The greatest risks to humanity – and to Switzerland.

Some risks have the potential to ruin our day – others to destroy the entire human race. Scientists are working to identify and understand the most urgent threats to our species. An overview.

Compiled by Sebastian Sele

When the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on 6th August 1945, J. Robert Oppenheimer knew he had to take action. Only a few weeks later, the father of the atomic bomb co-founded the organisation The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists with Albert Einstein and other scientists. Their objective was to warn the world of the dangers of nuclear technology.

In 1947, the Bulletin scientists put a clock on the cover of their magazine, the Doomsday Clock. It is seven minutes to midnight, i.e. apocalypse, they warned at the time – and have since set the clock forwards or backwards 25 times. Most recently in January 2025.

“In the year 2024, humanity edged ever closer to catastrophe,” the scientists announced, clarifying: “the closest it has ever been.” They mentioned the conflicts between the nuclear powers in Ukraine and the Middle East, the climate crisis, fake news and conspiracy theories as well as the rapid developments in biotechnology and artificial intelligence that could be used by the military and terrorists.

We are at 89 seconds to midnight.

But what dangers are so great that they could wipe out our entire species? And what risks are we confronted with in Switzerland? An overview.

Extinction due to climate change and environmental collapse

Probability by 2100: around 0.1 per cent*

Man-made climate change continues to advance: in 2024, we exceeded the 1.5-degree limit set as a target in the Paris Climate Agreement for the first time, and global CO₂ emissions are still increasing year on year. We are experiencing more heat waves and heat-related deaths, droughts and floods. Glaciers are melting, sea levels are rising and our ecosystems are becoming unbalanced.

Climate change, deforestation and overfishing are causing the extinction of around 150 animal and plant species per day. This loss of biodiversity further weakens the defences of ecosystems.

These factors can reinforce each other, putting us in danger of crossing so-called tipping points. “Imagine a valuable vase that initially stays in place while you keep lifting the table from one side,” explain the scientists at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Research. “Nothing happens at first – then all it takes is a little tremor and the vase tips over.”

The Global Tipping Point Report, published jointly by several universities in 2023, warns: crossing the tipping points would confront humanity with dangers on a scale it has never experienced before. The researchers speak of the “collapse of economic, social and political systems.”

Toby Ord agrees that these will be “changes of unknown proportions”. He writes of water scarcity, reduced agricultural productivity and the spread of tropical diseases in connection with potential global warming by 13 degrees by 2300. At the same time, he states that none of these effects are likely to wipe out the entire human race. However, he cannot completely rule it out, either.

Tipping point:
In 2005, the water levels in parts of the Amazon were 15 metres lower than usual. Millions of fish died and up to one-thousand-year-old trees burned down. The year went down in history as having produced the worst drought in over a century. For the first time, the so-called lungs of the Earth emitted more carbon dioxide than they absorbed. Climate researchers warned that the region was dangerously close to a tipping point: if the drought were to last longer or recur more frequently, large parts of the rainforest could turn into savannah. One of the world’s most biodiverse ecosystems would be lost and with it a central protective shield against global warming. The Amazon again experienced droughts in 2010, 2015 and 2016. It was “on the verge of functional collapse”, US biologist Thomas Lovejoy warned at the time. “And, along with it, so are we.” The forest is moving ever closer to the tipping point.

Extinction due to man-made pandemics

Probability by 2100: around 3.3 per cent*

COVID-19 has shown us all what a pandemic can do to our globally connected societies: health systems are pushed to their limits, supply chains are disrupted, social tensions intensify, and people die. According to the WHO, the coronavirus claimed around 7.1 million lives, this despite a moderate fatality rate.

Globalisation not only increases the risk of natural but also man-made pandemics. The International Peace Bureau estimates that 16 to 20 states have biological weapons programmes. Over 100 states have the ability to produce biological weapons.

The Bureau refers to biological weapons as “the poor man’s atom bomb”. Unlike nuclear weapons, they are easy to produce and easy to conceal because, despite international agreements, there are no mandatory inspections. Observers criticise that the budget of the supervisory body is below that of a McDonald’s branch.

