Peter Singer
In May, experts from many fields gathered in Montenegro to discuss “Existential Threats and Other Disasters: How Should We Address Them.” The term “existential risk” was popularized in a 2002 essay by the philosopher Nick Bostrom, who defined it as referring to risks such that “an adverse outcome would either annihilate Earth-originating intelligent life, or permanently and drastically curtail its potential.”
To appreciate the distinction between existential risks and other disasters, consider climate change. In some scenarios, runaway global warming could render most of the Earth too hot for humans to continue to live there, but Antarctica and some of the northernmost regions of Europe, Asia, and North America would become inhabitable.
That would reduce the potential of intelligent life on Earth, perhaps for millennia, but eventually the planet would cool, and the survivors’ descendants would repopulate it. If these are indeed the worst-case scenarios, then climate change, disastrous as it could be, is not an existential risk.
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