Extreme climate change. Global pandemic. Major asteroid impact. The rise of artificial intelligence.
These are just a few of the potentially world-ending events that threaten civilization as we know it, according to a new report from researchers at Oxford University.
The study, “Global Challenges” (pdf), urges readers to consider a new category of global risks—low-probability, high-impact scenarios that hover at the extreme end of the spectrum.
“This report has, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, created the first list of global risks with impacts that for all practical purposes can be called infinite.” However, the authors note, “the real focus is not on the almost unimaginable impacts of the risks the report outlines. Its fundamental purpose is to encourage global collaboration and to use this new category of risk as a driver for innovation.”
The report looks only at events that could trigger a civilization’s collapse—”defined as a drastic decrease in human population size and political/economic/social complexity, globally for an extended time.”
In the case of extreme climate change, for example:
Mass deaths and famines, social collapse and mass migration are certainly possible in this scenario. Combined with shocks to the agriculture and biosphere-dependent industries of the more developed countries, this could lead to global conflict and possibly civilization collapse. Further evidence of the risk comes from signs that past civilization collapses have been driven by climate change.
According to the researchers, the 12 global risks that threaten human civilization are:
Current risks
1. Extreme Climate Change
Click Here: Germany Football Shop 2. Nuclear War
3. Ecological Catastrophe
4. Global Pandemic
5. Global System CollapseExogenic risks