What is your dangerous idea?

[Anand]

I came across a book sometime ago with the above mentioned title. I was a collection of short essays/opinions of rather famous intellectual attempting to answer that exact question. It was published by the following website.

I am intrigued to see what you guys think of this question and your opinion.

[MoreMore2Much]

Hey, it's my first post!

I'll be sure to track down that book and add it to the summer reading list.  At the cusp of graduation, I've only just discovered the great adventure that striving to think "on the edge" can really be.  I squandered my youth on other things.

I'm sort of a Pinker junkie and am 3/7 through his main books, and would have to place myself firmly along the Dennet-Pinker-Dawkins axis (triumvirate?). 

It takes a lot of confidence, expertice, and panache to come up with a MOST dangerous idea, and I don't think I have just one.  It's also hard to propose an idea, and not an outcome, like global warming or a catastrophic nuclear war, or an insurmountable problem.

To the point: the idea of an indifferent universe.  I don't want to mention religion, but rather frame the idea in the light of global warming: the results of human intelligence breaking the chains of evolution (I could elaborate here) and establishing societies have resulted in massive changes to the planet in the span of say 11,000 years, and these changes will cause direct or indirect dire consequences that extinguish all or most of human life, thus ending our little chapter of thumbs, bipedal motion, and language.  The dangerous part is not that we're dead, but that Nature never cared anyway.  Life is life is life, chemical anti-entropic chain reactions.  I don't think people are comfortable with that reality.