From a young age, I was deeply influenced by my father’s interest in history and the Remembrance Day (November 11th) events by the Canadian Legion. However, despite many earnest attempts to instill in me a sense of the magnitude and meaning of the World Wars, they remained far removed from my everyday thoughts. They were distant, nebulous, and dramatic events with a larger-than-life cast of characters that made them seem more myth than history.

Gradually, over the intervening years, I’ve garnered a sober and deep sense of the magnitude of human folly during the World Wars and throughout the rest of history. My understanding grew slowly thanks to conversations, movies, and many books. Thanks to all of the patient friends who’ve helped me walk this path.

Recently, the arc of my life brought me to the Paris Peace Forum. One hundred years after the Armistice of World War I (November 11th, 1918), President Macron of France brought together dozens of heads of state and hundreds of governance thinkers and practitioners with the purpose of figuring out how the world can create and maintain peace.

Being lucky enough to attend, I feel an obligation to provide everyone else a glimpse of what insight I have gleaned from attending the Forum.

Here goes.

There are no simple solutions to “the world’s problems”. In fact, there are no simple problems either. All of the simple problems have already been solved. If a problem looks simple to solve today, it’s because there are other factors at play, including clashing beliefs or the fundamentals of limited money, time, and attention. In my experience, if anyone has a neat and tidy narrative about a problem and how it can be solved, they’re typically missing entire categories of systems or actors that relate to that problem. If we seek to understand our world and act effectively within it, I think we must beware tidy narratives. We must stress-test the stories we’re told by subjecting them to scrutiny by the smartest, best-informed people we know.

Most governance challenges may seem surprisingly mundane. How do we get food and water to those that need them? How do we remove the barriers that prevent the impoverished from being able to help themselves? How do we end the use of torture by governments? How do we tax large corporations? How do we foster interfaith dialog?

I think that this apparent mundanity is an illusion. In today’s world, governance both sets the rules for how a society operates and acts directly (and often powerfully) to shape outcomes. Getting the details right means that people can thrive; getting them wrong leads to suffering and conflict.

Nothing happens in isolation, so every success or failure of governance can have reverberating effects across the society and the world. Modern governance must embrace this complexity to succeed, which often means making compromises. Ideologues on all sides of politics either miss or dismiss this point. Again, there are no simple solutions, but there is a powerful undercurrent in human tendencies that draws us toward simple narratives. If we hope to help our societies thrive, each of us should do our very best to understand multiple theories and perspectives on society and how it works.

This vision of governance may be unsatisfying at first glance. I think we all have a strong tendency to like simple questions, simple answers, and systems that we can fully understand. We like to feel like we know the game that we’re playing.

But I think we can go much further than simply accepting this discomfort. Pondering the vast scope of governance can elicit satisfaction, hope, respect, and even awe. Functioning governance is perhaps humanity’s greatest invention. It’s a work of stunning complexity that has evolved over centuries to solve problems as complex as we are. When you add up all of the mundane pieces of modern governance and the systems that they govern, you get something beautiful, powerful, and precious: civilization.

If you’re reading this, it’s highly likely that you live in a country where you have opportunities to contribute to and change the governance of your society. Like me, you thus have some power to shape the evolution of governance. I believe that this power also implies that we have a responsibility to conscientiously engage if we can. We’re all players in a game whose rules we can change.

But where to focus our efforts? Some ideologies ask us to pay attention only to people who are like us or local to us. Some people see the world as a battle where only the highly motivated warriors of good can hold back the darkness – and the darkness will always be there. In essence, they believe that there are good people and bad people, and that the good must marshall all of their strength to fight back the encroaching influence (or movement) of the bad.

In today’s world, I think that this narrative is almost entirely misleading and misguided. I think that the challenge of our time is not about holding back the darkness, it’s about casting the light we have found to every soul. Given the chance, most people would be a force for good in this world. Our challenge is to ensure that everyone in the world gets that chance. It’s not just about minding your own house, it’s about engaging with the rest of the world with integrity.¹ The “light” I refer to is that of modern governance and open, civilized society. Over the last several decades we’ve accumulated a lot of evidence that humanity is succeeding at building effective societies – despite huge setbacks and risks. There is much cause for hope, but much work still to be done.

All of this brings me to the core of my intent. Given all that I know and all that I think is possible, what do I aspire to accomplish?

I want to see how far humanity can go. How good of a world can we build for ourselves? What are the possibilities for human flourishing on this planet and beyond? My hope begins with the realization that open, modern societies today allow and foster human thriving that is beautiful, inspiring, and precious. If systems can be built (or modified) that allow and foster such thriving across of all of humanity, we will have achieved a worthy goal.

For those of you who are inclined to look further into the future to anchor your hope, I invite you to meditate on this thought:

Everything that is not forbidden by laws of nature is achievable, given the right knowledge. – David Deutsch

Soon, I hope to explore in more detail where this thought takes me personally. For now though, I think it’s worth noting that humanity is on a path towards tremendous knowledge and power. If we can avoid the dangers posed by nature and ourselves, I think that we will (gradually) shape our corner of the universe to our desires. What I wonder about is what those desires will be, how they will change, and how we ourselves will be remade in their achievement.

———–

Extra notes:

Notable public speeches related to the Forum:

1. Emmanuel Macron’s Armistice Day Speech at the Arc de Triomphe
2. Angela Merkel’s speech opening the Paris Peace Forum
3. Transcript of António Guterres speech at the Paris Peace Forum

1. Here, I agree with the sentiment expressed by Macron in his Armistice Day Speech (English version) in which he argues that nationalism is a betrayal of the values that a nation holds dear. At least for the case of France and most (if not all) advanced nations, I think that this is very true. The prevailing cultures in these places are generous, open-minded, and enlightened. Turning inwards and ignoring the plight of the world would be a betrayal of those deeply held values. It might be very difficult to meaningfully engage with the world while retaining one’s integrity, but I think that it is what we must aspire to do.

In a previous post, we talked about the need for global governance in order to effectively tackle said global challenges. In the next few posts, we’ll look at some of these challenges in detail, beginning with armed conflict.

Over the last few generations, we have experienced such a prolonged era of peace between great powers that it is tempting to dismiss armed conflict as a global issue worth further consideration. Why invest resources in solving this issue when it appears to have already been solved?

It’s important to understand how recent this peace is and why it is so unprecedented. Throughout the ages, humans have had the tendency to murder, maim, and torture one another. In fact, it’s really only in relatively recent history that violence and sadism has become the exception rather than the norm in the human experience.¹

Over the past few centuries, violence has declined dramatically in various ways – two of which are particularly worth noting. First, there has been a decline in interpersonal violence within societies that began millenia ago and has continued up until the present day. Second, over recent decades there has been an enormous reduction in interstate conflicts, particularly between great powers.¹

The reduction of interpersonal violence came in several waves, beginning millennia ago with the creation of the first states. Throughout history there have been several additional factors in the decline of violence, including the spread of civilizing norms like table manners, the invention of the printing press, and the Enlightenment, which began in Europe in the 18th century and spread to the rest of the world from there.²  The further implementation of strong centralized governments throughout much of the world in the late 19th and early 20th centuries continued the reduction in overall lawlessness.

The decline in interstate conflicts is much more recent. Crucial factors for this decline include norms against war, the spread of democracy, and the shattering destruction of the two world wars. The Long Peace following the conclusion of the world wars has been the most peaceful time in human history.³ Thus, it’s worth exploring why this peace came about in the wake of World War II.

