It seems possible to me that main reason we would go extinct is that people aren’t even having replacement rate kids.
I can’t see how that could plausibly be a reason for extinction unless we were already right on the edge. The problem just solves itself rapidly as cultural and actual evolution select for the people who have the most children.
Technologically speaking, I’d assume we’d be well into the 20th century within 10 years of collapse (in the majority of different collapse situations)
This seems incredibly optimistic. To get that level of technology we’d already used an enormous amount of cheaply available resources that subsequent civilisation has made much less available. For example, fossil fuels would be mostly gone, and rock phosphorus would be much harder to access—some of the energy from the former is available in the form of things we use it to construct on the surface, but it seems likely 90%+ of it would be gone. Rock phosphorus I’m less clear on, but we’ve flushed the majority of what we’ve used of it into lakes and oceans, and while plenty remains which is accessible to modern society, we generally take the easiest-to-access deposits first, so a rebooting society would find it substantially more expensive to get in quantity.
The problem just solves itself rapidly as cultural and actual evolution select for the people who have the most children.
You are definitely right here. I take back what I said, or at most I append it to saying that the length it takes for this evolution to occur is a crux of how long recovery takes.
Re point 2: I think I might be a bit confused on what the end goal we are actually measuring is. Is the original post saying the amount of time it would take to push past our current level of technology, or until we have a stable society that is advancing technologically or until the world GDP per capita is approaching what it is today?
I’m not sure what I originally thought but now I’m having a tough time even understand what the time estimates are for. E.G. One might think Global supply chains could take decades—a couple hundred years to get back going as they once were but we might immediately be able to find new ways to gerry-rig much of the existing technology and upkeep it, even if we can’t build more of it or permanently save it. We might even be able to incrementally improve some of it.
Re point 2: I think I might be a bit confused on what the end goal we are actually measuring is. Is the original post saying the amount of time it would take to push past our current level of technology, or until we have a stable society that is advancing technologically or until the world GDP per capita is approaching what it is today?
I’m not sure exactly what Luisa had in mind, but I think the vagueness about what ‘recovery’ looks like after a catastrophe is a real problem in the x-risk community. I’ve got a couple of posts on a related subject in the works, which will hopefully be ready in a week or so.
Since Luisa is only considering natural sources of extinction during recovery, I assume that recovery means until the new time of perils when we have anthropogenic existential risks, so something like 1945. Some of this content is in her 80K podcast.
I listened to Luisa’s podcast a while ago but don’t really remember it so thank you for the clarification. I will go ahead and say that might be a bad definition to use. If anyone who had any knowledge about the nuclear protocol of any country with an arsenal survived, then plausibly we could launch dozens + nukes once we got a few basic functionalities up and running. Similar things could be said about AGI, if we imagine it has been invented before the collapse. I guess this does start to get really in the weeds of each countries nuclear protocall and how easy it would be to access them just based on the systematic defenses in place. I am completely out of my depth here. It’s possible that without a bunch of passcodes or people who remember certain things and have access to certain doors it’s all impossible. But on the other hand if most people are dead you can just start dynamiting parts of the pentagon until you find the right room...
( I think it’s an open question if nukes actually pose an existential risk until you start launching absurd amounts of them, something Luisa herself has done research on IIRC. Still, i’m mainly going off of getting to the level of destruction we could have created in 1945)
It seems like it is the creation of new objects and technology that will take a lot of time. Weapons of mass destruction will still exist, and perhaps be even easier to access for pernicious uses (but like I said I don’t have a clear idea of this).
Karma upvoted, agreement downvoted.
I can’t see how that could plausibly be a reason for extinction unless we were already right on the edge. The problem just solves itself rapidly as cultural and actual evolution select for the people who have the most children.
This seems incredibly optimistic. To get that level of technology we’d already used an enormous amount of cheaply available resources that subsequent civilisation has made much less available. For example, fossil fuels would be mostly gone, and rock phosphorus would be much harder to access—some of the energy from the former is available in the form of things we use it to construct on the surface, but it seems likely 90%+ of it would be gone. Rock phosphorus I’m less clear on, but we’ve flushed the majority of what we’ve used of it into lakes and oceans, and while plenty remains which is accessible to modern society, we generally take the easiest-to-access deposits first, so a rebooting society would find it substantially more expensive to get in quantity.
You are definitely right here. I take back what I said, or at most I append it to saying that the length it takes for this evolution to occur is a crux of how long recovery takes.
Re point 2: I think I might be a bit confused on what the end goal we are actually measuring is. Is the original post saying the amount of time it would take to push past our current level of technology, or until we have a stable society that is advancing technologically or until the world GDP per capita is approaching what it is today?
I’m not sure what I originally thought but now I’m having a tough time even understand what the time estimates are for. E.G. One might think Global supply chains could take decades—a couple hundred years to get back going as they once were but we might immediately be able to find new ways to gerry-rig much of the existing technology and upkeep it, even if we can’t build more of it or permanently save it. We might even be able to incrementally improve some of it.
I’m not sure exactly what Luisa had in mind, but I think the vagueness about what ‘recovery’ looks like after a catastrophe is a real problem in the x-risk community. I’ve got a couple of posts on a related subject in the works, which will hopefully be ready in a week or so.
Since Luisa is only considering natural sources of extinction during recovery, I assume that recovery means until the new time of perils when we have anthropogenic existential risks, so something like 1945. Some of this content is in her 80K podcast.
I listened to Luisa’s podcast a while ago but don’t really remember it so thank you for the clarification. I will go ahead and say that might be a bad definition to use. If anyone who had any knowledge about the nuclear protocol of any country with an arsenal survived, then plausibly we could launch dozens + nukes once we got a few basic functionalities up and running. Similar things could be said about AGI, if we imagine it has been invented before the collapse. I guess this does start to get really in the weeds of each countries nuclear protocall and how easy it would be to access them just based on the systematic defenses in place. I am completely out of my depth here. It’s possible that without a bunch of passcodes or people who remember certain things and have access to certain doors it’s all impossible. But on the other hand if most people are dead you can just start dynamiting parts of the pentagon until you find the right room...
( I think it’s an open question if nukes actually pose an existential risk until you start launching absurd amounts of them, something Luisa herself has done research on IIRC. Still, i’m mainly going off of getting to the level of destruction we could have created in 1945)
It seems like it is the creation of new objects and technology that will take a lot of time. Weapons of mass destruction will still exist, and perhaps be even easier to access for pernicious uses (but like I said I don’t have a clear idea of this).
Nice I’ll keep an eye out for the posts.