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?
What would that look like? Humanity existed for the great majority of its history without antibiotics.
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?