We could all be more altruistic and effective in our service of others, but what exactly is it that’s stopping us? What are the biases and cognitive failures that prevent us from properly acting in service of existential risks, statistically large numbers of people, and long-term future considerations? How can we become more effective altruists? Stefan Schubert, a researcher at University of Oxford’s Social Behaviour and Ethics Lab, explores questions like these at the intersection of moral psychology and philosophy. This conversation explores the steps that researchers like Stefan are taking to better understand psychology in service of doing the most good we can. 

Topics discussed include:

• The psychology of existential risk, longtermism, effective altruism, and speciesism
• Stefan’s study “The Psychology of Existential Risks: Moral Judgements about Human Extinction”
• Various works and studies Stefan Schubert has co-authored in these spaces
• How this enables us to be more altruistic

Timestamps:

0:00 Intro

2:31 Stefan’s academic and intellectual journey

5:20 How large is this field?

7:49 Why study the psychology of X-risk and EA?

16:54 What does a better understanding of psychology here enable?

21:10 What are the cognitive limitations psychology helps to elucidate?

23:12 Stefan’s study “The Psychology of Existential Risks: Moral Judgements about Human Extinction”

34:45 Messaging on existential risk

37:30 Further areas of study

43:29 Speciesism

49:18 Further studies and work by Stefan

Works Cited 

Understanding cause-neutrality

Considering Considerateness: Why communities of do-gooders should be exceptionally considerate

On Caring by Nate Soares

Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion

Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Sequences

Whether and Where to Give

A Person-Centered Approach to Moral Judgment

Moral Aspirations and Psychological Limitations

Robin Hanson on Near and Far Mode 

Construal-Level Theory of Psychological Distance

The Puzzle of Ineffective Giving (Under Review) 

Impediments to Effective Altruism

The Many Obstacles to Effective Giving (Under Review) 

Moral Aspirations and Psychological Limitations

 

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Lucas Perry: Hello everyone and welcome to the Future of Life Institute Podcast. I’m Lucas Perry.  Today, we’re speaking with Stefan Schubert about the psychology of existential risk, longtermism, and effective altruism more broadly. This episode focuses on Stefan’s reasons for exploring psychology in this space, how large this space of study currently is, the usefulness of studying psychology as it pertains to these areas, the central questions which motivate his research, a recent publication that he co-authored which motivated this interview called The Psychology of Existential Risks: Moral Judgements about Human Extinction, as well as other related work of his. 

This podcast often ranks in the top 100 of technology podcasts on Apple Music. This is a big help for increasing our audience and informing the public about existential and technological risks, as well as what we can do about them. So, if this podcast is valuable to you, consider sharing it with friends and leaving us a good review. It really helps. 

Stefan Schubert is a researcher at the the Social Behaviour and Ethics Lab at the University of Oxford, working in the intersection of moral psychology and philosophy. He focuses on psychological questions of relevance to effective altruism, such as why our altruistic actions are often ineffective, and why we don’t invest more in safe-guarding our common future. He was previously a researcher at Centre for Effective Altruism and a postdoc in philosophy at the London School of Economics. 

We can all be more altruistic and effective in our service of others. Expanding our moral circles of compassion farther into space and deeper into time, as well as across species, and possibly even eventually to machines, while mitigating our own tendencies towards selfishness and myopia is no easy task and requires deep self-knowledge and far more advanced psychology than I believe we have today. 

This conversation explores the first steps that researchers like Stefan are taking to better understand this space in service of doing the most good we can. 

So, here is my conversation with Stefan Schubert 

Can you take us through your intellectual and academic journey in the space of EA and longtermism and in general, and how that brought you to what you’re working on now?

Stefan Schubert: I started range of different subjects. I guess I had a little bit of hard time deciding what I wanted to do. So I got a masters in political science. But then in the end, I ended up doing a PhD in philosophy at Lund University in Sweden, specifically in epistemology, the theory of knowledge. And then I went to London School of Economics to do a post doc. And during that time, I discovered effective altruism and I got more and more involved with that.

So then I applied to Centre for Effective Altruism, here in Oxford, to work as a researcher. And I worked there as a researcher for two years. At first, I did policy work, including reports on catastrophic risk and x-risk for a foundation and for a government. But then I also did some work, which was general and foundational or theoretical nature, including work on the notion of cause neutrality, how we should understand that. And also on how EAs should think about everyday norms like norms of friendliness and honesty.

And I guess that even though I, at the time I didn’t do sort of psychological empirical research, that sort of relates to my current work on psychology because for the last two years, I’ve worked on the psychology of effective altruism at the Social Behavior and Ethics Lab here at Oxford. This lab is headed by Nadira Farber and I also work closely with Lucius Caviola, who did his PhD here at Oxford and recently moved to Harvard to do a postdoc.

So we have three strands of research. The first one is sort of the psychology of effective altruism in general. So why is it that people aren’t effectively altruistic? This is a bit of a puzzle because generally people, they are at least somewhat effective when they working for their own interest. To be sure they are not maximally effective, but when they try to buy a home or save for retirement, they do some research and sort of try to find good value for money.

But they don’t seem to do the same when they donate to charity. They aren’t as concerned with effectiveness. So this is a bit of a puzzle. And then there are two strands of research, which have to do with specific EA causes. So one is the psychology of longtermism and existential risk, and the other is the psychology of speciesism, human-animal relations. So out of these three strands of research, I focused the most on the psychology of effective altruism in general and the psychology of longtermism and existential risk.

Lucas Perry: How large is the body of work regarding the psychology of existential risk and effective altruism in general? How many people are working on this? If you give us more insight into the state of the field and the amount of interest there.

Stefan Schubert: It’s somewhat difficult to answer because it sort of depends on how do you define these domains. There’s research, which is of some relevance to ineffective altruism, but it’s not exactly on that. But I will say that there may be around 10 researchers or so who are sort of EAs and work on these topics for EA reasons. So you definitely want to count them. And then when we thinking about non EA researchers, like other academics, there hasn’t been that much research I would say on the psychology of X-risk and longtermism

There’s research on the psychology of climate change, that’s a fairly large topic. But more specifically on X-risk and longtermism, there’s less. Effective altruism in general. That’s a fairly large topic. There’s lots of research on biases like the identifiable victim effect: people’s tendency to donate to identifiable victims over larger number of known unidentifiable statistical victims. Maybe the order of a few hundred papers.

And then the last topic, speciesism; human-animals relations: that’s fairly large. I know less of that literature, but my impression is that it’s fairly large.

Lucas Perry: Going back into the 20th century, much of what philosophers have done, like Peter Singer is constructing thought experiments, which isolate the morally relevant aspects of a situation, which is intended in the end to subvert psychological issues and biases in people.

So I guess I’m just reflecting here on how philosophical thought experiments are sort of the beginnings of elucidating a project of the psychology of EA or existential risk or whatever else.

Stefan Schubert: The vast majority of these papers are not directly inspired by philosophical thought experiments. It’s more like psychologists who run some experiments because there’s some theory that some other psychologist has devised. Most don’t look that much at philosophy I would say. But I think effective altruism and the fact that people are ineffectively altruistic, that’s fairly theoretically interesting for psychologists, and also for economists.

Lucas Perry: So why study psychological questions as they relate to effective altruism, and as they pertain to longtermism and longterm future considerations?

Stefan Schubert: It’s maybe easiest to answer that question in the context of effective altruism in general. I should also mention that when we studied this topic of sort of effectively altruistic actions in general, what we concretely study is effective and ineffective giving. And that is because firstly, that’s what other people have studied, so it’s easier to put our research into context.

The other thing is that it’s quite easy to study in a lab setting, right? So you might ask people, where would you donate to the effective or the ineffective charity? You might think that career choice is actually more important than giving, or some people would argue that, but that seems more difficult to study in a lab setting. So with regards to what motivates our research on effective altruism in general and effective giving, what ultimately motivates our research is that we want to make people improve their decisions. We want to make them donate more effectively, be more effectively altruistic in general.

So how can you then do that? Well, I want to make one distinction here, which I think might be important to think about. And that is the distinction between what I call a behavioral strategy and an intellectual strategy. And the behavioral strategy is that you come up with certain framings or setups to decision problems, such that people behave in a more desirable way. So there’s literature on nudging for instance, where you sort of want to nudge people into desirable options.

So for instance, in a cafeteria where you have healthier foods at eye level and the unhealthy food is harder to reach people will eat healthier than if it’s the other way round. You could come up with interventions that similarly make people donate more effectively. So for instance, the default option could be an effective charity. We know that in general, people tend often to go with the default option because of some kind of cognitive inertia. So that might lead to more effective donations.

I think it has some limitations. For instance, nudging might be interesting for the government because the government has a lot of power, right? It might frame the decision on whether you want to donate your organs after you’re dead. The other thing is that just creating an implementing these kinds of behavior interventions can often be very time consuming and costly.

So one might think that this sort of intellectual strategy should be emphasized and it shouldn’t be forgotten. So with respect to the intellectual strategy, you’re not trying to change people’s behavior solely, you are trying to do that as well, but you’re also trying to change their underlying way of thinking. So in a sense it has a lot in common with philosophical argumentation. But the difference is that you start with descriptions of people’s default way of thinking.

You describe that your default way of thinking, that leads you to prioritize an identifiable victim over larger numbers of statistical victims. And then you sort of provide an argument that that’s wrong. Statistical victims, they are just as real individuals as the identifiable victims. So you get people to accept that their own default way of thinking about identifiable versus statistical victims is wrong, and that they shouldn’t trust the default way of thinking but instead think in a different way.

I think that this strategy is actually often used, but we don’t often think about it as a strategy. So for instance, Nate Soares has this blog post “On Caring” where he argues that we shouldn’t trust our internal care-o-meter. And this is because we can’t increase how much we feel about more people dying with the number of people that die or with the badness of those increasing numbers. So it’s sort of an intellectual argument that takes psychological insight as a starting point and other people have done as well.