The world wars were unprecedented in terms of their material destructiveness and ended with the unleashing of the most terrible weapon yet seen by humanity. As such, they serve as a profound cautionary tale for all great powers that no one is keen on repeating. It should be no surprise then, that at the conclusion of those wars, a body of incentives and political structures was assembled that could create significant and lasting peace – or at least peace that has at least lasted until the present. This peace has been maintained not only through Mutually Assured Destruction between nuclear superpowers, but also by other factors, such as the fact that democracies do not typically go to war with each other. This peace is significant in that no great powers have warred directly with each other in more than half a century.

Conflict, however, still exists – in the form of civil wars, proxy conflicts, genocides, and terrorism. External factors now play a major role in shaping hostilities around the world – often leading to their perpetuation or escalation.⁴  Major powers, unable to set aside their conflicting interests, are often unwilling to work together in order to prevent or end conflict. Even if they do so on the surface, they cannot agree about the strategy best taken. One only need look at the most recent and prominent international proxy conflict – the Syrian Civil War – for a potent example of this issue.⁵

There is also the issue of emerging technologies making conflict a greater threat to humanity. Ballistic missile defense and combat drones may weaken global military restraint – a false sense of security being granted by the idea that ICBMs could be shot down and that real soldiers do not have to be put in harm’s way in order to attack the enemy. Cyber-attacks on an unprecedented scale may be capable of radically destabilizing the world’s governments, infrastructures, communities, and markets. Biological and nanotechnological weapons could change the face of warfare and reshape the level of coordinated countermeasures that need to be rallied in order to protect the peace, which is ultimately more fragile than it might seem. As long as nations continue to be divided – as long as they call each other “rivals” or “enemies” – war will always be possible.

Government worldwide being consolidated into an agreed-upon structure, would of course not solve all of these problems right away. It would, however, allow for improved coordination between major powers to help deal with conflicts and resolve them instead of escalating them. The post-war settlement, which created the United Nations and its associated institutions, was profoundly important in setting the stage for the peacefulness and prosperity of the decades since.⁶  A renewed effort to invest in global governance institutions and and norms could likewise steer humanity toward peace. Governance institutions provide a forum for constructive dialog, centralized action, and an embodiment of norms as they evolve.⁷

Reformation of the Security Council is an oft-stated idea, but has not happened for a reason: It is a hard sell to the current Security Council, and therefore unlikely to happen in the near future. However, there are other options which can be explored. In Ruling Ourselves, we examine a few ways in which the UN can be expanded and improved.⁸  To close, we’ll describe a few of the most promising ways that global governance could be improved or modified such that it would reduce the risks of conflict.

One way to do this is to create new narrow-mandate institutions which aim to solve specific transnational problems that all major nations agree on, thus defusing some of the power conflicts that have arisen – and continue to rise – amongst them. For example, a UN institution aimed at combating piracy on the open seas, armed by a coalition of all major powers and staffed by all member states, could help fix a problem that plagues many nations. Cooperation in realms such as this is not as far-fetched as it may sound. There are plenty of problems that most nations agree should be solved, but for which there is currently no institution or agreement that is both trustworthy and powerful enough to accomplish the goal. This kind of trust can be earned by successful institutions over time, thus inspiring optimism about global cooperation.

Supplementing narrow-mandate institutions would be institutions that provide specific aid or information accessible to all nations. For example, acquiring, analyzing, and publishing information about existing and imminent conflicts is very helpful to national governments. Global institutions do some of this today, and it helps inform all nations and thus helps them act to achieve their goals – which of course are not always aligned. As trust is built up over time, these institutions can work in tandem with national governments to deliberately help prevent conflict.

Finally, while short term “global governance” refers to nations cooperating, there is of course the stretch goal of a unitary world government at some far-flung time in the future.⁹ If the entire world does unite at some point in the future under a single banner, that will greatly reduce the chance of conflict simply by virtue of there being no other nations to go to war with. The majority of conflicts throughout history have been conflicts between nations, while civil conflicts are a minority. This is no longer the case, of course – civil wars are now the majority. As civil wars break out, other nations stand by and watch as they disagree what to do about it or if anything should be done. However, the thought of a regional conflict breaking out while the rest of the world does nothing under a unitary world government is as unthinkable as a civil war being limited to a single state of the United States while the rest of the country does nothing. Beyond this, stability of government is also closely tied with a lack of internal conflict. A stable and unified world economic system where all nations share similar goals will make for an atmosphere where fighting over ethnic boundaries defining lines on a map will simply be obsolete. While that lies in the realm of science fiction for now, between here and there are many intermediate steps involving deeper ties between nations that have already begun to take shape. Think about how unlikely war would be between two European Union nations, for instance. It is almost impossible to imagine, yet a mere century ago, Europe was ground zero for the largest conflicts in history.

It must be stated that there is an element of “chicken or the egg” with regards to global governance being responsible for a further decline in conflict. Perhaps a decline in conflict and improvements in global governance simply go hand-in-hand. Certainly one could imagine that if all the great powers got along we’d live in a peaceful world. But, that is more or less what is necessary in order to build a powerful global institution/government with the ability and willingness to solve conflict. In reality, it is likely that baby steps will need to be taken, with each strengthening of global governance being accompanied by other factors that earn trust and deepen coordination between nations. This will lead to declines in violence that in turn lead to greater stability and trust, which in turn opens the door to a strengthening of global governance, and so on.

As conflict continues to evolve, so must our solutions. To create permanent global peace, humanity will need to navigate a tangle of incentives, beliefs, and technologies; yet it is undeniably in our interest to put aside geopolitical differences for the sake of self-preservation. The challenge now is to get global leaders to take meaningful steps toward the constructive resolution of conflicts, ideally via shared norms and global institutions.

1. Pinker, S., 2012. The better angels of our nature: Why violence has declined. Penguin Books.
2. Pinker, S., 2019. Enlightenment now: The case for reason, science, humanism, and progress. Penguin Books.
3. Gaddis, J.L., 1989. The long peace: Inquiries into the history of the cold war. Oxford University Press on Demand.
4. Hironaka, A., 2009. Neverending wars: The international community, weak states, and the perpetuation of civil war. Harvard University Press.
5. Matar, Linda, Kadri, Ali (Eds.), 2018. Syria: From National Independence to Proxy War.
6. Held, D., 2016. Elements of a theory of global governance. Philosophy & Social Criticism, 42(9), pp.837-846.
7. Schelling, T.C., 1980. The strategy of conflict. Harvard university press.
8. Harack, B., Laskowski, K., Bailey, R., Marcotte, J., Jaques, S., Datta, D., and Kuski, S., 2017. Ruling Ourselves: The deliberate evolution of global cooperation and governance. Available online: http://rulingourselves.com
9. Bostrom, N., 2006. What is a singleton. Linguistic and Philosophical Investigations, 5(2), pp.48-54.

The destruction of the rainforests may seem like another issue along those lines. And while government intervention will need to be part of the solution long-term, there are steps that everyone can take in the meantime to put a small dent in the pressure facing the rainforests.

Reduce your Paper and Wood Consumption

Some of the most endangered forests on the planet are being cut down to make wood and paper products. We’ve already pointed out 31 different ways to reduce paper usage, which will help reduce the demand for paper and take some of that pressure off. Wood products can also be selectively chosen by determining the source of the wood and ensuring it’s not coming from a vulnerable forest. If you are building a house or adding on to your home, utilize wood efficient building techniques and avoid old growth wood products. Learn about alternatives such as reclaimed or recycled lumber, composite lumber, and independently certified wood.

