What if Covid-19 isn’t our biggest threat? | Science | The Guardian
But if something hasn t yet happened, there is a deep-seated temptation to act as if it s not going to happen. If that is true of an event, like this pandemic, that will kill only a tiny fraction of the world s population, it s even more the case for what are known as existential threats. There are two definitions of existential threat, though they often amount to the same thing. One is something that will bring a total end to humanity, remove us as a species from this planet or any other. The other, only slightly less troubling, is something that leads to an irrevocable collapse of civilisation, reducing surviving humanity to a prehistoric state of existence.
An Australian based at Oxford s Future of Humanity Institute, Ord is one of a tiny number of academics working in the field of existential risk assessment. It s a discipline that takes in everything from stellar explosions right down to rogue microbes, from supervolcanoes to artificial superintelligence.
I’d rather not think about it.