So the psychologist Paul Bloom has this book Against Empathy where he argues for similar conclusions. And I think Eliezer Yudkowsky uses his strategy a lot in his sequences. I think it’s often an effective strategy that should be used more.

Lucas Perry: So there’s the extent to which we can know about underlying, problematic cognition in persons and we can then change the world in ways. As you said, this is framed as nudging, where you sort of manipulate the environment in such a way without explicitly changing their cognition, in order to produce desired behaviors. Now, my initial reaction to this is, how are you going to deal with the problem when they find out that you’re doing this to them?

Now the second one here is the extent to which we can use our insights from psychological and analysis and studies to change implicit and explicit models and cognition in order to effectively be better decision makers. If a million deaths is a statistic and a dozen deaths is a tragedy, then there is some kind of failure of empathy and compassion in the human mind. We’re not evolved or set up to deal with these kinds of moral calculations.

So maybe you could do nudging by setting up the world in such a way that people are more likely to donate to charities that are likely to help out statistically large, difficult to empathize with numbers of people, or you can teach them how to think better and better act on statistically large numbers of people.

Stefan Schubert: That’s a good analysis actually. On the second approach: what I call the intellectual strategy, you are sort of teaching them to think differently. Whereas on this behavioral or nudging approach, you’re changing the world. I also think that this comment about “they might not like the way you nudged them” is a good comment. Yes, that has been discussed. I guess in some cases of nudging, it might be sort of cases of weakness of will. People might not actually want the chocolate but they fall prey to their impulses. And the same might be true with saving for retirement.

So whereas with ineffective giving, yeah there it’s much less clear. Is it really the case that people really want to donate effectively and therefore sort of are happy to be nudged in this way, that doesn’t seem to clear at all? So that’s absolutely a reason against that approach.

And then with respect to arguing for certain conclusions, in the sense that it is argument or argumentation, it’s more akin to philosophical argumentation. But it’s different from standard analytic philosophical argumentation in that it discusses human psychology. You discuss how our psychological dispositions mislead us at length and that’s not how analytic philosophers normally do it. And of course you can argue for instance, effective giving in the standard philosophical vein.

And some people have done that, like this EA philosopher Theron Pummer, he has an interesting paper called Whether and Where to Give on this question of whether it is an obligation to donate effectively. So I think that’s interesting, but one worries that there might not be that much to say about these issues because everything else equal is maybe sort of trivial that the more effectiveness the better. Of course everything isn’t always equal. But in general, it might not be too much interesting stuff you can say about that from a normative or philosophical point of view.

But there are tons of interesting psychological things you can say because there are tons of ways in which people aren’t effective. The other related issue is that this form of psychology might have a substantial readership. So it seems to me based on the success of Kahneman and Haidt and others, that people love to read about how their own and others’ thoughts by default go wrong. Whereas in contrast, standard analytic philosophy, it’s not as widely read, even among the educated public.

So for those reasons, I think that the sort of more psychology based augmentation may in some respects be more promising than purely abstract philosophical arguments for why we should be effectively altruistic.

Lucas Perry: My view or insight here is that the analytic philosopher is more so trying on the many different perspectives in his or her own head, whereas the psychologist is empirically studying what is happening in the heads of many different people. So clarifying what a perfected science of psychology in this field is useful for illustrating the end goals and what we’re attempting to do here. This isn’t to say that this will necessarily happen in our lifetimes or anything like that, but what does a full understanding of psychology as it relates to existential risk and longtermism and effective altruism enable for human beings?

Stefan Schubert: One thing I might want to say is that psychological insights might help us to formulate a vision of how we ought to behave or what mindset we ought to have and what we ought to be like as people, which is not the only normatively valid, which is what philosophers talk about, but also sort of persuasive. So one idea there that Lucius and I have discussed quite extensively recently is that some moral psychologists suggest that when we think about morality, we think to a large degree, not in terms of whether a particular act was good or bad, but rather about whether the person who performed that act is good or bad or whether they are virtuous or vicious.

So this is called the person centered approach to moral judgment. Based on that idea, we’ve been thinking about what lists of virtues people would need, in order to make the world better, more effectively. And ideally these should be virtues that both are appealing to common sense, or which can at least be made appealing to common sense, and which also make the world better when applied.

So we’ve been thinking about which such virtues one would want to have on such a list. We’re not sure exactly what we’ll include, but some examples might be prioritization, that you need to make sure that you prioritize the best ways of helping. And then we have another which we call Science: That you do proper research and how to help effectively or that you rely on others who do. And then collaboration, that you’re willing to collaborate on moral issues, potentially even with your moral opponents.

So the details of this virtues aren’t too important, but the idea is that it hopefully should seem like a moral ideal to some people, to be a person who lives these virtues. I think that to many people philosophical arguments about the importance of being more effective and putting more emphasis on consequences, if you read them in a book of analytic philosophy, that might seem pretty uninspiring. So people don’t read that and think “that’s what I would want to be like.”

But hopefully, they could read about these kinds of virtues and think, “that’s what I would want to be like.” So to return to your question, ideally we could use psychology to sort of create such visions of some kind of moral ideal that would not just be normatively correct, but also sort of appealing and persuasive.

Lucas Perry: It’s like a science, which is attempting to contribute to the project of human and personal growth and evolution and enlightenment in so far as that as possible.

Stefan Schubert: We see this as part of the larger EA project of using evidence and reason and research to make the world a better place. EA has this prioritization research where you try to find the best ways of doing good. I gave this talk at EAGx Nordics earlier this year on “Moral Aspirations and Psychological Limitations.” And in that talk I said, well what EAs normally do when they prioritize ways of doing good, is as it were, they look into the world and they think: what ways of doing good are there? What different courses are there? What sort of levers can we pull to make the world better?

So should we reduce existential risk from specific sources like advanced AI or bio risk, or is rather global poverty or animal welfare the best thing to work on? But then the other approach is to rather sort of look inside yourself and think, well I am not perfectly effectively altruistic, and that is because of my psychological limitations. So then we want to find out which of those psychological limitations are most impactful to work on because, for instance, they are more tractable or because it makes a bigger difference if we remove them. That’s one way of thinking about this research, that we sort of take this prioritization research and turn it inwards.

Lucas Perry: Can you clarify the kinds of things that psychology is really pointing out about the human mind? Part of this is clearly about biases and poor aspects of human thinking, but what does it mean for human beings to have these bugs and human cognition? What are the kinds of things that we’re discovering about the person and how he or she thinks that fail to be in alignment with the truth.

Stefan Schubert: I mean, there are many different sources of error, one might say. One thing that some people have discussed is that people are not that interested in being effectively altruistic. Why is that? Some people say that’s just because they get more warm glow out of giving someone who’s suffering more saliently and then the question arises, why do they get more warm glow out of that? Maybe that’s because they just want to signal their empathy. That’s sort of one perspective, which is maybe a bit cynical, then ,that the ultimate source of lots of ineffectiveness is just this preference for signaling and maybe a lack of genuine altruism.

Another approach would be to just say, the world is very complex and it’s very difficult to understand it and we’re just computationally constrained, so we’re not good enough at understanding it. Another approach would be to say that because the world is so complex, we evolved various broad-brushed heuristics, which generally work not too badly, but then, when we are put in some evolutionarily novel context and so on, they don’t guide us too well. That might be another source of error. In general, what I would want to emphasize is that there are likely many different sources of human errors.

Lucas Perry: You’ve discussed here how you focus and work on these problems. You mentioned that you are primarily interested in the psychology of effective altruism in so far as we can become better effective givers and understand why people are not effective givers. And then, there is the psychology of longtermism. Can you enumerate some central questions that are motivating you and your research?

Stefan Schubert: To some extent, we need more research just in order to figure out what further research we and others should do so I would say that we’re in a pre-paradigmatic stage with respect to that. There are numerous questions one can discuss with respect to psychology of longtermism and existential risks. One is just people’s empirical beliefs on how good the future will be if we don’t go extinct, what the risk of extinction is and so on. This could potentially be useful when presenting arguments for the importance of work on existential risks. Maybe it turns out that people underestimate the risk of extinction and the potential quality of the future and so on. Another issue which is interesting is moral judgments, people’s moral judgements about how bad extinction would be, and the value of a good future, and so on.

Moral judgements about human extinction, that’s exactly what we studied in a recent paper that we published, which is called “The Psychology of Existential Risks: Moral Judgements about Human Extinction.” In that paper, we test this thought experiment by philosopher Derek Parfit. He has this thought experiment where he discusses three different outcomes. First, peace, the second, a nuclear war that kills 99% of the world’s existing population and three, a nuclear war that kills everyone. Parfit says, then, that a war that kills everyone, that’s the worst outcome. Near-extinction is the next worst and peace is the best. Maybe no surprises there, but the more interesting part of the discussion, that concerns the relative differences between these outcomes in terms of badness. Parfit effectively made an empirical prediction, saying that most people would find a difference in terms of badness between peace and near-extinction to be greater, but he himself thought that the difference between near-extinction and extinction, that’s the greater difference. That’s because only extinction would lead to the future forever being lost and Parfit thought that if humanity didn’t go extinct, the future could be very long and good and therefore, it would be a unique disaster if the future was lost.

On this view, extinction is uniquely bad, as we put it. It’s not just bad because it would mean that many people would die, but also because it would mean that we would lose a potentially long and grand future. We tested this hypothesis in the paper, then. First, we had a preliminary study, which didn’t actually pertain directly to Parfit’s hypothesis. We just studied whether people would find extinction a very bad event in the first place and we found that, yes, they do and they that the government should invest substantially to prevent it.

