Humanity has a one in six chance of survival

I have been reading some very pessimistic books lately. For example “Falter” or “Novacene”. Hence “The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity”. The power of humanity, which has reached a point where we pose a serious risk to our own existence. How we react to this risk is up to us. The problem is not so much an excess of technology as a lack of wisdom. Either humanity takes control of its destiny and reduces the risk to a sustainable level, or we destroy ourselves. The author puts the existential risk this century at around one in six: Russian roulette.

200,000 years

We have been around for a long time. Our species, Homo sapiens, arose on the savannahs of Africa 200,000 years ago. What set us apart was not physical but mental — our intelligence, creativity and language. Each human’s ability to cooperate with the dozens of other people in their band was unique among large animals. In ecological terms, it is not a human that is remarkable, but humanity.

Iteration and cooperation

Instead of dozens of humans in cooperation, we had tens of thousands cooperating across the generations, preserving and improving ideas through deep time. Little by little, our knowledge and our culture grew. At several points in the long history of humanity, there has been a great transition: a change…