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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025

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I accept it is plausible that climate change will cause human extinction within a few decades. The same is plausible for nuclear war, an asteroid impact, a superbug, a super-volcano, renegade AI, et. al.

Nuclear war: no, there's no mechanism that lets you get to extinction. Nuclear winter is literally a hoax, blast/heat/local fallout are too localised, and global fallout's too weak (I ran the numbers on Cold War arsenals and those weren't nearly enough). It could get to #2 on the list of "disasters in history by %humanity killed", but #1 is dubious, let alone X.

Supervolcano: another Yellowstone wouldn't do it (this is known fact; humanity already survived Yellowstone three times before we even tamed dogs). Another Siberian Traps might, admittedly.

Climate change/superbug: not in the normal senses. A normal pandemic can't get everyone because R drops below 1 before #humans reaches 0. The only "superbug" (i.e. infectious agent) that could get actual everyone is a full-blown insect-zombifier-for-humans where victims actively and intelligently attempt to infect others (rabies and toxoplasma are nowhere near precise enough), and that's highly implausible without intelligent design (there's nothing with this level of precision in any mammal, and it's generally thought to get harder with brain size). For climate change to get us would require, well, another Siberian Traps, or a Chicxulub+ impact (another Chicxulub wouldn't do it, due to preppers if nothing else), or some omnicidal maniac deliberately manufacturing and releasing millions of tonnes of fluorocarbons; I'm specifically not including "some idiot blocked out the Sun with a solar shade" because people would notice that and destroy it (with massive casualties, but not X).

Asteroid impact: technically no (at least not without terrorist redirection), but in practice I'll grant this one (we've found all the Earth-crossing asteroids of sufficient size and ruled out collisions, but comets are harder to predict). Low probability, though, particularly given the requirement for a Chicxulub+ one.

AI can do it. Life 2.0 can do it (here I'm thinking of things like a non-digestible alga that doesn't need phosphate and has better-than-RuBisCO photosynthesis, not a pathogen - an independent lifeform that terraforms the planet in ways that are incompatible with human survival, in this case by causing a superglaciation plus total failure of open-air crops). New physics catastrophes and terrorist geoengineering might do it, although I'd be more concerned about those on the scale of centuries rather than decades. And obviously there's the "unknown unknown" term which is unknowable by definition. But AI and Life 2.0 are the known X-risks that scare me. (Obviously there are GCRs that are significantly more likely than any X-risk. Nuclear war's highly likely to occur sometime this century if we don't get X first; I just expect not only people to survive but myself to survive.)