It’s easy to feel secure about the world and everything in it. The circle of life revolves around a multitude of routines, from one’s daily visit to the cafe across the street to the seasonal changes across the globe. And routines have a way of leading to complacency.

In talking of a subject such as global catastrophic risk — extinction-level events that could spell the end of life as we know it — one tends to straddle the boundary between reality and science fiction, and the discourse around the subject may be culpable of fueling mass hysteria.