Last year, I wrote an article bout how Sam Harris is a lot like Donald Trump — specifically, in the way that each has managed to bypass quality-control checkpoints in communicating with their (overlapping) audiences. Trump uses Twitter, and Harris uses his podcast. This resulted in a fair amount of…

But we need to get our act together — Every year since 2016, a group of students at Princeton University have hosted a conference called “Envision.” The 2019 conference included speakers like Susan Schneider, Anders Sandberg, Ruha Benjamin, Aubrey de Grey, Michele Reilly, and Francesca Ferrando. I gave one of the opening talks on the first day of the…

More people than you might expect — and new technologies might give them the power to do it — For most of human history, the question of who would want to destroy the world didn’t much matter. The reason, of course, was that that no individual or group of humans could demolish civilization or cause our extinction. …

Between climate change and more, we could be sleepwalking into annihilation — Asteroids, supervolcanoes, nuclear war, climate change, engineered viruses, artificial intelligence, and even aliens — the end may be closer than you think. For the next two weeks, OneZero will be featuring essays drawn from editor Bryan Walsh’s forthcoming book End Times: A Brief Guide to the End of the World…

When the fate of the human species is at stake, panic is the right response — if it’s followed by action — During a recent speech at the European Union parliament, the teenage activist Greta Thunberg began her talk as follows: “My name is Greta Thunberg. I’m 16 years old. I come from Sweden. And I want you to panic.” Her reasoning goes like this: While panicking is counterproductive when there’s nothing…

SOME CLARIFICATIONS: Oy vey. Re: Robin Hanson’s statement: “rape and slavery are far from the only possible levers!” Maybe I could have been clearer: at no point have I thought, and nowhere have I claimed, that Hanson endorses rape and slavery. Rather, my point is this: Imagine that I make…

There is a good chance that a child born today will live to see colonies on Mars, and perhaps beyond. NASA operates a colonization program that aims to put humans on Mars by the 2030s, and the founder of SpaceX, Elon Musk, declared in 2016 that martian colonies would pop…

Last February, Buzzfeed reported on “many wide-ranging allegations of [Lawrence] Krauss’s inappropriate behavior [toward women] over the last decade — including groping women, ogling and making sexist jokes to undergrads, and telling an employee at Arizona State University, where he is a tenured professor, that he was going to buy…

Is the world getting better? The Harvard psychologist and polymath Steven Pinker wants you to think that it is. …