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Politics : The Castle -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (4187)	11/23/2004 7:53:48 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 7936

I'm not so sure how well such risks could be quantified, but to the extent they can be I think the information would be useful. If the odds of a catastrophe that would wipe out the human race was 1 in 100 million per year it would make sense to take reasonable measures to deal with the risk if such measures existed (for example putting some more resources in to tracking the paths of asteroids). Or putting money in to researching global warming (a more likely but less severe threat), and taking what cheap and easy steps we have to try and counteract it. As for the other mention risks, the attack of the "gray goo", or the robots/computers taking over. I don't think we know enough about such risks at this point to implement defenses or to even really understand the risk. Biotererorism is a real risk but the methods to deal with it are mostly the same as the methods to deal with terrorism in general. Those that are specific to dealing with epidemics would also help against natural epidemics (a more likely threat anyway) so they wouldn't be purely anti-terrorist acts. "He estimates "the cost of extinction of the human race" at $600 trillion and the annual probability of such a disaster at 1 in 10 million." To the extent that you can estimate a cost his figure is far to low. The world will probably produce over $600tril in gross production in the next 10 years. But then maybe it doesn't make much sense to use any dollar figure. I think he overestimates the likelihood of an extinction event,on in 10 million seems to high, but no one has the information needed to really pin it down. Such economic analysis of world shaking catastrophes might be interesting to some and maybe even be slightly useful in certain contexts but its usefulness is limited by the fact that we can't estimate the likelihood of many types of disasters, the fact that many types of disasters might be things we can't protect against, and by the fact that any dollar figure on the value of avoiding a risk of human extermination is entirely arbitrary. Tim