OMEGA MEN

We're All Gonna Die!: But it won't be from germ warfare, runaway nanobots, or shifting magnetic poles. A skeptical guide to Doomsday. (Gregg Easterbrook, July 2003, Wired)

Everywhere you turn, pundits are predicting biblical-scale disaster. In many scenarios, mankind is the culprit, unleashing atmospheric carbon dioxide, genetically engineered organisms, or runaway nanobots to exact a bitter revenge for scientific meddling. But even if human deployment of technology proves benign, Mother Nature will assert her primacy through virulent pathogens, killer asteroids, marauding comets, exploding supernovas, and other such happenstances of mass destruction.

Fringe thinking? Hardly. Sober PhDs are behind these thoughts. Citing the hazard of genetically engineered viruses, eminent astrophysicist Stephen Hawking has said, "I don't think the human race will survive the next thousand years." Martin Rees, the knighted British astronomer, agrees; he gives us a 50-50 chance. Serious thinkers such as Pulitzer Prize winner Laurie Garrett, author of The Coming Plague, and Bill Joy, who wrote Wired's own 2000 article "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us," warn of techno-calamity. Stephen Petranek, editor in chief of the science monthly Discover, crisscrosses the world lecturing on "15 Major Risks to the World and Life as We Know It." University of Maryland arms-control scholar John Steinbruner is lobbying organizations like the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the World Medical Association to establish an international review board with the power to ban research into the Pandora's box of biomedicine. [...]

At a time of global unease, worst-case scenarios have a certain appeal, not unlike reality TV. And it's only natural to focus on danger; if nature hadn't programmed human beings to be wary, the species might not have gotten this far. But a little perspective is in order. Let's review the various doomsday theories, from least threatening to most. If the end is inevitable, at least there won't be any surprises.

One helpful thing about all this rationalist hysteria is that it makes obvious some of the ways in which science resembles religion. If the claim of science and reason is that they afford a means of dispassionately analyzing reality and that this analysis leads inevitably to the conclusion that Man is relatively insignificant, these nearly universal apocalypticisms--ranging from fretting over things like Global Warming, nanotechnology and genetically-modified foods to Mr. Rees's fear that we'll open a black hole or something--are all basically attempts to restore Man to the center of existence and to place the believer at a pivotal moment in history. If we can destroy everything then we must matter as a species and if you and I are going to get to be here for the end of it all then we must matter individually. It's really nothing more than boasting: We may not get to be Alpha (God), but dammit, we're going to usurp the role of Omega! Posted by Orrin Judd at August 24, 2003 8:30 AM