In this “fun”, festive episode of The Studies Show, Tom and Stuart discuss two ways—one man-made, one natural—that our species might be wiped off the planet.
The first is “mirror life”, a science-fiction-sounding threat that hardly anyone had heard of until last week, when a group of concerned scientists wrote an open letter arguing that this is a technology that should never be developed. The second is the eruption of a supervolcano, which has a scarily high likelihood of happening in the next century… and for which scientists say we’re “woefully underprepared”. Have a cheery Christmas!
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Show notes
* Mirror life:
* The 300-page full Stanford report
* Science perspective piece on the risks of mirror life
* Asimov Press explainer article
* Supervolcanoes:
* I HATE ICELAND!
* Nature piece from 2022 about our “woeful” level of preparation for a massive volcanic eruption
* 1816, the “year without a summer”
* Evidence against the idea that Mt. Tambora nearly drove humans to extinction
* 2024 paper that’s sceptical of global cooling beyond 1.5 degrees C
* 2023 paper with a much more pessimistic scenario
* Two useful discussions (first, second) of the effects of supervolcanoes on the Effective Altruism forum
* 2018 article on what interventions might prevent or mitigate supervolcanic eruptions
Credits
The Studies Show is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada Productions.
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