
What are the biggest threats to humanity? - pseudolus
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-47030233
======
uxcolumbo
According to the bulletin of atomic scientists it's climate change and nuclear
weapons [0].

I used to think when climate change was mentioned that it's something that
won't really impact us in the near term.

After looking more into this, reading more about what James Hansen, Peter
Wadhams, Dr Suzuki and other scientists are saying it's basically very very
late, but not too late to avoid major catastrophe.

We need major action now - real commitment and action from our governments
that protecting our life-ground is top priority and not economic growth at all
cost.

Small things are already happening, like school kids striking, people doing
civil disobedience etc, people reducing or not eating meat, trying to avoid
buying too many plastic products, using public transport etc, but I'm thinking
is this enough?

It really doesn't help that we have a US government or president that doesn't
really believe in human made climate change. And then we have the new
president in Brazil who doesn't think it's important to protect the Amazon.

What's your outlook for the next 10 - 15 years? Do you think we can make it?
Change our ways and get off our fossil fuel addiction, change our destructive
farming practices, change factory farming and move to a planetary diet
(reduced meat intake) or even plant-based diet?

Do you worry about food security issues caused by extended droughts?

Will city life in 10 years or so be worse or better?

[0] [https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/current-
time/](https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/current-time/)

EDIT: typos

~~~
moosey
I have gone through the existential angst that I read in your comment. The
ugly depression, the hopelessness. I understand that outcome is a very real
possibility. I also believe that humanity will defeat climate change, and
before we lose all major megafauna on the planet. I think that this is the
most radical position to take: a faith in the ability of humanity, after
thousands of years following the path of exploitation, changing to the path of
restoration.

Perhaps it's because of the changes that I'm willing to make, and that could
be my folly. I see highly compact cities feeding a world of vegans. I see us
doing everything in our power to restore the natural world to its splendor.
The zeitgeist that we must shift to is alien and extreme to modern cultures,
primarily because we have become so accustomed to the exploitation of people
and nature that escaping it seems unecessary to many, and therefore
impossible.

I have a sense that it will happen. I have a sense that people are tired of
this life, and even if they must themselves not live in nature, the act of
restoring it will bring meaning to a broken society. For the first time since
we left the forests, we will return to the path of peace.

~~~
SuddsMcDuff
That's a lovely thought, but I don't think it's based in reality. Change, by
it's nature, is disruptive, painful, sometimes unbearable. Human nature is to
avoid pain. In all of human history, I'm not aware that the human race has
ever collectively, proactively changed it's behavour in the way you describe,
and I see no evidence that we'll suddenly start now. Ultimately the changes
will happen, but they will happen in the same way they have always happened:
mother nature will compel us to change by making us suffer.

~~~
moosey
I agree that we'll have to have an "Oh shit" moment and that moment will have
to happen in the United States for things to happen. I don't deny there will
be pain. I don't deny that time is short.

I just think that we can move towards being a more perfect species, and that
it will soon happen.

~~~
SuddsMcDuff
I do respect, even admire the optimists view on this. It's not that I don't
have faith in humanity, it's that I _do_ have faith in nature, and I have
observed how she works.

~~~
moosey
I absolutely agree with you. My optimism is strained by what has already been
lost, and the repercussions will be severe. We will have to start accepting
some of the rules of nature, death, and population that the rest of the
species of this planet live under, and that is going to be extremely
problematic.

There will be death and despair, some of which we are going to have to accept
as inevitable. But there is already death and despair. We kill 9 billion
animals in the United States for food supply each year. There are more humans
slaves now than at any time in human history. We've lost so much wildlife. The
massive loss of arthropod life fills me with shock and dismay.

And yet, with suffering beyond suffering, I have a sense. I have no proof, it
could all very well be hopeless, but I have a sense that people are ready to
stop the exploitation that led us here.

------
millzlane
Honestly it's Extremists. Not only the religious kind. But every person that
doesn't want a tolerant, multicultural, scientific society. Dr. Michio Kaku
explains it in his Big Think video "Will human kind destroy itself."
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NPC47qMJVg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NPC47qMJVg)

~~~
umvi
It's also people who are unkind to those they disagree with. I think we will
destroy our society faster than climate change just via "pilot-induced
oscillation" where in this case the pilot is two party democracy and the
airplane is the country.

