View Civilizational resilience
Civilizational resilience is the ability of a civilization to effectively weather damages such as Global catastrophic risks. Resilience has been defined as"the positive ability of a system or company to adapt itself to the consequences of a catastrophic failure.”
Elements of civilizational resilience can be seen in a burgeoning movement among entities such as communities, businesses, and governments to improve their ability to respond to and quickly recover from catastrophic events such as natural disasters and terrorist attacks.
Civilizational resilience is an important part of strategies for managing Global catastrophic risks. Resilience is important in responding effectively to a variety of global catastrophic risks, including Pandemics, disasters caused by Global warming, or Cyber war.
The United Nations has attempted to coordinate civilizational resilience policies and has produced several documents outlining its implementation. Unfortunately, this action is limited in its significance because the UN’s guidelines for resilience are never enforced.
IEET Fellow Jamais Cascio lists as key components of civilizational resilience diversity, redundancy, decentralization, collaboration, Transparency, fail gracefully, flexibility, and foresight. He writes:
Diversity: Not relying on a single kind of solution means not suffering from a single point of failure. (Prepare for different kinds of problems needing to escape the house, needing to stay in the house, dealing with no water, etc.)
Redundancy: Backup, backup, backup. Never leave yourself with just one path of escape or rescue. (Make sure you have multiple copies of critical documents and extra amounts of key medications.)
Decentralization: Again with the single point of failure problem. Centralized systems look strong, but when they fail, they fail catastrophically. (Don’t store your emergency supplies in one location spread them out.)
Collaboration: We’re all in this together. (Take advantage of and learn to use collaborative technologies, especially those offering shared communication and information.)
Transparency: Don’t hide your systems transparency makes it easier to figure out where a problem may lie. (Make sure key shut-off switches for gas, especially are readily identified.)
Openness: Many eyes make all bugs shallow. Share your plans and preparations, and listen when people point out flaws. (You’re safer in an emergency when everyone is safer.)
Fail Gracefully: Failure happens, so make sure that failure states don’t make things worse than they are already. (Think about what’ll happen when disaster strikes what will fall, shatter, burst into flames, and what can you do now to prevent it?)
Flexibility: Be ready to change your plans when they’re not working the way you expect. Don’t get locked in to a particular approach. (Pay attention to what’s happening around you, and don’t expect things to remain stable.)
Foresight: You can’t predict the future, but you can hear its footsteps approaching. Think and prepare. (Make sure you have your emergency kit ready before the emergency hits.)
IEET’s Edward Miller argues that, for highly advanced civilizations, diversity in modes of consciousness is particularly important for resilience.
Sources:
Building Civilizational Resilience
Civilizational Resilience and Limitless Modes of Consciousness
Resilience and the Next Disaster
Strengthening Transnational Governance to Mitigate Risks
Wikipedia