The first piece of fiction was Max Brooks' World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War. Brooks' style is spot-on Studs Terkel, one-on-one interviews with survivors of a global zombie apocalypse that kills billions and leaves millions of zombies swarming the bottom of the oceans, and freezing and re-freezing in frozen climes, decades after the outbreak.

Yet, the book is surprisingly upbeat. In dozens of short accounts, the survivors recount the heroism and doggedness they discovered when forced to it by circumstance. In the background, the world political landscape appears fundamentally improved, with global federalism, the Chinese Communist leadership nuked by its own army, Israel replaced with a united Palestine, and North Korea having simply disappeared.

Unlike pastoralist post-apocalyptic fiction where humans learn to re-appreciate feudalism, in two decades the lights are back on and industry is humming again, although presumably with a much lower carbon footprint. The solutions Brooks proposes for how humanity would beat back and then control zombies are surprisingly practical and technoprogressive. Instead of trying to kill all the zombies shambling on the ocean floor, for instance, he has submarines tagging them with radio locators so that coastal areas and fishing fleets can be warned of their swarming.

The second apocalyptic novel, John Barnes' Directive 51, was less optimistic about our technological future, but just as optimistic about the resilience of liberal democracy. A global terrorist movement emerges as a leaderless collective intelligence from the Web, and attacks with nano and bio plagues that eat metals, plastics, and oil.

As industrial civilization worldwide slowly grinds to a halt, the US divides into military-controlled Southeast that wants to find "the enemy" and nuke them before all military resources turn to sludge, and a more enlightened Northwest that realizes there is no enemy, only the immediate job of survival and rebuilding. Both halves make claims to continue the constitutional government of the United States after nukes vaporize the entire Executive and Congressional branches. They even take time for Presidential elections under conditions where extended martial law makes a lot more sense. Barnes' depiction of our helplessness in the face of these entirely plausible forms of bio-nano-terrorism is chilling, but his detailed examination of actual political contingency plans for national emergency is reassuring.

By contrast, I found survivalist how-to non-fiction, in the form of James W. Rawles' How to Survive the End of the World as We Know It, much more depressing. Rawles is a Christian libertarian survivalist, although he makes a point of distancing himself from the racialist and belligerent fringes of this subculture. He runs the popular survivalblog.com, and his advice is oriented toward how to prepare for the kind of complete civilizational meltdown depicted in World War Z and Directive 51.

But Rawles has little faith in the ability of constitutional democrats or even martial warriors to maintain civil order or prevent starvation. He thinks we should be preparing for scenarios of every armed compound for itself, with five year stockpiles of food, fuel, seed, guns, and just about everything that your local hardware store sells. Rawles thinks you should pick a location off major refugee traffic routes, build your fortress and then live there, or close enough so that you can reach it when the hammer comes down. Your fenced-in fortress would need a warehouse to hold all the recommended supplies, enough families and homes to man 24-7 perimeter patrols, and you could spend years getting the recommended medical, weapons, farming and light industrial training he thinks we will need. The conclusion I came away with is that if a crisis lasts longer than a couple months, my family is done for.

(I probably should mention that I couldn't get past the first fifty pages of Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic and unremittingly pessimistic The Road, because it scared the hell out of me. Since I've had kids, the idea of not being able to protect them is more abjectly terrifying than being attacked by zombies.)

Which is all a prelude to saying how pleased I am that Dr. Sean Hays has joined the IEET as director of our Securing the Future program. The Securing the Future program has been one of our four core programs since shortly after the IEET's founding.

When we started the IEET in 2005, there was an almost complete overlap between the leadership of the IEET and the Board of Directors of the World Transhumanist Association (now Humanity+). We wanted the IEET to develop its own identity, but de facto, the IEET was the thinktank to the WTA's movement organization (or as I liked to imagine, the Fabian Society to the WTA's Labour Party). When we were defining the programmatic agenda of the two organizations, we adopted nearly identical language and missions for the pro-longevity, rights of the person, and cultural programs. But we correctly noted that it was a stretch to claim mitigation of catastrophic risks under transhumanism, even though Nick Bostrom does make the case for doing so in his "Transhumanist Values" essay.

