Methodology
Humanity Odds estimates the probability that humanity goes extinct, or civilization collapses beyond recovery, by the year 2100, separately for each scenario.
- Baseline: each real scenario starts from published expert forecasts (Toby Ord, the Existential Risk Persuasion Tournament and Metaculus), blended as the geometric mean of their odds.
- News layer: several times a day, an AI model sorts news items by scenario and relevance, and a second, stronger model rates each story as a whole for direction and severity on a fixed scale. Events and decisions count fully, opinion and speculation at most half. Repeated coverage of one story counts once, and older news fades with a half-life.
- Limits: news can move a scenario's odds at most by a factor of two, and daily values are smoothed.
- Global index: the scenarios are combined as if they were independent.
Speculative scenarios start from an editorial estimate, because no published forecasts exist for them. Reports count as signals, not as evidence.
Baseline sources
Data sources
- The GDELT Project · Global news monitoring data
- NASA/JPL CNEOS Sentry · Asteroid impact risk data
- NASA · News releases; NASA Ozone Watch (Antarctic ozone hole); no endorsement implied
- U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention · Newsroom; notifiable diseases (NNDSS), respiratory illness levels and wastewater data; human H5 bird flu cases; no endorsement implied
- U.S. Department of Defense · News releases
- The White House · News and presidential actions
- arXiv · Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability.
- International Atomic Energy Agency · News; no endorsement implied
- UK AI Security Institute · Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
- U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration · News releases; Global Monitoring Laboratory, Boulder, Colorado, USA (greenhouse gas index); Climate Prediction Center (El Niño index); National Hurricane Center; no endorsement implied
- European Commission · Press releases; reuse under Commission Decision 2011/833/EU
- U.S. Geological Survey · Volcano alert levels (Volcano Hazards Program); chronic wasting disease distribution (National Wildlife Health Center); no endorsement implied
- Dipartimento della Protezione Civile · Campi Flegrei volcanic alert level, cited; no endorsement implied
- NASA/JPL Small-Body Database · Close approaches of asteroids and comets; no endorsement implied
- NASA Exoplanet Archive · This research has made use of the NASA Exoplanet Archive, which is operated by the California Institute of Technology, under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under the Exoplanet Exploration Program.
- NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center · Space weather scales and the planetary K index; no endorsement implied
- C3S/ECMWF, Copernicus Climate Pulse · Daily global air and sea surface temperature from ERA5
- Robert Koch-Institut · ARE-Konsultationsinzidenz; Abwassersurveillance AMELAG (with the Umweltbundesamt). CC BY 4.0
- Bundesamt für Strahlenschutz (BfS) · Ambient gamma dose rate, ODL measuring network. Datenlizenz Deutschland – Namensnennung – Version 2.0 (dl-de/by-2-0)
- Epoch AI · Notable AI Models data. CC BY
- Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority STUK, Finnish Meteorological Institute · Dose rate of external radiation in Finland. CC BY 4.0
- LMArena · Leaderboard dataset. CC BY 4.0
- Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) · Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalogue. CC0; no endorsement implied
- EMSC SeismicPortal · Earthquakes in Europe. CC BY 4.0
- GOV.UK Prepare · Preparedness advice in the basics, the guides and the household plan. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
Humanity Odds is a model-based estimate combining published expert forecasts with automated news analysis. It is not a prediction and not scientific advice. Summaries are AI-generated.