Apply to join SHELTER Weekend this August

SHELTER (Safe Haven to Evade Long-Term Extinction Risk) Weekend is a 3-4 day event focused on gaining strategic clarity on exactly what’s needed to build civilizational shelters, and perhaps kickstarting an organization to do so.

It will take place August 5th-8th 2022, at a residential retreat in Oxford, UK.

We are recruiting participants from a broad range of backgrounds.

Travel, accommodation, and food during the event will be covered. (If attending the event still seems tricky to you, contact us and we’ll try to work something out.)

The initial application is extremely short and has a June 26th deadline.

Apply now!

About the event

Civilizational shelters could help civilization to survive or rebuild following global catastrophes. Building such shelters could be a high-value intervention (1), (2), (3), (4), but there is little systematic work on them so far.

SHELTER Weekend will bring relevant actors together to further explore the idea and consider concrete steps to implementation.

Questions we hope to get some clarity on include:

  1. What scale would we need for shelters to be helpful above existing natural, public, and private shelters?

  2. What information or technology might be most helpful to have stored within shelters?

  3. What are the major social challenges that shelters would face in the event of a catastrophe?

  4. To what extent should shelters host capacity for developing medical countermeasures?

  5. How should civilizational shelters be managed in the years before a potential catastrophe?

  6. What are the bottlenecks to having civilizational shelters?

  7. What are the most useful things that could be done over the next 2-3 years on civilizational shelters?

  8. What would we need from initial teams working on these challenges?

We hope that this event will lead to greater strategic clarity, better professional integration of people thinking about shelters, and perhaps concrete plans for work over the next months and years towards a future which has a robust line of defense against civilization-ending catastrophes in the form of shelters.

Who we’re looking for

Participants might have skills in: management, leadership, engineering (various flavors), biosecurity research, (anti-)nuclear research, or disaster planning. But this list is not exhaustive — we surely have not yet thought of all possible roles! Please err on the side of applying even if you are unsure whether or not your skills could be helpful.

We are most interested in applications from people who want to engage with both the macrostrategic questions of how shelters could help, and the pragmatic questions of what will be needed from new organizations. Still, if you’re particularly keen on one half of this we would be excited for you to apply.

It would be great to have event participants be excited about potentially joining a shelter-building organization that might result from the event. But you do not need to want to do this to participate in the event, and you do not need to participate in the event in order to do this!

Contact us

Apply now!