Also,

> multicultural

There are a lot of people that are both tolerant and scientific that don't
value diversity. Like... the entirety of Japan, for example. There are pros
and cons to homogeneity in society.

------
vis1231
Bugs becoming extinct:
[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/10/plummeti...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/10/plummeting-
insect-numbers-threaten-collapse-of-nature)

------
intrasight
The biggest "threat" is our ignorance. We don't know how these major threats
(climate change, insect decline, virulence) will aggregate in non-linear ways.
I think that many people intuit that they will, and that there will be tipping
points. But since the Earth is such a big system, all timeframes are stretched
out beyond human perceptions of immediate threat (e.g. will it threaten me or
my children). We don't know when the tipping points will arrive. We may have
already tipped.

------
vidanay
Am I having a bad morning, or does the formatting of that article make it
nearly impossible to read?

------
gmuslera
Some of the threats were handled as being for this year, more than for a not
so far future. Even something that have 0.001% probabilities to happen in this
particular year can have more significant odds in our lifetimes.

Also, that something didn't happen in the past N years don't mean that it
won't happen this one, or that the actual odds are 1/N because unaccounted
factors could increase the odds (i.e. global warming is increasing the odds of
extreme weather events, even for used-to-be-infrequent weather events). And
those unaccounted factors may change odds for most risks, (political, weather,
health) or make them worse, or to happen close enough.

------
superkuh
Probably the loss of fertile soil in farmland and increasing need for fresh
water.

------
otakucode
For several years now I have believed that there is a more general threat that
is far scarier as it has no ethical solution. Basically, the very idea of
civilization contains the seed of its own self-destruction. Danger and
suffering provides the motivation for humanity to turn away from its
destructive and unreliable intuition and to exert the energy necessary to
reason. Using reason, we build civilization - which removes danger and
suffering by definition. This means that it also removes all substantive
visceral motivation to distrust intuition and invest in reason. As reason is
used to construct more infrastructure and more danger and suffering is removed
from peoples lives, this necessarily removes the negative consequences from
trusting intuition. It becomes safe to trust intuition despite its horrendous
inaccuracy. And as intuition is sort of the 'default mode' of the brain,
requiring the absolute least amount of energy investment, it becomes very
popular to rely upon it and distrust reason.

It then becomes more and more difficult to get social support for expanding or
maintaining the infrastructure necessary to sustain the civilization.
Eventually, there will be a movement to actively destroy that infrastructure.
One might think that once some of the danger reasserted itself that people
would immediately turn back to reason, but that is not supported by any sort
of history. Instead, the most likely response is to double, triple, and
quadruple down on intuition and superstition. They will conclude that whatever
danger presents itself is an artifact of the remaining infrastructure and that
they simply haven't gone far enough. They will accelerate, not reverse course.

If a person or group of people do not agree that reason is the way in which
life should be dealt with, you can not convince them with reason, obviously.
You could persuade them emotionally... but assuming you are successful, one of
their first realizations will be that you have manipulated them unethically
and are a hypocrite. They would not side with reason for long. So the destiny
of civilization seems to be to destroy itself, to revert to humanitys 'base
state' of slogging through muck, racked with disease, killing one another over
whose god is stronger.

That, I think, is the biggest threat to humanity.

------
rnernento
An overwhelmingly large (and growing) population of ignorant people who don't
value critical thinking, learning, science, or anything but themselves and
their immediate desires.

~~~
uxcolumbo
I think you have a point it's also what I'm seeing, but I think it's not
because most people choose to be ignorant.

It's our system, which locks us into a work.eat.sleep.netflix&chill.repeat
cycle.

And if you have kids etc you just don't have enough time or maybe mental
energy to then research all this after a long day of work.

And some don't care, even if they have all the facts and are presented with
solutions to avoid causing further harm.

Tricky...

~~~
rnernento
I know what you mean, I have kids and don't have a lot of time to learn about
the things I want to. The thing is, people like that aren't who I'm talking
about.

