How Close Is Humanity to the Edge?

In mid-January, Toby Ord, a philosopher and senior research fellow at Oxford University, was reviewing the final proofs for his first book, "The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity." Ord works in the university's Future of Humanity Institute, which specializes in considering our collective fate. He had noticed that a few of his colleagues--those who worked on "bio-risk"--were tracking a new virus in Asia. Occasionally, they e-mailed around projections, which Ord found intriguing, in a hypothetical way. Among other subjects, "The Precipice" deals with the risk posed to our species by pandemics both natural and engineered.