An area of study more important than any other is that of extinction risks. An average-intelligence person devoting their life to the study and mitigation of existential risks can accomplish far more ethical good than lifetimes of work by thousands of the best and brightest politicians, scientists, writers, and programmers. Morality-wise, it’s a pursuit that blows all others out of the water. Why? Because the negative value represented by the possibility of existential disaster is much greater in magnitude than all the other evils in the world, including poverty, torture, disease, and tyranny. We can’t make a better world if we’re dead.

If our species survives this century and goes on to colonize the stars, the people who were instrumental in minimizing the probability of risk during this century will deserve a lot of the credit. If you choose to devote your life to mitigating existential risk and actually end up having a significant impact, you could actually be famous for the rest of eternity. Think about that!

This is why it’s of such massive importance whenever a new paper comes out about the subject. This area of study is neglected. Only in the past five years has it become an area of significant focus. Today, big names like Stephen Hawking and Martin Rees are on our side. However, there is an explicit lack of publications in the area.

It’s my pleasure to upload a paper by Jason Matheny of the University of Maryland, entitled “Reducing the risk of human extinction”. Matheny is known publicly for his involvement with New Harvest, a non-profit whose purpose is to develop artificial substitutes for meat. Recently he came across Nick Bostrom’s paper on existential risk, and decided to contribute to the field.

Here’s a chunk from the conclusion:

We may be poorly equipped to recognize or plan for extinction risks. We may not be good at grasping the significance of very large numbers (catastrophic outcomes) or very small numbers (probabilities) over large timeframes. We struggle with estimating the probabilities of rare or unprecedented outcomes. Policymakers may not plan far beyond current political administrations and rarely do risk analyses consider the existence future generations. (For a welcome exception, see Kent 2004.) We may unjustifiably discount the value of future lives. Finally, extinction risks are classic market failures where an individual enjoys no perceptible benefit from her investment in risk reduction. Human survival may thus be a good requiring deliberate policies to protect.

It might be feared that consideration of extinction risks would lead to a reductio ad absurdum: we ought to invest all our funds in asteroid defense, for instance, instead of AIDS, pollution, world hunger or other problems we face today. However, even if it were found that reducing extinction risks is highly cost-effective, it would not imply that public funds should be spent on asteroid defense, et al. at the exclusion of all other public programs. Many programs reduce extinction risk by maintaining a healthy, educated, and content population, and should be seen as part of a portfolio of risk-reducing projects.

In the concluding chapter of Reasons and Persons, Parfit (1984) wrote:

I believe that if we destroy mankind, as we now can, this outcome will be much worse than most people think. Compare three outcomes:

1. Peace
2. A nuclear war that kills 99% of the world’s existing population
3. A nuclear war that kills 100%

2 would be worse than 1, and 3 would be worse than 2. Which is the greater of these two differences? Most people believe that the greater difference is between 1 and 2. I believe that the difference between 2 and 3 is very much greater. . . . The Earth will remain habitable for at least another billion years. Civilization began only a few thousand years ago. If we do not destroy mankind, these thousand years may be only a tiny fraction of the whole of civilized human history. The difference between 2 and 3 may thus be the difference between this tiny fraction and all of the rest of this history. If we compare this possible history to a day, what has occurred so far is only a fraction of a second.

This paper tentatively supports Parfit’s conclusion. Human extinction in the next few centuries could reduce the number of future generations by thousands or more. We take extraordinary measures to protect some endangered species from extinction. It might be reasonable to take extraordinary measures to protect humanity from the same. To decide whether this is so requires more discussion of the methodological problems mentioned here, as well as research on the extinction risks we face and the costs of mitigating them.

Mitigating existential risk should be the human species’ number one priority, right now. If you want to help, mention the idea to your friends, organize your thoughts on the topic, contribute to mailing lists discussing it, blog about it, and lend risk-mitigating organizations your financial support.

As I write this, the nuclear tension on the Korean peninsula regrettably continues… while New York Magazine pokes fun at concern about risk.

Jason’s bio:

Jason Matheny is a Ph.D. student in Agricultural Policy at the University of Maryland and a researcher at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University, where he studies the health and environmental consequences of animal agriculture. He directs New Harvest, a nonprofit that funds research on in vitro meat, and previously worked on public health projects for the World Bank and the Center for Global Development.