You are a human being, and one day you will die. But when you die, you can take comfort in the knowledge that you're part of something larger than yourself. You're a member of the human race, and as long as the human race continues, in some ways, you do too. All of us, every living thing, are individual members in a cycle of life and death that began four billion years ago when that first single living cell divided into two.
Two billion years after that, along came sex, and birth led to more sex, led to more birth, And as long as that cycle continues in a species, death can happen in the background. It must happen. Really. It may sound a little cruel, but in the bigger picture, the death of one thing is kind of meaningless so long as the species continues. Humans tend to divide life along the borders between species, and for good reason. It's not an arbitrary dividing line. A species is what makes the
difference between eating a meal and engaging and cannibalism. Across the animal kingdom, individuals routinely do things that risk their own life to save members of their species. You almost never see that kind of behavior between different species. True, there are plenty of examples of species where eating one's own kind is an everyday act, and there are examples of adorable dogs adopting motherless lambs, But the chances are better than not that an animal will show preferential treatment
towards a member of its species over others. Most importantly, though, any member of a species can combine their genes with another member and come up with new and fascinating ways to push the species further along the evolutionary path where it's better able to grow and flourish. Homo sapiens, the species that you, me and every human alive are members of, means in Latin wise human, and it's a bit of flattery since it is the name that we human beings
gave to ourselves. But here today, so far removed from our ancient origins, it's easy to forget that the name is meant to distinguish us from other types of humans. As recently as fifty thousand years ago, we shared this planet with no less than three other human species. In the same way you might walk about the Earth today and come upon a lion, one species of cat, and
tabby an entirely different species of cat. In the very recent geological past, you would have been able to meet with a Neanderthal in a French cave and a Denisovan in Siberia, and had you wandered on down to Indonesia, you would have been able to meet a tiny variety of human called Homo floresiensis, who stood four ft talls. Today, though there is only the one species of human us, Homo sapiens. We can't say for certain, but we strongly suspect that the ultimate reason why we are the only
ones left is because of our intelligence. Perhaps the planet was presented with a series of tricky environmental challenges and we were the only ones intelligent enough to successfully negotiate them. Maybe it was the universally devastating step in the great filter,
or maybe that's not right at all. We've only recently discovered that denis Ovans and Floresiensis existed, but we've known about Neanderthals for some two hundred years now, and over time we've come to realize that they weren't the dim wits we initially took them for. We now know that they used tools like us, and they may have mastered fire as well, and Neanderthals might have been the earliest humans to bury their dead, which shows the capacity to
think about abstractions like an afterlife. Whether or not we were the only human species with the capacity for abstract thought, The one thing we can say for certain is that we, Homo sapiens, are the only ones left on Earth. To wonder at the immense responsibility we have to simply carry on is the one single remaining species of our kind.
That responsibility to survive and thrive is big enough just being the only human species left on Earth, but it grows to overwhelming proportions when you consider the idea that we could be the only intelligent life and the whole endless universe. The precariousness of our situation begins to sink. In The family paradox appears to show that the entire future of intelligent life in the universe rests on the
likelihood of us staying alive. The entire population of Homo floresiensis the species of tiny humans lived on a single island called Flores in modern day Indonesia. They lived there for almost a hundred and fifty thousand years, and then suddenly they disappeared. One current theory for their extinction is that a volcano erupted and killed them all off, which would have been relatively easy, since the entire species dweled
only on that one island. We humans alive today call our island Earth, and we have to wonder what our volcano will be. Right now, there are about seven and a half billion of us humans alive. Seven and a half billion is an enormous number, to be sure, but it's a small fraction, tiny fraction of all the Homo
sapiens who have ever lived. In the fifty thousand years since we emerged as modern humans early on and continuing for most of our species history, we had an extremely short average life expectancy, somewhere around ten to twelve years. That doesn't mean that the average person died at age eleven. It means that if you take all the people who lived into old age and all the children who died in infancy or at birth, so many people died young that the average age of death was dragged down all
the way into the tweens. Plenty of people lived into what we would consider old age. It's just that many, many more didn't survive childhood. And this is how it was for most of human history. That extremely high childhood
mortality rate was eventually overcome. Through the use of our clever sapiens brains, we figured out things like germ theory and anatomy and nutrition, and all of them converged to create a world that a child could be born into where they had a very good chance of surviving into adulthood. We humans used our brains to help our species be better able to survive, and as a result, our population began to boom. Around two thousand years ago, there were
