In honor of Earth Day, Johns Hopkins Professor Daniel Deudney, author of Dark Skies: Space Expansionism, Planetary Geopolitics, and the Ends of Humanity (Oxford University Press, 2020), will discuss his out-of-this-world work on planetary geopolitics. Pizza will be served!

Accurate mental maps are vital for all practical activity, but humanity’s maps are now profoundly outdated, and urgently need replacing.  The explosive expansion of human activity empowered by advancing technology and new scientific knowledge have produced — and revealed — a New Earth, marked by multiple perils to civilization and human survival, from nuclear war and climate change to artificial superintelligence.  Over the last half century, at least nine boldly new macro-mappings of the overall human situation have been proposed.  Each encapsulates important new realities, but each also dangerously hides.  And all fail to reflect the uneven historical pathways generating global and planetary Earth and our fractured world order.