To look at existential risk rationally requires that we maintain a cool, detached perspective. It’s somewhat hard to think of how this might be done, although watching videos of planetary destruction could actually help! As a detective needs to look at a few crime scenes before he can get experienced and move beyond being a simple gumshoe, existential risk analysts need to view simulations and thought experiments of planetary destruction before they can consider it without flinching. Because it is impossible to acquire experience of human extinction risk, as by definition no one is alive afterwards, we have to settle for simulations.

The reaction of many educated adults to extinction risk discussions reminds me of the reaction kids in my Middle School health classes had to the mention of the word “penis”: adolescent giggling. If I were to get onstage in front of a random audience and start talking about existential risk when they didn’t expect it, using words like “planetary destruction”, they’d probably start giggling, at least in their minds. Obviously, we have a way to mature as a society until we can look calmly at the prospect of our own demise. By resolving to do so yourself, you can be a part of the solution instead of the problem.

Last week a blogger for the Houston Chronicle, Eric Berger, covered my post on immortality and extinction risk, and the immaturity of most of the comments received is expected but also telling. One reader writes that we should hire Will Smith to save the world, another writes: “I don’t worry about this sort of thing, because when it happens, I’ll be dead and won’t care.” Just like how you get to see someone’s true self a little better when they’re a tad tipsy, we get to see what people really think of extinction risk analysis by their anonymous comments on a big website. When people are on the record, they aren’t likely to make pithy comments like those on the blog, but they might be thinking them, and what they say in public is likely to be a dressed-up version of these sentiments. For instance, there’s an article that appeared in The Mercury on the 22nd of April in 2003, “Disastronomer Royal: More Apocalyptic then the Pope”, which exemplifies the reaction to those who take the prospect of extinction risk seriously, referring to Martin Rees in this case. Extinction denialist articles are not hard to find on the Internet: just Google them.

Ideally, existential risk analysis should be getting hundreds of millions of dollars in funding, as the study of global warming does today. Until there are planetary immune systems in place that can respond so quickly and comprehensively that the likelihood of terminal disaster is reduced to practically nothing, existential risk mitigation should be the number one priority of the human species. And the first step is for individuals, such as yourself, to look at the prospect of human extinction in a serious way.

- Any risk which has become widely known, or an issue in contemporary politics, will probably be very hard to deal with. Thus, even if it is a legitimate risk, it may be worth putting on the back burner; there’s no point in spending millions of dollars for little gain.

- Any risk which is totally natural (could happen without human intervention), must be highly improbable, as we know we have been on this planet for a hundred thousand years without getting killed off. To estimate the probability of these risks, use Laplace’s Law of Succession.

- Risks which we cannot affect the probability of can be safely ignored. It does us little good to know that there is a 1% chance of doom next Thursday, if we can’t do anything about it.

Some specific risks which can be safely ignored:

- Particle accelerator accidents. We don’t yet know enough high-energy physics to say conclusively that a particle accelerator could never create a true vacuum, stable strangelet, or another universe-destroying particle. Luckily, we don’t have to; cosmic rays have been bombarding us for the past four billion years, with energies a million times higher than anything we can create in an accelerator. If it were possible to annihilate the planet with a high-energy particle collision, it would have happened already.

- The simulation gets shut down. The idea that “the universe is a simulation” is equally good at explaining every outcome- no matter what happens in the universe, you can concoct some reason why the simulators would engineer it. Which specific actions would make the universe safer from being shut down? We have no clue, and barring a revelation from On High, we have no way to find out. If we do try and take action to stop the universe from being shut down, it could just as easily make the risk worse.

- A long list of natural scenarios. To quote Nick Bostrom: “solar flares, supernovae, black hole explosions or mergers, gamma-ray bursts, galactic center outbursts, supervolcanos, loss of biodiversity, buildup of air pollution, gradual loss of human fertility, and various religious doomsday scenarios.” We can’t prevent most of these anyway, even if they were serious risks.

Some specific risks which should be given lower priority:

- Asteroid impact. This is a serious risk, but it still has a fairly low probability, on the order of one in 10^5 to 10^7 for something that would threaten the human species within the next century or so. Mitigation is also likely to be quite expensive compared to other risks.

- Global climate change. While this is fairly probable, the impact of it isn’t likely to be severe enough to qualify as an existential risk. The IPCC Fourth Assessement Report has concluded that it is “very likely” that there will be more heat waves and heavy rainfall events, while it is “likely” that there will be more droughts, hurricanes, and extreme high tides; these do not qualify as existential risks, or even anything particularly serious. We know from past temperature data that the Earth can warm by 6–9 C on a fairly short timescale, without causing a permanent collapse or even a mass extinction. Additionally, climate change has become a political problem, making it next to impossible to implement serious measures without a massive effort.

