National security threats

10 ways the world is most likely to end, explained by scientists

Remember when the possibility of nuclear war seemed remote? The fact that it doesn’t anymore shows how quickly threats to humanity can change and how important they are to pay attention to.

The Global Challenges Foundation, which works to reduce the global problems that threaten humanity, compiles an annual report on global catastrophic risks. The group released the 2018 edition in September, and the litany is harrowing: Chemical warfare, supervolcanic eruptions, asteroid collisions, and the looming effects of climate change threaten to cause everything from civilizational collapse to human extinction.

Some of these risks sound like science fiction, but so did weapons of mass destruction and climate change 100 years ago. As Allan Dafoe and Anders Sandberg of the Future of Humanity Institute write, our brains aren’t good at thinking about catastrophic risk because they either “completely neglect or massively overweight” things that are low probability. So the report, overseen by a team at GCF but with each section written by leading experts, combines historical evidence and scientific data to determine the biggest threats.

The good news for us is that scientists think the world will be habitable for at least a few hundred million more years. The bad news is there’s a lot that could change that. The risk of the threats highlighted in the report actually causing mass casualties are still small, but that doesn’t mean they’re not important to pay attention to — especially when the worst-case scenario means human extinction.