Six Easy Steps to Avert the Collapse of Civilization

Here’s a talk I gave at the Long Now Foundation about my optimistic hopes that the advent of the internet will mitigate threats that brought down previous civilizations.

This is an idea I’ve been working on for several years. It started as a short piece in Nature, then a short essay on Edge.org, and finally debuted as an iPad app called Why the Net Matters. For over a week this was the most watched video on fora.tv.

"David Eagleman is the kind of guy who really does make being a neuroscientist look like fun."
- New York Times

"What Eagleman seems to be calling for is a new Enlightenment."
- Sunday Herald

"David Eagleman may be the best combination of scientist and fiction-writer alive."
- Stewart Brand

"A popularizer of impressive gusto...[Eagleman] aims, grandly, to do for the study of the mind what Copernicus did for the study of the stars."
- New York Observer

"[A] neuroscientist and polymath."
- Wall Street Journal

"Eagleman has a talent for testing the untestable, for taking seemingly sophomoric notions and using them to nail down the slippery stuff of consciousness."
- The New Yorker