Future Tense (What To Worry About!))

Independent (UK) ^ | 7-25-2003

[blam]

Future tense

25 July 2003

Is mankind doomed? Against the background of the war against terror, the march of technology and environmental calamity, this has become the defining question of our age. As politicians warn of the threat from weapons of mass destruction, Prince Charles frets about the world being turned into 'grey goo' by miniature robots. Meanwhile, food campaigners warn by turns that we're going to starve if we don't plant GM crops, and if we do, there's barely time to heed warnings that Sars was just a dress rehearsal for a pandemic that will make Ebola look like the common cold. Charles Arthur weighs fact against hysteria, science against supposition - and assesses our chances of making it to the year 3000

THE PASSAGE OF TIME

Copernicus upset the Church by pointing out that the Earth did not occupy an exalted place at the centre of the universe; instead we orbited the Sun, along with some other planets. The "Copernican principle" says that wherever or whenever we are, it's nothing special. When J Richard Gott III, an astrophysicist from Princeton, visited the Berlin Wall in 1969, he used the Copernican principle to estimate how much longer it would last. It was erected in August 1961. He assumed that he was there at no special time in the wall's life - not its beginning or end, just some time during the other, say, 95 per cent of its existence. That meant that it would last between 2.66 (if he was there 97.5 per cent into its life) and 24 more years (if it was just 2.5 per cent along). Twenty years later, it fell.

The same maths with Homo sapiens (which appeared 200,000 years ago) means that we'll last between 5,100 and 7.8 million years - but not more. "Other mammal species' longevity is about two million years," Professor Gott comments. "If we remain on Earth, then we're subject to the same probabilities as other species. That's why the space programme is so important."

Worry rating: 0/10. Lots of time to go.

TINY ROBOTS AND GREY GOO

Imagine this: you're standing around minding your own business when a wave of nano-robots, so small you'd need a microscope even to see them, comes along and starts using the atoms in the clothes you're wearing to construct new versions of themselves. Metal from your buttons, starch polymer (the cotton) for fuel. Then those new ones start using you - iron from your blood, all sorts of minerals in your bones - to make copies of themselves. Within a few minutes there's just an unsightly puddle where you used to be and a whole stack more nano-robots looking for the next object - living or dead - to use. Within days the planet is covered with them, leaving nothing alive.

This is the "grey goo" scenario. Yes, the technology to build cell-sized machines is within reach, but not that needed to design machines able to replicate themselves. In a 2001 paper entitled, thrillingly, "Some Limits to Global Ecophagy by Biovorous Nanoreplicators, with Public Policy Recommendations" (translation: how politicians can stop grey goo eating the planet), Robert Freitas Jr noted two points: first, the replication might generate so much heat that the evil nanobots would fry themselves; and second, that such "badbots" could be stopped by building "goodbots" that only feed on the bad ones. Also, physics dictates that the smaller something is, the greater its drag moving through water or air. A nanobot could move about 2.5mm per second - about the speed of a racing snail.

Worry rating: 0/10. If they're ever built, we can outrun them.

CHEMICAL WEAPONS

Dangerous, deadly, and all around. World stocks of chemical weapons amount to 80,000 tonnes - half of it in Russia, stored in seven sites. Yes, the stuff is remarkably deadly if it's released near you. But the problem with chemical weapons for terrorists and nation states alike is that they're unpredictable; the wrong weather can turn an attack into a damp squib. And, although 12 people were killed when the Aum Shinrikyo cult released sarin gas on the Tokyo underground in 1995, more would have been killed by a bomb the size of the canisters.

This doesn't mean that terrorists, and terrorist states, don't want chemical weapons. But they're hard to store, hard to transport, and remarkably hard to deploy. Saddam Hussein may go down in history as the last war leader to use them. Everyone else prefers conventional weapons: an explosion is so much more final.

Worry rating: 0/10. Civilisation is not remotely threatened by these stocks.

GERMS WE CAN MAKE

"Within a few years, it may be possible for an inexperienced graduate student with a few thousand dollars' worth of equipment to download the gene structure of smallpox, insert sequences known to increase infectiousness or lethality, and produce enough material to threaten millions of people," wrote Henry Kelly, the president of the Federation of American Scientists, in The New York Times earlier this month.

Maybe - though plenty of experienced graduate students could already have a stab. But nature knows that infectious diseases are very hard to get right. Only HIV/Aids has 100 per cent mortality, and takes a long time to achieve it. By definition, lethal diseases kill their host. If they kill too quickly, they aren't passed on; if too slowly, we can detect them and isolate the infected. Any mutant smallpox or other handmade germ would certainly be too deadly or too mild. And even Sars killed fewer people worldwide than die on Britain's roads in a week. As scares go, this one is ideal - overblown and unrealistic.

