A pair of jars found bought for £20 ($25) at a London thrift store sold at for almost 3,000 times that after they were identified as rare 18th-century ceramics.

'Married At First Sight' Season 17, which premieres on October 18, will feature four and a half couples

The top diplomats and defense chiefs from India and the United States have met in New Delhi to discuss security issues involving the Indo-Pacific, China and the Israel-Hamas war

China scythed nearly $600 billion off Tencent Holdings Ltd.’s market value in its crackdown on tech and gaming.

Brtiney Spears, then 21, can be seen holding back tears as she grapples with Diane Sawyer's pointed line of questioning in the interview

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte pledged to send F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine during a surprise visit by

The lawsuit alleges that Google was told of the collapse of the bridge but did not update its web mapping platform

Russian president Vladimir Putin was seen at a concert as reports circulated that Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin was on a plane that crashed near Moscow, killing everyone onboard. Footage showed Putin at an event dedicated to the 80th anniversary of Soviet troops’ victory in the Battle of Kursk during World War II. Russian officials have said Prigozhin - who led an attempted coup in Russia in June - was on a private jet that crashed in the Tver region on 23 August. The Russian news agency TASS reported that ten people died in the crash.

South African Ashleigh Buhai successfully defended her Australian Open title Sunday, overcoming late nerves to hold off charging fellow major winner Minjee...

CHESTERBROOK, Pa.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 16, 2023--

She never dances with her husband, but when the bandages were peeled from her eyes after a double cataract operation to cure her blindness, Nepali farmer Santi Maya...

In 2020, philosopher Toby Ord published The Precipice, a book on the risk of human extinction. The chances of "existential catastrophe" for humanity in the next century according to Ord? One in six. It was a shocking number that alarmed many. After years of being flooded with warnings over climate change, rogue AI, nuclear weapons and pandemics, it's hard to disagree that humans face worrying chances. In his book, Ord discusses a number of potential extinction events, some of which can be examined through history. His research involved looking at the number of space rocks that have hit the moon over its history to figure out the likelihood than an extinction-sized asteroid hitting Earth. This was, in fact, looked at in 2022 by French scientists Jean-Marc Salotti, he calculated the odds of an extinction-level hit in the next century to be roughly one in 300 million. By contrast, Ord estimated the risk to be one in a million, although he does point out a considerable degree of uncertainty. Probabilities can be hard to understand in this context. Traditional probability, for example, relies on observations and a collection of repeated events, but human extinction would be a one-off. But there is another way to think if, called Bayesianism, after the English statistician Thomas Bayes. It sees probabilities as a ranking system of sorts. Specific number predictions shouldn't be taken so literally, but rather compared to other probabilities to understand the likelihood of each outcome. Ord's book contains a table of potential causes of extinctions, accompanied by his personal estimates of their probability. From a Bayesian perspective, we can view these as relative ranks. Ord thinks extinction from an asteroid strike (one in a million) is much less likely than extinction from climate change (one in a thousand). However, even using Bayesianism traditionally requires the incorporation of observational evidence. So, what do we make of Ord's "one in six"? Well it's better to take it less literally but to think of it as a warning, to jump start action on issues such as climate change to hopefully reduce the risk of human extinction in the next century. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.