The Uni­ver­sity of Oxford’s Future of Human­ity Insti­tute recently held a con­fer­ence on Global Cat­a­strophic Risks. There’s an upcom­ing book which might be worth a read but what I’m more excited about is that soon all of the conference’s lec­tures will be made avail­able for free.

Global cat­a­stro­phes have occurred many times in his­tory, even if we only count dis­as­ters caus­ing more than 10 mil­lion deaths. A very par­tial list of exam­ples includes the An Shi Rebel­lion (756–763), the Taip­ing Rebel­lion (1851–1864), and the famine of the Great Leap For­ward in China, the Black Death in Europe, the Span­ish flu pan­demic, the two World Wars, the Nazi geno­cides, the famines in British India, Stal­in­ist total­i­tar­i­an­ism, and the dec­i­ma­tion of the native Amer­i­can pop­u­la­tion through small­pox and other dis­eases fol­low­ing the arrival of Euro­pean col­o­niz­ers. Many oth­ers could be added to this list.

Although the cur­rent and future risks are of var­i­ous kinds, treat­ing global cat­a­strophic risk as a field for aca­d­e­mic enquiry is a use­ful, coher­ent and impor­tant endeavour.

Given that Sir Mar­tin Rees, Pres­i­dent of the Royal Soci­ety, recently esti­mated that the chances of human­ity sur­viv­ing the twenty-first cen­tury are fifty-fifty, I’m inclined to agree that top­ics like this are wor­thy of aca­d­e­mic dis­cus­sion. This argu­ment reminds me of another arti­cle I read regard­ing the Large Hadron Col­lider where I quoted the fol­low­ing from The New York Times:

One prob­lem is that soci­ety has never agreed on a stan­dard of what is safe in these sur­real realms when the odds of dis­as­ter might be tiny but the stakes are cos­mi­cally high. In such sit­u­a­tions, prob­a­bil­ity esti­mates are often no more than “informed bet­ting odds”.