Refuges (also known as bunkers or shelters) are structures designed to help humanity survive a global catastrophe.
Further reading
Baum, Seth D. (2015) Confronting the threat of nuclear winter, Futures, vol. 72, pp. 69–79.
Contains a brief discussion of refuges in section 4.2 (p. 7).
Baum, Seth D., David C. Denkenberger & Jacob Haqq-Misra (2015) Isolated refuges for surviving global catastrophes, Futures, vol. 72, pp. 45–56.
Beckstead, Nick (2015) How much could refuges help us recover from a global catastrophe?, Futures, vol. 72, pp. 36–44.
Boyd, Matt & Nick Wilson (2020) The prioritization of island nations as refuges from extreme pandemics, Risk Analysis, vol. 40, pp. 227–239.
Church, George (2022) SafeHomx (Home Sweet Biome): Biosecurity, refuges and/or ‘space colonies on earth’, George Church’s Website.
Hanson, Robin (2008) Catastrophe, social collapse, and human extinction, in Nick Bostrom & Milan M. Ćirković (eds.) Global Catastrophic Risks, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 363–377.
Turchin, Alexey & Brian Patrick Green (2017) Aquatic refuges for surviving a global catastrophe, Futures, vol. 89, pp. 26–37.
Turchin, Alexey & Brian Patrick Green (2019) Islands as refuges for surviving global catastrophes, Foresight, vol. 21, pp. 100–117.
Related entries
civilizational collapse | existential risk | global catastrophic risk | nuclear winter | resilient food
http://gcrinstitute.org/papers/020_nuclear-winter.pdf contains the following paragraph on refuges.
I think it’d sort of be nice for this wiki entry’s bibliography to be sufficiently comprehensive that it points people to this, but maybe if we’d accept everything that has just one paragraph of relevant stuff bibliography’s would get too big? But maybe it’s fine if we only accept one-paragraph-only things if they’re by people associated with the EA community or are explicitly related to EA cause areas (rather than just somewhat related—e.g., related to extreme nuclear winter rather than just any nuclear conflict), and if the bibliography references always point people to the right page number(s)? Not sure.
Yeah, I’m uncertain about what the optimal policy would be. There’s a tradeoff between having a short ‘Further reading’ section optimized for readers who are relatively new to the topic and would like to learn more about it, and a longer section optimized instead for readers who are already familiar with the topic and are looking for additional relevant references. One approach for dealing with this situation is to highlight the works that are especially suitable for either newcomers or more advanced readers in some way, such as with an asterisk or an annotation, or by placing them in a special subsection. I lean towards the view that we should use annotations for this purpose. Thoughts?
EDIT: I added Baum’s article together with a brief annotation.