Vladimir Putin and his advisers keep rattling the nuclear saber. Meanwhile, there’s this ancient threat called war. We’re all still unnerved by the pandemic. There are bad omens everywhere, and not just the melting glaciers and dying polar bears. We are not being paranoid when we recognize that human civilization has become increasingly complex and simultaneously armed with techniques for self-destruction. What are our biggest existential risks? Should we feel more threatened by low-probability but high-consequence risks, such as asteroid impacts and runaway artificial intelligence ( robot overlords and whatnot), or should we focus on less exotic, here-and-now threats such as climate change, viral pandemics and weapons of mass destruction? And should we even worry about low-probability risks when hundreds of millions of people right now lack adequate food, water, and shelter and are living off less than $2 a day? This is not the cheeriest topic, to be sure, but it’s endlessly fascinating if you can stomach it.

It could be an existential threat to national well-being - an economic disaster as well as an environmental disaster.” He paused a beat and said, calmly, “So it’s not something you want to happen.”Īnd here we are at the crux of our existential predicament as a species: There are just so many things we don’t want to happen. That includes all the earthquakes and hurricanes that have ever happened in the past. Johnson explained that there are many asteroids lurking out there, still unidentified, that are bigger than the Tunguska object, and they “would devastate a multistate area - a natural disaster of a scale we’ve never had to deal with. It was, he said, “probably a once-every-200-years or so event, on average. He cited the Tunguska event of 1908, when either an asteroid or comet exploded over a remote region of Siberia and flattened 800 square miles of forest. My question to Johnson: How worried should we be, really, about killer rocks from space? He said a major asteroid impact is rare but potentially catastrophic. Dear Earthlings: Please stop obsessing about UFOs

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