Quartz

If we don’t know the dangers that the future brings, how can we prepare for them?

The End of the World is a podcast that explores existential risks, those organic and man-made catastrophes that could bring about the extinction of humanity. The series begins with the origin of life and goes on to list all of the ways Homo sapiens could be snuffed out by nature, before focusing on all the ways we might do it ourselves. Artificial intelligence, biotechnology, physics experiments, nanobots—we may have an odd 5 billion years before we get swallowed up by the sun, but at the rate we’re innovating, it’ll be a wonder if we see another century.

Sound bleak? Well, yes, it is. But the podcast comes at a particularly dark time in human history. Never before have we been haphazardly equipped with the tools to bring about our own demise. We’re recklessly building AIs and algorithms that have no empathy for their human creators. Pandemic-level pathogens escape their labs on a shockingly regular basis. And we’re only a decade or two away from a climate-change point of no return; global warming’s own event horizon. Yet we don’t seem to be in any great rush to course correct. (The Doomsday Clock currently has us at two minutes to midnight, for what it’s worth.)

Host Josh Clark takes the stance of the more you know, the more you can do about it. And he knows a lot of stuff. The co-host of the Stuff You Should Know podcast and a former senior writer at How Stuff Works, an educational website, Clark has made a living of making sense of the world and teaching it to others. Through all of his research, he thankfully doesn’t think we’re doomed—not yet, at least. We just have to make it through the next couple of years alive.

Clark walks us through the various ways we could potentially send the species into a tailspin, and how we can avoid that terrible fate.

For a long time, we thought that nuclear war or even catastrophic climate change could do it. And those would be really bad for humanity! If the kind of climate change that we’re going to start facing in 12 years happens, a lot of people are going to die, and a lot of people will be displaced. It’ll be a terrible period of adaption for humanity. But we will adapt. There will be people left to rebuild.

But with these new risks, there won’t be anyone left to rebuild. There are no chances left. If one existential risk befalls one person, that’s it! Humanity is done. We tend to think because we’ve made it this far, we’ll be okay. But we’ve never been exposed to anything that could take out all of humanity. Nothing’s had the goods. But the technology we’ve started to develop now does.

We could make it to a utopian, post-biological society. But there’s a big catch: To make it there, we have to safely get through this period beforehand, which is the most dangerous that society has ever lived through.Our moral trajectory is on an upward climb. It goes up and down—and sometimes it goes backward and it’s ugly and messy—but overall, it’s still moving upward. Take how we treat animals, for instance. In the last 50 years we went from animals having the same rights as the toaster in your house to prosecuting humans who mistreat animals. We now recognize that us humans—the most amazing creatures on Earth—don’t have the right to violate these animals’ natural rights. Once you open that door and step through, our view of other animals is going to become more harmonious and friendly. Maybe all humans will soon be on a vegan diet, eating in-vitro meat, and all of the animals’ habitats will be preserved. And I can’t believe that won’t be expanded to all life.

But we can’t do that if we all die—to commit omnicide, as Bostrom puts it. If we take humans out of the equation, we also take out the possibility that we could make the world better for all life. As the most intelligent life on Earth, we could see it as our responsibility to make life better for the rest rather than take take take take take. That’s my hope.

Even if we can bumble though our next million years on Earth with this level of technological maturity, we still run into a natural risk eventually. Maybe it’s an asteroid. Maybe it’s a horrible super-volcanic eruption. It could be anything. But in a billion or so years, the sun will grow hotter and brighter and will actually deplete the CO2 in Earth’s atmosphere, messing up the climate and making photosynthesis impossible. So life would basically cease here. That means there’s a 1.1 to 1.2 billion-year expiration date ahead of humanity, if we can just stick around on Earth for the next billion years.