welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio.
this is: What is the likelihood that civilizational collapse would directly lead to human extinction (within decades)?, published by Luisa_Rodriguez on the effective altruism forum.
Epistemic transparency: Confidence in conclusions varies throughout. I give rough indicators of my confidence at the section level by indicating the amount of time I spent researching/thinking about each particular subtopic, plus a qualitative description of the types of sources I rely on. In general, I consider it a first step toward understanding this threat from civilizational collapse — not a final or decisive one.
Acknowledgements
This research was funded by the Forethought Foundation. It was written by Luisa Rodriguez under the supervision of Arden Koehler and Lewis Dartnell. Thanks to Arden Koehler, Max Daniel, Michael Aird, Matthew van der Merwe, Rob Wiblin, Howie Lempel, and Kit Harris who provided valuable comments. Thanks also to William MacAskill for providing guidance and feedback on the larger project.
Summary
In this post, I explore the probability that if various kinds of catastrophe caused civilizational collapse, this collapse would fairly directly lead to human extinction. I don’t assess the probability of those catastrophes occurring in the first place, the probability they’d lead to indefinite technological stagnation, or the probability that they’d lead to non-extinction existential catastrophes (e.g., unrecoverable dystopias). I hope to address the latter two outcomes in separate posts (forthcoming).
My analysis is organized into case studies: I take three possible catastrophes, defined in terms of the direct damage they would cause, and assess the probability that they would lead to extinction within a generation. There is a lot more someone could do to systematically assess the probability that a catastrophe of some kind would lead to human extinction, and what I’ve written up is certainly not conclusive. But I hope my discussion here can serve as a starting point as well as lay out some of the main considerations and preliminary results.
Note: Throughout this document, I’ll use the following language to express my best guess at the likelihood of the outcomes discussed:
TABLE1
Case 1: I think it’s exceedingly unlikely that humanity would go extinct (within ~a generation) as a direct result of a catastrophe that causes the deaths of 50% of the world’s population, but causes no major infrastructure damage (e.g. damaged roads, destroyed bridges, collapsed buildings, damaged power lines, etc.) or extreme changes in the climate (e.g. cooling). The main reasons for this are:
Although civilization’s critical infrastructure systems (e.g. food, water, power) might collapse, I expect that several billions of people would survive without critical systems (e.g. industrial food, water, and energy systems) by relying on goods already in grocery stores, food stocks, and fresh water sources.
After a period of hoarding and violent conflict over those supplies and other resources, I expect those basic goods would keep a smaller number of remaining survivors alive for somewhere between a year and a decade (which I call the grace period, following Lewis Dartnell’s The Knowledge).
After those supplies ran out, I expect several tens of millions of people to survive indefinitely by hunting, gathering, and practicing subsistence agriculture (having learned during the grace period any necessary skills they didn’t possess already).
Case 2: I think it’s very unlikely that humanity would go extinct as a direct result of a catastrophe that caused the deaths of 90% of the world’s population (leaving 800 million survivors), major infrastructure damage, and severe climate change (e.g. nuclear winter/asteroid impact).
While I expect that millions would starve to death in the wake of something like a globa...
view more