The End Of The World As We Know It (2014) | Tim Flannery, Elizabeth Kolbert, Steven Pinker & Jaan Tallinn

Festival of Dangerous Ideas

What does the future hold? A reign of world peace with stunning medical breakthroughs conquering death, illness and disease? 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? Must we think in terms of these extremes to create a positive future or prevent disaster?

Join a panel of brilliant optimists and pessimists to understand some of the amazing risks and opportunities that lie before us.

Tim Flannery is an Australian scientist, activist, author and editor of over twenty books, former Chief Scientist at the federal Climate Commission, and currently leader of the independent Climate Council.

Elizabeth Kolbert is an American environmental journalist and author. She is a staff writer at the New Yorker and the author of several books, including Field Notes from a Catastrophe and The Sixth Extinction: An unnatural history.

Steven Pinker is an experimental psychologist and one of the world’s foremost writers on language, mind, and human nature. He is currently Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and his most recent book is The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why violence has declined.

Jaan Tallinn is a founding engineer of Skype and Kazaa, a co-founder of personalised medicine company MetaMed, and a co-founder of the Centre for Study of Existential Risk at Cambridge.