Thomas Moynihan is a writer interested in the history of ideas surrounding both human extinction
and human flourishing.
Thomas Moynihan is a UK-based writer. He is a research fellow at the Forethought Foundation; a visiting research associate in history at St Benet’s College, Oxford University; and has worked with Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute. His research looks at the historical development of ideas surrounding human extinction, existential risk, and the long-term potential of our species. Through his writings, he aims to tell the story of how —across the ages— people have woken up to the vastness of humanity’s potential in step with learning about its sheer fragility.
Thomas’s work has been supported by the Berkeley Existential Risk Initiative and the Long-Term Future Fund; he has been interviewed on CBC Radio, BBC Radio 4, ABC Radio, and has appeared on various podcasts such as 80,000 Hours and Hear This Idea; his writings have been featured by publications such as BBC Future, The New Scientist, The Guardian, Aeon, The Conversation, The Independent, Salon, MIT Press Reader, Vice, and Tank Magazine.
At present, he is working on a book exploring how history’s horizons have expanded, as the acknowledged scope and severity of the consequences wrought by the present, upon the future, have ballooned throughout the past…
LATEST Book.
Recent Writings.
FOR BBC FUTURE
How the discovery of radioactivity taught us that we could be living at the very beginning of human history…
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
Speculations on photosynthesis, solar energy, and humanity’s fate - from Döblin, to Stapledon, to Tsiolkovsky.
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.
“There are no summits without abysses.”
— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin