Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: existential risks

Vladimir Putin is acting pretty crazy these days. The latest is that he is threatening to point nuclear missiles at Europe because the US is planning to install a missile defense system in Poland. How will this make Europe less inclined to have a missile defense system..? From CNN:

Speaking to foreign reporters days before he travels to Germany for the annual summit with President Bush and the other Group of Eight leaders, Putin assailed the White House plan to place a radar system in the Czech Republic and interceptor missiles in neighboring Poland. Washington says the system is needed to counter a potential threat from Iran.

In an interview released Monday, Putin suggested that Russia may respond to the threat by aiming its nuclear weapons at Europe.

“If a part of the strategic nuclear potential of the United States appears in Europe and, in the opinion of our military specialists, will threaten us, then we will have to take appropriate steps in response. What kind of steps? We will have to have new targets in Europe,” Putin said, according to a transcript released by the Kremlin. These could be targeted with “ballistic or cruise missiles or maybe a completely new system” he said.

As a Russian-American myself, I am appalled and disappointed that Putin’s anti-Americanism has reached the point where he feels he has to threaten Europe with nuclear attack because the US is planning to install a missile defense system there. All I can do is take pleasure in the fact that Putin has stated he will step down within the year, and pray that the next person to hold his office doesn’t behave like a gangster on the world stage.

Five evolutionary stages of pathogen progression from animals to human transmission have been identified A proposed monitoring system of viral chatter has been proposed to provide warning of new diseases before they spread to humans.

In 1999, Wolfe began field work in the jungles of Cameroon to track “viral chatter,” or the regular transmission of diseases from animals to people, usually without further spread among humans. By monitoring the habits and the blood pathologies of bushmeat hunters and their kills, Wolfe and his team have identified at least three previously unknown retroviruses from the same family as HIV, as well as promoted safe practices for handling animals and animal carcasses.

“The Cameroon project demonstrated that it’s possible to collect information on viral transmission under very difficult circumstances from these highly exposed people,” Wolfe said.

With Cameroon as a prototype and a $2.5 million National Institutes of Health Pioneer Award as seed money, Wolfe has gone on to create a network of virus-discovery projects that monitor hunters, butchers, and wildlife trade and zoo workers in some of the world’s most remote viral hotspots. The network of a dozen sites in China, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Malaysia, Laos, Madagascar and Paraguay include source locations for such emerging diseases as SARS, avian flu, Nipah, Ebola and monkeypox.

There are more details of the five stages and a proposed study of the detailed origins of disease.

Wolfe and his colleagues begin by identifying five intermediate stages through which a pathogen exclusively infecting animals must travel before exclusively infecting humans. The research team identifies no inevitable progression of microbes from Stage 1 to Stage 5 and notes that many microbes remain stuck at a specific stage. The journey is arduous, and pathogens rarely climb through all five stages:

Stage 1. Agent only in animals: A microbe that is present in animals but not detected in humans under natural conditions. Examples include most malarial plasmodia.

Stage 2. Primary infection: Animal pathogens that are transmitted from animals to humans as a primary infection but not transmitted among humans. Examples include anthrax, rabies and West Nile virus.

Stage 3. Limited outbreak: Animal pathogens that undergo only a few cycles of secondary transmission among humans so that occasional human outbreaks triggered by a primary infection soon die out. Examples include the Ebola, Marburg and monkeypox viruses.

Stage 4. Long outbreak: A disease that exists in animals and has a natural cycle of infecting humans by primary transmission from the animal host but that also undergoes long sequences of secondary transmission between humans without involvement of animals. Examples include Chagas disease, yellow fever, dengue fever, influenza A, cholera, typhus and West African sleeping sickness.

Stage 5. Exclusive human agent: A pathogen exclusive to humans that involves either an ancestral pathogen present in a common ancestor of chimps and humans or involves a more recent pathogen that evolved into a specialized human pathogen. Examples include HIV, measles, mumps, rubella, smallpox and syphilis.

