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

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.