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Good_Burning_Plastic comments on Maximizing Donations to Effective Charities - Less Wrong Discussion
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Solar flares may be pretty bad now that we are so reliant on the power grid but they hardly are an existential risk, Yellowstone erupts about once every 800,000 years in average which is hardly short-term, and asteroid impacts large enough to worry about are even rarer than that.
Rarity of events doesn't mean they can't happen in the short term.
It doesn't mean that they can't happen as in "probability equals zero", but it does mean that the probability that they happen in any given decade is pretty much negligible.
Whether a probability is negligible dependends on the impact of an event and not only it's probability.
Well, for that matter it also depends on what you can do about it, and I have no idea how we would go about preventing Yellowstone from erupting.
We might be able to reduce the harm it did, even if we couldn't stop it erupting.
I remember a proposal about cooling down Yellowstone by putting a lake on top of it.
If you spent more money you can ram carbon nanofiber rods deep into the ground. If the rod is thick enough the lave shouldn't do much damage to it and it can very effectively transport temperature to the top. Maybe you get even electricity as a bonus for cooling down Yellowstone so the project would pay for itself.