You afraid of sharks? Vending machines? Asteroids? Please be – or at least understand the risk!
Since do you really know the risks around you, and what they are worth to mitigate?! Why don’t most of us – and what can we do about it…? Finance it by venture capital???
To make a point about how most humans don’t truly understand the complex risks of the modern world and how they (should!) factor into our decision-making, I accepted an invite for doing a TEDx in August 2017 – in part about the asteroid defence.
“Do you know anybody who was killed by an asteroid? No. Nobody does. But statistics show a greater risk than the one of terrorism”.
Part of the point was to show how the different costs of mitigating threats, and thus in the end the costs of saving lives, must be considered diligently.
And that our brains are not made for understanding threats that meant nothing to our forefathers, such as asteroids, while seemingly great threats such as terrorism are greatly exaggerated and misunderstood.
Here is TED’s introduction to the event (link).
Here is the official TED video page (link).
See the full TEDx Copenhagen video below:
PlanetSave followed up the video with a great article, also touching on the World Electric Tour and the Venture Capital Financing of Society foundation (VCFS). This article have since also been taken up by CleanTechnica – I (and others it seems!) have taken a liking to this comment from the page:
“the guy in the above article deserves the nobel prize for ethical use of sarcasm, really brilliant way to highlight how collectively stupid we are.”