There is a growing chance of global catastrophe, as modern scientists and philosophers warn us. It seems that we are unable to coordinate our efforts and manage existential risks and make things even worse. The cause of this is the very nature of life (and so our human nature as well), and we can't change it. However, there is a kind of knowledge that can transform personal beliefs and lead to more pro-social behavior and subjective well-being. This knowledge (and I argue that it is a deep understanding of
Throughout human history we have been haunted by horrific tales of the end of the world. The Fifth Sunset in Aztec culture, Ragnarök in Norse mythology, and the Christian apocalypse — these are just a few examples. In today’s day and age, many of us have lived through alleged doomsdays, including the Mayan calendar’s prediction of the end of time (2012), which many people took seriously. Looks like we’ve become so much accustomed to this paranoid discourse that we don’t realize h
One of the most well-known examples of such warnings is the Doomsday Clock project, a symbol metaphorically representing the likelihood of a man-made global catastrophe as proximity to midnight. In 1945, Chicago scientists, who had participated in the development of a nuclear weapon, founded the magazine Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists , and since then its members along with Nobel Prize Laureates set the clock every year. In 2018, for the first time since the Cold War, the clock was again set to two minut