Jeroen Willems

A Happier World · 1 February 2023

What Are The Biggest Threats To Humanity?

Could asteroids, pandemics, nuclear war or AI lead to the end of civilization as we know it?

Thanks to Chelsea (@Hooplahoma) for co-hosting this video!

Interested in donating to safeguard the long-term future of humanity? You can donate to an expert managed fund at: https://bit.ly/3dXL8IG

Or look for an impactful job on the 80,000 Hours job board: https://bit.ly/AHW480kC

Great resources to understand the AI alignment problem better:

Something I wished I had mentioned in this video: The existential threat of AI might not come from one superintelligent AI. It could also come from millions of human-level AIs. Over the years I’ve grown a little bit more sceptical that one single AI which is vastly smarter than us is possible (though I still don’t rule it out). But a huge amount of human-level AIs could still easily overpower humanity by coordinating together. Since they’re just computer systems unconstrained by biological limits, they could also reason over a hundred times faster than us (think of how fast chatGPT writes compared to you). More on this here: https://www.cold-takes.com/ai-could-d…

Nuclear war close calls: https://futureoflife.org/resource/nuc…
Comet Hits Jupiter – Shoemaker-Levy 9 – BBC Animated Guide 1994: https://youtu.be/HXgq3Iq4wOk?t=165

Transcript

Sources are marked with an asterisk. Text might differ slightly in wording from the final video.

Intro

A bear almost caused a nuclear war. 

Will we see an earth destroying asteroid this century?

A lab leak may have resulted in more than 700 000 deaths!

In this video we’ll cover these things and more! Are any of these threats to humanity?

Nuclear War

Did you know a black bear almost caused a nuclear war? Yep, that’s right. It was 1962, it was the height of the Cuban missile crisis. The Soviets had begun to construct nuclear launch sites on Cuba, allowing the USSR to target areas deep inside the American mainland. This made the United States upset, and US aircrafts with nuclear weapons were ready to take off the moment the USSR would make a move. 

One night at a US Air Defence airport, a figure was climbing a fence to enter the terrain which set off the intruder alarms. 

A soldier started shooting at the intruder and notified other locations in the area, thinking the Soviets were making a move against the Air Force assets. But one air base in Wisconsin accidentally set off a much more serious alarm because of a bad wire. This caused the pilots to think a nuclear war was happening. They hurried to their aircraft so they could fly away and use their nukes. Luckily though, once people discovered the intruder was just a black bear, the Wisconsin base commander got one of his officers to drive a truck onto the flight line, right in the takeoff path of the jets. He was able to abort the mission as the planes started their engines.****

We’re lucky nothing happened that night – who knows how many people could have died. 

But this wasn’t the first and only time we have been close to a nuclear war. There have been many close calls, you can read all about them on the Future of Life website.*

Since Russia’s invasion into Ukraine it seems like Nuclear War is closer than it has in the past couple of decades. 

So how bad would it actually be?

A full blown nuclear war could kill hundreds of million of people – although it is at this moment in time unlikely to wipe out humanity. For nuclear weapons to create enough fallout to cause a deadly level of radiation all over the world, ten times as many weapons than we have today would be necessary. 

A nuclear war could still count as an existential risk – since its consequences might lead to some really scary futures. 

Following a nuclear war, firestorms could lead to lots of dust being kicked up into the atmosphere which might block sunlight from reaching the Earth’s surface. This could lead to a temporary but massive drop in temperatures all over the globe. That’s known as a nuclear winter and would have catastrophic consequences: A lot of vegetation and animal life would die. Agriculture, food supply chains, medical and transportation infrastructures would be destroyed. Millions of people could die.* 

In recent years, however, there has been more scepticism about nuclear winter claims, with scientists arguing that a drop in temperature likely wouldn’t happen.* But since we’ve never experienced a nuclear war, we’re uncertain what the effects really would be, which means it could easily be worse than what we’re thinking now.

Toby Ord estimates that the risk of a nuclear war causing an existential catastrophe in the next century is roughly 1 in a 1000. This is the same estimation he gives for climate change. The book, The Precipice, is from 2020. So the Russian invasion in Ukraine could have easily increased the odds of a nuclear war happening. And Toby Ord is just one person. To have a better idea about the risks of nuclear war, we can look at forecasting platforms like Metaculus where hundreds of people try to forecast specific events. Research has shown that on average, crowd forecasts outperform the predictions of any one expert.* Metaculus forecasters predict there’s a 7% chance that a not test related nuclear bomb will be detonated before 2024*, 33% chance that a nuclear bomb will be used in war before 2050* and a 10% of a full blown nuclear war happening before 2070.*

So what’s currently being done to prevent this horrible scenario? 

There are a number of organisations like the Nuclear Threat Initiative* or the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute* that work to reduce this kind of risk – for example by modelling scenarios to quantify the risk of nuclear war and advocating for better policies.

Another way to reduce the existential threat of nuclear war, which could also help in the case of pandemics and asteroids, is to build lots of shelters around the world. Figuring out how to rapidly scale our food production in the case of a nuclear winter also seems like a promising idea.

