X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered Its Own Extinction

by Thomas Moynihan

How humanity came to contemplate its possible extinction.

From forecasts of disastrous climate change to prophecies of evil AI superintelligences and 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, in the twenty-first century, existential risk has become the object of a growing field of serious scientific inquiry. But, as Thomas Moynihan shows in X-Risk, 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.

Tracing this untold story, Moynihan revisits the pioneers who first contemplated the possibility of human extinction and stages the historical drama of this momentous discovery. He 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, Moynihan reveals how today's attempts to measure and mitigate existential threats are the continuation of a project initiated over two centuries ago, which concerns the very vocation of the human as a rational, responsible, and future-oriented being.

Genres: Philosophy, History, Nonfiction, Science, Futurism, Politics, Technology

272 pages, Paperback

Published October 1, 2020

Reviews

[Ştefan Tiron · Rating 5 out of 5]

I got a free copy of this book from Urbanomic Press for an honest review. I already had the occasion to read a few related articles and essays by Thomas Moynihan in http://sumrevija.si/en/thomas-moyniha... Palladium Mag https://palladiummag.com/2020/05/11/o.... This review expands on those early first observations. Only later have I found out how they fit into a book of a much grander scope.

Its purpose is none other than redefining modernity and even reason as a reason to ensure that thinking will not cease to exist in the future. All this in the light of something that has never before dawned on human minds: that the universe can well do without those very minds. One risks being overlooked when arriving on the crest of such an expanding body of collapse studies or end of the world as “growth industry”(Claire Colebrook), with scientists moving the Doomsday Clock closer to Midnight and ongoing 6th mass extinction blending into a nearly omnipresent barrage of media apocalypticism. Yet, I believe X-Risk cuts like no other through all of the recent secular/post-secular eschatological confusions, separating the threat of exterminism from prepper talk. Once and for all witnessing the end of one's (or another's) world is not the same as experiencing extinction nor is it establishing a presumptive final date of expiration. Thomas Moynihan's book should be able to dispel all the lingering hesitation about what Big Filters to chose from (take ur pick from gray goo nano planetary meltdown to superintelligent AIs using our entire biomass as computronium fodder) by inviting us to step down from the giants upon whose shoulders we supposedly stand, and get a frisson as they succumb to 'infinitarian paralysis' (Nick Bostrom quoted by TM) and kamikaze theories about biospheres and entire worlds that keep on bursting like soda bubbles.


Clearly this book was written by someone who enjoys collecting all these ruinous and delightfully abhorrent mental cataclysms, a necessary feat at the very moment when we might desperately cling to old certitudes in the throes of apocalyptic theology, in spite of the daily facts that remind us that we've jumped off the cliff a while ago. Here comes a 21st c historical perspective on the long XX century of dreaming up wild galactic-scale visions about the present via the far future and across cosmic silences, not ignoring both the divergences and the ongoing dialogue btw Mutually Assured Destructive partners, a worthwhile recuperative effort especially in light of recent New Cold War fears. With a strong impetus from the cosmist undercurrent (what Zizek used to call the "biocosmist heresy") the Former East or ex-Soviet Bloc futurological contributions from 'actually existing socialism' that previously got short writ, Kardashev and Shklovsky finally get their due. I don't want to give a false impression this book is just a collection of daring visions and whimsical cosmological fallacies - it accomplishes the prodigious feat of channeling all these disparate resources about endangered futures through the lens of rapidly expanding (since ~ mid-90s explosion) astrobiological (or xenobiological as it was called) exoplanetary knowledge. The conceptual break crisscrossing a historical (diachronic) backdrop rich in brazen technological solutions and bedazzled initial responses to ever more darkly looming existential threats - takes us to precedents and first inklings of the idea that there might be something deeply wrong with entrusting the universe the mission to bring us back once we disappear. While exemplifying the novelty, X-Risk nevertheless eagerly recognizes the pioneering work of Milan M. Ćirković, Toby Ord, Anders Sandberg, Nick Bostrom and Sir Martin Rees that contributed to the establishment of a new academic discipline. At the same time, there is so much more to be said about a wider search of Non-Western forecasting institutions and X-Risks mediation with examples from the Global South let's say, or Chinese Society for Futures Studies (CSFS) established in 1979 China with the role of  “to serve the long-term planning and the modernization construction of the country, and to serve the progress of mankind.”  Romania's Laboratory for Prospective Research (later CIMSVD Institute) and their Tofflerian bromance.

