You’re going to run into difficult Anthropic Principle arguments (and related stuff) here. Especially given the tendency of populations to increase, it could be that the majority (or a substantial minority) of conscious observers in the universe live in lucky civilisations that just happen not to have been wiped out.

(Think about 100 civilisations, each doubling in size each generation, and each with a 10% chance of being wiped out each generation. The total number of people continues to increase until the last civilisation is wiped out. Thus, most people who ever live think the danger is less than it really is.)

Difficult stuff, I know.

It would have very little impact, other than to divert needed resources. People in government don’t listen to us; we’re not a lobbying group.

“Climate change bills should be adopted that would reduce pollution and global warming gases.”

How the heck are any of the transhumanist organizations going to get these bills passed? Al Gore can’t get these bills passed, and he’s an Oscar-winning filmmaker with prestige in government and millions of dollars in the bank.

“It could reduce coal usage from a projected 58% of electricity to as little as 11% if no international substitution is allowed.”

And, er, what’s going to substitute for the coal? People will not vote for a bill that leaves them shivering in the dark.

“can be significantly impacted just by helping to enable the adoption of policies”

People in government *do not listen to us*. We cannot just wave a magic wand and get these policies adopted. We can’t even work hard and spend thousands of dollars and get these policies adopted; other groups have worked much harder and spent much more money and achieved nothing.

“Completing a more complete survey of specific asteroid threats could identify an actual large threat.”

We know what the threat level is from historical impacts. It could turn out that there’s a 10 km asteroid on a collision course in ten years, but that has a probability of around one in fifty million.

ie. Global warming. Climate change bills should be adopted that would reduce pollution and global warming gases. I like the McCain/Lieberman climate stewardship bill. It could reduce coal usage from a projected 58% of electricity to as little as 11% if no international substitution is allowed.

>Build up of air pollution
This is something that can be addressed as well. Again the climate change bills before congress would help. Also, encouraging other nations to adopt policies to reduce pollution would be a good thing. It would reduce costs to the economy from health and business losses. This would mean more funds potentially available for other problems. Lifeboat just needs to support all plans where fossil fuel use is reduced and measures to clean up fossil fuel where it is used.

So two items (global warming and air pollution), can be significantly impacted just by helping to enable the adoption of policies that are being considered now that would increase the cost of carbon energy sources and encourage nuclear and renewable power.

Asteroid impact risks are also not well characterized. Completing a more complete survey of specific asteroid threats could identify an actual large threat. This could be a very affordable project. We do not need to trust indirect statistical evidence when we can determine actual risks. Another benefit would be useful information for science and for later space colonization and development projects.

In the course of figuring out where to spend resources, people and organizations like the Lifeboat Foundation are presumably tracking who else is working on what problems and how many resources are being spent by other organizations. Ideally, the Lifeboat Foundation should publish their order-of-magnitude estimates so that other people deciding what projects to work on can use that data as well.

Self-interested people have the same problem, of course. If there are already five companies selling apple-flavored toothpaste, you might not want your startup to sell the same thing. If no one is selling apple-flavored toothpaste, you might consider selling it, with the caveat you’d first want to make sure there isn’t a *really good reason* why no company has attempted to sell apple-flavored toothpaste. The difference between self-interested people and an (ideal) nonprofit is that self-interested people have less incentive to share their research with each other.

Great idea for a post. The point about using the foundation’s resources effectively is well-taken. It’d be interesting to hear about which risks you rate as the most important for the foundation to tackle.

A long-winded nitpick: I feel you dismiss global climate change and terrorism as existential risks too quickly.

On global climate change, you say “We know from past temperature data that the Earth can warm by 6–9 C on a fairly short timescale, without causing a permanent collapse or even a mass extinction.” True, but it appears past temperature increases may have been caused by different processes. Perhaps when warming is primarily caused by X, it involves a self-regulating cycle, but cause Y will result in a downward spiral. It’s difficult to make the analogy of “it’s happened before, so it’s nothing to worry about” based on temperature alone. And even relatively minor climate changes could destabilize parts of the world. Which could be very significant.

On the terrorism angle, you state that “but terrorists are not going to deliberately destroy the Earth; terrorism is a political tool with political goals that require someone to be alive.” I only partially agree. I think perhaps that terrorism as an institution can be productively viewed as a rational actor (as you note), but I don’t think it’s correct to view terrorists themselves as rational actors as a rule. They’re more like fire-and-forget missiles filled with an ideology then launched by different institutions/factions of terrorism. But there’s one key difference from fire-and-forget missiles: their payload can increase over time as technology moves forward.

Today’s terrorism is calibrated on a certain level of technological capacity for destruction that an individual or small group may acquire: I fear that capacity may increase faster than the institution of terrorism can evolve to compensate for it (e.g., tone down their ideology of “cause as much destruction to the unbelievers as you can”). And once you release a terrorist into the wild, it’s hard to recall them. Some of the missiles being fired today, with an ideology calibrated for suicide bombings, may have the means to blow us all up in 20 years.

Again, as you say– these things are very political and hard to change. But I wouldn’t rule them out as existential risks.