Death by Human Extinction Far More Likely Than by Car Crash

Pandemics, super-volcanoes, nuclear war, climate change, asteroids, and murderous artificial intelligence. You're not more likely to die from any one of those things than in a car crash. But put all those things together, and, well, that changes things a bit, the Atlantic reports. According to the annual Global Catastrophic Risks report from the Global Challenges Foundation, the average American is more than five times more likely to die in a "human extinction event" than in a car crash. Human extinction events are considered events in which 10% or more of the human population is killed off, and they've happened before, the Mirror reports.

A different report cited by the Atlantic puts the chance of a human extinction event happening in the next 100 years at 9.5%. That means you're nearly 12 times more likely to be killed by, say, a Terminator or a super-virus than in a car crash during your lifetime. "The international community needs to work together and do more to address these threats," Sebastian Farquhar, director of the Global Priorities Project, writes for the Huffington Post. "Doing nothing is not an option. Some of these threats seem unlikely, and they probably will not hit us tomorrow or the day after. But it only takes one to change the world we live in forever." (More extinction stories.)