Existenziellen Risiken für die Menschheit

The interdisciplinary understanding of existential risk, i.e. scenarios with the potential to cause the humanity's extinction, is attracting increasing public attention and reflected in a growing global body of research literature. Although nuclear war, pandemics, superintelligence, climatic and ecological hazards, are among the key global issues of the 21st century, existential risk is not adequately reflected in German higher education, at least not in its entirety and interrelationships.This is hardly surprising, as the complex, multi-faceted nature of these challenges does not fit easily into conventional curricula within faculties. After all, it is not just science and technology, but societal, political, economic and legal aspects that determine the understanding of these issues and their potential solutions. While some teaching in this area has so far been offered at a few Anglo-American universities, we consider it overdue to develop, for the first time on the European continent, a holistic, interdisciplinary, participatory programme on existential risk as an open education resource.As Germany's largest university, the FernUniversität, with 50 years of experience in distance and lifelong learning, is uniquely positioned to develop, trial, and disseminate a corresponding module broadly across the population, irrespective of location, time, and educational background, and, through the OpenEU network of distance learning universities, to reach almost 400.000 students.