OUR FINAL CENTURY: Will the Human Race Survive the Twenty-first Century?By Martin ReesHeinemann, £17.99; pp228
In 1942, the Reich armaments minister Albert Speer told Hitler that the physicist Werner Heisenberg had been unable to reassure him that a nuclear chain reaction could be controlled “with absolute certainty”. There had been rumours among the Nazi atomic-bomb scientists that, once started, a nuclear explosion could blow up the planet. Speer later wrote that Hitler was “plainly not delighted with the possibility that the earth under his rule might be transformed into a glowing star”.
In Our Final Century, Martin Rees, the astronomer royal, cites the similar scruples of Allied scientists at Los Alamos during the second world war. Hans Bethe and Edward Teller, distinguished fathers of the atomic and hydrogen bombs, speculated for a time that a nuclear explosion could go out of control and destroy the world. This was probably the first instance, outside science fiction, in which scientists contemplated apocalypse as a result of their experiments. As we know all too well, President Truman ordered the testing of the first atom bomb, indicating that democracies do not have a monopoly on responsible science. After that, fears of an exploding planet receded. But scientists have not ceased to put the world in danger.
Rees’s list of dangerous science and technology includes microscopic machines that could replicate and gobble up the biosphere, and engineered viruses that could be released by terrorists or laboratory accident and cause pandemics. He cites potential environmental disasters, such as the depletion of the ozone layer, with which we are already familiar, and calamitous super-collider experiments, that are less familiar. At the heart of his anxieties lie two considerations on which depend our continued survival. How should scientists behave so as to act responsibly towards society and nature? And how should governments and multinational companies act to control proliferating and accelerating scientific research that could prove a danger to the human race? Among a multiplicity of thorny political and ethical questions, Rees also raises this: “Who should decide, and how, whether a novel experiment should go ahead if a disastrous outcome is conceivable but believed to be very, very unlikely?” This prompts one of his most terrifying set-pieces, featuring experiments with the forces that govern particle physics in places such as CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research. According to Rees, physicists envisage crashing together an atom of gold and an atom of lead that could result in an unprecedented implosion. There are three possible outcomes, routinely discussed by physicists “with a straight face”. First, a black hole could form, into which we would all disappear. Second, quarks might assemble into an “object called a stranglet”, making the oceans solid. Third, a “phase transition” could occur that would rip the “fabric of space itself”, creating a vacuum that would expand like a bubble and destroy all the atoms in our galaxy.
“This,” comments Rees with consummate understatement, “would be a cosmic calamity, not just a terrestrial one.”
Some scientists might question Rees’s inclusion of eventualities that are “very, very unlikely”. But the greater the consequence, he reasons, the more we should seek to eliminate the risk. If an experiment has a one-in-50m chance of destroying the world, he argues, we are talking not only of the elimination of the six billion people that inhabit the planet, but the destruction of the countless populations that might follow us.
Yet one does not have to meditate on remote eschatological nightmares to appreciate the central problem, which is how we will avoid present dangers. There are plenty of everyday scenarios that Rees does not neglect. In biotechnology, for example, current cloning research could alter the germ-line cells that affect human inheritance; in weapons technology, the development of a new generation of mini-nukes for preemptive strategic strikes could encourage nuclear proliferation that is already occurring apace. Rees has placed a bet that within his lifetime a routine piece of science will cause the deaths of 1m people.
Rees is all too aware of circumstances that put science and technology beyond firm, rational control. International agreements are more difficult to achieve than they ever were; multinational business, like the big drug companies, operates powerfully outside nation states; and greater control could mean unacceptably authoritarian societies. So what to do? Rees, an astrophysicist by discipline, has for at least two decades been involved with wider questions of science and society. He is adamant that scientists are responsible for the consequences of their discoveries. And if that appears to labour the obvious, readers should take note that Lewis Wolpert, until recently the chairman of Britain’s Public Understanding of Science committee, is still advocating the apolitical, morally neutral status of basic science. Next, Rees acknowledges that science necessarily operates in rapidly altering historical, political and commercial contexts, requiring widespread vigilance and flexibility of public awareness.
The case history of the first atomic bomb is instructive. The Allied scientists worked on the bomb in order ensure a deterrent.They believed that the Nazis were also racing ahead with nuclear-weapons research. The British physicist Joseph Rotblat, a scientific hero and savant in Rees’s book, resigned from Los Alamos when he learnt that the Nazis’ atomic-bomb project had failed. Rotblat, at the time, was ordered to remain silent and not contact his colleagues about his decision.
The moral is that scientists are social beings with responsibilities towards society. They are our best whistleblowers. They cannot abdicate responsibility for the uses to which their research is put, even if they live in a democracy which supposedly makes responsible decisions on their behalf. Today, when media and information technology create expanding opportunities for people to alert the public and to answer back, a scientist such as Rotblat could not be so easily silenced or deprived of allies. But are scientists facing up to their responsibilities and speaking out? The communities of science, even in the West, lost many of their freedoms during and after the second world war. They became accustomed to operating under secrecy and became dependent on funding by government, the military and big business which, in turn, determined the direction of their research. They grew used to working as cogs in the machine of Big Science.
Many scientists believed that the fall of the Berlin Wall would bring greater peace dividends to science. But there are new, unprecedented constraints in the aftermath of September 11. Increasingly, America sees science and technology as being for or against the country in the war on terrorism, and there are few areas of research that are not considered, in some sense, apt for “dual use” and, therefore, control. In this predicament it is not the “stranglet” of the super-collider that we have to fear so much as the stranglehold of a new industrial-military complex.
Scientific imagination and responsibility, which thrive on pluralism and freedom, are threatened today on every side by aggressive intellectual property-rights battles and increasing government and “security” management. Rees’s book is not just a catalogue of scare stories but a clarion call for scientists to come together, to renounce their tendency to retreat into irresponsible purity and to be, as Rotblat once put it, “human beings first and scientists second”.
Read on... books:
Our Cosmic Habitat by Martin Rees (Phoenix £7.99)
A tour of the universe
