Everything you say is ahistorical nonsense, transatlantic trade on a massive was happening back in 19th century, so wood import from the New World (or Scandinavia, or any other place) could have easily happened. Energy density of charcoal and of coal are very similar, so one could just as easily be imported as the other.
Or industries could have been located closer to major sources of wood, the same way they were located closer to major sources of coal. This was entirely possible.
The disease killed an estimated 400,000 Europeans per year during the closing years of the 18th century
So? 400,000 people a year is what % of total mortality?
As recently as 1967, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that 15 million people contracted the disease and that two million died in that year.
In an important way diseases don’t kill people, poverty, hunger, and lack of sanitation kills people. The deaths were almost all happening in the poorest, and the most abused parts of the world—India and Africa.
Wood ran out because forests weren’t properly managed, not because photosynthesis is somehow insufficiently fast at growing forest—and in any case there are countless agricultural alternative energy sources like ethanol from sugar cane.
In 1990 3.5 billion m^3 of wood were harvested. With density of about 0.9kg/cubic meter, and energy of about 15 MJ/kg, that’s about 47 trillion MJ (if we burned it all, which we’re not going to).
All coal produced in 1905 was about 0.9 billion tons, or about 20 trillion MJ.
In 2010 worldwide biofuel production reached 105 billion liters (or 2.4 trillion MJ). But that’s very modest amount—according to the International Energy Agency, biofuels have the potential to meet more than a quarter of world demand for transportation fuels by 2050. And that’s not any new technology, we knew how to extract alcohol from plants thousands of years ago.
We don’t have enough hydropower to cover all our use, but it could cover very large fraction of our needs, definitely enough to jumpstart civilization, and there’s many times more of any of—wind, solar, biomass, or nuclear power than we need—none of them fully available to any new civilization.
The fact that we used something for a certain purpose is no evidence that it was necessary for this purpose, it’s just evidence that we’re not total idiots to leave a resource unused. Many alternatives which would work nearly just as well were available in pretty much every single case.
Which part of “Europe” are you talking about? Western peripheries of Roman Empire got somewhat backwards, and that was after massive demographic collapse of late Antiquity, the rest of Europe didn’t really change all that drastically, or even progressed quite a lot.
This argument is only convincing to people who never bothered to look at timeline of historical events in technology. No country had any significant amount of coal mining before let’s say UK in 1790-ish and forwards, and even there it was primarily to replace wood and charcoal.
Technologies we managed to build by then were absolutely amazing. Until 1870 the majority of locomotives in the USA operated on wood, canal transport was as important as railroads and was even less dependent on dense fuels, so transportation was perfectly fine.
Entire industries operated on water power just fine for decades before coal or electricity.
Just look at how well science, and technology was doing before coal came about.
Even mentioning oil in this context is pretty ridiculous—it only came to importance by about 1950-ish. Cars can be modified to run on wood of all things without much difficulty, and it happened on mass scale in many economies in war conditions.
That reasoning is just extremely unconvincing, essentially 100% wrong and backwards.
Renewable energy available annually is many orders of magnitude greater than all fossil fuels we’re using, and it has been used as primary source of energy for almost the entire history up to industrial revolution. Biomass for everything, animal muscle power, wind and gravity for water transport, charcoal for melting etc. were used successfully at massive scale before anybody even thought of oil or gas or made much use of coal.
Other than energy, most other resources—like ores—are trivially recyclable. If New Rome wanted iron and copper and so on they’d just need to head toward the nearest dump, and dig there. Amount of ores we dug out and made trivially accessible is ridiculously greater than what they had available.
Annual iron ore mining for example is 2.4 billion metric tons, or 1 kg per person per day. Annual steel production is 1.49 billion metric tons, or 220 kg per person per year. Every year (OK, some of that steel is from recycled iron). Vast majority of them would be easily extractable if civilization collapsed. If we went back to Roman levels of population, each Roman could easily extract tens or hundreds of tons of usable steel from just the stuff we extracted that their technology couldn’t.
The same applies to every other metal, and most non-metal resources. It doesn’t apply to a few resources like phosphorus and helium, but they’ll figure it out somehow.
And even if civilization “collapsed” it’s not like our scientific and organizational knowledge would have disappeared, making it ridiculously easier to rebuild than it was to build in the first place.
