What does it mean to save the world? Here, we'll say that it means saving the existence of those who enjoy it, namely humanity and maybe some other animals.
A few years back, a minor motion picture linked July 4th to humanity's survival. Now, 11 years later, we'll revisit this topic, except this time, it's not a movie.
Those who have studied the matter put the odds of humanity surviving the 21st Century somewhere between 50 and 75 percent- unless we do something about it.
So, how can we save the world? How can we prevent humanity from going extinct?
Update: Changing title from "How To Save The World" to "Human Extinction 1: How To Prevent It" to fit the ongoing series. -July 7, 2007
First, some perspective at what the stakes are. The Earth’s biosphere will remain hospitable for another 500 million years or so. If we can keep our civilization moving so long, then colonizing space should be easy, which buys us another 10^14 years or so, when all stars burn out. By then, we may have mastered living without stars, which might keep us around for another 10^32 years or so, until protons and neutrons start decaying en masse. By then, we may have figured out how to beat that. Indeed, our survival for an infinite amount of time, whatever that means, cannot currently be ruled out. That's a lot of blog posts, elections, and nice, happy lives, among other things. So to say that a lot is at stake here is, well, a big understatement.
Despite the stakes, very little work has yet been done (see reading list below) on making sure we'll be around to enjoy this very long future. Perhaps we think our extinction is too unlikely to worry about. It's not. Perhaps we think it's too inevitable for us to make a difference on. It's not. Perhaps we just hadn't thought of it this way. No longer.
OK, now the how-to.
- Learn more. Knowing is half the battle here too. We're much more likely to survive if we're not taken by surprise by anything. And given how small the reading list is, it might not take long before you can make quite meaningful contributions.
- Network. Persuaded that this is the most important thing to work on? (I am.) Drop me an email so we can collaborate further. (Felicifia, an online community I help run concerning the utilitarianism ethics system, also discusses these topics from an applied ethics perspective.) Then, pass word on to others, whether online or off.
- Fundraise. The best organization studying threats to our survival is Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute. (Yes, I appreciate the irony of applauding the British today.) An excellent US-based 501c(3) (non-profit) organization addressing a specific threat is the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI).
- Solve problems. If we're going to go extinct, it will happen for a reason. Lists of possible reasons can be found here and here. If you have professional expertise in these areas (or can acquire it), your service could be particularly valuable. The main short-term (i.e. within the next several decades) threats appear to be:
- Biological pandemic, whether human-engineered or not. This is perhaps the biggest immediate threat.
- Poorly designed artificial intelligence with capabilities surpassing ours, leaving us in the dust. Some suspect this may become an issue as soon as the 2020's. SIAI is working on this now to increase the odds of nothing tragic happening here. Given the trends, this may actually be the biggest concern.
- Nuclear winter. I sure hope we're unlikely to go that route, but it strikes me as at least possible.
- Runaway climate change. My impression of the state-of-the-art climate science is that we don't expect climate change to be so severe that we'd go extinct, but that we cannot yet rule this possibility out, especially given certain positive feedback mechanisms in the climate system. However, we may also be able to engage in geoengineering to avoid the worst consequences. So, given that:
- Reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Climate change is on the list of threats, both because runaway climate change might do us in on its own, and because a strong but not fatal change might cause social chaos that could feed other threats. Yinz here probably know how to reduce your emissions quite well already, but briefly, reduce your meat consumption, buy local, drive less, 'green' your residence, and use more efficient products.
- (Last but not least) Support good elected officials (or become one yourself!). I need tell no one here the importance of the public sector. In candidates, I'm looking for those who will keep the ball rolling on addressing climate change, those who will be effective diplomats to facilitate global cooperation, those whose ideologies value our future, and those who listen to and respect sound advice coming from the likes of scientists, ethicists, etc.
Reading List:
Three popular books by prominent scholars exist on the topic: Catastrophe: Risk and Response by Richard Posner, The End of the World: The Science and Ethics of Human Extinction by John Leslie, Our Final Hour: A Scientist's Warning: How Terror, Error, and Environmental Disaster Threaten Humankind's Future In This Century - On Earth and Beyond by Martin Rees. These are good places to start for in depth study. (I'm embarrassed to admit that I have not yet read these.)
Online, there's Existential Risks: Analyzing Human Extinction Scenarios and Related Hazards and Dinosaurs, Dodos, Humans? (pdf) by Nick Bostrom of the Oxford FHI. A draft of Reducing the risk of human extinction by Jason Matheny is also available. (The final version of this will be published in a forthcoming issue of the journal Risk Analysis).
More readings can be found on this page on the SIAI website.
Update: Some reads I didn't include in the original posting here: The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development's 2003 publication Emerging Systemic Risks in the 21st Century: An Agenda for Action (pdf), the World Economic Forum's 2006 publication Global Risks 2006 (pdf), Fred Ikle's Annihilation from Within: The Ultimate Threat to Nations, and Robin Hanson's Catastrophe, Social Collapse, and Human Extinction (pdf). -July 5, 2007
References:
So you know I'm not making crap up.
- The "50 and 75 percent" figure for odds of humanity surviving this century comes from p.2 of Dinosaurs, Dodos, Humans? (pdf).
- The "500 million years or so" figure for Earth's biosphere's lifetime comes from Caldeira, Ken and James Kasting, 1992. "The life span of the biosphere revisited". Nature, vol. 360, pages 721-723. Available online at http://www.geosc.psu.edu/....
- The 10^14 years until stars burn out and 10^32 years until protons and neutrons start decaying comes from Adams, Fred and Gregory Laughlin, 1997. "A dying universe: the long-term fate and evolution of astrophysical objects". Reviews of Modern Physics, vol. 69, no. 2 (April), pages 337-372. Discussion paper version available at http://arxiv.org/...
- The "our survival for an infinite amount of time, whatever that means, cannot currently be ruled out" comes from personal correspondence with my good friend Scott Field (this guy, currently a physics PhD student at Brown link. See also the Future of the Universe thread on Felicifia, a site I help run.
- The list of problems to solve displayed here comes from my own analysis (with help from others) of the lists linked to above.
All other facts and analyses are my own, so I claim full responsibility for any errors here.
Final Thoughts
Yes, this is that important. Please do get involved. Happy Independence Day, and may we have many, many, many more.