Fund Ecotourism, Rainforest Communities, and Conservation Efforts

There are large numbers of different avenues to spend dollars to help the rainforest. Giving the poor people in countries where rainforests are in danger alternative ways to make a living is important, as they typically take up destructive jobs in order to put food on the table. Supporting ecotourism is a great way to support communities because it not only provides an alternative way to make money for people in these areas but it encourages the people who live in these areas to protect the source of their livelihood. Funding efforts to buy up land for conservation purposes is also a great investment as this protects the land and creates jobs as well when done properly and doesn’t ignore the realities of life in these areas. The Rainforest Action Network for example has a program called “Protect-An-Acre”. This program provides funding to help forest peoples gain legal recognition of their territories, develop locally-based alternative economic initiatives, and resist destructive practices such as logging and fossil fuel development.

Reduce your Beef Consumption

When it comes to the Amazon rainforest in Brazil and rainforests in Central America, much of these countries’ rainforests have been cleared to raise cattle whose meat is exported to the USA and abroad. This beef is typically found in fast food hamburgers or processed beef products. Burger King, for example is not only owned by a Brazilian firm but uses primarily Brazilian beef products. The United States imports over 150 million pounds of beef from Brazil annually. Reducing your consumption of beef will reduce demand for it, cutting back on pressure to clear more forests for cattle. Furthermore, if you are going to eat beef, make sure you can tell that it is responsibly sourced and not imported from a rainforest country.

Support Activism Networks and Protection Agencies

There are many different agencies out there committed to protecting the rainforests that do great work, the aforementioned Rainforest Action Network is only one example. Some are committed to only the protection of rainforest; others, only to environmental issues; while others are more generalized, such as Avaaz. Whoever, you lend your support to, do your research to make sure they are a worthy cause and are effective in what they do.

Don’t Support Unethical Businesses

This is a good rule to follow generally. It applies to the rainforests because if companies (such as the aforementioned Burger King) are responsible for rainforest destruction (or other bad things!), then you should not support them by using their services or buying their products, if at all possible. Boise, for example, sells wood products from the world’s most endangered forests, including the tropical rainforests of the Amazon and Southeast Asia and the temperate rainforests of Chile. Citigroup would be another example – many people do not realize that Citigroup is involved in many world’s most destructive projects, such as the replacement of orangutan habitat with palm plantations in Indonesia.

Support Grassroots

Public protests are in fact, effective, as long as they are targeted, coherent, and rally against a cause that is actionable. Protests such as Occupy Wall Street are not typically effective because they are not specific or targeted enough and can be hijacked by almost anyone to mean almost anything. However, coherent protesting is effective. You can help by supporting grassroots movements in your area or by starting your own grassroots movement. In 1999, Home Depot, the single largest retailer of lumber in the world, agreed to phase out its sales of old growth wood. This victory was a direct result of the hard work of grassroots activists, who staged more than six hundred demonstrations at Home Depot stores across the U. S. and Canada.

The most important challenge for humanity to overcome is that of existential risks. One way to look at the danger of an existential risk is to quantify the level of global coordination needed to deal with it. While best-shot risks, at one end of the spectrum only require that a single nation, organization or even individual (i.e., superhero) has the means and the will to save everyone, weakest-link risks, at the other end of the spectrum, are dangers that might require literally every country to take appropriate action to prevent catastrophe, with no room for failure.^{2 3}

We’ve always been at risk of natural disaster, but with advances in our level of technology the risk we pose to ourselves as a species becomes ever greater. Nuclear weapons are a well-known risk that we still live with to this day. The progress of technological research exposes us to new dangers such as bioengineered superbugs, nanotechnological menaces, and the risk of an out-of-control artificial intelligence with ill-intent. Increased levels of global coordination are needed to combat many of these risks, as described in our article on the cooperation possibilities frontier.

There are other problems that don’t necessarily threaten the species or even civilization as we know it, but which are holding back the development of prosperity and progress. Armed conflict, around since the dawn of history, still haunts us today. Even though wars between great powers appear to be a thing of the past, regional conflicts still account for tremendous human suffering and loss of life in parts of the world without stable governance.⁴

Other problems have emerged precisely because of our successes in the past. The unprecedented advancement of human wellbeing and prosperity over the past century has been based in large part on the use of fossil fuels, thus exposing us to climate change. Widespread automation, already a stressor on society, will put increased pressure on the social and economic fabric of our societies over the next few decades. Global governance can help alleviate these issues in various ways – we refer the interested reader to the very detailed work in Ruling Ourselves.

Finally, global governance will increasingly be judged not only by the extent to which it prevents harm, but also by its demonstrated ability to improve human wellbeing.⁵ Progress has let us set our sights higher as a species, both for what we consider to be the right trajectory for humanity and for our own conduct.⁶ Major advances in human wellbeing can be accomplished with existing technology and modest improvements in global coordination.

Effective global governance is global governance that tackles these issues better than the regional governments of the world can independently. Global governance is key to solving global problems. Without it, we may not be able to avoid weakest-link existential risks or regulate new and dangerous technologies. With it, we may be able to prosper as we never have before. The next step is to determine how effective global governance can be achieved.

1. For a good primer on the subject of Global Governance, we suggest Hale, T., Held, D. and Young, K., 2013. Gridlock: why global cooperation is failing when we need it most. Hale et. all frame global governance as the solution to the issue of major world power’s inability to coordinate
2. Hirshleifer, J., 1983. From Weakest-Link to Best-Shot: The Voluntary Provision of Public Goods. Public choice, 41[3], pp.371-386.
3. Barrett, S., 2005. The Problem of Averting Global Catastrophe. Chi. J. Int’l L., 6, p.527.
4. Pinker, S., 2012. The better angels of our nature: Why violence has declined. Penguin Books.
5. Harack, B., Laskowski, K., Bailey, R., Marcotte, J., Jaques, S., Datta, D., and Kuski, S., 2017. Ruling Ourselves: The deliberate evolution of global cooperation and governance. Available online: http://rulingourselves.com 
6. United Nations, 2000. Millennium development goals. Available online: http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals [accessed on 21 July 2017].

As we researched and brainstormed ideas for that paper, we found ourselves continually confronted with a deceptively simple question: Why don’t the countries of the world cooperate more?

On topics as wide-ranging as trade, war, and climate change, it’s evident that humanity could achieve better results if countries “could just work together!”

Unfortunately, none of these problems are as simple as they first appear (as most of our readers probably know). Negotiations stall out for many reasons. In a future post, we hope to explore some of these reasons in much more detail. For the topic at hand, it’s sufficient to note that as you increase the number of nations that need to agree on something, the less likely that agreement becomes – or the more conservative your proposal must become in order to reach agreement.

Considering this, we realized that this challenge could be framed as a trade-off between depth of coordination (i.e. how much independence each player has to give up) and breadth of coordination (i.e. how many players need to work together). When illustrated, this trade-off is strongly reminiscent of the production possibility frontier in economics, which illustrates the total amount of a product that can be produced given a set of resources.

Thus, we termed our idea the cooperation possibility frontier.

Illustrated below is an example of the cooperation possibility frontier. On the horizontal axis is the breadth of coordination – the proportion of all actors that must cooperate in order to achieve something. As we go from left to right on the horizontal axis, coordination problems require an increasing percentage of actors to cooperate. At the lower extreme, best-shot problems require only one actor to take (effective) action. At the upper extreme, weakest-link risks require the cooperation of all actors.