I'm talking about people who will make no effort to learn about a topic, and
then feel that their opinion on said topic is of the same weight as everyone
else's (including experts). These people will then act/vote based on this
opinion and act offended when it's questioned. This mentality is creeping into
everything.

I don't want to politicize this but lets use climate change as an example.
Forget about whether or not climate change is real or not. Just leave the
possibility that it could be, and could be a potential threat to the existence
of humanity.

Now, don't get caught up on who is right or wrong, just think about the
overall quality of the debate that's currently occurring. It's not climate
change that scares me so much as the quality of the debate.

Eventually we will be faced with a very large problem and we don't seem to be
in any shape to work together to fix it.

------
Balgair
Not a lot of talk about CRISPR-CAS9 here. Though we don't really know enough
about what it will entail yet (it's still very new), I think that it's
potential power should cause raised eyebrows. Things like bio-terrorism are a
'first pass' at CRISPR's power, but there are much deeper implications. For
instance, the concept of 'family' may be threatened with enough gene editing,
a concept that goes back about a billion years.

------
Razengan
For any intelligent species to be considered objectively "successful", it has
to keep asking itself certain questions:

• How do we ensure that we propagate beyond our home?

• How do we ensure that we don't self-destruct?

• How do we ensure that the products and evidence of our existence survive us
in the event of our extinction?

And, to a lesser, more subjective extent:

• How do we ensure that no member of our species has a miserable existence?

So far, humans don't seem to be doing much of any of these.

~~~
bloak
To me those criteria seem completely arbitrary, though I believe some
philosophers have argued the exact opposite of what you're claiming, that is,
that an intelligent species should be considered "successful" when it causes
itself to disappear: see "antinatalism".

~~~
Razengan
Philosophy is, as far as we know, a pure human-specific construct.

A true hive-mind species, or a species that propagates asexually, for example,
will not relate to a lot of the stuff we do, let alone be able to care about
it.

However, if you cannot influence anything in the universe beyond your home
planet, and don't leave a lasting impact or any trace for any potential
observers in the future, you may as well never have existed.

Consider never having found any dinosaur fossils.

If humans die out on Earth, and the effects of our time here do not influence
anything after even say 1000 years, we will be no different than the Elves and
Dwarves and all the fictional species of our own imagination.

------
nec4b
It's is amazing that no matter how good humanity is doing, there is always at
least one end of the world type of meme circulating around the world and
making ordinary and also otherwise smart and educated people full of anxiety.
This pattern repeats it self across religions and cultures over and over
through the entire human history. And every time they say that this time their
prediction really will happen.

------
m4r35n357
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_from_the_Skies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_from_the_Skies)!

------
Devz0r
Ourselves.

------
klaudius
Imagine if someone asked "What are the biggest threats to white race?". That
would be recognized as a racist question and racism is seen as a bad thing.

For some weird reason racism is bad but speciesism is good. These types of
articles are typical specisist garbage. What about threats to other species?
Why are members of homo sapiens species superior to other species?

This wouldn't fly when it comes to racism since people now recognize that
racial superiority is a bogus concept.

~~~
rnernento
I rank this guy as a pretty big threat... This sounds like something a James
Bond villain says right before he releases the virus that kills 90% of the
human population.

~~~
klaudius
No, man I'm not a threat. Your remark reminds me of a common situation of
someone being accused of being a race traitor by a white supremacist.

~~~
rnernento
I guess if I'm being honest I'm kind of a human supremacist. I think most of
us are. That's why we eat other animals. I'm not saying I don't feel guilty
about it but I also don't feel guilty about swatting mosquitoes.

Also my comment wasn't meant to be serious...

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
I don't consider myself a human supremacist, but I also don't eat other
animals even if some of my quality of life is ultimately sourced from their
suffering.

I think it is just as foolish to assume that humans are more deserving, more
important, and more valuable than any other life simply because you are a part
of that group as it is to assume the same about your race.

------
ThomPete
If someone want to convince me that climate change is the biggest threat to
humanity they need to explain to me what scientifically demonstrated
consequences of climate change are we currently not able to deal with and
won't we be able to deal with 50-100 year from now.

Climate change will happen whether we emit CO2 or not and we always have to
find ways to co-exist with that fact.

But the idea that climate change is catastrophic to the extent a sudden impact
from an astroid is just not convincing and it's certainly not scientific no
matter how many scientist are behind that view.

"threat to humanity" is a big concept and it's disheartening to see it being
thrown around with regards to climate so easily.

My position on this is that we start taking care of our close environments
rather than worrying about climate change as that's not something we can
really do anything about (and no solar and wind will not solve our problems)

The current debate about climate change is politics masquaraded as science.

Until we accept this we can't have a constructive debate.

