I believe, from the Bible, the Apocalypse will arive in spite of man’s best intentions and efforts to stop it. This guy looks at it from a scientific point of view.
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Apocalypse now – or later?
British scientist says Earth has 50-50 chance of survival
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Martin Rees, Britain’s honorary astronomer royal, says** chances of an apocalypse have increased from 20 percent a hundred years ago to 50 percent today **because of the breakneck pace of latter-day scientific advances.
Rees, 60, who recently published the book “Our Final Hour,” says scientific discoveries are coming in a far more unpredictable and dangerous pattern than in prior decades. Of the calamities waiting to destroy civilization, he suggests, are an erupting “supervolcano” that blocks the sun, or a dramatic “bioerror,” in which scientists accidentally trigger a matter-squeezing “big bang.”
Also threatening the Earth, he says, is nuclear terrorism, deadly manufactured viruses, rogue machines and human character-altering genetic engineering. He believes by 2020, an incident of bioterror or bioerror will have killed a million people, said Reuters.
I left out most of the article, but I’m posting his conclusion which will have potentially interesting ramifications.
Is there anything that can be done to prevent such calamities?
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“We need to keep track of those who have potentially lethal knowledge,”** he said, adding there should be more effort to “reduce the number of people who feel excluded or otherwise motivated to cause harm.”
I wonder when we will reach the point of mandatory chip implants?
LOL. “And now, the weather: today will be fair and warmer, with a 20 to 50% chance of an Apocalypse. Consult your Ouija boards for details.”
Even better. Does he mention how much volcanic ash this would take? I would imagine the amount required rules out all logical possibility. The “big crunch” idea is even funnier.
This guy is a scientist? Are you serious? Wow.
Great. If CNN is running it, we may have to listen to even more of this moronitude.
Being a Professor at a respected university, unfortunately, does NOT mean you know what you’re talking about. Especially when it comes to something this speculative. There’s a Prof. at my school who is a vocal Holocaust denier who wrote a tract that was at one time rather respected among those people. Of course, he’s a Tech Professor, which raises another point - what the hell does an “astronomer” know about any of this junk?
I mean, how long til we know which way the coin fell?
When there’s a fifty percent chance of rain for the morning in the afternoon I know which fifty percent came true.
Well, they did, some paleontologists think, help kill off the dinosaurs in conjunction with the K-T event. Moroever, it thought the eruption of Mount Toba in Indonesia 75,000 years ago created a planetwide die-off and brought humanity close to extinction. In addition, the magma bed under Yellowstone National Park is overdue for a massive eruption. . .
So have a little respect for supervolcanoes, please
50% of what? A 50% chance of Armageddonm happening tomorrow? Within a year? Within a decade? At all?
“50%” means nothing unless we know what it’s 50% of. The odds of the Earth being destroyed are actually 100% if you mean “in the next ten billion years.”
Martin Rees is IMO a genius, by the way, in my book second only to Hawking of all the cosmologists in the public eye.
He has given an unsorted list of all the possible calamities that may befall the Earth, some pretty far out, some very threatening…
I think you would find that he bases his pessimism mostly on the prospect of genetic engineering leading to bioterrorism…
obviously this is not his field-
(do a google on his name to find out what oue esteemed astronomer royal * is * a specialist in- it is remarkably comprehensive)
but it is a reasonable guess to say that we have a 50-50 chance of GM bioterrorism in this next century causing a severe setback to the world economy…
just look at the effect of SARS in Toronto; it doesn’t even have to be a deadly plague, just perceived as such.
And I believe you would probably find that it is bad journalism that is causing the confusions about what his message is here.
For instance the supervolcano threat is real, but is very long term… you might have to wait millions of years for a Deccan Traps type event to reoccur.
Or it could start tomorrow, in Yellowstone park.
just you wait! My rogue machines will create a supervolcano through the use of a conveniently placed bioerror… unless, of course, the UN agrees to pay my ransom of, shall we say…
ONE MILLION DOLLARS!
Seriously, kill this thread. I feel dumber for having read it.
