Скачать или смотреть CCCR 2020 Sheri Wells Jensen - Grand futures: Who Will Be There?

Sheri Wells-Jensen is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and undergraduate minor in linguistics at Bowling Green State University (BGSU), Ohio.

Grand futures: Who Will Be There?
There’s a hugely important difference between ‘some elite bunch of humans might go into space to help save Humanity’ and ‘people like us will go into space to save our families’. Everybody except hard-core pessimists and people who are eagerly bracing for the apocalypse wants to believe in long-term survival of humanity; most people just don’t think they, in particular are the ‘kind of person’ whose contributions will make any difference. While some of us craft the long term goals, we have to simultaneously work on the very immediate goal of changing the public’s perception of whose work is important: who does science, who goes to space, whose ideas matter. The more people who understand themselves as ‘included’, the more people we have who will commit to the work. We need disabled people, women, the LGBTQIA+ community, all races, all income levels, all religious traditions and every other group I have not thought of here to understand themselves as involved. The time scale then has three components:
1. Many generations out: projects like terraforming mars and building self-sustaining space colonies
2. The next 50 years: projects like decreasing global warming that one generation of a family can see benefitting the next
3. This weekend: changes in inclusion and perception that have to start now.
We cannot predict what exactly will happen when we bring more kinds of people forward to participate in science, government, and education, but we know that when we do this, we will have more people committed to the work and a richer source of ideas to work on.

2020 Hindsight: Our Final Century Revisited was the third international conference presented by CSER, following conferences in 2016 and 2018. The Cambridge Conference on Catastrophic Risk 2020 (CCCR 2020), held remotely over 16-19 November 2020, drew on key themes from Lord Martin Rees’ seminal 2003 book Our Final Century, reflecting on the growth and development of the field of global catastrophic risk research over the last decades. More information about this conference and speakers can be found here: https://www.cser.ac.uk/events/cccr-2020/

The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) is an interdisciplinary research centre within the University of Cambridge dedicated to the study and mitigation of risks that could lead to human extinction or civilisational collapse. For more information, please visit our website:
https://www.cser.ac.uk
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