The thing is countries would not really be poorer. Properly treated HIV isn’t much worse than smoking (I mean the part before lung cancer) or diabetes for most of people’s lives. Countries differ a lot on these already, without any apparent drastic differences in economic outcomes.
By the time people are already very old they might live a few years less, but they’re not really terribly productive at that point anyway.
That’s already old data by standards of modern progress of medicine, and groups that tend to get HIV are highly non-random and are typically engaged in other risky activities like unprotected promiscuous sex and intravenous drug use, and are poorer and blacker than average, so their baseline life expectancy is already much lower than population average.
Smallpox wasn’t that bad if you look at statistics, and spanish flu happened at a time when humans have been murdering each other at unprecedented rate and normal society was either suspended or collapsed altogether everywhere.
Usually the chance of getting infected is inversely correlated with severity of symptoms (by laws of epidemiology), and nastiness is inversely correlated with broad range (by laws of biology), so you have diseases that are really extreme by any one criterion, but they tend to be really weak by some other criterion.
And in any case we’re getting amazingly better at this.
There’s no particular reason to believe this is going to make global thermonuclear war any less likely. Russia and United States aren’t particularly likely to start a global thermonuclear warfare anytime soon, and in longer perspective any major developed country, if it wanted, could build nuclear arsenals sufficient to make a continent uninhabitable within a few years.
There’s also this argument that mutually assured destruction was somehow stabilizing and preventing nuclear warfare—the only use of nuclear weapons so far happened when the other side had no way to retaliate. I’m quite neutral on this—I’m unwilling to say that nuclear arms reductions either increase or decrease risk of global war (which will eventually turn nuclear or otherwise very nasty).
HIV emerged before modern medicine developed. It was discovered in 1981 - almost prehistory by medical standards, but it was actually transfered to humans somewhere in late 19th century. It wrecks the most havoc in places which are extremely far from modern medicine as well, in developed countries HIV is a fairly minor problem.
SARS is a much better example of a new disease and how modern medicine can deal with it.
Except the fact they wouldn’t be particularly lethal.
If 100% of humans had HIV, it would increase probably make most countries disregard patent laws on a few drugs, and human life spans would get shorter by like 5-10 years on average.
This should keep things in perspective.
There’s really no such thing as a “super bug”. All organisms follow the same constraints of biology and epidemiology. If there was even some magical “super bug” it would infect everything of any remotely compatible species, not be constrained to one species, and small subset of cells in it.
We might not have any drugs ready for a particular infection, but we didn’t have any for SARS, it was extremely infectious, and extremely deadly, and it worked perfectly fine in the end. We have tools like quarantine, detection etc. which work against any disease known or unknown.
Medicine made a massive progress since then—mass sequencing of infectious genomes for quick reaction time is now far more practical, and we might soon even get broad spectrum antivirals.
And we’ve eradicated two diseases already (smallpox, rinderpest) with two more being very close to eradication (polio, dracunculiasis), and it’s not like anybody has any intentions of stopping the total at 4. We’ll keep eradicating diseases, even if it takes a decade or two for each such attempt. Every time we manage to do that, there’s one less source of potential pandemic.
I cannot really imagine how it could be going better than that.
This doesn’t fully apply to hypothetical manmade pandemics, but currently we don’t really know how to make such thing (the best we can do it modify existing disease to be a bit more nasty, creating diseases de novo is far beyond our capabilities), nobody has any particular desire to do so, and any broad spectrum countermeasures we develop against natural diseases will likely at least partly apply against manmade diseases in any case.
Yeah, I’ve mentioned pandemics already.
I’m not terribly willing to treat them as an “existential” risk, since countless pandemics already happened and for natural reasons they never actually kill the entire population.
And the way how awesomely we’ve dealt with SARS is a good data point showing that pandemics might actually be under control now. At least we should have far more confidence in our ability to deal with pandemics is far better than our ability to deal with just about any other existential threat.
And one nice side effect of just plain old medicine is reduction of this existential risk, even without any efforts specifically towards handling existential risk. Every antibiotic, every antiviral, every new way of keeping patients alive longer, every diagnostic improvement, every improvement in hygiene in poor countries etc. - they all make pandemics less likely and more manageable.
