Category Archives: risks

From Seth Baum:

Global catastrophic risks (GCR) are risks of events that could significantly harm or even destroy human civilization at the global scale. GCR is related to the concept of existential risk, which is risk of events that would cause humanity to no longer exist. (Note that Nick Bostrom, who coined the term existential risk, defines it in a slightly different way.) Prominent GCRs include climate change, nuclear warfare, pandemics, and artificial general intelligence. Due to the breadth of the GCRs themselves and the issues that GCRs raise, the study of GCR is quite interdisciplinary.

According to a range of ethical views, including my views, reducing GCR should be our top priority as individuals and as a society. In short, if a global catastrophe occurs, then not much else matters, since so much of what we might care about (such as human wellbeing, the wellbeing of non-human animals, or the flourishing of ecosystems) would be largely or entirely wiped out by the catastrophe. The details about prioritizing GCR are a bit more complicated than this (and are …

From The Guardian:

The threat of solar storms that could wreak havoc on the world’s electronic systems must be taken more seriously, the UK government’s chief scientist has warned. A severe solar storm could damage satellites and power grids around the world, he said, leading to a “global Katrina” costing the world’s economies as much as $2tn (£1.2tn).

“This issue of space weather has got to be taken seriously,” said John Beddington, the UK government’s chief scientific adviser, speaking at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Washington DC. “We’ve had a relatively quiet [period] in space weather and we can expect that quiet period to end. Over the same time, over that period, the potential vulnerability of our systems has increased dramatically. Whether it’s the smart grid in our electricity systems or the ubiquitous use of GPS in just about everything these days.”

Our electrical grid is completely vulnerable. None of the major transformers are contained in Faraday cages ready to be sealed off in the case of a coronal …

In other, potentially civilization-saving news, NSF-affiliated scientists are rolling out the first system that may help predict coronal mass ejections and other solar storms one-to-four days in advance. Would power companies be foresightful enough to shut down the grid for a few days in the instance of a truly major solar storm? We can only hope so.

To search for science on the connection between solar storms and earthquakes, see here. However, I doubt earthquakes are what we should be worried about. Still, did you know that geomagnetic storms and earthquakes have actually been linked?

I saw this at the Daily Mail, which everyone should know is a very unreliable source, but it’s still a little concerning:

They said that the super-volcano underneath the Wyoming park has been rising at a record rate since 2004 – its floor has gone up three inches per year for the last three years alone, the fastest rate since records began in 1923.

But hampered by a lack of data they have stopped short of an all-out warning and they are unable to put a date on when the next disaster might take place.

When the eruption finally happens it will dwarf the effect of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano, which erupted in April last year, causing travel chaos around the world.

The University of Utah’s Bob Smith, an expert in Yellowstone’s volcanism told National Geographic: ‘It’s an extraordinary uplift, because it covers such a large area and the rates are so high.

‘At the beginning we were concerned it could be leading up to an eruption.’

The prior probability of a catastrophic eruption per year is about 0.00014%. …

“Why it’s hard to crash the electric grid” from Eurekalert:

Last March, the U.S. Congress heard testimony about a scientific study in the journal Safety Science. A military analyst worried that the paper presented a model of how an attack on a small, unimportant part of the U.S. power grid might, like dominoes, bring the whole grid down.

Members of Congress were, of course, concerned. Then, a similar paper came out in the journal Nature the next month that presented a model of how a cascade of failing interconnected networks led to a blackout that covered Italy in 2003.

These two papers are part of a growing reliance on a particular kind of mathematical model — a so-called topological model — for understanding complex systems, including the power grid.

And this has University of Vermont power-system expert Paul Hines concerned.

“Some modelers have gotten so fascinated with these abstract networks that they’ve ignored the physics of how things actually work — like electricity infrastructure,” Hines says, “and this can lead you grossly astray.”

For example, the Safety Science …

Properly delivered from a plane, a few grams of botulinum toxin could kill hundreds of thousands, if not more, in a major city.

Silent Death by “Uncle Fester” has the full process instructions, including details on optimal delivery.

The LD-50 of botulinum injected into chimpanzees is 50 nanograms.

Combine it with effective microbots, and you have a situation where anyone can kill anyone without accountability.

This is one of the reasons I want a Friendly AI “god” (really more like a machine) to watch over me is that the dangers will simply multiply beyond human capability to manage.

Here’s a bit of an excerpt from my version of Silent Death:

Botulin is the second most powerful poison known, taking the runner up position to a poison made by an exotic strain of South Pacific coral bacteria. The fatal dose of pure botulin is in the neighborhood of 1 microgram, so there are 1 million fatal doses in a gram of pure botulin.

The bacteria that makes botulin, Clostridia botulinum, is found all over …