Thanks for this Toby. I like your suggestion about factoring the risk in this way, and we’ll keep you informed about where this all leads. Regarding civilisation collapse & recovery, there’s certainly a lot of parallels to abrupt cooling from nuclear and asteroid winters, though the nearer-field hazards (and resulting cascading impacts), may be significantly different. One major uncertainty in this seems to be the location of a super-eruption, which will strongly dictate its effects on society, e.g. similar magnitude super-eruption occurring in the Mediterranean versus New Zealand. So one of the things we hope to look into is identifying the regions & volcanoes where the next super eruptions are most likely to occur. Your book & the longtermism concepts have certainly made me reassess what the most important questions in our field are!
Thanks for this Toby. I like your suggestion about factoring the risk in this way, and we’ll keep you informed about where this all leads. Regarding civilisation collapse & recovery, there’s certainly a lot of parallels to abrupt cooling from nuclear and asteroid winters, though the nearer-field hazards (and resulting cascading impacts), may be significantly different. One major uncertainty in this seems to be the location of a super-eruption, which will strongly dictate its effects on society, e.g. similar magnitude super-eruption occurring in the Mediterranean versus New Zealand. So one of the things we hope to look into is identifying the regions & volcanoes where the next super eruptions are most likely to occur. Your book & the longtermism concepts have certainly made me reassess what the most important questions in our field are!