Cyberattack is the next catastrophic threat to be ready for
There are many predictions currently being made about how the world might be changed by the coronavirus. Will our lives back to normal, whatever normal is after pandemic?
Many informed scientists predicted that a global epidemic was almost certain to break out at some point in the near future. 2014( Ebola case), 2002–2004 SARS outbreak,…… all were indicators that the threat exists and if we are not taking cautious in our consideration it could be universal later.
The warnings of virologists and epidemiologists, the Microsoft founder, Bill Gates, gave a widely disseminated Ted Talk in 2015 in which he detailed the threat of a killer virus. All could be considered to implement security measures in time, but regardless of all, it didn’t.
History is a great teacher. The pandemic has been one of the two most prominent catastrophic threats, the other one could be a massive cyberattack.
But if something hasn’t yet happened, it doesn’t mean it won’t happen later. This pandemic, that will kill only a tiny fraction of the world’s population, it is known as existential threats. Existential threats are the ones that will bring a total end to humanity. We might have a less troubling one in this concept and that is a kind that leads to destroying civilization and changing the extant humanity to a prehistory condition.
According to Ord, an Australian based at Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, which is a few numbers of academics working in the field of existential risk assessment.
Ord considers the possibility of each threat and examines the likelihood of it in the century. An example is that possibility of a supernova on Earth is less than one in 50m.
Ord’s calculation shows that the next century will be a troublesome one. I think everything depends on our decisions today, right or wrong. Ord emphasized that the existential risk this century is one in six! But of course, everything depends on our decisions.
Not ignoring the threat and advances in areas like biotech and artificial intelligence, then the risk could be reduced.
We are so interconnected, that brings the risk much more than our expectations.
Simply consider the dependencies of our generation to the internet and satellite systems. The best source of destruction and universal collapse. These integrated networks are the source of potential disaster. It increases our weakness to viral pandemics and cyberattacks. The real pandemics can be a kind that engineered in biological laboratories. We need to know that the technologies we develop don’t destroy us. We need to educate people about that. One of my colleagues has a nice quote from Nelson Mandela in her signature: “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”
The human race is in its adolescence and as a teenager that has the physical strength of an adult but lacks prudence and patience, we are a danger to ourselves until we mature ( depending on the way mature). We need to know how our actions may affect the thousands of generations to come ( Hopefully, these viruses let them come ).
The pandemic may cause us to have a keener appreciation of the fact that we are, so to speak, all in it together. Ultimately, though, we will have to arrive at that kind of unity if we’re, to avoid far greater adversity in the future.
To your health and peace of mind
