12-02, 13:00–16:00 (Europe/Luxembourg), University of Luxembourg
What can we say about the very long-term future of humanity and life in the universe? This seminar will discuss what we can predict with some rigour about the very far future, and then discuss how this poses challenges for survival, and how these challenges might be overcome. In particular I will discuss how climate and geology are likely to change over the next gigayear, stellar evolution, the Milky Way-Andromeda merger, accelerating cosmological expansion, the long-term stability of galaxies and matter. Given current knowledge many of these might be manageable through adaptation, different settlement strategies, or megascale engineering. I will also discuss some of the philosophical challenges of how to evaluate extreme long-term projects.
Dr. Anders Sandberg is a researcher at the Mimir Centre for Long Term Futures at the Institute for Futures Studies in Stockholm. His research at the centers on management of low-probability high-impact risks, societal and ethical issues surrounding human enhancement, estimating the capabilities of future technologies, uncertainty, and very long-range futures. Topics of particular interest include global catastrophic risk, existential risk, cognitive enhancement, methods of forecasting, neuroethics, SETI, transhumanism, and future-oriented public policy.
He was senior research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford 2006-2024. He is research associate of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, and the Center for the Study of Bioethics (Belgrade). He is on the board of the non-profits ALLFED and AI Objectives Institute. He is on the advisory boards of a number of organizations and often debates science and ethics in international media.
Anders has a background in computer science, neuroscience and medical engineering. He obtained his Ph.D. in computational neuroscience from Stockholm University, Sweden, for work on neural network modelling of human memory.