Are You Worried About Solar Flares?

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Once every thousand years, there'll be a solar flare big enough to knock out our entire electrical grid on earth. Millions of people will died and we are doing nothing to prevent something like that. We never had an electrical grid before a hundred years ago,. So they could happen all the timethat on the scale of centuries. And yo, there could be a one % chance per year, which could be completely sm - but it's hard to see how it wipes out humanity if that's the case. But i don't want to add another worry to your list of axestential risks.

We’re pretty well-calibrated when it comes to dealing with common, everyday-level setbacks. But our brains aren’t naturally equipped for dealing with unlikely but world-catastrophic disasters. Yet such threats are real, both natural and human-induced. We need to collectively get better at anticipating and preparing for them, at the level of political action. Andrew Leigh is an academic and author who now serves in the Parliament of Australia. We discuss how to move the conversation about existential risks from the ivory tower to implementation in real policies.

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Andrew Leigh received his Ph.D. in Public Policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He is a member of the Australian House of Representatives representing Fenner. He was previously a professor of economics at Australian National University, and has served as Shadow Assistant Minister for Treasury and Charities. His recent book is What’s the Worst That Could Happen? Existential Risk and Extreme Politics.

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