~~~
rnernento
How many people have to die for you to consider it a threat to humanity. Not
trying to be dramatic, just understand that small changes in climate and crops
have the potential to starve millions if not billions.

~~~
krageon
For humanity to be properly threatened the threat needs to make humanity stop
existing. Starving/dying people are bad, but not unusual even in current day
to day life. It might even ramp up, that's really bad. But that doesn't make
it a threat to humanity as a whole.

~~~
rnernento
I take the question as humanity as a whole, not just the existence of
humanity. If something is capable of wiping out 50% of humanity, I consider
that a threat. I understand what you're saying though.

~~~
ThomPete
Can you point to where it's been demonstrated that climate change will wipe
out 50% of humanity?

~~~
rnernento
50% was an arbitrary percentage, does it matter? My point was where do you
draw the line? My thought is that a billion people dying constitutes a threat
to humanity. The reality is we don't know exactly how we'll react to climate
change but it is in the realm of possibility that there will be significant
losses to crop productivity in places like India.

~~~
ThomPete
Again. Can you point to the evidence that billions will die?

People die every day from nature already and already have. We've become better
and better at dealing with nature.

Many things are in the realm of possibility big astroid hitting earth is
certainly going to be quite dramatic and in the billions.

We aren't just dealing with one scenario here there are many ways that
billions can be affected.

So why try to force solar and wind when they can't even deliver the amount of
energy we need, they aren't stable and they aren't even close to being green
either.

It's much more responsible to keep using the resources we have, become better
at utilizing them keep developing new methods.

This idea that we can push some pause button and still get people out of
poverty and make peoples lives safer or whatever it is people are suggesting
is simply out of touch with any reasonable measure up against the consequences
of climate change we can actually predict.

~~~
krageon
I feel like I need to weigh in here: You're taking this a bit too far. I
didn't mean to imply anywhere that nothing needs to be done about climate
change. I think it is essential that we do, and demanding "evidence that
billions will die" is to my mind perhaps being purposely deaf to the reality
of the situation as it is and will be.

~~~
yesenadam
"Science is not about consensus. Science is what can be tested and thus
demonstrated." \- ThomPete above

ThomPete on this page is, it seems, holding people to impossible standards and
then complaining that they're not met.

I have no idea what they mean "If someone want to convince me...they need to
explain to me what scientifically demonstrated consequences of climate
change...won't we be able to deal with 50-100 year from now." .. "There is no
shortage of speculated outcomes. What there is a shortage of is demonstrated
outcomes"

A shortage of what?! One is supposed to _demonstrate_ the future somehow, or
give a deductive proof, or something? What _would_ count as evidence that
events predicted by scientists will occur? I'm not sure. Nothing, it seems.

It seems any prediction or forecast about almost anything can equally be
called 'certainly not scientific', 'politics masquaraded as science',
'speculations...not scientifically demonstrated' etc etc.

I guess the probability of asteroids hitting the earth is independent of the
stuff happening here, of human plans and actions, so can't similarly be
accused of being politics in disguise. But most issues on this planet - all
the other ones I can think of - aren't of that kind.

~~~
ThomPete
One is supposed to at least entertain the idea that there is no consensus
about "the sky is falling" claims we see in the media and pushed by
politicians.

So no I am not holding anything to impossible standards I am simply saying
that currently none of the consequences of climate change are things we can't
deal with.

And yes predictions or forecast about almost anything can equally be called
not scientific which would be a welcome change compared to the discussion we
have today where bogus claims like "i believe in science" or "97% of
scientists" agree are being used as ways to shut down any dissent from the
catastrophist interpretation of the actual data.

