Robin Hanson - Civilizational Goals to Prevent Decline

On Sunday, November 16, 2025, at 1 p.m. U.S. Pacific Time, the U.S. Transhumanist Party invites Robin Hanson to continue the discussion on cultural drift and how civilizational decline can be prevented by positing grand unifying goals that a society can unite around. The discussion will address the feasibility of a unifying goal such as radical life extension, which could be framed in objectively measurable ways, with specific incremental goalposts. It will also delve into the challenge of how to get from the current highly turbulent and polarized political and cultural situation to one in which large segments of society embrace the grand goal and work toward it.
In addition, the discussion will aim to address various viewer questions and observations from the previous Virtual Enlightenment Salon with Robin Hanson of August 25, 2024: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=po99ApM8T7s
Robin Hanson is an Associate Professor of Economics at George Mason University, and received his Ph.D in 1997 in social sciences from Caltech. He joined George Mason's economics faculty in 1999 after completing a two-year post-doc at U.C Berkeley. His major fields of interest include health policy, regulation, and formal political theory. He is also interested in all aspects of the future, including uploading, nanotech, cosmology and the foundations of physics, future economic growth rates, limits of computation, and the origin of life.
Read Robin Hanson’s writings on his website, Overcoming Bias: https://www.overcomingbias.com/
See Robin Hanson’s home page at George Mason University: http://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/home.html