Then, we moved on to the main topic, which was Parfit’s hypothesis. We made some slight changes. In the middle outcome, Parfit had 99% dying. We reduced that number to 80%. We also talked about catastrophes in general rather than nuclear wars and we didn’t want to talk about peace because we thought that you might have an emotional association with the word “peace;” we just talked about no catastrophe instead. Using this paradigm, we found that Parfit was right. First, most people, just like him, thought that extinction was the worst outcome, near extinction the next, and no catastrophe was the best. But second, we find, then, that most people find the difference in terms of badness, between no one dying and 80% dying, that’s greater than the difference between 80% dying and 100% dying.

Our interpretation, then, is that this is presumably because they focus most on the immediate harm that the catastrophes cause and in terms of the immediate harm, the difference between no one dying and 80% dying, it’s obviously greater than that between 80% dying and 100% dying. That was a control condition in some of our experiments, but we also had other conditions where we would slightly tweak the question. We had one condition which we call the salience condition, where we made the longterm consequences of the three outcomes salient. We told participants to remember the longterm consequences of the outcomes. Here, we didn’t actually add any information that they don’t have access to, but we just made some information more salient and that made significantly more participants find the difference between 80% dying and 100% dying the greater one.

Then, we had yet another condition which we call the utopia condition, where we told participants that if humanity doesn’t go extinct, then the future will be extremely long and extremely good and it was said that if 80% die, then, obviously, at first, things are not so good, but after a recovery period, we would go on to this rosy future. We included this condition partly because such scenarios have been discussed to some extent by futurists, but partly also because we wanted to know, if we ramp up this goodness of the future to the maximum and maximize the opportunity costs of extinction, how many people would then find the difference between near extinction and extinction the greater one. Indeed, we found, then, that given such a scenario, a large majority found the difference between 80% dying and 100% dying the larger one so then, they did find extinction uniquely bad given this enormous opportunity cost of a utopian future.

Lucas Perry: What’s going on in my head right now is we were discussing earlier the role or not of these philosophical thought experiments in psychological analysis. You’ve done a great study here that helps to empirically concretize the biases and remedies for the issues that Derek Parfit had exposed and pointed to in his initial thought experiment. That was popularized by Nick Bostrom and it’s one of the key thought experiments for much of the existential risk community and people committed to longtermism because it helps to elucidate this deep and rich amount of value in the deep future and how we don’t normally consider that. Your discussion here just seems to be opening up for me tons of possibilities in terms of how far and deep this can go in general. The point of Peter Singer’s child drowning in a shallow pond was to isolate the bias of proximity and Derek Parfit’s thought experiment isolates the bias of familiarity, temporal bias and continuing into the future, it’s making me think, we also have biases about identity.

Derek Parfit also has thought experiments about identity, like with his teleportation machine where, say, you stepped into a teleportation machine and it annihilated all of your atoms but before it did so, it scanned all of your information and once it scanned you, it destroyed you and then re-assembled you on the other side of the room, or you can change the thought experiment and say on the other side of the universe. Is that really you? What does it mean to die? Those are the kinds of questions that are elicited. Listening to what you’ve developed and learned and reflecting on the possibilities here, it seems like you’re at the beginning of a potentially extremely important and meaningful field that helps to inform decision-making on these morally crucial and philosophically interesting questions and points of view. How do you feel about that or what I’m saying?

Stefan Schubert: Okay, thank you very much and thank you also for putting this Parfit thought experiment a bit in context. What you’re saying is absolutely right, that this has been used a lot, including by Nick Bostrom and others in the longtermist community and that was indeed one reason why we wanted to test it. I also agree that there are tons of interesting philosophical thought experiments there and they should be tested more. There’s also this other field of experimental philosophy where philosophers test philosophical thought experiments themselves, but in general, I think there’s absolutely more room for empirical testing of them.

With respect to temporal bias, I guess it depends a bit what one means by that, because we actually did get an effect from just mentioning that they should consider the longterm consequences, so I might think that to some extent it’s not only that people are biased in favor of the present, but it’s also that they don’t really consider the longterm future. They sort of neglect it and it’s not something that’s generally discussed among most people. I think this is also something that Parfit’s thought experiment highlights. You have to think about the really longterm consequences here and if you do think about them, then, your intuitions about these thought experiment should reverse.

Lucas Perry: People’s cognitive time horizons are really short.

Stefan Schubert: Yes.

Lucas Perry: People probably have the opposite discounting of future persons that I do. Just because I think that the kinds of experiences that Earth-originating intelligent life forms will be having in the near to 100 to 200 years will be much more deep and profound than what humans are capable of, that I would value them more than I value persons today. Most people don’t think about that. They probably just think there’ll be more humans and short of their bias towards present day humans, they don’t even consider a time horizon long enough to really have the bias kick in, is what you’re saying?

Stefan Schubert: Yeah, exactly. Thanks for that, also, for mentioning that. First of all, my view is that people don’t even think so much about the longterm future unless prompted to do so. Second, in this first study I mentioned, which was sort of a pre-study, we asked, “How good do you think that the future’s going to be?” On the average, I think they said, “It’s going to be slightly better than the present” and that would be very different from your view, then, that the future’s going to be much better. You could argue that this view that the future is going to be about as good as present is somewhat unlikely. I think it’s going to be much better or maybe it’s going to be much worse. There’s several different biases or errors that are present here.

Merely making the longterm consequences of the three outcomes salient, that already makes people more inclined to find a difference between 80% dying and 100% dying the greater one, so then you don’t add any information. Also ,specifying that the longterm outcomes are going to be extremely good, that makes a further difference that make most people find the difference between 80% dying and 100% dying the greater one.

Lucas Perry: I’m sure you and I, and listeners as well, have the hilarious problem of trying to explain this stuff to friends or family members or people that you meet that are curious about it and the difficulty of communicating it and imparting the moral saliency. I’m just curious to know if you have explicit messaging recommendations that you have extracted or learned from the study that you’ve done.

Stefan Schubert: You want to make the future more salient if you want people to care more about existential risk. With respect to explicit messaging more generally, like I said, there haven’t been that many studies on this topic, so I can’t refer to any specific study that says that this is how you should work with the messaging on this topic but just thinking more generally, one thing I’ve been thinking about is that maybe, with many of these issues, it’s just that it takes a while for people to get habituated with them. At first, if someone hears a very surprising statement that has very far reaching conclusions, they might be intuitively a bit skeptical about it, independently of how reasonable that argument would be for someone who would be completely unbiased. Their prior is that, probably, this is not right and to some extent, this might even be reasonable. Maybe people should be a bit skeptical of people who say such things.

But then, what happens is that most such people who make such claims that seem to people very weird and very far-reaching, they get discarded after some time because people poke holes in their arguments and so on. But then, a small subset of all such people, they actually stick around and they get more and more recognition and you could argue that that’s what’s now happening with people who work on longtermism and X-risk. And then, people slowly get habituated to this and they say, “Well, maybe there is something to it.” It’s not a fully rational process. I think this doesn’t just relate to longtermism an X-risk but maybe also specifically to AI risk, where it takes time for people to accept that message.

I’m sure there are some things that you can do to speed up that process and some of them would be fairly obvious like have smart, prestigious, reasonable people talk about this stuff and not people who don’t seem as credible.

Lucas Perry: What are further areas of the psychology of longtermism or existential risk that you think would be valuable to study? And let’s also touched upon other interesting areas for effective altruism as well.

Stefan Schubert: I mentioned previously people’s empirical beliefs, that could be valuable. One thing I should mention there is that I think that people’s empirical beliefs about the distant future are massively affected by framing effects, so depending on how you ask these questions, you are going to get very different answers so that’s important to remember that it’s not like people have these stable beliefs and they will always say that. The other thing I mentioned is moral judgments, and I said we stated moral judgements about human extinction, but there’s a lot of other stuff to do, like people’s views on population ethics could obviously be useful. Views on whether creating happy people is morally valuable. Whether it’s more valuable to bring large number of people whose life is barely worth living into existence than to bring in a small number of very happy people into existence and so on.

Those questions obviously have relevance for the moral value of the future. One thing I would want to say is that if you’re rational, then, obviously, your view on what and how much we should do to affect the distant future, that should arguably be a function of your moral views, including on population ethics, on the one hand, and also your empirical views of how the future’s likely to pan out. But then, I also think that people obviously aren’t completely rational and I think, in practice, their views on the longterm future will also be influenced by other factors. I think that their view on whether helping the longterm future seems like an inspiring project, that might depend massively on how the issue is framed. I think these aspects could be worth studying because if we find these kinds of aspects, then we might want to emphasize the positive aspects and we might want to adjust our behavior to avoid the negative. The goal should be to formulate a vision of longtermism that feels inspiring to people, including to people who haven’t put a lot of thought into, for instance, population ethics and related matters.

There are also some other specific issues which I think could be useful to study. One is the psychology of predictions about the distant future and the implications of the so-called construal level theory for the psychology or the longterm future. Many effective altruists would know construal level theory under another name: near mode and far mode. This is Robin Hanson’s terminology. Construal level theory is a theory about psychological distance and how it relates to how abstractly we construe things. It says that we conceive of different forms of distance – spatial, temporal, social – similarly. The second claim is that we conceive of items and events at greater psychological distance. More abstractly, we focus more on big picture features and less on details. So, Robin Hanson, he’s discussed this theory very extensively including with respect to the long term future. And he argues that the great psychological distance to the distant future causes us to reason in overly abstract ways, to be overconfident to have poor epistemics in general about the distant future.

I find this very interesting, and these kinds of ideas are mentioned a lot in EA and the X-risk community. But, to my knowledge there hasn’t been that much research which applies construal level theory specifically to the psychology of the distant future.

It’s more like people look at these general studies of construal level theory, and then they noticed that, well, the temporal distance to the distant future is obviously extremely great. Hence, these general findings should apply to a very great extent. But, to my knowledge, this hasn’t been studied so much. And given how much people discuss near or far mode in this case, it seems that there should be some empirical research.

