Doom and Gloom by 2100
By Julie Wakefield
Sir Martin Rees, Britain's Astronomer Royal, warns that civilization has only an even chance of making it to the end of this century.
Rees thinks science and technology are creating not only new opportunities but also new threats.
Advances in biotechnology, in terms of both increasing sophistication and decreasing costs, means that weaponized germs pose a huge risk. Rees has bet $1,000 that a biological incident will claim one million lives by 2020.
Self-replicating, nanometer-size robots might chew through organic matter and turn the biosphere into a lifeless "gray goo."
Princeton University physicist Frank Wilczek pointed to "a speculative but quite respectable possibility" that the Brookhaven National Laboratory's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) could produce particles called strangelets. These subatomic oddities could grow by consuming nearby ordinary matter.
Life exists thanks to a happy combination of physical constants. Tweak a few, and life as we know it becomes impossible.
Comments (4)
Hopefully, he's wrong. Otherwise, I might be one of those one million people to die because of a biological incident.
i can't wait!
KTO
...its a good thing people are so optimistic. i dont think i could live here if people kept predicting the end of the world through things like bio-warfare and weapons!
oh wait...
Bleh. I'd be dead by then. Or... might not. *shrugs* I'm not going to be afraid of the future... I mean, I'm afraid in a different way.
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