PRESENT AT THE DESTRUCTION:

Doom and Gloom by 2100: Unleashed viruses, environmental disaster, gray goo--astronomer Sir Martin Rees calculates that civilization has only a 50-50 chance of making it to the 22nd century (Julie Wakefield, 6/21/04, Scientific American)

Death and destruction are not exactly foreign themes in cosmology. Black holes can rip apart stars; unseen dark energy hurtles galaxies away from one another. So maybe it's not surprising that Sir Martin Rees, Britain's Astronomer Royal, sees mayhem down on Earth. He warns that civilization has only an even chance of making it to the end of this century. The 62-year-old University of Cambridge astrophysicist and cosmologist feels so strongly about his grim prognostication that last year he published a popular book about it called Our Final Hour. [...]

Innovation is changing things faster than ever before, and such increasing unpredictability leaves civilization more vulnerable to misadventure as well as to disaster by design. Advances in biotechnology, in terms of both increasing sophistication and decreasing costs, means that weaponized germs pose a huge risk. In a wager he hopes to lose, Rees has bet $1,000 that a biological incident will claim one million lives by 2020. "In this increasingly interconnected world where individuals have more power than ever before at their fingertips, society should worry more about some kind of massive calamity, however improbable," Rees states.

In calculating the coin-flip odds for humanity at 2100, Rees adds together those improbabilities, including those posed by self-replicating, nanometer-size robots. These nanobots might chew through organic matter and turn the biosphere into a lifeless "gray goo," a term coined by nanotech pioneer K. Eric Drexler in the 1980s. Gray goo achieved more prominence last year after Prince Charles expressed concern about it and Michael Crichton used it as the basis for his novel Prey.

It's not just out-of-control technology that has Rees worried. Basic science can present a threat. In July 1999 Scientific American ran a letter by Princeton University physicist Frank Wilczek, who pointed to "a speculative but quite respectable possibility" that the Brookhaven National Laboratory's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) could produce particles called strangelets. These subatomic oddities could grow by consuming nearby ordinary matter. Soon after, a British newspaper posited that a "big bang machine"--that is, RHIC--could destroy the planet.

The ensuing media flurry led then Brookhaven director John H. Marburger to pull together an outside panel of physicists, who concluded that the strangelet scenario was remote, about a one-in-50-million chance of killing six billion people. (Another panel, convened by CERN near Geneva, drew a similar conclusion.) In Our Final Hour, Rees noted that the chances can be expressed differently--namely, that 120 people might die from the RHIC experiments. He thinks experts should debate in public the merits and risks of such work.

While he's certainly right that the worth and wisdom of scientific work should be debated, and if decided against should be forbidden, predictions about the imminent end of the world are inevitably boastful.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 24, 2004 7:33 AM