Here’s a sweeping journey through the history of the idea of human extinction, by Thomas Moynihan, a historian, philosopher, and researcher at the Future of Hum

Here’s a sweeping journey through the history of the idea of human extinction, by Thomas Moynihan, a historian, philosopher, and researcher at the Future of Humanity Institute. The abstract, using some of Tom’s language from the intro: While we humans have been prophesying the end of the world since we began talking and telling stories, the modern idea of human extinction, made possible by the burgeoning sciences and philosophical tumult of the Enlightenment era, did not, and could not, exist until only a few centuries ago. In this timeline he revisits some of the most important milestones in this ongoing drama — from the introduction of the Hindu-Arabic numeral system (which later allowed for the measurement of large timespans) to the birth of the field of population science; from the atom bomb to genome editing and the IPCC climate report. 2,500 years in 2,500 words. disclosure: I work for the MIT Press, who’s distributing Tom’s forthcoming book (“X-Risk”), from which a leaner version of this timeline was culled. The publisher, Urbanomic, is doing some very cool stuff in the space of contemporary philosophy: https://www.urbanomic.com/about/ https://www.urbanomic.com/about/. But for real, and even if i didn't work for MITP: Tom’s book is fantastic and I can’t recommend it highly enough.