I should also mention that I find that construal level theory a very interesting and rich psychological theory in general. I could see that it could illuminate the psychology of the distant future in numerous ways. Maybe it could be some kind of a theoretical framework that I could use for many studies about the distant future. So, I recommend that key paper from 2010 by Trope and Liberman on construal level theory.

Lucas Perry: I think that just hearing you say this right now, it’s sort of opening my mind up to the wide spectrum of possible applications of psychology in this area.

You mentioned population ethics. That makes me just think of in the context of EA and longtermism and life in general, the extent to which psychological study and analysis can find ethical biases and root them out and correct for them, either by nudging or by changing the explicit methods by which humans cognize about such ethics. There’s the extent to which psychology can better inform our epistemics, so this is the extent to which we can be more rational.

And I’m reflecting now how quantum physics subverts many of our Newtonian mechanics and classical mechanics, intuitions about the world. And there’s the extent to which psychology can also inform the way in which our social and experiential lives also condition the way that we think about the world and the extent to which that sets us astray in trying to understand the fundamental nature of reality or thinking about the longterm future or thinking about ethics or anything else. It seems like you’re at the beginning stages of debugging humans on some of the most important problems that exist.

Stefan Schubert: Okay. That’s a nice way of putting it. I certainly think that there is room for way more research on the psychology of longtermism and X-risk.

Lucas Perry: Can you speak a little bit now here about speciesism? This is both an epistemic thing and an ethical thing in the sense that we’ve invented these categories of species to describe the way that evolutionary histories of beings bifurcate. And then, there’s the psychological side of the ethics of it where we unnecessarily devalue the life of other species given that they fit that other category.

Stefan Schubert: So, we have one paper on the review, which is called “Why People Prioritize Humans Over Animals: A Framework for Moral Anthropocentrism.

To give you a bit of context, there’s been a lot of research on speciesism and on humans prioritizing humans over animals. So, in this paper we sort of try to take a bit more systematic approach and pick these different hypotheses for why humans prioritize humans over animals against each other, and look at their relative strengths as well.

And what we find is that there is truth to several of these hypotheses of why humans prioritize humans over animals. One contributing factor is just that they value individuals with greater mental capacities, and most humans have great mental capacities than most animals.

However, that explains the only part of the effect we find. We also find that people think that humans should be prioritized over animals even if they have the same mental capacity. And here, we find that this is for two different reasons.

First, according to our findings, people are what we call species relativists. And by that, we mean that they think that members of the species, including different non-human species, should prioritize other members of that species.

So, for instance, humans should prioritize other humans, and an elephant should prioritize other elephants. And that means that because humans are the ones calling the shots in the world, we have a right then, according to this species relativist view, to prioritize our own species. But other species would, if they were in power. At least that’s the implication of what the participants say, if you take them at face value. That’s species relativism.

But then, there is also the fact that they exhibit an absolute preference for humans over animals, meaning that even if we control for the mental capacities of humans and animals, and even if we control for the species relativist factors that we control for who the individual who could help them is, there remains a difference which can’t be explained by those other factors.

So, there’s an absolute speciesist preference for humans which can’t be explained by any further factor. So, that’s an absolute speciesist preference as opposed to this species relativist view.

In total, there’s a bunch of factors that together explain why humans prioritize animals, and these factors may also influence each other. So, we present some evidence that if people have a speciesist preference for humans over animals, that might, in turn, lead them to believe that animals have less advanced mental capacities than they actually have. And because they have this view that individuals with lower mental capacity, they are less morally valuable, that leads them to further deprioritize animals.

So, these three different factors, they sort of interact with each other in intricate ways. Our paper gives this overview over these different factors which contribute to humans prioritizing humans over animals.

Lucas Perry: This helps to make clear to me that a successful psychological study with regards to at least ethical biases will isolate the salient variables which are knobs that are tweaking the moral saliency of one thing over another.

Now, you said mental capacities there. You guys aren’t bringing consciousness or sentience into this?

Stefan Schubert: We discuss different formulations at length, and we went for the somewhat generic formulation.

Lucas Perry: I think people have beliefs about the ability to rationalize and understand the world, and then how that may or may not be correlated with consciousness that most people don’t make explicit. It seems like there are some variables to unpack underneath cognitive capacity.

Stefan Schubert: I agree. This is still like fairly broad brushed. The other thing to say is that sometimes we say that this human has as advanced mental capacities as these animals. Then, they have no reason to believe that the human has a more sophisticated sentience or is more conscious or something like that.

Lucas Perry: Our species membership tells me that we probably have more consciousness. My bedrock thing is I care about how much the thing can suffer or not, not how well it can model the world. Though those things are maybe probably highly correlated with one another. I think I wouldn’t be a speciesist if I thought human beings were currently the most important thing on the planet.

Stefan Schubert: You’re a speciesist if you prioritize humans over animals purely because of species membership. But, if you prioritize one species over another for some other reasons which are morally relevant, then you would not be seen as a speciesist.

Lucas Perry: Yeah, I’m excited to see what comes of that. I think that working on overcoming racism and misogyny and other things, and I think that overcoming speciesism and temporal biases and physical space, proximity biases are some of the next stages in human moral evolution that have to come. So, I think it’s honestly terrific that you’re working on these issues.

Is there anything you would like to say or that you feel that we haven’t covered?

Stefan Schubert: We have one paper which is called “The Puzzle of Ineffective Giving,” where we study this misconception that people have, which is that they think the difference in effectiveness between charities is much smaller than it actually is. So, experts think that the most effective charities are vastly much more effective than the average charity, and people don’t know that.

That seems to suggest that beliefs play a role in ineffective giving. But, there was one interesting paper called “Impediments to Effective Altruism” where they show that even if you tell people that cancer charity is less effective than an arthritis charity, they still donate.

So, then we have this other paper called “The Many Obstacles to Effective Giving.” It’s a bit similar to this speciesist paper, I guess, that we sort of pit different competing hypotheses that people have studied against each other. We give people different tasks, for instance, tasks which involve identifiable victims and tasks which involve ineffective but low overhead charities.

And then, we sort of started, well, what if we tell them how to be effective? Does that change how they behave? What’s the role of that pure belief factor? What’s the role of preferences? The result is a bit of a mix. Both beliefs and preferences contribute to ineffective giving.

In the real world, it’s likely that are several beliefs and preferences that obstruct effective giving present simultaneously. For instance, people might fail to donate to the most effective charity because first, it’s not a disaster charity, and they might have a preference for a disaster charity. And it might have a high overhead, and they might falsely believe then that high overhead entails low effectiveness. And it might not highlight identifiable victims, and they have a preference for donating to identifiable victims.

Several of these obstacles are present at the same time, and in that sense, ineffective giving is overdetermined. So, fixing one specific obstacle may not make as much of the difference as one would have wanted. That might support the view that what we need is not primarily behavioral interventions that address individual obstacles, but rather a more broad mindset change that can motivate people to proactively seek out the most effective ways of doing good.

Lucas Perry: One other thing that’s coming to my mind is the proximity of a cause to someone’s attention and the degree to which it allows them to be celebrated in their community for the good that they have done.

Are you suggesting that the way for remedying this is to help instill a curiosity and something resembling the EA mindset that would allow people to do the cognitive exploration and work necessary to transcend these limitations that bind them to their ineffective giving or is that unrealistic?

Stefan Schubert: First of all, let me just say that with respect to this proximity issue, that was actually another task that we had. I didn’t mention all the tasks. So, we told people that you can either help a local charity or a charity, I think it was in India. And then, we told them that the Indian charity is more effective and asked “where would you want to donate?”

So, you’re absolutely right. That’s another obstacle to effective giving, that people sometimes have preferences or beliefs that local charities are more effective even when that’s not the case. Some donor I talked to, he said, “Learning how to donate effectively, it’s actually fairly complicated, and there are lots of different things to think about.”

So, just fixing the overhead myth or something like that, that may not take you very far, especially if you think that the very best charities that are sort of extremely much more effective than the average charity. So, what’s important is not going from an average charity to a somewhat more effective charity, but to actually find the very best charities.

And to do that, we may need to address many psychological obstacles because the most effective charities, they might be very weird and sort of concerned with longterm future or what-not. So, I do think that a mindset where people seek out effective charities, or defer to others who do, that might be necessary. It’s not super easy to make people adopt that mindset, definitely not.

Lucas Perry: We have charity evaluators, right? These institutions which are intended to be reputable enough that they can tell you which are the most effective charities to donate to. It wouldn’t even be enough to just market those really hard. They’d be like, “Okay, that’s cool. But, I’m still going to donate my money to seeing eye dogs because blindness is something that runs in my family and is experientially and morally salient for me.”

Is the way that we fix the world really about just getting people to give more, and what is the extent to which the institutions which exist, which require people to give, need to be corrected and fixed? There’s that tension there between just the mission of getting people to give more, and then the question of, well, why do we need to get everyone to give so much in the first place?

Stefan Schubert: This insight that ineffective giving is overdetermined and there are lots of things that stand in a way of effective giving, one thing I like about it is that it seems to sort of go well with this observation that it is actually, in the real world, very difficult to make people donate effectively.

I might relate there a bit to what you mentioned about the importance of giving more, and so we could sort of distinguish between the different kinds of psychological limitations. First, that limitations that relate to how much we give. We’re selfish, so therefore we don’t necessarily give as much of our monetary rather resources as we should. There are sort of limits to altruism.

But then, there are also limits to effectiveness. We are ineffective for various reasons that we’ve discussed. And then, there’s also fact that we can have the wrong moral goals. Maybe we work towards short term goals, but then we would realize on the careful reflection that we should work towards long term goals.

And then, I was thinking like, “Well, which of these obstacles should you then prioritize if you turn this sort of prioritization framework inwards?” And then, you might think that, well, at least with respect to giving, it might be difficult for you to increase the amount that you give by more than 10 times. Americans, for instance, they already donate several percent of their income. We know from historical experience that it might be hard for people to sustain very high levels of altruism, so maybe it’s difficult for them to sort of ramp up this altruist factor to the extreme amount.

