Thanks for the clarification, David. There are so many concepts of existential risk, and they are often so vague that I think estimates of existential risk can vary by many orders of magnitude even holding constant the definition in words of a given author. So I would prefer discussions to focus on outcomes like human extinction which are well defined, even if their chance remains very hard to estimate.
I also think human extinction without recovery to a similarly promising state is much less likely than human extinction. For a time from human extinction to that kind of recovery described by an exponential distribution with a mean of 66 M years, which was the time from the last mass extinction until humans evolving, and 1 billion years during which the Earth will remain habitable, and therefore recovery is possible, the probability of recovery conditional on human extinction would be 2.63*10^-7 (= e^(-10^9/​(66*10^6))).
Thanks for the clarification, David. There are so many concepts of existential risk, and they are often so vague that I think estimates of existential risk can vary by many orders of magnitude even holding constant the definition in words of a given author. So I would prefer discussions to focus on outcomes like human extinction which are well defined, even if their chance remains very hard to estimate.
I also think human extinction without recovery to a similarly promising state is much less likely than human extinction. For a time from human extinction to that kind of recovery described by an exponential distribution with a mean of 66 M years, which was the time from the last mass extinction until humans evolving, and 1 billion years during which the Earth will remain habitable, and therefore recovery is possible, the probability of recovery conditional on human extinction would be 2.63*10^-7 (= e^(-10^9/​(66*10^6))).