An article with plenty to think about.
Posted on 09/06/2004 10:33:25 AM PDT by PatrickHenry
Unleashed viruses, environmental disaster, gray goo--astronomer Sir Martin Rees calculates that civilization has only a 50-50 chance of making it to the 22nd century.
Death and destruction are not exactly foreign themes in cosmology. Black holes can rip apart stars; unseen dark energy hurtles galaxies away from one another. So maybe it's not surprising that Sir Martin Rees, Britain's Astronomer Royal, sees mayhem down on Earth. He warns that civilization has only an even chance of making it to the end of this century. The 62-year-old University of Cambridge astrophysicist and cosmologist feels so strongly about his grim prognostication that last year he published a popular book about it called Our Final Hour.
The book (entitled Our Final Century in the U.K.) represents a distillation of his 20 years of thinking about cosmology, humankind and the pressures that have put the future at risk. In addition to considering familiar potential disasters such as an asteroid impact, environmental degradation, global warming, nuclear war and unstoppable pandemics, Rees thinks science and technology are creating not only new opportunities but also new threats. He felt compelled to write Our Final Hour to raise awareness about both the hazards and the special responsibilities of scientists.
As one himself, Rees was among the first to posit that giant black holes power quasars, and his work on quasar distribution helped to refute the theory that the cosmos exists in a steady state. Rees directed Cambridge's Institute of Astronomy until 1992; he then served for a decade as a Royal Society Research Professor before assuming the mastership of Cambridge's Trinity College. Since 1995 Rees has also held the honorary title of U.K. Astronomer Royal, once an active post based at Greenwich Observatory and first held by John Flamsteed and then Edmond Halley.
Astronomers are well positioned to ponder the fate of humanity, Rees insists, because they have a unique vantage point in terms of the vast timescales of the future. "Astronomers have a special perspective to see ourselves as just a part of a process that is just beginning rather than having achieved its end," he says. "And perhaps this gives an extra motive to be concerned about what happens here on Earth in this century."
Innovation is changing things faster than ever before, and such increasing unpredictability leaves civilization more vulnerable to misadventure as well as to disaster by design. Advances in biotechnology, in terms of both increasing sophistication and decreasing costs, means that weaponized germs pose a huge risk. In a wager he hopes to lose, Rees has bet $1,000 that a biological incident will claim one million lives by 2020. "In this increasingly interconnected world where individuals have more power than ever before at their fingertips, society should worry more about some kind of massive calamity, however improbable," Rees states.
In calculating the coin-flip odds for humanity at 2100, Rees adds together those improbabilities, including those posed by self-replicating, nanometer-size robots. These nanobots might chew through organic matter and turn the biosphere into a lifeless "gray goo," a term coined by nanotech pioneer K. Eric Drexler in the 1980s. Gray goo achieved more prominence last year after Prince Charles expressed concern about it and Michael Crichton used it as the basis for his novel Prey.
It's not just out-of-control technology that has Rees worried. Basic science can present a threat. In July 1999 Scientific American ran a letter by Princeton University physicist Frank Wilczek, who pointed to "a speculative but quite respectable possibility" that the Brookhaven National Laboratory's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) could produce particles called strangelets. These subatomic oddities could grow by consuming nearby ordinary matter. Soon after, a British newspaper posited that a "big bang machine"--that is, RHIC--could destroy the planet.
The ensuing media flurry led then Brookhaven director John H. Marburger to pull together an outside panel of physicists, who concluded that the strangelet scenario was remote, about a one-in-50-million chance of killing six billion people. (Another panel, convened by CERN near Geneva, drew a similar conclusion.) In Our Final Hour, Rees noted that the chances can be expressed differently--namely, that 120 people might die from the RHIC experiments. He thinks experts should debate in public the merits and risks of such work.
