Odds of just one in six do not sound great, even in a simple game of chance. But if this were the probability that humanity itself could be wiped out, you might say we were in a fix. Yet here we are, argues philosopher Toby Ord in The Precipice, a new book about the bleak survival chances we now face as a species.
Those with a penchant for worrying about catastrophe already have plenty to be going on with, as the coronavirus continues its grim global march, setting off an array of scary thoughts about what the coming months might bring. Churches in the US are now closed, but newspapers last weekend pictured long lines outside gun shops, a sign that many are preparing in their own way for broader social disruption to come.
Visions of post-apocalyptic collapse are familiar from disaster movies, or novels such as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Ord’s concern is more with what he calls “existential” risk: an apocalypse in which there is no “post”; just the end of all of us. Hence his calculations of the chance of human life ending entirely during this century: one in six. “This is not a small statistical probability that we must diligently bear in mind, like the chance of dying in a car crash, but something that could readily occur, like the roll of a die, or Russian roulette.”