This short paper is an introduction to Confronting Future Catastrophic Threats to Humanity, a special issue of the journal Futures covering solutions for addressing global catastrophic risk. It begins as follows:
Humanity faces a range of threats to its viability as a civilization and its very survival. These catastrophic threats include natural disasters such as supervolcano eruptions and large asteroid collisions as well as disasters caused by human activity such as nuclear war and global warming. The threats are diverse, but their would-be result is the same: the collapse of global human civilization or even human extinction.
These diverse threats are increasingly studied as one integrated field, using terms such as existential risk, global catastrophic risk, global megacrisis, ultimate harm, survival research, and simply catastrophe. Contributions to this field come from diverse intellectual disciplines, including economics, philosophy, astronomy, and risk analysis, in addition to the disciplines of each specific risk. Futures studies has been especially active, with futures journals (including this one) hosting several special issues and symposia and publishing numerous stand-alone articles. The present special issue continues this interdisciplinary, futures-oriented tradition.
Academic citation:
Seth D. Baum and Bruce E. Tonn, 2015. Introduction: Confronting future catastrophic threats to humanity. Futures, vol. 72 (September), pages 1-3, DOI 10.1016/j.futures.2015.08.004.
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Image credit: Elsevier
This blog post was published on 28 July 2020 as part of a website overhaul and backdated to reflect the time of the publication of the work referenced here.
