Couple of excerpts
“Let's begin with the greatest existential question of all, the fate of our species. As with the more parochial question of our fate as individuals, we assuredly have to come to terms with our mortality. Biologists joke that to a first approximation all species are extinct, since that was the fate of at least 99 per cent of the species that ever lived. A typical mammalian species lasts around a million years, and it's hard to insist that Homo sapiens will be an exception. Even if we had remained technologically humble hunter-gatherers, we would still be living in a geological shooting gallery. A burst of gamma rays from a supernova or collapsed star could irradiate half the planet, brown the atmosphere and destroy the ozone layer, allowing ultraviolet light to irradiate the other half. Or the Earth's magnetic field could flip, exposing the planet to an interlude of lethal solar and cosmic radiation. An asteroid could slam into the Earth, flattening thousands of square miles and kicking up debris that would black out the sun and drench us with corrosive rain. Supervolcanoes or massive lava flows could choke us with ash, CO2 and sulfuric acid. A black hole could wander into the solar system and pull the Earth out of its orbit or suck it into oblivion. Even if the species manages to survive for a billion more years, the Earth and solar system will not: The sun will start to use up its hydrogen, become denser and hotter and boil away our oceans on its way to becoming a red giant.
Technology, then, is not the reason that our species must some day face the Grim Reaper. Indeed, technology is our best hope for cheating death, at least for a while. As long as we are entertaining hypothetical disasters far in the future, we must also ponder hypothetical advances that would allow us to survive them, such as growing food under lights powered with nuclear fusion, or synthesizing it in industrial plants such as biofuel. Even technologies of the not-so-distant future could save our skin. It's technically feasible to track the trajectories of asteroids and other "extinction-class near-Earth objects," spot the ones that are on a collision course with the Earth and nudge them off course before they send us the way of the dinosaurs. NASA has also figured out a way to pump water at high pressure into a supervolcano and extract the heat for geothermal energy, cooling the magma enough that it would never blow its top. Our ancestors were powerless to stop these lethal menaces, so in that sense, technology has not made this a uniquely dangerous era in the history of our species but a uniquely safe one.”
“Other threats are less fanciful, but are already being blunted. Contrary to Malthusian predictions of teeming populations eating themselves into mass starvation, the world has been increasingly feeding itself. The reasons include advances in agronomy, the spread of democratic governance and especially the demographic transition: As countries escape extreme poverty and illiteracy, their people choose to have fewer children. The predictions of catastrophic resource depletion have been repeatedly falsified, too, by a combination of technology and markets. As the most easily extracted supply of a resource becomes scarcer, its price rises, encouraging people to conserve it, get at the less accessible deposits or find cheaper and more plentiful substitutes.
This leaves still other threats which are real and nowhere near being solved: climate change and nuclear war. But unsolved does not mean unsolvable. Pathways to decarbonizing the economy have been mapped out, including carbon pricing, zero-carbon energy sources and programs for carbon capture and storage. So have pathways to denuclearization, including strengthening international institutions, de-alerting nuclear forces, stabilizing systems of deterrence and verifiably reducing (and eventually eliminating) nuclear arsenals.
The prospect of meeting these challenges is by no means utopian. The world has dealt with global challenges in the past, including atmospheric nuclear testing and the ozone hole. It has survived half-mad despots with nuclear weapons, namely Stalin and Mao, and episodes of dangerous brinkmanship during the Cold War. It has reduced nuclear arsenals by 85 per cent, and the amount of CO2 emitted per dollar of GDP by 44 per cent. Implementing the measures that will drive these numbers all the way down to zero will require enormous amounts of persuasion, pressure, and will.
But we know that there is one measure that will not make the world safer: moaning that we're doomed.”