But then, with effectiveness, if this story about heavy-tailed distributions of effectiveness is right, then you could increase the effectiveness of your donations a lot. And arguably, the sort of psychological price for that is lower. It’s very demanding to give up a huge proportion of your income for others, but I would say that it’s less demanding to redirect your donations to a more effective cause, even if you feel more strongly for the ineffective cause.

I think it’s difficult to really internalize how enormously important it is to go for the most effective option. And also, of course, then the third factor to sort of change your moral goals if necessary. If people would reduce their donations by 99%, they would reduce the impact by 99%. Many people would feel guilty about it.

But then, if they reduce their impact 99% via reducing their effectiveness 99% through choosing an ineffective charity, then people don’t feel similarly guilty, so similar to Nate Soares’ idea of a care-o-meter: our feelings aren’t adjusted for these things, so we don’t feel as much about the ineffectiveness as we do about altruistic sacrifice. And that might lead us to not focus enough on effectiveness, and we should really think carefully about going that extra mile for the sake of effectiveness.

Lucas Perry: Wonderful. I feel like you’ve given me a lot of concepts and tools that are just very helpful for reinvigorating a introspective mindfulness about altruism in my own life and how that can be nurtured and developed.

So, thank you so much. I’ve really enjoyed this conversation for the reasons I just said. I think this is a very important new research stream in this space, and it seems small now, but I really hope that it grows. And thank you for you and your colleagues work here on seeding and doing the initial work in this field.

Stefan Schubert: Thank you very much. Thank you for having me. It was a pleasure.

Most of us working on catastrophic and existential threats focus on trying to prevent them — not on figuring out how to survive the aftermath. But what if, despite everyone’s best efforts, humanity does undergo such a catastrophe? This month’s podcast is all about what we can do in the present to ensure humanity’s survival in a future worst-case scenario. Ariel is joined by Dave Denkenberger and Joshua Pearce, co-authors of the book Feeding Everyone No Matter What, who explain what would constitute a catastrophic event, what it would take to feed the global population, and how their research could help address world hunger today. They also discuss infrastructural preparations, appropriate technology, and why it’s worth investing in these efforts.

Topics discussed include:

• Causes of global catastrophe
• Planning for catastrophic events
• Getting governments onboard
• Application to current crises
• Alternative food sources
• Historical precedence for societal collapse
• Appropriate technology
• Hardwired optimism
• Surprising things that could save lives
• Climate change and adaptation
• Moral hazards
• Why it’s in the best interest of the global wealthy to make food more available

References discussed include:

• ALLFED
• Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Jared Diamond
• Appropedia.org
• Effective Thesis
• Extreme Weather and Resilience of the Global Food System, UK Global Food Security Program

You can listen to the podcast above, or read the full transcript below. All of our podcasts are also now on Spotify and iHeartRadio! Or find us on SoundCloud, iTunes, Google Play and Stitcher.

Ariel Conn: In a world of people who worry about catastrophic threats to humanity, most efforts are geared toward preventing catastrophic threats. But what happens if something does go catastrophically wrong? How can we ensure that things don’t spiral out of control, but instead, humanity is set up to save as many lives as possible, and return to a stable, thriving state, as soon as possible? I’m Ariel Conn, and on this month’s episode of the FLI podcast, I’m speaking with Dave Denkenberger and Joshua Pearce.

Dave and Joshua want to make sure that if a catastrophic event occurs, then at the very least, all of the survivors around the planet will be able to continue eating. Dave got his Master’s from Princeton in mechanical and aerospace engineering, and his PhD from the University of Colorado at Boulder in building engineering. His dissertation was on his patented heat exchanger. He is an assistant professor at University of Alaska Fairbanks in mechanical engineering. He co-founded and directs the Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters, also known as ALLFED, and he donates half his income to that. He received the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. He is a Penn State distinguished alumnus and he is a registered professional engineer. He has authored 56 publications with over 1600 citations and over 50,000 downloads — including the book Feeding Everyone No Matter What, which he co-authored with Joshua — and his work has been featured in over 20 countries, over 200 articles, including Science.

Joshua received his PhD in materials engineering from the Pennsylvania State University. He then developed the first sustainability program in the Pennsylvania State system of higher education and helped develop the Applied Sustainability Graduate Engineering Program while at Queens University Canada. He is currently the Richard Witte Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and a professor cross-appointed in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, and he’s in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Michigan Technological University where he runs the Open Sustainability Technology research group. He was a Fulbright-Aalto University Distinguished Chair last year and remains a visiting professor of photovoltaics and Nano-engineering at Aalto University. He’s also a visiting professor at the University of Lorraine in France. His research concentrates on the use of open source appropriate technology to find collaborative solutions to problems in sustainability and poverty reduction. He has authored over 250 publications, which have earned more than 11,000 citations. You can find his work on appropedia.org, and his research is regularly covered by the international and national press and continually ranks in the top 0.1% on academia.edu. He helped found the field of alternative food for global catastrophes with Dave, and again he was co-author on the book Feeding Everyone No Matter What.

So Dave and Joshua, thank you so much for joining us this month.

Dave Denkenberger: Thank you.

Joshua Pearce: Thank you for having us.

Ariel Conn: My first question for the two of you is a two-part question. First, why did you decide to consider how to survive a disaster rather — than focusing on prevention, as so many other people do? And second, how did you two start working together on this topic?

Joshua Pearce: So, I’ll take a first crack at this. Both of us have worked in the area of prevention, particularly in regards to alternative energy sources in order to be able to mitigate climate destabilization from fossil fuel burning. But what we both came to realize is that many of the disasters that we look at that could actually wipe out humanity aren’t things that we can necessarily do anything to avoid. The ones that we can do something about — climate change and nuclear winter — we’ve even worked together on it.

So for example, we did a study where we looked at how many nuclear weapons a state should have if they would continue to be rational. And by rational I mean even if everything were to go your way, if you shot all of your nuclear weapons, they all hit their targets, the people you were aiming at weren’t firing back at you, at what point would just the effects of firing that many weapons hurt your own society, possibly kill many of your own people, or destroy your own nation?

The answer to that turned out to be a really remarkably low number. The answer was 100. And many of the nuclear power states currently have more weapons than that. And so it’s clear at least from our current political system that we’re not behaving rationally and that there’s a real need to have a backup plan for humanity in case something does go wrong — whether it’s our fault, or whether it’s just something that happens in nature that we can’t control like a super volcano or an asteroid impact.

Dave Denkenberger: Even though there is more focus on preventing a catastrophe than there is on resilience to the catastrophe, overall the field is highly neglected. As someone pointed out, there are still more publications on dung beetles than there are on preventing or dealing with global catastrophic risks. But I would say that the particular sub-field of resilience to the catastrophes is even more neglected. That’s why I think it’s a high priority to investigate.

Joshua Pearce: We actually met way back as undergraduate students at Penn State. I was a chemistry and physics double major and one of my friends a year above said, “You have to take an engineering science class before you leave.” It changed his life. I signed up for this class taught by the man that eventually became my advisor, Christopher Wronski, and it was a brutal class — very difficult conceptually and mathematically. And I remember when one of my first tests came back, there was this bimodal distribution where there were two students who scored A’s and everybody else failed. Turned out that the two students were Dave and I, so we started working together then just on homework assignments, and then continued collaborating through all different areas of technical experiments and theory for years and years. And then Dave had this very interesting idea about what do we do in the event of a global catastrophe? How can we feed everybody? And to attack it as an engineering problem, rather than a social problem. We started working on it very aggressively.

Dave Denkenberger: So it’s been, I guess, 18 years now that we’ve been working together: a very fruitful collaboration.

Ariel Conn: Before I get any farther into the interview, let’s quickly define what a catastrophic event is and the types of catastrophic events that you both look at most.

Dave Denkenberger: The original focus was on the catastrophes that could collapse global agriculture. These would include nuclear winter from a full-scale nuclear war like US-Russia, causing burning of cities and blocking of the sun with smoke, but it could also mean a super volcanic eruption like the one that happened about 74,000 years ago that many think nearly wiped out the human species. And then there could also be a large asteroid impact similar to the one that wiped out the dinosaurs about 66 million years ago.

And in those cases, it’s very clear we need to have some other alternative source of food, but we also look at what I call the 10% global shortfalls. These are things like a volcano that caused the year without a summer in 1816, might have reduced food supply by about 10%, and caused widespread famine including in Europe and almost in the US. Then it could be a slightly smaller sized asteroid, or a regional nuclear war, and actually many other catastrophes such as a super weed, a plant that could out-compete crops. If this happened naturally, it probably would be slow enough that we could respond, but if it were part of a coordinated terrorist attack, that could be catastrophic. Even though technically we waste more than 10% of our food and we feed more than 10% of our food to animals, I think realistically, if we had a 10% food shortfall, the price of food would go so high that hundreds of millions of people could starve.

Joshua Pearce: Something that’s really important to understand about the way that we analyze these risks is that currently, even with the agricultural system completely working fine, we’ve got somewhere on the order of 800 million people without enough food to eat, because of waste and inefficiencies. And so anything that starts to cut into our ability for our agricultural system to continue, especially if all of plant life no longer works for a number of years because of the sun being blocked, we have to have some method to provide alternative foods to feed the bulk of the human population.

Ariel Conn: I think that ties in to the next question then, and that is what does it mean to feed everyone no matter what, as you say in the title of your book?

Dave Denkenberger: As Joshua pointed out, we are still not feeding everyone adequately right now. The idea of feeding everyone no matter what is an aspirational goal, and it’s showing that if we cooperated, we could actually feed everyone, even if the sun is blocked. Of course, it might not work out exactly like that, but we think that we can do much better than if we were not prepared for one of these catastrophes.

