November Newsletter: Year in Review

Post Date November 25, 2020
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Dear friends,

What a year 2020 has been. The COVID-19 pandemic is already the most severe global catastrophe in decades, and it’s far from over. It shows the importance of addressing global catastrophic risk: a global catastrophe can upend everything else we’re doing and destroy so much of what we care about.

GCRI has been relatively fortunate during the pandemic. We have always been a remote collaboration organization, so we have been able to maintain a high degree of social distancing with relatively little impact on our …

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Accounting for Violent Conflict Risk in Planetary Defense Decisions

Post Date September 09, 2020
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Category asteroids, publications, risk analysis

View the paper “Accounting For Violent Conflict Risk In Planetary Defense Decisions”

Planetary defense is the defense of planet Earth against collisions with near-Earth objects (NEOs), which include asteroids, comets and meteoroids. A central objective of planetary defense is to reduce risks to Earth and its inhabitants. Whereas planetary defense is mainly focused on risks from NEO, this paper argues that planetary defense decisions should also account for other risks, especially risks from violent conflict. The paper is based on a talk I gave at the 2019 Planetary …

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Lessons for Artificial Intelligence from Other Global Risks

Post Date November 21, 2019
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Category announcement, articles, artificial intelligence

View the paper “Lessons for Artificial Intelligence from Other Global Risks”

It has become clear in recent years that AI poses important global risks. The study of AI risk is relatively new, but it can potentially learn a lot from the study of similar, better-studied risks. GCRI’s new paper applies to the study of AI risk lessons from four other risks: biotechnology, nuclear weapons, global warming, and asteroids. The paper is co-authored by GCRI’s Seth Baum, Robert de Neufville, and Tony Barrett, along with GCRI Senior …

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July Newsletter: Asteroid-Nuclear Risk Analysis

Post Date July 16, 2019
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Dear friends,

One reason it is important to analyze the global catastrophic risks quantitatively is that some decisions involve tradeoffs between them. An action may reduce one risk while increasing another. It’s important to know whether the decrease in the one risk is large enough to offset the increase in the other.

This month, we announce a new paper that presents a detailed analysis of one such decision: the use of nuclear explosives to deflect Earthbound asteroids away. Nuclear deflection is an option under active consideration by …

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August Newsletter: Long-Term Trajectories

Post Date August 15, 2018
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Dear friends,

This month I am proud to announce a new paper, “Long-Term Trajectories of Human Civilization“. The paper calls for attention to the fate of human civilization over time scales of millions, billions, or trillions of years into the future. While most attention goes to nearer-term phenomena, the long-term can be profoundly important to present-day decision-making. For example, one major issue the paper examines is the fate of global catastrophe survivors. How well they fare is a central factor in whether people today should focus …

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GCR News Summary August 2013

Post Date August 31, 2013
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California Rim Fire image courtesy of the USDA.

California governor Jerry Brown declared a state of emergency for San Francisco County when a large wildfire on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada mountains threatened to disrupt public utilities. Two of the three hydroelectric power stations in the region were forced to shut down. San Francisco also gets 85% of its water from the nearby Hetch Hetchy reservoir. Most of the western US is in drought and the recent increase in the number …

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