Thank goodness for the man-made fires ravaging the Amazon rainforest raising concerns almost 20-years ago. Greenpeace made every effort to bring this destruction to the world’s attention. If only for a brief moment here and there, it did catch the attention of some figureheads to acknowledge a looming calamity facing the planet – but not nearly enough as the problem is still ongoing.
Today most of us now understand that more alarming environmental developments are all linked: A spike in carbon emissions, the rapid melting of Arctic ice, the steady rise of global temperatures, the increasingly erratic and extreme storms assailing coastlines. Almost every week, we are living in a “dramatic climate emergency.” We even had a once in a lifetime generational storm sweep across both Canada and The U.S. wreaking havoc on many Christmas plans this year. Who would have thought?
But it’s not just global warming that poses an existential challenge to humanity and whose effects we are already feeling. As well, there are additional dangers such as asteroids, super volcanoes, artificial intelligence, to a worldwide nuclear war and engineered super viruses. Take your pick!
You would have to believe that researchers and scientist are working their guts out to find innovative ways and means to protect all of us from these perils. Yes, we are in greater peril than ever as we are introducing new risks into the world as time goes on thereby making the scientific objective even more complex.
Likely the least peril to be worried about human distinction is infectious diseases. At least they come from nature – evolution prevents anything that comes out of nature, whether virulent or contagious, is not enough to remotely threaten human extinction.
But it is legitimately scary, especially to live through it at ground zero. Covid along with the other diseases like avian flu and Ebola has taught us that nature has a kind of speed limit on disease. Diseases have killed more human beings than anything else, any war or natural disaster. So we needn’t worry about a virus suddenly emerging and killing us all. Even among animal extinctions, We almost never see that happen.
What is very concerning is the threat from bioengineered pathogens, using new tools from biology like gene editing and synthetic biology, which may be the greatest existential threat over the next few decades. That’s because these tools take what’s already a killer in nature and can potentially allow it to bypass the limits of evolution. The result is a super virus, for lack of a better term; something that can spread like the cold but kill hundreds of millions around the world, creating a total social collapse. And what’s particularly worrying here is that it doesn’t have to be a weapon. You could also have legitimate research done now that uses these tools to make an existing virus, like avian flu, more dangerous. That work is being done now to try to understand how it might evolve and become more dangerous in nature, but by creating that in the lab, even with the best intentions, there is an introduction of an existential risk into the world, because things made in labs can and do escape. How we respond to the danger is through reliable leadership and international cooperation to keep the worst from being even worse.
There’s a school of thought that we have already lost the battle over climate change. However it is not viewed as an immediate existential risk in the same way as some of the others. Climate change is going to cause havoc and misery, but is it likely to cause the extinction of humanity? Not on the kind of more immediate timeline that most of these other risks will be. The difference is that we know climate change is and will happen, while the others are more “what if?” The question with climate is just how bad it will get.
While the end of the world seems inevitable, there are scientists still trying to prevent nuclear war etc. and prolong climate change. Meanwhile other scientists and experts are grappling with interplanetary travel to resettle away from this world.