Numerous mini-chapters with memorable titles like "Bubbles of Cosmic Nonchalance", "Eternalism and Its Discontents", "Worst of All Possible Worlds", "Tadpole Hedonists and Fatal Flower-Arrangers", "Shitting on the Morning Star or the Uses and Abuses of History" remind me that we should cherish all the thinkers that know how to tickle the hyper-modulated nerve of maximally distracted 21st reading. Clearly one of the best ways to do it - is to zoom-in on hopelessly (till now) and shamefully lost metaphysical constructions (Stanislaw Lem once called upon the singular powers of Sci-Fi to peddle such disreputable - but oh so intriguing metaphysical beasts). X-Risk is full with the decadent splendor of abstruse, smothered in their cradle natural philosophies, full of enormities with blusterous cosmic (and comic) reach. Adjoining are excellent B&W images peppering the text from a draft of dela Beche 'Awful Changes' with Professor Icthyosaurus lecturing the necrofauna, woodcuts of Tambora's eruption provoking the Year Without a Summer and unwittingly creating the perfect conditions for Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus at Diodati Villa on the shores of Lake Geneva, including some well-chosen portraits of Eduard von Hartmann ("looking omnicidal") and F.W.J. Schelling ("in his old age and cosmic wisdom") or biologist-degenerationist Oka Asajirō ("considering omnicidal degeneration, decadence, and debauchery").

Whatever we might still think about giants of Continental philosophy (with either waning extinctionist credentials or pretty shaky perennialist positions), their Appetite For Destruction seems to have been fed by a very tenacious metaphysical Principle - the undead Principle of Plenitude. Years ago I read a fresh Romanian translation of The Great Chain of Being: Study of an Idea (1936) by Arthur Oncken Lovejoy, where the Principle of Plenitude gets ample exposition. This and Alexandre Koyre's From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (1957) potentially changed our understanding of how such cosmic modeling and reordering got us to where we are now. The Great Chain of Being is one of those books that will never let any figureheads of Scientific, Literary and Philosophical canon rest in peace. It unwinds the living history of Scala Naturae, patiently uncovering the seams that bound innumerable taxonomical schemes almost till Linnaeus or Darwin & Wallace, the glue that kept everything in place in grand preordained hierarchies. X-Risk newness consists in striking a definitive last blow at this chain constricting the way Life on Earth and the supralunar realms were imagined under the grip of Plenitude, finally to be ruined after the idea of extinction had sunk in. X-Risk widens the nonsequiturs and gaps of the eternalist principle of Plentitude, or the endurance of value in a universe that appeared biased in our favor (take ur pick: Weak or Strong Anthropic Principle) as much part of philosophical and theological clusters as for Leibniz's theodicy, under-girding his whole "best of the best worlds" on the same inherent overestimation and smugness about ultimate default safety nets. My feeling is that Schumpeter's gale - 'schöpferische Zerstörung' or creative destruction that animates capitalism blows hard on the same wind of teleologic justification for destruction and ensuing cosmic renewal that made J. G. Fichte remark "All death in nature is birth, and precisely in dying does the augmentation of life visibly appear"(The Vocation of Man - quoted by T Moynihan).

