Anders Sandberg of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute took to Reddit earlier this week to explain what keeps him up at night. At the top of the list is nuclear war:
The typical mammalian species last for a few million years, which means that extinction risk (or turning-into-something-else-risk) is on the order of one in a million per year. Just looking at nuclear war, where we have had at least one close call in 69 years (the Cuban Missile Crisis, claimed by some of the participants to have had about one chance in three of having ended badly) gives a risk of 0.5 percent per year. Ouch. Of course, nuclear war might not be 100-percent extinction causing, but even if we agree it has just 10-percent or 1-percent chance, it is still way above the natural extinction rate.
What doesn’t worry him:
Overpopulation has actually dropped down the agenda since the ’70s. Back then it looked like there would literally be too many people to feed, and people would start starving soon. Then the green revolution happened, and crop yields went up. But birth rates also started declining, and have continued declining nearly everywhere (even if pretty backwards societies). The UN began to reassess their predictions, and things look much better. Or rather, we realized that the real problem is poverty rather than people. …
People actually seem to change the number of kids they have surprisingly easily (one would imagine evolution has predisposed us to have as many as we can, but human desires are stronger). A classic study showed that the introduction of TV soap operas – which generally show families with few kids – reduced birth rates in Indian and Brazilian villages. We might control our fertility more by what we see on the screen or how many playgrounds we have around us than we think.
(Hat tip: Mark Strauss)
The Dish 