism the way other risks can. To some extent, this means I’m less worried about it, since I’m more optimistic that if I don’t campaign about it someone else will.
I read in Influence that people are much more likely to identify with a cause once they’ve made a small commitment to it. Perhaps the best thing we can do for existential risk is to track down people who seem like intelligent, rational sorts and ask them to make very small contributions to preventing asteroid risk?
I wish. Last time I read about it the U.S. gov wasn’t inclined to spend the few million necessary for an all-sky survey to register all potentially dangerous objects.
Is it only expected to be a few million? This could easily be privately funded with a good advertising campaign. For example, a project which might have a similar audience, SETI, is entirely privately funded and has a budget of a few million a year.
Part of why I mention asteroid risk is because it’s a good poster child for existential risk in general. See the document which I emailed you.
Not received it yet—what address did you mail it to? Try paul at ciphergoth dot org.
Sent
Still no joy I’m afraid. Is it possible your sender IP is listed by zen.spamhaus.org? I’ve checked my junk folder for things titled “asteroid” and found nothing. If you can tell me the sender address I can tell you if it’s showing up in my mail logs. Sorry!