The Anti-Apocalyptus Newsletter
This is the Anti-Apocalyptus Newsletter. In it I discuss existential risks, that could kill humanity, or threats serious enough to disrupt our society or hurt significant amounts of people.
It’s a newsletter about the most important, pressing issues of our time.
Issues that I feel are often forgotten today in the maelstrom of short-term politics and social media debates. We often pay more attention to the latest Twitter fight than to issues such as climate change or nuclear war, which I want to correct here.
In each issue you will receive one interesting link, like an article, scientific paper or podcast, about each of these topics:
1. Climate change
2. Weapons of mass destruction
3. Emerging technologies, like AI or biotechnology
4. Mass causes of death, like pandemics, malaria or car accidents
5. Great power wars
Inspiration for this newsletter comes from books like The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity from Toby Ord and On the Future: Prospects for Humanity by Martin Rees. It’s intended to focus on the biggest questions and issues facing the human race right now, and what the biggest challenges are to work on.
Contrary to what its subject matter suggest this newsletter isn't pessimistic about the future, nor is it about morbidity or expressions of helplessness like survivalism. This newsletter fundamentally has an optimistic angle, even when the articles I share at times will be shocking or pessimistic. I want to track what are undoubtedly the biggest scientific, technological and political challenges of our time. This newsletter wants to give them their due, and contribute to solving them.
I'm neither apocalyptic nor post-apocalyptic, I'm anti-apocalyptic.
These five topics are of course up for debate, and I might change them over time. I also realise questions like inequality, racism or animal abuse aren't in there. But these topics are a good combination of what I know, and what's important. Since my background is in technology, this angle will probably also be present prominently.
So feel free to subscribe to my newsletter or send me feedback. Hopefully it will offer something of use.
