Does anyone know the parts of government that deal with existential risk? My impression (from UK/US) is that it is spread about in the military and intelligence agencies and universities.
This might be an okay way of doing things, but perhaps there is a better way of doing things? I'm thinking about central parts of government encouraging making legible models of farming and industry that can feed into decision making around existential risks and centres of excellence on coordination systems to provide best practice methods to avoid arms races. Do such things exist?
I suppose I'm interested in questions around what is an existential threat. How bad a nuclear winter would it have to be to cause the collapse of society (and how easily could society be rebuilt afterwards). Both require robust models of agriculture in extreme situations and models of energy flows in economies where strategic elements might have been destroyed (to know how easy rebuilding would be). Since pandemic/climate change also have societal collapse as a threat the models needed would apply to them too (they might trigger nuclear exchange or at leas... (read more)