‼️ The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity by Toby Ord ‼️

 59/∞

Rating: ⭐️⭐️

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📚 Length: 480 pages

🔊Audiobook: 8 hours 45 minutes

Why you should read this book?

💡It examines how dangerous are potential threats to humanity

💡 These threats include a nuclear war, another global pandemic, climate change, threat of technology or an impact of an asteroid

💡 Makes you think about the future of humanity, possibilities of settling other planets and stars, which you do not do in your day-to-day life because you have to pay stupid bills and fight for the survival on the planet Earth

The author claims to not to be writing an academic book. Despite his claim I find it quite academic and vague. I think you can easily skip 25% or 1/4 of this book and jam directly to chapter about ‘existential risks’ but even after that I wasn’t pleased.

The author is the philosopher at Oxford University. While I had studied law and I do have respect for other educated people in branch of humanities (even for such vague disciplines as philosophy), this book does not contain much of tangible data. Or maybe is, but it is definitely not presented in a very good, straight to the point and understandable way. 😬

While the book itself made me sometimes wonder what would a real nuclear fall out would look like, I did not give into it. I am convinced the author wanted to write his own sci-fi novel. As the matter of fact, I would recommend this book to anybody who intents to write a sci-fi book. While reading this book I thought about every single sci-fi book I have read. Including Metro 2033. A Russian sci-fi novel taking place is Moscow metro system after a nuclear war which made the surface of the Earth inhabitable. This game was later turned in outstanding video games such as Metro 2033, Metro Redux, Metro Exodus and Metro Awakening. On the top of that, when you consider that Russia is now at war with Ukraine, it is not such impossible scenario. I have the entire trilogy of Metro 2033, Metro 2034 and Metro 2035 as a book in German, but after I finished the first one I was kind of lazy to carry on with the other two (each book is around 1000 pages at least, because I have to think when and concentrate like crazy when reading in German).

There was another game which came to my mind when I read this book, called The Spore. You start your life as a little bacteria, then you start to eat the other ones and slowly but surely you will develop into your own species capable of travelling and settling other planets, solar system and even galaxies. Spores is for children, but I played it as an adult and I absolutely loved it! 😀❤️

It also made me think about the movie Alien and esp. about the latest one called Alien: Romulus.

When you look on the cover of this book, you see a picture of the planet Earth taken from the Moon. The author talks about well known facts such as: our solar system is not ethereal, it is here only for a limited period of time. Once the Sun will burn most of its nuclear fuel, it will expand, overheat and eventually turns into a supernova and explodes. So we as humanity really need to continue to develop to the post we will became capable of interstellar travel and settle other planets in the other solar systems and one day even galaxies (sadly even the closest one is so far away it does not make sense to even think about it now).

What the author is trying to say is that the biggest danger to humanity are we, humans. Old says that the biggest risks to humanity are represented by nuclear war and anthropological dangers (global warming). He says that we should be responsible and invest into the creation of institutions which (similar to OSN) which would help to prevent and eventually diminish these kinds of danger. That is a political statement, from my perspective…

I am convinced that calling this book ‘the existential risks to humanity’ was an academic excuse to an attempt to write a sci-fi where humans would be colonising new planets, travelling to the other stars and maybe the nearest galaxies, but why he did not do that? Why he had to write a book where literally a few chapters are dedicated to the actual topic? 😃 Well, somebody ought to ask him. 

Kaiser’s Verdict: ⭐️ (not so much recommended read unless you look for inspiration to write a sci-fi novel)

As already said, I think this book diverts from the topic, it is vague and not straight to the point. 

👉 Buy this book! 👈 through my link and help me build this website! 😊

⭐️⭐️

Feel free to like, share and comment or recommend books/courses you find inspirational yourself. I’m keen to hear about them.

Coming Up Next:

The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

Peace 🧘‍♂️✌️🌱