By: Tom Cloyd; reviewed: 2025-06-27:1419 Pacific Time (USA))
This website section focuses on large-scale existential threats1 to our society, culture, and species, and to the life of our planet (our planetary ecosystem). These are my personal notes on information which seems most notable.
Since these are personal notes, my first concern is to make coherent sense to myself. To the extent that I have time, I then work to increase the chances that someone else will understand me. But…I don’t always have time, so if some part of this website section seems less than fully clear, that is likely the reason why.
I share these notes in the hope that they may be helpful to others If you wish to dialog with me about what’s here, contact me: [email protected].
For a list of topics addressed in this section, browse to the Challenges section of the website Sitemap.
Existential problems have two sources: those external to our own actions, and those we create ourselves. This applies to us as individuals, groups, societies, cultures, species, and life in general itself.
Consider: oneself; family; social (cultural, employment, etc.) group; region (state, group of states); nation; geographical location.
Location can make a large difference in the risk and consequences of a threat. Mt. Rainier is a dormant volcano close to Seattle which has been showing signs of emerging activity for some time. If it erupts suddenly, there are populated valleys at its foot through which snow and ice melt will rapidly run, wiping out entire settlements. Then the eruption emissions itself will affect nearby Seattle, and because of the southwest winds typical to our region it will then affect Spokane, where I live.
I remember the Mount St. Helens eruption in southern Washington vividly. I watched it happen from the streets of downtown Portland, Oregon. The respiratory health of thousands of people was adversely affected for months due to the eruption ashfall.
The universe is dynamic in nature - always moving, always changing. Sometimes we can see a direction to this change, and sometimes not.
EXTERNAL PROBLEMS come to our attention occasionally - seasonal serious storms (hurricanes/typhoons), an asteroid strike on our planet, the awakening of a dormant volcano, activity of a geological fault, etc.
CREATED PROBLEMS seem just as urgent, if not more so. Additionally, it appears likely that some external problems may occur more frequently and/or severely as a consequence of actions taken by human society.
Consider one of the major dynamic factors in society: technological progress.
For thousands of years, the only way for a human to become more powerful was to harness the power of other humans: a spouse, one’s children, servants, slaves, employees, etc. That is no longer true. Athenian democracy, for example, rested on an economic base of slavery. So did American democracy, in the beginning. Now, it just rests, to the extent that it exists at all, on a base of under-paid employees.
Knowledge is a true force-multiplier, to use a military term. Today we have vast publicly accessible databases, as well as syntheses of bodies of information. More than that, we now have software that can digest these syntheses and dialog with us about their contents, in ways that may (or may not!) be exceptionally useful.
In the past, knowledge was a precious thing - inaccessible to most, and difficult to spread around, if you had any to share. Then came Gutenberg, and eventually, the Internet, and smartphones (the Internet in your pocket), and now AI. (And if you don’t know what that abbreviation means, you’ve already lost.)
Increasingly, it appears that the problem is simply us - the messes we create and our own limited ability to see them and respond to them adequately and in time. It’s not clear that we are smart enough to avoid running ourselves over the edge of some as-yet-unseen cliff.
What are the risks where you live? How can you quickly find out?
Put simply, culture is any learning that is passed from one person to another.
More importantly, culture is any learning that is passed from one generation to another.
Modern culture generates threats from its technology, multiplied by its population.
To request, send, and receive information via the Internet, each source of information has to have a unique name - a domain name. This is a string of numbers, but is seen by most users as a name, such as tomcloyd.com, or drive.google.com, etc. To convert the name to the actual numeric address, as required by the computers that run the Internet, that number must be looked up in a directory, of which there are many - the Domain Name System.
While your computer’s data stream may be encrypted, thus keeping it private, DNS lookup requests are not, unless you set this up. On Android phones this is easily done, and is fully described by Wallen.2 It involves installing the 1.1.1.1 + WARP app, then manually activating it.
Access attempts typically come from the Internet but could come from an attached flash drive or temporary attachment of a computer to an outside network. Access to the victim computer is possible by many paths, but the root problem is usually insufficient security of memory used by the operating system.3
With access to the random-access memory used by a computer’s operating system, theft of passwords, code, file contents, images, etc., becomes possible. Also possible is file kidnapping and ransom, covert activity monitoring, establishment of bot networks for denial of service attacks, etc., establishment of system capture and shutdown capability.4
Solution: memory safe programming languages
Solution: an open-source anomaly detection software system - Orion
Memory-safety vulnerabilities are reduced or eliminated by programming languages like Rust - designed to be memory safe from the start. But, “…rewriting legacy systems in new, memory-safe languages can be costly and complicated” and likely to take decades. Meanwhile, partial solutions are being worked out, as “…a way of securing legacy systems while we are transitioning to safer languages.”4
A group of computer security experts have proposed3 a standardized framework “…as an essential next step to adopting memory-safety technologies throughout all forms of computer systems, from fighter jets to cell phones.” The concept of the framework is that it is not tied to specific technologies - it is “technology agnostic”, and is “generic enough that different types of systems can apply different technologies” to attain system-wide memory safety.4
Because the ideal of memory safe computer programs and systems is not one that may be easily and quickly attained, other security threat responses are needed. One such is Orion, an anamoly detection software system that “…uses statistical and machine learning-based models that are continuously logged and maintained. Users do not need to be machine learning experts to utilize the code. They can analyze signals, compare anomaly detection methods, and investigate anomalies in an end-to-end program. The framework, code, and datasets are all open-sourced.” Orion is easier and quicker to employ because it uses pre-train LLMs to predict rather than detect anomalies.5
| Foy, K. (2025-06-18). Memory safety is at a tipping point. MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. https://news.mit.edu/2025/memory-safety-tipping-point-0618 |
| Williams, B. G. (2025-05-28). An anomaly detection framework anyone can use. MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. https://news.mit.edu/2025/anomaly-detection-framework-anyone-can-use-sarah-alnegheimish-0528 |
Watson, R. N. M., et al. (2025, January 22). It Is Time to Standardize Principles and Practices for Software Memory Safety – Communications of the ACM. https://cacm.acm.org/opinion/it-is-time-to-standardize-principles-and-practices-for-software-memory-safety/
Wallen, J. (2025, June 27). How to turn on Android’s Private DNS mode—And why turning it off is a big mistake. ZDNET. https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-to-turn-on-androids-private-dns-mode-and-why-turning-it-off-is-a-big-mistake/
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