It’s great to see your reasoning. It seems reasonable for rerunning history. However, for something like fossil fuels and mineral resources being more expensive, it might not just be a delay in getting industry, but instead not having rapid enough economic growth to exceed population growth and therefore escape the Malthusian trap. Even worse would be potential permanent changes in humanity, such as a change in genetics due to radioactive damage (I don’t think we have enough nuclear weapons to do that now, but in some future scenario, we might). Similarly, perhaps the massive mortality of the catastrophe could select for people with less desirable characteristics, such as lower trust. If the catastrophe involved the loss of the grass family, that would have excluded all agricultural civilizations except for the Andean one. There could also be an endemic disease that prevents high population density, which is basically required for civilization. You mentioned long-lasting anthropogenic climate change as being a significant risk, but naturally we could go back into an Ice Age or just have a generally less stable climate than the last 10,000 years.
I think the bigger picture is how much a catastrophe reduces our long-term potential of humanity. Though not the question you’re asking here, I am concerned about even if we do recover technologically, that our values might be worse than now, and that could get locked into AI.
For all of these reasons, I think the reduction in long-term potential of these global catastrophes is more like order of magnitude 10%.
It’s great to see your reasoning. It seems reasonable for rerunning history. However, for something like fossil fuels and mineral resources being more expensive, it might not just be a delay in getting industry, but instead not having rapid enough economic growth to exceed population growth and therefore escape the Malthusian trap. Even worse would be potential permanent changes in humanity, such as a change in genetics due to radioactive damage (I don’t think we have enough nuclear weapons to do that now, but in some future scenario, we might). Similarly, perhaps the massive mortality of the catastrophe could select for people with less desirable characteristics, such as lower trust. If the catastrophe involved the loss of the grass family, that would have excluded all agricultural civilizations except for the Andean one. There could also be an endemic disease that prevents high population density, which is basically required for civilization. You mentioned long-lasting anthropogenic climate change as being a significant risk, but naturally we could go back into an Ice Age or just have a generally less stable climate than the last 10,000 years.
I think the bigger picture is how much a catastrophe reduces our long-term potential of humanity. Though not the question you’re asking here, I am concerned about even if we do recover technologically, that our values might be worse than now, and that could get locked into AI.
For all of these reasons, I think the reduction in long-term potential of these global catastrophes is more like order of magnitude 10%.