While the default Firewall setting has fighting existential risks as a core theme, it might be useful to consider exactly what extinction scenarios are on top of the worry list of the proxies and sentinels.
- The obvious one is malign superintelligence, be it the TITANs, new seed AGIs or some alien entity. It would subvert transhuman civilization and then reshape it and its resources to whatever ends it has, eventually wiping out transhumanity because it doesn't care (or maybe, with a lower probability, doing something permanently horrible to it because it does care).
- A second kind of threat is war. Given the technologies around a transhuman vs. transhuman war could become very nasty. Antimatter warheads, nanoweapons, bioweapons, applications of YGBM and basilisk hacks, disinformation warfare and automatized sabotage could pretty easily wipe out most habitats very quickly. Brinkers might be safe as long as they live somewhere unknown, but there are potential replicator interplanetary seeker weapons that could wipe them out too.
- Alien invasion can obviously not be ruled out. The Factors seem fairly benign, but who knows what else is out there. The Pandora gates and putative Factor FTL also imply that if there is something dangerous anywhere it could come and get us.
- Replicators such as the Exurgent virus, human-created spam AGIs, pandemics or von Neumann machines could out-compete transhumanity, reducing our ecological niche to nothing.
- If the AGIs take over but continue transhuman civilization this might be OK, but some worry that even ordinary AGIs could fulfil this role: they might simply be better in the new interplanetary/interstellar environment than transhumans and uplifts with all their genetic baggage. If they continue transhuman civilization it might be OK, but (see below) they might rapidly evolve to something that is not just alien but pointless.
- A more subtle threat is bad evolutionary attractors. People/AGIs who enjoy forking might become more and more numerous until they completely dominate the population, slowly evolving towards a situation where all resources are diverted to reproduction. Hive minds could be far more stable and effective than individual beings, out-competing individuals and reducing transhumanity to a number of hive corporations. A particularly nasty scenario is that all traits that give life value (consciousness, joy, beauty etc.) are unstable in such a situation and will eventually be weeded out of the population - transhumanity continues as something valueless.
- Population implosion is not entirely impossible. Birthrates may be below replacement rate (although the demographics of the solar system is an unsettled question), and given the presence of very enticing virtual partners and virtual children traditional reproduction might become very rare.
- Emergence of perfectly addictive drugs or virtual worlds might lock all transhuman intelligences into a static VR entertainment civilization.
- Permanent socio-economic collapse. Some worry that there might be economic disaster risks due to too complex interconnectivity or inherent flaws in the evolutionarily stable market systems at this level of technology.
- Physics disasters like making black holes, stable strangelets or naked singularities. While somewhat unlikely, the possibility that a baby black hole could stellify Jupiter or strangelets convert a planet into a quark matter blob (with sterilizing gamma radiation as a side effect) cannot entirely be ruled out. A related risk is vacuum phase transitions, thunderbolt singularities, supersymmetry phase transitions and other universe-ending disasters: very low probability due to anthropic bounds and Pandora gate evidence, but still not zero probability.
- The universe is a simulation and is shut off. Far more believable in among the people of EP than today, since many of them *are* simulations and live in largely simulated worlds, sometimes deeply nested.
- Interstellar disasters such as gamma ray bursts and hypernovas have somewhat receded as a threat: there are enough heavily radiation-shielded habitats to have plenty of survivors. If Eta Carina or WR 104 go boom and irradiate us it will be bad, but at the very least synthmorphs and biomorphs living in atmosphere- or rock-shielded habitats will be safe.
- Old worries like environmental disasters, asteroid impacts, supervolcanos, climate extremes have become local issues. They might be a problem for some groups.
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Rethink Resleeve Redo