Joshua Pearce: Right. Today, roughly one in nine people go to bed hungry every night, and somewhere on the order of 25,000 people starve to death or die from hunger-related disease [per day]. And so one of the inspiring things from our initial analysis drawn up in the book is that even in the worst-case scenarios where something major happens, like a comet strike that would wipe out the dinosaurs, humans don’t need to be wiped out: We could provide for ourselves. And the embarrassing thing is that today, even with the agricultural system working fine, we’re not able to do that. And so what I’m at least hoping is that some of our work on these alternative foods provides another mechanism to provide low-cost calories for the people that need it, even today when there is no catastrophe.

Dave Denkenberger: One of the technologies that we think could be useful even now is there’s a company called Comet Bio that is turning agricultural residues like leaves and stalks into edible sugar, and they think that’s actually going to be able to compete with sugar cane. It has the advantage of not taking up lots of land that we might be cutting the rainforest down for, so it has environmental benefits as well as humanitarian benefits. Another area that I think would be relevant is in smaller disasters, such as an earthquake or a hurricane, generally the cheapest solution is just shipping in grain from outside, but if transportation is disrupted, it might make sense to be able to produce some food locally — like if a hurricane blows all the crops down and you’re not going to be able to get any normal harvest from them, you can actually grind up those leaves, like from wheat leaves, and squeeze out the liquid, boil the liquid, and then you get a protein concentrate, and people can eat that.

Ariel Conn: So that’s definitely a question that I had, and that is to what extent can we start implementing some of the plans today during a disaster? This is a pre-recorded podcast; Dorian has just struck the Bahamas. Can the stuff that you are working on now help people who are still stuck on an island after it’s been ravaged by a hurricane?

Dave Denkenberger: I think there is potential for that, the getting food from leaves. There’s actually a non-profit organization called Leaf for Life that has been doing this in less developed countries for decades now. Some other possibilities would be some mushrooms can mature in just a few weeks, and they can grow on waste, basically.

Joshua Pearce: The ones that would be good for an immediate catastrophe are the in between food that we’re working on: between the time that you run out of stored food and the time that you can ramp up the full scale, alternative foods.

Ariel Conn: Can you elaborate on that a little bit more and explain what that process would look like? What does happen between when the disaster strikes? And what does it look like to start ramping up food development in a couple weeks or a couple months or however long that takes?

Joshua Pearce: In the book we develop 10 primary pathways to develop alternative food sources that could feed the entire global population. But the big challenge for that is it’s not just are there enough calories — but you have to have enough calories at the right time.

If, say, a comet strikes tomorrow and throws up a huge amount of earth and ash and covers the sun, we’d have roughly six months of stored food in grocery stores and pantry that we could use to eat. But then for most of the major sources of alternative food, it would take around a year to ramp them up, to take these processes that might not even exist now and get them to industrial scale to feed billions of people. So the most challenging is that six-month-to-one-year period, and for those we would be using the alternative foods that Dave talked about, the mushrooms that can grow really fast and leaves. And the leaf one, part of those leaves can come from agricultural residues, things that we already know are safe.

The much larger biomass that we might be able to use is just normal killed tree leaves. The only problem with that is that there hasn’t been really any research into whether or not that’s safe. We don’t know, for example, if you can eat maple or oak leaf concentrate. The studies haven’t been done yet. And that’s one of the areas that we’re really focusing on now, is to take some of these ideas that are promising and prove that they’re actually technically feasible and safe for people to use in the event of a serious catastrophe, a minor one, or just being able to feed people that for whatever reason don’t have enough food.

Dave Denkenberger: I would add that even though we might have six months of stored food, that would be a best-case scenario when we’ve just had the harvest in the northern hemisphere; We could only have two or three months of stored food. But in many of these catastrophes, even a pretty severe nuclear winter, there’s likely to be some sunlight still coming down to the earth, and so a recent project we’ve been working on is growing seaweed. This has a lot of advantages because seaweed can tolerate low light levels, the ocean would not cool as fast as on the land, and it grows very quickly. So we’ve actually been applying seaweed growth models to the conditions of nuclear winter.

Ariel Conn: You talk about the food that we have stored being able to last for two to six months. How much transportation is involved in that? And how much transportation would we have, given different scenarios? I’ve heard that the town I’m in now, if it gets blocked off by a big snow storm, we have about two weeks of food. So I’m curious: How does that apply elsewhere? And are we worried about transportation being cut off, or do we think that transportation will still be possible?

Dave Denkenberger: Certainly there will be destruction of infrastructure regionally, whether it’s nuclear war or a super volcano or asteroid impact. So in those affected countries, transportation of food is going to be very challenging, but most of the people would not be in those countries. That’s why we think that there’s still going to be a lot of infrastructure still functioning. There are still going to be chemical factories that we can retrofit to turn leaves into sugar, or another one of the technologies is turning natural gas into single-cell protein.

Ariel Conn: There’s the issue of developing agriculture if the sun is blocked, which is one of the things that you guys are working on, and that can happen with nuclear war leading to nuclear winter; It can happen with the super volcano, with the asteroid. Let’s go a little more in depth and into what happens with these catastrophic events that block the sun. What happens with them? Why are they so devastating?

Joshua Pearce: All the past literature on what would happen if, say, we lost agriculture for a number of years, is all pretty grim. The base assumption is that everyone would simply starve to death, and there might be some fighting before that happens. When you look at what would happen based on previous knowledge of generating food from traditional ways, those were the right answers. And so, what we’re calling catastrophic events not only deal with the most extreme ones, the sun-killing ideas, but also the maybe a little less tragic but still very detrimental to the agricultural system: so something like a planned number of terrorist events to wipe out the major bread baskets of the world. Again, for the same idea, is that you’re impacting the number of available calories that are available to the entire population, and our work is trying to ensure that we can still feed everyone.

Dave Denkenberger: We wrote a paper on if we had a scenario that chaos did not break out, but there was still trade between countries and sharing of information and a global price of food — in that case, with stored food, there might around 10% of people surviving. It could be much worse though. As Joshua pointed out, if the food were distributed equally, then everyone would starve. Also people have pointed out, well, in civilization, we have food storage, so some people could survive — but if there’s a loss of civilization through the catastrophe, and we have to go back to being hunter-gatherers, first, hunter gatherers that we still have now generally don’t have food storage, so they would not survive, but then there’s a recent book called The Secret of Our Success that argues that it might not be as easy as we think to go back to being hunter-gatherers.

So that is another failure mode where it could actually cause human extinction. But then even if we don’t have extinction, if we have a collapse of civilization, there are many reasons why we might not be able to recover civilization. We’ve had a stable climate for the last 10,000 years; That might not continue. We’ve already used up the easily accessible fossil fuels that we wouldn’t have to rebuild industrial civilization. Just thinking about the original definition of civilization, about being able to cooperate with people who are not related to you, like outside your tribe — maybe the trauma of the catastrophe could make the remaining humans less open to trusting people, and maybe we would not recover that civilization. And then I would say even if we don’t lose civilization, the trauma of the catastrophe could make other catastrophes more likely.

One people are concerned about is global totalitarianism. We’ve had totalitarian states in the past, but they’ve generally been out-competed by other, free-er societies. But if it were a global totalitarianism, then there would be no competition, and that might be a stable state that we could be stuck in. And then even if we don’t go that route, the trauma from the catastrophe could cause worse values that end up in artificial intelligence that could define our future. And I would say even on these catastrophes that are slightly less extreme, the 10% food shortfalls, we don’t know what would happen after that. Tensions would be high; This could end up in full-scale nuclear war, and then some of these really extreme scenarios occurring.

Ariel Conn: What’s the historical precedence that we’ve got to work with in terms of trying to figure out how humanity would respond?

Dave Denkenberger: There have been localized collapses of society, and Jared Diamond has cataloged a lot of these in his book Collapse, but you can argue that there have even been more global collapse scenarios. Jeffrey Ladish has been looking at some collapses historically, and some catastrophes — like the black death was very high mortality but did not result in a collapse of economic production in Europe; But other collapses actually have occurred. There’s enough uncertainty to say that collapse is possible and that we might not recover from it.

Ariel Conn: A lot of this is about food production, but I think you guys have also done work on instances in which maybe it’s easier to produce food but other resources have been destroyed. So for example, a solar flare, a solar storm knocks out our electric grid. How do we address that?

Joshua Pearce: In the event that a solar flare wipes out the electricity grid and most non-shielded electrical devices, that would be another scenario where we might legitimately lose civilization. There’s been a lot of work in the electrical engineering community on how we might shield things and harden them, but one of the things that we can absolutely do, at least on the electricity side, is start to go from our centralized grid infrastructure into a more decentralized method of producing and consuming electricity. The idea here would be that the grid would break down into a federation of micro-grids, and the micro-grids could be as small as even your own house, where you, say, have solar panels on your roof producing electricity that would charge a small battery, and then when those two sources of power don’t provide enough, you have a backup generator, a co-generation system.

And a lot of the work my group has done has shown that in the United States, those types of systems are already economic. Pretty much everywhere in the US now, if you have exposure to sunshine, you can produce electricity less expensively than you buy it from the grid. If you add in the backup generator, the backup co-gen — in many places, particularly in the northern part of the US, that’s necessary in order to provide yourself with power — that again makes you more secure. And in the event of some of these catastrophes that we’re looking at, now the ones that block the sun, the solar won’t be particularly useful, but what solar does do is preserve our fossil fuels for use in the event of a catastrophe. And if you are truly insular, in that you’re able to produce all of your own power, then you have a backup generator of some kind and fuel storage onsite.

In the context of providing some resiliency for the overall civilization, many of the technical paths that we’re on now, at least electrically, are moving us in that direction anyway. Solar and wind power are both the fastest growing sources of electricity generation both in the US and globally, and their costs now are so competitive that we’re seeing that accelerate much faster than anyone predicted.

