# Resilience to Global Catastrophes | Devcon SEA

- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2025-10-07
- Duration: 11:32
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-hWVKnQWXui0
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWVKnQWXui0

## Description

The risk of nuclear war or an extreme pandemic is frighteningly high. Little work has been done on resilience to these catastrophes. I’ll discuss resilient food sources that can be scaled up quickly, methods of maintaining the functioning of critical sectors in an extreme pandemic, and backup methods of meeting basic needs. I’ll discuss cost effectiveness of low-cost preparations, including piloting technologies, such as resilient satellite communications, and a resilience DAO.

Speaker(s): David Denkenberger, Yesh
Skill level: Beginner
Track: [CLS] d/acc Discovery Day: Building Towards a Resilient Utopia
Keywords: Climate, DAO, Effective Altruism

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Devcon is the Ethereum conference for developers, researchers, thinkers, and makers. 
Devcon SEA was held in Bangkok, Thailand on Nov 12 - Nov 15, 2024.
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## Transcript

[Music] hello so um I'm Dave a uh co-founder of Alliance to feed the Earth in disasters or alfed also a professor at University of canbury in New Zealand uh so aled's mission is to build resilience to Global catastrophes and uh its vision is is feeding everyone no matter what uh aled is all around the world has a board members including Robin Hansen Andrew Sandberg uh Yan talin and Martin Helman who won the uh Turing award uh for cryptography uh so one of example of the catastrophes we work on was there was an eruption in uh 1815 that caused The Year Without a summer in 1816 and there was famine in many parts of the world including Europe and um there's uh the catastrophes we focus on disrupt food supply uh greater than 5% of total food production in the world and there are many such catastrophes uh one of them is uh abrupt um climate change another one is extreme weather on multiple continents at the same time and a UK government study estimated that that alone had an 80% chance of happening this Century but there are other catastrophes there could be a super pest uh that attacks crops that's resistant to pesticides or uh a super weed that outcompetes crops uh you could also have disruption of pollinators uh disruption of beneficial bacteria asteroid impact and uh most extreme is uh nuclear winter so if we have a large-scale nuclear war we'd have burning of cities smoke would go up into the stratosphere and stay there for up to a decade and the global climate would uh be severely disrupted around 9° C drop globally and the uh agricultural output would fall about 90% And to put this into the perspective you can see the yield number of tons per hectare per year of uh Global food production and if we had a severe nuclear winter basically our yields would go back to before the Industrial Revolution so what can we do about this well we could relocate cool loving crops closer to the Equator things like wheat and potatoes uh also mushrooms don't require sunlight to grow but there are a number of of other options we could scale up seaweed seaweed can grow uh around 10% per day even in nuclear winter conditions uh we could turn fiber or wood into sugar so that's cellulitic sugar we could take crop residues and make Leaf protein concentrate from them uh we could build green houses and we could also do fermentation so there are several companies that are now turning natural gas into protein and also some companies is turning hydrogen uh into protein uh but these companies are not thinking about how to do it fast in a catastrophe so that's what we focus on uh we also look at catastrophe scenarios that could disrupt infrastructure such as electricity and these include extreme solar storm uh a detonation of a nuclear weapon at high altitude causing an electromagnetic pulse that could destroy Electronics uh or a Cyber attack act which which could be AI enabled uh or an extreme pandemic that could cause people to be unable or unwilling to report to critical Industries and then this would Cascade across Industries so uh as we've talked about today future pandemics could be far more severe than covid they could have the transmissibility of measles and the fatality of rabies and have no vaccine and uh we're not prepared for that and we could have a collapse of of critical Industries we've done some research on potential backup plans for meeting basic needs of food energy and water in these scenarios but um but there's another line of research I want to talk about and that is could we scale up some of the technologies that we've heard about today uh like UV or in room filtration like we have in this room and it would be better if we could scale these ahead of the catastrophe but we're not ready yet and that's probably going to take more like tens of billions of dollars so what we're interested in doing is figuring out whether we could scale