probably three hundred million people alive on Earth. About three hundred and fifty years ago, the human population had grown to five million. Thirty years from now we will hit the ten billion mark, So in just three hundred and fifty years we will have grown by nine billion, five hundred million people. All told, you can count yourself as one of the hundred and eight billion modern humans who
have ever lived. An astronomical number, to be sure, But the number of humans who have ever lived, as immense as it is, is a drop in the bucket of the number of humans who haven't lived yet. This is philosopher Toby ord Our. Species Homo sapiens is about two hundred thousand years old UM, so that's about two thousand centuries that we've been around. If we could survive that long again, uh, you know, we'd see two thousand centuries
of civilization. That's about twenty times longer than civilization has been around so far, with just wondrous things being created throughout that whole time that we can barely imagine. And that's even with relatively little in the way of fancy
science fiction technological progress that we might imagine. Remember back when we talked about the possibility that we don't see alien life in the universe because they opted to stay home instead, Let's say that we humans have that same type of home body nous in our far future, sticking around on Earth rather than spreading out into the rest of the galaxy. So Earth remains the only planet where
you can find a human population. And let's say that over the course of a billion years our population gradually lowers and stabilizes, that one billion people alive on the planet at any given time, And if our lifespans stick around where it is today, then by a billion years from now, an additional ten to the sixteenth power humans will have been born. That's ten with fifteen zeros after it, ten quadrillion, a million, trillion future human lives hundred and
eight billion doesn't seem quite so big now. That ten quadrillion number is a low end estimate. If we do nothing but continue to plot along as a species for the next billion years, we could expect to reach it, But we might also increase the number of future human lives dramatically if we humans in a a as a species. One of the ways that most futurists expect we will innovate is by leaving our bodies behind and entering into a digital world, becoming what's called a post biological species.
Imagine that we learned how to free the human mind from its bonds to the neurons and dendrites and axons that make up the functioning human brain. No real reason that the human mind should require our selves to think and to experience. What if the human brain is just one of many ways to produce what we call consciousness. What if there are other ways that could produce the same thoughts, the same experiences, but with hardware instead of squishy, soft,
extremely fragile material we call the brain. To understand how we could create consciousness inside a machine rather than a human brain, you should know a little bit about the hard problem. First, Back in The Philosopher of the Mind, David chaw Mers published a paper where he divided our attempts to understand consciousness into the hard problem and the
easy problem. The easy problem of consciousness is how it arises. How, for example, light can enter the eye and be carried along as an electrical impulse to the brain, where it's analyzed and sorted into the image of a house plant. We generally understand how the various parts involved in this process work. We pretty much understand how the sights and sounds of the external world are perceived by us. There's
no mystery to it. So although we haven't worked out every last detail of how consciousness arises from our brains, in Chalmer's view, we were well enough along that we basically had the easy problem licked already by the time he wrote his essay. The hard problem is how we subjectively experienced those sights and sounds. How all of those experiences, moment to moment combine and create what we think of
as the experience of being human. Why is it that rather than simply observing the house plant and deeming it neither a threat nor food and simply disregard it, instead you might be reminded of your dear sweet mother who loved house plants, and maybe you'll also think about how perhaps a house plant might brighten up your own apartment and maybe put you in a better mood because you've been a little bit down lately. In other words, why should we experience the inner life that we think of
as ourselves? More to the point, where does this conscious experience come from? We can point to the language processing parts of the brain to show how we humans understand what the other person is saying when someone tells us they love us, But we can't point to the part of the brain that creates the incredibly rich experience those words can arouse in us. That is the hard problem of consciousness. To some people, we will never figure out.
The answer to the hard problem. Human conscious experience is too ethereal to ever understand. To those on the other side, we've already solved the hard problem. It's the same answer is the easy problem. All of those neurons and dendrites and axons that are responsible for communicating and sorting and storing the sensory input in our brains are also the same parts that are responsible for creating our conscious experience. We just haven't figured out how they do it quite yet.
If that's true, and the hard problem really isn't a hard problem at all, there's a big implication in there. If consciousness is just an emergent property of neural complexity, like how tens of thousands of individual bees form a high mind that is larger than the sum of its parts, then we should be able to simulate consciousness by simulating
neural complexity. Maybe not today, maybe not anytime soon, but the point is it would be theoretically possible, and given enough time in technological development, it's a pretty safe bet that we will figure out how to do it. If there is an organizing principle of life that takes hold once molecules begin to take an organic form, then perhaps the bio logical form. It's just one phase of evolution.
