I recommend Anna Salamon's presentation How Much it Matters to Know What Matters: A Back of the Envelope Calculation. She did a good job of showing just how important existential risk research is.
I thought it would be nice to be able to plug in my own numbers for the calculation, so I quickly threw this together.
Interesting. You can do similar calculations for things like asteroid prevention, I wonder which would win out. It also gave me a sickly feeling when you could use the vast numbers to justify killing a few people to guarantee a safe singularity. In effect that is what we do when we divert resources away from efficient charities we know work towards singularity research.
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