THOSE of a nervous disposition should look away now, and not just from the rolling news channels. They would also do well to avert their gaze from publication lists, where books forecasting doom and gloom are vying miserably for supremacy over those predicting Jihad, the apocalypse or the extinction of Homo sapiens.
Indeed, with the Iraq conflict dominating the Middle East and a mystery pneumonia virus threatening south-east Asia, I wouldn’t be surprised if an asteroid was found to be hurtling towards the western world. Hello, what’s this in my inbox? Why, it’s a media missive from the Royal Astronomical Society informing me that since its formation over four billion years ago, “planet Earth has resembled a giant bulls-eye in space, a target for asteroids and comets of all shapes and sizes”, and would I like to attend a conference discussing this cheery proposition? It’s a good job I’m a glass-half-full kinda gal.
Scientists have the edge when it comes to discussing the bumping off of humanity, for good reason. They have the expertise to hasten it (nuclear bombs) and stop it (vaccines). But I am still somewhat alarmed to see Professor Sir Martin Rees, the calm and reasonable Cambridge University cosmologist, muttering apocalyptically in his latest book, Our Final Century (Heinemann, £17.99; offer, £14.39) Buy the book. The book is subtitled with fence-sitting aplomb: Will the Human Race Survive the Twenty-first Century? Even though he’s keeping his options open, Rees has still bet a thousand dollars that by the year 2020, one biological disaster will have claimed at least a million lives. The former Astronomer Royal also believes we should colonise at least one other planet to “safeguard against the worst possible disaster — the foreclosure of intelligent life’s future through the extinction of all humankind”.
This slim but grim homage to pessimism rather cleverly appeals to different strands of the bookbuying public. Conventional science book aficionados will buy it because Rees, while outside his specialism, is a name. For science virgins desperate not to remain so, it is a useful round-up of the latest technology and science in which global danger could possibly lurk (global disease pandemics, environmental change).
And, of course, it will attract the End is Nigh brigade. Their outdated sandwich boards no longer look in danger of congealing — plenty of heavyweights have come round to their depressing way of thinking. This month also saw the paperback publication of A Guide to the End of the World, by Bill McGuire, a professor of “geophysical hazards” at University College, London (Oxford University Press, £11.99; offer, £9.59) Buy the book. McGuire focuses on natural perils, such as asteroid impacts, deadly volcanic eruptions and killer tsunamis, which suggest to him that planet Earth is “an extraordinarily fragile place that is fraught with danger”.
As Rees puts it, with cutting politeness: “Although he (McGuire) might make it sound scary, the threat of natural disasters doesn’t keep us awake at night any more than it did our ancestors. In my view the most serious ones are human-induced threats, which are getting worse.” And so Rees carries on a fine publishing tradition of scaring the reader witless, which started with such books as Laurie Garrett’s The Coming Plague (Penguin, £13.99; offer, £11.19 Buy the book) and Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone (Corgi, £5.99; offer, £5.09 Buy the book), which both explored biological threats. More recent offerings include Russian-defector-turned-grass Ken Alibek’s Biohazard (Arrow, £6.99; offer, £5.94 Buy the book), the creepy tale of his former country’s covert weapons programme, and Dorothy Crawford’s The Invisible Enemy: A Natural History of Viruses (Oxford University Press, £8.99; offer, £7.64 Buy the book), a rather more scholarly portrait of gloom.
Rees puts our odds of surviving to the end of this century at only fifty-fifty. “You’d have to be a real optimist to put our chances at better than that,” Rees tells me brightly. “Twenty or thirty years ago, a prudent person would have said there was a 30 per cent chance of 500 million people being killed by nuclear weapons. It didn’t happen, but the odds were better than even that we’d survive.
“That threat may have diminished but it hasn’t gone away. And now we have a greater variety of threats. We just have to accept that we’re going to be more vulnerable. Individuals have more power and the world is more interconnected.”
Thanks to the internet, scientific knowledge travels around the globe quickly, and it can occasionally stray into the wrong hands (interestingly, science journals are currently debating whether the cherished norm of completely open publication should continue to apply to sensitive research). Imagine, Rees says, a demented individual who could design and unleash a deadly, infective biological organism into the community. Rees writes: “An organised network of al-Qaeda-type terrorists would not be required; just a fanatic or social misfit with the mindset of those who now design computer viruses. There are people with such propensities in every country — very few, to be sure, but bio- and cyber-technologies will become so powerful that even one could be well too many.”
It matters not whether a calamitous event is perpetrated by error or terror. In a world characterised by increasing technical know-how but with growing disenfranchisement, Rees says, both risks are swollen. However, pinning down which dangers will be the greatest, Rees says, is impossible, because scientific progress is so fast. That makes predictions for a hundred years hence “absurd”. Rees says: “We know how unpredictable the past 20 years have been, so I wouldn’t want to guess.” He believes in making the disenchanted less so, but appreciates this is a political problem. He also adds, quite rightly, that the revolution in genetics means we will soon be able to alter ourselves, which moves the goalposts yet again. Who knows what species we will become in a century, or how self-destructive we will have grown? Much as I admire the eloquence of Rees’ glum reckoning, I’m a little circumspect myself.
First, I believe scientists are not as gung-ho as Rees implies, and do not gloss over the moral issues and hazards of their work. Second, whether or not by the skin of our teeth, we did survive the nuclear age. Viruses may evolve but so does our medical knowledge. We have conquered smallpox and, I reassure myself, the awesome combined might of the top ten public health laboratories in the world will soon contain Sars, the pneumonia virus terrorising Asia. The Millennium bug was supposed to do us in, but we pulled through. The human race is incredibly smart — we have developed education, medicine, sanitation and technology. Throughout history, our species has generally trodden the route towards self-preservation. I don’t have any reason to believe we have suddenly changed, even though we are more scientifically and technologically empowered than ever before.
But, as I said, I’m a glass-half-full kinda gal. If you don’t share my optimism, Ladbroke’s is offering odds of a million to one on the world ending within a century. That’s better, then, than the Lotto, although how you claim the winnings beats me.