While Whitehead is not present in any visible way, I somehow felt his mathematical approach to philosophical aporias useful in this altogether different context. In an unsuspecting way he discovers an age-old problem while rotating certitudes around almost like a Rubik cube, unceremoniously fitting parts that have been kept apart for ages, lightly addressing hampering axioms that constrain all subsequent chains of reasoning or their given solutions, restricting all flights of speculative endeavor. He does not try to eliminate or weed out the audacious brambles and thickets of reason. X-Risk also finds immense scope in detailing and following up on all the consequences of setting these finitudes free, in order to establish what grounding beliefs subtend and unite all thinkers, no matter their school, language, methods or their particular apocalyptic flavor. What Thomas Moynihan in both rich detail and systematic search brings forth example after illuminating and frankly hilarious example from the most quirky, whimsical to the brightest of feverish minds - is their nearly complete naivete in regard to humanity's cosmic no-rerun show. Up to a certain point, nobody seems to get that once they are out they are out. It is really gloriously and darkly funny to try and go back to the Encyclopedistes, or to the most pre-critical Philosophers as well as later SETI searches for humanoid aliens and see why so much of this intellectual bravado went so wonderfully askew. Only Marquis de Sade stands apace - but here he is on its own in many ways as he actively promotes extinction. This might also partially explain why reactions to the actual disappearance of the Dodo species (and others) in Mauritius or why Dodo-populated planets seemed possible to Bernard de Fontenelle (in retrospect), or why the dramatic realization of ultimate extinction came so late (possible clue: the Plurality of World aka Multiverse - Many Worlds theory sadly also fails the sensitivity-to-extinction litmus test).

This brings me to a possible consequence of this book imho - the way it counters the sort of abundance craze - Plenitude - as an expression of ontological excess, an ontology that seems to stumble on examples of non-experience or absence, or tends to avoid what might be called the wasteland of missing opportunities or encounters. An unrecognized dearth that might isolate such abundance on 'lucky' rafts drifting the void of space or forever lost in the gulfs between 'island universes'. In some way Plenitude tangles as well with Cornucopian versions of ecological or eco-critical thinking. A cornucopian might have the same obliviousness to man-made disasters or to how everything runs its course if left alone (ex: neo-Malthusian COVID herd immunity or man-made conflicts that seem to help nature replenish itself). Thus, the faltering and lazy logic of non-interventionism runs amok and abstains specifically when worst comes to worst. What seems to be an increasingly growing problem of our times, not only disarray and suspicion about what is to be done, is a retreat from directed collective action coupled with nonchalant stand-back attitude. One cannot fully abandon excess - since austerity seems to be allied with the worst of capitalism nowadays, imposing all manners of punishing restrictions and well-targeted scarcity on those who anyway feel the brunt of a very bad deal. Technological post-scarcity Pays de Cockaygne's is far indeed almost because it felt possible to the most prosperous and wasteful boomer generation, children of plenty and man-made extinction (mostly atomic) fears. It is easy to trumpet austerity on a planet where waste-disposal is being rerouted to the second or third world and efficiency has become ever pressing and depressing. Before recognizing extinction as a fact of history and evolution, past or future, as this baroque abundance of literary, scientific and philosophical examples makes clear, it became a sheer impossibility to see something else besides basically bursting, agglomerated, populous celestial spheres. If this cornucopian view of 'nature' (here terrestrial thus inclusive of humans) where all new continents and all worlds & all planets are as full as the old rivers, fields or standing forests becomes a thing of the past, even at fault for being completely exploitative, genocidal and predatory, what lies at the other end? Future Orchidelirium might not be such a bad habit after all, only and only if it does not become a botanical hunter's dream bioprospecting after the rare and valued. Otherwise 'Herschel's Garden' might resemble the good old lawns. Embracing full artificiality and artistry we might still learn from pop-cultural ET galactic horticulturalists as Ralo Mayer already explored in his E.T.E. Extra-Terrestrial Ecologies performance lecture. On a final note - with the waning of plentiful plenitude and strategically retreating from it, even if unaffected by extinction ideas and the radical realization of irreversible disappearance - extreme environments and desert communities where the anorganic was abundant (sun and sand in the excess) also hosted say Dune's Fremen, the Albertian Order of St. Leibowitz, or mothers of the desert or fathers of the wasteland in the Eastern cenobitic tradition (with whom at least presumably we could exchange apocalyptic or messianic pleasantries) could help along by entertaining ideas of infertility, of absence, of no return and a growing emptiness that resonates far better with the vast expanse of suddenly available exoplanetary (external 'nature' unaffected by humans) desolation.

