Existential Threats

[peter]

I just read Noam Chomsky and Larry Polk's 2012 discussion on the existential threats posed by nuclear war and environmental catastrophe and while these seem bad enough in themselves I couldn't help wondering if there are not yet others that we are blindly wandering into with out even realising it.
Take the threat of disease. In an age of huge population numbers and significant reduction in the efficacy of the drugs that have formed a bulwark against microbial pathogens is the probability of a pandemic of game-changing proportions such a small one: a rump human population reduced to pre-industrial living conditions would be way more vulnerable to extinction would it not. Or saying we start/continue messing with the delicate process of natural selection deciding what direction genetic 'advancement' should take. Might not we bio-tech ourselves into the dustbin of 'also-ran's' with this bit of scientific hubris?

Seems to me that Chomsky and Polk's big two, while still of major import, are not the only players in town!

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Pandemic is definitely a potential threat.

--A

[peter]

On the environment alone, studies have shown that even were never another a car to be started, never another light switch to be hit, never another ounce of CO2 to be added to the atmosphere, there is already sufficiently high levels to cause "significant warming and disruptive climate change, and with that considerably more poverty, violence, social dislocation, forced migration and political upheaval" ((Christian Parenti Tropic of Chas). The author goes on to say "Thus we must find humane and just means of adaption or we face barbaric prospects". Given this bleak scenario and the very real likelihood that we are going to need to quickly learn the skills of teraforming for our own planet, let alone another if we are to retain any real prospects of long term survival ............... then I refer my learned friend to my thread on SpaceX without further ado and rest my case!

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Been saying for years now that we're already past the point of no return on climate.

SpaceX isn't a viable solution yet though. Might not be for a long time yet.

--A

[Zarathustra]

All the bleak scenarios involving global warming are based on mathematical models ... every single one of which has been proven to have been wrong. Not merely theoretically, but in terms of the predictions not matching the temperatures over time.

CO2 by itself is a mild greenhouse gas. It contributes to heating in a logarithmically decelerating function, meaning that every additional molecule of CO2 contributes less than the one before, with quite a lot of heating at first (i.e. the kind that keeps our planet warm enough to be habitable) and then not much later (i.e. where we're at now), eventually flattening out (i.e. the near future).

CO2 alone could not produce the catastrophic scenarios that global warming alarmists predict. To get those predictions, they use an entirely theoretical assumption that other gasses, like water vapor, will increase as CO2 increases. And this is based entirely on models, which, as I've said, have been proven false.

www.moralcaseforfossilfuels.com/data/

Scroll down to figure 4.3. I tried to post it, but it stretched the thread. Look at the figure 4.1 for the CO2 graph and its contribution to heating as a function of atmospheric concentrations.

Alarmists have been making these predictions for over 30 years. We have enough real world data now to know that they've been exaggerating since the beginning. If we aren't going to take into account how wrong they've been, then we're no longer doing science.

[peter]

Hi Z. I'll come back to this tomorrow when I've charged my tablet - in the mean time it's good to hear a voice of optimism.......... I've been soaking up a lot of the other type from my reading of late and am badly in need of a bit of balance!

[Mighara Sovmadhi]

Artificial Intelligence is supposedly a possible existential threat. Two options:

(1) A sufficiently efficient data-processing, event-outputting machine system is created that, due to programming errors, results in catastrophe (think of an automated nuclear-launch system that "hiccuped").

(2) A sufficiently sentient such machine is created, with its own autonomous purposes, and one of these purposes ends up being directly or indirectly the deletion of humanity.

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At the moment, 1 is a more likely scenario (of the two) in terms of our current capabilities, I think.

--A

[peter]

Those are very interesting and highly pertinent graphs Z. The onus must be on the pro-warming side tighten up their act (scientifically speaking) in order to give weight to ther claims, if they would move action on climate change to the very top of the world political agenda.

(I have an idea for a thread on this topic that I'd like to post over in the Loresraat and would be glad of any participation you guys could give.)

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(1) A sufficiently efficient data-processing, event-outputting machine system is created that, due to programming errors, results in catastrophe (think of an automated nuclear-launch system that "hiccuped").

It doesn't even have to be that complicated: https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer

--A

[peter]

That's a new spin on recycling!