Pandemics

In 1977, a lab leak likely started a pandemic causing approximately 700 000 deaths! The virus behind it was the H1N1 virus, known as the virus that caused the 1918 influenza pandemic, where it killed more than 17 million people in 2 years. It had gone extinct in humans in 1957, but it mysteriously reappeared. First in China and then the Soviet Union. It became known as the Russian flu. What’s odd is that the strain of the virus looked eerily similar to the strain from 20 years before. Normally a virus would mutate a lot during that time. This is why experts argue that it likely came from either a lab leak or an ill-advised vaccine experiment or trial.**

Lab leaks have happened in the past, a whole list can be found on wikipedia. Many of these have happened in labs with the highest biosecurity levels. The leaks that are confirmed had less severe consequences than the Russian flu, but many of the pathogens were more dangerous, if they had spread, so it could be much worse.**

Biotechnology is improving rapidly. The genetic modification of existing organisms or the creation of new ones is becoming easier and cheaper year by year.

Research on viruses is being done all the time. If not well regulated, researchers might experiment with making viruses more lethal, more spreadable or more resistant to vaccines. Someone might accidentally create or spread a potentially disastrous disease. Leaks aren’t a thing from the past. Even last year, a lab worker in Taiwan was bitten and infected by a mouse infected with the Covid Delta variant.**

If we’re able to easily re-engineer human pathogens, malicious actors, too, can more easily create and spread horrific diseases.

This is why the aforementioned Oxford philosopher Toby Ord estimates there’s roughly a 1 in 30 chance of an engineered pandemic causing an existential catastrophe within the next hundred years.

So what can be done?

One promising path to significantly reduce the risks of pandemics is by setting up an early detection system. Currently, by the time we discover new pathogens, they’ve already spread far and wide and are thus difficult to contain. One way to rapidly detect new viruses would be to frequently test large chunks of the population. But this seems rather invasive, and comes with some privacy concerns. 

A more favourable approach is to check our wastewater for new or scary pathogens, especially in urban areas or near airports. It’s less invasive and can’t be traced back to specific people. This is not a new concept, a few cities have already done this to help track the covid-19 pandemic.* MinuteEarth made a great short video on this idea.*

Other things that could help with reducing the risk of pandemics is to develop better personal protective equipment, like cheaper, comfortable and easier to produce suits, strengthening the biological weapons convention which currently just has 4 people working for it or quicker approval and production of vaccines. After the genetic sequence of the SARS-CoV-2 was published in January, it took Moderna just two days to design their vaccine. But it took another 11 months for the vaccine to be distributed. This is impressive, but if we can make that timeline even shorter we could save even more lives.**

Future me here! Just wanted to add that there’s now a new organisation called the Nucleic Acid Observatory trying out checking wastewater among other things.* Cities like Houston are now also monitoring the spread of monkeypox through their wastewater.* 

Another cool idea to prevent pandemics is to use a specific type of lighting, called far UV-C lighting, inside buildings. In contrast to other kinds of UV lighting, far UV-C seems very unlikely to hurt humans, but it does efficiently kill airborne viruses. Currently far UV-C light bulbs are really expensive, but with some more innovation and funding the costs could dramatically go down and become competitive with regular light bulbs. Other types of UV lighting could still be used too as long as it isn’t shined directly on humans, for example by shining it on the ceiling and letting air pass through it, killing airborne pathogens. This is already widely available and cheaper than far UV-C lighting so could be tested by anyone today! More research on the effectiveness and safety of both far UV-C light and other UV light is needed however.****

If you want to learn more about the future risks of pandemics, we made a whole video on the topic. Check it out!

Great power war

At the time of writing this video, the prediction platform Metaculus puts the likelihood of a third world war before 2050 at 25%* – that number has increased dramatically since the invasion of Ukraine. 

A Great Power Conflict, meaning a violent conflict between major powers like the US, China or Russia would be devastating and could downstream increase the probability of other existential risks.

The researcher Stephen Clare describes a Great power conflict as a risk factor for existential risks – because it “plausibly increases the chance that a host of other bad outcomes come to pass”.*

This could happen for example because worldwide cooperation is significantly damaged, because nuclear weapons could be used, because new bio weapons would be developed or because an AI arms race might lead to a heightened risk of misaligned AI takeover.*

So it’s in the interest of the whole world to decrease the odds of a Great Power War.

Conclusion/outro

When combining the threats from climate change, nuclear war, pandemics, AI, great power war and more together, Toby Ord estimates a 1 in 6 chance of an existential catastrophe happening in the next century. That sounds scary. Even if you think that’s way off, even if you think it’s just 1 in a 100, that’s still way too high. Would you get on a plane with a 1 in a 100 odds of crashing? I sure wouldn’t.

For all the risks we’ve discussed this episode, there are a few things you can do to help. You can become politically active and advocate for sensible long-term policies. You can work for an organisation trying to reduce existential risks, like some of the ones we mentioned during this video. For open positions check out the 80.000 hours job board! They list jobs at various organisations where you can have a big impact.

And for even more ideas, check out the description of this video!

Also check out Chelsea Parks’ TikTok or Instagram account, hooplahoma, where she showcases some incredible circus moves!

In the next video we’ll explore what would happen if 99% of the population vanished. So be sure to subscribe and ring that notification bell to stay in the loop!

We’ve tried our best to explain the topics in this video as accurately as possible. But since we’re human, there’s a good chance we’ve made mistakes. If you noticed a mistake or disagree with something, let us know in the comments down below. Thanks for watching!