"Discover the Top 10 Risks Imperiling Human Civilization"

History has shown that civilizations do not last forever, as evidenced by the fall of the Aztecs, Maya, and the original Roman Empire. From the Myceneans in Mediterranean to the Anasazi in Arizona, societies have crumbled due to wars, disease, natural disasters, famine, and altered weather patterns.

Noah Webster defined civilization in his 1828 dictionary as “the state of being refined in manners, from the grossness of savage life, and improved in arts and learning.” However, today, civilization has become more complex, denoting global interconnectedness and technological sophistication beyond what Webster could have envisioned.

Current civilization's stability is reliant on a vast global interdependence of countless connected components. Cooperation between individuals, corporations, and nations is necessary for necessities such as food, fuel, materials for manufacturing, clothing, and housing. Any economic activity or change in transportation or communication affects everything everywhere.

However, civilization is on the brink of breakdown due to various credible existential threats. Lack of space restricts immediate warnings to the Top 10 Threats to the Survival of Civilization:

1. An alien attack that would destroy all earthly civilization.
2. An asteroid collision that would destroy modern technology and create subsequent fires and global cooling.
3. The demise of bees and other pollinating insects and animals, which would disrupt the food chain, ultimately collapsing civilization.
4. The shifting of Earth's magnetic poles, affecting communication and navigation technology.
5. The possibility of an AI takeover, in which artificially intelligent entities surpass human intelligence and take over.
6. Nuclear war, resulting in global destruction and environmental collapse.
7. Climate change, with rising temperatures and sea levels devastating agricultural and coastal communities.
8. Global epidemics or pandemics, such as a deadly virus, that could wipe out entire populations.
9. Natural disasters, such as earthquakes, tsunamis, and hurricanes, causing widespread death and destruction.
10. The depletion of natural resources, such as oil and gas, leading to international conflicts and civil wars.

While some of these threats may seem far-fetched, they pose a real danger to civilization. Therefore, immediate action is necessary to mitigate these risks and ensure that civilization lasts beyond the 21st century.

There is a wealth of literature detailing the potential catastrophic threats posed by artificial intelligence to civilization. Though currently minimal, AI’s ever-increasing sophistication in both hardware and software suggests that its destructive capabilities will continue to accelerate. A 2018 paper identified numerous scenarios in which AI-generated global catastrophe could occur.

One such scenario describes a future in which civilization extensively relies on robots. A computer virus with AI capability could turn into a weapon for a malicious cyberattack. “If the attack is on a very large scale, affecting billions of sophisticated robots with a large degree of autonomy, it may result in human extinction,” wrote Alexey Turchin and David Denkenberger. Additionally, allowing AI to control nuclear weapons could become just as dangerous in real life as it is in movies, as the military already incorporates AI technologies and plans to increase its use of AI-powered drones and other robotic weapons.

“Military robotics could become so cheap that drone swarms could cause enormous damage to the human population; a large autonomous army could attack humans because of a command error; billions of nanobots with narrow AI could be created in a terrorist attack and create a global catastrophe,” note Turchin and Denkenberger.

Quantum computing is an even more powerful technology in its infancy, making it even more dangerous than ordinary AI. Although often overhyped, quantum computing has the potential to perform certain tasks exponentially faster than today’s supercomputers. One such task may be simulating the interactions of atoms and molecules to develop new drugs or chemicals.

“Quantum simulation … offers an exponential quantum speedup in understanding reaction mechanism in molecules and probing the properties of new materials,” quantum scientist Benjamin Schiffer wrote in a paper last year.

However, in malevolent hands, this power could also be used to design more potent poisons, as a novel pandemic agent could be engineered without time-consuming chemical trial-and-error. “There is an existential threat to humanity arising from the prospect of being able to run quantum simulation on a quantum computer in the future,” Schiffer argues.

Any complex system is at risk of reaching a tipping point, where the slightest disturbance can cause a collapse. Adding a single grain of sand to a large sandpile or snapping a twig can initiate an avalanche, showing that seemingly stable complex systems may conceal vulnerability. Though the math exists to predict their demise, in 2000, geophysicists Didier Sornette and Anders Johansen warned of a collapse of human population growth and a severe economic crash in the 2050s, indicating an end to the current era that cannot be overcome with innovation.

A 2013 paper by Sornette and Peter Cauwels compared the silent march to catastrophe to the phenomenon of “creep” in materials, where small, unnoticeable cracks accumulate until the material suddenly fractures. For the world at large, this might very well culminate in a “blood red abyss,” Sornette and Cauwels wrote, the “likely and very painful final stage of creep … ending in the failure of existing institutions.”

Finally, social media platforms have provided a platform for ideological idiocy that can deter efforts to prevent or diminish many of the threats facing civilization. Anti-vaccination propaganda and efforts to deny the dangers of climate change are just some of the examples of how false information can manipulate the masses and intimidate governments, and many supposedly legitimate mainstream media outlets have fallen prey to this manipulation as well.

