“When you look at human character, it’s hard to be confident humans will survive. To me, it’s crazy to be confident, I have to say. To think that it’s highly likely we will survive nuclear weapons, climate change, artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, biological warfare… to be confident like that is to be either totally ignorant of the nature of humanity – which most people are – or to be crazy.

So, thinking it’s likely we’ll survive? I can’t believe that. I think it’s unlikely, very unlikely. But not impossible. My age and experience doesn’t permit me to be confident that there’s no way out here. Because humans are adaptable, and things do change, and the changes I’ve mentioned are possible.

We are on the Titanic, going at full speed on a moonless night into iceberg waters. Have we hit the iceberg yet, and made it inevitable that we will all go down together? We don’t know. It may turn out that, a while ago, we went past the no-return point. But we don’t know that, there’s no way to prove it. As I say in The Doomsday Machine: “I act as if we have a chance to find our way out of this. I don’t know what that path is yet, but that doesn’t tell me there is no way.”

So, I urge others, I encourage them. And if they give up hope, or even devote themselves entirely to pleasure, like a life on the Titanic drinking champagne after hitting the iceberg… I can’t say that’s crazy. But I don’t join in that. And should someone stop trying to save the world as a whole, and instead just works to ease the suffering of other people – I think that’s very reasonable, very good. I just think that it’s definitely not wasted for some of us to keep trying to explore and see if there’s a way out of the precarious situation in which humanity finds itself.”

— Daniel Ellsberg on The 80,000 Hours Podcast with Rob Wiblin episode #43 (2018)