Dave Denkenberger: It is true that a solar flare would generally only affect the large grid systems. In 1859 there was the Carrington event that basically destroyed our telegraph systems, which was all we had at the time. But then we also had a near miss with a solar flare in 2012, so the world almost did end in 2012. But then there’s evidence that in the first millennium AD that there were even larger solar storms that could disrupt electricity globally. But there are other ways that electricity could be disrupted. One of those is the high altitude detonation of a nuclear weapon, producing an electromagnetic pulse or an EMP. If this were done multiple places around the world, that could disrupt electricity globally, and the problem with that is it could affect even smaller systems. Then there’s also the coordinated cyber attack, which could be led by a narrow artificial intelligence computer virus, and then anything connected to the internet would be vulnerable, basically.

In these scenarios, at least the sun would still be shining. But we wouldn’t have our tractors, because basically everything is dependent on electricity, like pulling fossil fuels out of the ground, and we also wouldn’t have our industrial fertilizers. And so the assumption is as well that most people would die, because the reason we can feed more than seven billion people is because of the industry we’ve developed. People have also talked about, well, let’s harden the grid to EMP, but that would cost something like $100 billion.

So what we’ve been looking at are, what are inexpensive ways of getting prepared if there is a loss of electricity? One of those is can we make quickly farming implements that would work by hand or by animal power? And even though a very small percent of our total land area is being plowed by draft animals, we still actually have a lot of cows left for food, not for draft animals. It would actually be feasible to do that. 

But if we lost electricity, we’d lose communications. We have a short wave radio, or ham radio, expert on our team who’s been doing this for 58 years, and he’s estimated that for something like five million dollars, we could actually have a backup communication system, and then we would also need to have a backup power system, which would likely be solar cells. But we would need to have this system not plugged into the grid, because if it’s plugged in, it would likely get destroyed by the EMP.

Joshua Pearce: And this gets into that area of appropriate technology and open source appropriate technology that we’ve done a lot of work on. And the idea basically is that the plans for something like a solar powered ham radio station that would be used as a backup communication system, those plans need to be developed now and shared globally so that everyone, no matter where they happen to be, can start to implement these basic safety precautions now. We’re trying to do that for all the tools that we’re implementing, sharing them on sites like Appropedia.org, which is an appropriate technology wiki that already is trying to help small-scale farmers in the developing world now lift themselves out of poverty by applying science and technologies that we already know about that are generally small-scale, low-cost, and not terribly sophisticated. And so there’s many things as an overall global society that we understand much better how to do now that if you just share a little bit of information in the right way, you can help people — both today but also in the event of a catastrophe.

Dave Denkenberger: And I think that’s critical: that if one of these catastrophes happened and people realized that most people were going to die, I’m very worried that there would be chaos, potentially within countries, and then also between countries. But if people realized that we could actually feed everyone if we cooperated, then I think we have a much better chance of cooperating, so you could think of this actually as a peace project.

Ariel Conn: One of the criticisms that I’ve heard, that honestly I think it’s a little strange, but the idea that we don’t need to deal with worrying about alternative foods now because if a catastrophe strikes, then we’ll be motivated to develop these alternative food systems.

I was curious if you guys have estimates of how much of a time difference you think would exist between us having a plan for how we would feed people if these disasters do strike versus us realizing the disaster has struck and now we need to figure something out, and how long it would take us to figure something out? That second part of the question is both in situations where people are cooperating and also in situations where people are not cooperating.

Dave Denkenberger: I think that if you don’t have chaos, the big problem is that yes, people would be able to put lots of money into developing food sources, but there are some things that take a certain amount of calendar time, like testing out different diets for animals or building pilot factories for food production. You generally need to test these things out before you build the large factories. I don’t have a quantitative estimate, but I do think it would delay by many months; And as we said, we only have a few months of food storage, so I do think that a delay would cost many lives and could result in the collapse of civilization that could have been prevented if we were actually prepared ahead of time.

Joshua Pearce: I think the boy scouts are right on this. You should always be prepared. If you think about just something like the number of types of leaves that would need to be tested, if we get a head start on it in order to determine toxicity as well as the nutrients that could come from them, we’ll be much, much better off in the event of a catastrophe — whether or not we’re working together. And in the cases where we’re not working together, to have this knowledge that’s built up within the population and spread out, makes it much more likely that overall humanity will survive.

Ariel Conn: What, roughly, does it cost to plan ahead: to do this research and to get systems and organization in place so that we can feed people if a disaster strikes?

Dave Denkenberger: Around order of magnitude $100 million. We think that that would fund a lot of research to figure out what are the most promising food sources, and also interventions for handling the loss of electricity and industry, and then also doing development of the most promising food sources, actual pilot scale, and funding a backup communications system, and then also working with countries, corporations, international organizations to actually have response plans for how we would respond quickly in a catastrophe. It’s really a very small amount of money compared to the benefit, in terms of how many lives we could save and preserving civilization.

Joshua Pearce: All this money doesn’t have to come at once, and some of the issues of alternative foods are being funded in other ways. There already are, for example, chemical engineering plants being looked at to be turned into food supply factories. That work is already ongoing. What Dave is talking about is combining all the efforts that are already existing and what ALLFED is trying to do, in order to be able to provide a very good, solid backup plan for society.

Ariel Conn: So Joshua, you mentioned ALLFED, and I think now is a good time to transition to that. Can you guys explain what ALLFED is?

Dave Denkenberger: The Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters, or ALLFED, is a non-profit organization that I helped to co-found, and our goal is to build an alliance with interested stakeholders to do this research on alternate food sources, develop the sources, and then also develop these response plans.

Ariel Conn: I’ll also add a quick disclosure that I also do work with ALLFED, so I don’t know if people will care, but there that is. So what are some of the challenges you’ve faced so far in trying to implement these solutions?

Dave Denkenberger: I would say a big challenge, a surprise that came to me, is that when we’ve started talking to international organizations and countries, no one appears to have a plan for what would happen. Of course you hear about the continuity of government plans, and bunkers, but there doesn’t seem to be a plan for actually keeping most people alive. And this doesn’t apply just to the sun-blocking catastrophes; It also applies to the 10% shortfalls.

There was a UK government study that estimated that extreme weather on multiple continents, like flooding and droughts, has something like an 80% chance of happening this century that would actually reduce the food supply by 10%. And yet no one has a plan of how they would react. It’s been a challenge for people to actually take this seriously.

Joshua Pearce: I think that goes back to the devaluation of human life, where we’re not taking seriously the thousands of people that, say, starve to death today and we’re not actively trying to solve that problem when from a financial standpoint, it’s trivial based on the total economic output of the globe; From a technical standpoint, it’s ridiculously easy; But we don’t have the social infrastructure in place in order to just be able to feed everyone now and be able to meet the basic needs of humanity. What we’re proposing is to prepare for a catastrophe in order to be able to feed everybody: That actually is pretty radical.

Initially, I think when we got started, overcoming the views that this was a radical departure for what the types of research that would normally be funded or anything like that — that was something that was challenging. But I think now existential risk just as a field is growing and maturing, and because many of the technologies in the alternative food sector that we’ve looked at have direct applications today, it’s being seen as less and less radical — although, in the popular media, for example, they’d be more happy for us to talk about how we could turn rotting wood into beetles and then eat beetles than to actually look at concrete plans in order to be able to implement it and do the research that needs to be done in order to make sure that that is the right path.

Ariel Conn: Do you think people also struggle with the idea that these disasters will even happen? That there’s that issue of people not being able to recognize the risks?

Joshua Pearce: It’s very hard to comprehend. You may have your family and your friends; It’s hard to imagine a really large catastrophe. But these have happened throughout history, both at the global scale but even just something like a world war has happened multiple times in the last century. We’re, I think, hardwired to be a little bit optimistic about these things, and no one wants to see any of this happen, but that doesn’t mean that it’s a good idea to put our head in the sand. And even though it’s a relatively low probability event, say the case of an all-out nuclear war, something on the order of one percent, it still is there. And as we’ve seen in recent history, even some of the countries that we think of as stable aren’t really necessarily stable.

And so currently we have thousands of nuclear warheads, and it only takes a tiny fraction of them in order to be able to push us into one of these global catastrophic scenarios. Whether that’s an accident or one crazy government actor or a legitimate small-scale war, say an India and a Pakistan that pull out the nuclear weapons, these are things that we should be preparing for.

In the beginning it was a little bit more difficult to have people consider them, but now it’s becoming more and more mainstream. Many of our publications and ALLFED publications and collaborators are pushing into the mainstream of the literature.

Dave Denkenberger: I would say even though the probability each year is relatively low, it certainly adds up over time, and we’re eventually going to have at least some natural disaster like a volcano. But people have said, “Well, it might not occur in my lifetime, so if I work on this or if I donate to it, my money might be wasted” — and I said, “Well, do you consider if you pay for insurance and don’t get anything out of it in a year, your money is wasted?” “No.” So basically I think of this as an insurance policy for civilization.

Ariel Conn: In your research, personally for you, what are some of the interesting things that you found that you think could actually save a lot of lives that you hadn’t expected?

Dave Denkenberger: I think one particularly promising one is the turning of natural gas into single-cell protein, and fortunately, there are actually two companies that are doing this right now. They are focusing on stranded natural gas, which means too far away from a market, and they’re actually producing this as fish food and other animal feed.

Joshua Pearce: For me, living up here in the upper peninsula of Michigan where we’re surrounded by trees, can’t help but look out my window and look at all the potential biomass that could actually be a food source. If it turns out that we can get even a small fraction of that into human edible food, I think that could really shift the balance in providing food, both now and in the case of a disaster.

Dave Denkenberger: One interesting thing coming to Alaska is I’ve learned about the Aleutian Islands that stick out into the pacific. They are very cloudy. It is so cool in the summer that they cannot even grow trees. They also don’t get very much rain. The conditions there are actually fairly similar to nuclear winter in the tropics; And yet, they can grow potatoes. So lately I’ve become more optimistic that we might be able to do some agriculture near the equator where it would not freeze, even in nuclear winter.

