[tt] [x-risk] Another Global Cat Risks conf report

[Eugen Leitl]

----- Forwarded message from "Hughes, James J." <James.Hughes at trincoll.edu> -----

From: "Hughes, James J." <James.Hughes at trincoll.edu>
Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2008 11:45:07 -0400
To: existential at transhumanism.org
Subject: [x-risk] Another Global Cat Risks conf report
Reply-To: For discussion of existential risks <existential at transhumanism.org>

http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/257637

Posted Jul 20, 2008 by [Citizen Journalist]  Sue D.

Move Over Global Warming, Let's Talk About Global Catastrophes

First up at the conference on Global Catastrophic Risks was the topic of
asteroids, with David Morrison who is a NASA senior scientist. He spoke
about the threat of a catastrophic asteroid strike and the Spaceguard
Survey.

It is NASA's responsibility since 1998, to monitor the skies and detect
near Earth asteroids that are larger than 1 kilometer in size, which is
the size that, if it hit Earth, could end civilization.

Morrison stated that 80 percent of the near Earth asteroids that are 1
kilometer or larger have been identified and that he could assure those
gathered at the conference that "We are not going the way of the
dinosaurs." He also says the Spaceguard Survey has not turned up any
near Earth asteroids as large as the one that is believed to have wiped
out the dinosaurs.

Morrison pointed out that asteroid strikes are the only natural hazard
that in principle can be completely eliminated. Thanks to the Spaceguard
Survey, humanity will likely have decades of warning before an impending
collision. Once alerted, missiles could be used to nudge a threatening
asteroid so that it misses the earth.

Then again, they are keeping their eye on the 210-330 meter asteroid
Apophis, to which they say there is a 1 in 45,000 chance that it could
hit the earth on April 13, 2036 and the next three or four years will
allow them to specify the likelihood a little better.

Next up was Arnon Dar who is a Technion physicist, discussing Gamma Ray
Bursts (GRBs).

Gamma-ray bursts (GRB) are sudden, intense flashes of gamma-rays which,
for a few blinding seconds, light up in an otherwise fairly dark
gamma-ray sky. They are detected at the rate of about once a day, and
while they are on, they outshine every other gamma-ray source in the
sky, including the sun. GRBs are produced when a gigantic star goes
supernova.

Dar highlights the Eta Carinae, which is 7,500 light years away and
points out that it has been unstable, it is 100 times more massive than
the sun and 5 million times brighter and then he gives the good news
that it's axis is pointed away from the earth.

Lest everyone let their concern dwindle though, Anders Sandberg from the
Future of Humanity Institute, states that "some astronomers are worried
that we may be looking down the barrel of gamma ray gun when the WR 104
binary located 8,000 light years away goes supernova."

Next on the agenda for the conference was the topic of comets.

William Napier from the Center for Astrobiology at Cardiff University in
Wales spoke on the topic of comets and he states that long-period
comets, which are those coming from the Oort cloud and the Kuiper belt
have very different properties and behave differently, and are thought
to "constitute around 1 percent of the risk of catastrophic collision."

Napier believes that is underestimating the threat because of Dark
Comets, which are comets that do not have bright tails and therefore are
harder to detect and he uses the IRAS-Araki-Alcock comet as an example,
stating that it was detected "only two weeks before it came within 0.03
astronomical units of the earth (about 230 earth diameters) back in
1983-the closest of any known comet since 1770."

Napier argues that the record of large impact craters suggests that the
earth experiences periods of cometary bombardment every 36 million years
or so. He attributes the episodes to the sun's periodic passage through
galactic plane where contact with molecular clouds dislodges comets from
the Oort cloud surrounding the solar system. He believes that the earth
is currently in a bombardment episode. "We have comet problem because
they are hard to detect which means that we would have months or weeks
of warning at most," said Napier.

The topics to be discussed next at the Global Catastrophic Risks
conference in Oxford will be pandemics and nuclear war.

>From all accounts it seems that for now, human beings are not in
imminent danger from outer space.

Then again, outer space is not the only thing these scientists and
experts are looking into.

On the last day of the conference, they are expected to discuss the
unintended consequences of new technology, with one example being
superintelligent machines that, if handled wrong, might cause the demise
of Homo sapiens.

According the director of Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, which
is hosting the conference, Dr. Nick Bostrom, "Any entity which is
radically smarter than human beings would also be very powerful. If we
get something wrong, you could imagine the consequences would involve
the extinction of the human species."

Another topic being discussed by the CNN article linked above is how
some experts believe that in as little as two decades "humans will
become more non-biological than biological, capable of uploading our
minds onto the Internet, living in various virtual worlds and even
avoiding aging and evading death," according to Dr. Ray Kurzweil, who is
an inventor and futurist who calculates technology trends using what he
calls the law of accelerating returns, a mathematical concept that
measures the exponential growth of technological evolution.

Sound like a science fiction movie?

    In the 1980s, Kurzweil predicted that a tiny handheld device would
be invented early in the 21st century, allowing blind people to read
documents from anywhere at anytime; this year, such a device was
publicly unveiled. He also anticipated the explosive growth of the
Internet in the 1990s.

Other experts agree that humans will merge with machines before the end
of this century, according to the CNN article.

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