After reading X-Risk one can breathe again relieved because one is not left to suck in another dose of private and frankly boring musings and philanthropic escape plans of company founders attending to their favorite Sci-Fi fears (Superintelligences transforming everyone into Paperclips etc). They seem to ignore and completely try to circumvent the bountiful historical examples of past and present - slow extinctions that go on without a bang, of non-spectacular threats no less important to human and more-than-human existence here on planet Earth (divestment from fossil fuels or the present retreat from long-term planning in spite of Green New Deal and Extinction Rebellion). If catastrophism was still seen as pre-modern, X-Risk endows extinctionism with a key role to play in the 21st century.

[Joshua Line · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sickeningly hopeful about humanity and our 'vast duty to manifest our future's potential'

[Derek · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another entry to the genre of the history of human thought. The sharpest part of this book is the thesis that ancient stories of apocolyptica have nothing to do with what we think of as extinction, they are "the sense of ending", but extinction is "the end of sense." Where "inorganic" once meant the life of the non-physical, enlightenment criticality quickly made it come to mean the physics of the non-living. It's actually quite a novelty to humanity to understand intelligent life as impossibly rare, so much so that human extinction could very well be the deletion of intelligence in the greater universe altogether. This perspective renders a rather sharp reflection when staring out into the mirror of the cosmos.

[Herm · Rating 5 out of 5]

The fascinating history of humans discovering x-risks and the changes it brought in how we view our place in the universe. Moynihan doesn't miss.

[Rowan · Rating 4 out of 5]

My ever hardening shell of postmodern detachment was softened slightly by the earnest and well reasoned call to action against existential risk Moynihan presents in this text alongside an engaging historical account of the idea of said risk. The big idea here is that human extinction was a basically unthinkable thought up until quite recently in our history, and that knowledge of the possibility represents a sort of Santa Claus does not exist (value is not an immutable feature of the universe) moment for humanity that burdens us with increased responsibility for our persistence as a species. Compelling on many levels, I'd recommend this to anyone interested in the history of ideas in general, historical futurism in particular, and of course, those concerned by existential risk.

[Adam Holm · Rating 4 out of 5]

Everything you want to learn about human extinction and then some. Between this and Spinal Catastrophism, Moynihan has proven to be one of the most interesting intellectual figures currently around. Clearly a passionate scholar, he sheds light on the past, present, and future of our frail species.

Content warning: Eduard von Hartmann

[Chant · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fantastic book! Couldn't put down the damn thing!

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lucid, engaging, compulsively readable--a tour de force of science, philosophy, arts, and literature. An unwaveringly optimistic book about humanity's most worrisome prospect.

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book a lot and recommend it to everyone. But because I enjoyed it I thought it would be more fun to go into detail about where I diverged from it rather than just gush. You can find my full review here:
https://geotrickster.com/2021/05/08/b...

[Ricci · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an ambitious book, but its ambitions are undermined by what it is, a selective and arbitrary chronicle of ideas. More chronicling and less analysis at crucial points.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating, wide-ranging intellectual history of an idea whose consequences we’re just beginning to grapple with, X-Risk traces the history of how humanity became self-conscious of its ability to bring the planet’s biota to the point of the extinction, a history beginning with the sense of humanity’s own ending via apocalypse or extinction.

While apocalypse is spiritual, moral, and God-determined; extinction is material, amoral, and human-determined. In apocalypse only the evil suffer; in extinction, everybody suffers. The apocalyptic asserts an entire cosmos structured according to moral principles and truths, populated by Earth-like creatures, including and especially humanoids. Extinction asserts through evidence that as conscious, technologically savvy beings, we are alone in the universe, have only one chance on Earth, and are likely to die out sooner or later, no matter what we do.

As material evidence about the Earth’s lands and seas accumulated over the course of 150 years or so, the religious assumption that human-like life populated the Earth’s oceans and core (and by extension the entire universe) was replaced by the fact that it’s mostly inorganic matter all the way down. As measured in sentient life, God’s abundance and goodness were shown to be in short supply.

