Tag Archives: Disaster

Vulnerable World Hypothesis











Added 8am:

Kevin Kelly in 2012:


Anders Sandberg in 2018:

Added 19Nov: Vox quotes from this article.

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World Government Risks Collective Suicide








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Great Filter, 20 Years On





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A Coming Hypocralypse?


















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Two Types of Future Filters

In principle, any piece of simple dead matter in the universe could give rise to simple life, then to advanced life, then to an expanding visible civilization. In practice, however, this has not yet happened anywhere in the visible universe. The “great filter” is sum total of all the obstacles that prevent this transition, and our observation of a dead universe tells us that this filter must be enormous.

Life and humans here on Earth have so far progressed some distance along this filter, and we now face the ominous question: how much still lies ahead? If the future filter is large, our changes of starting an expanding visible civilization are slim. While being interviewed on the great filter recently, I was asked what I see as the most likely future filter. And in trying to answer, I realized that I have changed my mind.

The easiest kind of future filter to imagine is a big external disaster that kills all life on Earth. Like a big asteroid or nearby supernovae. But when you think about it, it is very hard to kill all life on Earth. Given how long Earth as gone without such an event, the odds of it happening in the next millions years seems quite small. And yet a million years seems plenty of time for us to start an expanding visible civilization, if we were going to do that.

Yes, compared to killing all life, we can far more easily imagine events that destroy civilization, or kill all humans. But the window for Earth to support life apparently extends another 1.5 billion years into our future. As that window duration should roughly equal the typical duration between great filter steps in the past, it seems unlikely that any such steps have occurred since a half billion years ago, when multicellular life started becoming visible in the fossil record. For example, the trend toward big brains seems steady enough over that period to make big brains unlikely as a big filter step.

Thus even a disaster that kills most all multicellular life on Earth seems unlikely to push life back past the most recent great filter step. Life would still likely retain sex, Eukaryotes, and much more. And with 1.5 billion years to putter, life seems likely to revive multicellular animals, big brains, and something as advanced as humans. In which case there would be a future delay of advanced expanding life, but not a net future filter.

Yes, this analysis is regarding “try-try” filter steps, where the world can just keep repeatedly trying until it succeeds. In principle there can also be “first or never” steps, such as standards that could in principle go many ways, but which lock in forever once they pick a particular way. But it still seems hard to imagine such steps in the last half billion years.

So far we’ve talked about big disasters due to external causes. And yes, big internal disasters like wars are likely to be more frequent. But again the problem is: a disaster that still leaves enough life around could evolve advanced life again in 1.5 billion years, resulting in only a delay, not a filter.

The kinds of disasters we’ve been considering so far might be described as “too little coordination” disasters. That is, you might imagine empowering some sort of world government to coordinate to prevent them. And once such a government became possible, if it were not actually created or used, you might blame such a disaster in part on our failing to empower a world government to prevent them.

Another class of disasters, however, might be described as “too much coordination” disasters. In these scenarios, a powerful world government (or equivalent global coalition) actively prevents life from expanding visibly into the universe. And it continues to do so for as long as life survives. This government might actively prevent the development of technology that would allow such a visible expansion, or it might allow such technology but prevent its application to expansion.

For example, a world government limited to our star system might fear becoming eclipsed by interstellar colonists. It might fear that colonists would travel so far away as to escape the control of our local world government, and then they might collectively grow to become more powerful than the world government around our star.

Yes, this is not a terribly likely scenario, and it does seem hard to imagine such a lockdown lasting for as long as does advanced civilization capable of traveling to other stars. But then scenarios where all life on Earth gets killed off also seem pretty unlikely. It isn’t at all obvious to me that the too little coordination disasters are more likely than the too much coordination disasters.

And so I conclude that I should be in-the-ballpark-of similarly worried about both categories of disaster scenarios. Future filters could result from either too little or too much coordination. To prevent future filters, I don’t know if it is better to have more or less world government.

