In January 1995, Russia detected a nuclear missile on its way. The alert reached the president, who was deciding whether to launch a counterattack when another system conflicted with the initial warning.
What they thought was the first missile in a major attack was actually a research rocket to study the Northern Lights.
This event occurred after the end of the Cold War, but was nevertheless one of the closest calls we've ever come to igniting a global nuclear war.
With the invention of the atomic bomb,
humanity gained the power to destroy itself for the first time in history.
Since then, our existential threat – either the threat of extinction or the irreversible collapse of human civilization – has steadily increased.
Mitigating this risk is within our power, but to do so, we must understand which of our activities pose existential risks now, and which may in the future.
So far, our species have survived for 2,000 centuries, each one vulnerable to extinction from natural causes — asteroid impacts, supervolcanoes and the like.
Estimating existential risk is an inherently uncertain business because usually when we try to figure out how likely something is, we check how many times it has happened before.
But the total destruction of humanity has never happened before. While there is no perfect way to determine our vulnerability to natural hazards, experts estimate it to be 1 in 10,000 per century. Nuclear weapons were our first addition to this baseline.
Although there are many dangers associated with nuclear weapons, the existential threat arises from the possibility of a global nuclear war leading to a nuclear winter, where the soot of burning cities blocks out the sun for years, causing it to Crops that humanity depends on fail.
We haven't had a nuclear war yet,
but our track record is too short to tell whether they're inherently unlikely or whether we've just been lucky. We also cannot say for sure whether a global nuclear war will cause a nuclear winter that will threaten the existence of humanity.
The next major addition to our existential threat was climate change. Like nuclear war, climate change could result in many dire situations that we must work hard to avoid, but it will stop short of causing extinction or irreversible destruction.
We expect a few degrees Celsius of warming, but cannot yet completely rule out 6 or even 10 degrees, which would likely cause a disaster of extraordinary proportions.
Even in this worst-case scenario,
it's unclear whether warming will pose a direct existential threat, but the disruption it will cause will put us at greater risk than other existential threats.
The greatest threats may come from technologies that are still emerging. Take engineered epidemics. The greatest destruction in human history has been caused by epidemics.
And biotechnology is enabling us to modify and create germs that can be far more deadly than naturally occurring germs. Such germs can cause pandemics through biowarfare and research accidents.
The decrease in the cost of genome sequencing and editing, along with the availability of potentially dangerous information such as published genomes of deadly viruses, also increases the number of people and groups that can potentially produce such pathogens.
Another concern is unconnected AI.
Most AI researchers believe that this will be the century where we develop artificial intelligence that surpasses all human capabilities.
If we give up this advantage, we put our future in the hands of the systems we build.
Even if created entirely with humanity's best interests in mind, superintelligent AI could pose an existential threat if it is not fully aligned with human values—a task scientists are extremely concerned about.
Seems difficult.
Based on what we know at this point, some experts estimate that human existential risk is 100 times higher than the background rate of natural risk.
But these odds depend heavily on human choice.
Because most of the risk is from human action, and it is under human control. We can reduce this threat if we consider the security of humanity's future as the most important issue of our time.
Whether or not humanity fulfills its potential is in our hands.
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