In addition, the team examines 25 diseases of important historic consequence to humans. Of the 25 diseases, 17 impose the heaviest world burden today: hepatitis B, influenza A, measles, pertussis, rotavirus A, syphilis, tetanus, tuberculosis, AIDS, Chagas disease, cholera, dengue hemorrhagic fever, East and West African sleeping sicknesses, falciparum and vivax malarias, and visceral leishmaniasis.

Eight more imposed heavy burdens in the past but have been reined in or eradicated thanks to modern medicine and public health practices: temperate diphtheria, mumps, plague, rubella, smallpox, typhoid, typhus and tropical yellow fever. Except for AIDS, dengue fever and cholera, most of the 25 have been important for more than two centuries.

The research team considered the varied pathologies of diseases originating in temperate (15) versus tropical (10) regions, as well as differing pathogen and geographic origins. Among the conclusions:

– Most of the temperate diseases, but none of the tropical diseases, are so-called “crowd epidemic diseases,” occurring locally as a brief epidemic and capable of persisting regionally only in large human populations. Most of the diseases originating in temperate climates convey long-lasting immunity.

– Eight of the 15 temperate diseases probably or possibly reached humans from domestic animals, three more from apes or rodents, and the other four came from still unknown sources. Thus the rise of agriculture, starting 11,000 years ago, plays multiple roles in the evolution of animal pathogens into human pathogens.

– Most tropical diseases have originated in wild, non-human primates. These animals are most closely related to humans and thus pose the weakest species barriers to pathogen transfer.

– Animal-derived human pathogens virtually all arose from pathogens of other warm-blooded vertebrates plus, in two cases, birds.

– Nearly all of the 25 major human pathogens originated in the Old Word (Africa, Europe and Asia), facilitating the conquest of the New World. Chagas disease is the only one of the 25 that clearly originated in the New World, while the debate is unresolved for syphilis and tuberculosis.

–Far more temperate diseases arose in the Old World because far more animals that furnish ancestral pathogens were domesticated there. Far fewer tropical diseases arose in the New World because the genetic distance is greater between humans and primates in this part of the globe.

The conclusions of the review illustrate large gaps in the understanding of the origins of even established major infectious diseases. Almost all studies reviewed were based on specimens collected from domestic animals, plus a few wild animal species.

The researchers propose an “origins initiative” aimed at identifying the origins of a dozen of the most important human infectious diseases as well as a global early warning system to monitor pathogens emerging from animals to humans.

This work is relevant to the lifeboat bioshield

In a report to be published in the peer-reviewed journal PLoS Computational Biology and currently available online, Sally Blower, a professor at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA, and Romulus Breban and Raffaele Vardavas, postdoctoral fellows in Blower’s research group, used novel mathematical modeling techniques to predict that current health policy — based on voluntary vaccinations — is not adequate to control severe flu epidemics and pandemics unless vaccination programs offer incentives to individuals.

According to the researchers, the severity of such a health crisis could be reduced if programs were to provide several years of free vaccinations to individuals who pay for only one year. Interestingly, however, some incentive programs could have the opposite effect. Providing free vaccinations for entire families, for example, could actually increase the frequency of severe epidemics. This is because when the head of the household makes a choice — flu shots or no flu shots — on behalf of all the other household members, there is no individual decision-making, and adaptability is decreased.

While other models have determined what proportion of the population would need to be vaccinated in order to prevent a pandemic, none of these models have shown whether this critical coverage can actually be reached. What has been missing, according to Blower, a mathematical and evolutionary biologist, is the human factor.

The human factor involves two biological characteristics, “memory and how adaptable people can be,” Blower said. “These characteristics drive human behavior.”

The model Blower’s team developed is inspired by game theory, used in economics to predict how non-communicating, selfish individuals reach a collective behavior with respect to a common dilemma by adapting to what they think are other people’s decisions. The group modeled each individual’s strategy for making yearly vaccination decisions as an adaptive process of trial and error. They tracked both individual-level decisions and population-level variables — that is, the yearly vaccine coverage level and influenza prevalence, where prevalence is defined as the proportion of the population that is infected. The individual-level model was based on the human biological attributes of memory and adaptability.

