> http://www.newscientist.com/channel/being-human/mg19926663.900-the-en...
> The end of the world is not nigh
> 23 July 2008
> From New Scientist Print Edition. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.
> Michael Brooks
>
>  YOU could be forgiven for thinking that our existence on Earth becomes more precarious by the decade. So breathe a sigh of relief -
> we may never have been safer.
>
> Last weekend, experts gathered at the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford to discuss the risk of global
> "mega-catastrophes". The idea was to leave aside slow-burn disasters such as climate change and global famine and focus on events
> that could wipe out hundreds of millions of people, threaten humanity's continued existence on Earth, or at least produce a total
> collapse of civilisation. The meeting drew contributions from physicists, sociologists, microbiologists and philosophers. Their
> conclusion: leaving aside scenarios that have yet to be imagined, we are at least handling the major concerns well.
>
> First up for consideration was an act of bioterrorism, such as the synthesis and release of a dangerous virus. According to Ali
> Nouri of the Science and Global Security programme at Princeton University, such an act is becoming ever more unlikely. That's
> because the centralisation and automation of the biotech industry are making it harder for anyone to create a dangerous pathogen or
> compound without triggering alarms within the industry, he says. For example, in the US if someone applies to synthesise Ebola
> without a licence, they are reported to the authorities.
>
> Joseph Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund, a foundation dedicated to reducing nuclear proliferation, told the meeting
> that the threat of nuclear war is lower now than it has been for 15 years. This is down to significant reductions in US and Russian
> nuclear arsenals, bans on nuclear testing, the shutdown of weapons material production and consensus between nuclear policy-makers.
>
> The threat of nuclear terrorism has similarly diminished: improved security at nuclear facilities, the removal of fissile material
> from vulnerable sites in former Eastern bloc countries, and a tighter grip on smuggling have made it "hard to devise plausible
> scenarios for terrorists wiping out humanity with stolen nuclear materials", says William Potter of the Monterey Institute of
> International Studies in California. There is still scope for such acts to cause huge loss of life, he says, but the challenge of
> preventing nuclear terrorism is "urgent but manageable".
>
> The way of the dinosaurs
> How about cosmic threats? Though the danger from asteroid impacts remains, we are getting close to charting all the potential
> world-destroying rocks. "We now know there is no asteroid out there remotely like the one that ended the Cretaceous period," says
> David Morrison, NASA's leading expert on asteroid threats. "We are not going to go the way of the dinosaurs."
>
> We can be confident that physics won't kill us either: Michelangelo Mangano of the CERN particle physics laboratory near Geneva in
> Switzerland points out that exhaustive investigations mean we can dismiss any claims that the Large Hadron Collider will produce
> dangerous particles or black holes when it turns on later this year.
>
> There is one cloud on the horizon. The threat from the H5N1 strain of influenza virus is real, according to John Oxford, a
> virologist at St Bartholomew's hospital in London. The density and mobility of modern populations - especially in the western world
> - mean that an outbreak could quickly become a major catastrophe. But, he says, governments have taken this possibility seriously
> and are well prepared for the worst-case scenario. "We can stop an outbreak for the first time in history," he says.
>
> However, some threats remain unquantifiable. Nanotechnology is one: it is simply too early to say whether anything dangerous enough
> to cause a mega-catastrophe might emerge. Another is artificial intelligence. "Intelligence is the most powerful force scientists
> have ever tried to tamper with. It could help or it could hurt," says Eliezer Yudkowsky from the Singularity Institute for AI
> research based in Palo Alto, California.
>
> “Intelligence is the most powerful force scientists have ever tried to tamper with. It could help or it could hurt”Reassuringly,
> humanity's ability to cope with an unexpected major catastrophe has improved vastly in recent years - and not just because of new
> technology. According to the geneticist Christopher Wills, in the last century, racial mixing has created a dynamic gene pool that
> is accelerating our evolution in a positive manner. This includes throwing up diverse kinds of intelligence in the population, which
> will provide a vital resource for the future, he reckons. "We are now beginning to draw on the resources of our gene pool in ways
> that could not be imagined a few years ago," he told the assembly. "Our society and our attitudes are changing as a result."
>
> Wills believes it is becoming ever more likely that individuals with new insights or unprecedented charisma will arise in the human
> population. He points to Mohammed Yunus, winner of the Nobel peace prize, as someone who fits this model. Yunus's economic
> innovations, such as the introduction of micro-credit loans for small Bangladeshi businesses, have transformed his society, Wills
> says. "The variation makes it exponentially more likely that someone extraordinary like this will emerge to form a new scientific or
> political paradigm," he says. This, Wills says, will get us out of many of the threats we currently face.
>
> If it comes as a surprise that the future is rosier than expected, that is probably because we have misread the times, according to
> Jonathan Wiener of Duke University, North Carolina, and president of the Society for Risk Analysis in McLean, Virginia. "There's a
> sense that these catastrophic risks are of growing importance, but it's really that, as we solve other risks, these become
> relatively more important," he says.
>
> This gradual erosion of the things to worry about poses a new problem for scientists. According to sociologists and cultural
> historians at the meeting, it has created a heightened religious and cultural focus on apocalyptic scenarios - a focus that
> scientists are tempted to share. Researchers are given disproportionately large policy, publishing and funding incentives to look at
> catastrophe, rather than at more likely but less dramatic scenarios, says Dave Frame of the University of Oxford's Centre for the
> Environment. This means there is a disproportionate amount of research into - and publicity for - spectacular possibilities. That's
> no surprise to Yudkowsky, who told the meeting that many studies have shown that we are unable to think rationally about the end of
> humanity. "Things outside the human experience send our minds into a different mode of thinking," he says.
>
> Nick Bostrom, the meeting organiser, says this is just one reason why the conference was important: the full spectrum of
> catastrophic risk has never been properly assessed. "The very biggest questions, the things that can fundamentally change humanity,
> have until now been the subject of speculation by journalists and retired physicists," he says. "By gathering academic researchers,
> you get the ability to compare which are most serious, and mitigate them."
>
> From issue 2666 of New Scientist magazine, 23 July 2008, page 8-9
> Who foots the bill?
> If you think your insurance premiums are high, consider the travails of companies involved with biotech or nanotechnology. Getting
> insurance for the worst-case health or environmental disaster that their products may cause can be a real struggle.
>
> That is because insurers cannot work out what they should charge. "We have no way of estimating what the frequency or severity of
> losses might be, so our approach is the same as with nuclear, biological and chemical warfare: we exclude them," says Peter Taylor,
> a researcher at the University of Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute and a consultant to Lloyd's of London.
>
> Taylor reckons this could stymie the development of vital new technologies. He wants governments to underwrite extremely large but
> unlikely events. With the worst-case scenarios taken care of, the industry can begin the process of setting and annually adjusting
> premiums to cover its insurance needs. This, he says, will also encourage people to monitor their working practices. Because risks
> and incidents are reassessed every year, and the incentives are financial, insurance is a powerful motivator in the business world.
> "Insurance is a great way of helping industry regulate its behaviour," Taylor says.