The Map of Doom | Apocalypses Ranked

the point of this video is to try and figure out all of the different threats to humanity that exist now before the pandemic there are lots of people warning us that something like this would happen at some stage and yet when it happened we as a society were completely unprepared for it now this made me wonder what other things exist out there other disasters that could happen that we're not prepared for so i collected them all together and put them in this this is the map of doom crikey there's quite a lot aren't there but just finding all of these disaster scenarios isn't enough i also wanted to figure out which ones pose the biggest threat to humanity using some real data and i think i've hit on a really nice way of visualizing the relative threats of all of these different disasters in this doom chart so by the end of this video you should have a good idea of what the biggest threats to humanity are and so which ones we should be focusing most of our energy on trying to mitigate and prevent [Music] so here's everything that might befall us as a human race all of the calamities i could find there's a bunch of stuff from space like asteroid impacts natural disasters earthquakes volcanoes and a bunch of stuff waiting to ourselves war climate change and a few futuristic scenarios like robo apocalypses now let me show you how i'm going to compare all of these things so you can break down the risk of a disaster into two parts first of all are the potential number of casualties it would cause if it happened so the total number of deaths it would cause and then the second is the likelihood of that event happening so for example an asteroid impact could cause a huge number of casualties but it's very unlikely so every disaster on this map is going to have some combination of of these two numbers so what we can do is actually plot all the disasters on a scatter plot on the horizontal axis we're going to plot the casualties which go from a thousand deaths all the way up to eight billion deaths which is basically more than the total population of humanity so we've got a zone of total extinction on the left-hand side which will capture all the existential threats to humanity and this is a log plot so each tick here is 10 times as many casualties as the last one then on the vertical axis we've got the likelihood of an event happening so the most likely events are at the top so this would be an event that happens on average once per year again on a log plot we go all the way down to an event that happens on average once every billion years but typically events down at that end it's very hard to assess the likelihood of those events in fact at the very bottom i'm going to put a bin for things that is impossible to determine the likelihood for things that have never happened before like a robo apocalypse like how do we assess the likelihood that that's going to happen it's good to think about but yeah you can't draw on any past data um the terminator movers don't count and then at the very top we've got the most likely events in fact we've got a bin for the things that are actually happening right now already so things like earthquakes happen every single year and so those cause a certain number of casualties in fact let's look at the very first one earthquakes the magnitude 8 earthquake hits somewhere on earth on average once per year and around 10 000 people die per year because of earthquakes and the resulting effects things like tsunamis or mudslides so we can put a point on our scatter plot in the already happening zone to represent this but if we look at the history of earthquakes there are more severe earthquakes that kill more people the most destructive earthquake was in 16th century china killed around 830 000 people in one event and also over the last 100 years we've had about a million deaths due to earthquakes and so we can extend this out into a line which captures the the general risk over a certain time scale of earthquakes as this is based on real data what it's telling us is that this is the expected lives lost due to earthquakes over these time scales unfortunately this line doesn't extend any further because earthquakes are relatively localized and so they don't pose a risk to the entire human population and so now as we add more disasters to this doom chart we can assess how scary they are relative to earthquakes so anything further up is more likely and anything further to the right is more deathy and so those are the things we really want to worry about in fact why don't we label these different quadrants on the lower left we've got the low likelihood and low casualty events these i'm going to call the freak accidents things like personally being hit by an asteroid or being killed by a shark attack or being one of the eight unfortunate people to die from the london beer flood of 1814 on the top left we've got the really bad events things that are relatively likely but have relatively low casualty rate where relative means relative to the entire extinction of the human race um on the bottom right we've got total disasters but unlikely things like asteroid impacts and on the top right we've got the just straight up total disasters things that will be very likely and also cause huge amounts of casualties so we really want to be worried about anything that falls into that top right quadrant let's look at asteroid impacts next because we've got some really good data on the likelihood of an impact based on past impacts and looking at the moon and also the size distribution of near-earth objects from sky surveys small asteroids hit the earth all the time and large asteroids hit less frequently the larger that they get but the risk to humans kicks in for diameters of the asteroids around 140 meters and larger the one that killed off the dinosaurs was around 10 kilometers in diameter and in this range we can have big calamities things like giant tsunamis caused by the asteroid crashing into the ocean or the real killer is the amount of dust that's kicked kicked up by an asteroid impact it would cover the globe for many years obscuring the sun instigating a mini ice age cooling global temperatures we wouldn't be able to go grow crops so we'd have crop failures around the world not enough food global famine possibly war to fight for resources and the possible extinction of the human race the smaller 140 meter asteroids will collide with the earth roughly once every 30 000 years and the larger ten kilometer asteroids would hit roughly once every hundred million