What is the difference between global catastrophic risk and existential risk?
Global catastrophic risk refers to any event that could inflict serious damage to human well-being on a global scale, including disasters that civilization could eventually recover from. Existential risk is a narrower sub-category: events that would either cause full human extinction or permanently and irreversibly lock humanity into a drastically inferior state, such as an unrecoverable civilizational collapse or a permanent totalitarian dystopia.
What is the Doomsday Clock and who created it?
The Doomsday Clock was established in 1947 by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, an organization founded in 1945 after the public became alarmed by the potential of atomic warfare following WWII. It serves as a symbolic measure of how close humanity is judged to be to a civilization-ending catastrophe.
Why do researchers say global catastrophic risk is underfunded?
Risk reduction is a global public good, meaning that any nation investing in it provides benefits to all other nations without those nations contributing. Because no single actor captures the full benefit, markets systematically undersupply it. Nick Bostrom has noted that more research has been done on topics like Star Trek and dung beetles than on existential risks, and the Biological Weapons Convention organization had an annual budget of only US$1.4 million as of 2020.
What cognitive biases affect how people perceive existential risks?
Researchers identify several biases, including scope insensitivity, hyperbolic discounting, the availability heuristic, the conjunction fallacy, the affect heuristic, and the overconfidence effect. Scope insensitivity is particularly relevant: studies show people are roughly as willing to prevent the deaths of 200,000 birds as 2,000 birds, indicating that moral concern does not scale with the magnitude of a problem.
What is the Svalbard Global Seed Vault and why does it matter for global catastrophic risk?
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is a storage facility buried 400 feet inside a mountain on an Arctic island, designed to hold 2.5 billion seeds from more than 100 countries. It functions as a resilience measure, preserving the world's crop diversity so that agriculture could be rebuilt after a large-scale catastrophe.
What is the three-layer defense-in-depth framework for global catastrophic risk mitigation?
The framework divides mitigation into prevention, which reduces the probability a catastrophe occurs; response, which stops a small-scale disaster from scaling globally; and resilience, which improves humanity's ability to survive if the first two layers fail. Human extinction is most likely when all three defenses are simultaneously weak.