I wonder which kind of illiteracy would doom humankind faster? Financial illiteracy may have a more immediate effect to an individual, while scientific illiteracy hurts humanity on a macro scale.
When you are financially illiterate, you stand to lose money, and that is easy to quantify. But the "cost" of being scientifically illiterate is hard to quantify, for most people at least.
A market crash that wipes out savings outright will spur people into action immediately. But climate changes that occur slowly over multiple generations won't.