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
Longtermism, aggregation, and catastrophic risk – Emma J. Curran (University of Cambridge)
Advocates of longtermism point out that interventions which focus on improving the prospects of people in the very far future will, in expectation, bring about a significant amount of good. Indeed, in expectation, such long-term interventions bring about far more good than their short-term counterparts. As such, longtermists claim we have compelling moral reason to prefer long-term interventions. …
When should an effective altruist donate? – William MacAskill (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)
Effective altruism is the use of evidence and careful reasoning to work out how to maximize positive impact on others with a given unit of resources, and the taking of action on that basis. It’s a philosophy and a social movement that is gaining considerable steam in the philanthropic world. For example,…
Dynamic public good provision under time preference heterogeneity – Philip Trammell (Global Priorities Institute and Department of Economics, University of Oxford)
I explore the implications of time preference heterogeneity for the private funding of public goods. The assumption that players use a common discount rate is knife-edge: relaxing it yields substantially different equilibria, for two reasons. First, time preference heterogeneity motivates intertemporal polarization, analogous to the polarization seen in a static public good game. In the simplest settings, more patient players spend nothing early in time and less patient players spending nothing later. Second…