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Fears that heavy-ion collisions at the Brookhaven Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider might initiate a catastrophic destruction of Earth have focused on three possible scenarios: a transition to a lower vacuum state that propagates outwards from its source at the speed of light2; formation of a black hole or gravitational singularity that accretes ordinary matter2; or creation of a stable ‘strangelet’ that accretes ordinary matter and converts it to strange matter3. A careful study1 concluded that these hypothetical scenarios are overwhelmingly more likely to be triggered by natural high-energy astrophysical events, such as cosmic-ray collisions, than by the Brookhaven collider.

Given that life on Earth has survived for nearly 4 billion years (4 Gyr), it might be assumed that natural catastrophic events are extremely rare. Unfortunately, this argument is flawed because it fails to take into account an observation-selection effect4,5, whereby observers are precluded from noting anything other than that their own species has survived up to the point when the observation is made. If it takes at least 4.6 Gyr for intelligent observers to arise, then the mere observation that Earth has survived for this duration cannot even give us grounds for rejecting with 99% confidence the hypothesis that the average cosmic neighbourhood is typically sterilized, say, every 1,000 years. The observation-selection effect guarantees that we would find ourselves in a lucky situation, no matter how frequent the sterilization events.

Figure 1 indicates how we derive an upper bound on the cosmic catastrophe frequency τ−1 that is free from such observer-selection bias. The idea is that if catastrophes were very frequent, then almost all intelligent civilizations would have arisen much earlier than ours. Using data on planet-formation rates6, the distribution of birth dates for intelligent species can be calculated under different assumptions about the rate of cosmic sterilization. Combining this with information about our own temporal location enables us to conclude that the cosmic sterilization rate for a habitable planet is, at most, of the order of 1 per 1.1 Gyr at 99.9% confidence. Taking into account the fact that no other planets in our Solar System have yet been converted to black holes or strange matter1,2,3 further tightens our constraints on black hole and strangelet disasters. (For details, see supplementary information.)

Figure 1: The catastrophe timescale cannot be very short.
figure 1

The probability distribution is shown for observed planet-formation times, assuming catastrophe timescales, τ, of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 Gyr and infinity (shaded yellow), respectively (from left to right). The probability of observing a formation time ≥9.1 Gyr for Earth (area to the right of the dotted line) drops below 0.001 for τ<1.1 Gyr.

This bound does not apply in general to disasters that become possible only after certain technologies have been developed — for example, nuclear annihilation or extinction through engineered microorganisms — so we still have plenty to worry about. However, our bound does apply to exogenous catastrophes (for example, those that are spontaneous or triggered by cosmic rays) whose frequency is uncorrelated with human activities, as long as they cause permanent sterilization. Using the results of the Brookhaven analysis1, the bound also implies that the risk from present-day particle accelerators is reassuringly small: say, less than 10−12 per year.