- Nuclear war is a special case, because although we can’t do much to prevent it, we can take action to prepare for it in case it does happen. We don’t even have to think about the best ways to prepare; there are already published, reviewed books detailing what can be done to seek safety in the event of a nuclear catastrophe. I firmly believe that every transhumanist organization should have a contingency plan in the event of nuclear war, economic depression, a conventional WWIII or another political disaster. This planet is too important to let it get blown up because the people saving it were “collateral damage”.

- Terrorism. It may be the bogeyman-of-the-decade, but terrorists are not going to deliberately destroy the Earth; terrorism is a political tool with political goals that require someone to be alive. While terrorists might do something stupid which results in an existential risk, “terrorism” isn’t a special case that we need to separately plan for; a virus, nanoreplicator or UFAI is just as deadly regardless of where it comes from.

Betterhumans: How did the formation of the Lifeboat Foundation come about?

Philippe Van Nedervelde: Lifeboat Foundation’s founder, Eric Klien, was shaken wide awake by 9/11.  The new reality of what we call (exponentially accelerating) “Asymmetric Destructive Capability” (ADC) fully hit him: ever smaller groups of people can create ever more enormous amounts of damage. And all of this thanks to advances in technology. As a bracelet-wearing cryonicist, he knew of the potentials of nanotechnology (having attended MIT Nanotechnology Group meetings in the late 1980s), and that 9/11 was just a taste of things to come.  Accordingly, the Lifeboat Foundation was incorporated within months of 9/11.

Read the whole thing here.

With many governments pursuing new ways to power their cities via green energy, it looks like they soon may have another option to add to their list.

While most people think of cows as a “unconverted” forms of lunch and dinner, these harmless beasts may be able to energize our communities through the smelly presents that they often leave behind.

(Globes Online) GES said that the Hefer Valley plant is the first large-scale plant of its kind in Israel, and one of the first in the world. The plant utilizes 600 tons of manure a day. The manure is sterilized, and the solid and liquid waste are then processed to produce methane, which drives the generators to make electricity.

Granite Hacarmel CEO Amiaz Sagis said, “This is unquestionably an important milestone. This facility fits in with Granite Hacarmel’s strategy to invest in infrastructures and ecology. The company is also investing resources to develop alternative energy, water treatment, and desalination.”

Ironically this whole development began when the Hefer Valley Cooperative Society was ordered to find a solution towards reducing the pollution being produced by 12,000 cows. It seems that after some head scratching, this power plant was built, allowing the community to not only reduce pollution, but find a unique way at keeping the lights on.

Although many nations would benefit from turning cow manure (or sheep, horse, camel, etc.), there probably is not enough of this stuff to both fuel our planet and make our gardens grow. However, if researchers found a way to turn “human manure” into energy, we could ultimately find a renewable energy source that can keep up with our ever growing population.

The Ares V launch vehicle is scheduled to first fly in 2018. It would launch 130 tons to LEO.

I welcome this study for providing a clearer analysis of the deflection options and the analyzing costs of searching for threatening asteroids.

The 8.9m (29ft)-long “Cradle” spacecraft would carry six 1,500kg (3,300lb) missile-like interceptor vehicles that would carry one 1.2MT B83 nuclear warhead each, with a total mass of 11,035kg.

99942 Apophis is a near-Earth asteroid that caused a brief period of concern in December 2004 because initial observations indicated a relatively large probability that it would strike the Earth in 2029. It is 350 meters across and weighs about 46 million tons.

The study team assessed a series of approaches that could be used to divert a NEO potentially on a collision course with Earth. Nuclear explosives, as well as non-nuclear options, were assessed.
• Nuclear standoff explosions are assessed to be 10–100 times more effective than the non-nuclear alternatives analyzed in this study. Other techniques involving the surface or subsurface use of nuclear explosives may be more efficient, but they run an increased risk of fracturing the target NEO. They also carry higher development and operations risks.
• Non-nuclear kinetic impactors are the most mature approach and could be used in some deflection/mitigation scenarios, especially for NEOs that consist of a single small, solid body.
• “Slow push” mitigation techniques are the most expensive, have the lowest level of technical readiness, and their ability to both travel to and divert a threatening NEO would be limited unless mission durations of many years to decades are possible.
• 30–80 percent of potentially hazardous NEOs are in orbits that are beyond the capability of current or planned launch systems. Therefore, planetary gravity assist swingby trajectories or on-orbit assembly of modular propulsion systems may be needed to augment launch vehicle performance, if these objects need to be deflected.

This diagram shows that the nuclear options work better and can handle asteroids up to 950 meters in size

This is a table that shows that a performance index of 1 means a method was good enough to perform a successful deflection. Less than 1 means more launches are needed.

This is a drawing of the deflection vehicle

The Lifeboat foundation has the asteroid shield program