Tags: #existential-risks Type: #notes Stage: #evergreen Existential risks like nuclear war and man-made pandemics are not the only things we should be worried about. A sufficiently large destabilising event could knock civilisation into the dark ages because tacit knowledge — knowledge that's locked between people's ears and is hard to extract and express — runs the world. ![[precarious infrastructure.png]] *This image is true for more than just digital infrastructure.* Many of these the potential disasters that threaten civilisation can't even be considered black swan events, as we know that they may occur and are aware of the scale of the devastation that could ensue. One of the best examples of this are solar storms. A solar storm of sufficient magnitude, like the [Carrington event](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event) in 1859, could fry much of our electrical and communications infrastructure, and it could take *years* to get this stuff back online. Our world runs on electricity and the internet, so I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that chaos that would ensue could cost most than a billion lives. We will likely rebuild, but we'd certainly lost some hard-earned knowledge that will difficult to replace.