Conjecture

Existential risk is better treated as a non-renewable budget spent across all future generations than as a hazard rate to be minimised in the present. Ord's formulation is that total risk across the entire future can be kept small even though some risk remains in each century, and that futures in which accumulated risk climbs toward certainty are unsustainable. This makes safety work a problem of allocation across time rather than of prevention now, and it gives a reason to accept risk in one period that is absent from any framing we currently hold.

Stakes and trajectory