SURVIVAL OF THE SPECIES
The official global death toll for Covid may be in excess of 1.3 million (unofficial estimates are much higher), Europe may be firmly back in lockdown and Donald Trump may still be trying to subvert the US presidential election. But the good news is that things aren’t that bad, and I don’t just mean in New Zealand.
The world will survive this pandemic and it’s likely that some kind of normality and a more stable political order will soon return, hastened by several vaccines that look set to be successful. However, the bad news is that in the near future, things could get a whole lot worse for all of us.
How bad? Well, the extinction of the human race – that bad. According to Toby Ord, an Australian moral philosopher whose speciality is existential risk, the next century is going to be the most dangerous in the history of Homo sapiens.
“Overall,”, he writes in his recent book, The Precipice, “I think the chance of an existential catastrophe striking humanity in the next hundred years is about one in six.”
Those are the same odds currently available for my football team, Tottenham Hotspur, to win the English Premier League title – and they sit in second position. It certainly dampens the optimism to think there’s the same chance that, not too long afterwards, all human life will come to an end.
Ord prefers to look at the survival of our species as akin to a game not of football but of Russian roulette. There’s a single bullet in a six-cartridge chamber and humanity is just about to pull the trigger. Isn’t that a little alarmist, I ask, when we speak on Skype? Won’t it just freak out
