Avoiding the Great Filter: A Simulation of Important Factors for Human Survival

TL;DR

This paper uses probabilistic modeling to evaluate the impact of various global threats on human survival, highlighting nuclear war, climate change, and pandemics as the most immediate dangers, and discussing AI's potential risks.

Contribution

It introduces a simulation framework to quantify the effects of major existential threats on human longevity, providing comparative insights into their relative immediacy and severity.

Findings

Nuclear war reduces average survival to 60 years.

Climate change reduces survival to 193 years.

Asteroid impacts could threaten civilization in approximately 1754 years.

Abstract

Humanity's path to avoiding extinction is a daunting and inevitable challenge which proves difficult to solve, partially due to the lack of data and evidence surrounding the concept. We aim to address this confusion by addressing the most dangerous threats to humanity, in hopes of providing a direction to approach this problem. Using a probabilistic model, we observed the effects of nuclear war, climate change, asteroid impacts, artificial intelligence and pandemics, which are the most harmful disasters in terms of their extent of destruction on the length of human survival. We consider the starting point of the predicted average number of survival years as the present calendar year. Nuclear war, when sampling from an artificial normal distribution, results in an average human survival time of 60 years into the future starting from the present, before a civilization-ending disaster. While climate change results in an average human survival time of 193 years, the simulation based on impact from asteroids results in an average of 1754 years. Since the risks from asteroid impacts could be considered to reside mostly in the far future, it can be concluded that nuclear war, climate change, and pandemics are presently the most prominent threats to humanity. Additionally, the danger from superiority of artificial intelligence over humans, although still somewhat abstract, is worthy of further study as its potential for impeding humankind's progress towards becoming a more advanced civilization cannot be confidently dismissed.