Perspective: ExtinctionHumans “Extinct by 2100” as Intelligent Life Annihilates Itself Says Oxford Prof
There is almost a one-in-five chance that humans will be wiped out before this century is over, according to an Oxford University department. The overall probability — or “existential risk” — of human extinction by 2100 is worryingly high, at 19 percent, Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute has calculated. Nick Bostrom, director of the Institute, notes that we should worry about the fact that aliens have not yet visited planet Earth: With billions of stars in our galaxy, it is proposed that statistically there is a very high chance of an alien race existing which has mastered space travel. But we have never found any evidence for interstellar tourists. This intriguing contradiction is known as the Fermi Paradox. Bostrom says that the fact that we have so far failed to discover another intelligent existence in space may mean that other intelligent races on other planets, if they had ever existed, may have doomed themselves to extinction by their own advanced technologies.
There is almost a one-in-five chance that humans will be wiped out before this century is over, according to an Oxford University department.
The overall probability — or “existential risk” — of human extinction by 2100 is worryingly high, at 19 percent, Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute has calculated.
Sofie Jackson writes in the Daily Star that the institute estimates molecular nanotechnology weapons and super-intelligent AI both have a 5 percent chance of wiping us out.
Meanwhile, there’s a 4 percent chance that war, including civil wars, will annihilate us.
An engineered pandemic, made by a bioweapons company, is calculated to be responsible for 2 percent of the overall risk.
Nuclear war carries a probability of 1 percent and nuclear terrorism just 0.03 percent of obliterating humanity.
The other risks also include a nanotechnology accident, at 0.5 percent, and natural pandemic at 0.05 percent.
Philosopher Nick Bostrom, director of the institute, is one of many academics who think the absence of aliens visiting us could be a bad sign.
With billions of stars in our galaxy, it is proposed that statistically there is a very high chance of an alien race existing which has mastered space travel. But we have never found any evidence for interstellar tourists.
This bizarre contradiction is known as the Fermi Paradox.
In an essay, titled “In the Great Silence there is Great Hope,” Bostrom argued a lack of intelligent aliens was an indication that “our own species too will go extinct” as we invent increasingly dangerous technologies.
He wrote:
The kind of collapse that merely delays the eventual emergence of a space-colonizing civilization by a few hundred or a few thousand years would not help explain why no such civilization has visited us from another planet.
A thousand years may seem a long time, but in this context it’s a sneeze.
There are planets that are billions of years older than Earth.