Perhaps post biology is just another stage. If or when we become capable of uploading human minds on the computers, the number of future human lives will increase exponentially, and those lives can be expected to be exponentially better than
the average life of those of us alive today. If we are the only intelligent life in the universe and That means that should we become capable of spreading out in our galaxy and then eventually throughout the rest of the universe, it will all be there for our taking. Though farther out we look in more detail, and the more clearly we see there's nothing at all alive anywhere in the universe, then it says we are really quite special.
Not only that we are special for having, you know, created cars and televisions, we are just special for being on a planet that has life at all. Ah and the universe will remain dead until the life on our planet spreads. That was great filter theorist Robin Hanson. Once we spread beyond Earth, we will reach one of the largest milestones in the history of our species, in the history of life. Really, we will no longer be earth bound. We will have become a spacefaring species with an entire
universe to explore and use for whatever we want. All of the resources material and energy in the universe that we can reach before it inflates beyond our grasp is there for our use in ours alone. This is what an Oxford University philosopher named Nick Bostrom calls humanity's cosmic endowment and The key thing about it is that it
looks like it's astronomically large. Every less scrap of accomplishment that we humans have managed to achieve in our relatively short time here on Earth has been created with extremely limited resources compared to what will be available to us
when we begin to spread out around the universe. If things are the way they look that what we have been able to play our hands on so far is a period of time maybe a thousand, ten thousand years of human history and some hundred thousand years of prehistory. That's kind of our species tenure so far, and we've been confined to the surface of planet Earth, which is this little crumb floating around in a huge style of
material and energy and resources. So it's one planet in one solar system out of a hundred billion solar systems in this galaxy, which is it's so one of maybe a hundred building galaxies that could be reached from our starting point and then used for billions of years. So if you add all of those orders of magnitude together, you find that by some very large number, it dominates what exists today or has existed through human history. What
will we do with all that stuff? I don't know, but it at least seems to me that protecting a chance to do that is critically important. If, as a great many philosophers throughout history have believed the point of life is finding happiness, then we could use it to
pursue happiness on a massive scale. If you, for example, I think that happy people are our minds experiencing pleasure or beauty or doing interesting things have value, then that could just be a lot more like a lot more of those in the future, a lot more like a quadrillion more, and that number could grow exponentially higher if or when we reach that point of post biology, like any post biological civilization, we would place a pretty high
value on converting all of that into computing power. The science fiction author Ray Bradberry once estimated that the energy captured from a star could power tend to the forty second computer operations per second. So Nick Bostrom took that figure and he applied it to a post biological society with access to all of the stars that we can reach in the universe until they inflate forever out of
our grasp. If the human brain makes in the neighborhood of ten to the seventeenth operations per second to produce our conscious experience, then it's a pretty fair bet that's about how many computations per second we would require to
experience consciousness and digital form as well. So, considering those numbers and more, Bostro included some other complex astronomical figures as well, he arrived at the low end estimate, the low end of ten to the fifty second power future human lives waiting to be lived expressed an American English that is ten sex Deicilian lives. That's a real word. A number is so astoundingly large it might be tried
to even mention that it is. And you could make the case that in many ways, okay, essentially every way, those humans in the far future will live better lives than those of us alive today, because natural selection and didn't design us to be happy, discontent other things. Being
equal is adaptive and fitness enhancing. And there's a transhumanist I very much hope that we're going to be able to design a civilization based on to use a slogan, a triple ess, a civilization based on super intelligence, super happiness, and super longevity. This is transhumanist philosopher David Pierce, who is among the number of people who believe that humans have a long and potentially bright future ahead of us.
Humans might use all of that power to simulate amazing new experiences for ourselves that we haven't considered yet and that would be utterly impossible in our physical reality. We would be able to expand and edit our consciousness, our faculties, our ability to empathize with others, for capability to experience emotion. What we alive today might consider the high a state of happiness, maybe the baseline happiness for all new humans born into a digital world, and so the humans of
the future would be blissed out all the time. Here's an example one sees today the effects of a drug like m d M A ecstasy or hug drug, in which essentially people become loving, bonabo like warm, empathetic, jealousy, resentment evaporate UH. For evolutionary reasons, people aren't like that all the time. But with the use of UH some genetic tweaking, it would be possible to create people trans humans, post humans who who love each other in the way that people fleetingly do today on the m d M A.
