A Weekly Series Of Essays About The Language Of Bitcoin by Alex McShane.
Lingua Contra Imperium
The Language of Bitcoin: 4
TL;DR – An existential risk is the possibility of an event or series of of events that could drastically curtail humanity’s potential. A hypothetical global catastrophe could be anthropogenic or non-anthropogenic and internal or external in nature. The adoption of Bitcoin will better position us to address these risks as a society.
External Non-anthropogenic
A catastrophic collision with an astronomical object, such as an asteroid impact would be an external non-anthropogenic risk. This has already occurred here several times. During the Permian Triassic period (ending 250 million years ago) an astronomical impact killed 90 percent of the species on Earth. It took tens of millions of years for life on Earth to repopulate and Earth’s intelligence potential to recover.
One interesting external non-anthropogenic risk is Earth’s reflected light, which could be measured by an external intelligence who then come to extinguish us. (The topic of our own signal bringing about this death by misadventure is discussed further below.)
What does this have to do with…
Read more:Bitcoin And Existential Risk
