Rare and extreme events are ubiquitous in nature and society, spanning from magnetic storms or particularly violent earthquakes, to market crashes or oceanic rogue waves. Different viewpoints are therefore possible: coming from two different communities, we will try here to bring together our ways to look at these events. After a very brief review of some recent results in our respective scientific domains, that is, non-equilibrium/ statistical physics and nonlinear/dissipative optical systems, we draw some perspectives to develop a new approach using genetic algorithms to calculate extreme events in nonlinear dissipative optical systems.