Submitted by Tyler Durden on 02/17/2015 21:15 -0500
From ‘Armageddon’ to ‘Day After Tomorrow’ to ‘Independence Day’, many have speculated as to the eventual demise of human life on the planet but – according to Dennis Pamlin of the Global Challenges Foundation, no scientists had “compiled a list of global risks with impacts that, for all practical purposes, can be called infinite,” until now. The following list of 12 possible ways that human civilization might end – ranked from least to most likely, come with a warning, “we don’t want to be accused of scaremongering but we want to get policy makers talking.” We suspect Paul Krugman will be happy at the economic growth potential…
The four main goals of this report are to acknowledge, inspire, connect and deliver.
The first of the report’s goals – acknowledging the existence of risks with potential infinite impact – seeks to help key stakeholders to acknowledge the existence of the category of risks that could result in infinite impact and to show them that we can reduce or even eliminate most of them.
The second inspires by showing the practical action that is taking place today. This report seeks to show that helping to meet these global challenges is perhaps the most important contribution anyone can make today, and highlights concrete examples to inspire a new generation of leaders.
The third goal is to connect different groups at every level, so that leaders in different sectors connect with each other to encourage collaboration. This will need a specific focus on financial and security policy where significant risks combine to demand action beyond the incremental.
The fourth goal is to deliver actual strategies and initiatives that produce actual results. The report is a first step and its success will ultimately be measured only on how it contributes to concrete results.
The report will have achieved its goals when key decision-makers recognise the magnitude of the possible risks and our ability to reduce or even eliminate most of them.
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The odds vary dramatically…
As do the possibilities of managing the risk…
But here are the 12 ways the world will end… (from least to most likely)
Asteroid impact
If an asteroid about five kilometers in size were to collide with our planet, the main destruction would be from clouds of dust projected into the upper atmosphere – which would affect climate change and food supplies, and cause political instability. Larger sized objects could cause immediate extinction on the planet. Large asteroid collisions happen about once every 20 million years, the report says. Probability: 0.00013%
Super-volcano eruption
A volcano capable of causing an eruption with an ejecta volume greater than 1,000 km3 could cause a global catastrophe. The dust projected into the atmosphere would absorb the Sun’s rays and cause global freezing. The effects of possible eruptions can be compared to those of a nuclear war, only without the firestorms. Probability: 0.00003%
Global pandemic
A high impact epidemic is more probable than is widely believed, as all the features of an extremely devastating disease already exist in nature, the report says, giving examples of several devastating illnesses including Ebola, rabies, an infectious cold, and HIV. If all were combined, “the death toll would be extreme.” Probability: 0.0001%
Nuclear war
The possibility of a deliberate or accidental nuclear conflict in the next century or so is estimated at 10%. The larger impact would depend on whether the conflict would trigger a “nuclear winter” – a climatic effect that would plunge temperatures below freezing, destroy most of the ozone layer, and start firestorms, which would likely lead to mass starvation and state collapse. Probability: 0.005%
Extreme climate change
The report warns that climate change could be more extreme than some estimates suggest. The world’s poorest countries could become completely uninhabitable. Climate change could lead to mass deaths, famines, social collapse, and mass migration. Probability: 0.01%
Synthetic biology
The most damaging impact from synthetic biology to human civilization would come from an engineered pathogen targeting humans or a crucial component of the ecosystem, the report states. Such would emerge from military or commercial bio-warfare, bio-terrorism, or leaked pathogens. Probability: 0.01%
Nanotechnology
Atomically precise manufacturing would create smart or extremely resilient materials, and allow many different groups to manufacture a wide range of things – including large arsenals of novel weapons, such as nuclear ones. Probability: 0.01%
Unknown consequences
These are all the unknowns that could lead to the end of the world, scientists say, urging for extensive research into the matter. “One resolution to the Fermi paradox – the apparent absence of alien life in the galaxy – is that intelligent life destroys itself before beginning to expand into the galaxy.”Probability: 0.1%
There are also a few potential causes of the Apocalypse which have not had a probability assessed to them.