them up very quickly with our current capability in a catastrophe uh in an extreme pandemic and another option is uh massively increasing ventilation from outside and also sequestering workers and in terms of uh cost Effectiveness uh we think that for the the resilient foods that I talked about earlier an investment of something like aund million could get us research and piloting of the Technologies and planning and we have some peer-reviewed papers uh making the case that this is a uh very cost-effective way of saving uh expected lives and also improving the long run future uh but in this case in particular uh we don't need to build big industrial Pilots this could be done potentially for for millions of dollars so it' be extremely cost- effective uh so some of the pilots uh the uh paper factories actually have most of the equipment already that we need to turn wood into sugar uh but we'd like to actually try it out and convert a paper Factory into a Sugar Factory um another pilot we'd like to do is a resilient satellite so if we had an extreme solar storm or emps uh the satellites we have now would be destroyed quickly but if we had a satellite that was resilient to these catastrophes we could get emergency communication and with just one satellite in a polar orbit uh it would be able to get information to everyone on Earth with just regular cell phones once per day and here again the investment is just in the in the millions of dollars uh so now I'll have uh yeses talk about some opportunities with crypto thank you David you might have all seen already some of the uh solution sets um that we could have uh for such a uh scenario but there's still more work to be done uh so for the next uh couple of minutes I want to explore with all of you um about how we as a community can uh come together and build resilience to uh Global Food catastrophes there is a lot more work to be done um some of the things that we can do uh using the uh the decentralization ethos and the defensive EOS uh from the crypto ecosystems uh could be communication of crucial information uh you know we would want to have the capability and the capacity to uh distribute uh things like disaster resilient guides or response plans when these catastrophe occurs so one thing that we can do is we already have decentralized uh you know hosting and storage through your uh ipfs uh but we would still need mechanisms that would help us when we do not have access to Internet so we need to have such Technologies uh to be able to um communicate very crucial information that could save a lot of lives uh during such a scenario we could also built uh software Solutions uh to enable coordination uh with uh multiple stakeholders who would uh do decision making this need not be during a catastrophe but this could uh also be done um on a you know without a catastrophy too uh we can utilize all of the things that the uh web3 ecosystem is working on uh for example more pluralistic decision making and uh using prediction markets as Robin Hansen uh was talking about today for for um more informed policy decisions but this time only to sort of predict uh the different uh catastrophes um we can also um have build um you know govern and launch uh our own Community owned resilient satellites uh as uh David previously explained uh we need satellites which can be resilient to uh solar storms or uh hemps so I want to leave um this with all of you uh about um a potential idea of a food resilience Dow to so that we as a community we can together um build and govern uh resilience at a planetary scale um does a dow structure suitable for this I'm not sure yet but would love to uh love all of your inputs but there is so much we can do together um and uh you know take control of our own resilience and defense as a community but there are some other simpler things that we can do uh for example directly sort of supporting uh the work that uh alfed does through ethereum uh you can just uh send some eth to alfred. e um some of the things that um Alfred's working on currently is sort of mapping out the entire uh technology road maps so building a technology tree uh for food resilience uh you know one of them could be uh research on uh Precision fermentation uh you can make fats from microorganisms but we would need to still map out what sort of bottlenecks are there in the industries and as David pointed out when a catastrophe occurs how can we actually scale up very rapidly so we you know we need to uh have that research uh and plans available beforehand uh we we can also do some really cool Pilots uh we can simulate a nuclear witer condition uh in the uh Australian interior here uh we can um do a test uh launch uh of our uh resilient uh satellite as well so if you're interested to contribute and help uh my signal is up there at yes. 88 uh you can um hit me up um yeah so I want to leave you with this um about uh potential community-owned uh resilience um and if you have any questions uh we can now take it I think you can go to the QR code on the side and um have some questions there