Ariel Conn: I want to switch gears a little bit. We’ve been talking about disasters that would be relatively immediate, but one of the threats that we’re trying to figure out how to deal with now is climate change. And I was wondering how efforts that you’re both putting into alternative foods could help as we try to figure out how to adapt to climate change.

Joshua Pearce: I think a lot of the work that we’re doing has a dual use. Because we are trying to squeeze every last calorie we could out of primarily fossil fuel sources and trees and leaves, that if by using those same techniques in the ongoing disaster of climate change, we can hopefully feed more people. And so that’s things like growing mushrooms on partially decomposed wood, eating the mushrooms, but then feeding the leftovers to, say, ruminants or chickens, and then eating those. There’s a lot of industrial ecology practices we can apply to the agricultural food system so that we can get every last calorie out of our primary inputs. So that I think is something we can focus on now and push forward regardless of the speed of the catastrophe.

Dave Denkenberger: I would also say that in addition to this extreme weather on multiple continents that is made more likely by climate change, there’s also abrupt climate change in the ice core record. We’ve had an 18 degree fahrenheit drop in just one decade over a continent. That could be another scenario of a 10% food shortfall globally. And another one people have talked about is what’s called extreme climate change that would still be slow. This is sometimes called tail risk, where we have this expected or median climate change of a few degrees celsius, but maybe there would be five or even 10 degrees celsius — so 18 degree fahrenheit — that could happen over a century or two. We might not be able to have agriculture at all in the tropics, so it would be very valuable to have some food backup plan for that.

Ariel Conn: I wanted to get into concerns about moral hazards with this research. I’ve heard some criticism that if you present a solution to, say, surviving nuclear winter that maybe people will think nuclear war is more feasible. How do you address concerns like that — that if we give people a means of not starving, they’ll do something stupid?

Dave Denkenberger: I think you’ve actually summarized this succinctly by saying, this would be like saying we shouldn’t have the jaws of life because that would cause people to drive recklessly. But the longer answer would be: there is evidence that the awareness of nuclear winter in the 80s was a reason that Gorbachev and Reagan worked towards reducing the nuclear stockpile. However, we still have enough nuclear weapons to potentially cause nuclear winter, and I doubt that the decision in the heat of the moment to go to nuclear war is actually going to take into account the non-target countries. I also think that there’s a significant cost of nuclear war directly, independent of nuclear winter. I would also say that this backup plan helps up with catastrophes that we don’t have control over, like a volcanic eruption. Overall, I think we’re much better off with a backup plan.

Joshua Pearce: I of course completely agree. It’s insane to not have a backup plan. The idea that the irrational behavior that’s currently displayed in any country with more than 100 nuclear weapons isn’t going to get worse because now they know that at a larger fraction their population won’t starve to death as they use them — I think that’s crazy.

Ariel Conn: As you’ve mentioned, there are quite a few governments — in fact, as far as I can tell, all governments don’t really have a backup plan. How surprised have you been by this? And also how optimistic are you that you can convince governments to start implementing some sort of plan to feed people if disaster happens?

Dave Denkenberger: As I said, I certainly have been surprised with the lack of plans. I think that as we develop the research further and are able to show examples of companies already doing very similar things, showing more detailed analysis of what current factories we have that could be retrofitted quickly to produce food — that’s actually an active area of research that we’re doing right now — then I am optimistic that governments will eventually come around to the value of planning for these catastrophes.

Joshua Pearce: I think it’s slightly depressing when you look around the globe and all the hundreds of countries, and how poorly most of them care for their own citizens. It’s sort of a commentary on how evolved or how much of a civilization we really are, so instead of comparing number of Olympic medals or how much economic output your country does, I think we should look at the poorest citizens in each country. And if you can’t feed the people that are in your country, you should be embarrassed to be a world leader. And for whatever reason, world leaders show their faces every day while their constituents, the citizens of their countries, are starving to death today, let alone in the event of a catastrophe.

If you look at the — I’ll call them the more civilized countries, and I’ve been spending some time in Europe, where rational, science-based approaches to governing are much more mature than what I’ve been used to. I think it gives me quite a bit of optimism as we take these ideas of sustainability and of long-term planning seriously, try to move civilization into a state where it’s not doing significant harm to the environment or to our own health or to the health and the environment in the future — that gives me a lot of cause for hope. Hopefully as all the different countries throughout the world mature and grow up as governments, they can start taking the health and welfare of their own populations much more seriously.

Dave Denkenberger: And I think that even though I’m personally very motivated about the long-term future of human civilization, I think that because what we’re proposing is so cost effective, even if an individual government doesn’t put very much weight on people outside its borders, or in future generations even within the country, it’s still cost effective. And we actually wrote a paper from the US perspective showing how cheaply they could get prepared and save so many lives just within their own borders.

Ariel Conn: What do you think is most important for people to understand about both ALLFED and the other research you’re doing? And is there anything, especially that you think we didn’t get into, that is important to mention?

Dave Denkenberger: I would say that thanks to recent grants from the Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative, the Effective Altruism Lottery, and the Center for Effective Altruism, that we’ve been able to do, especially this year, a lot of new research and, as I mentioned, retrofitting factories to produce food. We’re also looking at, can we construct factories quickly, like having construction crews work around the clock? Also investigating seaweed; But I would still say that there’s much more work to do, and we have been building our alliance, and we have many researchers and volunteers that are ready to do more work with additional funding, so we estimate in the next 12 months that we could effectively use approximately $1.5 million.

Joshua Pearce: A lot of the areas of research that are needed to provide a strong backup plan for humanity are relatively greenfield; This isn’t areas that people have done a lot of research in before. And so for other academics, maybe small companies that slightly overlap the alternative food ecosystem of intellectual pursuits, there’s a lot of opportunities for you to get involved, either in direct collaboration with ALLFED or just bringing these types of ideas into your own subfield. And so we’re always looking out for collaborators, and we’re happy to talk to anybody that’s interested in this area and would like to move the ball forward.

Dave Denkenberger: We have a list of theses that undergraduates or graduates could do on the website called Effective Thesis. We’ve gotten a number of volunteers through that.

I would also say another surprising thing to me was that when we were looking at these scenarios of if the world cooperated but only had stored food, the amount of money people would spend on that stored food was tremendous — something like $90 trillion. And that huge expenditure, only 10% of people survived. But instead if we could produce alternate foods, our goal is around a dollar a dry pound of food. One pound of dry food can feed a person for a day, then more like 97% of people would be able to afford food with their current incomes. And yet, even though we feed so many more people, the total expenditure on food was less. You could argue that even if you are in the global wealthy that could potentially survive one of these catastrophes if chaos didn’t break out, it would still be in your interest to get prepared for alternate foods, because you’d have to pay less money for your food.

Ariel Conn: And that’s all with a research funding request of 1.5 million? Is that correct?

Dave Denkenberger: The full plan is more like $100 million.

Joshua Pearce: It’s what we could use as the current team now, effectively.

Ariel Conn: Okay. Well, even the 100 million still seems reasonable.

Joshua Pearce: It’s still a bargain. One of the things we’ve been primarily assuming during all of our core scenarios is that there would be human cooperation, and that things would break down into fighting, but as we know historically, that’s an extremely optimistic way to look at it. And so even if you’re one of the global wealthy, in the top 10% globally in terms of financial means and capital, even if you would be able to feed yourself in one of these relatively modest reductions in overall agricultural supply, it is not realistic to assume that the poor people are just going to lay down and starve to death. They’re going to be storming your mansion. And so if you can provide them with food with a relatively low upfront capital investment, it makes a lot of sense, again, for you personally, because you’re not fighting them off at your door.

Dave Denkenberger: One other thing that surprised me was we did a real worst case scenario where the sun is mostly blocked, say by nuclear winter, but then we also had a loss of electricity and industry globally, say there were multiple EMPs around the world. And I, going into it, was not too optimistic that we’d be able to feed everyone. But we actually have a paper on it saying that it’s technically feasible, so I think it really comes down to getting prepared and having that message in the decision makers at the right time, such that they realize it’s in their interest to cooperate.

Another issue that surprised me: when we were writing the book, I thought about seaweed, but then I looked at how much seaweed for sushi cost, and it was just tremendously expensive per calorie, so I didn’t pursue it. But then I found out later that we actually produce a lot of seaweed at a reasonable price. And so now I think that we might be able to scale up that food source from seaweed in just a few months.

Ariel Conn: How quickly does seaweed grow, and how abundantly?

Dave Denkenberger: It depends on the species, but one species that is edible, we put into the scenario of nuclear winter, and one thing to note is that the ocean, as the upper layers cool, they sink, and then the lower layers of the ocean come to the surface, and that brings nutrients to the surface. We found in pretty big areas on Earth, in the ocean, that the seaweed could actually grow more than 10% per day. With that exponential growth, you quickly scale up to feeding a lot of people. Now of course we need to scale up the infrastructure, the ropes that it grows on, but that’s what we’re working out.

The other thing I would add is that in these catastrophes, if many people are starving, then I think not only will people not care about saving other species, but they may actively eat other species to extinction. And it turns out that feeding seven billion people is a lot more food than keeping, say, 500 individuals of many different species alive. And so I think we could actually use this to save a lot of species. And if it were a natural catastrophe, well some species would go extinct naturally — so maybe for the first time, humans could actually be increasing biodiversity.

Joshua Pearce: That’s a nice optimistic way to end this.

Ariel Conn: Yeah, that’s what I was just thinking. Anything else?

Dave Denkenberger: I think that’s it.

Joshua Pearce: We’re all good.

Ariel Conn: All right. This has been a really interesting conversation. Thank you so much for joining us.

Dave Denkenberger: Thank you.

Joshua Pearce: Thank you for having us.