Worry rating: 1/10. Bioengineered diseases would be grim, but shortlived.

BLACK HOLES

When scientists began building particle accelerators, they wondered if there was a possibility that smashing atoms together at huge energies might do something odd to what Star Trek's Mr Spock used to call "the time-space continuum". Such as, create some sort of subatomic hole that would suck in other matter.

They decided that this wasn't really a risk, because it happens already around the universe, which is still there - literally, as far as we can see. But in 1999 the question was raised again with the building of the Brookhaven accelerator in the United States. Sir Martin Rees, who is the Astronomer Royal, has evaluated the possibility and worries about it in his latest book, Our Final Hour. As accelerators get more and more powerful, they might one day create a "strangelet" of hypercompressed quarks (the smallest possible units of matter), which would bind all matter to it and then collapse everything - the whole universe - into a void that would spread out at light speed from the place that used to be Earth.

You may think that's something to make Mr Spock prick up his ears - but the only people in any position to know (the physicists who do this work) laugh off the risk. If we're doomed, they reckon it's not by this method. (And if it does happen this way, we'll know nothing about it.)

Worry rating: 1/10. Impossible to understand or estimate, and will happen too fast if it does.

GENETICALLY MODIFIED CROPS

In 1798, the mathematician Thomas Malthus noted that agricultural output grew arithmetically (1, 2, 3, ...) but populations grew geometrically (1, 2, 4, ...). To him, this suggested that starvation and disaster were not far off. Our numbers are still growing, but the GM lobby now says that we need genetically modified crops to keep pace... or face disaster.

In contrast, the anti-GM lobby thinks that using those crops could itself be the disaster. "The impact on soil fertility of GM is only poorly understood," says Stephen Tindale, the director of Greenpeace UK. "There's evidence that the pesticides used on GM crops hangs around longer in the soil, because it's not organic. That can reduce fertility. And that could rapidly lead to us not being able to feed ourselves. Far from being the way to feed the world, it could be the biggest threat."

Worry rating: 3/10. More research would clear this up.

VOLCANIC ERUPTION

Supervolcanoes - there are only a few in the world - lie dormant for hundreds of thousands of years, building up magma and then exploding with earth-shattering force. The last was in Sumatra, 75,000 years ago. It threw up enough volcanic dust to block out the sunlight, and it changed the course of life here: global temperatures fell by an average of 11C. The dust made the rain acidic. Three-quarters of the plants in the northern hemisphere died, and humans were pushed close to extinction - just a couple of thousand survived.

One example of a supervolcano is Yellowstone, the national park in the US. Scientists only realised it had a crater when they looked at satellite photographs. And when is it due to go off? Apparently, it should explode every 600,000 years... and it last exploded 640,000 years ago.

If, or when, it goes off, tens of thousands will die almost immediately, and the world's harvests will fail dramatically. Humans could once again face being snuffed out. What can we do about it? Unfortunately, nothing at present. Best buy a sweater while you're out.

Worry rating: 6/10. Big and, like other volcanoes, unstoppable.

AN ASTEROID STRIKE

The dinosaurs did not have Bruce Willis to save them, Armageddon-style, from impending doom 65 million years ago when an asteroid struck the planet. Unfortunately, neither do we. Despite the publicity about the hundreds of big and small rocks floating about our solar system, governments aren't funding a programme to spot them early enough, before they come dangerously close. "If we're due to be hit within a day, week, month or year, we aren't going to spot it," says Professor Duncan Steel, reader in astrophysics at Salford University, who has done much to alert politicians to the dangers through The Spaceguard Foundation. "But if one's due in 50 years, I think we could spot it. I do get called a doom-monger, but while it's true that an asteroid could hit Earth and push us back into the Dark Ages - it's unlikely, but possible - I'm optimistic that we have the scientific and technical capability to detect and divert it."

Even so, he thinks that it might take a cosmic calling-card to wake everyone up: something like the meteorite that came down over Tunguska, Siberia, in 1908. That was about 50 metres across and exploded in the atmosphere with the force of a 10- to 20-megaton bomb. Had it entered the atmosphere a few minutes earlier, it would have devastated London. Such events happen about once a century, on average. So statistically speaking...

Worry rating: 8/10. We have house insurance but not planet insurance. Is that sensible?

CLIMATE CHANGE

"The biggest threat we face is climate change," says Stephen Tindale of Greenpeace UK. "Especially, positive feedback loops forming within the climatic system." He worries that we might suddenly cross a threshold which would cause a flip in our climatic systems - melting the permafrost in the Arctic, thus releasing more methane into the atmosphere and speeding up climate change even more. "That's the most worrying prospect, and the one where we can say there's a possibility," Tindale says. That wouldn't wipe out the planet, but it would leave a small group of survivors scrabbling for subsistence. "It would be the end of civilisation, and of political and economic structures," he says. "It's not entirely far-fetched."