The Lifeboat Foundation has the bioshield project

Carnegie Mellon researchers Keith Florig and Baruch Fischhoff offer simple, practical advice: on whether it is worth citizens’ time to stock supplies needed for a home shelter, how urgently should one seek shelter following a nearby nuclear detonation, and how long should survivors remain in a shelter after the radioactive dust settles.


“A number of emergency-management organizations recommend that people stock their homes with a couple dozen categories of emergency supplies,” said Florig of Carnegie Mellon’s engineering and public policy department. “We calculated that it would cost about $240 per year for a typical family to maintain such a stock, including the value of storage space and the time needed to tend to it.”

Their research also suggests that many families who could afford to follow the stocking guidelines might think twice about whether the investment was really worth it, given the low probability that stocked supplies would actually be used in a nuclear emergency.

They advocate simple rules for minimizing risk based on how far people are from the blast. If you are within several miles of the blast, there will be no time to flee and you will have only minutes to seek shelter. If you are 10 miles [downwind] from the blast, you will have 15 to 60 minutes to find shelter, but not enough time to reliably flee the area before the fallout arrives,” said Florig.

However, the prior advice would suggest that if you are 10 miles from the blast that you could move perpendicular to the direction of the fallout plume and get out of the way in under 15 minutes. Needing to move one mile for smaller bombs. So I would think 10–20 miles downwind is a judgement call, but 25 miles you should be able to get out of the way of the fallout plume.

Cities that quickly closed schools and discouraged public gatherings had fewer deaths from the great flu pandemic in 1918 than cities that did not, researchers reported on Monday. Experts agree that a pandemic of some virus, most likely influenza, is almost 100 percent certain. What is not certain is when it will strike and which virus it will be.

In Kansas City, no more than 20 people could attend weddings or funerals. New York mandated staggered shifts at factories. In Seattle, the mayor told people to wear face masks.

No single action worked on its own, the researchers found, it was the combination of measures that saved lives. Peak death rates can be 50% to eight times lower. St. Louis authorities introduced “a broad series of measures designed to promote social distancing” as soon as flu showed up. Philadelphia downplayed the 1918 flu.

Philadelphia ended up with a peak death rate of 257 people per 100,000 population per week. St. Louis had just 31 per 100,000 at the peak.

No good vaccine would be available for months, and drugs that treat influenza are in very short supply.

So experts are looking at what they call non-pharmacologic interventions — ways to prevent infection without drugs. They hope this can buy time while companies make and distribute vaccines and drugs.

Because the virus is spread by small droplets passed within about three feet (1 meter) from person to person, keeping people apart is considered a possible strategy.

The U.S. government flu plan calls for similar measures, including allowing employees to stay home for weeks or even months, telecommuting and closing schools and perhaps large office buildings.

The Lifeboat Foundation has a bioshield project

Using maps of population density, the researchers charted the places likely to suffer the most casualties from asteroids. As might be expected, countries with large coastal populations turned out to be most vulnerable, with China, Indonesia, India, Japan and the US in the top five spots.

The team focused on smaller asteroids because they hit the Earth more frequently. An asteroid a few hundred metres across hits the planet about once every 10,000 years, on average, while those larger than 1 kilometre hit only every 100,000 years or so. Small asteroids are also harder to spot. They considered a range of impact energies corresponding to asteroids between 100 and 500 metres across, striking with typical solar system speeds of about 20,000 kilometres per second.


Simulations show the asteroid impact locations that would produce the most casualties in red. The Pacific coast of Asia is a particularly deadly place for an asteroid to strike because of tsunamis, while a direct strike on some densely populated inland areas could also cause a heavy toll (Illustration: Nick Bailey et al/University of Southampton)

The US faced the worst potential economic losses, since it has a lot of infrastructure on coastlines facing two different oceans. China was second, followed by Sweden, Canada, and Japan.

The Lifeboat asteroid shield project helps to address these risks and Tsunami warning and response systems would also help mitigate loss of life from ocean impacts.

Some information on how to reduce nuclear bomb casualties

If you are downwind of the blast, look at tree tops to see direction of wind and then flee perpendicular to the wind. Because the plumes are significantly longer than they are wide, moving as little as one to five miles perpendicular to the plume can mean the difference between life and death. People in areas upwind of the detonation site, on the other hand, are safest staying where they are.

