What is our greatest existential threat? What events or cause/effect scenarios could lead to the end of humanity's existence on Earth?

Outside of the scope of astrological events, think asteroids, solar decay, etc., what human caused events could destroy us as a species?

The idea that the greatest existential threat to humanity is human activity has been with us for a while. He's an image and a pity statement from a poster created by Walter Kelly in 1970 for the first Earth Day, "We have met the enemy and he is us."

It does not take long to come up with a short list of very scary but real scenarios of actions, or inactions, by a small number or a larger number of humans collectively that could end our existence.

1. Global nuclear war and subsequent nuclear winter.

2. Global poisoning of the planet. This could be via multiple sources: plastics, nitrates in the water, pharmaceuticals, mercury, pesticides, etc... a soup of chemicals in the air, land, and water that make it impossible to inhabit the Earth

3. Extreme global warming that turns Earth into Venus

Coordination Problems

At this point in humanities existence, it appears that there are few things that are not under our collective control. While true, most of the really scary and easily predicable causes for inaction are coordination problems with relatively elusive solutions. While theoretically under "our" control, in reality, no one person or group has enough control to will change to the social systems that theoretically contain the levers of power to effect change.

Coordination problems are ones where the majority of people in a social system agree on potential solutions, but for any one person or group to step forward to act in a manor to help resolve the problem would put them at odds with others or cause them a disadvantage, so the people in the system and the system as a whole defaults to status quo operation.

Fascism

The current move toward fascism around the world is a reaction to the systemic failures of institutions to address coordinations problems. People are scared and looking for bold, confident, father figures to tell them they have all the answers. These authoritarians do not have the answers, but they do act boldly with confidence. Most fascist leaders are committed to old ideas that will only accelerate our demise in the face of our new environments. Reference: Jared Diamond: Why do societies collapse.

Modeling Systems Properly

There are many examples of coordination problems, including the three noted above. Coordination problems have two major components.

1. Modeling the system properly is extremely hard

2. Changing human behavior is extremely hard.

Science can help on both fronts, but so can creativity and design.

The best book I've read on systems thinking and system design is "Recreating the Corporation" by Russell Ackoff. He created an new school of thought related to systems thinking, and his emphasis on designing accurate mental models to best reflect reality are paradigm shifting. He does a good job of describing elusive obvious concepts with regards to corporate structure and operation that awake the read to better paths if they adopt a more accurate mental model of reality. The concepts highlighted by Russel Ackoff are useful in government and beyond; really any social system.

Changing Behavior

Changing human behavior is difficult, but cultures have been doing this for eons. Culture exerts social pressure on people that bends and alters their natural desires. There is a paradox inherent to cultural control of anything. While one's culture defines the social norms that make up the "rights" and "wrongs" as defined by the group (morality); A group's culture is determined by an emergent property of the values that the individuals within the culture hold to be true (ethics).

The Power of Culture

The main thing that alters an individual's understanding of ethics is culture. Cultural forces are often powerful enough to subvert one's innate understanding of ethics (their self derived understanding of right and wrong using introspection). Culture is extremely powerful; "Culture is king."

The Power of the Individual

That said, our innate knowledge of ethics is hard to fully alter. "I feel, therefore I know ethics" is an axiom of ethical truth. A basic understanding of how to derive ethics can give someone the understanding and conviction to challenge their culture. Simply asking yourself, "How would I like if if that was done to me?" is the basis of ethical understanding. When you think of every historical progressive movement, their is typically a person or group of people that tap into their innate knowledge of right/wrong and communicate core ethical principles so clearly as to break through the noise of the cultural norm of the day and bend the arc of history towards justice.

The Paradox of Individual and Cultural Power is the paradox of Ethics and Morality

Individuals do have power. Cultural change first happens at the individual level with ethical understanding. As individuals influence others individuals there comes a tipping point in a society when a significant enough minority is able to convince the majority to change their views, thus altering the culture. So culture paradoxically is the thing that enforces morality (cultural norms) and it's a major force subverting ethical understanding at the individual level. The flip side of the paradox is, ethical understanding at the individual level is the only thing that can alter cultural understanding, but it requires a significant number of individuals all on the same page to provide the emergence of a cultural shift.

