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Global Catastrophic Risks
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 577

Global Catastrophic Risks

A Global Catastrophic Risk is one that has the potential to inflict serious damage to human well-being on a global scale. This book focuses on such risks arising from natural catastrophes (Earth-based or beyond), nuclear war, terrorism, biological weapons, totalitarianism, advanced nanotechnology, artificial intelligence and social collapse.

X-Risk
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 481

X-Risk

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2020-11-03
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  • Publisher: MIT Press

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...

The Great Silence
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 502

The Great Silence

The Great Silence explores the multifaceted problem named after the great Italian physicist Enrico Fermi and his legendary 1950 lunchtime question "Where is everybody?" In many respects, Fermi's paradox is the richest and the most challenging problem for the entire field of astrobiology and the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence (SETI) studies. This book shows how Fermi's paradox is intricately connected with many fields of learning, technology, arts, and even everyday life. It aims to establish the strongest possible version of the problem, to dispel many related confusions, obfuscations, and prejudices, as well as to offer a novel point of entry to the many solutions proposed in existing literature. Milan Cirkovic argues that any evolutionary worldview cannot avoid resolving the Great Silence problem in one guise or another.

If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens ... WHERE IS EVERYBODY?
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 294

If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens ... WHERE IS EVERYBODY?

In a 1950 conversation at Los Alamos, four world-class scientists generally agreed, given the size of the Universe, that advanced extraterrestrial civilizations must be present. But one of the four, Enrico Fermi, asked, "If these civilizations do exist, where is everybody?" Given the fact that there are perhaps 400 million stars in our Galaxy alone, and perhaps 400 million galaxies in the Universe, it stands to reason that somewhere out there, in the 14 billion-year-old cosmos, there is or once was a civilization at least as advanced as our own. Webb discusses in detail the 50 most cogent and intriguing solutions to Fermi's famous paradox.

Planet Formation and Panspermia
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 354

Planet Formation and Panspermia

An in-depth view of the panspermia hypothesis examined against the latest knowledge of planetary formation and related processes. Panspermia is the concept that life can be passively transported through space on various bodies and seed, habitable planets and moons, which we are beginning to learn may exist in large numbers. It is an old idea, but not popular with those who prefer that life on Earth started on Earth, an alternative, also unproven hypothesis. This book updates the concept of panspermia in the light of new evidence on planet formation, molecular clouds, solar system motions, supernovae ejection mechanisms, etc. Thus, it is to be a book about newly understood prospects for the m...

It Keeps Me Seeking
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 367

It Keeps Me Seeking

An exposition on the common phrase "science and religion". Science has something to say about every aspect of human experience, and religion is, broadly speaking, the attempt by people to find and assert meaningfulness.

Anthropic Bias
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 241

Anthropic Bias

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2013-10-11
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  • Publisher: Routledge

Anthropic Bias explores how to reason when you suspect that your evidence is biased by "observation selection effects"--that is, evidence that has been filtered by the precondition that there be some suitably positioned observer to "have" the evidence. This conundrum--sometimes alluded to as "the anthropic principle," "self-locating belief," or "indexical information"--turns out to be a surprisingly perplexing and intellectually stimulating challenge, one abounding with important implications for many areas in science and philosophy. There are the philosophical thought experiments and paradoxes: the Doomsday Argument; Sleeping Beauty; the Presumptuous Philosopher; Adam & Eve; the Absent-Mind...

Macro-Engineering
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 322

Macro-Engineering

Macro-engineering involves the large-scale modification and manipulation of natural systems for the benefit of mankind. The primary goals of some Earth-based macroprojects described in this book are power production, land reclamation, food production, climate change, water, transport and coastal protection. Other Earth or space projects considered here have a more futuristic ring, but our present-day technical skill makes their realization possible.

In Search of a Theory of Everything
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 187

In Search of a Theory of Everything

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2020
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  • Publisher: Unknown

In Search of a Theory of Everything is on a quest for the theory that will ultimately explain all the phenomena of nature via a single immutable overarching law.

Spinal Catastrophism
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 353

Spinal Catastrophism

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2019-12-03
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  • Publisher: MIT Press

The historical continuity of spinal catastrophism, traced across multiform encounters between philosophy, psychology, biology, and geology. Drawing on cryptic intimations in the work of J. G. Ballard, Georges Bataille, William Burroughs, André Leroi-Gourhan, Elaine Morgan, and Friedrich Nietzsche, in the late twentieth century Daniel Barker formulated the axioms of spinal catastrophism: If human morphology, upright posture, and the possibility of language are the ramified accidents of natural history, then psychic ailments are ultimately afflictions of the spine, which itself is a scale model of biogenetic trauma, a portable map of the catastrophic events that shaped that atrocity exhibitio...