☄ Is Washington getting more serious about existential risk?

Also: 5 Quick Questions for … economist Anna Stansbury on the productivity-pay gap

In This Issue

The Essay: Is Washington getting more serious about existential risk?

5QQ: 5 Quick Questions for … economist Anna Stansbury on the productivity-pay gap

Micro Reads: the case for space, machine learning and parenting, “soft” CRISPR, and more …

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Quote of the Issue

“Setting up self-sufficient colonies on the moon and elsewhere in the solar system — and eventually in other solar systems — will be a good hedge against the extinction of our species or the destruction of civilization, and is a highly desirable goal for that reason among others.” - David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity

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The Essay

☄ Is Washington getting more serious about existential risk?

Is a successful society more like a mighty oak tree or a wispy blade of grass? The tree might seem the obvious answer — though you’ve probably already guessed it’s the wrong answer — given its obvious strength and majesty. When you see a thriving forest, it means there’s a population of trees well suited to that particular environment.

But what if that environment suffers a sudden shock? What if there’s, say, a hurricane or tornado? A strong tree can maintain its stability under high winds, but if it breaks, that’s it. The damage is irreversible, even once the winds die down. But the blade of grass, while less stable day to day as it sways with every breeze, bends but does not break. This lack of stability is what generates resilience. And it’s much the same with a wealthy, technologically progressive society. Although the change generated by advanced economies can be disruptive — jobs come and go, industries and cities rise and fall — this inherent instability also generates long-term resilience through the production of wealth and pushing forward the tech frontier.

The tree and grass analogy comes from Searching for Safety by the political scientist Aaron Wildavsky, who goes on to argue that “resilience is the capacity to cope with unanticipated dangers after they have become manifest, learning to bounce back through economic growth and technical progress. Increased wealth and technical knowledge help us build up a reservoir of resilience for dealing with such problems.”

I was thinking about Searching for Safety and the notion of tech-driven resilience when I wrote last week about how the US Supreme Court’s decision in West Virginia v. EPA — limiting but hardly eliminating the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions — should be seen as an opportunity to rethink climate change policy. Perhaps it will give new life to non-regulatory approaches, such as a carbon tax.

More importantly, I would hope the ruling will jolt more policymakers and activists into aggressively favoring public policy that supports the generation of abundant, clean, affordable energy through emerging technologies: advanced fission, fusion, advanced/enhanced geothermal, and space-based solar. Such innovations could also help power a broad carbon capture (and sequestration) effort. This is a far more promising approach than ones counting on major lifestyle changes, driven in part by regulation, to mitigate climate change.