Thomas Moynihan on the history of existential risk

Abstract

Thomas Moynihan is a writer and researcher interested in the history of ideas surrounding existential risk and human flourishing. He completed a PhD on the history of human extinction, and currently works with Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute. His most recent book is called X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered Its Own Extinction. The book charts the gradual realisation of the “perils and promises” that face the human species. Today, we are becoming attuned to the notion that humanity’s potential is both potentially enormous and entirely fragile: no laws of nature or outside forces secure us against a wide range of natural and anthropogenic threats. We also recognise the rarity and loneliness of our predicament as intelligent beings in an otherwise apparently sterile stellar neighbourhood. As Moynihan shows, the recognition of existential risk represents a dramatic and revealing turning point in the history of ideas, and the story that leads up to it is rich, expansive, and often surprising. In our conversation, we meet some figures from this story, and discuss the significance of intellectual history more generally.