Toby Ord - The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity

If all goes well, human history is just beginning. Humanity is about two hundred thousand years old. But the Earth will remain habitable for hundreds of millions moreenough time for millions of future generations; enough to end disease, poverty and injustice forever; enough to create heights of flourishing unimaginable today. And if we could learn to reach out further into the cosmos, we could have more time yet: trillions of years, to explore billions of worlds. Such a lifespan places present-day humanity in its earliest infancy. A vast and extraordinary adulthood awaits.

Our view of this potential is easily obscured. The latest scandal draws our outrage; the latest tragedy, our sympathy. Time and space shrink. We forget the scale of the story in which we take part. But there are moments when we rememberwhen our vision shifts, and our priorities realign. We see a species precariously close to self-destruction, with a future of immense promise hanging in the balance. And which way that balance tips becomes our most urgent public concern.

This book argues that safeguarding humanitys future is the defining challenge of our time. For we stand at a crucial moment in the history of our species. Fueled by technological progress, our power has grown so great that for the first time in humanitys long history, we have the capacity to destroy ourselvessevering our entire future and everything we could become.

Yet humanitys wisdom has grown only falteringly, if at all, and lags dangerously behind. Humanity lacks the maturity, coordination and foresight necessary to avoid making mistakes from which we could never recover. As the gap between our power and our wisdom grows, our future is subject to an ever-increasing level of risk. This situation is unsustainable. So over the next few centuries, humanity will be tested: it will either act decisively to protect itself and its longterm potential, or, in all likelihood, this will be lost forever.

To survive these challenges and secure our future, we must act now: managing the risks of today, averting those of tomorrow, and becoming the kind of society that will never pose such risks to itself again.

It is only in the last century that humanitys power to threaten its entire future became apparent. One of the most harrowing episodes has just recently come to light. On Saturday, October 27, 1962, a single officer on a Soviet submarine almost started a nuclear war. His name was Valentin Savitsky. He was captain of the submarine B-59one of four submarines the Soviet Union had sent to support its military operations in Cuba. Each was armed with a secret weapon: a nuclear torpedo with explosive power comparable to the Hiroshima bomb.

It was the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Two weeks earlier, US aerial reconnaissance had produced photographic evidence that the Soviet Union was installing nuclear missiles in Cuba, from which they could strike directly at the mainland United States. In response, the US blockaded the seas around Cuba, drew up plans for an invasion and brought its nuclear forces to the unprecedented alert level of DEFCON 2 (Next step to nuclear war).

On that Saturday, one of the blockading US warships detected Savitskys submarine and attempted to force it to the surface by dropping low-explosive depth charges as warning shots. The submarine had been hiding deep underwater for days. It was out of radio contact, so the crew did not know whether war had already broken out. Conditions on board were extremely bad. It was built for the Arctic and its ventilator had broken in the tropical water. The heat inside was unbearable, ranging from 113F near the torpedo tubes to 140F in the engine room. Carbon dioxide had built up to dangerous concentrations, and crew members had begun to fall unconscious. Depth charges were exploding right next to the hull. One of the crew later recalled: It felt like you were sitting in a metal barrel, which somebody is constantly blasting with a sledgehammer.

Increasingly desperate, Captain Savitsky ordered his crew to prepare their secret weapon:

Maybe the war has already started up there, while we are doing somersaults here. Were going to blast them now! We will die, but we will sink them allwe will not disgrace our Navy!

Firing the nuclear weapon required the agreement of the submarines political officer, who held the other half of the firing key. Despite the lack of authorization by Moscow, the political officer gave his consent.

On any of the other three submarines, this would have sufficed to launch their nuclear weapon. But by the purest luck, submarine B-59 carried the commander of the entire flotilla, Captain Vasili Arkhipov, and so required his additional consent. Arkhipov refused to grant it. Instead, he talked Captain Savitsky down from his rage and convinced him to give up: to surface amidst the US warships and await further orders from Moscow.

We do not know precisely what would have happened if Arkhipov had granted his consentor had he simply been stationed on any of the other three submarines. Perhaps Savitsky would not have followed through on his command. What is clear is that we came precariously close to a nuclear strike on the blockading fleeta strike which would most likely have resulted in nuclear retaliation, then escalation to a full-scale nuclear war (the only kind the US had plans for). Years later, Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense during the crisis, came to the same conclusion: