Not only could you die at any moment, but the entire world could abruptly end. So why aren’t we all terrified all the time?

First, let’s illustrate that the world is in fact perched on doom’s windowsill; here are some possible world-ending (life-ending for a significant population of earth) events:

• the yellowstone supercaldera (or other supervolcanoes)
• an asteroid
• the canary islands tsunami
• a pandemic disease outbreak
• a nuclear war
• a local supernova
• a profound coronal mass ejection
• an alien attack
• the magnetic pole-flip
• an extreme shortage of fuel

The events with the greatest possible period of warning on those are likely the supernova, followed by pandemic disease and an extreme shortage of fuel — likely on the order of days or months before the effects are felt. It’s possible that we could have warning before an asteroid strike, but far from guaranteed. Any of these events could happen with just hours or even minutes of warning.

Here’s where the weird part comes in though: it is pretty much guaranteed that one of these events will occur, or something else equally terrible. The world as we know it will one day face a significant existential challenge, but we seem totally unconcerned! It’s typically a subject of some ridicule.

It’s a certainty from a very long point of view, outside a regular person’s sphere of perception. From that very long point of view, it’s a certainty that one of these sort of events will occur, but your typical person doesn’t have any reason to look at things that way. In our lives, we see tens of thousands of new days where nothing bizarre or particularly out of the ordinary occurs. On the timescale of a life, the statistics flip: instead of a long guarantee that something will happen, we have a pretty-much guarantee that nothing will happen on a given day.

We have a paradox! Each new day is likelier than ever before to be humanity’s last. It’s also far likelier than that to be the exact same as yesterday.

This is why it makes no sense to freak out and stop whatever we’re doing. It’s extremely likely that we’ll live out our entire lives without significant changes — if we all just stopped, we’d cause the change we fear. It doesn’t help that we are so susceptible to sensationalism: there is always a segment of society that wants to believe the end is imminent, and will stretch reason and sensibility to believe it. Those people have made a bad name for anyone wishing to keep in mind that the world is not to be taken for granted.

If there’s any advice to be taken here, I think it would just be to enjoy life. Steve Jobs’ advice to ensure that whatever it is you do each day is something you’d be happy to spend your final day doing seems relevant. I’m doubtful that we have much of a chance to prevent or even to significantly increase the warning time on all of the risks I listed above, but surely we can make progress for some of them. It’s good to know that there are people out there studying existential risks and how best to respond to them.

I’m also of the persuasion that it’s fun to think about these things, and exciting (while very scary) to consider that the world could change in the blink of an eye. Fortunately, it’s not very likely to happen in my lifetime.