On the vertical axis is the depth of coordination. Deep coordination can present many challenges, including monetary cost, reduced independence of action, and the many costs, delays and frustrations associated with a framework for coordination (e.g., communication channels, procedures, etc.). Since our example is the global cooperation possibility frontier and we’re therefore focusing on the coordination of nation-states, the vertical axis is thus strongly related to the amount of sovereignty that must be ceded by nations in order to solve a particular problem.

On the plot, we’ve also illustrated several salient global coordination problems that we believe provide some insight into the dynamics of coordination. They include:

• Defending the Earth from Asteroids. This risk is in the lower-left because it requires only a single actor (e.g., one of the space-faring nations like the USA or China) to solve the problem – and there is no significant cost or sovereignty lost in the process. Note that the fact that we still do not yet have all of the requisite technologies to avert this risk is not relevant to the placement of this risk in the lower-left corner of the plot.
• Preventing wars between great powers and creating the United Nations. Both of these challenges require a significant number of nations to cooperate rather deeply.
• Protecting the ozone layer. In order to avert the danger of a disappearing ozone layer, the Montreal Protocol required agreement from almost all nations on the planet – but that agreement was not significantly costly in terms of sovereignty or money.²
• Creating a sovereign global government. This is a hypothetical future goal for humanity, where we choose to build a global government which is the ultimate legal authority in the world – with no possibility of this government being overruled by smaller governments. Some parts of the global risks literature refer to such an entity as a singleton. ³

The arcs from the upper left down towards the lower-right are illustrated estimations of the global cooperation possibility frontier at a particular time in history (with prospective frontiers expanding out into the future). Each such frontier describes the possibility for global cooperation at a given time, where cooperation problems within (below) the frontier might be solvable but those beyond the frontier are not. The frontier has expanded since the mid-20th century, but further progress is not guaranteed.¹

We’ve found that the global cooperation possibility frontier is a useful tool for achieving coherent discussions about global risks and global coordination challenges. In Ruling Ourselves, we deeply explore one question based on this analysis: How can the global cooperation possibility frontier be expanded? To that end, we explore what factors seem to be hampering the expansion of the frontier today and how various actors in the world can act throughout the coming years and decades to deliberately expand the frontier so that humanity will be better positioned to face the coordination challenges of tomorrow. The full work goes into detail on the opportunities for transformative work in these areas:

• Building our capacity for governance reform at the global level.

• Pursuing holistic security, where nations pragmatically choose to invest in the most cost-effective ways to help other nations succeed – and thus make everyone more secure.

• Safeguarding the global digital commons so that humans everywhere can learn about each other’s humanity, thus making us much less likely to dehumanize and dismiss each other’s fears, cares, and dreams.

• Deploying transformative digital tools to dramatically improve the effectiveness and reach of our collaborative systems – including government.

• Addressing widespread automation in a way that allows societies to not only survive widespread automation, but to thrive.

• Pursuing peaceful global political convergence with the long-term goal of ensuring that all of humanity lives under governments of their choosing.

Other questions can and should be asked. Here are a few that have occurred to us:

• Might it be possible to find ways to bring some coordination problems down-and-to-the-left on this plot, effectively making them easier to solve?

• Would it be possible to deliberately reshape the frontier on short notice if widespread coordination is required for humanity to avert an imminent existential threat – and what dangers might there be in such a strategy?

• What is the detailed shape of the frontier today?

• Does the frontier appear to manifest consistently across many areas of international coordination, or does the degree of coordination appear to be primarily dependent on the specific topics being considered?

• How strong is the correlation between a nation cooperating on one topic and their cooperation on other topics?

To close, we’d like to reiterate that this idea (and illustrative plot) is the core of our answer to the question “Why don’t the countries of the world cooperate more?” In brief, cooperation becomes more difficult as you increase the number of players and the costs of cooperation rise. We hope that these insights will help guide future strategy on global coordination challenges – a topic we hope will receive much more attention.

1. Harack, B., Laskowski, K., Bailey, R., Marcotte, J., Jaques, S., Datta, D., and Kuski, S., 2017. Ruling Ourselves: The deliberate evolution of global cooperation and governance. Available online: http://rulingourselves.com 
2. See the Multilateral Fund for Implementation of the Montreal Protocol, http://www.multilateralfund.org
3. Bostrom, N., 2006. What is a singleton. Linguistic and Philosophical Investigations, 5[2], pp.48-54.

Roughly speaking, global governance refers to governance on a global scale. While the concept seems simple in theory, it can take many forms in practice. National governments come in many shapes and sizes. But global governance, as we shall see, is a different beast altogether.

First, it’s important to note that governance is not the same as government. A government is a formal body that is solely responsible for governance of specific institutions within a jurisdiction. Governance on the other hand typically refers to rules, institutions, and officials that have the power to shape the behavior of actors in a system. For example, the enforcement of laws and regulations as well as the provision of safety and services. It should be clear then, that achieving governance with a global scale or impact doesn’t necessitate a single global government. There is a continuum from negotiation between nations to broad-impact treaties and agreements¹ to trade/customs unions to political unions. These exist from a transnational all the way up to a global scale.

On a global scale, this could be achieved the same way as on a national scale: one monolithic, unitary government operating across the entire globe. All people would adhere to the same rules and be answerable to the same final authority, and all people would rely on the same institutions to provide safety and services. In other words, the whole world could unite as a single country.

This is in fact probably the first concept that springs to mind when people hear the term “global governance”. There have been many attempts by futurists to propose frameworks and systems that would be most effective for unitary governance of the world in this fashion² .

That said, such a system will not be built for a long, long time – if it is ever built at all. For the reasons why, look forward to our upcoming piece on the Global Cooperation Possibilities Frontier. For now, it is sufficient to know that such a monolithic global government would both represent a high level of national government coordination and sacrifice of sovereignty.

Is global governance impossible without first achieving this daunting and distant goal? Not at all. In fact, manifestations of global governance have been in place, or at least the building blocks for it, since the end of the Second World War.

The United Nations governing body and its institutions constitute a framework that allows for global governance. It fits the definition because it allows for a democratic framework of voting on regulations that apply globally, it provides a safety net to prevent or respond to wars and humanitarian crises, and is funded by nations which are a part of it. This structure allows for an array of institutions and services that provide everything from consulting, advisory, justice, humanitarian aid, education, information, and so on. In theory, it could provide much more, and on a global scale.

In fact, the United Nations (UN) is the closest thing we have to a global government. Today, it contains the closest approximations that the world has to a constitution (the Universal Declaration of Human Rights); a set of deliberative lawmaking bodies (the General Assembly and Councils); a police system among nations (the Security Council); and an executive branch (the UN bureaucracies).

Regardless of the shape global governance takes, it’s something that humanity will certainly need in the future. With all of the challenges and risks facing us, our ability and willingness to cooperate is going to directly impact our ability to thrive.

1. See The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade.
2. See, for example, the global governance model proposed by one of the winners of the 2017 New Shape Prize. Lopez-Claros, A., Groff, M., Dahl, A., Global Governance and the Emergence of Global Institutions for the 21st Century, 2017.

In this post, we will do our best to provide an introduction to the key components of human survival beyond Earth. We’ll also provide links to resources for readers interested in digging deeper into these particular topics.

