How cost-effective are efforts to detect near-Earth-objects?
Toby Newberry (Future of Humanity Institute, University of Oxford)
GPI Technical Report No. T1-2021
Near-Earth-objects (NEOs) include asteroids and comets with orbits that bring them into close proximity with Earth. NEOs are well-known to have impacted Earth in the past, sometimes to catastrophic effect.2 Over the past few decades, humanity has taken steps to detect any NEOs on impact trajectories, and, in doing so, we have significantly improved our estimate of the risk that an impact will occur over the next century. This report estimates the cost-effectiveness of such detection efforts. The remainder of this section sets out the context of the report...
Other working papers
Population ethics with thresholds – Walter Bossert (University of Montreal), Susumu Cato (University of Tokyo) and Kohei Kamaga (Sophia University)
We propose a new class of social quasi-orderings in a variable-population setting. In order to declare one utility distribution at least as good as another, the critical-level utilitarian value of the former must reach or surpass the value of the latter. For each possible absolute value of the difference between the population sizes of two distributions to be compared, we specify a non-negative threshold level and a threshold inequality. This inequality indicates whether the corresponding threshold level must be reached or surpassed in…
Moral demands and the far future – Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)
I argue that moral philosophers have either misunderstood the problem of moral demandingness or at least failed to recognize important dimensions of the problem that undermine many standard assumptions. It has been assumed that utilitarianism concretely directs us to maximize welfare within a generation by transferring resources to people currently living in extreme poverty. In fact, utilitarianism seems to imply that any obligation to help people who are currently badly off is trumped by obligations to undertake actions targeted at improving the value…
Maximal cluelessness – Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)
I argue that many of the priority rankings that have been proposed by effective altruists seem to be in tension with apparently reasonable assumptions about the rational pursuit of our aims in the face of uncertainty. The particular issue on which I focus arises from recognition of the overwhelming importance…