Ecological collapse
In this scenario, the ecosystem would suffer a drastic change that would lead to mass extinction. Species extinction is now far faster than the historic rate, and attempts to quantify a safe ecological operating space place humanity well outside it. Probability: N/A
Global system collapse
The world economic and political systems are interconnected, and are prone to system-wide failures caused by the structure of the network. Economic collapse is usually accompanied by social chaos, civil unrest, and a breakdown of law and order. Probability: N/A
Future bad governance
A disaster could be caused by failing to solve major problems; for example, a failure to alleviate global poverty, or actively causing worse outcomes – like constructing a global totalitarian state. Probability: N/A
And lastly, the most probable of all the mentioned causes of the Apocalypse is…
Artificial Intelligence
The creation of human-level intelligence can result in the possibility that this intelligence will be driven to construct a world without humans. There is also a possibility of artificial intelligence waging war or creating “whole brain emulations” that would give machines human minds.
On the other hand, the report also says it is probable that such intelligence could counter other apocalyptic causes presented in the study. Probability: 0-10%
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Full Report below:
Too stupid for words.
All of the existential threats boil down to two:
1. Man-made
2. Natural
ALL of the Man-Made threats boil down to “Future Bad Governance,” but in fact are part of CURRENT BAD GOVERNANCE.
It is the GOVERNMENTS of the world, run by sociopaths everywhere, that are in current process of gifting us with
1. Fukushima’s hot water bath
2. AI being driven by DARPA-like work
3. Biowarfare (exclusively a DoD thing)
4. Ecological collapse of FDA-approved factory farming & strip-mining crop systems.
It is the Dept of Defense that gifted us with nuclear catastrophe. It is the DoD constantly developing new, hellish weapons of total annihilation of which we can only now guess.
It is the FDA that approves unimaginably vast amounts of chemicals, antibiotics and hormones added to our foods every day. It is the EPA that encouraged the pumping dry of ancient aquifers to grow water-dependent crops in the deserts of California and other places. It was the EPA that approved nuclear plants having NOWHERE to go with spent fuel, so EPA lets spent, highly radioactive spent fuel stack up in pools at existing plants, JUST LIKE at FUKUSHIMA.
The odds of getting hit with an asteroid or the rise of a supervolcano are relatively low.
The odds of one of the MANY idiotic things promulgated by political systems (especially the most dysfunctional, best funded one on the planet, the USA’s) wiping us all out?
High. And growing.
dc sunsets said:
“Too stupid for words.
All of the existential threats boil down to two:
1. Man-made
2. Natural
ALL of the Man-Made threats boil down to “Future Bad Governance,” but in fact are part of CURRENT BAD GOVERNANCE.”
I was going to say basically the exact same thing! If the current ignorant fucks in charge would have been in charge back in the day, cave men never would have left the caves. Governments fuck up nearly everything they touch. The very best thing they could do is get the hell out of the way.
IS, rulers have, throughout all history, set humanity back at every turn.
Heinlein was spot-on when he noted that it is a tiny minority of innovators, despised by the masses and hindered always by the rulers, who are responsible for everything good that has come our way.
The plight of Mankind is that here in these times of unimaginable plenty, we have given the most destructive sociopaths of our species resources to produce things so destructive, so purely evil, that it is almost a statistical certainty that they will eventually be employed….destroying us all.
It takes fantastic wealth to create the demonic weapons of the Department of Defense. Do we think tiny countries with very limited resources and rulers who are very “close” to their citizens could accumulate the wealth and operate in the shrouds of secrecy necessary to develop these horrendous, Satanic weapons?
The USA is the worst offender. Our government has frankly unimaginable resources. Its work is shrouded in layer after layer of secrecy. Payoffs, graft, and every criminal act is available because its agents WORK for the very entity that defines what is and is not a crime.
The only way humanity survives is if we make it through the coming economic collapse long enough for large nation-states to break apart. A world full of little countries like Iceland and Lichtenstein is not a world bristling with biowarfare, ICBMs and CIA’s.
Frankly, I give us far lower than 50/50 odds.
And I figure that, instead of the world’s population continuing to rise as it has for 100 years, it’s about to undergo an abrupt decline of major proportion courtesy of a major decline in social mood and the warfare that will immediate follow it.
D.c. hittin the truthiness hard this morning. We have already sown the seeds of our destruction. From trash, plastic, and radiation in our oceans to fracking and polluting our fresh water, to modifying our food genetically, our path is already paved. The only question, is will we walk, run, or drive like speed freaks down this path.
