THOMAS MOYNIHAN IS A WRITER INTERESTED IN THE HISTORY OF IDEAS REGARDING THE FURTHER FUTURE, ALONGSIDE CHANGING ATTITUDES TO THE GRANDEST PROSPECTS & GREATEST PERILS FACING LIFE.
Thomas Moynihan is a historian of ideas & writer. He holds a DPhil from Oriel College, Oxford, and is currently a Research Affiliate at Cambridge University’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, as well as an Affiliate Researcher at the Berggruen Institute’s Antikythera thinktank.
Thomas studies how worldviews transform over time, in often radical ways, as more is learnt and revealed about the cosmos and our placement within it. In particular, he is interested in how cumulating insights about the external universe have, again and again, reorganised our sense of the biggest picture priorities, potentials, and perils facing our species.
Aside from regularly keynoting at institutions ranging from Stanford University to MIT Media Lab to Hong Kong’s Tai Kwun Contemporary, Thomas has been featured on shows and podcasts including BBC Radio 4, CBC Radio, 80,000 Hours, and The Atlantic, and his writing has appeared in publications like BBC Future, The New Scientist, The Guardian, Aeon, Noema Magazine, The Independent, MIT Press Reader, Vice, and Tank Magazine.
Amongst other projects, Thomas is currently working on a book exploring how science discovered the deep future and proved that the present moment might be able to dictate its course. The project explores our species’s changing sense of orientation within not only time, but also relative to all the ways things—in the broadest sense of the term—could have gone otherwise…
Thomas is represented by Monica MacSwan at Aitken Alexander Associates.
RECENT WRITINGS —
RECENT WRITINGS —
FOR NOEMA MAGAZINE
The process of producing artificial intelligence might also artificialize our entire planet. Many have argued this is already well underway.
From superorganisms to superintelligences, this is the story of how studying crabs led to suggestions we are unintentionally buildling a world brain.
FOR BIG THINK
A century ago, many people believed that dinosaurs roamed Venus. It was only through toppling this belief, that our neighbouring planet is swampy & sweltering, that we truly came to grips with the potentials for climate change on Earth…
FOR BBC FUTURE
In 1877, the historian Frederic Harrison wanted to bury a legacy for the 29th Century beneath the UK's ancient monument. It included poetry, music, skeletons, and a guide to being a Cockney.
FOR NOEMA MAGAZINE
People claim ideas and factions in the world of AI resemble motifs and schisms from religions of the past. Those advocating AI safety and AI accelerationism, alike, are accused of subscribing to their own opposing theologies… But what's really at stake in the game of uncloaking and scorning 'secular religions’?
FOR BBC FUTURE
Less than a century ago, one US engineer believed setting alight every coal mine on the planet would be good for the climate. He was not alone in such beliefs. The fact we've come so far in our understanding since then provides cautious hope for the future…
FOR BBC FUTURE
On lessons from forecasts produced 100 years ago: when tomorrow’s world seemed less tethered to the polar extremes of ‘utopia’ and ‘dystopia’, and other, stranger, more multifarious possibilties abounded…
FOR SPIKE ART MAGAZINE
Even if our present would shock the past, the apparent newness of AI belies that its conceptual premises are centuries old, as are the anxieties that computation arouses. Is making machines more like people turning humans more like things? And does the future where we will have our being scare us with its strangeness, or with the risk it will be more of the same, just worse?
FOR BBC FUTURE
The story behind the worry that subatomic tampering may ignite the atmosphere and detonate Earth, and what it may tell us about current fears swirling around artificial intelligence…
FOR NOEMA MAGAZINE
When people first encountered extinct beasts, they tended to blame—and even scorn—them for their demise. Through learning to stop pillorying the perished, humanity learnt a lesson in humility, important for our age of ecological crisis…
FOR THE PHILOSOPHER
Why does predicting the future of mind have such a chequered history? A reflection on contingency.
FOR BBC FUTURE
The story of how discoveries, regarding the humble ant, influenced our view of humanity's place – and ultimate prospects – within the Universe…
FOR BBC FUTURE
How the discovery of radioactivity taught us that we could be living at the very beginning of human history…
FOR THE GUARDIAN
What the history of space settlement tells us about present ambitions.
FOR THE Conversation InsightS
What would you be willing to sacrifice for the purest pleasure? The strange, fascinating, and illuminating history of ‘wireheading’.
Co-authored with Anders Sandberg.
FOR THE PHILOSOPHICAL LIFE OF PLANTS
Curious speculations on photosynthesis, solar energy, and humanity’s fate.
FOR 80,000 HOURS
Podcast and in-depth write-up for 80,000 Hours podcast, with Rob Wiblin & Keiran Harris.
FOR AEON
What the porpoise taught us about humanity’s potential — a reflection on SETI, dolphins, and silence.
FOR TANK MAGAZINE
During what could be the daybreak of human history, the severity of extinction rests on futures lost.
FOR VICE
On ideas surrounding astroengineering, Dyson spheres, and directed panspermia - past and present. Exploring proposals for space gardening and greening the galaxy.
FOR SALON
Ironically, the computations of risk that had first made global population visible to us simultaneously forced us to acknowledge that it was itself subject to risk…
FOR MIT PRESS READER
A timeline of thinking on human extinction, splitting it into 4 distinct phases. From the ancient philosophers all the way to COVID-19…
FOR THE NEW SCIENTIST
The nuclear bomb told us we are the greatest threat to our own survival – and the COVID-19 pandemic shows the lessons still to learn…
Co-authored with Anders Sandberg.
FOR THE INDEPENDENT
Realising the silence of outer space was what made us appreciate our precarious position down on this pale blue dot – so beginning our obsession with extinction.
FOR AEON MAGAZINE
Only since the Enlightenment have we been able to imagine humans going extinct. Is it a sign of our maturity as a species?
FOR PALLADIUM MAGAZINE
Futurists have imagined a conflicted spectrum of cosmic visions with intriguing convergence.
