Reduce the Chances of a Global Catastrophe
Submitted by Robert Bast on October 13, 2010 – 10:14 pmNo Comment
Alexei Turchin has posted 20 ideas that could save our species, and it has nothing to do with “global warming”. Here are some of his ideas:
1. Create a book titled “Guide to the restoration of civilization”, which describes all the necessary knowledge of hunting, industry, mining, and all the warnings about the risks of civilization collapse. Test its different sections on volunteers. Print the book in stone / metal / other solid media in many copies throughout the world. Bury treasure with the tools / books / seeds in different parts of the world. Estimated cost: 1-100 million USD. Reduction of probability of extinction (assuming that real prior probability is 50% in XXI century): 0.1%.4. Send human DNA to the moon in the stable time capsule. Several tens of millions of dollars. You can also send cryo-preserved human brains. The idea here is that if mankind would perish, then someday the aliens arrive and revive people based on these data. Expense of 20-50 million dollars, the probability of success of 0.001%.7. The creation of a scientific court for the Hadron Collider and other potentially dangerous projects, in which a theoretical physicist could be paid large sums of money for the discovery of potential vulnerabilities.
The underlying problem for most of his ideas is that governments tend not to spend money on events that are perceived to be unlikely, or even unlikely to happen “on their watch”, like Hurricane Katrina… So the only hope lies in either a society that has heaps of surplus cash, or private investment. Unfortunately individuals with such money tend to invest based on ego (Branson) or old-school saviourism (Gates). All we need is for the next (or current) Googlesque billionaire to have a leaning towards 2012 and survivalism…
