[littlemissattitude]

The problem is that we really need a reason to actually face that risk in the first place.

I think we do have that reason. It's just that it's seen as a long-range reason, and mostly politicians and CEOs don't much past the next election or the next fiscal year.

That reason is that we must - and least some of us - leave the earth to survive as a species on a long-term basis. Now, you can take the position that extinction is inevitable and leave it at that. That's what many people do. Or you can believe in the human survival instinct, and try to figure out what to do to keep the species going. And I'm not just talking about the fact that in a few billion years the sun is going to swell up and cook the earth. Or that one of these days one of those asteroids they keep trying to scare us with really is going to hit earth and trigger another extinction event that could very well include us.

I'm talking shorter-range than that. The environment is not going to sustain the population growth that is still taking place on the earth indefinitely. People are going to keep on having babies, and nonrenewable resources are going to continue their depletion. Wars and disease keep this in check to a certain extent, but the population is still growing exponentially. And, personally, I don't like the "lets kill off a few billion of the population" solution. I don't believe in "acceptable losses" and "collateral damage". A better solution would be to get some of the population off the planet.

And there are even shorter range scenarios than that. Nuclear weapons keep getting more efficient at killing people, and I'm not that sure that we are going to be able to keep from using them indefinitely. India/Pakistan worry me. North Korea worries me. Another thing I don't believe in is "limited nuclear war". There is too much chance of it getting out of hand, no matter how limited it was intended to be. I'm not as concerned with the dirty bombs that we keep hearing that various terrorist groups are learning to make. They will kill, of course, but probably not on the kind of scale that threatens the species as a whole.

And then there are the biologicals. Chemicals don't worry me as much; from what I understand, they are likely to be of relatively local effect in most cases, even if they managed to take out a couple of million people in a large city. Chemicals aren't contagious. But one of these days, someone is going to come up with something biological that is really lethal - Captain Tripps lethal, or worse. It might not even be a government or a rogue group that comes up with it; Mom Nature is perfectly capable of that.

Solution? Make sure that the whole population of the Homo sapiens sapiens is not on the same planet. Completely destroying a species that is distributed throughout the solar system, some millennia even throughout the galaxy, is a lot harder than destroying the species when it's all in once place. I know that the old "Spaceship Earth" concept from the sixties/seventies has become kind of cliche. But you know what? It's the truth. It's a pretty small ship, and we are all in it together. We need to be kinder to each other. And we need to start looking farther than the bow of the ship.

Edit to say: this was supposed to be my two cents worth. Is this what they mean by inflation? Sorry, you all, I really didn't mean to write a book here.