# Existential Risk

Existential risks threaten humanity’s survival and potential. Faith and scripture call us not to complacency but to vigilant, moral action against catastrophe.

An existential risk, in the technical sense the philosopher Nick Bostrom gave it in 2002, is a catastrophe that would either annihilate intelligent life originating on Earth or permanently and drastically curtail its potential. The adjective descends from the Latin *exsistere*, “to emerge,” so the danger concerns what humanity might yet become as well as whether it survives. Nuclear war, engineered pandemics, and misaligned artificial intelligence lead most lists, with natural threats such as asteroids far lower. Toby Ord puts the chance of such a catastrophe this century at roughly one in six, a figure grounded in judgment more than data. Believers commonly meet these warnings with one of two assurances: the end is foretold and belongs to God, or God will never permit His children to destroy themselves.

Restoration scripture sustains a narrower and more demanding confidence. The Savior withheld the timing of the end from every creature, declaring that “of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only” (Matthew 24:36), leaving believers no calendar by which to relax their vigilance. The same canon that promises the human family a future records the complete destruction of peoples who disregarded their warnings, and preserves those records for readers expected to learn from them. Within this framework, divine sovereignty over the end and human responsibility for the survival of particular civilizations stand together. The flood narrative shows how the two are joined.

## The Ark and the Remnant

The Epistle to the Hebrews commends Noah, who, “being warned of God of things not seen as yet, moved with fear, prepared an ark to the saving of his house” (Hebrews 11:7). The phrase “things not seen as yet” describes precisely a danger with no earlier instance to learn from. The Hebrew *tevah*, “ark,” denotes a box or chest, and the Bible employs it elsewhere only for the basket of bulrushes that carried the infant Moses, so that two of Israel’s deliverers were preserved in vessels bearing the same name. Jeffrey M. Bradshaw has shown how the ark’s three decks correspond to the three divisions of the tabernacle, making Noah’s vessel a sanctuary constructed against the waters of chaos.

Noah was instructed to cover the ark with *kopher*, “pitch,” a noun formed from *kaphar*, “to cover,” the root that also supplies the Hebrew vocabulary of atonement, and early hearers would likely have caught the echo. After the waters receded, God covenanted that “neither shall all flesh be cut off any more by the waters of a flood” (Genesis 9:11). Restoration scripture adds His decree to Enoch “that a remnant of his seed should always be found among all nations, while the earth should stand” (Moses 7:52). In the order of the narrative, the warning preceded the labor and the covenant followed it. Noah’s ark was the means by which the promised remnant came through the flood.

## Two Peoples Destroyed

The Book of Mormon ends by recounting the destruction of two civilizations, the Jaredites and the Nephites, and its compilers intended both accounts for readers who might avoid the same end. Surveying the Nephite dead at Cumorah, Mormon lamented, “O ye fair ones, how could ye have departed from the ways of the Lord” (Mormon 6:17). His son Moroni survived him, remaining “alone to write the sad tale of the destruction of my people” (Mormon 8:3). The Jaredite record ends more starkly still, with the last two commanders fighting on after their armies had perished, until one slew the other while the prophet Ether looked on. Each people had received repeated prophetic warnings, and each had refused them.

Both endings conform closely to the pattern that students of catastrophe most fear. Each people destroyed itself with its own weapons and secret combinations, and each passed beyond any point from which recovery remained possible. Bostrom’s definition embraces such cases, in which a people may survive in remnants while losing what it might have become. Moroni addressed his account to a future audience, writing as though its readers were present before him. The covenant with Noah assures humanity’s continuance, while the plates of Mormon record that no such assurance attaches to any particular nation, however righteous its founders.

## Prepared and Not Afraid

A revelation given in January 1831, as the Saints prepared to gather to Ohio amid warnings of coming calamity, promised that “if ye are prepared ye shall not fear” (D&C 38:30). The Mormon Transhumanist Affirmation applies that counsel to the future, committing its signers “to identify and prepare for risks and responsibilities associated with future advances.” Indeed, many of the gravest risks arise from the very technologies transhumanists most desire: artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, and molecular manufacturing. Carl Youngblood has argued that mutual suspicion between religious and secular communities makes such risks harder to meet, since believers who distrust scientists may discount their warnings when they matter most.

Concern for the distant future carries a danger of its own. Some philosophers contend that the vast number of people who could live in ages to come makes even a minute reduction in extinction risk worth more than nearly any present good. Critics answer that such reasoning can excuse harm to the living and concentrate decisions about the entire human future in a few hands. By way of contrast, Noah prepared “to the saving of his house,” beginning with the people before him, and the covenant that followed embraced “all flesh.” Preparation in the scriptural pattern serves the living household first and the distant posterity through it, and the promised remnant descends from a family whose members were saved together.

## Preparation in the Laboratory

At the AI Seoul Summit in May 2024, sixteen companies developing the most capable artificial intelligence pledged to publish safety frameworks stating how they would assess the risks of each new model and at what threshold a risk would become intolerable. These commitments represent preparation for harms not seen as yet, undertaken by a handful of competing firms on behalf of every person those harms would reach. The pledges are voluntary, and critics doubt they will bind once a rival pulls ahead. Their wager resembles Noah’s in asking builders to act on a warning before any precedent confirms it, and it differs in that the firms preparing against the danger are also the ones creating it.

The covenant gives Mormon transhumanists reason to expect that the human family will continue and to hope that such machines will serve its flourishing. It gives no assurance that the present civilization will be the one to carry the remnant, and the record of Cumorah warns against that presumption. Existential risk names, in the language of probability, the danger Noah faced and the Nephites ignored, a catastrophe without precedent that only preparation could meet. Whether the safety frameworks hold when competitive pressure mounts is the kind of choice the Nephites faced after their prophets spoke, and its outcome depends on whether the warnings now in hand are turned into the patient labor that Noah gave to the ark.

*See also*: [Artificial General Intelligence](/topical-guide/artificial-general-intelligence), [Destroyer](/topical-guide/destroyer), [Fermi Paradox](/topical-guide/fermi-paradox), [Grey Goo](/topical-guide/grey-goo), [Last Days](/topical-guide/last-days), [Millennium](/topical-guide/millennium), [Probability](/topical-guide/probability), [Refuge](/topical-guide/refuge), [Singularity](/topical-guide/singularity)