Threats to civilization

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Imminent Threats

global issues

• religious extremism, primarily Islamic extremism
• intellectual property law is not keeping up with rapid developments in information technology, and threatens to "hand the keys to the 21st century" to organizations more interested in using it for their own ends than for the good of civilization
• global warming
  • Global Warming: Mankind's Greatest Threat by Phil B.
• not a likely immediate threat, but representing a catastrophic risk:
  • thermonuclear war
    • Carl Sagan discusses nuclear self-destruction from Cosmos episode 13
• unlikely near-term, likely/inevitable long-term threats:
  • asteroid impact: extremely catastrophic were it to happen, and we are woefully unprepared to deal with the possibility. "The Earth is just too small and fragile a basket for the human race to keep all its eggs in." – Robert A. Heinlein
    • The Sky Is Falling by Gregg Easterbrook: much of the science in this article is a bit fuzzy ("It’s true that a free-falling body will plummet toward the nearest source of gravity—but in space, free-falling bodies are rare."), but the basic conclusion seems correct: we should be paying more attention to this threat.
      • Target Earth: essentially a video blog entry by Easterbrook summarizing the article. Ignore the visuals, which are uninformative and misleading (what does the Ring Nebula have to do with asteroid impacts?) as well as the somewhat annoying camera editing.
    • Simulation of a giant meteor collision with Earth
    • Meteor compilation: too small to do any real damage, but shows how often we do get hit by smaller debris
    • 1972-08-10 daylight fireball over the rockies:
      • Linda Baker's footage
    • near-misses: 2004 FH (~30m diameter)
    • known impacts: Tunguska 1908...
    • Somewhat related: deadly asteroid impact denial imagines an impending deadly asteroid impact as a metaphor for every other obvious problem that leaders like to pretend isn't important
  • nearby supernova: also not likely in the near-term but possible; effects could be blocked with technology currently within our grasp but not yet tried:
    • 2008-03-04 Binary 'deathstar' has Earth in its sights: "A spectacular, rotating binary star system is a ticking time bomb, ready to throw out a searing beam of high-energy gamma rays – and Earth may be right in the line of fire. ... One member of the pair is a highly unstable star known as a Wolf-Rayet, thought to be the final stage of stellar evolution to precede a cataclysmic supernova explosion. ... "Viewed from Earth, the rotating tail appears to be laid out on the sky in an almost perfect spiral. It could only appear like that if we are looking nearly exactly down on the axis of the binary system," said Tuthill. .. This means we are peering down the barrel of the gun, as when binary supernovae go off, all their energy is focussed into a narrow beam of wildly destructive gamma ray radiation that emanates (both up and down) from the poles of the system. .. "If such a gamma-ray burst happens, we really do not want Earth to be in the way"."

United States

To the extent that civilization within the United States is itself threatened, that represents a threat to the world at large for the following reasons:

• Any force powerful enough to overcome the US, arguably "the world's only remaining superpower", is powerful enough to overcome any other country or alliance on Earth
• If the United States is taken over from within by forces inimical to the idea of civilization, then the US itself could become a threat.

Current threats to civilization within the US include:

• kleptocrats, most notably those currently in charge of the executive branch
• military readiness is currently (2007) at abysmal levels, leaving the US highly vulnerable to any substantial surprise emergency
• religious extremism, primarily Christian extremism aka "fundamentalism" (a misnomer):
  • apocalypticism encourages thinking of apocalyptic events as a good thing
  • divides popular opinion regarding issues on which there should be a clear consensus (e.g. abortion, gay rights, death penalty) and thus distracts attention away from real issues we need to deal with
  • promotes the authoritarian mindset
• spiraling bureaucracy
  • bureaucratic control of research
• The authoritarian mindset discourages individual initiative, isolates the decision-makers from the results of their decisions, and appears to be responsible for the worst of what is disparagingly referred to as "business as usual" in both the political and corporate arenas.
• health care in the US is increasingly run by private corporations whose primary goal is profit and who have few if any incentives to reduce bureaucracy
• media consolidation is another form in which self-interested companies are being handed "the keys to the 21st century", but in this case it's not so much a matter of the law not keeping up with progress as it is a matter of existing laws being relaxed and reversed by successful lobbying. Perhaps the most visible effect of this, recently, has been the near-total failure of the (traditional) media to report on the extensive corruption in the Bush administration.

Tools of Destruction

Some of the tools via which the various threats are being propagated:

• terrorism provides a distraction by which democratic citizens can be fooled into unnecessarily trading their freedoms for apparent safety
• religion is often used as a tool for spreading attitudes harmful to a free civilization:
  • discourages individual initiative
  • squelches scientific investigation, especially in the biological and environmental sciences
  • centralizes authority outside of the rule of law and beyond the reach of rational discussion
  • encourages dogmatic thinking at the expense of rationality
• gerrymandering is a tool (primarily in the United States) whereby the established parties negotiate political control amongst themselves, thus negating much of the democratic process
• weapons of mass destruction wield unusually high amounts of destruction in proportion to their cost. These include:
  • nuclear weapons
    • The Doomsday Clock is an interesting example of perceived nuclear annhilation threat.
  • bioweapons

Solutions in Progress

• religion control

Links

Projects

• Global Catastrophic Risks, a project of the Future of Humanity Institute