Furthermore, once the ability to age rocks arose and knowledge acquired of the materials and forces required of their formation, geologists could then demonstrate the existence of a vast, “deep time” in the past—but a past with a moment of origin rather than one that has eternally existed, as had been believed.

Discontinuities among fossils with contemporary fauna also demonstrated that extinction of entire species had occurred in the past and will likely occur in the future. Reports coming from the New World during the 18th- and 19th-centuries indicated that humans were also currently hunting to extinction native birds and mammals.

Theological assumptions of eternal cycles of death and renewal, of eternal plentitude everywhere, had been cut at both ends, past and future. Replacing a sense of eternal plentitude was the realization that everything is on a one-way trip to oblivion.

Once the fact of a changing but a-cyclical material history was established among sciences from biology to geology, the discovery in mathematics of calculus and the establishment of probability theory allowed the prediction of future events. At one point in human development, deviations from daily norms were interpreted as unpredictable acts of God (or the Devil). But now, physical forces of change—past and future, planetary and cosmic—could be determined and the mechanisms behind deviations explained and predicted.

Debates within the sciences, and the physical records they were based upon, were mediated by various philosophers, British Romantic poets, and prescient French novelists, who also all began predicting what the future holds in store for humanity (something unhappy) and why and how (or if) that direction should be changed.

But notions of “better future” indicate that, if minimizing human misery is the goal of technology and ideological systems, then not being born would be in the best interests of all people. Once the likelihood of humanity’s extinction was established and the misery of human existence universally acknowledged, proposals for omnicide began popping up in philosophy and the sciences. Some omniciders argue for accelerating the natural course of human extinction, rationalized as doing the universe a favor, arguments earnestly presented by anti-natalists as an overall moral good. Moynihan is not one of their supporters.

Nor does he endorse a future in which humans evolve toward some form of drug-induced pleasure-stupor, coddled by technology designed to perpetuate our existence.

Insofar as we have any Lamarckian abilities to steer the course of our otherwise Darwinian (aka aimless) evolution, Moynihan argues that we should aim to live above mere the mere survival level that happy droolers inhabit and equip ourselves with a life vocation: Once the bare minimum to survive has been satisfied, our remaining physical and mental efforts should be used toward achieving perfection in some skill.

Or if achieving, say, Olympic-contender greatness isn’t among the skills a person wants to develop, they can work instead to use technology to devise ways to help humans live with and correct the world-wide ecological disaster currently unfolding. Unlike other species, Moynihan argues, we have the ability and should do what we can to sustain and perpetuate ourselves, and as much other life as we can, too.

While I would counter that every well-engineered solution is also a well-engineered problem, correcting our path as we go along may be our only chance for longer survival, even if every solution proves temporary, creating new problems in its wake.

[Gary Schroeder · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was expecting this book to be an exploration of how human beings seem to be continually drawn to creating the mechanisms of our own destruction. Whether it be be nuclear weaponry, machines which poison our atmosphere, or computers which will become hyper-intelligent in an instant, we always seem to head in the same direction. Why should this be so? I thought this book would help me figure it out. No such luck. “X-Risk” isn’t about any of these real world problems. It’s about the philosophical origins of these problems as written by famous Western thinkers over the last 400 years. If you don’t like abstract philosophy, this isn’t your book.

Here’s the core claim of the book: “the discovery of human extinction may well yet prove to have been the very centerpiece of that unfolding and unfinished drama that we call modernity. In discovering our own extinction, we realized that we must think ever better because, should we not, then we may never think again.” Fine. That’s an interesting topic to explore over the course of 400 plus pages. But if that florid, overweighted prose bothers you, hoo boy, you’re in for a slog because the whole style of this book is to say in 50 pages what could be said in five. An editor was sorely needed here to improve flow and readability.

Here’s a breakdown of the takeaways from the four main sections of the book,.

