Humanity faces multiple existential threats that are planetary in scale. Currently, most threats are from nature, but in the near future we’re likely to create new risks. Most of these disasters could directly affect everyone on the Earth, but their destructive power cannot reach out across the void of space. A hypothetical independent human colony […]
Tag: pandemics
How much do humans need to cooperate in order to survive?
Existential risks are thorny problems. They generally can’t be solved by one person working alone. Success will almost certainly require deep cooperation among all countries. In fact, existential risks can be categorized according to how much cooperation is needed to avoid them. Mass cooperation without an explicit structure might work for some types of risk […]
How likely is human extinction due to a natural pandemic?
A pandemic is the rapid spread of an infectious disease across a large region. Global pandemics will likely occur in the future, but their danger is very hard to estimate. So far, pandemics have received far more attention than other natural existential threats and our analysis below indicates that this level of attention is appropriate. […]