Civilisation can be rebuilt. Focus on existential threats over far more likely civilisation collapse threats is done by those who view unrealised potential as loss. So it’s 7 billion humans vs the trillions that could exist if we keep spreading and growing and start colonising other planets.
Here’s a good review/summary by a rationalist of a book on the topic by someone who if not a rationalist (I don’t actually know) was at least instrumental in starting the effective altruism movement which is rationalist adjacent.
You'd be surprised, there's a lot of advancement that we might not be able to replicate if our civilzation fully collapsed.
For instance, so much of our early nuclear technology was dependent on the Shinkolobwe uranium mine in the DRC, and it's orders of magnitude better uranium purity than anything else we've found.
> Our best source, the Shinkolobwe mine, represented a freak occurrence in nature. It contained a tremendously rich lode of uranium pitchblende. Nothing like it has ever again been found. The ore already in the United States contained 65 percent U3O8, while the pitchblende aboveground in the Congo amounted to a thousand tons of 65 percent ore, and the waste piles of ore contained two thousand tons of 20 percent U3O8. To illustrate the uniqueness of Sengier's stockpile, after the war the MED and the AEC considered ore containing three-tenths of 1 percent as a good find. Without Sengier’s foresight in stockpiling ore in the United States and aboveground in Africa, we simply would not have had the amounts of uranium needed to justify building the large separation plants and the plutonium reactors [for the Manhattan Project].
~ Colonel Ken Nichols
Additionally, without the very dense energy in the easily accessible fossil fuels we've very nearly mined out, restarting an industrial revolution would be at best extremely problematic.
We've been OK so far with progress meaning we slam the door shut to independent replication of that progress in a lot of cases.
> Additionally, without the very dense energy in the easily accessible fossil fuels we've very nearly mined out, restarting an industrial revolution would be at best extremely problematic.
I feel like this is the more important of the two points you made.
Even without Uranium, it's conceivable to have a second industrial revolution. We don't need nuclear power for that.
But without easily accessible fossil fuels, it's much harder to envision the next civilization having an industrial revolution. They might indeed never rise to our level of technology again.
>But without easily accessible fossil fuels, it's much harder to envision the next civilization having an industrial revolution. They might indeed never rise to our level of technology again.
knowledge is the key. Even Ancient Greeks could have built a wind electricity generator if they knew how - ie. if they knew about copper wire and electrical charge movement in it. And you can collect sun light and focus it on a boiler while still being in Ancient Greeks situation - that gives you https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile which can be used to generate electricity too. And they could have possibly have that too https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voltaic_pile or even https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_detector#Cat_whisker_d... - piece of crystal and a wire making a diode - and you can have primitive radio.
So, the newly built civilization bypassing fossil fuels would even be better :)
> Even Ancient Greeks could have built a wind electricity generator if they knew how - ie. if they knew about copper wire and electrical charge movement in it.
Did they have the level of materials science to build a practical one? They weren't able to produce steel, for example.
That is my point - the necessary material science in many respects is just a knowledge. If you have copper it is relatively easy to make copper wire, at least some crude one, if you know what it is for. It took 2000 years to build the knowledge, yet having that knowledge one can rebuild a lot of stuff in orders of magnitude shorter timeframe. Btw, that reminded about that book that i liked a lot back then as a child https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mysterious_Island - rebuilding a significant pieces of civilization starting from scratch almost.
It's not though - it's a whole interlinked ecosystem of industry and even if you have the knowledge that doesn't mean you'd be able to bootstrap. A simple example is that most wind turbines today are likely built from steel that was made in an electric arc furnace, which themselves require massive amounts of electricity to run. (And that's just the basic material, to say nothing of the tools and processes you need to actually build one).
"Just well enough" may not be enough to rebuild society with. The Greeks didn't lack the knowledge of how to make a steam engine - they had novelty steam engines - but they lacked the industrial base that could actually make them productive.
i imagine how in the year 3000 the people will be arguing why the people of the 21st century, i.e. we, wouldn't build say a fusion engines and power generators (we do have "novelty" fusion devices) , or may be even FTL space ship when it happens to be such a simple thing :) We probably have the tech for the fusion, or very close to it, yet we don't know how to put it together and/or in what direction to make that small final push.
As long as we don't forget how to build renewables we could skip the fossil fuel stage. Bootstrap solar panels and wind turbines using some biomass as fuel and continue from there.
We've dug out almost all the easily accessible minerals - we're currently mining minerals that are cheaply accessible to us with modern technology, but the ones that were cheaply accessible to pre-industrial civilizations are long gone.
For some minerals (e.g. metals) that might possible even be a bonus, as we've brought it up to the surface and it might be more accessible than before (a scrapyard that's buried under some soil could be an excellent place to mine iron), but there won't be shallow coal or shallow oil that a second industrialization could use as a cheap power source.
> In my view, the greatest risk to humanity’s potential in the next hundred years comes from unaligned artificial intelligence, which I put at 1 in 10. One might be surprised to see such a high number for such a speculative risk, so it warrants some explanation.
The above is from the article you link. Where.....oh where....are you getting the 1 in 10 number? This is pure, and I mean pure...uncut conjecture. This is why these types of 'intellectual' offerings are so irritating to me. There is absolutely no sound, or 'rational', way to back that number up.
It’s a review of a book. Presumably it’s in the book.
Even if you don’t care to read it and doubt his ability to estimate, add the amount of zeros in there that you think appropriate. If you think humanity has the potential to get in to the quintillions like Toby and friends, then the negative EV of it is still going to be far greater than any non existential threat.
Then consider elsewhere where it’s mentioned that humanity spends more on ice cream than preventing existential threats. Maybe some of that ice cream money would help increase the accuracy of his statistics.
Here’s a good review/summary by a rationalist of a book on the topic by someone who if not a rationalist (I don’t actually know) was at least instrumental in starting the effective altruism movement which is rationalist adjacent.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/01/book-review-the-precip...