On Sunday, August 25, 2024, at 1 p.m. U.S. Pacific Time, the U.S. Transhumanist Party invites Professor Robin Hanson to discuss his thoughts on the future of civilization, including the possibility of civilizational decline due to cultural drift and how to avoid this outcome. Some topics addressed will include declining fertility throughout the world, possible cultural responses, implications for a transhumanist and techno-optimistic vision of the future, as well as whether or not we are currently in a Great Filter. 
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.
Robin Hanson introduced the idea of the Great Filter in his 1998 essay, “The Great Filter – Are We Almost Past It?” – http://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/greatfilter.html 
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