Usually, the abrupt extinction of the human species occurs in the context of a joke or fictional plot device, and is more rarely considered in serious terms. That’s why I’m pleased to see two events on extinction risk occurring this year — a day-long seminar on preventing extinction by the IEET, occurring at the Computer History Museum in Palo Alto, and a Global Catastrophic Risks conference at Oxford. The conference is 17-20 July, the seminar is on the 14th of November. If you plan to attend, I will see you at the Palo Alto seminar.

The jokey way in which most people react to extinction risk is a major obstacle to getting the world to take these possibilities seriously. Risk prevention advocates acknowledge the lacksidasical approach to x-risks in popular culture, in contrast to issues like health care, civil rights, and foreign relations. The latter issues are important, yes — but so is x-risk prevention. Leading scientists like Stephen Hawking have argued that the likelihood of humanity wiping itself out in the next century could be as high as 50%. Even if the figure is as low as 10%, it merits more attention than it gets.

That’s why I’ve come to believe that a controlled demonstration of extremely destructive weapons may ultimately be necessary to convince the world that we need to take extinction risk prevention seriously. This is a very difficult position to come to, considering both the possible PR blowback and the very real dangers inherent in developing and deploying such weapons. But I’ve come to think it may be the only way to really get prevention efforts going, on the same scale as global warming prevention or larger.

Of particular interest are weapons of mass destruction driven by chemical loops, synthetic, natural, or modified organisms, or robotics, which demonstrate an open-ended ability to self-replicate using common hosts, like humans, or materials available in the field, like dirt and sunlight. If a country’s military were able to use such a weapon to destroy all life on, say, a very small quarantined island populated only by plants and insects, then the world’s attitude towards extinction risk would turn around overnight. Poking, prodding, arguing, and intellectualizing can only go so far. At some point, people need to see it with their own eyes.