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 UK-based 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 think tank. He 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 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.
Ultimately, through his work & writing, Thomas aims to shed light on the ways humanity’s estimation of its biggest picture priorities—alongside the greatest perils and potentials facing us as a species—has transformed throughout the past, in response to cumulating knowledge about ourselves and our universe. After all, it is vital we remember how much worldviews and orientations can, and do, change in order to assess the scope of what we might yet be missing, today, when it comes to asking and answering ethical questions about what, ultimately, must be done.
Changing ideas of what’s possible reorganise people’s sense of what’s practical and imperative, and only by studying the history of these changes can we shed light on the structure of revolutions in worldviews, both moral and scientific. Such knowledge is vital for any stance that has plans on steering our future; it is ignored at great peril.
Thomas also is interested in nonhuman intelligence, and the ways encounters with other minds—animal, alien, and artificial—have shifted humanity’s own measure of itself throughout time. Previous writings focused on the historical development of ideas around human extinction, leading up to the current study of existential risk.
Thomas’s work has been interviewed on CBC Radio, BBC Radio 4, ABC Radio, and has appeared on various podcasts, such as 80,000 Hours, The Atlantic, and Futures Podcast; his writings have been featured by publications such as BBC Future, The New Scientist, The Guardian, Aeon, Noema Magazine, The Independent, MIT Press Reader, Vice, and Tank Magazine.
At present, he is working on a book exploring how history’s horizons have expanded throughout the past, as people have slowly woken up to the ways in which present action can scar the entire future for life…