Social media alone may not result in the complete destruction of civilization, but it could certainly eliminate any semblance of civilized discourse. When combined with other options for destruction, social media could accelerate civilization's devastation while hindering efforts to prevent it.

Movie: I Am Legend

You would think that a pandemic that has killed over a million Americans and millions more worldwide would prompt a concerted effort to prevent future pandemics. Instead, the pandemic has caused a lack of support for public health measures and has led to an official response that essentially tells individuals they are on their own.

Institutions that are responsible for protecting public health are now insisting that individuals assess their own risks, yet they fail to provide the necessary information to properly weigh those risks. Furthermore, the vast majority of people do not possess the expertise necessary to properly assess these risks. This approach to mitigating pandemics is akin to suggesting that individuals should decide for themselves whether to obey traffic signals or disregard them altogether. As a result, a future pandemic as infectious as COVID-19 but with a significantly higher fatality rate could be catastrophic enough to tear the social fabric apart.

This danger has been predicted for some time but has mostly been disregarded. In 1988, molecular biologist and Nobel laureate Joshua Lederberg warned that global epidemics posed a significant threat, and viruses and microbes are staunch competitors in an ongoing competition for planetary domination. “In that natural evolutionary competition,” Lederberg said, “there is no guarantee that we will find ourselves the survivor.”

Movie: Dr. Strangelove

After World War II, a plausible scenario for the destruction of civilization was a nuclear war. This theme became popular for depictions of civilization's demise in fiction. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, many people breathed a sigh of relief, but as long as nuclear arsenals remained intact, the threat persisted, and now, it may be greater than ever before.

In January, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved its infamous doomsday clock to 90 seconds before midnight, the closest it has ever been to global catastrophe. The organization's science and security board released a statement saying that Russia's war on Ukraine was largely responsible for the shift. "Russia's thinly veiled threats to use nuclear weapons remind the world that escalation of the conflict—by accident, intention, or miscalculation—is a terrible risk. The possibility that the conflict could spin out of anyone's control remains high."

UN Secretary-General António Guterres declared last year that the world was facing a nuclear danger as significant as it did during the Cold War's height. "Humanity is just one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation," he warned.

Aside from Russia, other countries, such as North Korea, China, and Iran, pose a threat of a potential nuclear holocaust.

Movie: Princess Mononoke

For over a century, scientists have been warning about how carbon dioxide emissions may affect the planet. The increasingly higher temperatures, hotter summers, melting sea ice, severe droughts, more powerful hurricanes, more winter storms are all signs that climate change is not a myth. Though international efforts to limit carbon dioxide levels have been made, they have struggled to gain traction. Studies have outlined the various negative consequences of global warming on agriculture, human health, and social welfare. Catastrophic climate change could trigger conflict, famine, and revolution.

Of course, efforts to mitigate climate change have the potential to save civilization. However, if these efforts fail, the worst-case warming scenarios are genuinely apocalyptic, as warned by Luke Kemp and his co-authors in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last year. "There is ample evidence that climate change could become catastrophic," they wrote. Climate change has contributed to the collapse of many regional civilizations. It is uncertain about the future of the climate, and there is a need for investigation into the possibility that climate change could result in worldwide societal collapse or even human extinction.

Of course, most of the risks to the civilization are not isolated threats. Climate change could trigger wars (see No. 2) or contribute to the spread of infectious diseases (No. 3), Kemp and colleagues note. And a United Nations report last year found that analyses of numerous related systemic risks “show a dangerous tendency for the world to move toward a global collapse scenario” in “the absence of ambitious policy and near global adoption and successful implementation.” In other words, without worldwide cooperation, “total societal collapse is a possibility.”

Both Kemp and colleagues and the authors of the U.N. report emphasize that these warnings are not predictions but calls to action. Listing threats is not for the purpose of overdramatizing them or to suggest that everybody should surrender to an inevitable existential catastrophe.

Behavioral scientist Caroline Orr Bueno, one of the few sane voices who offsets Twitter’s threat to civilization with insight and intelligence about misinformation and the techniques for spreading it, warns that scaring people “makes them reject the message.”

“The key is to get people to perceive that the threat is real,” she tweets, “but also that there are things we can do to effectively reverse the threat.”

And therein lies the hope.

Warnings of potential catastrophes should not be taken as cause for despair, but as motivation for investigating the dangers. “Analyzing the mechanisms for these extreme consequences could help galvanize action, improve resilience and inform policy,” Kemp and colleagues write. After all, when drought dissolved the Natufians’ civilization 10,000 years ago, they had no power to affect the climate. Modern humans do have such power. They could, in principle, stop using that power to make things worse and take steps to restore civilization’s safety and stability. At least until the aliens arrive.

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