Before humans can live on Mars, we must first get there. Before we can settle Mars permanently, we must be able to send explorers with the resources to explore Mars and return to Earth safely. The first challenge is that no existing rocket has the capacity to carry humans to Mars in a single launch. At present, many launches would be required to assemble the needed equipment and fuel in near-Earth space prior to a Mars mission. The more pieces a mission must be launched and constructed from, the more challenging and expensive this orchestra of orbital assembly becomes. Additionally, a larger portion of your launch mass must be dedicated to carrying out meeting and mating of separate portions to assemble a whole mission.

The Saturn V Moon rocket was large enough to send people and cargo to Mars, but it has been discontinued since 1972. By 2020, at least two heavy lift rockets are expected to be flying: NASA’s SLS and SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy. Heavy rockets such as these would allow human Mars missions to be constructed from just a few independent launches, or for hardware to be sent to Mars from a single launch. Once these rockets have proven themselves, humanity’s ambitions can be unleashed toward Mars. The Falcon Heavy has taken its first step in proving itself by sending the test payload ‘Star Man’ towards Mars in 2018.

Cost-effective and reliable rockets must be available before a sustained human presence can be established on Mars. This is no easy task, because these two goals can be at odds with each other, and it takes many tests and launches to demonstrate reliability. At present, SpaceX is landing the first stage of their rockets and launching them again on subsequent missions. As SpaceX is able to refine this technique, launching things into orbit will get substantially cheaper, at a tenth or less the current price.

Any explorer sent to Mars must also have access to food, water, and enough fuel to return to Earth. By providing some of these supplies by using resources already on Mars, we become capable of doing more with less. We would be able to send more astronauts and scientific equipment to Mars, and they would be able to stay longer. There is something powerful about the idea of living off the land of Mars, just as explorers have been doing on Earth for millennia. Nobody leaves the driveway with everything they may need for a cross-country trip. When we can provide these vital resources reliably and efficiently, we can move from exploration to colonization; from habitats to homes.

You may not be accustomed to thinking of Mars as a place rich with resources, but it certainly is. Mars has rich mineral and material resources, in an abundance found nowhere closer to Earth. Today, serious organizations are preparing to mine asteroids, and large ones may hold a trillion dollars in mineral wealth. Mars has a trillion times that potential. Before humans used them, the Earth had mineral wealth accessible on the surface. On Mars, these resources still lay upon the surface, waiting for us to take and shape them. Mars has an atmosphere which is not hospitable or harmful to life. In comparison, Venus has air rich in acid and so hot that it is inhospitable to even hardened machines. Mars’ atmosphere is accessible anywhere and can be harvested more easily than ground resources. Gravity is very important to both our bodies and technologies. The longest a human has spent without gravity has been a year, and re-adjusting took weeks. Even making and using a toilet is a very involved affair without gravity. One of the greatest challenges of getting people to Mars is keeping them healthy during the many month interplanetary flight without the influence of gravity.

Resources are one thing – gravity, another – but what about water, food, and fuel? The atmosphere of Mars contains abundant carbon and oxygen in the form of carbon dioxide. Its soil and ice caps also contain a surprising amount of water. With these in-situ (native, local) resources and a source of energy, it is possible to produce breathable air, drinking water, and rocket fuel. If we don’t make these things on Mars, every ounce of food for the crew and litre of fuel for the voyage home will need to be launched from Earth and carried safely to Mars’ surface. This would be extremely heavy and therefore expensive. Key thinkers on the colonization of Mars, including Robert Zubrin and Elon Musk, agree that using Martian resources is vital for any mission, and have published their plans for how to accomplish this.

Actionable proposals already exist for securing water on Mars.¹ Since water can largely be recycled, the question of whether we bring our own drinking water to Mars or extract it there is not a crucial one for the viability of human exploration on Mars. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for food. The ability to produce food on Mars is crucial for viable long term settlement. In fact, it can provide substantial benefit for even relatively short missions.²  The first Martian explorers will likely conduct experiments to refine and demonstrate this technology. Humanity must first prove that food can be produced safely and reliably before explorers and colonists can rely on Martian food at all. Martian agriculture could also accept human waste as an input, thus serving as part of a system for recovering nutrients and water.

There are substantial challenges to growing food on Mars. The Martian atmosphere is much thinner than Earth’s, and plants are accustomed to growing in very biologically active soil. Much research is already being done on this front in simulated Martian environments, which will help us develop this precious technology more quickly and cost effectively than if we waited to experiment on Mars.

Experiments ^{3 4}   have shown that Martian soil will likely be an adequate growing medium, with some known challenges.⁵ Other experiments have examined the challenges of growing plants in a low pressure environment. Plants that can thrive with low pressure and low oxygen would allow large greenhouses to be built on Mars.⁶ This would be much cheaper than oxygenating and pressurizing them to match human requirements.⁷ Keep in mind that pressurized structures are under constant strain, requiring that they be very strong. Developing plants and growing techniques that are capable of producing food at Mars’ ambient pressure would be very handy for the long term habitation of Mars, but we do not need to have that worked out before our first trips. Even growing food in a pressurized environment (like a crew module) for our first food growing operation on Mars could still be a wise move because less food would need to be imported from Earth. Establishing this experience early on would go a long way to laying the groundwork for rapidly growing, thriving Martian cities.

Keeping people alive during a trip to Mars and back is a challenging task. However, scientists and engineers have explored the underlying problems in great detail and have designed promising solutions. If fuel, water, and food can be secured from the in-situ resources of Mars, then larger, longer, cheaper, and more frequent missions become possible. In short, humans can start exploring Mars in the near future. The challenges for doing so have been outlined above, and the techniques are already in development. These bold initial missions will accomplish much more than exploring Mars, they will establish the foothold necessary for permanent Mars habitation. The technology and techniques described here are also applicable to crossing interplanetary space for other human exploration missions, such as to Venus or to the asteroid belt and its rich resources. These technologies are a crucial part of humanity’s coming of age in the solar system.

In our next article, we will discuss the greater challenges of establishing permanent human habitation and civilization of Mars.

1. Wiens, Jordan, Forest Bommarito, Eric Blumenstein, Matt Ellsworth, Toni Cisar, B. McKinney, and B. Knecht. “Water extraction from Martian soil.” In Fourth Annual HEDS-UP Forum, p. 11. 2001.
2. It is, after all, a very long way home even after the mission crew leaves the surface of Mars. If Martian-grown food could even partially feed the crew on their voyage home, it would mean substantial savings on launch weight from Earth.
3. Perchonok, Michele H., Maya R. Cooper, and Patricia M. Catauro. “Mission to Mars: food production and processing for the final frontier.” Annual review of food science and technology 3 (2012): 311-330
4. Davies, Fred T., et al. “Growing Plants for NASA–Challenges in Lunar and Martian Agriculture.” Combined Proceedings International Plant Propagators’ Society. Vol. 53. 2003.
5. Navarro‐González, Rafael, et al. “Reanalysis of the Viking results suggests perchlorate and organics at midlatitudes on Mars.” Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets 115.E12 (2010)
6. Richards, Jeffrey T., et al. “Exposure of Arabidopsis thaliana to hypobaric environments: implications for low-pressure bioregenerative life support systems for human exploration missions and terraforming on Mars.” Astrobiology 6.6 (2006): 851-866
7. At its thickest, Mars’ atmosphere is a 20th of Earth’s.

Volunteer group made semifinals for $5 million governance prize

Regina, Saskatchewan, May 21st — Graduates from the University of Regina have envisioned a practical path forward for global governance. Hailing from across Saskatchewan, they banded together in 2017 in the hopes that fresh eyes and hard work could improve the state of world politics.

