What about taking steps to reduce the incidence of conflict, e.g. making meditation more pleasant/enjoyable/accessible/effective so people chill out more? Improved translation/global English fluency could help people understand one another. Fixing harmful online discussion dynamics could also do this, and prevent frivolous conflicts from brewing as often.

BTW, both Nick Beckstead and Brian Tomasik have research-wanted lists that might be relevant.

(I know there are almost certainly problems with what I'm about to suggest, but I just thought I'd put it out there. I welcome corrections and constructive criticisms.)

You mention gene therapy to produce high-IQ people, but if that turns out not to be practical, or if we want to get started before we have the technology, couldn't we achieve the same through reproduction incentives? For example, paying and encouraging male geniuses to donate lots of sperm, and paying and encouraging lots of gifted-level or higher women to donate eggs (men can donate sper... (read more)

The roadmap is distributed under an open license GNU.

I don't know what that sentence means. If you mean the GPL that includes a provision of distributing the work along with a copy of the GPL which you aren't doing.

Creative Commons licenses don't require you to distribute a copy of them, which makes them better for this kind of project.

PDF not available without "joining" Scribd, which appears to require giving them information I do not wish to give them. Any chance of making it available in some other way?

I would use the word resilient rather than robust.

• Robust: A system is robust when it can continue functioning in the presence of internal and external challenges without fundamental changes to the original system.

• Resilient: A system is resilient when it can adapt to internal and external challenges by changing its method of operations while continuing to function. While elements of the original system are present there is a fundamental shift in core activities that reflects adapting to the new environment.

I think that it is a better idea to think ab... (read more)

(Thinking out loud)

Currently, about a third of all food produced in the world doesn't make it to being consumed (or something like that - we were told this in our phytopathology course.) With the increase in standardization of food processing, there should be more common causes of spoilage and the potential of resistant pathogen evolution and rapid spread. How much worse should the food loss become before initiating a cascade of x-threats to mankind?

I have an idea related to Plan B – Survive the Catastrophe.

The unfortunate reality is that we do not have enough resources to effectively prepare for all potential catastrophes. Therefore, we need to determine which catastrophes are more likely and adjust our preparation priorities accordingly.

I propose that we create/encourage/support prediction markets in catastrophes, so that we can harness the “wisdom of the crowds” to determine which catastrophes are more likely. Large prediction markets are good at determining relative probabilities.

Of course, th... (read more)

Improbable idea for surviving heat death: computers made from time crystals. (h/t Nostalgebraist and Scott)

New idea: Nuclear hoarding. Collecting of all nuclear particles to limit its ability to be used. (not sure if this falls under a larger "worldwide risk prevention authority", but it doesn't have to be carried out willingly, it can be carried out via capitalism. Just purchase and contain the material.)

New idea: to limit climate change. tree-planting. plant massive numbers of green species in order to reduce the carbon in the atmosphere. Australia is a large land mass that is unused and could be utilised to grow the oxygen farm and carbon cap... (read more)

Meta: I honestly didn't read the plan in full the first two times I posted. Instead I went to Wikipedia and looked up global catastrophic risk. Then once I had an understanding of what the definition of global catastrophic risk is; I thought up solutions (How would I best solve X) and checked if they were on the map.

The reason why I share this is because the first several things I thought of were not on the map. And it seems like several other answers are limited to "whats outside the box" (Think outside the box is a silly concept because i... (read more)

I don't think "low rivalry" in science is desirable. Rivalry makes scientists criticize the work of their peers and that's very important.

Is A3 meant to have connecting links horizontal through it's path?

Another bad idea: build a simulation-world to live in so that we don't actually have to worry about real-world risks. (disadvantage - is possibly an X-risk itself)

It kinda depends on which x-risk you are trying to cover...

For example - funding technologies that improve the safety or efficiency of nuclear use might mean that any use is a lot more harmless. Or develop ways to clean up nuclear mess; or mitigate the decay of nuclear radiation (i.e. a way to gather nuclear radioactive dust)

Enco... (read more)

Comprehensive, I think it has the makings of a good resource, though it needs some polish. I'd imagine this would be much more useful to someone new to the ideas presented if it linked out to a bunch of papers/pages for expansion from most bulletpoints.

One thing I'd like to see added is spreading the memes of reason/evidence-based consequentialist decision making (particularly large-scale and future included) at all levels. It may be entirely accepted here, but the vast majority of humans don't actually think that way. It's kind of a pre-requisite for gett... (read more)