Yet the risk of human extinction due to climate change—or an accidental nuclear war, or a meteor—could be much higher than that. The Stern Review, the U.K. government’s premier report on the economics of climate change, assumed a 0.1-percent risk of human extinction every year. That may sound low, but it adds up when extrapolated to century-scale. Across 100 years, that figure would entail a 9.5 percent chance of human extinction.

And that number might even underestimate the risk. Another Oxford survey of experts from 2008 posited the annual extinction risk to be a higher figure, 0.2 percent. And the chance of dying from any major global calamity is also likely higher. The Stern Review, which supplies the 9.5-percent number, only assumed the danger of species-wide extinction. The Global Challenges Foundation’s report is concerned with all events that would wipe out more than 10 percent of Earth’s human population.

“We don’t expect any of the events that we describe to happen in any 10-year period. They might—but, on balance, they probably won’t,” Sebastian Farquhar, the director of the Global Priorities Project, told me. “But there’s lots of events that we think are unlikely that we still prepare for.”

For instance, most people demand working airbags in their cars and they strap in their seat-belts whenever they go for a drive, he said. We may know that the risk of an accident on any individual car ride is low, but we still believe that it makes sense to reduce possible harm.

So what kind of human-level extinction events are these? The report holds catastrophic climate change and nuclear war far above the rest, and for good reason. On the latter front, it cites multiple occasions when the world stood on the brink of atomic annihilation. While most of these occurred during the Cold War, another took place during the 1990s, the most peaceful decade in recent memory:

In 1995, Russian systems mistook a Norwegian weather rocket for a potential nuclear attack. Russian President Boris Yeltsin retrieved launch codes and had the nuclear suitcase open in front of him. Thankfully, Russian leaders decided the incident was a false alarm.

Climate change also poses its own risks. As I’ve written about before, serious veterans of climate science now suggest that global warming will spawn continent-sized superstorms by the end of the century. Farquhar said that even more conservative estimates can be alarming: UN-approved climate models estimate that the risk of six to ten degrees Celsius of warming exceeds 3 percent, even if the world tamps down carbon emissions at a fast pace. “On a more plausible emissions scenario, we’re looking at a 10-percent risk,” Farquhar said. Few climate adaption scenarios account for swings in global temperature this enormous.

Other risks won’t stem from technological hubris. Any year, there’s always some chance of a super-volcano erupting or an asteroid careening into the planet. Both would of course devastate the areas around ground zero—but they would also kick up dust into the atmosphere, blocking sunlight and sending global temperatures plunging. (Most climate scientists agree that the same phenomenon would follow any major nuclear exchange.)