Some fixed models also support macroscopic probabilities of indefinite survival: e.g. if in each generation each individual has a number of descendants drawn from a Poisson distribution with parameter 1.1, then there’s a finite chance of extinction in each generation but these diminish fast enough (as the population gets enormous) that if you make it through an initial rocky period you’re pretty much safe.
That model is clearly too optimistic because it doesn’t admit crises with correlated problems across all the individuals in a generation. But then there’s a question about how high is the unavoidable background rate of such crises (i.e. ones that remain even if you have a very sophisticated and well-resourced attempt to prevent them).
On current understanding I think the lower bounds for the rate of exogenous such events rely on things like false vacuum decay (and maybe GRBs while we’re local enough), and those lower bounds are really quite low, so it’s fairly plausible that the true rate is really low (though also plausible it’s higher because there are risks that aren’t observed/understood).
Bounding endogenous risk seems a bit harder to reason about. I think that you can give kind of fairytale/handwaving existence proofs of stable political systems (which might however be utterly horrific to us). Then it’s at least sort of plausible that there would be systems which are simultaneously extremely stable and also desirable.
Some fixed models also support macroscopic probabilities of indefinite survival: e.g. if in each generation each individual has a number of descendants drawn from a Poisson distribution with parameter 1.1, then there’s a finite chance of extinction in each generation but these diminish fast enough (as the population gets enormous) that if you make it through an initial rocky period you’re pretty much safe.
That model is clearly too optimistic because it doesn’t admit crises with correlated problems across all the individuals in a generation. But then there’s a question about how high is the unavoidable background rate of such crises (i.e. ones that remain even if you have a very sophisticated and well-resourced attempt to prevent them).
On current understanding I think the lower bounds for the rate of exogenous such events rely on things like false vacuum decay (and maybe GRBs while we’re local enough), and those lower bounds are really quite low, so it’s fairly plausible that the true rate is really low (though also plausible it’s higher because there are risks that aren’t observed/understood).
Bounding endogenous risk seems a bit harder to reason about. I think that you can give kind of fairytale/handwaving existence proofs of stable political systems (which might however be utterly horrific to us). Then it’s at least sort of plausible that there would be systems which are simultaneously extremely stable and also desirable.