Of all the doom scenarios, this is the one that's hardest to discount, because scientists know that our climate uses many complex feedback loops that they don't fully understand. Breaking one of them down might be just the bad news we don't want to hear. But Tindale adds: "We are optimistic, though, that it's possible to address these doom scenarios through the use of new technology. Look at the ozone layer - 15 years ago that would have been high on the doom list, with the suggestion that we'd all be about to die of skin cancer. But governments acted and now it's healing. Now we need the international community to get together again."

Worry rating: 9/10. It's real, happening now, and we can do something about it.

So what are our prospects? It might seem surprising that politicians and media alike spend their time rowing about who last saw the weapons of mass destruction and how many lanes the motorways should have. The problem is that these threats tend to fall into two categories: those that make a good sound bite ("grey goo" is a rising star) and those that are vital but involve making sacrifices (climate change). Being human, we're better at worrying about short-term things than taking care of long-term issues, even when the latter are more important.

It may be that the only real way for us to avoid doom is, as a species, to grow up a little. It may take a "species incident" - an asteroid obliterating a major city, or a volcano devastating a continent - before we realise that J Richard Gott's comments really do apply to all of us. Asked where he would go if he had a time machine for an hour, he replied: "210,000 years into the future, to see if we're still here. Because I think the message from the future is - don't waste your time, humanity. You have just a little of it."

[blam]

The super-volcanos and asteroid impacts are my top worries.

[blam]

Did Asteroids And Comets Turn The Tides Of Civilization?

[Beaker]

Is mankind doomed?

Yeah, eventually...

[blam]

ping.

[RightWhale]

J Richard Gott is the physicist who has determined that time travel is possible. He would go into the future to see if we are still there, or rather, he would send a grad student since the required black hole part of the apparatus is somewhat dangerous to be near.

[LibWhacker]

They forgot one:

FOOLED BY PSEUDOSCIENCE

People give too much credence to Greenpeace et al. and stop flushing their toilets so as not to pollute our waterways. Toilets worldwide back up and drive folks outdoors where everyone either freezes to death or dies of some horrible disease.

Worry rating: 10/10. It's real. It's happening right now.

[farmfriend]

Gods, Graves, Glyphs
List for articles regarding early civilizations , life of all forms, - dinosaurs - etc.

Doesn't quite fit the profile but what the hey.

[Gal.5:1]

"Prince Charles frets about the world being turned into 'grey goo' "

Fret not, Prince Charles; mankind is not in charge of the world's destination, no matter how "sustainable" you try to make it.

[blam]

"Doesn't quite fit the profile but what the hey."

I agree, I was gonna say something but, I thought I'd let you decide. I'll report, you decide, lol

[farmfriend]

I started to ask and then figured I'd just index anyway. No big deal and thanks for the flag.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

When did that "Gods etc" start working again?

[farmfriend]

When did that "Gods etc" start working again?

Didn't know it had stopped working. I just took over indexing so I would get pinged to the threads.

[Old Professer]

Jock itch and nail fungus do it for me.

[gorush]

"Look at the ozone layer - 15 years ago that would have been high on the doom list, with the suggestion that we'd all be about to die of skin cancer. But governments acted and now it's healing."

Yeah, right, it was the governments that saved us all from that pesky (cyclical) ozone layer hole.

[jacquej]

Ya did it again, blam! Great post!!!!

I am gonna hug my pups, and be glad for every moment of the day! LOL!!! Whatever happens, we have to deal wif it, right?

[boris]

"Worry rating: 9/10. It's real, happening now, and we can do something about it."

No, it isn't.

See This.

And:

"This temperature update presents the NASA satellite measurements of monthly temperature anomalies—the difference between the observed values and the 1979–1998 mean values. Global satellite measurements are made from a series of orbiting platforms that sense the average temperature in various atmospheric layers. Here, we present the lowest level, which matches nearly perfectly with the mean temperatures measured by weather balloons in the layer between 5,000 and 28,000 feet. The satellite measurements are considered accurate to within 0.01°C and provide more uniform coverage of the entire globe than surface measurements, which tend to concentrate over land.

"April 2003: The global average temperature departure was 0.14°C; the Northern Hemisphere temperature departure was 0.25°C; and the Southern Hemisphere departure was 0.03°C.

"Below: Monthly satellite temperatures for the Northern Hemisphere (top) and Southern Hemisphere (bottom). Trend lines indicate statistically significant changes only."