Just how likely this scenario is. I don't know, but in the long run it's so be feasible because we live in a world where we must compete with one another and other life on our planet for resources. What the future might be like in a world where scarcity doesn't exist is largely inconceivable to us. Suffice it to say that life can be better than it is today should we make it there. We can't forget the possibility that between us and all of those countless future lives.
Since the Great Filter. Back in the summer of a space probe launched by NASA called Viking one flew over Mars if photographed the planet's surface for the first time in human history, and prior to landing on July, Viking one flew over the Sidonia region, a bumpy transition zone between the planets, cratered north in the flat plains of the South. Within those images that it's sent back to its controllers at the Jet Propulsion Lab on Earth was
a particularly striking one. It showed what looked to be a massive stone face wearing a ceremonial headdress. It looked a lot like an ancient monument on the surface of Mars. Is what it looked like It became one of the more famous images in the world, the Face on Mars, and it stirred the imagination of earth bound humans about a potential Martian pass where a great civilization once lived
and thrived. But when the Mars Global Surveyor flew over the site with a far better camera than the Viking one had on board, it was clear the Face on Mars was just another mesa, shaped not by ancient Martian hands,
but by Martian wind and erosion. But what if that image had confirmed the wildest speculations and we had mounted an expedition to Mars to investigate the governments of Canada, Japan, and the United States, the three countries leading the International Mars Expedition received a bundle of despat just from the
astronauts investigating the Mars anomaly. Today, newly discovered structures that appear to be ceremonial halls and temples built from a yet unidentified metal, further confirmed the one time presence of an advanced civilization on the red planet. President Clinton was in New York today to news like this would not bode well for those of us living here on Earth. As Nick Bostrom points out in an article, that ran
in Technology Review in two thousand and eight. If we were to find evidence of other intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, it would strongly suggest that the Great Filter lies waiting ahead of us. News like that would tell us that it's not so tough after all to get past all the steps that led to us. Other life managed it too. We would learn that we are not special and unique, and so the likelihood would be that the Great Filter is not somewhere in our past, which
means that it must be somewhere in our future. Everything we've ever imagined that could go wrong is a candidate for a future filter. Uh. So, you know, take out all of your favorite um disaster stories and fears and add them all up, and it might be in there.
It might be something we haven't imagined. If it is the case that the Great filters in our future, then the reason that there is no intelligent life in the universe other than us is because none of those who came before us were able to make it through the
step that lies ahead. The more you learn about the kind of risks we humans are beginning to take on, the kind of make up the worst of those disaster scenarios Robin Hanson mentioned the more convincing the idea that we are now entering the great filter becomes m It's probably about here that you should meet Nick Bostrom, he chimed in earlier, but what I mean to say is that you should know more about him, as his work
forms a lot of the basis of this series. In Oxford, England, there is a university among the world's oldest, where people have been teaching since at least ten nine, nearly a thousand years, and housed in a three story tan brick administration building called Little gate House is the Future of
Humanity Institute. The FHI was founded by Nick Bostrom, who, as I said, is a philosopher, and it is a center where people from a wide array of disciplines come together to consider the ways that humanity could accidentally wipe itself out in the near future, and also how to prevent that, and also what we might do with ourselves if we're able to negotiate the very tricky near future and actually survive into the far future. A great many of the ideas in this series came from those collaborations
that arose at f HI. What Nick Bostrom mostly thinks about our existential risks. Existential risks are threats to life that have consequences so sweeping, so utterly catastrophic, that should one of them befall us, it would spell the end of humankind. No more humans, and if it turns out that we are the only intelligent life in the universe,
no more intelligent life anywhere at all. What makes existential threats so dangerous, in addition to the catastrophe they bring, is that they are unlike any other type of risk we're used to encountering. With virtually every other type of threat posed to humans, we can reasonably expect that enough of us will be left alive to continue our species should one befall us. Take a disastrous change in climate.
For example, imagine that a couple of decades from now, we humans are caught totally off guard by a sudden shift in the global climate far more pronounced and abrupt than the warning signs were currently experiencing. A rapid rise in sea levels drowns coastal towns around the world, sending huge populations of people inland, which puts in a nor restrain on the cities that absorb them. At the same time, massive droughts and floods break out, and virtually every food
producing region of the world. The ecological collapse leads to social collapse. Food supplies dwindle, water supplies become salty. An untold number of people begin to die, more than ever have in human history. Even more are killed in wars that break out over the precious resources that remain. In just a handful of decades, the entire human race is reduced from ten billion to just one hundred million people
living in scattered settlements across the globe. As categorically awful as such an experience would be, it would not spell the end of humans. Even with just one percent of the population left alive. We could reasonably expect that a hundred million people living across the world would be enough to carry the human race along and eventually to rebuild.