Most of entries on the list are either not quantifiable even approximately to within order of magnitude. Of those that are (which is pretty much only “risks from nature” in Bostrom’s system) many are still bad candidates for putting significant effort into, because:
we either have little ways to deal with them (like nearby supernova explosions)
we have a lot of time and future will be better equipped to deal with them (like eventual demise of Sun)
they don’t actually seem to get anywhere near civilization-threatening levels (like volcanoes)
About the only new risk I see on the list which can and should be dealt with is having some backup plans for massive solar flares, but I’m not sure what we can do about it other than putting some extra money into astrophysics departments so they can figure things out better and give us better estimates.
I understand that global thermonuclear war could cause serious damage, but I’m not aware of any credible efforts that can prove they’re moving things in the right direction.
What do you mean by “biological holocaust”?
Super eruptions surely follow some kind of power law, and as far as I can tell (and we can be sure by extrapolating from the power law), they don’t get anywhere remotely near levels of destroying all life on Earth.
And we sure know how to heat Earth significantly in no time—just release some of these into atmosphere. It will only increase temperature, not sunlight, so food production and such will still be affected, but we already produce way more food per capita to feed everyone, so even a pretty big reduction won’t get anywhere near compromising food security for majority of people, let alone threatening to kill everyone.
Existential risk reduction is a very worthy cause. As far as I can tell there are a few serious efforts—they have scenarios which by outside view have non-negligible chances, and in case of many of these scenarios these efforts make non-negligible difference to the outcome.
Such efforts are:
asteroid tracking
seed vaults
development of various ways to deal with potential pandemics (early tracking systems, drugs etc.) - this actually overlaps with “normal” medicine a lot
arguably, global warming prevention is a borderline issue, since there is a tiny chance of massive positive feedback loops that will make Earth nearly uninhabitable. These chances are believed to be tiny by modern climate science, but all chances for existential risk are tiny.
That’s about the entire list I’m aware of (are there any others?)
And then there’s huge number of efforts which claim to do something based on existential risk, but either theories behind risk they’re concerning themselves with, or theories behind why their efforts are likely to help, are based on assumptions not shared by vast majority of competent people.
All FAI-related stuff suffers from both of these problems—their risk is not based on any established science, and their answer is even less based in reality. If it suffered from only one of these problems it might be fixable, but as far as I can tell it is extremely unlikely to join the category of serious efforts ever.
The best claim those non-serious effort can make is that tiny chance that the risk is real tiny change the organization will make a difference huge risk is still a big number, but that’s not a terribly convincing argument.
I’m under impression that we’re doing far less than everything we can with these serious efforts, and we haven’t really identified everything that can be dealt with with such serious effort. We should focus there (and on a lot of things which are not related to existential risk).
I understand what you’re saying, but all these examples are going to be loaded and for a very good reason—they all involve paternalistically overriding another person’s wishes.
This is going to be controversial unless everybody somehow agrees that their wish is “wrong” by some standard. (and since at least one person doesn’t agree, or you wouldn’t need such overriding...)
This thinking (people cannot be trusted knowing what’s good for them) is something nobody is willing to accept in general, but everyone is perfectly willing to accept in some specific cases or other. I cannot think of any objective standard to judge when such paternalism would be appropriate and when it wouldn’t—or I can feel of a few things, but they really feel like post-hoc rationalizations.
I don’t deny many people here are smart and interesting.
If you could point me to some things on LW I should definitely learn (and for some reasons more serious than entertainment), I’d definitely like to see that.
Strong orthogonality hypothesis is definitely wrong—not being openly hostile to most other agents has enormous instrumental advantage. That’s what’s holding modern human societies together—agents like humans, corporations, states etc. - have mostly managed to keep their hostility low. Those that are particularly belligerent (and historical median has been far more belligerent towards strangers than all but the most extreme cases today) don’t do well by instrumental standards at all.
Of course you can make a complicated argument why it doesn’t matter (someone’s end goals might be extremely hostile, but they act in mostly non-hostile ways for instrumental reasons), but there’s not that much difference practically.
You’d pretty much need to postulate infinitely powerful AI (like Eliezer’s AI foom idea, which is totally wrong of course) before you can disregard this argument from every single observation we can make of every single intelligent agent in the real world.