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Why Is No One Talking About Existential Risk? | Mara Cortona | Modern Wisdom Podcast 229

Mara Cortona is the Executive Director of the Astropolitics Institute and Founder of Nöonaut.

Mara CortonaguestChris Williamsonhost

Oct 8, 20201h 9mWatch on YouTube ↗

Summaries, chapters, transcripts, and FAQs on this page are made by uListen, not YouTube.

CHAPTERS

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Chapter summaries

COVID as a warning shot: predictable crises, politicization, and broken collaboration
Mara uses COVID-19 as a case study in how the world fails to prepare for foreseeable global threats. She argues the real failure wasn’t scientific uncertainty, but breakdowns in communication, cooperation, and depoliticized decision-making.
- •Pandemics of this scale were modeled and expected, yet preparedness was weak
- •Simple mitigation measures were undermined by conspiracy narratives and polarization
- •Global collaboration systems appear fragile under stress
- •Communication failures may be an underlying driver of many existential risks
Why talk about existential risk at all? The motivation for making it mainstream
After Chris welcomes Mara, they set the agenda: existential risk and how individuals and societies relate to it psychologically. Mara explains her frustration that these topics aren’t discussed proportionally to their stakes.
- •Existential risk and catastrophic risk are neglected in everyday discourse
- •The topic is emotionally difficult, but avoidance doesn’t reduce danger
- •The episode aims to make the subject navigable rather than paralyzing
- •Framing: individual psychology meets civilization-scale threats
Core definitions: existential risk vs global catastrophic risk, and natural vs anthropogenic threats
Mara lays out a glossary to distinguish total species-ending risks from civilization-shattering events that stop short of extinction. She also separates background natural threats from human-caused (anthropic) risks that are increasingly dominant.
- •Existential risk: threatens the long-term future of humanity entirely
- •Global catastrophic risk: mass die-offs and severe quality-of-life collapse without total extinction
- •Major anthropogenic risks: climate change, engineered pandemics/bioweapons, nuclear war (and more)
- •Natural background risks (asteroids, supervolcanoes) exist but are comparatively lower now
The technology paradox: progress creates risk, but also protects us from nature
Chris introduces the idea (via Toby Ord) that technology both generates new existential threats and is necessary to mitigate unavoidable natural risks. Mara complicates the picture by comparing humanity’s instability with long-lived species and by discussing suffering in the natural world.
- •A fully anti-tech ‘regression’ strategy fails because natural risks eventually strike
- •Some simple organisms persist for millions of years—longevity vs complexity tradeoff
- •Nature contains enormous suffering; romanticizing ‘back to nature’ can be naïve
- •Humans are motivated more by avoiding pain than by pursuing utopia
Pain avoidance at scale: why humans struggle to prioritize civilization-wide threats
They explore whether pain-avoidance psychology works when stakes are abstract and distributed across populations and future generations. COVID becomes evidence that short-term incentives routinely override collective, long-term optimization.
- •Individuals can be risk-averse, but collective systems often aren’t
- •2020 shows how quickly short-term economic/political pressures dominate
- •Most people don’t naturally think in ‘trillions of future lives’ abstractions
- •The challenge is cognitive: our heuristics didn’t evolve for global systems
Dunbar-number morality, force multipliers, and why persuasion may fail
Mara argues human psychology is tuned for small-group life (~150 people), while modern actions have global “force multiplier” effects. Because broad persuasion is unreliable, she suggests many solutions will come via technology and concentrated decision-makers rather than mass moral awakening.
- •Evolutionary constraints: we empathize with stories, not statistics or distant futures
- •Modern tools let small actions affect distant strangers (e.g., effective donations)
- •Valuing future, non-existent people is cognitively and politically hard
- •Pragmatic conclusion: leverage points sit with technological and institutional elites
Conflict of interest and the limits of consumer responsibility (especially on climate)
The discussion turns to the mismatch between what individuals can realistically do and where structural power actually sits. Mara describes pervasive conflicts of interest—from biology to politics—and critiques overemphasis on consumer guilt versus industrial and institutional levers.