To be sure, we would be set back substantially. All of the progress that we had made as a global civilization would be pushed back thousands of years, almost to
square one. Almost. There's a substantial difference between the perhaps fateful series of events that led to the discovery of something like smelting iron and carbon into steel and having people who remember learning that if you add carbon to iron you can make steel, or that there's such a thing as coffee, or that you can make wine from grapes. And if you spin a magnet inside a spool of
copper wire, you can generate an electrical current. And if you pass steam through a turbine, you can use it to spin that magnet, so you don't have to stand there and do it yourself. The memories of all the ideas and discoveries that accumulated to make up the general knowledge base of the average human walking around on Earth would remain and would provide an enormous advantage for those left to rebuild compared to those who built in the
first place. Consider that it was perhaps only ten thousand years ago that we began organizing ourselves into complex societies for the first time. Those early settlements in cities like cattle Hook in Turkey and Mesopotamia in Iraq that served as the earliest attempts at communal living, agriculture, government, law, trade, and everything else that forms the basis of modern civilization
or only about ten thousand years old. So even being set back to the beginning, even with humanity suddenly dead, we could reasonably expect that people could get back to roughly the point where we're at today within about ten millennia, which sounds like a long time, but remember we're talking about time on geological and cosmological scales. Ten thousand years
is a blink. Throughout our history, we humans have survived plagues, floods, droughts, supervolcano eruptions, just about anything Earth could throw at us, and we've always had enough of us left after a catastrophe to continue on for forward momentum to slow sometimes but never to halt entirely, and those eons of experience of disaster and recovery form the basis of how we learn from the world, a process you may know as trial and error. Imagine that you're a chemist working on
a new explosive. As this customary, you keep detailed notes as you go along, and then one day you're in the lab when boom, you blow yourself up. You are in a great many pieces, but your notes are intact, and so other chemists can come along, consult your notes, find where you went wrong, and then try again with
a slightly different formula. This process can continue indefinitely as long as it takes until we master this new explosive so long as there are chemists who take good notes, who are willing to risk blowing themselves up, and are never all in the same lab at once. This process of trial and error is so glaringly obvious that it seems not even worth spelling out. But it is because the process of trial and error is how we've gain virtually all of human knowledge about the world to this point,
and understandably so, because it works. But trial and error doesn't work with existential risks. When it comes to other risks, humanity is very good, actually at learning from trial and error, and we have some failures and we rebuild. This is Toby Ord, you've met him previously. He's one of Nick Bostrom's colleagues at the f HI, and he's literally writing the book on existential risks. But when it comes to existential risks, uh, failing even once means we've lost permanently
our potential for the future. So we can't have any failures, which means that we can't use our our most successful way of learning, trial and error. What separates existential risks from all other types of risks is the outcome, the potential consequences of existential risks are so catastrophic that if something goes wrong with them once, that's it for humanity. With these types of risk, there isn't any one percent of humanity to carry on. There are none of us.
There's no trial and error with existential risks. It's more like trial and sudden nothingness. We can't go back to the drawing board to figure out what went wrong and try again. The drawing board will have been vaporized or there won't be any people left to write on it. And that's very different from many kinds of risk because, um, first there's no redo. Um. If we accidentally trigger some sort of existential risk or are exposed to an existentially
destructive event, that sort of it for humanity. Um. But beyond that, lots of the mechanisms that we used to manage risks stop working. That was Sebastian Farquhar. He too is a philosopher at Oxford, and he too is with the f HI. Another name for existential risks is low probability, high consequence risks. Fortunately, the possibility of a bad outcome befalling us from any of these risks is the remote. Normally, we wouldn't give them much thought, or any thought at all.
