How We Discovered Our Own Extinction (with Thomas Moynihan and Benjamin Bratton)

For most of human history, the end of the world was a divine promise, inevitable and liberating for the holy alone. But the invention of extinction changed that. This was no prophecy. It was discovery – a realization that the universe could go on without us – and probably would. In this episode, philosopher Thomas Moynihan joins Benjamin Bratton to trace the history of a shift in thinking: that the future isn’t guaranteed. They ask how our expanding knowledge of time reshaped not just our fears, but our obligations — not only to each other, but to futures we might never see. Along the way: AI, planetary intelligence, and the ethics of life beyond Earth.

Om Podcasten

The future never arrives all at once. It ripples through society long before we know what to call it. At the Berggruen Institute, we know that we need more than prediction to name what’s next; we need invention. Each week, Institute President Dawn Nakagawa introduces us to scientists and philosophers recalibrating our cosmologies, technologists coming to terms with alien intelligence, and policymakers scrambling to design systems for a world in flux.  Join thinkers and doers from the Berggruen-verse as we imagine a future that we can accomplish together, instead of one that we’re all working to prevent.