Chance is our friend, but we need to understand it

Humanity is here by chance.

Sir Martin Rees.

And despite our wonderful and innovative technology, it is again chance that stops us straying into harm’s way.

The Scientific American, in the story “Doom and Gloom by 2100” by Julie Wakefield, quotes British cosmologist and astrophysicist, Sir Martin Rees, who thinks science and technology is creating not only new opportunities, but also new threats.

So compelled was he to alert people to these hazards and the special responsibilities of scientists, that in 2004 he wrote the book “Our Final Hour”.

Rees directed Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy until 1992 and then served for a decade a Royal Society Research professor before assuming the Mastership at Cambridge’s Trinity College.

He insists that astronomers are well positioned to ponder the fate of humanity.

Writing about Rees, Wakefield says: “Innovation is changing things faster than ever before, and such increasing unpredictability leaves civilization more vulnerable to misadventure as well as disaster by design”.

Wakefield writes that Rees has made a £1,000 wager he hopes to lose arguing that a biological incident will claim one million lives by 2020.

Rees said: “In this increasingly connected world where individuals have more power than ever before at their fingertips, society should worry more about some kind of massive calamity, however improbable.”

He argues that it is possible to tip the balance to civilization’s favour. However, to do that, he says, environmental and biomedical issues should be higher on the political agenda.

“To raise the debate above the level of rhetoric,” he says, “the public must be much better informed.”