Weekend long reads

Non-Fiction

How to save the human race from

extinction

If coronavirus doesn’t kill us, what about climate or AI?

Here’s why we must get serious about saving the world

James Crabtree MARCH 19 2020

Odds of just one in six do not sound great, even in a simple game of chance. But if this
were the probability that humanity itself could be wiped out, you might say we were in a
fix. Yet here we are, argues philosopher Toby Ord in The Precipice, a new book about
the bleak survival chances we now face as a species.

Those with a penchant for worrying about catastrophe already have plenty to be going
on with, as the coronavirus continues its grim global march, setting off an array of scary
thoughts about what the coming months might bring. Churches in the US are now
closed, but newspapers last weekend pictured long lines outside gun shops, a sign that
many are preparing in their own way for broader social disruption to come.

Visions of post-apocalyptic collapse are familiar from disaster movies, or novels such as
Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Ord’s concern is more with what he calls “existential”
risk: an apocalypse in which there is no “post”; just the end of all of us. Hence his
calculations of the chance of human life ending entirely during this century: one in six.
“This is not a small statistical probability that we must diligently bear in mind, like the
chance of dying in a car crash, but something that could readily occur, like the roll of a
die, or Russian roulette.”

A leading light in a movement known as “effective altruism”, Ord is also a researcher at

the University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, which (given his own odds-
making) must be a pretty bleak place to work. His book tallies up various apocalyptic
scenarios, from asteroid strikes to the one in 1,000m chance of a “stellar explosion” in
space taking the Earth with it. More alarming are the man-made “anthropogenic”
threats, specifically climate change, broader environmental collapse, nuclear war,
biotechnology and artificial intelligence.

These risks are new, coming together in the latter 20th century to create an era that Ord
dubs “the precipice”, meaning one in which total human collapse remains alarmingly
likely. “If I’m even roughly right about their scale, then we cannot survive many
centuries with risk like this,” he writes. “Either humanity takes control of its destiny and
reduces the risk to a sustainable level, or we destroy ourselves.”

Many might quibble with the exactitude of Ord’s probabilities, but his message about
the rising likelihood of civilisational disruption is grimly convincing — all the more so
for being delivered in admirably clear prose. Of his various apocalyptic horsemen, he
worries most of all about “unaligned artificial intelligence”, giving odds of one in 10 to
the notion that future intelligent machines might wipe out their human underlings — a
scenario that has also alarmed the likes of the late scientist Stephen Hawking and
entrepreneur Elon Musk.
 Pandemics are his second-biggest fear, and he
recalls how the Black Death wiped out as many

The complex interlocking as half of all Europeans during the 14th century

technological networks that — or the earlier Plague of Justinian that swept

underpin almost all of our through the Byzantine Empire in 541CE,

social systems actually make reducing humanity’s headcount by 3 per cent.

us more vulnerable By comparison, today’s coronavirus outbreak is

mild, although it provides a taste of the
massive disruption a more lethal strain might
bring.

The real risk here, however, is man-made, specifically a bioweapon or lab-mutated

virus. Back in 2012, Dutch virologist Ron Fouchier ran an experiment with H5N1, an
especially deadly strain of bird flu that kills more than half of the humans it infects,
albeit one that so far has not been transmissible between humans. “He passed the
disease through a series of ten ferrets,” Ord writes. “By the time it passed to the final
ferret, his strain of H5N1 had become directly transmissible between mammals.” Even
putting the risk of military bioweapons to one side, Fouchier’s experiment caused an
outcry, underlining the potential for disaster.

Chaotic hospital scenes in Wuhan and Lombardy make such risks easier to imagine. Yet
they do not solve the wider problem: namely that most of us find it all too easy to ignore
those that might bring about a temporary social collapse, let alone a humanity-ending
disaster.
Oliver Letwin’s Apocalypse How? sketches out just one scenario, in which a fictional
freak “space weather” magnetic pulse knocks out Britain’s internet, electricity and other
vital networks on New Year’s Eve 2037, causing chaos and tens of thousands of deaths.
A brainy former minister during David Cameron’s premiership, Letwin was once in
charge of Britain’s disaster preparedness, thinking through everything from natural
catastrophes to malign outside interference, similar to Russian cyber attacks that
knocked out Ukraine’s power supplies in 2015 and 2016.

