Existential Hope

Facing Our Future When the Signs Look Bad

By: SJ Beard

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Hardcover | 17 December 2025

At a Glance

Hardcover
272 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
23.5 x 16.0 x 2.7

Hardcover

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We live in an era of existential risk, facing multiple threats to the survival of our species. We also face an epidemic of existential anxiety, struggling to find meaning and purpose in a complex and dehumanizing world. In such times, hope can be hard to find.

Yet, we are not alone with these problems. They have troubled people for centuries now and, with eight billion fellow human beings to work with, we can and will rise to their challenge.

In this wide-ranging exploration of humanity’s existential predicament, SJ Beard, philosopher, futurist, and pioneer of Existential Risk Studies, takes stock of why humanity got into this mess, what we have learned about ourselves, and how we can move forward in our quest for meaning, safety, and flourishing.

Ultimately, SJ argues, our future depends on breaking free from a sense of individual powerlessness to discover shared hopes, collective wisdom, and common humanity, then using them to address the many challenges we face.

About the Author

SJ Beard is Academic Programme Manager and Senior Research Associate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, University of Cambridge.

Industry Reviews

"Let SJ Beard replace your existential anxiety with existential hope – once you read this book there is no going back, and your world won't ever look quite the same again."
Mark Lynas, author of Six Minutes to Winter: Nuclear War and How to Avoid It

"SJ Beard eloquently lays out our past and current predicament to help us all direct a more hopeful future. Timely and much needed."
Hannah Critchlow, author of Joined-Up Thinking: The Science of Collective Intelligence

"SJ Beard is one of the founders of the field of existential risk and has thought deeply about the precarious nature of civilization. In this accessible work, by turns philosophical and personal, Beard flips the script and focuses on the many ways our shared humanity provides a beacon of light guiding us forward."
Daniel Holz, Chair of the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, setters of the Doomsday Clock

"a remarkably lucid read [...] Beard should, I think, be heeded as a prophet in concluding that the forces that threaten humanity as a whole are already at work diminishing, oppressing, and dehumanising the most vulnerable. The big question is not the end of the human species, but the end of humanity."
Church Times

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