Lisa Randall: evaluation

Transcript context

…Given the complexity, all cosmological scales involved here that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs, when you look out at the future of earth, do you worry about future extinction events? I do think that we might be in the middle of an extinction right now if you define it by the number of species that are getting killed off. It’s subtle, but it’s a complex system. The way things respond to events is sometimes things evolve, sometimes animals just move to another place. The way we’ve developed the earth, it’s very hard for species just to move somewhere else. We’re seeing that with people now, too. I know people are worried just about AI taking over, and that’s a totally different story. We just don’t think about the future very much. We think about what we’re doing now, and we certainly don’t think enough about all the animals that we’re destroying, all the things that are precursors to humans that we rely on. It’s interesting to think whether the things that threaten us is the stuff we see that’s happening gradually or the stuff we don’t really see that’s going to happen all of a sudden. I sometimes think about what should we be worried about? It seems like with the asteroids or nuclear war, it could be stuff that just happens one day. When I say one day meaning over a span of a few days or a few months, but not on a scale of decades and centuries. We sometimes mostly talk about stuff that’s happening gradually, but we can be really surprised.…

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