Karim Jebari is a researcher at the Institute for Futures Studies. He defended his doctoral thesis in 2014 at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH). His research interests are highly interdisciplinary, combining philosophy, political theory and future studies. His research at Mimir concerns ideas and issues related to global catastrophic risks and the long-term future of earth-originating life that he believes have been neglected in the X-risk community.

Karim is writing a book on the climate crisis and the future of humanity, where he argues that the climate crisis should primarily be seen as a social and political crisis, rather than only an environmental crisis. The greatest expected harm from the climate crisis is, he argues, mediated through social and political mechanisms and processes, such as economic stagnation, institutional decay, political instability, intra-state conflicts, forced migrations, and perhaps even great power conflicts. Consequently, he argues that the climate crisis not only represents a major global catastrophic risk, but could also lead, via various causal mechanisms, to an irreversible social collapse.

Karim is interested in how to understand the concept of a social collapse, and the risks associated with such outcomes. For example, how to apply theories of cultural evolution to predict likely trajectories for post-collapse populations.

He also has an interest in long-term space governance, especially with regards to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and what to do if those efforts would be successful. Interestingly, ideas about cultural evolution may also apply to how we can understand the range of possibilities for how an extraterrestrial intelligent being may reason. Karim’s interest in space governance also intersects with an interest in environmental ethics, and how familiar concepts from this domain can and cannot be extended to non-terrestrial environments. For example, how are we to understand the suffering of wild animals, and how should that understanding influence our thinking about spreading life to extraterrestrial planets?

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