Sometimes, when you dig into the Earth, past its surface
and into the crustal layers, omens appear. In 1676, Oxford professor
Robert Plot was putting the final touches on his masterwork, The Natural History of Oxfordshire,
when he received a strange gift from a friend. The gift was a fossil, a
chipped-off section of bone dug from a local quarry of limestone. Plot
recognised it as a femur at once, but he was puzzled by its
extraordinary size. The fossil was only a fragment, the knobby end of
the original thigh bone, but it weighed more than 20 lbs (nine kilos).
It was so massive that Plot thought it belonged to a giant human, a
victim of the Biblical flood. He was wrong, of course, but he had the
conceptual contours nailed. The bone did come from a species lost to
time; a species vanished by a prehistoric catastrophe. Only it wasn’t a
giant. It was a Megalosaurus, a feathered carnivore from the Middle
Jurassic.
Plot’s fossil was the first dinosaur bone to appear in the scientific literature, but many have followed it, out of the rocky depths and onto museum pedestals, where today they stand erect, symbols of a radical and haunting notion: a set of wildly different creatures once ruled this Earth, until something mysterious ripped them clean out of existence.
Last December I came face to face with a Megalosaurus at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. I was there to meet Nick Bostrom, a philosopher who has made a career out of contemplating distant futures, hypothetical worlds that lie thousands of years ahead in the stream of time. Bostrom is the director of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, a research collective tasked with pondering the long-term fate of human civilisation. He founded the institute in 2005, at the age of 32, two years after coming to Oxford from Yale. Bostrom has a cushy gig, so far as academics go. He has no teaching requirements, and wide latitude to pursue his own research interests, a cluster of questions he considers crucial to the future of humanity.
Read more here
Plot’s fossil was the first dinosaur bone to appear in the scientific literature, but many have followed it, out of the rocky depths and onto museum pedestals, where today they stand erect, symbols of a radical and haunting notion: a set of wildly different creatures once ruled this Earth, until something mysterious ripped them clean out of existence.
Last December I came face to face with a Megalosaurus at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. I was there to meet Nick Bostrom, a philosopher who has made a career out of contemplating distant futures, hypothetical worlds that lie thousands of years ahead in the stream of time. Bostrom is the director of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, a research collective tasked with pondering the long-term fate of human civilisation. He founded the institute in 2005, at the age of 32, two years after coming to Oxford from Yale. Bostrom has a cushy gig, so far as academics go. He has no teaching requirements, and wide latitude to pursue his own research interests, a cluster of questions he considers crucial to the future of humanity.
Read more here
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