#1 – Fukushima, by a wide margin…and it’s not even on the list or charts.
Rise
What’s going on with fuckushima? I have not heard anything in months.
BTW, I put Obama and the Dimocrats at #1 threat to Human Existance.
This world may be destroyed but it will not end.This sin cursed world , this sin cursed creation will be
Redeemed.. Don’t any of you read your Bibles?
For what it’s worth . YOU WILL NOT END.YOU WILL BE ALIVE FOREVER.For all Eternity. Think about it .
Sensetti says: Rise
“What’s going on with fuckushima? I have not heard anything in months.
BTW, I put Obama and the Dimocrats at #1 threat to Human Existance.”
http://enenews.com
http://www.rense.com
As to your 2nd sentence…probably true at least for America’s existence as we know and love it.
I’m delighted that the authors believe Nuclear Armageddon has a probability of only 0.005%
What the hell, we might as well build 20,000 more. I think they pulled all those percentages out of their asses …. or a BLS spreadsheet.
Well said, dc. While the cosmos is a dangerous place and there are many things out there that could wipe out of little planet in the blink of an eye, it is also a very old place. Thinks happen slowly. I fully believe humanity will manage to wipe itself out long before the cosmos gets around to it. I just hope it isn’t soon, but with 10s of thousands of nukes out there and lunatics running the show, it very well could be.
Me spelung suks.
They are missing a fairly common one, which could act as a catalyst for a few of the ones noted here, A solar CME (coronal mass ejection)
A solar CME (coronal mass ejection) if strong enough, has the potential to severely damage power grids, transformers, and damage almost anything with microchip and everything that relies on it. Examples include finance and banking ,food processing, transportation, automation,sanitation, you name it.
This impact may make certain things more likely, such as Pandemics, global system collapse and nuclear conflict. The bad government thing just comes along with any of these scenarios
Well, since Fukushima is already here and going on 3 years with no progress toward resolution, I’d say that’s our #1 worry. #2 on my list is all the similarly configured GE Mark I reactors spread across the U.S. near population centers. All of these plants store spent nuke rods on-site and require electricity to run cooling pumps. So a CME could hit us with a one-two punch, knocking out utility power over a widespread area AND knocking out power to the nuke plants themselves.
Another worry along these same lines is dams upstream from nuke plants bursting through obsolescence or sabotage. One such leaking dam (Boone dam) with 7 downstream nuke plants is a current concern: http://enenews.com/discolored-water-coming-downstream-dam-bank-river-course-shouldnt-be-happening
I’ll combine the last two, Alex, for $500.
Does anyone know if a major CME would knock out generators that are NOT at that moment running?
Just about every nuke plant in America melts down within a week or three if without power.
http://www.nrdc.org/nuclear/fallout/
Nice to know how supremely screwed we are, in such an event.
What screwed Fukashaftus into the ground was the lack of generators for hours & days after the quake.
Makes me wonder why they didn’t use one of the who-knows-how-many generators the US military had in the immediate area. Dozens could certainly have been airlifted in on an hour’s notice.
Oh….stupid me….STUPID GOVERNMENT TRICKS again………………….
Your trouble may be that you are living in a very dominant culture so you don’t have the benefit of other perspectives when you look out at the world or imagine the future.
All the rest of the world knows the stories America tells, but Americans seldom listen to the stories of everyone else. You have such a strange idea of government. Even though you trademarked the idea of “we, the people” you don’t seem to believe in it in practice. Your government is not meant to govern you, its meant to be the apparatus by which you govern yourselves. This is a crucial difference. But you all seem to hate the idea of government as if it was intrinsically alienated from the people it should serve. Here is a question for you: if you hate government then how are you going to govern yourselves? How will you come together as a people to make the big decisions which require collaboration, since they address common, public concerns and cannot be trusted to the whims of private interest? You will end up surrendering your sovereignty to corporations that are not loyal to any nation or people and which cannot be trusted to respect your needs or values.
There are many problems with governments. But governments are most dangerous when the people don’t take ownership of their institutions. The PEOPLE are meant to be the government. I can’t understand why Americans of all people should apparently forget this. If you want to be a great nation again stop letting your corporations ransack the planet. The rest of the world wants your country to regain a grip on itself, because you are big and you’re powerful and it is dangerous for all of us if you can’t get your corporations under control.