Talks by Thomas Moynihan
'Are We Situated Near History’s End or Its Beginning?: How Discovering the Deep Past Unveiled Humanity’s Deep Future' - invited to talk at 'Rethinking History in the Anthropocene', History of Knowledge Seminar Series @ Utrecht University, Feb 2021
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Throughout its long history, life has been a force of planetary transformation, remaking the air,... more Throughout its long history, life has been a force of planetary transformation, remaking the air, the rocks, the landscapes, even painting the colour of the sky and increasing the variety of Earth's minerals. But are the histories of life and Earth just one thing after another, or is there an underlying pattern that we can make sense of? Here, I argue that there is a pattern, and that life-Earth history can be understood as a sequence of five epochs, each of which corresponds to the evolution of lifeforms that can access a new source of energy. With each new epoch, the diversity of life has become greater, ecosystems have become richer, and life has increased its impact on the planet. This framework of energy expansions provides a way to think about current human impacts upon the Earth-and about the probable trajectories of life-planet systems elsewhere in the cosmos.
'A Prehistory to Prescience: The Birth and Development of Future Thinking' - given at 'Anticipation and Anticipatory Systems: Humans Meet AI' conference, 10 June, 2019, Örebro University, Sweden.
'An Intellectual History of Existential Risk' - given at 'Rethinking Crisis Conference', 13-14 June, 2017, Oxford University
'A Prehistory to Planetary-Scale Simulation: World-Models from the Middle Ages to Modernity' - given at 'Simulations and Environments' conference, Goldsmiths, March 11, 2017
'The Intellectual Discovery of Human Extinction' - given at 'Imagining Apocalypse' conference, Oxford, June 18, 2016
Papers by Thomas Moynihan
'The first person to warn that scientific progress could result in human extinction' - piece commissioned by The Conversation.
https://theconversation.com/scientific-progress-could-result-in-human-extinction-121220
'To Imagine Our Extinction Is To Be Able To Answer For it' - piece commissioned for Aeon Magazine.
https://aeon.co/essays/to-imagine-our-own-extinction-is-to-be-able-to-answer-for-it
'The End of the World: A History of How a Silent Cosmos Led Humans to Fear the Worst' - long reads piece commissioned for The Conversation's 'Insights' series.
'Existential Risk and Human Extinction: An Intellectual History', Futures Journal, Vol. 116 (February 2020).
Futures, 2019
Of late, existential risks have become the target of an emerging field of scientifically serious ... more Of late, existential risks have become the target of an emerging field of scientifically serious study. This baptism of ‘X-risk studies’ is symptomatic of what Riel Miller has diagnosed as an ever-increasing demand for ‘futures literacy’, inasmuch as we are progressively conversant with progressively distal perils. Yet this dynamic, of incremental ‘future orientation’, is not itself without a history. We have been being swept up in the future for some time now. Accordingly, we embark upon supplying an intellectual history to humanity’s responsivity to existential risks. The aim is to provide a richly recollective dimension to ‘X-risk studies’. Our contention is that such a retrospective tribunal will help secure a resilient prospectus and justificatory impetus going forward. This takes us to the Enlightenment. This period saw the consolidation of the various empirical-descriptive vocabularies requisite for the first explicit prognoses on existential catastrophe. Yet the discovery of X-risk was a question of ‘Enlightening’, construed as humanity’s global undertaking of self-responsibility, in an altogether more fundamental way. For, ultimately, it is only through realizing that we may never reason again that we become motivated to reason ever better, and, thus, were first summoned to the modernity-defining projects of foresight, mitigation, and strategizing.
'The Child is the Parent of the Geist: On Negarestani's Intelligence & Spirit' (2019, Cosmos & History)
Cosmos and History, 2019
Thesis Chapters by Thomas Moynihan
'The Intellectual Discovery of Human Extinction: Existential Risk and the Entrance of the Future Perfect into Science' (Thesis Submitted, 26th September 2018)
Teaching Documents by Thomas Moynihan
Course Syllabus for 'Responsibility & Existential Risk'
Syllabus and prospectus for course 'Responsibility and Existential Risk', taught at the New Centr... more Syllabus and prospectus for course 'Responsibility and Existential Risk', taught at the New Centre for Research and Practice, 22nd June to 13th July, 2019.
Books by Thomas Moynihan
X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered Its Own Extinction.
X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered Its Own Extinction., 2020
From global pandemics to prophecies of evil AI superintelligences to the impending perils of geno... more From global pandemics to prophecies of evil AI superintelligences to the impending perils of genome editing, our species is increasingly concerned with the prospects of its own extinction. With humanity’s future on this planet seeming more insecure by the day, the twenty-first century has seen ‘existential risk’ become the object of a growing field of serious scientific inquiry.
But this preoccupation is not exclusive to the post-atomic age of global warming and synthetic biology. Our growing concern with human extinction itself has a history—one that is important for our understanding of what it means to be human in the first place.
Retracing this untold story, X-Risk revisits the pioneers who first contemplated the possibility of human extinction, and stages the historical drama of this momentous discovery.
Thomas Moynihan shows how, far from being a secular reprise of religious prophecies of apocalypse, existential risk is a thoroughly modern idea, made possible by the burgeoning sciences and philosophical tumult of the Enlightenment era.
In recollecting how we first came to care for our extinction, X-Risk reveals how today’s attempts to measure and mitigate existential threats are the continuation of a project initiated over two centuries ago, and which concerns the very vocation of the human as a rational, responsible, and future-oriented being.
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Talks by Thomas Moynihan
Papers by Thomas Moynihan
Read online: https://tankmagazine.com/issue-86/features/thomas-moynihan/
Thesis Chapters by Thomas Moynihan
Teaching Documents by Thomas Moynihan
Books by Thomas Moynihan
But this preoccupation is not exclusive to the post-atomic age of global warming and synthetic biology. Our growing concern with human extinction itself has a history—one that is important for our understanding of what it means to be human in the first place.
Retracing this untold story, X-Risk revisits the pioneers who first contemplated the possibility of human extinction, and stages the historical drama of this momentous discovery.
Thomas Moynihan shows how, far from being a secular reprise of religious prophecies of apocalypse, existential risk is a thoroughly modern idea, made possible by the burgeoning sciences and philosophical tumult of the Enlightenment era.
In recollecting how we first came to care for our extinction, X-Risk reveals how today’s attempts to measure and mitigate existential threats are the continuation of a project initiated over two centuries ago, and which concerns the very vocation of the human as a rational, responsible, and future-oriented being.
Read online: https://tankmagazine.com/issue-86/features/thomas-moynihan/
But this preoccupation is not exclusive to the post-atomic age of global warming and synthetic biology. Our growing concern with human extinction itself has a history—one that is important for our understanding of what it means to be human in the first place.
Retracing this untold story, X-Risk revisits the pioneers who first contemplated the possibility of human extinction, and stages the historical drama of this momentous discovery.
Thomas Moynihan shows how, far from being a secular reprise of religious prophecies of apocalypse, existential risk is a thoroughly modern idea, made possible by the burgeoning sciences and philosophical tumult of the Enlightenment era.
In recollecting how we first came to care for our extinction, X-Risk reveals how today’s attempts to measure and mitigate existential threats are the continuation of a project initiated over two centuries ago, and which concerns the very vocation of the human as a rational, responsible, and future-oriented being.