Civilisational Resilience
Pā Aumangea
Why focus on civilisational resilience?
Even if humanity survives a catastrophe, our potential could be permanently curtailed if civilisation collapses.
In the aftermath of a disaster that kills most people, many of the things we do today will be impossible — and even some of the things we did in the past, like collect coal from the surface of the Earth, will be impossible the second time around. We might never regain the key infrastructure, knowledge and industries we take for granted today.
However, if we can make it more likely that civilisation could eventually recover from a catastrophic collapse, we could preserve the possibility of a long and flourishing future. While this is still a new and highly speculative area of research, some in the effective altruism community see developing civilisational resilience as a top priority. It also has the potential to be relatively cost effective, given its scale, neglectedness, and tractability:
Scale
Āwhata
The loss of civilisation would affect everyone who survived the initial catastrophe. And if the loss were permanent, it would also impact all of the generations to come.
Neglectedness
Mahuetanga
While governments allocate some resources to disaster preparation, they generally focus on much smaller-scale scenarios. Very few people are working to safeguard civilisation from global catastrophe.
Solvability
Whakaotitanga
While there has been very little research on this topic, there do seem to be some concrete things we could to increase our chances of survival after a collapse, such as developing alternative foods, or creating caches of key information. ¹
Content adapted from 80,000 Hours. For more information, see their exploratory problem profile on civilisational resilience.
How could humanity recover from civilisational collapse?
In this episode of the 80,000 Hours podcast, Lewis Dartnell discusses the biggest impediments to bouncing back after a disaster, and the most valuable pro-resilience adjustments we can make today.
Enjoyed the episode? Want to listen later? Subscribe by searching “80,000 Hours” wherever you get your podcasts.
Would survival shelters help us recover from a global catastrophe?
In this paper, Nick Bedstead argues that many proposed catastrophes do either too much or too little damage for shelters to help, affect the environment in ways that make shelters largely irrelevant, or otherwise give relatively limited advantages to the people protected. However, he also notes that shelters could have an impressive expected cost per future generation allowed to exist, and may add something unique in terms of isolation and coordination.
Support work safeguarding civilisation
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![EA Funds Longterm Future Fund]()
A managed philanthropic fund that makes grants to projects safeguarding the longterm future- including those mitigating biorisk.
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Works to identify, promote and develop resilient food solutions that could feed everybody in the event of a global catastrophe.
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And more to come! We hope to partner with more high impact organisations working in this area in the future.
