Thomas Moynihan is a UK-based writer. He holds a DPhil from Oriel College, Oxford, and is currently a Visiting Researcher at Cambridge University’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk. His motivating interests include how attitudes towards temporality have changed throughout time. That is, how beliefs about deep history and the further future have become more capacious: or, how people have, across the ages, gradually discovered just how far the horizon of consequence seems to extend through space and time. In his writings, he sheds light on how the sheer scope of contingency—of the ways in which what comes before can shape all that comes thereafter—came to be recognised across various fields of knowledge and science. He also is interested in nonhuman intelligence, and the ways encounters with other animal minds have shifted humanity’s own measure of itself. Previous writings focused on the historical development of ideas around human extinction.

Moyhihan is the author of X-Risk (MIT Press, Urbanomic, 2020) and Spinal Catastrophism (MIT Press, Urbanomic 2019). He has been interviewed on CBC Radio, BBC Radio 4, ABC Radio, and has appeared on various podcasts, such as 80,000 Hours and Futures Podcast; his writings have been featured by publications such as BBC Future, The New Scientist, The Guardian, Aeon, The Conversation, The Independent, MIT Press Reader, Vice, and Tank Magazine.

Currently, he is working on a book exploring how history’s horizons have expanded throughout the past—as people have slowly woken up to the ways in which present action can scar the future for life on Earth.