Today’s hospital burn units provide exemplary but time consuming care to burn victims, who typically arrive sporadically and in small numbers. A nuclear attack would bring a sudden surge of patients, but the medical system could dramatically minimize fatalities by training staff and equipping non-medical people to treat second-degree burn victims in much larger numbers. The focus must be on cleaning the wounds to avoid fatal infections, administering painkillers and then moving on to the next patient. And all of this must occur in the field, since thousands of victims would not make it to a hospital.

An excellent article by Bruce Schneier on the psychology of security is available here. It starts as follows:

Security is both a feeling and a reality. And they’re not the same.

The reality of security is mathematical, based on the probability of different risks and the effectiveness of different countermeasures. We can calculate how secure your home is from burglary, based on such factors as the crime rate in the neighborhood you live in and your door-locking habits. We can calculate how likely it is for you to be murdered, either on the streets by a stranger or in your home by a family member. Or how likely you are to be the victim of identity theft. Given a large enough set of statistics on criminal acts, it’s not even hard; insurance companies do it all the time.

We can also calculate how much more secure a burglar alarm will make your home, or how well a credit freeze will protect you from identity theft. Again, given enough data, it’s easy.

But security is also a feeling, based not on probabilities and mathematical calculations, but on your psychological reactions to both risks and countermeasures. You might feel terribly afraid of terrorism, or you might feel like it’s not something worth worrying about. You might feel safer when you see people taking their shoes off at airport metal detectors, or you might not. You might feel that you’re at high risk of burglary, medium risk of murder, and low risk of identity theft. And your neighbor, in the exact same situation, might feel that he’s at high risk of identity theft, medium risk of burglary, and low risk of murder.

The difference between the feeling of security and true security, and the difference between pursuing one thing or the other, is central to the Lifeboat Foundation’s mission. For example, planetwide risks like synthetic life or unfriendly AI should be analyzed more thoroughly and given more effort than prevention of nuclear proliferation, even if we consider the near-term probability of the former scenarios to be less, simply because their scope is so much larger. For more on this topic, see Cognitive biases affecting judgement of existential risks.

A valuable paper by Jason Matheny of the University of Maryland is “Reducing the Risk of Human Extinction”. The abstract is as follows:

In this century a number of events could extinguish humanity. The probability of these events may be very low, but the expected value of preventing them could be high, as it represents the value of all future lives. We review the challenges to studying human extinction risks and, by way of example, estimate the cost-effectiveness of preventing extinction-level asteroid impacts.

Continue reading it here.

NASA estimates the cost to find at least 90 percent of the 20,000 potentially hazardous asteroids and comets by 2020 would be about $1 billion, according to a report NASA will release later this week. It would cost $300 million if a asteroid locating telescope was piggybacked on another vehicle. The report was previewed Monday at a Planetary Defense Conference in Washington.

The agency is already tracking bigger objects, at least 3,300 feet in diameter, that could wipe out most life on Earth, much like what is theorized to have happened to dinosaurs 65 million years ago. But even that search, which has spotted 769 asteroids and comets — none of which is on course to hit Earth — is behind schedule. It’s supposed to be complete by the end of next year.

A cheaper option would be to simply piggyback on other agencies’ telescopes, a cost of about $300 million, also rejected, Johnson said.

“The decision of the agency is we just can’t do anything about it right now,” he added.

Earth got a scare in 2004, when initial readings suggested an 885-foot asteroid called 99942 Apophis seemed to have a chance of hitting Earth in 2029. But more observations showed that wouldn’t happen. Scientists say there is a 1-in-45,000 chance that it could hit in 2036.

They think it would mostly likely strike the Pacific Ocean, which would cause a tsunami on the U.S. West Coast the size of the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean wave.

John Logsdon, space policy director at George Washington University, said a stepped-up search for such asteroids is needed.

“You can’t deflect them if you can’t find them,” Logsdon said. “And we can’t find things that can cause massive damage.”

Lifeboat has an asteroid shield project