Astrobiology
Beginning in the 1600s, Western philosophers experienced a growing awareness of outer space, other planets, and the stars beyond our own. Understanding the vastness of the cosmos led them to realize that humans are unlikely to appear again anywhere in the universe should we fail as a species, contrary to what earlier thinkers believed when they embraced the idea of plentitude, I.e., no lifeforms are ever truly extinguished, they simply rise again in time.

Geoscience
Discovery of the deep past through paleontology revealed that nature’s law is the same for men and animals: we’re no safer from extinction than the dinosaurs or any other creature that has ever lived on the earth. We lost our Special Place in the planetary order.

Forecasting the Future
When advanced mathematics were developed, people began to grasp the concept of deep time, that history is unimaginably long. When you can back-fit the past to precise equations, it makes it possible to predict certain aspects of the future. That power, previously unavailable, got people thinking about projecting into the distant future. Human extinction looks plausible in many projected scenarios like heat death, sun burnout, exhaustion of resources, etc. The future started to look a lot more threatening.

Omnicide
We got too smart. If we automate everything, we will become nothing but pleasure seekers, our thinking faculties will whither and die. Full automation will destroy our desire to continue to innovate and discover as we seek greater comfort. “Humans are vanishing into their machines.” Or we’ll become exclusive creatures of the mind and thought, abandoning the material world and external reality. All of these lead to human extinction.

Vocation
“The shock of extinction really hit when we realized that none of our ethical preferences were inherent in the natural world” which I take to mean “Enlightenment thinkers realized that there was no benevolent god coming to rescue us should we choose to do ourselves in.” This chapter is largely about all of the crackpot ideas for harnessing animals and the ecosystem to engineer some kind of paradise. Most of it seems silly because all of the ideas quoted are absurdly grandiose, obviously unworkable, or inadvisable. If the 20th century taught us anything, it’s that we don’t have the wisdom to engineer the planet to a state of perfection. If anything, the planet needs to be protected from our efforts in that direction. We always create unintended consequences.

The author finishes off be getting into really obtuse concepts like our “obligation” to work to "cosmically expand the domain of value”, “our duty to bring economy to nature,” and other philosophical claptrap which has little to do with Real Life. Many grand plans for human expansion into the universe (without regard for the physical impossibility of doing so) are described.

[Benji · Rating 4 out of 5]

Imagine stacking a postage stamp on a penny, and then balancing both upon the pinnacle of a twenty-metre-high Egyptian obelisk. The thickness of the stamp is the extent of human civilization, the thickness of the stamp and penny is the extent of our species's existence., and the distance from the stamp to the obelisk's base is the age of our Earth.

Now stick another postage-stamp on top of the first to represent the next 5000 years of civilization, and keep sticking on postage-stamps until you have a pile as high as Mont Blanc. [...] The first postage-stamp was the past of civilization; the column higher than Mont-Blanc its future. Or, to look at it in another way, the first postage-stamp represents what man has already achieved; the pile which outtops Mont Blanc represents what he may achieve [...] Accidents may happen to the race [...] Celestial collisions may occur; shrinking into a white dwarf, the sun may freeze terrestrial life out of existence; bursting out as a nova it may scorch our race to death. Accident may replace our Mont Blanc of postage-stamps by a truncated column of only a fraction of the height of Mont Blanc. Even so, there is prospect of tens of thousands of millions of years before our race. [...] We have come into being the fresh glory of the dawn, and a day of almost unthinkable length stretches before us with unimaginable opportunities for accomplishment. [...] We are still too much engulfed in the greyness of the mornings mists to be able to imagine, however vaguely, how this world of ours will appear to those who will come after us and see it in the full light of day. But by what light we have, we seem to discern that the main message [is] one of responsibility because we are drawing plans and laying foundations for a longer future than we can well imagine.

[Nils · Rating 5 out of 5]

Begins with a meta-ethical point that since ethics are a human construct the end of humanity would be the end of ethics and therefore the greatest conceivable ethical disaster. From this is follows that every effort must be put in to eliminate existential risk, which includes risks inherent to being stuck on one little planet. Doing what it takes to enable the conquest of other planets and systems becomes thus a moral imperative of the highest order.

