Last year October, I mentioned how
resilient our planet was – how it has survived major catastrophic events that
killed up to 85% of the species of our planet at a time. Because, yes, our
little blue-green planet is not quite as fragile as we expect it to be. Life,
after all, finds a way. However, we – and our way of life – is quite a bit more
fragile than the planet, and that has concerned us for quite a while now.
Scientists even have a term for that risk –
a Global Catastrophic Risk. It is defined as a hypothetical future event that
could cripple or destroy modern civilization. If it could cause human
extinction, it is termed an existential risk. Thus, while a global catastrophic
risk could kill the vast majority of life on earth, humanity could at least
still recover from it. An existential risk, however, would destroy our species.
There is no coming back from that.
Given our rather human prevalence for not
quite grasping statistics, we tend to think the chance of this is rather minor.
We could not be more wrong. Many of these events have happened before, and we
thus have some idea of their likelihood. That is where statisticians with their
mathematical models come in, and the results are quite shocking.
The Global Challenges Foundation –
specifically founded to attempt to identify and limit global catastrophic
events – revealed in its 2016 Annual Report that the average person is five
times more likely to die during a human extinction event than in a car crash.
In a 2008 expert survey, it was found that the estimated probability for a
human extinction event during the next century was 19%!
So what are these events? Well, they are
generally grouped into two categories – Anthropogenic (or human caused) and
non-anthropogenic. Non-anthropogenic are those we usually think about when we
think extinction events – things like asteroid strikes, which is calculated to
be a one-in-a-million chance during the next hundred years. After all, the Chicxulub
asteroid did cause the extinction of non-avian dinosaurs just 66 million years
ago.
It also includes the possibility of extra-terrestrial
invasion, although no evidence has been found of extra-terrestrials yet, my
article about the Drake Equation last year April should give some ideas as to
why. Others include cosmic threats. A
close supernova, or a gamma ray burst would certainly do that, but neither are
very likely. Then, of course, there is the 1% chance identified that the planet
Jupiter could cause Mercury’s orbit to become unstable, and one of the four
outcomes there would be a collision with the Earth.
Other include global pandemics, a mega
tsunami, and even the eruption of a super-volcano – such as the Toba eruption
in Indonesia about 71 500 years ago that caused a global volcanic winter of 6
to 10 years and severely reduced the human population of earth, as evidence by
a genetic bottleneck occurring around that time in our evolution. However, as
it turns out, the greatest threat to our existence is anthropogenic threats.
Those we made ourselves.
The bleeding edge of technology has always
presented some problems, but currently we are expanding on several fronts that
could affect our own survival. The two front-runners currently are super
intelligent artificial intelligences and molecular nanotechnology weapons. The
emergence of these two technologies would certainly spell our end if not
handled properly. A super intelligent AI would suddenly supplant humans and
improve itself so quickly we could never hope to contain it. We would become
comparable to ants against its intelligence – and since when do we negotiate
with ants? Would we expect it to be any different?
Molecular nanotechnology allows
construction on an atomic scale – small machines that could literally reshape
matter. Should they be improperly programmed, they could replicate out of
control, and consume our biosphere. Nevertheless, even should this not happen,
we already have several technologies that could lead to extinction. While
nuclear weapons have so far only been used twice, there still exists enough of
them to scourge the earth. Biotechnology could be used to create biological
weapons – a human-created pandemic that spirals out of control!
Simpler still, we could just exhaust the
earth of its resources, leaving us unable to support the billions of people
currently living of earth! Alternatively, as we‘ve witnessed already, we could
just ignore the dangers of climate change, and find that the planet’s climate
has become hostile to our way of life.
So what can we do to defend against this?
Well, the Norwegian government already started with a project. On the island of
Spitsbergen in the Svalbard archipelago, they created the Global Seed Vault.
Situated just 1300 km from the North Pole, they started to preserve a wide
variety of plant seeds to protect against widespread ecological disruption, and
allow us to reseed the planet, as it were, should a global catastrophic event
occur. African seeds were amongst the first to enter, as the Southern African
Development Community has for years been sending seed samples to Norway for
protection against the unthinkable.
The location was considered ideal, since it
was not located near any tectonic activity and was located under the permafrost
near the Arctic pole. A feasibility study had determined that the seed vault,
operating unaided, could preserve most seeds for hundreds of years – possibly
even thousands for some seeds. Naturally, humanity has managed to put even our
Doomsday seed vault in danger though our own actions.
With global warming accelerating, the
permafrost that was supposed to provide protection, and was thought to be
permanent, turned out to be anything but. Last week, as summer approached, the
vault found its entrance flooded after ‘permanent’ permafrost started to melt
for the first time in forever. Luckily, only the entrance flooded, and not the
vault, but still – it was enough for the Norwegian government to start
installing drainage ditches they did not think they would ever need.
We need to be careful however. These risks
are quite difficult to calculate, and may even be underestimated due to
observation selection effects. Just because a complete extinction event has
never occurred, does not mean it will not – after all, if it had occurred,
there would be no survivors, and we would have no idea it ever happened. So
take a moment to reflect just how fragile our existence is on this world, and
how lucky we are to be here. Life is precious. We should start acting like it.
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