[extropy-chat] FUTURES: Human Extinction Scenarios

[Jose Cordeiro]

Dear transhumanist friends,
 
     I am helping my friend Bruce Tonn to publish a special issue of FUTURES about Human Extinction Scenarios. If you have something relevant, please, send it to Bruce or to me directly: jose_cordeiro at yahoo.com. Next year, I plan to coordinate also a special issue on transhumanism, so please, you can also start working on that:-)
 
     Transhumanistically yours,
 
     La vie est belle!
 
     Yose
 

CALL FOR PAPERS

 

HUMAN EXTINCTION SCENARIOS

 

A Special issue of Futures: The Journal of Policy, Planning and Futures Studies

 

            The human species faces numerous cataclysmic events and forces that can impact us on a large scale, definitely causing disruption and perhaps leading to extinction. These include global climate change, collisions with near-earth objects, nuclear war, and pandemics. While these threats are indeed serious, taken separately they fail to describe exactly how humans could become extinct. For example, nuclear war by itself would most likely fail to kill everyone on the planet, as strikes would probably be concentrated in the northern hemisphere and the Middle East, leaving populations in South America, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand some hope of survival. It is highly unlikely that any uncontrollable nanotechnology could ever be produced but even it if were, it is likely that humans could develop effective, if costly, countermeasures, such as producing the technologies in space or destroying sites of runaway nanotechnologies with nuclear weapons. Viruses could indeed
 kill many people but effective quarantine of ‘healthy’ people could be accomplished to save large numbers of people. Humans appear to be resilient to extinction with respect to single events.

 

            However, human extinction is much more likely in the face of waves of these types of events over time. To truly assess the likelihood of human extinction, combinations of these risks need to be woven together into ‘human extinction scenarios.’ An extinction scenario needs to posit a time line of events that could lead to human extinction. What makes human extinction scenarios challenging to write is the need for them to encompass human response, adaptation and even foresight. An air tight and internally consistent extinction scenario is one where all human efforts, whether they be earnest, half-hearted or tragically just too late, to stave off extinction fail. While an extinction scenario may be quite unlikely to happen, if everything assumed to happen in the scenario did happen, then the future is known: humans become extinct. 

 

            It is important to develop human extinction scenarios for several reasons. They can contribute to global foresight activities. They will highlight key risks and combinations of risks. They can also be considered a first step towards estimating the current probability of human extinction. Estimating this probability is important because policy makers tend to react more forcefully when confronted with quantified risks. It is also important because the process will assuredly spur debate about what might be an acceptable risk of human extinction. 

 

Special Issue Editors:  Bruce Tonn, University of Tennessee and Don MacGregor, MacGregor-Bates, Inc. 

 

Paper Guidelines: Each human extinction scenario must be convincing and internally consistent. Each scenario must incorporate multiple events and human response. No limitations are placed on what risk events can be included in the scenario, except one: no alien attacks are allowed. Scenarios that do not rely solely upon nuclear war or collisions with asteroids or grey goo or cosmic rays or other events of this ilk must be part of the special issue. The scenario time frame can run from the near-term to 10,000 years into the future. 

 

Due Date: Draft manuscripts of approximately 6,000 words are due to Bruce Tonn (btonn at utk.edu) on March 15, 2006. Please use MS Word and follow the Futures format (see http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/30422/authorinstructions) .





La vie est belle!

Yosé (www.cordeiro.org)

Caracas, Venezuela, Americas, TerraNostra, Solar System, Milky Way, Multiverse


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