This is the preprint of the article published in Safety Science as one contribution to the Special Issue on societal safety, critical infrastructure reliability and related intersectoral governance. Edited by Emery Roe, Kristine Vedal Størkersen, Petter Almklov, Stian Antonsen. Le Coze, JC. 2018. An essay: societal safety and the global1, 2,3. Safety Science. 110. Part C. 23-30 An essay: societal safety and the global1, 2,3 --00-- Jean-Christophe Le Coze Abstract The essay’s purpose is to explore the relation between societal safety and the global. It describes some of the complexities of our contemporary situation. Conceptualising the global is now at the heart of many of current problems and challenges, not least of which is safety. When confronting safety with the category of the global over the past 30 years from the point of view of large scale threats, one can differentiate three consecutive conceptualisations of types of risks for the purposes of the essay: socio-technological risks (1), systemic risks (2) and existential risks (3). These risk types, in turn, can be associated historically with the concepts of high-risk systems (1’), globalisation (2’), and the anthropocene and transhumanism (3’). The categories overlap and do not historically replace each other but are embedded in a nested hierarchy of issues. For each successive type of risk, the notion of the global expends into three different meanings, moving (in terms to be defined) from the techno-socio-sphere (global1), to what can be termed the bio-eco-geo-techno-socio sphere (global2) and finally, to the novel and emerging amalgam, a cosmo-bio-eco-geo-techno-socio 2 sphere (global3). It is argued that our vision of societal safety must be understood through an appreciation of how these three different layers of issues of the global are interwoven, how this global challenges the management and governance of safety, and why in this light our contemporary situation is now one of generalised complexity. Introduction In periods of major and multidimensional changes, our minds struggle to make sense of what is happening. The picture is very likely blurred and as a result it becomes very important to stabilise, even temporarily, our view of the complex processes which unfold in many different directions and at very different time and spatial scales. Some describe our moment as a series of revolutions in many domains (Atlan, Pol Droit, 2014), others claim a new Renaissance (Goldin, Kutarna, 2016). This essay brackets the flow of events of the past three decades so as to be relevant for the issue of societal safety, defined here as the “ability to maintain critical social functions, to protect the life and health of citizens and to meet the citizens’ basic requirements in a variety of stress situations” (Olsen, Kruke, Hovden, 2007, 69). The multifaceted notion of the