Smile!

Smile!
The world doesn’t end without you.

One in two.
That’s the clean chance Sir Martin Rees, the UK’s Astronomer Royal,
gives our civilization to survive the 21st century. This estimate–humanity’s
high-stakes, slow-motion coin toss, if correct–is made early on in Rees’
popular-science guide to the apocalypse, Our Final Hour.

Rees is
no dour doomsday quack, but neither is the Cambridge professor inclined to candy
coat our predicament. Although his stated purpose is to alert us to the ways
in which we can still nudge the odds in our favor, the question hovering over
this surprisingly sprightly little volume remains: Do we feel lucky?

Even if
we do, our species may have used up all its planetary luck. Surviving 40 years
of nuclear superpower stand-off was itself a remarkable feat–and one that
looks easy in retrospect. After a brief, drunken burst of post-Cold War optimism,
new threats have been creeping in like spiders from all directions, and Rees
is coldly confident that these will multiply and fatten in the coming years,
in some cases exponentially. These gathering dangers are so critical and so
near to us that "it may not be overstatement to assert that the most crucial
location in space and time (apart from the big bang itself) could be here and
now." Who says your life is boring?

While Rees’
metaphorical coin toss haunts every page, the book is more than just scary.
Twenty-first-century dragons often given alarmist coverage in the media look
smaller in their scientific and historical contexts, while the clarity of Rees’
prose is calming. And treatments of obscure threats that skirt the line between
mainstream futurism and whimsical speculation are so gripping, you almost forget
to be afraid. But what really separates Our Final Hour from other catalogs
of the same genre is the cosmologist’s Hubble-like long-view and his bubbling
excitement over the as-yet unlocked mysteries of the universe. Rees is a man
who wants our race to colonize the galaxy and find other dimensions. And he’s
confident science will take us there.

But only
if we get out of here alive, and Sir Martin Rees is still not the guy you want
to tell you a bedtime story. In 2002, as part of Wired magazine’s
series of "long bets," he staked one thousand dollars that, as he
says in the book, "by the year 2020, an instance of bioerror or bioterror
will have killed a million people." Among current threats, Rees views the
open can of biotech as by far the most urgent and intractable. The downward
proliferation of microbiology technology will soon put the means to create and
mutate viruses in the hands of virtually anyone who wants it, and the threat
of a killer virus or bacteria’s escaping non-terrorist-related research
only grows with the accelerating advance of science.

Rees also
examines the likelihood and consequences of visits from old friends like killer
asteroids, H-bombs, earthquakes and climate change. More fascinating, however,
are the chapters on threats once reserved for sci-fi: life-destroying, self-replicating
nanotechnologies and particle accelerators that could rupture the very fabric
of the universe.

Although
the chance of these experimental catastrophes’ coming to pass is small,
Rees argues that their remote probabilities should be balanced against their
monumental consequences, and that the precautionary principle should guide all
research as we barrel into this brave new century. He likewise applies this
principle to the emission of carbon gasses–despite the uncertainties of
current climate predictions–and argues for arms control and the intensification
of efforts to protect Russia’s rusting nuclear arsenal.

In the end–pun
intended–humanity’s survival is, for the author, about more than just
ourselves. If our civilization is one of millions in a universe teeming with
intelligent life, then Rees considers our extinguishment insignificant. But
if we are unique and alone, as he suspects, the result of unimaginably complex
factors unlikely to ever be duplicated, then our continued existence and progress
takes on a cosmic meaning. In such a lonely universe, we should do everything
possible to counter the army of threats now arrayed against us, aware that fate,
as always, is at least partly in our hands.