- •Climate discourse can ‘gaslight’ individuals into feeling primary blame
- •Industrial systems and concentrated actors often dominate emissions and outcomes
- •Many people globally are in survival mode and cannot prioritize abstract risks
- •Conflict of interest is a feature of systems at every level, not a moral anomaly
Ranking the threats: unknown unknowns, bioweapons, and misaligned AI
Asked for her top risks over the next century, Mara highlights the danger of threats we can’t yet name, plus engineered pandemics and AI misalignment. They note the difficulty of modeling and preparing for novel technological failure modes.
- •‘Unknown unknowns’ may be among the most serious long-term dangers
- •Engineered pandemics and bioweapons represent high-impact, plausible near-term risks
- •Misaligned artificial general intelligence is treated as a central concern
- •Mitigation emphasis: resilience, R&D, and anticipating new categories of failure
How to make people care: reframing morality, influence, and cultural tipping points
Mara and Chris debate strategies for increasing public concern: moral recalibration toward outcomes, and the role of charismatic messengers. They also discuss how social movements often require an enabling “substrate” plus a catalytic event to ignite mass change.
- •Public awareness exists, but avoidance and helplessness block engagement
- •Proposal: judge morality by real-world outputs/efficacy, not feel-good feedback loops
- •Chris’s strategy: amplify credible, charismatic communicators to spread the idea
- •Movements often need both groundwork and an unpredictable trigger event
Attenborough, climate communication, and why politicization distorts risk prioritization
Using David Attenborough’s climate messaging as an example, Mara questions who such appeals actually influence and whether consumer-focused advice moves the needle. They explore why climate became the iconic risk while other threats (bio/AI) remain less salient, emphasizing politicization and social signaling.
- •Mass messaging may mostly reach people already aligned with the cause
- •Individual “consume less/recycle more” narratives may miss major leverage points
- •Climate attracts broad opinion and identity signaling; technical risks attract fewer amateurs
- •Politicization can both raise visibility and sabotage coherent action
A case of successful x-risk governance: asteroid defense vs neglected exponential tech risks
Mara contrasts the relatively effective, non-politicized response to asteroid risk with the relative neglect of emerging technology risks. She suggests that timing, cultural salience, and depoliticized framing helped asteroid mitigation succeed.
- •Asteroid risk mitigation improved quickly once evidence and attention aligned
- •Cultural moments (events and movies) helped make the threat legible without polarization
- •Some risks remain ‘quiet’ or under-addressed despite potentially higher stakes
- •Lesson: governance capacity depends on narrative, timing, and institutional focus
Space as a governance stress test: astropolitics, commons problems, and ‘decolonizing Mars’
Mara explains her work in astropolitics and describes space as a poorly governed commons with weak coordination and foresight. A tangent on ‘decolonizing Mars’ opens into a broader discussion about whether human flaws will be exported to new worlds—and whether selection and shared goals could improve cooperation.
- •Astropolitics: the geopolitics and legal governance of space activity
- •Space is a commons with high incentives for competition and weaponization
- •Cultural debates (e.g., ‘decolonize Mars’) reflect anxieties about repeating history
- •Optimism: collaboration toward big goals may ‘smooth out’ factional conflict over time
Wisdom gap, prisoner’s dilemma dynamics, extinction odds, and learning to carry the responsibility
They return to the core dilemma: humanity has unprecedented power but insufficient wisdom, creating a civilization-level prisoner’s dilemma. Discussing Toby Ord’s probabilities and personal coping, they emphasize responsibility, rigorous self-assessment, and ‘chop wood, carry water’ acceptance while still acting.
- •Humanity is ‘at the junction’ of high power and low wisdom (knife-edge era)
- •Tit-for-tat cooperation and accountability as partial antidotes to prisoner’s dilemma dynamics
- •Ord’s extinction/civilizational lock-in risk is front-loaded into the next century
- •Personal takeaway: consciously examine inputs, motives, and impacts; build responsibility-bearing lives

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