Toby Ord considers the existential threat of a natural pandemic to be low in view of our medical advances and warning systems. Instead, he warns of man-made pandemics: “There are cases in which pandemic pathogens have been deliberately modified so that they spread more easily or are more deadly than naturally occurring ones.” More and more people are capable of developing such viruses faster and faster.

Tipping point:

In 2011, two research teams in the Netherlands and the USA succeeded in modifying the highly contagious H5N1 avian flu virus so that it became airborne among ferrets, who filled in as an established model for the human organism. The virus is considered extremely lethal, killing around sixty per cent of those infected. In theory, publishing the methods has made it possible to recreate the pathogen outside of high-security laboratories, with potentially devastating consequences. The US government called in the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity. The two teams put their work on hold for almost a year before the studies were published in full after heated debate: the modified H5N1 virus may only be analysed by selected institutes and under strict conditions. This case could be resolved without serious repercussions, but “gain-of-function” experiments continue.

*The probability that the event will occur within one century and wipe out humanity or destroy its long-term potential according to Toby Ord, Senior Researcher at Oxford University and author of “The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity”

Extinction due to artificial intelligence

Probability by 2100: around 10 per cent*

Ever since 2022, when OpenAI published ChatGPT, its chatbot based on generative AI, hardly anyone has been able to avoid artificial intelligence. While it can be helpful, for example for data analyses, it also allows a glimpse into the abyss: deepfakes, automated cyberattacks, endangered professions. Artificial intelligence is already being used to identify military targets, and its energy consumption is so high that Microsoft is planning to dedicate an entire nuclear power plant to its AI data centres.

While the horror scenarios of machines enslaving humanity can usually be attributed to Hollywood rather than science, academics are also warning of the dangers of AI. Geoffrey Hinton, the so-called “Godfather of AI”, is one of the most prominent doomsayers. “At the moment, AI is just a cute tiger cub,” he says. “But as long as you cannot ensure that it will not want to slay you once it is fully grown, there is reason for concern.”

The philosopher Nick Bostrom uses paper clips to illustrate the danger: AI is given the seemingly harmless task of producing as many paper clips as possible. Without being given limits or being able to understand human values, it might proceed to use all the earth’s resources, including humans, to fulfil its task. An initially banal task can thus turn into an existential threat.

Hundreds of scientists and AI researchers are calling for artificial intelligence to be regulated and monitored in the same way as nuclear developments.

Tipping point:

Shortly after the release of ChatGPT-4 in March 2023, researchers discovered that so-called “jailbreaks” – prompts designed to bypass safety mechanisms programmed into the AI – could easily achieve their objective. In one test, artificial intelligence was faced with a captcha, a task designed to only be solved by humans. ChatGPT commissioned a person to solve the captcha via the microjob platform TaskRabbit. When the person became suspicious, it deliberately lied, claiming not to be a machine, but a human being. This is the first known case in which an AI actively manipulated a human.

Switzerland’s risks: power supply, mobile communications, pandemic

Switzerland has its idiosyncrasies – but also some constancies. The Federal Office for Civil Protection (FOCP) has been publishing a risk analysis since 2013, where it compares and categorises 44 hazard scenarios. On the one hand, this is based on the financial damage, which is calculated from a maximum of twelve indicators, and on the other hand, the FOCP assesses the likelihood of occurrence within the next five to ten years.

The latest edition was published in 2020, and it places armed conflicts, a power shortage and earthquakes at the top of the list. These risks could cause the greatest damage. When taking their likelihood into account, however, the ranking shifts: a power shortage climbs to the top of the list, followed by an influenza pandemic and a mobile phone outage.

In terms of power shortage, the experts assumed an undersupply of 30 per cent for several months in winter. Cost of this damage: over 180 billion Swiss francs. Likelihood: once every 30 to 50 years.

And the radioactive waste? The scenario analysed by the federal government since 2020 consists of an attack on a transport of radioactive materials and is classified as “somewhat plausible”. “There is no specific evidence of anyone intending to commit this exact criminal scenario,” says the corresponding threat dossier in the risk analysis. The expected damage is far from making it into the top ten: it falls into the single-digit billion Swiss franc range.

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