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Comment by kulahan | Hacker News Reader

If you have a house of cards and someone starts swapping them out for other random things, most of which do not work, then reshaping everything == existential threat. Our environment is in an incredibly delicate balance in some locations, and we don't know how losing some species might have larger domino effects.

If they're rare creatures, maybe the effect won't be large. But who knows?

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I think your response reinforces my point. I understand existential threat to mean human extinction threat.

Humans can outlive the destruction and change of basically every environment on earth. We can live in swamps and blistering deserts.

What do you think existential threat means?

They might either mean that the (current line of) humanity will not continue

Millions will die.

For the latter, I contend that millions die every week as the status quo, so I don't see events that might kill 10s or even a few hundred million as an real existential threat.

Remember what happened during COVID? Now imagine the "essential" workers are all dead or too busy fighting for the last scrap of food. The food trucks no longer turn up. The hospitals aren't running. You might survive, but our technological civilization of billions won't.

I think the subtext implied in the respondents tone is that they don’t consider millions or even billions of people dying off as existential.

I thought I was pretty explicit in saying exactly that.

Many countries lost more than 10% of their population in World War II in the span of just a few years. Some lost more than 50% of the working age men. Even that wasn't an existential threat.

It all boils down to what hides behind that word, "existential". Slavs and Jews definitely considered what happened in WW2 an existential threat for instance, but you seem to be arguing that only threats to the entirety of humanity qualify as existential, a view that many others here don't agree with, probably because it gives off the impression that things like the extinction of entire cultures and millions or billions of people are discounted by using a restrictive definition. It seems however that neither view matches the use of the concept of "existential risks" in contemporary discourse, which are understood to be "risks that threaten the destruction of humanity's long-term potential". That's a much lower bar to clear and by that standard, we're clearly collectively cutting the branch we're sitting on, though probably not indeed jumping off the cliff of an absolute total annihilation of the human race.

I might surprise you but our current population is not a prerequisite for technological civilization. At 4 billion people died, that would only set us back to 1970s population.

An existential threat to us is, as the name implies, a threat to our existence. Unknown domino effects which may or may not have changes so large that it causes massive swathes of humans to die off, forever changing the future of our species, seems to fit that description.

How much more does it need to be existential to you?

A credible chance of extinction without unknown unknowns.

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