Seth Baum on Human Extinction
July 9th, 2007 –
SIAI Guest Blogger Seth Baum maintains a blog diary at the popular Daily Kos. He has written a series of interesting posts on the topic of existential risks, beginning with Human Extinction 1: How to Prevent It, which includes a reading list and “What you can do” list.
Thanks for the shot-out, Tyler. I’ve got two more up now:
Human Extinction 2: Government Response - Discusses what the US government is doing or could do to help prevent human extinction, and what we can do to help it help.
Human Extinction 3: Critical Review of DK Diaries - A broad overview of DK diaries on human extinction. This one might be particularly interesting for outsiders to the DailyKos community since it’ll give a glimpse of how people there treat this topic.
My other DailyKos diaries are listed at http://seth-baum.dailykos.com/
Nuclear war and climate change, although risks, are not existential risks in any sense of the term. We know that nuclear war won’t kill off humanity, because asteroid impacts regularly deliver (on geological time) a good four-six orders of magnitude more power than the world’s entire nuclear arsenal. A large percentage of the biosphere managed to survive these impacts despite having no intelligence and no preparation. As for climate change, in the past (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c2/Vostok-ice-core-petit.png), Earth’s temperature has regularly risen 6-8 degrees C in only a few thousand years, and this was not only survivable but didn’t result in a mass extinction.