Five Catastrophic Risks That Could Destroy Civilization

5. Nuclear Terrorism

As The words imply, nuclear terrorism refers to an act in which a person or people belonging to a terrorist organization detonate a nuclear device. With the pace of technological advances in recent years, it has become increasingly easier to acquire knowledge and the materials needed to build a nuclear bomb. And worse still, except from building a nuclear device from scratch, terrorists, have several other methods to disrupt civilization. For example: they could use a nuclear weapon that has been stolen or purchased on the black market, they could acquire fissile material from a nation-state or use a crude explosive device built by nuclear scientists who the terrorist organization has furtively recruited. Despite the estimated low probability of 0.03% for human extinction from nuclear terrorism, it's consequences are too dire to just sweep under the rug. Former U.S. President Barack Obama called nuclear terrorism "the single most important national security threat that we face". In his first speech to the U.N. Security Council, President Obama said that "Just one nuclear weapon exploded in a city be it New York or Moscow, Tokyo or Beijing, London or Paris,  could kill hundreds of thousands of people". It would "destabilize our security, our economies, and our very way of life.

4. Nuclear War

Another Anthropogenic global risk, that is linked with nuclear weapons, is nuclear war. So far, only two nuclear weapons have been used in the course of warfare. Both by the United States, near the end of World War II.  On August 6, 1945, a uranium gun-type device, code name "Little Boy", was detonated over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Three days later, on August 9, a plutonium implosion-type device, code name Fat Man, was detonated over the Japanese city of Nagasaki. These two bombings resulted in the deaths of approximately 120,000 people. Today, we live in a world with over 15,000 nuclear weapons. Over 14,000 of which are owned by the United States and Russia alone. Imagine how the world looks like at war, with enough nuclear firepower to annihilate civilization. Even a minor nuclear exchange anywhere in the world, would disrupt the global climate and put two billion lives at risk. Although there is a significant decline of nuclear weapons since the 1980s, where the figure peaked at around 70,000, scientists at the science and security board Bulletin of the atomic scientists, stated that in 2018, it is 2 minutes to midnight on the Doomsday clock. 

3. Enginereed Pandemic

Throughout history, people have been using biological warfare. In 1346, the bodies of Mongol warriors, who had died of plague, were thrown over the walls of the besieged city of Kaffa. they catapulted the infected corpses over the city walls, to infect the inhabitants. It has been speculated that this operation, may have been responsible for the arrival of the Black Death in Europe. Which killed over 75 million people. The most recent pandemics, include the HIV pandemic, as well as the 1918 and 2009 H1N1 pandemic. But these natural pandemics could look like a walk in the park, compared to engineered pandemics. Besides nuclear terrorism, also Bio-terrorism is becoming an increasing concern for global security. According to the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Bio-terrorism, is the deliberate release of viruses, bacteria, toxins, or other harmful agents to cause illness, or death. These agents are typically found in nature, but could be engineered to increase their ability to cause disease, and make them resistant to current medicines, or to increase their ability to spread into the environment. But an engineered pathogen, doesn't have to be released deliberately to cause mayhem. There are numerous cases where infectious diseases, escaped from laboratory containment by accident. Imagine unleashing a contagious pathogen, deliberately or otherwise, which is extremely hard to detect, and doesn't cause illness for several days. Even if a handful of people were infected, apocalyptic results, would follow in a short period of time. 

2. Molecular Nanotechnology

Molecular Nano-technology, or short, M.N.T, is a technology based on the ability to build structures, to atomic specifications by means of chemical syntheses, to direct reactive molecules to specific molecular sites. Some analysts, believe Molecular nano-technology could lead to a technological singularity. It conceivably could enable cheaper and more destructive conventional weapons. Also, M.N.T, might permit weapons of mass destruction, that could self-replicate, as viruses and cancer cells do, when attacking the human bodyA fear exists that nano-mechanical robots, if achieved, and if designed to self-replicate, using naturally occurring materials, could consume the entire planet, in their hunger for raw materials. Or, simply crowd out natural life, out-competing it for energy, as happened historically, when blue-green algae appeared, and out-competed earlier life forms. In light of this perception of potential danger, the Foresight Institute founded by Drexler, has prepared a set of guidelines for the ethical development of nano-technology. These include the banning of self-replicating pseudo-organisms, on the Earth's surface. Nevertheless, the overall estimated probability for human extinction, caused by molecular nano-technology,  before the year 2100 , is currently at 5%.

1. Superintelligent AI

It has been suggested, that learning computers that rapidly become Super-intelligent, may take unforeseen actions, or that machines would out-compete humanity. The fear isn't that Super-intelligent machines would become spontaneously malicious, but that their interests would not be aligned with ours. For example, when we decide to build a bridge, the least of our worries are that in the process of building a bridge, we might also destroy ant colonies. If we ever find ourselves in the presence of Super AI, and proportionally speaking in terms of intelligence, they look at us the same way we look at insects, they might squash us, because whatever Super-intelligent AI project they have in mind, from their perspective, that would be more important than billions of apes standing in their way. This is known as the Alignment Problem. The human race, currently dominates other species, because the human brain has some distinctive capabilities, that the brains of other animals lack. Some scholars, such as philosopher Nick Bostrom, and AI researcher, Stuart Russell, controversially argue that if AI surpasses humanity in general intelligence, and becomes "Super-intelligent", then this new Super-intelligence could become powerful and difficult to control. Just as the fate of the mountain gorilla depends on human goodwill, so might the fate of humanity depend on the actions of a future machine Super-intelligence. Physicists like Stephen Hawking, publicly advocated for starting research into solving  the "control problem", well before the first Super-intelligence is created. And argued that attempting to solve the problem after a Super-intelligence is created, would be too late, as a rogue Super-intelligence, might successfully resist efforts to be controlled