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Richard Stallman's Political Notes

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Existential Risks Are More Likely to Kill You Than Terrorism

vendredi 15 juillet 2016 à 02:00

The best thinkers estimate a chance of 10%, or 25%, or maybe 50% that some event will wipe out humanity during this century, killing you among others if you're still alive at the time. That is much more likely than many risks that people take care to avoid, such as car accidents.

As for terrorism, the chance you will be killed by that minuscule.

For the most part, the threats of human extinction don't inspire us to action because they are imponderable: we don't know what we could do to protect ourselves from them.

However, there are two noteworthy exceptions. We know how to campaign to abolish nuclear weapons, and we can campaign for strong action to curb gkobal heating. That would reduce two significant possibilities for killing all, or a large fraction, of humaity.