From this dubious premise (of which more, below), what unfolds is, surprisingly, a gloriously adventure through a vast and eclectic intellectual history of the coming into awareness of humanity’s existential risk. It careens through enlightenment philosophy, the history of biological and anthropological theory, the importance of literary imagineers and the birth of science fiction, various mystics and cranks, as well as visionary inventors trying to enable the human escape from existential risk.

Problems:
A) As Hobbes (tellingly ignored in this volume) explained long ago, absolute security for one implies about insecurity for everyone else. In this case, the moral license for extending human persistence at all costs necessarily implies that everything else in the world (indeed, in the universe) should be subordinated to that end — it is a license (a mandate, even) for literally galactic conquest, eeriely reminiscent of the kinds of claims that conquistadors made about the moral imperative to spread the ethical principles embodies by Jesus to all corners of the earth.
B) The category of “humanity,” assumed to be a stable and uniform biologically coherent thing, sits at the center of this argument — which is deeply problematic given that this category itself is in fact not stable either conceptually or even biophysically. If humans are constantly changing themselves by externalizing the capacities through technological prostheses, how can we speak of the human as a coherent category. Further, how can we assert that the human is the only source of ethical meaning, especially when one considers Intergalactic Others that may have moral conceptions and standing of their own. Even when he reads Stanislaw Lem, he seems not to want to face this meta-ethical conundrum.
C) one wonders whether by literally reaching for the stars to escape X-risk, it ironically actually increases the live risks that we face right here on the ground today and for the indefinite future. Who exactly will get to do the space colonization, and who will be left behind on the existentially abandoned rump of Gaia?

Quite literally “Galaxy brain” stuff.

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

I give this book 3 stars out of 5. I try to give 5 stars only to books that I really feel are worthy, with which I form some kind of deeper connection. So this book was most likely only going to get 4 at most. It is well-written, and it is about an important subject, sufficient for it to merit 4 stars, but I disagree with what it says enough that I give it 3 stars.

Basically, I take Moynihan to be trying to motivate people, and I find his motivational project to be flawed -- a lot of people could just not care about his attempt at motivating them and from their perspective live lives that were fine. And it seems that people could actually be motivated
if they had a good moral realism compelling them, but he only offers a "we need to strive hard to live so that someday we can maybe know what that realism is and what its axiology is". This might work for some people, but probably not a lot of other people. (Or maybe he thinks an anti-realist moral view would work just as well, but I have my doubts it would.)

For a more in-depth review, see here.

[melancholinary · Rating 4 out of 5]

Easily the best book I've read in 2020 - what an experience. A long trip to the question of existence covered from a wide range of ideological formation (but mainly focus on the scientific endeavour and enlightenment). It makes me wonder on the question of a non-Western cosmological trait with its complexity in seeing existential risk, e.g. the Javanese mystic see the Merapi volcano as both an existential risk (in X-risk there is a chapter about geosystem) and source of livelihood—extinction and natalism as one system, which also shared similarity with several ideas covered in this book.

[DaisyB · Rating 5 out of 5]

There’s such a lot of great information here. I loved the section about the Tambora Volcanic eruption in Indonesia and the impact it had on the group of writers staying in the Alps and how it strongly influenced great literature including the writing of Frankenstein.

Really interesting nuggets of information on every page.

I thought that I had understood the risk to humanity of extinction before I started reading this but have a completely different understanding now.

[Ross Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

A thrilling ride though how humanity woke up, bit by bit to discover the possibility of our own extinction. From a concept seen as impossible to one possibly even likely. Really interesting and sometimes disturbing. Surprised by how good this is.

Reminds me quite a bit of books by Stephen J Gould in terms of depth of learning. Lovely illustrations too

[Ezequiel]

Excelente recorrido histórico. Después, uno puede tener sus dudas respecto del posicionamiento del autor.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's a great history, but the longtermism is shockingly stupid (the last chapter is particularly unbearable to read)