[ExI] Planetary defense

[Tom Nowell]

Anders, may I ask your professionally biased opinion on something? I was looking online for a copy of "Global catastrophic risks" by Bostrom and Cirkovic, and amazon indicated the paperback edition comes out next month. Am I better off waiting for the new edition and whatever new information it contains, or will a copy of the first edition be just as good?  

Anders also wrote>

"This shows an interesting problem we have: NEOs are not the biggest or 
most important threats we need to stop. Yet they are the best managed of 
all of them. We know their physics, it is deterministic, we have a lot 
of data on them, we have some experimental interventions (asteroid and 
comet landings), there is a community working on the problem and there 
is even some public understanding of the issue. Try finding that 
combination for climate change, wars, AGI, bioweapons or nanotech. The 
only thing anywhere close is pandemics."

Well, bioweapons aren't something your independent think tank or study group can do anything more than issue a policy report about - 
actually getting hold of samples of the most deadly viruses and bacteria and then studying them with a view to working on vaccines or medicines is difficult legally, as governments want to control them. Suitable high level biosecurity facilities are expensive, and getting ethics committee approval to do the work may not be easy.

AGI & nanotech are largely unknowns as they aren't deterministic and we have little data. It's very hard to build public awareness until you can  people a concrete example of the tech and what it can do.

Wars - people are aware, but the level of compassion fatigue is huge. Given  that you can't uninvent modern war (given the tens of millions of AK-47  derivatives in Africa, and that the Lord's Resistance Army wages war by kidnapping children, getting them drunk and giving them machetes), that interventions cost money and the lives of intervening soldiers, and that most of them occur far away from the developed world, it is very hard to get people to care. There are communities working on reducing warfare, but it's a hard task.

Climate change - the problem here is that the public is aware of conflicting points of view. There are many communities working on it, stacks of data for people to analyse, but global climate is only semi-deterministic. Given that most policy changes to intervene in climate change have strong economic implications, and the economy is a similarly chaotic system, and people can string together data sets to support the course of action they prefer. This confuses the hell out of the public.

Tom