Worst possible scenarios
Steve King
OUR FINAL CENTURY by Martin Rees Heinemann, £17.99, pp. 228, ISBN 0434008095 Sir Martin Rees has written three thrillingly good books on cosmology for non-specialists. In Before the Beginning, Just Six Numbers and Our Cosmic Habitat he made the biggest of big ideas seem not just comprehensible but excitingly available to anyone with a passing interest. Though an elegant and vivid writer, he is no show-off, preferring plainness and clarity to flashy word-painting. Certainly there is in his books none of the self-regarding razzle-dazzle that you get with so many other pop scientists.
Our Final Century is Rees's gloomiest book by far, and sits oddly with its predecessors. It is best approached with a stiff drink at the ready. Never mind that, in another six billion years or so, the dying Sun will flare up into a 'red giant' and vaporise whatever is left on Earth's surface. There are plenty of other potential catastrophes to worry about right now. Indeed, Rees reckons humankind has no more than a 50-50 chance of surviving another 100 years.
First, though, he gives us the good news. The threat of an old-fashioned nuclear holocaust has receded since the end of the cold war. The Cuban missile crisis may have brought us within a whisker of annihilation, but it passed. So much for the good news.
The nuclear threat, Rees goes on to say, will be overshadowed in coming years by other threats that could be just as destructive, and far less controllable.
These may come not primarily from national governments, not even from 'rogue states', but from individuals or small groups with access to ever more advanced technology. There are alarmingly many ways in which individuals will he able to trigger catastrophe.
Biological terror is of course one way. Rees mentions the attempt by members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult to track down Ebola in Africa in the 1990s. Fortunately they failed to find the deadly virus. But that was ten years ago. Today they wouldn't even have to go slogging through the jungle to get hold of the bug. They could simply cook it up in a home laboratory, buying all the necessary ingredients, including bits of DNA, over the internet. Rees points out that personal computers and the internet have transformed the practice of certain sciences, like astronomy, in perfectly innocent ways. 'But one would view ambivalently the empowerment of a sophisticated community of amateur biotechnologists,' he adds coolly.
Miniaturised technology is another of Rees's worries. In one lurid but apparently not altogether far-fetched scenario, socalled nanobots — tiny machines capable of self-replication and more omnivorous than any bacterium — might take over the planet, multiplying uncontrollably, devouring any kind of living matter and reducing Earth to a giant blob of grey goo.
Rees runs through these and various other horrors with admirable sangfroid. Mercifully, Our Final Century is more than a catalogue of doomsday prognostications. Rees also addresses the question of what, if anything, can he done to minimise the risks to human life posed by new technologies. Throughout the book he implores cutting-edge scientists to conduct their research responsibly and with a view to its possible misuse.
For readers left pale-faced and shaky by all this, Rees holds out a final shred of hope. There is a chance — admittedly slim but, under the circumstances, oddly reassuring — that before the designer viruses or voracious nanobots can get us, a stray comet or asteroid will do the job instead, blowing Earth to smithereens and wiping out the human race like the dinosaurs before us.
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