Existential Risk: Panel Discussion

Coming from the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, hosted at the Sydney Opera House, this panel discussion includes Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction and Field Notes from a Catastrophe, Steven Pinker, author of The Blank Slate and more recently The Better Angels of our Nature, Tim Flannery, co-founder of the Copenhagen Climate Council, and Jaan Tallinn, Director for the Center for the Study of Existential Risk in Cambridge, England. The focus of this panel, moderated by Natasha Mitchell, asks the following questions: What does the future hold? A reign of world peace with stunning medical breakthroughs? Or a world where human beings have destroyed the web of living things and put our own existence at risk by playing with science we don’t fully understand? Originally published on Sep 1, 2014