The IEET, however, had no qualms about working on catastrophic risk mitigation, or in coordinating with Nick Bostrom's catastrophic risks program at Oxford University, which produced the collected volume Global Catastrophic Risks with essays from myself, the IEET's Mike Treder, and the book's co-editors IEET Chair Nick Bostrom and IEET Fellow Milan Cirkovic. We participated in the Oxford conference that launched the book in 2008, and then organized our own seminar on catastrophic risk mitigation in the winter of 2008 in Mountain View, California.

One of the notable items we have worked to raise awareness about, staying a step ahead of the mainstream discourse, is geoengineering as a possible part of the response to global climate change. We have actively promoted the geoengineering policy writings of IEET Senior Fellow Jamais Cascio, who was recognized (along with Nick Bostrom) as one of the Top 100 Global Thinkers last year by Foreign Policy magazine.

Jamais' approach to geoengineering is a great example of the distinctiveness of a technoprogressive approach to global risks. First, as opposed to Luddite pastoralism or corporate-sponsored denialism, we recognize that technologies can pose catastrophic risks, but also that we can chart a course to a cleaner, fairer, high-tech future if we want to. Second, we set aside the idea that the Earth's ecosystem can be restored to its "natural" state, and demand that we take responsibility for ecological management. Third, we recognize that technological solutions with global impacts need globally accountable negotiation and governance. Fourth, we believe that political action to reduce catastrophic risks must receive at least as much attention as techno-fixes. And fifth, we emphasize the idea of building civilizational resilience as a strategy to prepare for the inevitable black swans.

Sean comes to us well prepared to greatly expand and deepen our work on catastrophic risks. He has been studying political theory, science policy, and international relations while working with the nano-policy folks at Arizona State University, and has just completed his doctorate on the geopolitical implications of cognitive enhancement technologies. This year he will be working on public policy and emerging technologies with the New America Foundation. He shares our goal of reaching out to the many organizations working on catastrophic risk mitigation, such as the arms control, spacewatch, biosecurity, and technological resilience communities, to move forward on practical techno-political solutions.

I was struck last week at how well positioned the IEET is now to speak to both the hopes and anxieties of the public about emerging technologies when I read the latest Pew poll of American expectations for the next forty years. Majorities of Americans believe that by 2050 "computers will be able to converse like humans," that "cancer will be cured," that "artificial limbs will perform better than natural ones," that race relations will improve, and that health care will be more affordable. But majorities also expect another world war, nuclear terrorism, global warming, worsening class inequality, a major energy crisis, and a transition to a post-oil economy. Compared to the heady days of 1999 when Pew last conducted this poll, Americans are less optimistic, but majorities still think things will be better overall by 2050.

While last week's Humanity+ Summit at Harvard was an inspiring and breakneck introduction to lots of dynamic doers and thinkers, I think it still reflected a little too much of the techno-optimism of transhumanism a la 1999 and not enough of the sober 2010 realism of oil-soaked beaches, collapsing markets, and exploding IEDs -- a little too much of the "unleash the biohackers to solve the world's problems" and not enough consideration of what dangers the democratization of biohacking could bring. Our program on catastrophic risks is intended to provide a balanced perspective, to help us speak to the public's anxieties as well as to its visionary aspirations.

With the addition of Sean, we now have dedicated program directors for three of our four programs. Kyle Munkittrick is serving as director of the Envisioning the Future program on the biopolitics of popular culture, as well as doing a great job as intern wrangler, and Kristi Scott has begun work as director of our Rights of the Person program.

Thus far, we still have an opening for a program director for our Longer, Better Lives program, to promote efforts in anti-aging research and the benefits of a "longevity dividend." Please contact us if you are interested in applying for that position.

We are also launching a new Affiliate Scholar program, for aspiring technoprogressive public intellectuals willing to commit to writing for the IEET, reviewing manuscripts for the Journal of Evolution and Technology, and generally participating in the IEET's frothy debates. Look for an official announcement of this initiative shortly.

(My garden is really struggling this summer, which is another reason for my pessimism about post-apocalyptic survival. Turns out I over-manured, which is surely a metaphor for my intellectual career.)