The Importance of Quantifying Events Probability

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I'm morbidly fascinated by solar flares which are certainly a natural phenomenon that has happened many times. I met a lawyer who had worked on a commission where they thought about this and he was very concerned about the idea that once every thousand years there's a solar flare that would be big enough to wipe out the entire electrical grid here on Earth. And so it's that kind of a combination of a naturally occurring thing and the vulnerability that we have invented for it. But you're right in saying that there are some natural phenomena whose consequence is greater now because we depend on electricity more. The consequence of an earthquake in Tokyo is more now and would have been 300 years ago because of the number of

Anyone who has read histories of the Cold War, including the Cuban Missile Crisis and the 1983 nuclear false alarm, must be struck by how incredibly close humanity has come to wreaking incredible destruction on itself. Nuclear war was the first technology humans created that was truly capable of causing such harm, but the list of potential threats is growing, from artificial pandemics to runaway super-powerful artificial intelligence. In response, today’s guest Martin Rees and others founded the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk. We talk about what the major risks are, and how we can best reason about very tiny probabilities multiplied by truly awful consequences. In the second part of the episode we start talking about what humanity might become, as well as the prospect of life elsewhere in the universe, and that was so much fun that we just kept going.

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Lord Martin Rees, Baron of Ludlow, received his Ph.D. in physics from University of Cambridge. He is currently Emeritus Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics at the University of Cambridge, as well as Astronomer Royal of the United Kingdom. He was formerly Master of Trinity College and President of the Royal Society. Among his many awards are the Heineman Prize for Astrophysics, the Gruber Prize in Cosmology, the Crafoord Prize, the Michael Faraday Prize, the Templeton Prize, the Isaac Newton Medal, the Dirac Medal, and the British Order of Merit. He is a co-founder of the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk.

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