12 Things for World Destruction

These are the 12 things most likely to destroy the world

1) Catastrophic climate change

The scenario that the authors envision here isn't 2ºC (3.6ºF) warming, of the kind that climate negotiators have been fighting to avoid for decades. It's warming of 4 or 6ºC (7.2 or 10.8ºF), a truly horrific scenario which it's not clear humans could survive.

2) Nuclear war

The "good" news here is that nuclear war could only end humanity under very special circumstances. Limited exchanges, like the US's bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II, would be humanitarian catastrophes but couldn't render humans extinct. So why does nuclear war make the list? Because of the possibility of nuclear winter. That is, if enough nukes are detonated, world temperatures would fall dramatically and quickly, disrupting food production and possibly rendering human life impossible. It's unclear if that's even possible, or how big a war you'd need to trigger it, but if it is a possibility, that means a massive nuclear exchange is a possible cause of human extinction.

3) Global pandemic

As with nuclear war, not just any pandemic qualifies. Past pandemics — like the Black Death or the Spanish flu of 1918 — have killed tens of millions of people, but failed to halt civilization. The authors are interested in an even more catastrophic scenario.

4) Ecological catastrophe

"Ecological collapse refers to a situation where an ecosystem suffers a drastic, possibly permanent, reduction in carrying capacity for all organisms, often resulting in mass extinction," the report explains.

5) Global system collapse

This is a vague one, but it basically means the world's economic and political systems collapse, by way of something like "a severe, prolonged depression with high bankruptcy rates and high unemployment, a breakdown in normal commerce caused by hyperinflation, or even an economically-caused sharp increase in the death rate and perhaps even a decline in population."

6) Major asteroid impact

Major asteroid impacts have caused large-scale extinction on Earth in the past. Most famously, the Chicxulub impact 66 million years ago is widely believed to have caused the mass extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs (an alternative theory blames volcanic eruptions, about which more in a second). Theoretically, a future impact could have a similar effect.

7) Supervolcano

As with asteroids, there's historical precedent for volcanic eruptions causing mass extinction. The Permian–Triassic extinction event, which rendered something like 90 percent of the Earth's species extinct, is believed to have been caused by an eruption.

8) Synthetic biology

This isn't a risk today, but it could be in the future. Synthetic biology is an emerging scientific field that focuses on the creation of biological systems, including artificial life.

9) Nanotechnology

This is another potential risk in the future. The concern here is that nanotech democratizes industrial production, thus giving many more actors the ability to develop highly destructive weapons. "Of particular relevance is whether nanotechnology allows rapid uranium extraction and isotope separation and the construction of nuclear bombs, which would increase the severity of the consequent conflicts," Pamlin and Armstrong write. Traditional balance-of-power dynamics wouldn't apply if individuals and small groups were capable of amassing large, powerful arsenals.

10) Artificial Intelligence

The report is also concerned with the possibility of exponential advances in artificial intelligence. Once computer programs grow advanced enough to teach themselves computer science, they could use that knowledge to improve themselves, causing a spiral of ever-increasing superintelligence.

11) Future bad governance

This is perhaps the vaguest item on the list — a kind of meta-risk. Most of the problems enumerated above would require some kind of global coordinated action to address. Climate change is the most prominent example, but in the future things like nanotech and AI regulation would need to be coordinated internationally.

12) Unknown unknowns

The first 11 items on the list are risks we can identify as potential threats worth tackling. There are almost certainly other dangers out there with grave potential impacts that we can't predict. It's hard to even think about how to tackle this problem, but more research into global catastrophic risks could be helpful. This unknown could be BOKO HARAM, ISIS, EBOLA, etc. Watch out for details of the Unknown Unknowns from this blog

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