His bigger argument concerns the rising vulnerability of sophisticated industrialised

societies, given the complex interlocking technological networks that already underpin
almost all of our social systems. In the near future, when everything from telemedicine
to self-driving vehicles will be hitched up online, the risks of a cascading network
collapse will be greater still. “If the electricity grid and the internet go down in the late
2030s, and if we have not taken very particular precautions, it is likely that life as we
know it will close down too,” Letwin writes.
Farm workers in China pollinate plants by hand, given declining numbers ... and the male-heavy 'preppers' who are gearing up to imminent
of bees ... © Kevin Frayer/Getty disruptions to our social order. © Chris Keane/Reuters

Similar worries vex Pablo Servigne and Raphaël Stevens — albeit on a grander scale —
in How Everything Can Collapse. First published in 2015 and only now translated from
French, the duo are leftwing activists and researchers in a developing field they describe
half-jokingly as “collapsology”. This covers plenty of ground, from the risks of fossil
fuel-dependent energy systems to instability in international finance. But their concern
is primarily ecological, namely the overburdening of the Earth’s natural systems, from
the climate crisis to the collapse in biodiversity that now forces some farm workers in
China to manually pollinate plants, given declining numbers of bees.
Five mass extinctions have scarred our planet’s 4.5bn-year history, the most recent
wiping out the dinosaurs 65m years ago. Some scientists believe extensive habit and
species destruction is now causing a sixth “Holocene extinction”, meaning one in which
three quarters of species disappear. “We are not there yet but we are rapidly getting
closer to this figure,” the authors write.

All these more contemporary potential disasters share a common feature — namely that
they result at some level from the intersection of globalisation and technology. This is
true for the coronavirus outbreak, given that its rapid global spread was largely a
function of greater global transport integration, even since the outbreak of Sars earlier
this century. Globalisation has brought huge benefits, but also levels of human
interconnection and environmental strain that make now truly global catastrophes
much easier to imagine.

The word apocalypse derives from the Greek apokalyptein, meaning to uncover or to
reveal — a well-chosen root, given the way thinking about disaster so often reflects
anxieties about the present. Religious apocalyptic visions focus on blinding flashes from
vengeful deities, something replaced in the last century by the potential wipeout of a
nuclear strike. Today’s visions of collapse are more gradual, be that a spreading
pandemic or the remorseless warming of our planet. “Today, climatic and
environmental catastrophes are less spectacular, but they have actually started,”
Servigne and Stevens suggest.

How should we prepare for such a possibility? Some take matters into their own hands,
the subject of Mark O’Connell’s Notes from an Apocalypse, a delightful peek inside the
world of “preppers” gearing up for imminent disruptions to our social or political order.
From renovated nuclear bunkers being sold to well-heeled survivalists in North Dakota,
to nuclear disaster tourists in Chernobyl, O’Connell’s book, published next month, is a
wryly amusing tour of the end of the world.

Four books on humanity at a crossroads

THE PRECIPICE APOCALYPSE HOW? NOTES FROM AN HOW EVERYTHING
APOCALYPSE CAN COLLAPSE

Toby Ord’s bleak Oliver Letwin, who

work calculates the helped Britain Mark O’Connell Activists examine
prospects of the prepare for disaster, takes a delightful the overburdening
end of the human looks at the peek into the world of the planet’s
race this century at terrifying prospects of survivalists in natural systems,
one in six and is of a cascading this wryly amusing from the climate
grimly convincing in technological tour of the end of crisis to collapse in
its argument network collapse the world biodiversity

Over recent weeks a handful of Asian nations such as Taiwan and Singapore have
seemed like sanctuary states, holding out against the virus’s spread. But for those truly
anxious about looming catastrophe, there is always New Zealand. PayPal founder Peter
Thiel is just one of a bunch of libertarian billionaires and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to
buy land and houses in New Zealand, which O’Connell describes as “the ark of nation-
states, an island haven amid a rising tide of apocalyptic unease”.

