BBC On Short-Termism And Long-Term Trajectories

Richard Fisher of the BBC has published a detailed and thoughtful article The perils of short-termism: Civilisation’s greatest threat. The article covers the widespread tendency across contemporary society to focus on very short-term issues and several efforts to promote more long-term thinking and action. The article includes a detailed discussion of the research paper Long-term trajectories of human civilization, which I am lead author of. The BBC article includes each of the four types of trajectories covered in the Long-term trajectories paper (and illustrated in …

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Resilience To Global Catastrophe

View the paper “Resilience To Global Catastrophe”

One of the most important questions in the study of global catastrophic risk is how resilient global human civilization is to catastrophes. At stake here is what range of events could cause global catastrophe, and likewise how wide the scope of work on global catastrophic risk should be. A resilient civilization would only fall to a narrow range of catastrophes, and our focus could be correspondingly narrow. This short paper summarizes the state of knowledge on resilience to global …

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