Episode 49 - Existential Risk
Explicit content warning
02/04/21 • 58 min
Duration: 58 minutes 44 seconds
Co-hosts Paul Carr and Daniela DePaulis are joined by author Thomas Moynihan. The subject is the idea of human extinction and how it evolved into our present day understand of Existential Risk.
Guest Bio:I am a writer and researcher from the UK. In 2019, I completed a PhD at Oriel College on the history of human extinction. Currently, I am a visiting Research Associate in History at St Benet's College, Oxford University, and I am working for Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute with a grant from the Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative. I am interested in the history of existential risk and of existential hope: that is, how people first came to understand the perils and promises that face us as a species. I see this as the central philosophical drama of the modern world: how we came to appreciate our position—and precarity—as intelligent beings within an otherwise seemingly silent and sterile universe. My goal is to reveal how contemporary research into global risks can be seen as part of the wider story of our ‘coming of age’ as a civilisation and a species.
Links:Thomas Moynihan - https://thomasmoynihan.xyz
X-Risk at MIT Press: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/x-risk
Mary Shelley - The Last Man
Churchill - Shall We All Commit Suicide?
Frank Drakę: A Speculation on the Influence of Biological Immortality on SETI
Natural Selection of Stellar Civilizations by the Limits of Growth
Credits:Co-hosts: Paul Carr and Daniela De Paulis
Producer: Paul Carr
Music: Sun Ra and his Intergalactic Solar Arkestra, DJ Spooky
Duration: 58 minutes 44 seconds
Co-hosts Paul Carr and Daniela DePaulis are joined by author Thomas Moynihan. The subject is the idea of human extinction and how it evolved into our present day understand of Existential Risk.
Guest Bio:I am a writer and researcher from the UK. In 2019, I completed a PhD at Oriel College on the history of human extinction. Currently, I am a visiting Research Associate in History at St Benet's College, Oxford University, and I am working for Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute with a grant from the Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative. I am interested in the history of existential risk and of existential hope: that is, how people first came to understand the perils and promises that face us as a species. I see this as the central philosophical drama of the modern world: how we came to appreciate our position—and precarity—as intelligent beings within an otherwise seemingly silent and sterile universe. My goal is to reveal how contemporary research into global risks can be seen as part of the wider story of our ‘coming of age’ as a civilisation and a species.
Links:Thomas Moynihan - https://thomasmoynihan.xyz
X-Risk at MIT Press: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/x-risk
Mary Shelley - The Last Man
Churchill - Shall We All Commit Suicide?
Frank Drakę: A Speculation on the Influence of Biological Immortality on SETI
Natural Selection of Stellar Civilizations by the Limits of Growth
Credits:Co-hosts: Paul Carr and Daniela De Paulis
Producer: Paul Carr
Music: Sun Ra and his Intergalactic Solar Arkestra, DJ Spooky
Previous Episode
Episode 48 - Chelsea Haramia on the Ethics of METI
Released: 28 November 2020
Duration: 70 minutes, 39 seconds
Co-hosts Paul Carr and Daniela De Paulis engage philosopher Chelsea Haramia on the ethics of sending signals into space that might be received by intelligent beings in the cosmos.
For more information about this episode, include a rich set of links, please see the blog entry for Episode 48 at:
https://wowsignalpodcast.com
Guest BioChelsea Haramia received her PhD in philosophy from the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she specialized in ethics. She is now an assistant professor in the philosophy department at Spring Hill College. She is also co-editor of the online journal 1000-Word Philosophy, which houses a growing set of original 1000-word essays on philosophical questions, figures, and arguments aimed at an audience of philosophers and non-philosophers alike. She has published in the areas of normative ethics, bioethics, animal ethics, aesthetics, feminist philosophy, and astrobiology ethics. Her current work involves ethical and metaethical analyses of space exploration and of the search for intelligent life in particular.
Credits:Co-hosts: Paul Carr and Daniel De Paulis
Producer: Paul Carr
Music: DJ Spooky, Nest, Erika Lloyd.
The Wow! Signal is published under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike license.
Next Episode
Burst 34 - The Mystery of the Nine Transients
Interview recorded: 11 July 2021
Released: 16 July 2021
Duration: 21 minutes, 33 seconds
Beatriz Villarroel discusses her latest VASCO paper in Nature Scientific Reports, "Exploring nine simultaneously occurring transients on April 12th 1950."
Links:Villarroel+ , Exploring Nine simultaneously occurring transients on April 12th 1950.
Burst 19: Our Sky Now and Then (August 2016)
Episode 41: The Vanishing Sources with Beatriz Villarroel (November 2019)
The Palomar Digital Sky Survey
The United States Nuclear Testing Program
CreditsHost and Producer: Paul Carr
Music: Ahleuchatistas and Erika Lloyd
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