They were chosen as one of 100 semifinalists for the New Shape Prize, a $5 million USD competition funded by the Global Challenges Foundation – a nonprofit that identifies and addresses threats to humanity. Of 2,702 total submissions to the prize globally, only ten semifinalists were chosen from North America.

The team from Saskatchewan has now made their work public. Their paper, Ruling Ourselves: The deliberate evolution of global cooperation and governance, describes a path forward towards effective and ethical global governance. They show that global governance is both necessary and possible. Progress, however, will be slow. There are no silver bullets, only productive avenues of progress. They identify two categories of effort as crucial:

• Governance systems such as international institutions must be developed and modified incrementally. The world is changing, thus requiring new and different institutions over time.
• The primary reason why global governance is often ineffective today is that nations don’t have the same goals and don’t trust each other. Building trust and goal alignment thus emerge as the central challenges of our time.

The team of Saskatchewanians, Ben Harack, Kyle Laskowski, Robert Bailey, Jeanette Marcotte, Sam Jaques, and Steven Kuski graduated from the University of Regina throughout 2006-2018 with degrees in Computer Science, Physics, Mathematics, Economics, Psychology, Geology, Biology, Business, and Public Policy.

Lastly, two of the team’s member’s, Ben Harack and Steven Kuski, are attending the New Shape Forum in Stockholm, Sweden on May 27-29 – the closing event of the New Shape Prize. There they will participate in discussions focused on shaping existing governance ideas into a workable reality. Ben, the team’s leader, described one of the challenges they face, “Envisioning an achievable and worthwhile future is extremely difficult, but it’s also hard to express. If you describe the incredible possibilities for progress, you may be labelled as naive even if your arguments are sound. Equally, if you focus too much on the very real problems that we need to solve, you might be accused of lacking vision.”

Steven Kuski adds, “Global governance is complicated, and there are important reasons why it hasn’t made more progress in the last few decades. Unfortunately, most of the ideas we’ve seen for improving global governance cannot be implemented today because they assume that the nations of the world are willing to cooperate far more than they have so far.”

Saskatchewan has exported important governance ideas in the past, including Medicare in the 1960s, the first single-payer universal healthcare system in North America. Ruling Ourselves is unabashedly modern and forward looking, but it remains deeply rooted in Saskatchewan’s humanism and pragmatism.

Vision of Earth is a volunteer-driven think tank founded in Saskatchewan in 2009.

The Global Challenges Foundation is an organization whose objective is to identify and address major global threats to humanity. One avenue that this foundation uses to do this is to gather thinkers from around the world to contribute ideas towards this goal. The New Shape Prize is one such effort. The New Shape Prize is a USD 5 million competition seeking improved frameworks of global governance.

Vision of Earth is proud to announce that members of our team were part of a group that spent nearly a year working towards a submission for this prize, entitled “Ruling ourselves: The deliberate evolution of global cooperation and governance” that has been selected from nearly 3000 entries from 122 countries as a one of twenty semi-finalists. We are extremely proud of this effort and encourage our readers learn more at https://rulingourselves.com where more information about the paper, the team, and the objectives can be found. There, interested readers can also read the paper in its entirety.

The aim of the prize is to find models or frameworks for international cooperation which could help address global issues such as climate change, environmental damage, violent conflict (including weapons of mass destruction), and extreme poverty. The competition was open for submissions from November 2016 to September 2017.

Our paper suggests that global cooperation is limited primarily by the lack of mutual trust and similar priorities between nations. In our submission, we theorize that creating a vetoless global legal authority – which we call a “sovereign global government” – requires the ceding of unprecedented sovereignty by all nations. We feel that this is an infeasible goal for the near future. That said, improved global governance is still possible. Existing patterns of governance are capable of articulating and embodying humanity’s willingness to cooperate. Evolving effective global governance will require widespread support, steadfast determination, and a lot of time – but it is very possible.

The paper elaborates on a variety of ways that mutual trust and cooperation can be fostered between nations as well as ways that the legitimacy and effectiveness of existing global governance structures such as the UN can be strengthened.

Now that this project has drawn to a close, we look forward to posting more regularly on Vision of Earth – particularly on topics relating to global governance.

Unlike Earth, Mars cannot provide the basic necessities of human life. To live there, we will need to use technology to acquire everything we need to survive. A successful Mars colony must have the hardware and skilled personnel needed to produce its own air, food, heat, and electricity – among other things. Colonists will need to be able to remove or reprocess their own waste on an ongoing basis. If a colony achieves all of this, they’ll have taken the first major step towards self-sufficiency: keeping colonists alive for weeks to months.

Living independently off-world for years to decades requires much more. Nothing lasts forever, including life support hardware and the technical experts who maintain it. At a minimum, a capable colony will need to be able to repair and replace the hardware that supports it. Similarly, it will need to be able to rear and educate people to have the expertise needed to survive and contribute.

But even that isn’t enough. An existentially independent colony must have the industry and size to not only replace capabilities as they are gradually lost; it must also be capable of robust growth. If the colony cannot grow each of its interlinked capabilities, it is at the mercy of the next accident or catastrophe. A colony that cannot grow will stagnate and eventually perish.

For humanity to survive the loss of Earth, offworld colonies would have to be capable of surviving and thriving if even their most important trade partner was gone. This includes the ability to produce new life-supporting and industrial production equipment. Mars may be host to the first independent colony (or colonies). Alternately, perhaps a network of colonies throughout the solar system may together become so capable that they would be able to survive the loss of Earth by working together.

Mars is a materially rich world, waiting for an intellectually mature species to make good use of it. If humanity is to survive in the long run, we need to spread to the stars. The first step on our journey is settling beyond the cradle of the Earth. We need colonies that are capable of growing their own industry and population. To achieve this, we’ll need to overcome specific technological and logistical challenges. We live in very exciting times as it seems likely that many of these challenges will be confronted during the next few decades.

As humans spread beyond Earth, these catastrophes eventually cease to be existential risks. Eventually, individual catastrophic events will no longer be able to endanger all of humanity. The key requirement is that these offworld colonies must be capable of surviving without the Earth. We will describe such colonies as being existentially independent. In a future with existentially independent human colonies, even the destruction of every human life on Earth would not mean the end of humanity. Human colonization of the solar system would make us more resilient and eventually even immune to broad categories of existential threats, both natural and human made.

Offworld colonies would still be deeply affected by catastrophes on Earth. They would be deprived of material, intellectual, and cultural exchange with Earth, likely resulting a dramatic reduction in their ability to grow and thrive. Surviving the loss of Earth is very different from being unaffected by it. However, even with these setbacks, existentially independent colonies should eventually be able to to expand and develop on their own.

Unfortunately, even if we had fully independent offworld colonies, there are still some risks that could endanger all of us. Most natural risks would not be a threat to us because in almost all cases their impact is limited to a single planet. But several human-made risks would remain just as dangerous even if we’re arrayed on many worlds. In particular, the creation of the first superintelligent AI could endanger all of humanity regardless of whether we’ve spread beyond Earth.^{2 3}

Another way to see the value of existentially independent colonies is to think about how they can preserve hope. If we had independent colonies, it would mean that many scenarios which would have killed 100% of humanity will instead only kill the Earthbound majority of us. Some people would survive and have a chance to recover and eventually thrive again. Even after a horrific disaster, the future of humanity in the universe could still be a bright one.⁴

There are many worthy reasons to develop human outposts in the solar system. However, actually building them will be extremely challenging. Next, we’ll discuss the problems we need to surmount in order to establish self-sufficient offworld colonies.