years and the estimate of deaths goes from around three million for the smaller asteroids up to total extinction for the ten kilometer asteroids fortunately we can actively try and detect and prevent asteroid impacts by doing good astrophysics and in fact derek on his channel veritasium has done a companion video to this one where he delves deeper into asteroids and asteroid impact so after you've watched this video i highly recommend you go check that out the links in the description below okay now let's move on to look at super volcanoes giant volcanic eruptions that happen on earth around once every hundred thousand years these kick up huge amounts of smoke and dust and the scenario is very similar to asteroid impacts where they obscure the sun for many years leading to the failure of food crops and global mass famine and death the last super volcano eruption was in indonesia mount toba which happened 74 000 years ago and led to global cooling of temperatures around three to five celsius which led to a huge loss of plant and animal life and some people think it actually brought our species close to extinction when it happens and worryingly there's actually nothing we can do to prevent a super volcano eruption the only thing we could do is to make our food systems more resilient to these big disasters which seems like a sensible thing to do if that seems depressing because this video was brought to you by existential dread and if you want your own slice you too can own the map of doom perfect for any home socially distanced workplace or nuclear bunker the map of doom will take your mind off the pandemic when you realize how many other things you should be worrying about grab your map of doom now from dftba.com domain of science and the first 200 poster sales will also get this cool sticker also available separately as a sticker and a pin fixes central dread should be taken responsibly may lead you to wonder what the point of it all is this is perfectly normal please remember to vote here is a picture of a kitten okay now that we've got a few disasters on our map let's compare it to our current pandemic and pandemics in general covert 19 has caused over a million deaths so far we don't quite know how high that will climb but for the spanish flu 50 million people died in 1918. flu pandemics occur around three times a century with different levels of severity and in general epidemics and pandemic risk is increasing for example in the last 20 years we've had sars mers ebola and the hiv aids pandemic has claimed 36 million lives in between 2005 and 2012. so pandemics are a very big risk they're lie around here and another biological disaster that's already happening is antibiotic resistant bacteria which claims around 000 lives per year and this is expected to climb up to 10 million lives per year by 2050 unless we find ways of tackling it so this lies here this is quite a surprise to me because this is a bigger risk to us than pandemics but we don't hear about it much probably because it's not an acute event it's just happening in the background so it doesn't make a good news story so this is another thing we're probably not thinking about enough and finally to round off the biological threats we need to think about the risks posed by advances in genetic engineering and synthetic biology the kovid pandemic has been awful but at least the death rate's been relatively low imagine a pandemic like this but the death rate's a lot higher something that's been engineered for nefarious purposes either through bioterrorism or biological warfare or even a research accident i've got no idea how to assess the likelihood of that happening or the death toll so i'm not putting it on my doom chart but something to bear in mind it's inevitable that video like this is going to get a little bit heavy so i thought i'd give us a little break to recoup because the next section's on the environment which as you can imagine isn't the best news so i'm just doing something that makes me feel better when i'm staring into the abyss having a bit of a sit down and a cup of tea let me know in the comments what makes you feel better when you're dreading the future sometimes when things get really bad i even have a hobnob it's a bit soft in a way an environmental disaster would be similar to an asteroid impact or a super volcano because the final thing that would end up killing us is mass starvation due to failure of our food production now there's a whole complex web of relationships involved including climate change and environment destruction and pollution which i'm sure you all know by now but if you want to see the whole network of relationships pause the video now for an image put simply we rely on the natural world to provide food for our massive population through arable land fresh water pollinators and also wild food stocks like fishing but through climate change and destruction of the environment and pollution we are upsetting the balance of the natural world and that's leading to people dying the best estimate from the world health organization is that 150 000 people are dying per year due to the effects of climate change and this is expected to rise to 250 000 by 2050 and a total of a little bit over 100 million people will have died because of causes due to climate change by 2100 and that gives us this line which is very interesting when we compare it to the covet pandemic so this is why people are like yeah the covert crisis has been really bad but we shouldn't forget about climate change this is what they're talking about because climate change is basically like a really bad pandemic but just spread out and it's actually worse than this because these numbers are based on the ipcc projections and historically the ipcc worst case scenarios have underperformed actual data so their worst case scenarios were actually too optimistic so what that means is this line would be higher up somewhere i don't know how much higher also i haven't taken into account things like ecosystem collapse and pollution so yeah now predicting future scenarios is uncertain because this hasn't happened yet and a lot of this depends on what actions we take over the next decade and beyond but what i wanted to do is in this context of the doom truck try and work out a worst case and best case scenario to at least put some bounds on it in the worst cases the question of whether climate change and environmental catastrophes pose an existential threat to the continued existence of humanity which is still an open question we need to take into account