Image courtesy of NASA, ESA, and E Perlman (Florida Institute of Technology). NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Ensuring the human race has a long-term future
'Hubble peers at the heart of a spiral galaxy'
It could be the first line of a joke: there was a philosopher, a software engineer and a scientist. But the birth of the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) is no laughing matter.
An existential risk is one that threatens the existence of our species and CSER was co-founded by Huw Price, Bertrand Russell Professor of Philosophy, Jaan Tallinn, co-founder of Skype, and Martin Rees, Emeritus Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics to interrogate these threats. The Centre was set up with a generous donation from Jaan Tallinn and its focus is on the comparatively new idea that developing technologies might lead to direct, extinction-level threats to our species.
Its goal is to steer a small fraction of Cambridge’s great intellectual resources, and of the reputation built on its past and present scientific pre-eminence, to the task of safely harnessing our rapidly-developing technological power and ensuring that our own species has a long-term future.
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Centre for the Study of Existential Risk
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Published on:
5 May 2015
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