Global catastrophic risk
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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A global catastrophic risk is a hypothetical future event with the potential to seriously damage human well-being on a global scale. Some events could destroy or cripple modern civilization. A severe event, one that could cause human extinction, is known as an existential risk.
Potential global catastrophic risks include but are not limited to hostile artificial intelligence, nanotechnology weapons, climate change, nuclear warfare, and pandemics.
Researchers experience difficulty in studying human extinction directly, since humanity has never been destroyed before. While this does not mean that it will not be in the future, it does make modelling existential risks difficult, due in part to survivorship bias.
The concept is expressed in various phrases such as "End of the World", "Doomsday", "Ragnarök", "Judgment Day", "Armageddon", "the Apocalypse", "Yawm al-Qiyāmah" and others.
See also
- 10 Ways to End the World
- Anarcho-primitivism
- Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction
- Catastrophe
- Degeneration
- Doomsday argument
- Doomsday Clock
- Doomsday event
- Eschatology
- Existential risk
- Extinction event
- Fermi paradox
- Future of the Earth
- Future of the Solar System
- Human extinction
- Last Days on Earth
- Malthusian catastrophe
- Near-Earth supernova
- Outside Context Problem
- Pandemic
- Peak Food
- Planetary management
- Rare events
- The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (nonfiction book)
- Snowball Earth
- Societal collapse
- Supervolcano
- Survivalism
- The End of History and the Last Man
- Timeline of the far future
- Ultimate fate of the universe