But these aren't normal risks. The potential bad outcome is so great that even though they have an extremely tiny chance of happening, they are still worth thinking about and trying to mitigate. And that is just what Nick Bostrom in the Future of Humanity does. Back in two thousand twelve, in a paper on existential risks, Nick Bostrom included a handy graph for categorizing different types of risk. Along the
X axis, the horizontal one. I always have trouble remembering that is the severity of a risk, how catastrophic its outcome could be. Bostrom has ordered the severity from imperceptible like losing a single hair off of your head, too endurable like having your car stolen, to crushing like dying
in a car crash. All of those terrible events are ones that happened to a single person, which is the first category along the Y axis, the upward one, which is the scope or how many people that the event affects. This category starts with personal and moves up to local, global, transgenerational affecting more than one generation of people, and pan generational affecting every generation. From that point on, graphs are, of course, a lot easier to take him when you
see them rather than to hear about them. So let's just say that the upshot of all this is that you can take any event and plot it on the graph to find if it qualifies as an existential risk. So let's do that. Take the death of a local baseball mascot. We'll go with the Richmond Flying Squirrels for
no reason whatsoever. Let's say that the team's mascot was doing his thing up at the top of the bleachers when he fell over the side all the way down to the concrete below, dying instantly beside the ticket booth. This would be a very sad day, not just for the person who wore the flying squirrel costume, but also for their family and maybe even a sizeable portion of
the Richmond, Virginia area. Yeah, so we can say that this would be a local event since it affects more than just one person or one family, but it definitely doesn't affect humanity as a whole. And since the Flying Squirrels family and residents of Richmond will be able to carry on, then we can say that it will be an endurable event. So the tragic accidental death of the Richmond Flying Squirrels mascot would be a local, endurable event. Let's up the stakes a little, shall we. How about
a global thermonuclear war. This would obviously be a global event, and it would affect in some ways everyone alive at the time, whether through fiery death or from radioactive fallout, starvation during the nuclear winter, being forced out of one's
home to find a safer place to live. You can make a pretty good bet that a global nuclear war will affect everybody on the planet, and depending on how bad the outcome was, the after effects it has on society could continue on for some time, affecting multiple generations of people. Perhaps it would be transgenerational in its scope, but it would be pretty unlikely that it killed everyone alive at the time and wiped humanity out of existence.
There would almost certainly be enough survivors to carry on, and, as we saw with that climate change disaster scenario earlier, they should eventually return back to where we were prior to the nuclear war, and hopefully smart enough to avoid doing it all over again once we got there. So for humanity as a whole, a global nuclear war would
be a transgenerational endurable event. But if you follow the scale this handy graph up into the right, you will find the point where existential risks live pan generational crushing events. We don't make it through those, but those are exactly what's coming down the pike right now. We are creating new technology that poses risks to humankind in a form we've never encountered before, a kind that dwarf global nuclear war and climate change, and we are wholly unprepared for them.
My hope is that this series, in some small way, will make us aware that we need to prepare. That there is a safe path through the coming treacherousness, but we have to plan for it now. If we can make it through the process of mastering the new technology that will define our world artificial intelligence, advances in biotechnology and particle physics nanotechnology, we may secure a very bright and very long history for humanity, reaching long into the
far future and spreading across the universe. Technology that poses an existential risk to us now is the very same that can prevent existential risks from befollowing us once we've mastered them, a point called technological maturity. We're entering the most precarious period now the point between where those unprecedentedly dangerous technologies come into existence and where we have them
fully under control. Any time between those two points, one single slip up, one single lab accident caused by one single person, one single failure to plan, one single oversight, could bring about the sudden, rapid demise of humankind forever. Turning our back on our destiny won't help us. The dye is already cast. Some self imposed return to the Dark Ages won't reverse our momentum. In the great filter
that we will go through, it has become inevitable. Even during the actual Dark Ages, that period of modern human history where we supposedly stopped progressing intellectually, was filled with pockets of people and entire cultures around the world still discovering, still innovating. And so it would be as well if we all foolishly banded together to try to halt the progress of science for fear of the risks that poses. We are not equipped to prevent science, and we would
not want to even if we could. It is science that will expose us to these risks, but it is also science will free us from them forever. On the other side, and It's not just us who we have to carry on for, it's the entire future of the human race. We're carrying all of those tend to the who knows what power future humans on our shoulders as we walk this tight rope over ruination. The way to ensure our survival is not to concentrate on what's ahead, but instead to look down to plumb the void below.
The only chance we have of navigating existential risks is to understand them. On the next episode of the End of the World with Josh Clark, the sun will basically fill up our entire sky. You look out the window will just be a big, de seething mess of of star. We've lived with natural existential risks since the dawn of humanity. When bad things happen to Earth, they happen to us as well, and that will be so as long as we remain an earth bound species.