#26 – Thomas Moynihan on the History of Existential Risk
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The Influence of the Copernican Revolution on Existential Risk
I think it'd be useful just to go through a few of them and just speak to how they influenced thinking about existential risk so let's start with astronomy we get this famous discovery that the earth it turns out is not the center of the universe in fact it revolves around something. The Copernican Revolution was absolutely not this knock to human self-esteem so it was decentering because you know it kind of implied this principle of mediocrity but people didn't interpret that very carefully to begin with. People believed basically that every single world would have the same kind of history and the same realities as earth for example.
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