Talk:Human extinction

message: There is ongoing discussion about whether to move Draft:Existential risk to mainspace.  If it is decided that the draft content be merged into an existing article instead, I propose that the article be this one instead of the often-suggested Global catastrophic risk for two reasons:
# Human extinction and existential risk are conceptually closer in terms of impact on humanity and methodological challenges.
# Global catastrophic risk is already long, and the current treatment of existential risk in it is awkward and confusing.
Such a merger could also entail making this article the primary home for existential risk content on Wikipedia, including receiving redirects for "existential risk" and related terms.
WeyerStudentOfAgrippa (talk) 17:41, 19 August 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: What do you think of this option? WeyerStudentOfAgrippa (talk) 15:08, 22 August 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Existential risk draft 

message: In my opinion, the Omnicide section should be merged with the Morality section.Rich (talk) 22:47, 11 September 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: managed to do it myself, hope you like it.Rich (talk) 23:05, 11 September 2020 (UTC)
thread_title: Omnicide

message: I'm planning to expand this article; does anyone object if I change it to WP:SFN cites when I do that? Lev!vich 05:34, 10 October 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  sfn ok? 

message: I have added a mention of the CAE in the "research" section, and I believe it could be expanded, but all I have at the moment is WP:PRIMARY the official website. I almost half-think that we are being trolled and they aren't actually serious about this, but stranger things do exist. Elizium23 (talk) 06:02, 19 November 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  The Centre for Applied Eschatology 

message: Should we change this to “inevitable”?  The human race’s extinction is guaranteed to occur eventually, so it’s not really hypothetical. FinnSoThin (talk) 23:35, 24 May 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: [citation needed] 216.164.249.213 (talk) 19:57, 28 December 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  “Hypothetical” end of human race 

message: I have truncated this part of the article to take attention off of what I feel are more like periphery characteristics of the important claim than relevant aspects of the scientific consensus. Specifically, I have removed the "likely 'less than one in 87,000'" (which should have been written as "1" btw, but I digress) with a reason I elaborated on in the edit summary. With that being said, this really does not get to the heart of the issue. Forecasts about forecasts actually project very little about the odds of an event: you can have some model, which is likely to be good, which forecasts the likelihood of an event as being very low, but have another one that is arbitrarily high, since there is no explicit constraint on it, and still say "the likelihood of this event is likely <<low>>". Really, we should try and procure a more productive risk profile for the case of a natural extinction event that actually offers an explicit probabilistic forecast instead of a meta-forecast on forecasts about the event themselves. 216.164.249.213 (talk) 19:57, 28 December 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Based on a formalization of this argument, researchers have concluded that we can be confident that natural risk is lower than 1 in 14,000 (and likely "less than one in 87,000") per year.[2] 

message: (ping , , )
Regarding the IP editor's removal of the risk estimate table in : bad behavior aside, I'm actually with them on the edit they're trying to make. That's a bunch of people making oddly specific guesses about the future, and duplicating the entire table here seems excessive for the amount of useful information it provides. How do we feel about removing the table and adding the preceding sentence ("In 2008, an informal survey of experts at a conference hosted by the Future of Humanity Institute estimated a 19% risk of human extinction by the year 2100.") to the following bulleted list?  ℰmi1y⧼T·C⧽ 04:26, 13 March 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: "That's a bunch of people making oddly specific guesses about the future" I mean, that's literally what weathermen do. But regardless, I'm fine with removing it. IT's just the WP:STATUSQUO to keep it. ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#6545 14:12, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

text: Hey, sorry for the late reply. I trust you guys to make an informed decision. Just didnt like how some people were reverting the table without a second thought, especially given how that version of the article literally claimed said table was unreliable. i think i would be ok with retaining the same info/forecasts as they seem to have garnered interest, but rearranging the section to reflect the fact that extinction-centric organizations are not considered reliable. 216.164.249.213 (talk) 03:08, 17 March 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Risk estimates 

message: :
Yeah, no?  I realize the status quo is to keep one’s heads in the sand and to ignore the destruction of the Earth’s ecosystem, which keeps humanity alive, in favor of a dreamy, optimistic consumerism, but we’ve gone well beyond "research and debate" at this point. This sounds like a statement from 1989, not given what we know in 2023.  Things are not peachy and business as usual. Viriditas (talk) 00:40, 27 June 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Recommend update 

message: Posting this on both the 'Human extinction' page and the 'Global catastrophic risk' page to suggest the creation of either 1. an 'Omnicide' page 2. a separate 'Existential risk' page and/or 3. Retitling the 'global catastrophic risk' page. 
There are some gnarly issues with the terminology in this constellation of pages & page redirects: 'Human extinction' covers...human extinction.  Whereas omnicide, properly understood in the context of the literature on this subject, refers to the extinction of all terrestrial life. We can concede that while these may be potentially related domains they are meant to describe consequentially and meaningfully distinct outcomes. Human extinction is, so to speak, a sub-domain of what is being referred to in the word 'omnicide'--as a header it doesn't even remotely cover what is meant to be called up in the word omnicide. Meanwhile 'mass-extinction' no longer has the right ring because most people entering middle-age who have had access to a K-12 education have been aware that we're living through a mass-extinction since they were young children. Mass-extinction begins to sound like a normative element in other words and is more likely to be associated with ancient, pre-human events as opposed to evoking the threat of a future event without example in terrestrial history. 
Meanwhile, "existential risk" redirects to "global catastrophic risk." The distinction here is even more subtle but it's still a problem. Existential risk refers to all of the following: 1. the risk of omnicide 2. the risk of human extinction 3. the risk of a civilizational collapse so severe that would evacuate the meaning or desirability of a continuity of human life.  <<The modifying phrase here is important. Civilizational collapse, historically, encompasses plenty of situations that might have been experienced as desirable or less severe than the sort of situation that's being gestured towards in the term existential risk. As a term for this constellation of existential threats 'global catastrophic risk' appears to discount or downplay or fall short of the extremity of these potentials. "Global catastrophic risk" sounds like it could just as easily be applied to the risk of the bond market collapsing as to, say for example, the extinction of all terrestrial life. As a description of omnicide or even of existential risk the header "global catastrophic risk" shades into classical apocalyptic thinking--the end is conceived as potentially redemptive. Conceiving of or talking about the actual cessation of all terrestrial life without the implication of cyclic reinvention or hanging onto the possibility of a silver lining is avoided and repressed by apocalyptic thinking. Clarifying distinctions between these styles of thought about the complex of issues relating to omnicide or to existential risk requires some sort of revision in this space. 
The reworking of these either Human extinction page or the Global catastrophic risk page to cover what is being discounted, downplayed or missed in this conversation . Really, it seems to me, the most appropriate move would be to make a new, separate Existential Risk page that has a slightly different emphasis and organization than the Global Catastrophic Risk page. But this is likely to be somewhat duplicative of the Global catastrophic risk page. Therefore: maybe a new Omnicide page? But that term is more exotic. Either option seems worth pursuing.
So the question, I'm raising is: Should we look into re-titling and revising the Global catastrophic risk page or creating a new omnicide page? 
   ThomasMikael (talk) 18:10, 23 January 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Category errors & Redirect issues: New 'Omnicide' page?