By Brian Carnell

Thursday, July 10, 2003

Proving that it's not just nutcase religious types who are wont to give firm predictions about the end of the world, British astronomer Martin Rees received a lot of credulous news coverage for his claim that human species only has a 50 percent chance of surviving the next 100 years. Conveniently, should such an apocalypse strike it will not threaten sales of Rees' new book our Final Hour.

Rees' book appears to be a rehashed version of every other "technology is going to kill us all" book. In the 1960s and 1970s the theme was that previous technologies were somewhat benign, but recombinant DNA technology was a serious threat that could endanger life as we know it. Now the watchword is that recombinant DNA may not have been all it was cracked up to be as a method of doomsday, but nanotechnology and genetic engineer really are the real deal.

As Clive Cookson put it in a review of Our Final Hour,

The flaw in this book, however, is easy to identify and it is a surprising one for an eminent scientist known for his intellectual rigour. Rees outlines a series of Doomsday scenarios, all quite unlikely, and he makes little effort to quantify their probabilities and none to bring them together into an overall risk estimate. His assertion that human civilisation has only a 50 per cent chance of surviving into the 21st century is plucked out of the air without justification.

Another problem is that Rees emphasises the growing vulnerability of humanity to scientific progress, while neglecting the increasing resilience of new technologies such as the Internet. Biotechnology will make it easier to produce deadly germs but at the same time it will offer a huge range of diagnostic and therapeutic defences against them.

Of course adding such provisos doesn't do as much for book sales as does yelling that the sky is falling.

Sources:

British scientist puts odds for apocalypse at 50-50. Deena Beasley, Reuters, June 9, 2003.

Apocalypse, now? Clive Cookson, The Financial Times (London), May 3, 2003.

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