The Fall of Humanity
Imagine, if you will, a big red magic button. Whenever pressed, this button will instantly kill every human being alive. Now imagine this button exists, what would you do with it?
I am hoping you answered with something along the lines of “not press it.” It would be safe in the hands of most humans. If such a button existed, it would likely be guarded by the highest authority under the highest priority. It is unlikely, then, that it would ever be pressed.
But what if there were two buttons? Well, it would lower the odds of continued human survival — but not by much. They would probably be kept safe, the two of them might even be kept in the same guarded vault. Humankind would still have some hope of continued survival.
But what if there were three magic buttons? Ten? A thousand? A million? With an ever-increasing number of buttons, the likelihood of one being pressed also increases.
The twist is that the red button exists.
Imagine, if you will, a video of you being awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Now, unless you have been awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom, this video does not exist — or does it? A video is nothing but images and sounds converted into 0s and 1s. If someone were to record you receiving a Presidential Medal of Freedom, this supposed video would be stored in a hard drive as a very specific combination of (probably) less than a billion 0s and 1s. But that combination of 0s and 1s existed even before the video was recorded, it exists right now. You don’t necessarily have to record that video, all you have to do is discover the right sequence of 0s and 1s that encodes this theoretical video, and you would have the video without ever having to record it.
Where am I going with this?
The red button exists in many forms, it just has to be discovered.
The red button is in biology — there is a genetic sequence that codes for a virus that could wipe out humanity, it just hasn’t been discovered. With biology becoming ever more sophisticated, it is only a matter of time until people will be able to carry out genetic editing in their garages. Just to illustrate how good we’re getting at this, here’s a biologist who genetically modified himself to cure his lactose intolerance.
The red button is in politics — Russia has nearly 14,000 nuclear warheads, the United States has over 6,000. If either of those countries decided they wanted, more than anything else, to annihilate the human race, they arguably could. However unlikely, there is a series of events that could make that happen — it just hasn’t been discovered.
The red button is in physics. There was considerable anxiety among physicists, before the first nuclear bomb test (Trinity test in July 1945), that the test would ignite the atmosphere of Earth and kill everyone. Physicists didn’t think it would happen, and it didn’t, but the threat was there. There is an experiment in physics that can destroy our planet, it just hasn’t been discovered yet.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic-Arthur C. Clarke
Technological advancement is amazing — it makes it increasingly easier to cure cancer, eradicate malaria, fix our climate, or get rid of lactose intolerance. But it also gives more red buttons to more people.
Tell someone from a hundred years ago about the internet, and they might forget to consider it could foster intellectual isolation and filter bubbles, polarizing people and sewing extremism.
As the human system rises in complexity, so then does the chance of extinction. Systems that are more complex are more prone to error. Gradually rising complexity is why empires fall, why organisms die, and it is the single most daunting threat facing humankind. If there is a cure, it remains to be discovered.
