Thanks so much for writing this. There are a lot of new leads on understanding the risks here, and it is great to see people working on what I think is the largest of all the natural risks.
I’d be very interested to see what estimates of the overall existential risk from supervolcanic eruptions you come up with. As direct extinction appears particularly difficult, much of the question comes down to estimates of the chance that an eruption of a given magnitude would cause the collapse of civilisation and the chance of recovering from that collapse. Factoring the risk in this way may be helpful for both showing where disagreements between researchers lie and for understanding where the current uncertainty is.
Note also that there was a numerical mistake in my supervolcanic eruption section which I explain on the book’s Errata page: https://theprecipice.com/errata
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 so much for writing this. There are a lot of new leads on understanding the risks here, and it is great to see people working on what I think is the largest of all the natural risks.
I’d be very interested to see what estimates of the overall existential risk from supervolcanic eruptions you come up with. As direct extinction appears particularly difficult, much of the question comes down to estimates of the chance that an eruption of a given magnitude would cause the collapse of civilisation and the chance of recovering from that collapse. Factoring the risk in this way may be helpful for both showing where disagreements between researchers lie and for understanding where the current uncertainty is.
Note also that there was a numerical mistake in my supervolcanic eruption section which I explain on the book’s Errata page: https://theprecipice.com/errata
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!