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Our Final Hour by Martin Rees. Basic Books. 2003. 228 pages. Check price/buy book.
Rating Future Dangers: Natural and Human-Caused
The odds are even on whether the world is coming to an end. But astronomer Martin Rees, author of Our Final Hour, doesn't tell us what to do about it.
Reviewed by Lane JenningsMartin Rees, distinguished Cambridge University cosmologist and Astronomer Royal of the United Kingdom, leaves his accustomed realm of theoretical physics to issue a stark warning to the world at large: "I think the odds are no better than 50-50 that our present civilization on Earth will survive to the end of [this] century."
Whether through malign intent or simple accident, twenty-first-century humanity’s choices and actions could "jeopardize life’s potential" in ways that range from global megadeaths to destroying the universe itself, Rees writes in Our Final Hour.
Certain natural hazards with potential to disrupt human civilization or devastate the planet have always existed. These include massive earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, extreme climate shifts (such as a new ice age), and the chance that an asteroid or comet might collide with Earth.
Rees uses these natural threats as the "baseline" against which to measure the likelihood and severity of new human-induced risks that appear to be rapidly multiplying and potentially far more devastating. According to Rees, "We are entering an era when a single person can, by one clandestine act, cause millions of deaths or render a city uninhabitable for years, and when a malfunction in cyberspace can cause havoc worldwide to a significant segment of the economy.... Indeed, disaster could be caused by someone who is merely incompetent."
Stricter governmental controls and global policing efforts can help safeguard known stockpiles of dangerous materials. But Rees foresees no method short of universal surveillance and/or mind control via drugs or electronic monitoring that can permanently prevent some technically trained but unstable individual from someday building a homemade bomb or spreading poison, disease-causing germs, or radioactive material in a public place.
Prospects for more serious industrial accidents like Chernobyl and Bhopal in the 1980s present another source of future concern. To these, Rees adds the economic turmoil and public panic likely to result from any accidental or deliberate disruption of a key global communication link like the Internet, or some act or event that could halt a major transportation system for any length of time.
Rees sees a still greater threat in the growing number and intensity of human impacts on the environment. Of special concern: the possibility that even relatively small changes such as a rise in global average temperature by a few degrees could trigger a drastic and sudden climate change or shift the track of ocean currents such as the Gulf Stream. This particular change could make weather conditions in the British Isles and parts of western Europe resemble those of northern Canada in a decade or less.
Finally, Rees draws attention to a different class of dangers that appear remote, but would unquestionably cause enormous damage if they did occur. Among these are certain lines of scientific research in genetics, nanotechnology, and high-energy particle physics. Some genetic experiments could potentially release deadly new disease organisms into the environment. Work in nanotechnology could set loose self-replicating machines the size of bacteria or smaller into the environment, where they might eat their way through the biosphere and convert everything into raw material to produce more of themselves.
Already, particle accelerators can, inside a very small area, generate heat and pressure conditions approaching those of the original Big Bang. So far as scientists know, conditions like these do not exist naturally anywhere in the universe today. Restaging the Big Bang, even on a tiny scale, could have a number of unintended consequences. Some physicists suggest that it might produce a black hole--initially very small and probably unstable. But, unless it collapsed almost instantly, such a black hole could theoretically grow to swallow everything nearby--including the planet we live on. It has even been suggested that extreme conditions inside a giant particle accelerator might locally warp the fabric of space itself, creating a bubble of altered reality that would expand outward in all directions at the speed of light and destroy our planet, our solar system, and eventually everything in the universe.
Rees’s purpose in pointing out these dangers is not simply to alarm readers, but to make them more fully aware that they have a life-and-death stake in the decisions being made by governments, corporations, and scientists every day, and to urge them to become more active in deciding what risks they are willing to assume and which ones to avoid.
Yet, this is precisely where Rees’s specialized training lets his readers down. Being a scientist, he relentlessly presents the unvarnished truth as he sees it. He lacks the ability (that marks a top military or political leader) to inspire individuals--even those who know they face desperate danger or near-certain death--with hope and courage.
I’m not being cynical here. Rees does a good job of reviewing and building on information from many individuals who have considered various dangers confronting the world today and propose possible ways to help avoid specific threats or reduce their impacts. But he can never resist qualifying each proposed action with a full list of the reasons why it may fail or prove useless. As a result, he leaves readers doubting whether any attempt to reduce dangers or control damage is really worth the effort.
To take just one example, the Spaceguard program outlined by Arthur C. Clarke in his novel Rendezvous with Rama suggests how a cost-effective effort could be made even today to locate and track asteroids that might possibly strike Earth. Rees doesn’t disagree, but he adds that, while asteroid tracking might provide months or years of advance warning before a collision occurred, comets tend to rush directly toward the sun from the outer edges of our solar system, so that even Spaceguard could not warn us in time to deflect or destroy one heading straight for Earth.
Rees concludes that "humanity is more at risk than at any earlier phase of its history." Left to choose freely, he implies, humanity would opt to avoid as many risks as possible. The result could well mean always preferring inaction to action, voluntarily renouncing innovation, and taking the line of least resistance rather than facing up to the unknown.
The very title of Rees’s book, Our Final Hour, seems a pathetic echo of Winston Churchill’s famous phrase "Their Finest Hour" from his speech to the British House of Commons, June 18, 1940, in which he urged his listeners not to focus on who to blame for past policy failures and recent military setbacks, but to look ahead and stand firm even in the face of overwhelming odds.
Rees makes clear his own level of risk-aversion when he states, regarding the Cold War, that "I personally would not have chosen to risk a one in six chance of a disaster that would have killed hundreds of millions and shattered the physical fabric of all our cities, even if the alternative was a certainty of a Soviet takeover of Western Europe."
Individual readers may agree or disagree with Rees’s judgments. But it is worth asking whether "risk" is adequately gauged merely in terms of an individual’s likelihood of staying alive. Earlier generations repeatedly risked their lives and fortunes--with no guarantees--to defend cherished beliefs and values or to find some new and better way to realize their potential. The history of humankind has been shaped by both pioneers and shopkeepers, questing heroes and steady workers, risk takers and homemakers. One would hope that prudence and planning will continue to coexist with curiosity and sheer daring as humanity discovers and invents its future.
About the Reviewer
Lane Jennings is research editor of THE FUTURIST and production editor of Future Survey.
[Reviewed in THE FUTURIST September-October 2003]
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