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Two Types of Envy



Now consider this recent news:

Shortly before the [recent Toronoto van] attack, a post appeared on the suspect’s Facebook profile, hailing the commencement of the “Incel Rebellion”. …There is a reluctance to ascribe to the “incel” movement anything so lofty as an “ideology” or credit it with any developed, connected thinking, partly because it is so bizarre in conception. … Standing for “involuntarily celibate”,… it [has] mutate[d] into a Reddit muster point for violent misogyny. …



Basically, their virginity is a discrimination or apartheid issue, and only a state-distributed girlfriend programme, outlawing multiple partners, can rectify this grand injustice. … Elliot Rodger, the Isla Vista killer, uploaded a video to YouTube about his “retribution” against attractive women who wouldn’t sleep with him (and the attractive men they would sleep with) before killing six people in 2014.  (more)








Added: On June 26, after a civility pause, I wrote a long clarifying post on Comparing Income & Sex Redistribution.

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How Deviant Recent AI Progress Lumpiness?

















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Growth Is Change. So Is Death.

The very readable book The Wizard and the Prophet tells the story of environmental prophet William Vogt investigating the apocalypse-level deaths of guano-making birds near Peru. When he discovered the cause in the El Nino weather cycle, his policy recommendations were to do nothing to mitigate this natural cause; he instead railed against many much smaller human influences, demanding their reversal. A few years later his classic 1948 screed Road To Survival, which contained pretty much all the standard environmental advice and concepts used today, continued to warn against any but small human-caused changes to the environment, while remaining largely indifferent to even huge natural changes.







But of course few are very good at resolving their near versus far incoherences. And so the positions people take end up depending a lot on how they first framed the key issues, as in terms of short or long term changes.

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Kaczynski’s Collapse Theory

Many people argue that we should beware of foreigners, and people from other ethnicities. Beware of visiting them, trading with them, talking to them, or allowing them to move here. The fact that so many people are willing to argue for such conclusions is some evidence in favor of them. But the fact that the arguments offered are so diverse, and so often contradict one another, takes away somewhat from the strength of this evidence. This pattern looks like people tend to have a preconceived conclusion for which they opportunistically embrace any random arguments they can find.

Similarly, many argue that we should be wary of future competition, especially if that might lead to concentrations of power. I recently posted on my undergrad law & econ students’ largely incoherent fears of one group taking over the entire solar system, and how Frederick Engels expresses related fears back in 1844. And I’ve argued on this blog with my ex-co-blogger regarding his concerns that if future AI results from competing teams, one team might explode to suddenly take over the world. In this post I’ll describe Ted “Unabomber” Kaczynski’s rather different theory on why we should fear competition leading to concentration, from his recent book Anti Tech Revolution.

Kaczynski claims that the Fermi paradox, i.e., the fact that the universe looks dead everywhere, is explained by the fact that technological civilizations very reliably destroy themselves. When this destruction happens naturally, it is so thorough that no humans could survive. Which is why his huge priority is to find a way to collapse civilization sooner, so that at least some humans survive. Even a huge nuclear war is preferable, as at least some people survive that.

Why must everything collapse? Because, he says, natural-selection-like competition only works when competing entities have scales of transport and talk that are much less than the scale of the entire system within which they compete. That is, things can work fine when bacteria who each move and talk across only meters compete across an entire planet. The failure of one bacteria doesn’t then threaten the planet. But when competing systems become complex and coupled on global scales, then there are always only a few such systems that matter, and breakdowns often have global scopes.

Kaczynski dismisses the possibility that world-spanning competitors might anticipate the possibility of large correlated disasters, and work to reduce their frequency and mitigate their harms. He says that competitors can’t afford to pay any cost to prepare for infrequent problems, as such costs hurt them in the short run. This seems crazy to me, as most of the large competing systems we know of do in fact pay a lot to prepare for rare disasters. Very few correlated disasters are big enough to threaten to completely destroy the whole world. The world has had global scale correlation for centuries, with the world economy growing enormously over that time. And yet we’ve never even seen a factor of two decline, while at least thirty factors of two would be required for a total collapse. And while it should be easy to test Kaczynski’s claim in small complex systems of competitors, I know of no supporting tests.

Yet all dozen of the reviews I read of Kaczynski’s book found his conclusion here to be obviously correct. Which seems to me evidence that a great many people find the worry about future competitors to be so compelling that they endorse most any vaguely plausible supporting argument. Which I see as weak evidence against that worry.

Yes of course correlated disasters are a concern, even when efforts are made to prepare against them. But its just not remotely obvious that competition makes them worse, or that all civilizations are reliably and completely destroyed by big disasters, so much so that we should prefer to start a big nuclear war now that destroys civilization but leaves a few people alive. Surely if we believed his theory a better solution would be to break the world into a dozen mostly isolated regions.

