About Human-Survival.org:

The best way to start thinking about why this site exists is to start with a fact: Human kind has some big problems. Some of them have been with us for the whole of our existence, and some we've just recently created for ourselves. Among these problems are nuclear war, global warming, asteroid impacts, diseases, and overpopulation, to name a few. Although they are often the subject of ridiculous theories or silly movies, these are very real issues. It's not crazy to think seriously about them, and it would be completely crazy to ignore them.

Human-survival.org is at its heart a humanitarian volunteer organization, founded around the principle of giving back to your community. Not unlike your local soup kitchen or the salvation army, we seek to fill a gap that doesn't fit well with the scale and interests of government or for-profit companies. In our case the scale is just bigger, and the community is global. Human-survival.org is about helping humanity last longer.

This is not a website for doomsday theories or conspiracies. There are plenty of real life issues before our species for which here is a real scientific consensus and concern. This is meant to be a forum for serious discussion of such issues and their respective solutions.

How important should these issues be to us? It's common for people to vote with their wallets. Often our real priorities come out when you try to put money on them. According to the United States' collective wallet, the survival of humanity is over 17,000 times less important than fighting a war on the other side of the world, and 7,800 times less important than fighting national boredom with media and entertainment services.

Compared to fighting wars between ourselves, or delivering entertainment to the first world, precious little is being done about the huge problems facing us. For example in 2007, $4.1 million was spent by NASA in the United States looking for asteroids big enough to end all life on earth. Finding all of them was figured at a cost of $1 billion total. Consider that the same year, $70 billion was fighting a war in Iraq, and $32 billion was spent on entertainment by American families. For easier comparison, the daily rate on asteroid searching was $11,232, while the daily rate for the war in Iraq alone was $720,000,000. What does our spending then say about our priorities?

Like hunger or poverty, these are global problems, but unlike the former they require global solutions; and governments aren't interested in solving them. Unfortunately we are preciously short on global institutions able to look beyond the concerns of individual nations. The UN for example was originally intended to be a global institution, one that would be able to address global issues, and it does to an extent, but it remains at the whim of individual nations that are more likely to push their own agenda. That's possibly and sadly the best international institution we have today.

Our governments share our global concern for the safety of our species, but they have smaller fish to fry. There are a thousand more immediate, more pressing things which are more likely to happen during the term of any one politician. There are people in government trying to solve these problems for us, but the incentives and (critically) the funding in our institutions run the other way, towards the short term, the immediate, and the local. Just as we have nonprofit organizations who work tirelessly to eradicate poverty, hunger, disease, and illiteracy around the world, we need an organization to watch over what should matter most: our continued global well-being.

Our goal is to make our collective survival as near to certain as possible. To do this we will educate people, influence and inform global policy, fund research, and in some cases maybe even get things done ourselves. This can be done carefully and pragmatically but firmly. We need people with big hearts, big minds, and an ambitious drive to make the biggest impact that any human can have. There are people in the world today with the best resources, the best education, and available time for something big. Please consider joining me in this effort.

Most sincerely,
D. Graham Andrews