1. Baum, S. D., Denkenberger, D. C., & Haqq-Misra, J. (2015). Isolated refuges for surviving global catastrophes. Futures, 72, 45-56.
2. Bostrom, N. (2014). Superintelligence: Paths, dangers, strategies. OUP Oxford.
3. Yudkowsky, E. (2008). Artificial intelligence as a positive and negative factor in global risk. Global catastrophic risks, 1, 303.
4. Bostrom, N. (2013). Existential risk prevention as global priority. Global Policy, 4(1), 15-31.

This turns out to be another significant challenge. Humans tend think in particular ways, and some of our tendencies make it very likely that we will make serious mistakes when we confront topics as challenging as existential risks. Psychological research has uncovered a vast array of heuristics and biases during the last few decades. Some of these mistakes are particularly relevant for the study of existential risks:¹

• The availability heuristic means that if we can easily or quickly remember ideas or examples, then we tend to think that they are important and/or likely, regardless of their true importance or likelihood.
• Humans deem Black Swan events (an event that is surprising and has a major impact) to be far less likely and less impactful than they really are.
• The conjunction fallacy causes humans to consider more detailed stories to be more likely even though logic dictates that each additional detail makes a story less likely.
• The confirmation bias means that humans search for (and are more likely to believe) evidence that confirms their existing beliefs rather than evidence that refutes them.
• Anchoring makes people likely to keep their predictions very close to the first guess that enters their mind even if the source of that guess has nothing to do with the subject at hand (or is even explicitly fictional).
• The affect heuristic means that people use how they feel about a particular subject to color all of their thoughts about that subject. A technology that poses great dangers must therefore not be useful; useful technologies must therefore not be risky. In reality, the riskiest technologies can also be the most useful, and vice-versa.
• Scope neglect is when the scale of a particular problem (or solution) is not taken into account in the assessment of how bad (or good) it is. Famously, the deaths of 2,000 and 200,000 migrating birds are regarded very similarly. Similar challenges occur when people attempt to estimate the moral importance of the death of one human versus the deaths of a billion.
• The overconfidence effect is the noted pattern of humans being far more confident in their knowledge and guesses than they should be.
• The bystander effect is the tendency of humans to be less likely to act during emergencies when not alone. The larger the group of people who witness an emergency, the less likely it is that anyone acts. Existential risks have the largest possible group of human bystanders. The bystander effect means that we should expect that very few people will naturally end up acting to avert these risks, regardless of their likelihood.
• The need for closure is the human tendency to search for certainty and to avoid uncertainty and ambiguity. We have to overcome our discomfort with uncertainty if we want to think effectively about highly uncertain subjects like existential risks.

Yudkowsky also calls attention to another problematic mode of thinking with regards to existential risks. The authors of this post have also confronted this thought pattern and corroborate Yudkowsky’s description of it:

In addition to standard biases, I have personally observed what look like harmful modes of thinking specific to existential risks. The Spanish flu of 1918 killed 25-50 million people. World War II killed 60 million people. 108 is the order of the largest catastrophes in humanity’s written history. Substantially larger numbers, such as 500 million deaths, and especially qualitatively different scenarios such as the extinction of the entire human species, seem to trigger a different mode of thinking—enter into a “separate magisterium.” People who would never dream of hurting a child hear of an existential risk, and say, “Well, maybe the human species doesn’t really deserve to survive.”

Knowing about these problems in human thinking does not make you immune to them. In fact, a common finding in the psychological literature is that even when participants are taught how people tend to make mistakes on a task, they still make large mistakes. Similarly, added incentives (like monetary rewards) often don’t improve performance.

Knowledge alone isn’t enough. Motivation alone isn’t enough. Effective thinking requires dedicated practice and consistent external feedback. David Brin may have said it best when he said, “Criticism is the only known antidote to error.”

Each of us must overcome these challenges within ourselves. Restrain the urge to use these words as tools to attack the arguments of others. Criticize yourself most of all. Be an example of selfless and fearless thinking so that others may follow the trail you blaze.

1. Yudkowsky, E. (2008). Cognitive biases potentially affecting judgment of global risks. Global catastrophic risks, 1, 86.

First of all, risk assessment is hard even for systems that we’ve already built. Even though we can learn a lot about the design and function of every part of a nuclear reactor, when you put them all together you get a system of staggering complexity.

Risk assessment of future technologies is even harder. In most cases we have only the barest understanding of how these future systems might be designed. We don’t know what their constituent parts will be, let alone how they will interact with one another. Prospective technologies such as molecular nanotechnology, machine intelligence, and bioengineering involve many interacting parts that we do not yet understand. When many uncertain elements interact strongly, our uncertainty about the final result must grow immensely. Prediction is hard and we must necessarily be very uncertain about the potential dangers that these technologies may pose.

Assessing risks gets even harder when we bring in a human element. Human beings are diverse, hard to predict, adaptable, and intelligent. If even one human intelligence is trying to change the outcome that you’re trying to predict, it introduces even more uncertainty.¹

Second, human thinking is imperfect. We make mistakes in many ways, but there are particular cognitive biases that make it very hard to think about existential risks.

Worse still, social science experiments have shown that merely knowing about biases typically isn’t enough to improve one’s performance. If we hope to really improve our thinking, we need to make profound changes to how we approach problems. This field is far too vast to even summarize here. It is the opinions of the authors that at a minimum, thinking effectively requires that we be disciplined, thorough, and humble in scrutinizing ideas.²

Third, there are institutional and social factors that downplay the importance of existential risks. As one example, standard methods for “discounting” the future tend to downplay large gains or losses that take place more than a few years into the future. If someone is reasoning this way, even an existential risk might be so discounted that it never registers as a genuine danger for them. Living in the present is an important part of life, but an excessive focus on the present leads individuals, institutions, and society to pay too little attention to what the future may hold.

This list is incomplete, but it hopefully provides a useful starting point for thinking about existential risks. Digging deeper will lead you to cognitive biases pertaining to existential risks and the danger humanity poses to itself.

1. This is related to the computer security concepts known as the security mindset and Schneier’s Law. The latter can be summarized as “Anyone, from the most clueless amateur to the best cryptographer, can create an algorithm that he himself can’t break. It’s not even hard. What is hard is creating an algorithm that no one else can break, even after years of analysis.” – Bruce Schneier
2. For a short but impactful introduction to the field, see the Checklist of Rationality Habits from the Center for Applied Rationality.

Recall, or imagine, yourself waking up in the morning. The groggy feeling, the sleepiness, the feeling of soreness, unwillingness to get up, or perhaps instead the feeling of being totally refreshed after a good night’s sleep. I’m sure you’ve felt that.

Recall the taste of cool water in your mouth, refreshing you when you’re thirsty. Or perhaps the warmth and comfort of a cup of hot coffee just when you need it.

Picture yourself stubbing your toe, or maybe nicking yourself on something sharp. Imagine, really imagine, the pain. Imagine being itchy, or hot and sweaty, or cold with the shivers.

Recall the taste of some of your favorite foods. Imagine taking a bite. Imagine, with as much detail as you can, the way your mouth starts to salivate just as the scent of that food comes up to your mouth. Imagine the texture as you chew; the feeling of swallowing.

Imagine what it feels like to go to the bathroom. No, seriously.