Kaczynski does deserve credit for avoiding common wishful thinking in some of his other discussion. For example, he says that we can’t much control the trajectory of history, both because it is very hard to coordinate on the largest scales, and because it is hard to estimate the long term consequences of many choices. He sees how hard it is for social movements to actually achieve anything substantial. He notes that futurists who expect to achieve immortality and then live for a thousand years too easily presume that a fast changing competitive world will still have need for them. And while I didn’t see him actually say it, I expect he’s the sort of person who’d make the reasonable argument that individual humans are just happier in a more forager-like world.

Kaczynski isn’t stupid, and he’s more clear-headed than most futurists I read. Too bad his low mood leans him so strongly to embrace a poorly-argued inevitable collapse story.

Some book quotes on his key claim: Continue reading "Kaczynski’s Collapse Theory" »

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Dragon Debris?

Apparently the causal path from simple dead matter to an expanding visible civilization is very unlikely. Almost everything that starts along this path is blocked by a great filter, which might be one extremely hard step, or many merely very hard steps. The most likely location of this great filter is that the origin of life is very very hard. Which is good news, because otherwise we’d have to worry at lot about our future, via what fraction of the overall huge filter still lies ahead of us. And if we ever find evidence of life in space that isn’t close to the causal path that led to us, that will be big bad news, and we’ll need to worry a lot more.

One of the more interesting future filter scenarios is a high difficulty of traveling between the stars. As we can easily see across the universe, we know that photons have few problems traveling very long distances. And since stars drift about at great speeds, we know that stars can also travel freely suffering little harm. But we still can’t be sure of the ease of travel for humans, or for the sort of things that our descendants might try to send between the stars. We have collected a few grains of interstellar dust, but still know little about them, and so don’t know how easy was their travel. We do know that most of the universe is made of dark matter and dark energy that we understand quite poorly. So perhaps “Here Be Dragons” lie in wait out there for our scale of interstellar travelers.

Many stars, like ours, are surrounded by a vast cloud of small icy objects. Every once in a while one of these objects falls into a rare orbit where it travels close to its star, and then it becomes a comet with a tail. Even more rarely, one should fall into an orbit that throws it out away from its star (almost always without doing much else to it). Such an object would then travel at the typical star speed between stars, and after billions of years it might perhaps pass near one other star; the chance of two such encounters is very low. And if the space between stars is as mild as it seems, it should arrive looking pretty much as it left.

Astronomers have been waiting for a while to see such an interstellar visitor, and were puzzled to have not yet seen one. They expected it to look like a comet, except traveling a lot faster than do most comets. Well within roughly a year of a new instrument that could see such things better, we’ve finally seen such a visitor in the last few months. It looked like what we expect in some ways. It is traveling at roughly the speed we’d expect, its size is unremarkable, and its color is roughly what we expect from ancient small space objects. But it is suspiciously weird in several other apparently-unrelated ways.

First, its orbit is weird. Its direction of origin is 6 degrees from sun’s motion vector; only one in 365 random directions are closer. And among the travel paths where we could have seen this object, only one in 100 such paths would have traveled closer to the sun than did this one (source: Turner). But one must apparently invoke very strange and unlikely hypotheses to believe these parameters were anything but random. For now, I won’t go there.

Second, the object itself is weird. It does not have a comet tail, and so has apparently lost most of its volatiles like water. If this is typical, it explains why we haven’t seen objects like this before. The object seems to be very elongated, much more than any other natural object we’ve ever seen in our solar system. And it is rotating very fast, so fast that it would fly apart if it were made out of the typical pile of lightly attached rubble. So at some point it experienced an event so dramatic as to melt away its volatiles, melt it into a solid object, stretch it to an extreme, and set it spinning at an extreme rate. After which it drifted for long enough to acquire the usual color of ancient space objects.

This raises the suspicion that it perhaps encountered a dangerous “dragon” between the starts. Making it “dragon debris.” If the timing of this event were random, we should see roughly one a year in the future, and with new better instruments coming online in a few years we should see them even faster. So within a decade we should learn if this first visitor is very unusual, or if we should worry a lot more about travel dangers between the stars.

Added 30Oct2018: The object is even more interesting: it started out at rest wrt galaxy, and seems to be paper thin.

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