Getting back to the original premise of this article,

What is the greatest existential threat humanity faces?

Answer: "We have met the enemy and he is us."

In order for humanity to survive, we have to get better at resisting aspects of our nature, and enhance other aspects of our nature. Historically religion was used for this purpose. Unfortunately, religion is an antiquated technology that is accelerating our demise. Religion is the roots in the sculpture Polarity.

The Problem with Faith

The core issue with religion is it literally steals your sense of reality. Religion teaches us to irrationally believe in things that defy our senses, our knowledge and understanding of the natural world. It makes willful ignorance a virtue. It's main method of doing this is to subvert individual's natural curiosity with non-answers. If someone asks why? Religion answers, "God did it" or "It's God's will." Seeing as God is not definable, nor is his will, God as an answer is really a non-answer that has the effect of killing curiosity. This has a large a profound impact on individual academic and mental achievement. It has a large impact on society as politicians of religious conviction refuse to acknowledge harmful realities and are motivated to activity work against policies that would mitigate future harm.

Religion has concepts that are soothing, like the idea of heaven, or the idea of an all powerful force that can exert its will to assist you personally. That said, it also teaches people to be obedient to a ruthless authoritarian who promises to torture the insubordinate for eternity. Teaching your children about biblical sin and hell is tantamount to psychological child abuse. If you want to read up on this, follow the #ExEvangelical or #EmptyThePews on Twitter for countless examples of this kind of abuse.

I could go on forever discussing the ills of religion, in terms of epidemiology, psychology, practical and historic ills, etc., but let's agree it provides poor mental models for reality and we need new ones to prosper.

Idealized Design

What are the three big things individuals could do to positively mitigate the effects of climate change? Here's my list (there are countless others):

1. Have less children

2. Eat less meat

3. Stop consuming useless shit (this includes needless gift giving, etc.).

Outside of cultural pressure by religion, the state, your parents, etc., there is a biological urge to procreate, and not just with one child but with many. Resisting the innate biological urge to procreate beyond one or two children is extremely hard emotionally and practically (for some people; not all). Doing so is the single best thing you can do for the planet. People are the biggest cause of global warming and pollution. A future world with less people is a sustainable world. If we keep exponentially growing the population, we do so are the peril of humanity itself.

Meat consumption is a huge problem for the environment. The reasons for this are outline relatively well in the documentary Cowspiracy. The main issues with meat production is the lack of sanitation for fecal waste, which pollutes the water. In addition, the amount of farming land utilized for animal feed, and the large amounts of water and energy consumed for meat production are all major issues effecting global warming but also pollution in general. Resisting the urge to eat meat is difficult, but doable. The impact of doing so would be profound.

Limiting consumption has obvious benefits, but again, we are wired to want more, and we are wired to show appreciation to others with gifts, etc.

These are just three examples of high impact things that individuals can engage with which are as easy as deciding to think and act in the best interest of humanity (i.e. your descendants and the descendants of others), but as hard as resisting what biology and culture compels you to do.

Nuclear Weapons

Solving the nuclear threat will take wide, global agreement to reduce the number of nuclear weapons to zero. Nuclear weapons are far too destructive to exist. The existing stock plies should all be used to produce energy in nuclear reactors. This will reduce the threat they pose and offset global warming considerably.

Global Toxins

We have to come up with better materials and consumables that have an ecologically sustainable life cycle to them. Not only is this critically important, but it's also vital to our collective survival. It could also lead to vast new economic potentials, so this design challenge could have exponential benefits to society on multiple levels.

Summary

This blog is already too long and too rambling in nature, but to close it up I will end with this thought:

The way to make large societal shifts is to start at the individual level. When enough individuals agree on a path, if becomes cultural. This is a slow but effective approach to coordination problem issues.

Ethical understanding is at the core of these problems. Beyond that, the ability to synthesize complex system interactions will be a key element of solving coordination problems now and into the future.

Let's start by building a community of like minded individuals who instill curiosity in their children and maintain it throughout their lifetimes. Let's promote liberal thought, to break free of orthodoxy, and let's instill a sense of civil duty to ensure we have governments founded that reflect our values, ones founded on ethical principles.