The End of the World: Public Views on Global Catastrophic Risks and Human Extinction

People have long been fascinated with global catastrophic risks (GCRs), such as super-volcanoes, asteroid impacts, lethal pandemics, nuclear war/winter, artificial intelligence, and nano-engineered “grey goo.” Some GCRs could lead to human extinction, yet research about extreme hazards is lacking. This project is the first to systematically identify U.S. public perceptions of human extinction itself and of GCRs that could cause extinction—including risk perceptions, judgments of the need for action, protective decision preferences, and non-protective and information search intentions. The study documents how these views relate to each other, as well as to potential cognitive, affective, social, cultural, and demographic predictors. Risk communication experiments determine how responses vary due to cognitive (professional and public risk estimates; time perspective) and cultural (culturally biased decision options) manipulations. Data are generated from nationally representative surveys and experiments, supplemented by focus groups and cognitive interviews. Overall, this project clarifies the extent to which Americans care about human survival, the degree to which they differentiate among hazards that might pose risks of human extinction, and how they regard GCRs compared to other low-probability, high-consequence events and sub-extinction outcomes. The project team is fostering a societal dialogue through an aggressive dissemination plan, including the development of online and other products targeted to lay audiences and decision makers (e.g., practitioner summaries of findings; publicity via web portal and social media) in addition to academic publications and presentations. The results inform individual and collective deliberations and decisions over how much effort citizens, scientists, decision makers, and communicators should expend to postpone human extinction. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.