Teaching Astrobiology In A Sustainability Course

Post Date February 05, 2013
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Category astrobiology

View the paper “Teaching Astrobiology In A Sustainability Course”

Sustainability commonly refers to the ability for human and/or ecological systems to be sustained on Earth in the face of natural resource depletion, environmental degradation, and other stressors. Astrobiology is the study of life in the universe, including Earth-life colonizing space and life that originates elsewhere. Both are interdisciplinary fields asking big-picture questions about humanity and its surroundings. While sustainability almost always focuses on life on Earth, much about sustainability can be learned from astrobiology. This paper …

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Emerging Tech Governance Article At IEET

Post Date January 23, 2013
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Category articles, emerging technologies, law & policy

Quick FYI: I have a new article at IEET, Seven Reasons For Integrated Emerging Technologies Governance. The article discusses advantages of handling all emerging technologies within one governance regime instead of treating each technology in separate piecemeal fashion. The seven reasons are forecasting, politics, relationships, dual-use technology, risk driven by research and development, lab transparency, and whistleblowing.

Not all emerging technologies pose risk of global catastrophe. An integrated governance regime would help with the global catastrophic risks from emerging technologies, but it would help with the …

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New Paper: Inadvertent Nuclear War

Post Date January 09, 2013
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Category nuclear war, publications

GCRI has another new academic paper out. Analyzing and reducing the risks of inadvertent nuclear war between the United States and Russia, by Tony Barrett, Seth Baum, and Kelly Hostetler, has been accepted for publication in Science and Global Security.

The paper discusses the possibility of US-Russia nuclear war occurring when one country mistakenly concludes that a false alarm is real and launches nuclear weapons in what it believes is a counterattack. Inadvertent US-Russia nuclear war has come close to happening before, even since the end …

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New Paper: Geoengineering Double Catastrophe

Post Date January 04, 2013
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Category emerging technologies, environmental change, publications

GCRI has a new academic paper out. Double catastrophe: Intermittent stratospheric geoengineering induced by societal collapse, by Seth Baum, Timothy Maher, and Jacob Haqq-Misra, has been accepted for publication in Environment, Systems and Decisions.

The paper discusses a global catastrophe scenario involving climate change, geoengineering, and a separate catastrophe. In the scenario, stratospheric geoengineering is conducted to cool the warming temperatures associated with climate change. Then, an initial catastrophe separate from climate change prevents humanity from continuing the geoengineering, causing a rapid temperature increase. The initial …

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Nuclear War Group Discusses Ongoing Risk Of US-Russia Nuclear War

Post Date December 30, 2012
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Category discussion groups, nuclear war

On Thursday 29 November, GCRI hosted the fourth of a series of discussions among a group of nuclear war scholars. This discussion focused on the ongoing risk of an all-out nuclear war between the United States and Russia.

Meeting participants included Martin Hellman of Stanford, Benoit Pelopidas of Bristol, James Scouras of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, and Tony Barret, Seth Baum, Jacob Haqq-Misra, and Tim Maher, all of GCRI.

The reason for focusing on US-Russia nuclear war is simple: the US and Russia still …

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Grant Wilson On Emerging Tech Treaties At IEET

Post Date December 30, 2012
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Category articles, emerging technologies, law & policy

Quick FYI: Grant Wilson has a new article at IEET: Emerging Technologies: Should They Be Internationally Regulated? The article discusses existing and possible treaties for a range of emerging technologies, including bioengineering, geoengineering, and artificial intelligence. The article summarizes Grant’s recent law paper Minimizing global catastrophic and existential risks from emerging technologies through international law.

Note that the IEET article lists me as an author on this. My name is only listed because I was the one with existing IEET status. Grant wrote the article. I …

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Happy Apocalypse Day

Post Date December 21, 2012
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Category outreach

On behalf of the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute, I would like to wish you all a happy apocalypse day. As you most likely already know, today, 21 December 2012, is the day that some people have misinterpreted as being the day that the world ends. While the skies are very cloudy here in New York City, I am otherwise pleased to report that the world has not actually ended.

While the threat of apocalypse today could be easily dismissed, the overall ongoing threat of global catastrophe …

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New Time Zones Resource

Post Date December 20, 2012
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Category resources

GCRI is pleased to announce the publication of its newest resource for the global catastrophic risk community, a time zone coordination guide. This resource is helpful for anyone who needs to coordinate activities across multiple time zones around the world, whether for global catastrophic risk or for other purposes.

Global catastrophic risk is of course an inherently global issue. Likewise addressing it benefits from contributions from around the world. GCRI is increasingly active in facilitating a global conversation about global catastrophic risk. Sometimes these conversations are …

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GCRI Welcomes Research Assistant Kaitlin Butler

Post Date December 05, 2012
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Category environmental change, law & policy, new affiliate

We’re pleased to announce our newest affiliate, Research Assistant Kaitlin Butler. Here’s her bio from the GCRI People page.

Kaitlin is a Research Assistant for the Consortium for Climate Risks in the Urban Northeast, a NOAA Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments project. Kaitlin holds an M.A. in Climate and Society from Columbia University (2011) and a B.A. in Sociology from Vassar College (2007). As a GCRI Research Assistant, Kaitlin contributes to GCRI research on environmental change, law & policy, and psychology & communications.

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Katherine Thompson Gives GCRI Public Lecture On Psychology Of Uncertainty

Post Date December 05, 2012
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Category online lectures, psychology & communications, uncertainty

In GCRI’s first public lecture (26 November 2012), Katherine Thompson spoke on the psychology of uncertainty in a talk titled “What We Think About When We Think About Probability: How Our Experience Affects the Way We Perceive the Risk of Rare Events”. Katherine is a PhD student in Psychology at Columbia University and researcher with Columbia’s Center for Research on Environmental Decisions, a group I’m also affiliated with. She’s been working on, among other things, the psychology of disaster preparedness [1].

Global catastrophic risk is fundamentally …

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