First of all, don’t do as Amazon suggests, and also pick up Our Final Hour – as this is the American edition of the same book. Quite why the future is somewhat more bleak for our friends across the water, is not immediately clear, although it may have something to do with their refusal to sign the Kyoto Treaty. And now the BBC are dramatising what will happen when the supervolcano below Yellowstone Park erupts.
The book itself is fascinating. It’s only a short book at around 200 pages, but it’s very readable and you don’t need to be an expert in many subjects to understand it. It’s author, Martin Rees, is Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics at Trinity in Cambridge and is obviously widely read. In fact the only thing this book is lacking is a bibliography because there are several books mentioned in the text that I’d like to read at a later stage.
The book is divided up into sections taking into account the different disasters that may befall, mankind, the planet or indeed the universe. So that could be nuclear, chemical, biological, natural, or the advancement of science (from Prince Charles’ grey goo, to the possibility that an experiment in one of the particle accelerators at somewhere like CERN might cause the formation of strangelets that attract all the matter in the universe effectively ending it all.
One of the most interesting ideas about the future of life on the planet was from an almost philosophical viewpoint. Broadly speaking – and forgive me if this summary loses some of the niceties of the true argument – the fact that there have been around 60 billions alive so far (10% of whom are alive now), actually leads us to suspect that we’re probably around mid-way through the lifespan of the human race. To explain a little more, Rees uses the example of a pair of urns. The two urns each have a number of lottery tickets in them, the first with the numbers 1 to 1000, and the second with the numbers 1 to 10. If we select an urn at random and then select a ticket at random from it (paying no attention to the quantity of lottery tickets within it), and we draw number 6, then we know that it’s far likelier that we’ve drawn from the second urn to have such a low number. Another example was of someone who visited two structures in 1970 – the Berlin Wall and the Pyramids. The wall had stood for 12 years (I think) and the Pyramids for 4000. Therefore we expect that the Pyramids will remain standing a lot longer than the Berlin Wall, which did indeed come down less than twenty years later. It’s an interesting argument.
Anyhow, making you think is what this book is about, and it’s well worth a read.