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Sir Martin Rees (1942—) is a professor of cosmology and astrophysics and Master of Trinity College at the University of Cambridge.
My subjective attitude was better expressed by the mathematician and philosopher Frank Ramsey, a member of the same College in Cambridge (King’s) to which I now belong: “I don’t feel the least humble before the vastness of the heavens. The stars may be large, but they cannot think or love; and these are qualities which impress me far more than size does. . . . My picture of the world is drawn in perspective, and not like a model drawn to scale. The foreground is occupied by human beings, and the stars are all as small as threepenny bits.”
Martin Rees, Our Final Hour: A Scientist’s Warning: How Terror, Error, and Environmental Disaster Threaten Humankind’s Future in This Century—On Earth and Beyond (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 5.
It may not be absurd hyperbole—indeed, it may not even be an overstatement—to assert that the most crucial location in space and time (apart from the big bang itself) could be here and now. I think the odds are no better than fifty-fifty that our present civilisation on Earth will survive to the end of the present century. Our choices and actions could ensure the perpetual future of life (not just on Earth, but perhaps far beyond it, too). Or in contrast, through malign intent, or through misadventure, twenty-first century technology could jeopardise life’s potential, foreclosing its human and posthuman future. What happens here on Earth, in this century, could conceivably make the difference between a near eternity filled with ever more complex and subtle forms of life and one filled with nothing but base matter.
Ibid., 7–8.
An iconic image from the 1960s was the first photograph from space, showing our spherical Earth. Jonathan Schell suggests that this picture should be complemented by another one, which focuses on our planet but is extended in time rather than in space: “The view that counts is the one from Earth, from within life. . . . From this Earthly vantage point another view—one even longer than the one from space—opens up. It is the view of our children and grandchildren, and of all the future generations of humankind, stretching ahead of us in time. . . . The thought of cutting off life’s flow, of amputating this future, is so shocking, so alien to nature, and so contradictory to life’s impulse that we can scarcely entertain it before turning away in revulsion and disbelief.”
Ibid., 169–170.
The ever-present slight risk of a global catastrophe with a “natural” cause will be greatly augmented by the risks stemming from twenty-first-century technology. Humankind will remain vulnerable so long as it stays confined here on Earth. Is it worth, in the spirit of Pascal’s wager, insuring against not just natural disasters but the probably much larger (and certainly growing) risk of the human-induced catastrophes discussed in earlier chapters? Once self-sustaining communities exist away from Earth—on the Moon, on Mars, or freely floating in space—our species would be invulnerable to even the worst global disasters.
Ibid., 170.
O’Neill’s specific scenarios may become technically feasible, but they will remain sociologically implausible. A single fragile structure containing tens of thousands of people would be even more vulnerable than integrated communities down on Earth to a single act of sabotage. A more dispersed set of smaller-scale habitats would offer more robust chances of survival and development.
Ibid., 179.
Those going into space will be impelled by an exploratory urge. But their choices will have epochal consequences. Once the threshold is crossed when there is a self-sustaining level of life in space, then life’s long-range future will be secure irrespective of any of the risks on Earth (with the single exception of the catastrophic destruction of space itself). Will this happen before our technical civilisation disintegrates, leaving this as a might-have-been? Will the self-sustaining space communities be established before a catastrophe sets back the prospect of any such enterprise, perhaps foreclosing it for ever? We live at what could be a defining moment for the cosmos, not just for our Earth.
Ibid., 180–181.
This would be as epochal an evolutionary transition as that which led to land-based life on Earth. But it could still be just the beginning of cosmic evolution.
Ibid., 181.
The first aquatic creatures crawled onto dry land in the Silurian era, more than three hundred million years ago. They may have been unprepossessing brutes, but had they been clobbered, the evolution of land-based fauna would have been jeopardised. Likewise, the post-human potential is so immense that not even the most misanthropic amongst us would countenance its being foreclosed by human actions.
Ibid., 183.
But it could turn out that the odds are heavily stacked against the emergence of life, so that our biosphere is the unique abode of intelligent and self-aware life within our Galaxy. Our small Earth’s fate would then have a significance that was truly cosmic—an importance that would reverberate through the whole of Thomas Wright’s “Celestial Creation.”
Ibid., 187–188.
The theme of this book is that humanity is more at risk than at any earlier phase in its history. The wider cosmos has a potential future that could even be infinite. But will these vast expanses of time be filled with life, or as empty as the Earth’s first sterile seas? The choice may depend on us, this century.
Ibid., 188.
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