YOU could be forgiven for thinking that our existence on Earth becomes more precarious by the decade. So breathe a sigh of relief – we may never have been safer.
Last weekend, experts gathered at the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford to discuss the risk of global “mega-catastrophes”. The idea was to leave aside slow-burn disasters such as climate change and global famine and focus on events that could wipe out hundreds of millions of people, threaten humanity’s continued existence on Earth, or at least produce a total collapse of civilisation. The meeting drew contributions from physicists,…
