Bringing Our World Together to Create Peace
Would you believe it if we told you that One World has contributed to saving 100 million lives?!
That is the conclusion Nick Bostrom of the Oxford Martin School of the 21st Century makes in the below Youtube video where he explains in minute 5:30 that the expected value of reducing existential risk by a mere one millionth of one percentage point is equivalent to saving 100 million human lives.
We mention this because 75 years ago last week, the world was fundamentally changed when for the first time in 3.7 billion years, human beings developed the capacity to destroy all forms of life on the planet earth. The chief scientist, leading the project, Robert Oppenheimer, had no doubt as to how profoundly the world had been changed with the successful detonation of the first atomic bomb when he exclaimed: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
The profundity of this moment was not lost some 25 years later on newly elected President John F. Kennedy who in his inaugural address told us: “The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life.”
60 years on from JFK, Toby Ord also of the Oxford Martin School tell us in his new book The Precipice that building resilience in our global society to avoid existential risk is by far and away the most altruistic endeavor one can undertake.
Building resilience by bringing youth together across the world is exactly what we are doing at One World. It is not a stretch to believe that through our efforts to bring youth and educators from around the world together to learn with and from one another we have contributed to the reduction of existential risk by one millionth of one percentage point. Certainly as we continue to build our global learning community our hope is not only to create a platform for good but also to create global platform for peace.
