{"id":7480,"date":"2020-11-11T16:26:24","date_gmt":"2020-11-11T16:26:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.urbanomic.com\/?post_type=product&#038;p=7480"},"modified":"2026-01-07T12:16:22","modified_gmt":"2026-01-07T12:16:22","slug":"x-risk-e-book","status":"publish","type":"product","link":"https:\/\/www.urbanomic.com\/wordpress\/product\/x-risk-e-book\/","title":{"rendered":"Thomas Moynihan \u2013 X-Risk E-Book"},"content":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>E-Book version of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.urbanomic.com\/wordpress\/book\/x-risk\/\">X-Risk<\/a> by Thomas Moynihan<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><em>To think about <\/em>really<em> big issues, one must overcome not only the mountain of obstacles facing any multidisciplinary scholarship, but also the temporal parochialism of one\u2019s own epoch and its\u2014often baseless and irrational\u2014intellectual fashions and mores. Thomas Moynihan succeeds in doing exactly that in this outstanding book\u2014a true celebration of synthetic thinking about what is, almost by definition, the most important topic of the epoch.<\/em><br \/>\n\u2014 Milan M. Cirkovic, author of <em>The Great Silence<\/em>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<blockquote><p><em>Thinking about the end of everything has rarely been so enjoyable and enlightening.<\/em><br \/>\n\u2014 Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>From global pandemics to prophecies of evil AI superintelligences to the impending perils of genome editing, our species is increasingly concerned with the prospects of its own extinction. With humanity\u2019s future on this planet seeming more insecure by the day, the twenty-first century has seen \u2018existential risk\u2019 become the object of a growing field of serious scientific inquiry.<\/p>\n<p>But 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\u2014one that is important for our understanding of what it means to be human in the first place.<\/p>\n<p>Retracing this untold story, <em>X-Risk<\/em> revisits the pioneers who first contemplated the possibility of human extinction, and stages the historical drama of this momentous discovery.<\/p>\n<p>Thomas Moynihan 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.<\/p>\n<p>In recollecting how we first came to care for our extinction, <em>X-Risk<\/em> reveals how today\u2019s attempts to measure and mitigate existential threats are the continuation of a project initiated over two centuries ago, and which concerns the very vocation of the human as a rational, responsible, and future-oriented being.<\/p>\n<p>Several edited extracts have been published in the MIT Press Reader:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/thereader.mitpress.mit.edu\/how-humanity-discovered-its-possible-extinction-timeline\/\">How Humanity Came To Contemplate Its Possible Extinction: A Timeline<\/a><br \/>\n<a href=\"https:\/\/thereader.mitpress.mit.edu\/classification-humankind-and-birth-of-population-science\/\">The Classification of Humankind, and the Birth of Population Science<\/a><\/p>\n[embed]https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=GEBqbPzYGGo[\/embed]\n","protected":false},"featured_media":7678,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false},"product_brand":[],"product_cat":[1603],"product_tag":[],"class_list":["post-7480","product","type-product","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","product_cat-ebooks","first","instock","downloadable","virtual","purchasable","product-type-simple"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.urbanomic.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product\/7480","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.urbanomic.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.urbanomic.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/product"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.urbanomic.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7678"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.urbanomic.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7480"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"product_brand","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.urbanomic.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product_brand?post=7480"},{"taxonomy":"product_cat","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.urbanomic.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product_cat?post=7480"},{"taxonomy":"product_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.urbanomic.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product_tag?post=7480"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}