Concretely? I’m not sure. One way is for a pathogen to jump from animals (or a lab) to humans, and then manage to infect and kill billions of people.
Humanity existed for the great majority of its history without antibiotics.
True. But it’s much easier for a disease to spread long distances and among populations than in the past.
Note: I just realized there might be some terminological confusion, so I checked Bostrom’s terminology. My “billions of deaths” scenario would not be “existential,” in Bostrom’s sense, because it isn’t terminal: Many people would survive, and civilization would eventually recover. But if a pandemic reduced today’s civilization to the state in which humanity existed for the majority of its history, that would be much worse than most nuclear scenarios, right?
if a pandemic reduced today’s civilization to the state in which humanity existed for the majority of its history
Why would it? A pandemic wouldn’t destroy knowledge or technology.
Consider Black Death—it reduced the population of Europe by something like a third, I think. Was it a big deal? Sure it was. Did it send Europe back to the time when it was populated by some hunter-gatherer bands? Nope, not even close.
We have a lot of systems that depend on one another; perhaps a severe enough pandemic would cause a sort of cascade of collapse. I’d think it would have to be really bad, though, certainly worse than killing 1⁄3 of the population.
I am sure there would be some collapse, the question is how long will it take to rebuild. I would imagine that the survivors would just abandon large swathes of land and concentrate themselves. Having low population density overall is not a problem—look at e.g. Australia or Canada.
But we are now really in movie-plots land. Are you prepared for the zombie apocalypse?
Concretely? I’m not sure. One way is for a pathogen to jump from animals (or a lab) to humans, and then manage to infect and kill billions of people.
True. But it’s much easier for a disease to spread long distances and among populations than in the past.
Note: I just realized there might be some terminological confusion, so I checked Bostrom’s terminology. My “billions of deaths” scenario would not be “existential,” in Bostrom’s sense, because it isn’t terminal: Many people would survive, and civilization would eventually recover. But if a pandemic reduced today’s civilization to the state in which humanity existed for the majority of its history, that would be much worse than most nuclear scenarios, right?
Why would it? A pandemic wouldn’t destroy knowledge or technology.
Consider Black Death—it reduced the population of Europe by something like a third, I think. Was it a big deal? Sure it was. Did it send Europe back to the time when it was populated by some hunter-gatherer bands? Nope, not even close.
We have a lot of systems that depend on one another; perhaps a severe enough pandemic would cause a sort of cascade of collapse. I’d think it would have to be really bad, though, certainly worse than killing 1⁄3 of the population.
I am sure there would be some collapse, the question is how long will it take to rebuild. I would imagine that the survivors would just abandon large swathes of land and concentrate themselves. Having low population density overall is not a problem—look at e.g. Australia or Canada.
But we are now really in movie-plots land. Are you prepared for the zombie apocalypse?