Some researchers were not pleased with Rees's position. Subir Sarkar, a University of Oxford cosmologist who considers Rees a true "guru" for his wide-ranging perspective and contributions to astrophysics and cosmology, contends nonetheless that Rees was "irresponsible in making a big deal of the negligible probability" connected with the particle collisions at RHIC. Rees acknowledges that other doomsday scenarios rank much higher in terms of a "risk calculus." Yet he maintains that if the safety criteria used for nuclear reactors are applied--in terms of maximum acceptable probability of deaths multiplied by number at risk--the probability of global catastrophe from any particle acceleration experiment would need to be below about one in a trillion.
Perhaps more important than his Our Final Hour arguments is Rees's ability to popularize technical subjects. "He is, by any account, one of the clearest and most readable expositors of current science to the general public," asserts friend and colleague Peter Meszaros, a Pennsylvania State University astrophysicist. Rees has written six books for the lay reader (as well as several Scientific American articles).
It's possible to tip the balance to civilization's advantage, Rees concludes, believing that environmental and biomedical issues should be higher on the political agenda. To raise the debate above the level of rhetoric, however, the public must be better informed. He looks to the U.S. to take a leadership role. But so far he finds its handling of the controversies over stem cell research and global warming to be wanting: the U.S. "has been rather remiss in tackling issues that are taken more seriously elsewhere in the world, especially environmental problems."
If humanity loses, would it really matter to the rest of the universe? Life exists thanks to a happy combination of physical constants. Tweak a few, and life as we know it becomes impossible. Those who ponder whether we were meant to be here or whether our universe is part of a multiverse, consisting of universes with different physical parameters, sometimes invoke the anthropic principle. It basically states that the universe must be able to spawn intelligent life because we are here to observe it. "Anthropic reasoning will be irrelevant if the 'final theory' defines all the constants of physics uniquely, but unavoidable if it doesn't," Rees states. "The latter option is favored by an increasing proportion of theorists"--in other words, science may be able to explain the numbers only with an anthropic argument.
Anthropic reasoning would seem to cast a supernatural pall over science. But Rees doubts that revelations from cosmology will ever resolve the controversy between science and religion. For a start, he sees no qualitative change in the debate since Newton's time: scientific explanations remain perpetually incomplete. "If we learn anything from the pursuit of science, it is that even something as basic as an atom is quite difficult to understand," Rees declares. "This alone should induce skepticism about any dogma or any claim to have achieved more than a very incomplete and metaphorical insight into any profound aspect of our existence." Or nonexistence, depending on the coin flip.
An article with plenty to think about.
YAAAAAAWN........
50-50...I'm betting on red.
DOOMED!
Sir Martin doesn't look manly enough to make it to 2100 hours tonight, much less 2020 to collect on his bet.
Is that why the phone company starts threatening me if my bill is a whole day late?
The first few posts have appeared within the first 30 seconds of posting the thread. No time to read anything but the title, if that. Nevertheless, we appreciate your deeply thoughtful remarks.
> Doom and Gloom by 2100
The Kerry campaign immediately issued a statement that if
you favor doom&gloom, Kerry is your man.
In other news, Sir Rees will be joining the Kerry
campaign as the top advisor for the next 56.8 hours,
when the next re-org is scheduled.
Yea, another well-known scientific phenomenon: Eminent man of science spouts off on areas of which he has no expertise (usually with a political slant).
I call it scientific gadflyism. So this Martin Rees is the "gray-goo" nanotechnology hysteric?
We'll be fine
From a "worst songs" website
I'd worry less about the "nanobots" and more about garden variety germs. If antibiotics peter out... heaven help us.
BUSTED
WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE! UNLESS WE DON'T!
I strongly disagree with this:
Astronomers are well positioned to ponder the fate of humanity, Rees insists, because they have a unique vantage point in terms of the vast timescales of the future.
I agree with this:
scientific explanations remain perpetually incomplete
'God is dead' - Nietszche
'Nietszche is dead' - God
Why do experiments that have even a small chance of killing everyone on Eart? Is the knowledge gained so valuable? And to think our tax dollars pay for it all. The arrogance of science is amazing.
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