SCIENTISTS NAME THE ONLY TWO THINGS THAT CAN END HUMANITY

Thirty-five experts, three years of work, hundreds of candidate catastrophes, 204 countries modeled, and the whole thing dropped in The Lancet this week at the World Health Summit in Berlin. Seventeen threats made the cut. Only two can finish the species: nuclear conflict and the famine that follows it, and the malicious use of AI, specifically the part where a model helps some dipshit cook up a bioweapon. The Lancet's companion editorial says that if either one lands, humanity gets an apocalypse. That is a hell of a word to find in a medical journal. To even qualify as catastrophic, a threat had to be capable of costing a billion DALYs by 2100. One DALY is one year of healthy life lost to illness, disability, or dying early. Preventing nuclear war could avert 133 million deaths and 9.35 billion of those years. Reducing the malicious AI risk could save an estimated 10.4 billion. And then there is obesity at 23.1 billion, more than double the AI figure, and the leading threat in 154 of the 204 countries studied. Income inequality comes in at 13.8 billion, which the commission puts at roughly 25 COVID pandemics worth of damage. Co-chair Christopher Murray said the team expected to find three big problems, conflict, climate, and pandemics, and walked away with a much longer list. The commission insists this is not a priority ranking, partly because DALYs cannot count the billions who would never be born after an extinction event. Sleep tight.

Why you should give a shit: Skynet and the nukes get the scary tier, but the Lancet's own math says the thing quietly taking the most healthy years off you is lunch, and that is the one threat on the list you can personally do something about this week.