Seth Baum | Global Catastrophic Risk Institute

GCRI Crowdfunding Campaign: International Treaties For Emerging Technologies

Post Date December 04, 2012

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Author Seth Baum

Grant Wilson and Seth Baum (myself) have just launched an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign Preventing Technological Disaster Through International Treaties. The campaign is raising funds to write a new paper extending Grant’s recent publication Minimizing global catastrophic and existential risks from emerging technologies through international law.

Crowdfunding is raising funds via large numbers of people. Websites like Indiegogo let people post projects for funding, and then anyone interested can contribute funds. Crowdfunding has been used to raise often quite large amounts of funding for a wide range …

New Organization Directory Resource

Post Date December 04, 2012

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Author Seth Baum

Category resources

GCRI is pleased to announce the publication of its newest resource for the global catastrophic risk community, a directory of GCR organizations. The resource features 117 organizations, each with an annotation describing the organization.

The organizations listed here work on many different aspects of GCR. The organizations cover many specific GCRs and many approaches to addressing the risks. There are also many types of organizations, including think tanks, university research groups, government agencies, and private foundations. The organizations come from many different countries, though most are …

GCRI Nuclear War Group Discusses Nuclear Winter

Post Date December 03, 2012

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Author Seth Baum

Category discussion groups, nuclear war

On Thursday 8 November 2012, GCRI hosted the third of a series of discussions among a group of nuclear war scholars. This discussion focused on the topic of nuclear winter.

Meeting participants included Martin Hellman of Stanford, Benoit Pelopidas of Bristol, James Scouras of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, George Michael of the U.S. Air Force’s Air War College, and Tony Barret, Seth Baum, Jacob Haqq-Misra, and Tim Maher, all of GCRI.

The group discussed several aspects of nuclear winter. A key question is how …

New Publication: Teaching Astrobiology In A Sustainability Course, By Seth Baum

Post Date December 03, 2012

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Author Seth Baum

Category astrobiology, publications

GCRI now has its second academic publication: Teaching astrobiology in a sustainability course by Seth Baum (i.e. me, your humble GCRI blogger).

This paper is based on Geog 30, an introductory undergraduate sustainability course I taught at Penn State. The basic idea is that while sustainability education usually focuses on sustainability on Earth, much can be learned from considering life in the universe. (Astrobiology is the study of life in the universe.) This includes a direct connection to GCR: In order to sustain Earth-originating life beyond …

Meet The Team Tuesdays: Grant Wilson

Post Date November 27, 2012

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Author Seth Baum

Category emerging technologies, environmental change, law & policy, meet the team Tuesdays

This post is part of a weekly series introducing GCRI’s members.

This past June, I was getting ready for a trip overseas when I get an email from a recent law school graduate interested in global catastrophic risk and looking for career suggestions. I was immediately intrigued. Legal thinking has an important role to play in GCR, but not many people in law gravitate to GCR. (See discussion in Arden Rowell’s Meet The Team interview.) Grant was so interested in GCR that he wanted career advice …

GCRI’s First Publication, On Emerging Technologies And International Law, By Grant Wilson

Post Date November 27, 2012

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Author Seth Baum

Category emerging technologies, law & policy, publications

As part of its research, GCRI is working on several research papers for peer-reviewed publication. The first of these papers has now been accepted, and so we are adding a publications page to our website. We will be adding more publications to this page as they become available.

The first paper, by Grant Wilson, is titled “Minimizing global catastrophic and existential risks from emerging technologies through international law“. The paper has been accepted at Virginia Environmental Law Journal and can be downloaded from the Social Science …

Meet The Team Tuesdays: Tony Barrett

Post Date November 20, 2012

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Author Seth Baum

Category meet the team Tuesdays, nuclear war

This post is part of a weekly series introducing GCRI’s members.

Tony and I met at the 2010 Society for Risk Analysis Annual Meeting. I was co-chair with Vanessa Schweizer of two sessions on global catastrophic risk. Vanessa and Tony had attended Carnegie Mellon’s Engineering & Public Policy PhD program together. Tony and I both wanted to focus our careers on GCR, and started thinking about the most effective ways of doing this. We benchmarked many other organizations and concluded that there was a need for …

Meet The Team Tuesdays: Arden Rowell

Post Date November 13, 2012

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Author Seth Baum

Category law & policy, meet the team Tuesdays

This post is part of a weekly series introducing GCRI’s members.

Arden and I met at the 2008 Society for Risk Analysis Annual Meeting. We were both at a presentation together, I think by Cass Sunstein, with whom Arden co-authored a paper on discounting while she was a law student at the University of Chicago. I had read the paper and recognized her name on her name tag after the presentation, so she and I got to talking. The conversation has continued ever since, and I …

Meet The Team Tuesdays: Jianhua Xu

Post Date November 06, 2012

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Author Seth Baum

Category meet the team Tuesdays, risk analysis

This post is part of a weekly series introducing GCRI’s members.

Global catastrophic risk is an inherently global issue. Likewise the study and response to GCR benefits from global collaboration. I was thus delighted when Jianhua expressed interest. Jianhua is based in Beijing, but we met in Sydney, at the 2012 World Congress on Risk, sponsored by the Society for Risk Analysis. Jianhua attended the session on global catastrophic risk I chaired and approached me afterwards. Her research is excellent, spanning several aspects of risk analysis. …

Hurricane Sandy & GCR In Scientific American

Post Date November 06, 2012

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Author Seth Baum

Category natural disasters

Here’s a quick FYI: I just published an article Hurricane Sandy Hints At The Perils Of Global Catastrophe in Scientific American. This discusses the impacts of Sandy on the US and Haiti, and what this means for global catastrophic risk. The basic idea is that when one event disrupts multiple parts of the world, they can’t help each other out like they usually do. Right now the US can’t help Haiti as much because it’s busy helping itself. In a global catastrophe, there may not …

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