Don’t like that? How about the feeling of a warm shower – the water hitting your body, when you are sunburned. The pain mixed with the odd feeling of refreshment at the same time.

These little experiences are the kind we forget to talk about when we ask ourself what it means to live. Why life is valuable – what the meaning of life is. Life isn’t just about what great things you achieve – it’s about what it feels like to be alive – and that by itself is a precious thing. It’s one of the great miracles and mysteries of the universe.

Now remember the smile on the face of someone you love, or care about. Recall laughing and having a conversation or a special moment with them. Recall as many such moments as you can. Your life is a collection of memories, some say. But it’s more than that – because even when you aren’t building new memories or moments, you are experiencing life.

Now imagine your own death – in particular, focus on the fact that this will all end. Set aside any belief you may hold in the afterlife – instead focus on what will be lost regardless of what you hope you will gain.

It will all end. There’s no more memories, no more pain, no more pleasure, no more waking up or going to sleep, no more going to the bathroom, nothing.

Really THINK about it, let the thought linger – now, add to that this – it will happen. It’s going to happen, and it’s real. Your story, over. No rewinding. You won’t get to make any more memories, knock off any more items from your bucket list, or eat any more of your favorite foods. All of your memories will vanish. It’s one of the most unpleasant thoughts people can think – not death itself, but the fact that it will happen. The first time that most people think of their OWN life ending, they feel somewhat sick. You know the feeling? That deep, sinking, nauseous feeling in your gut as you feel a mixture of fear and anger at the injustice of it.

But, take comfort in the fact that you have lived – and greater comfort knowing that your are part of something bigger – the human race – and life itself. You see, every other person alive today is experiencing the exact same sensations as you. The feeling of going to the bathroom is the same whether you are a billionaire or bum. Life itself is a gift we all share, and it’s a gift that has been shared by countless generations before. Each and every person who has ever lived got to feel the same basic mixtures of everyday sensations, although of course the details have been different.

Everyone experiences joy, pain, love, sadness, and so on. And that means everyone who lives or has ever lived has been a part of the preciousness of this human experience. Think about that the next time you lay eyes on a stranger. Imagine what it feels like to be them.

Now imagine what they feel like at the moment of death. When someone dies, a life as full of richness and experience as yours is extinguished forever. This is why human life is precious and why death is wrong.

Now imagine every single possible human life from now to the end of time being not only extinguished, but prevented from even existing. No one will be around to even discuss what it feels like to go to the bathroom, let alone write a play or sing a song. The very concept will be lost forever – and no one will be around to even mourn that loss. That is what we face in the case of human extinction – and that is why preventing such an event should be the moral responsibility of everyone on Earth.

Most people would agree that human life is a good thing, and that the death of a human is a bad thing. In case you don’t hold this belief, I recommend these words by Eliezer Yudkowsky about the death of his brother.

This is familiar ground for most of us. Most moral systems posit that living is a good thing and that human deaths are something to be avoided if possible, and to be mourned if they come to pass. Let’s try to extend this moral intuition to existential risks.

Before we begin, let’s acknowledge that thinking about human extinction is very hard. We tend to make mistakes when we try. We’ll take it slow and try to work our way towards understanding.

Take a deep breath.

Try to imagine or recall the death of someone you know. Everything that they were is gone. Their actions will continue to have an effect on the world after they are gone, but they themselves will never know it. They have been destroyed. Our memories of our loved one are precious because they are all we have left of them.

Hold that feeling in your mind. Let it weigh on your heart. This is the tragedy of the irrevocable death of a sentient being.

Take a deep breath.

Now, imagine that all of your family and friends suffer a similar fate. School classmates, sports teammates, drinking buddies, work colleagues, all of them. Every life, so different from the others, is worthy of our attention. In this imagined reality, the light of dozens or hundreds of humans has been extinguished. Their dreams have been snuffed out. If these deaths suddenly happened today, it would probably be all over the news. In some countries this would be a tragedy of such magnitude that it would define a generation.

Take a deep breath.

Imagine the death of every person alive today. Every single person you’ve ever seen or heard of is no more. Every hope that any human ever held has been annihilated. Every caring parent; every wide-eyed child; every bold and cautious thinker; every soul struggling to survive and thrive, all of them are gone – never to return.

No one person can comprehend the entirety of this loss, but we must try. It’s all at stake, everything that we value in this world and everything we hope for.

Take a deep breath.

Think of all the human lives that could have existed in the future. If humanity had thrived rather than gone extinct, there may have one day have been a billion humans for every person alive today.¹ Whether or not these people share our personal beliefs or specific biology, they are the descendants of all of us today. They grow from our culture, our thoughts, our hopes.

Let’s take a detour for a moment and dwell on what it means for there to be a billion times as many humans as there are today.

Start again with yourself. Think of what you’ve experienced in your life and try to feel it all. The bad and the good. The imperfect and the perfect. The boredom and the adventures. If your life so far has led you to be pessimistic or depressed, then for the purposes of this moral calculation you should strive to acknowledge the fact that most people are happy. Overwhelmingly, humans consider life to be desirable – a huge net positive.

Imagine several billion humans with their own cares and thoughts. Imagine the laughter and love of all of the people on the Earth today. Imagine the hope of every child.

Now do the impossible and try to grasp what all of these things would be if they were made a billion times what they are today.

Such a civilization might have continued to thrive for billions of years, producing perhaps billions of masterpieces of art and thought for each one that we hold dear today.

The loss of this future is beyond feeling, but not beyond calculation. We haven’t evolved the ability to grasp calamity on this scale, but we can augment our sentiments with intellect. No one can multiply their emotions by a billion. Emotional reasoning alone will fail us. The best we can do is courageously generalize what we feel. If ten deaths are bad, ten billion deaths are a billion times worse.

These can be uncomfortable thoughts. Why are they worth thinking?

We feel that we’ve learned a lot by exploring this meditation ourselves. Here are two of the ideas that stand out for us:

Certainty

If we know with great certainty that one person’s death is a bad thing, then numerous deaths are worse. Regardless of whether our emotions evolved the ability to multiply by a billion, we can. This means that we can be extremely certain that human extinction is very, very bad. This insight can help us with our decisions moving forward.

Calibration

We can grow our feelings. One human death is a profound tragedy, but it is not the greatest of all possible tragedies. This meditation will hopefully encourage you to value individual lives more. But with effort and practice we can extend our understanding of loss (and gain) to a vast scale. We can develop our sentiments and intuitions to bring them more into alignment with our deeply held values.

If this meditation has moved you, please do what you can to help avert existential threats. Just as every individual life counts, every individual’s actions count.

If you’re looking for a good place to start, we recommend spending at least a few hours reading on the subject. We’ve written a few brief articles to get you started. Digging deeper, we’ve found the work of Nick Bostrom and the Future of Humanity Institute to be excellent. Many others have done excellent work on the subject as well, too many to list here. See here for a large collection of important works relating to existential risks.

If you’ve read a bit on the subject, we recommend discussing these challenges with friends and colleagues. Striking the right tone can be difficult because the subject tends to elicit either hysteria or dismissive contempt. Since neither of those extremes are productive, we recommend starting slowly and from a place of questioning rather than sermonizing.

Thanks for your attention, and good luck to us all.

1. The number “billion” was chosen for illustrative purposes. Among far-future predictions of humanity’s potential, this is rather conservative. For a more thorough treatment of the subject, see Bostrom, N. (2003). Astronomical waste: The opportunity cost of delayed technological development. Utilitas, 15(03), 308-314.