things like climate tipping points things like when the arctic permafrost melts releasing loads of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere or changes in the ocean currents changing the climate irreversibly these are like point of no return type situations which lead to the very worst outcomes of climate change but assessing their likelihoods still seems to be a contentious issue but let's say we do nothing and carbon emissions just keep on rising around the world to 150 gigatonnes of carbon by 2100. that would correspond to around a 15 centigrade rise in temperatures globally by 2200 and i'm going to say that that is unlivable for humans in the long term so i'm going to put that down as our worst case scenario now in the best case let's say that the entire world goes completely carbon neutral in the next 10 years by 2030 which is which is optimistic but we'll just go with that that would mean that we're just locked into the current death rate due to climate change and so we've just got a straight line here and it just doesn't get any worse which is interesting when you compare them like this because climate change certainly doesn't feel as acute as this covert pandemic and the reason is is that climate change happens every year and is just spread out over many years and it's just gradually getting worse and worse and for most of us we're not feeling the direct effects of climate change yet which leads to the next section i didn't think that a map of doom would be complete without things like social inequality income inequality or overpopulation but these aren't acute disasters that kill a load of people so why did i include them on the map well the reason is is that all of these are important multiplying effects for example the covert pandemic was made worse by online disinformation and social inequality and overpopulation is the major driver of all of the environmental disasters like climate change and ecosystem collapse one example is that the richest one percent of the population have emitted more than double the carbon of the poorest 50 percent of the population but climate change is going to hit the poorest people the hardest so social inequality makes disasters worse so far i've looked at disaster scenarios where i've got actual data to use for my doom chart but from now on it's difficult or impossible to assess likelihoods for the following so from now on i'm just winging it as is anyone else who talks about these with that in mind let's crack on total nuclear war is uh ever-present threat to humanity it's hard to predict the likelihood of an all-out nuclear war for my doom chart other than it's on the very high death toll area with 14 000 nuclear warheads continually primed were a risk of accidents which have very narrowly missed during the cold war or things like cyber terrorism they're continually threatening the entire existence of humanity but now we get onto the fun stuff these last scenarios all share the similar characteristics of completely destroying humanity but also being incredibly low likelihood or being a likelihood we can't even determine and also sounding like excellent plots for a sci-fi movie these include nanobots or molecular machines gradually turning all the material in the world into more coppers of themselves the grey goo theory there's also rogue artificial intelligence in the future not recognizing the importance of humans and just gradually wiping us all out then in space we've got the uncalculable risk of aliens visiting and wanting to kill us all or rogue black holes wandering through our solar system absorbing everything on its way or the collapse of the vacuum the idea that the whole universe is in a meta-stable quantum state and at any time it could find a lower energy state and a band of energy would travel at the speed of light throughout the universe unraveling everything in its path then there's the potential for a gamma-ray burst which is an incredibly high energy explosion in space which could wipe out the ozone layer and expose us to the full ultraviolet rays of the sun which wouldn't be good fortunately these are pretty rare happening once every 10 000 years per galaxy and they're probably too far away to do to too much damage there's a potential that the orbit of mercury is unstable and could wander out of the solar system potentially colliding with the earth although the likelihood is probably incredibly small these are all existential threats to humanity which certain philosophers have highlighted because even though the likelihood of them happening is incredibly low the risk that they could wipe out the whole of the human race is so severe that they're things that we should be spending time thinking about and trying to avoid whatever you think about that logic they're very easy to place on the doom chart they all exist down here in the very low likelihood or impossible to calculate likelihood in the bottom right corner apart from gamma-ray bursts which sit around here finally we get to the sun bringer of all life on earth although one day it will die and so will we unless we escape in spaceships which we've got about a billion years to figure out before the sun swells and cooks the earth into an inhospitable hell hole so i'm going to put this as a low probability i mean it's definitely going to happen but we've got a billion years and to be honest if we've survived that long we'll have done well so that's my best effort to try and capture the data i could find on the relative risks of these different disaster scenarios but i'm sure it's not perfect so if you think i've missed anything important or if you've got any constructive feedback on a way i could improve this please let me know in the comments below but this is a cha i'd love the actual professionals to produce some visualization like this for us to be able to compare the different risks because i think it'd be a really useful way of the general public to see the biggest threats to humanity and see which of the things we should be focusing our energies on trying to prevent all right well thanks for watching and make sure you check out derek's video on asteroid impact on his channel veritasium and other than that i'm not going to ask you to like or subscribe because you can do what you want so i'll see you on the next video she'll be posting in a couple of weeks [Music] you

Channel: DoS - Domain of Science

Views: 416,954

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Id: Htf0XR6W9WQ

Length: 21min 31sec (1291 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 30 2020