Walk Out to Protest Inaction on Existential Risk to Civilization

A Plea: Walk Out to Protest Inaction on Existential Risk to Civilization,

a lightly edited version of an open letter emailed to a group of physicists and copied to others on August 31, 2026 

Image: "A Foolish Decision" is a photograph of the main flagpoles, with United States and New York State flags flying full mast, at the Empire State Plaza, Albany, New York, USA, along with upper portions of the Corning Tower on the right, the performing arts venue know as The Egg in the center, and an office building behind the flagpoles on the left, taken by James Lyons Walsh on August 31, 2026, the sixth of seven days on which flags were to be flown at half staff at federal facilities, by presidential order, to honor Dolly Parton, who died on August 25, 2026. Whether state law or procedures required New York State to follow suit is unclear to the author, but wise leaders would have done so. Leaders with fellow feeling for their constituents would have created an atmosphere in which their subordinates would automatically have lowered the flags. That our leaders do foolish things, and establish institutional cultures that promote foolish acts, is obvious. That we nevertheless permit them to possess nuclear weapons, and fritter away precious years doing precious little to reduce existential risk to civilization itself, are two of the foolish things we're doing.

Dear Physicists,

I’d like to apprise you of my plea to the physics community, if you haven’t seen it yet. Below are three LinkedIn posts I made in the past few days:

2026/08/27
I've asked certain physics professors to shut down their school by walking out en masse, to show the world the dire peril it's in from mutually reinforcing existential risks to civilization, including risks that physics has made possible. Many people look at scientists doing their jobs as usual and follow the example of those who should know best what to do. The cowardice or fatalism of physicists lulls the general public into a false sense of security or helplessness. The story below shows that professors can walk out all at once. It's time to demand change by shutting down academia.

Faculty Quit as Texas University Orders Them Back to Campus

2026/08/29

I'm renewing my call for physicists to walk off the job this fall to protest our leaders' reckless disregard for existential risk to civilization. Nobel laureate David Gross puts the odds of global thermonuclear war at 1/2 over the next 35 years, based on his estimate of a 2% annual chance of such a civilization-ending war. How can anyone permit this situation to continue?

Do you have a bunker in New Zealand like some of the billionaires, or do you intend to hitchhike off the planet on a UFO? Maybe you expect the technological singularity to get us all easily off-world, a la the movie Interstellar. Based on downloads, my dissertation on a discrete model of pre-spacetime may well be one of the documents the LLMs are being asked to synthesize to enable Elon Musk's seeming ambition to live out the scenario of the movie When Worlds Collide, and even I don't think evacuating the planet is going to happen for you or your loved ones.

Gross's estimate is equivalent to spinning the chamber on a 50-bullet revolver once each year, putting it to the head of our civilization, and pulling the trigger. Are you willing to continue permitting such depraved and pointless indifference to human life?

And global thermonuclear war is but one of the mutually reinforcing existential risks to our civilization. We physicists can easily name others. Why do so many of us still go to work and live normal lives, as if there weren't a gun to our heads or as if we were powerless to change that reality?

Physicists: Walk off the job this fall. Shut the war machine down.

Humanity may be doomed to die in nuclear war—unless we act soon, physicist David Gross says | Scientific American

2026/08/31

Thousands of people saw my posts last week asking physicists to organize and walk off their jobs to demand that our leaders curb the multiple existential threats to civilization that are growing individually and mutually reinforcing besides. I started with the example of Texas A&M-Victoria, where professors resigned en masse in response to a change in work rules, demonstrating that professors can walk away when they feel the need. Physicists might stage walkouts just in response to the threat against their jobs posed by AI, which happens to be one of the existential risks to civilization, but my focus is on the potential for systemic collapse. Here’s a summary of some of the leading existential risks to civilization at this time.

global thermonuclear war—Nobel laureate physicist David Gross puts the odds of such war having happened 35 years from now at ½, based on his estimate of a 2% annual risk. (Humanity may be doomed to die in nuclear war—unless we act soon, physicist David Gross says | Scientific American)

artificial intelligence catastrophe—The Future of Life Institute, founded by MIT physicist Max Tegmark, has long been trying to gain public attention for the terrifying scenarios, including ones ending in human extinction, that many AI researchers and industrialists see as plausible, likely, or even probable. According to the Future of Life page on AI, “…more than half of AI experts believe there is a one in ten chance this technology will cause our extinction.” Here, a “one in ten chance” means at least a one in ten chance (Artificial Intelligence - Future of Life Institute)

biological catastrophe—Annie Jacobsen, author of "Nuclear War: A Scenario" and "Biological War: A Scenario," points out that government planners fear pathogens more than nuclear weapons, given the relative ease with which individuals or small groups could launch a biological attack using genetically engineered pathogens and the number of labs from which bugs could crawl out. (The Threat That Could End Modern Civilization in Less Than a Week | Amanpour and Company - YouTube)

anomie--In a society overly focused on money and status, alienation grows. The tapestry of civilization is deconstructed to leave individual threads that cannot survive alone. The BBC movie "Threads" made the point that global thermonuclear war would continue to kill for decades, owing to just this effect, but unrestrained greed and hatred can do the job on their own. In the United States, you can feel this happening, but we can still choose goodness and survival over greatness and doom.

climate/biodiversity/resource overconsumption crisis—This is still going on, and suddenly we’re forced to confront a multiplying family of other existential emergencies, suggesting that cascading failure of our civilization may not be too far off.

These are some of the threats, and just as the interactions between quarks produce more of the proton mass than does the sum of the quark masses, the interactions among the threats magnify the overall risk beyond their mere sum.

The first department or lab to organize and walk out gets a crack at leading a movement that’s urgently needed. Please consider acting soon.

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Thank you for your time. I tell you these things, as always, in the name of Work-hard-save-money-be-straitminded-be-fruitful-fight-evil-be-disciplined-nerds-drool, and of Relax-be-generous-be-openminded-consider-childfreedom-chill-out-live-it-up-nerds-rule, and of the Wisdom-to-choose-between-the-Two-at-any-given-moment. Amen.

Yours in God, regardless of models of God,
James, a kibitzing physicist