50 Surprising Facts

A brief note: Cambridge is hosting a digital minds fellowship that I’d encourage you to apply for. How to treat digital minds is one of the most important questions we will ever answer, and yet the field is in its early stages. Having more people thinking about it is enormously important. Read more here.

You people seemed to like my last post where I listed 50 interesting facts. A fact is just something that’s the case, and it turns out that more than 50 interesting things are the case in the world. So, I thought I’d present 50 more.

1. There are about 100 different ways threats from space like asteroids, supernova explosions, and solar flares could kill us. Some I hadn’t thought about before: a rogue planet could crash into us or send us hurtling through space, neutron stars with magnetic fields could send powerful magnetar bursts, we could get infected with alien microbes, and the sun will probably boil the oceans in about a billion years. However, these risks aren’t very high in general—one way you know this is that they haven’t killed life on Earth in the last ~1 billion years.

2. One risk along these lines is that we could create a true vacuum. Currently, on some views, the world is in a false vacuum state. If it reached a true vacuum, this would expand at the speed of light, causing an unstoppable wall of destruction. This false vacuum possibility might also be alarming for the same reason as the hypothetical existence of a false cabbage.

3. The best way to improve health in rich countries is likely to work on stuff like tobacco control. This is plausibly within an order of magnitude as effective as working on improving health in poor countries. So if you’re a nationalist who cares only about your own country, this looks like a good place to donate.

4. Relatedly, tobacco caused about 100 million deaths in the 20th century, and causes about 8 million extra deaths per year. This includes around 490,000 in the U.S.! This means smoking is responsible for more than 10% of global deaths, and almost one in six U.S. deaths.

5. Cats kill a lot more birds than wind turbines. However, wind turbines kill more environmentally important bird populations, so their impact is potentially bigger. Relatedly, our evidence for how many birds cats kill isn’t

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