Existential Risk

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Existential risks threaten to drive humanity to extinction, or at least permanently prohibit humanity’s future flourishing. We seem to live in an era defined, in part, by the proliferation of such risks, from extreme climate change to nuclear war, from engineered pandemics to artificial intelligence. Half of this this course guides students through the history of such risks. It explores the origins of existential risk as a concept, and then reveals how different existential risks – including nuclear winter, asteroid impacts, the ozone hole, runaway global warming, and even alien invasions – were mitigated or exacerbated in different parts of the world between the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries. In the second half of the course, students collaborate to develop solutions to a present-day or near-future existential risk that seems particularly urgent. The solutions could, hopefully, guide government responses to that risk – and thereby make the world a little safer than it once was.