Released: 4 February 2021 
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:
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| Thomas Moynihan |
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
The Wow! Signal is released under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike license.
Released: 6 April 2020
A hundred years ago cosmologists were struggling to understand the nature and structure of the universe, and at the heart of this struggle was the island universe hypothesis. Today we find ourselves confronted with a similar question posed at a far greater scale. In order to resolve our cosmic archipelago problem we will have to attempt to reconstruct a history of our universe as a part of a far larger cosmological system, and to do this we will have to extend cosmology beyond the observable universe -- but what, exactly, is the observable universe?
