We should be more afraid of asteroids, pandemics, and Terminators
By Michael Harthorne, Newser Staff
Posted Apr 29, 2016 5:50 PM CDT
(Newser) –
Pandemics, super-volcanoes, nuclear war, climate change, asteroids, and
murderous artificial intelligence. You’re not more likely to die from
any one of those things than in a car crash. But put all those things
together, and, well, that changes things a bit, the Atlantic reports. According to the annual Global Catastrophic Risks
report from the Global Challenges Foundation, the average American is
more than five times more likely to die in a “human extinction event”
than in a car crash. Human extinction events are considered events
in which 10% or more of the human population is killed off, and they’ve
happened before, the Mirror reports.
A different report cited by the Atlantic
puts the chance of a human extinction event happening in the next 100
years at 9.5%. That means you’re nearly 12 times more likely to be
killed by, say, a Terminator or a super-virus than in a car crash during
your lifetime. “The international community needs to work together and
do more to address these threats,” Sebastian Farquhar, director of the
Global Priorities Project, writes for the Huffington Post.
“Doing nothing is not an option. Some of these threats seem unlikely,
and they probably will not hit us tomorrow or the day after. But it only
takes one to change the world we live in forever.”