He is especially good on the oddities of American survivalists: an almost exclusively

male subculture that revels in packing meticulous “bug out bags” filled with survival
gear, and hangs out on internet discussion boards chatting about “TEOTWAWKI” (the
end of the world as we know it), or the correct course of action when “TSHTF” (You
probably can guess that one).

All this reflects a deep anxiety about the direction of complex liberal urban societies.
“Preppers are not preparing for their fears: they are preparing for their fantasies”, he
writes. “The collapse of civilisation means a return to modes of masculinity our culture
no longer has much use for, to a world in which a man . . . can build a toilet from scratch
— or protect his wife and children from intruders using a crossbow.”

This might seem ridiculous, and O’Connell has plenty of fun treating it as such. But it
merely begs the question of what sensible measures should be taken to prepare instead,
especially when politicians find it so hard to focus on risks that are low-probability and
complex, or those, such as climate change, whose full effects will not be felt for decades.

Servigne and Stevens glimpse hope in the “transition town” movement, a low-carbon
community effort to build local self-sufficiency in advance of future disaster. They
would almost certainly find much to admire in Extinction Rebellion, whose calls for
radical travel limits and sharply reduced consumption look remarkably like the results
of the current coronavirus lockdown.

More alarmingly, the duo flirt with the ideas of “collapsniks”: thinkers who want
deliberately to engineer economic collapse now in a perverse attempt to forestall even
worse environmental catastrophes later. The dangers of this approach should be clear
enough from the genuine crisis spreading around the world over recent weeks, not least
in terms of the extreme political backlash it would create. As Letwin argues: “Liberal
democracies are fragile, demagoguery is latent, and there is every reason not to test
whether the liberal democratic system would prove robust in the face of calamity on this
scale.”

Letwin himself is more practical, suggesting greater international co-operation, in

particular a new UN convention on global network protection. His other big idea is
more old-fashioned, specifically that governments should invest in basic back-up
networks from ham radios to old-fashioned 2G telecom networks that could kick in
during a temporary period of crisis — “‘make-do-and-mend’ systems that will just about
get us by when the all-singing, all-dancing first-best technology fails”.

Ord’s ideas are mostly practical too, involving

Culture Call podcast
new international efforts to handle existential
risks, as well as policies to slow down and
manage the development of risky technologies,
not least AI. Much of this boils down to money.
The global body overseeing prohibition of
bioweapons has an annual budget of just over
 $1m. He notes: “Humanity spends more on ice
cream every year than on ensuring that the
technologies we develop do not destroy us.”

Changing this requires far more investment for

expert-led global bodies such as the World
Gris and Lilah discuss how coronavirus
is already changing daily life — and Health Organisation, which in any case should
how it might impact culture. Will we emerge in the coming years with many more
stop flying so much? And can the thrill resources, as well as the Intergovernmental
of a live performance be replicated
Panel on Climate Change. Amid the
online? Listen here
horrendous human cost, one welcome result of
the pandemic should be that some of the
feverish scenarios imagined by survivalists
should be a little easier for the rest of us to imagine too. Just as important, though, is
the realisation that actions from lone individuals are hopeless replacements for
preparation that is well-resourced, collective and global.

Existential destruction would, by definition, be unprecedented. Yet our world is still

littered with the ruins of once-thriving civilisations that did at some point come to an
end, mostly for reasons that modern societies are in a position to prevent. Our own
chances of survival may well prove to be much greater than one in six. But the odds of
serious disaster are also far higher than most of us would like to think.

The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity, by Toby Ord,
Bloomsbury, RRP£25, 480 pages
Apocalypse How? Technology and the Threat of Disaster, by Oliver Letwin,
Atlantic, RRP£14.99, 256 pages

Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and
Back, by Mark O’Connell, Granta, RRP£14.99, 258 pages

How Everything Can Collapse, by Pablo Servigne and Raphaël Stevens (translated
by Andrew Brown), Polity, RRP£14.99, 250 pages

James Crabtree is associate professor in practice at Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School
of Public Policy, and author of ‘The Billionaire Raj’

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