> Postmodernism is so twentieth century
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Ditto for modernism and mo/pomo antagonistic binary...............
The end of the world as we know it (maybe)
Martin Rees, the astronomer royal, believes our civilisation will be lucky to survive the century. Simon Hattenstone hears why.
Thursday April 24, 2003 The Guardian
Martin Rees is rather chirpy for a horseman of the apocalypse. He welcomes me to his house in Cambridge with a firm handshake and optimistic smile.
His dog Masha wags her tail, jumps up and insists we dance. "I'm just about to make a cup of tea. Would you like one. Milk? Sugar?" A tiny bit of sugar would be lovely, I say. He trots off happily, and leaves me dancing with Masha.
In his new book, Our Final Century, the astronomer royal predicts that we're doomed. Well, almost. The subtitle is not quite so hopeless: "Will the human race survive the 21st century" it asks. Ultimately, Rees concludes that we have no more than a 50-50 chance of surviving.
He acknowledges that many people have been surprised by the book. After all, Rees is an internationally respected astrophysicist best known for highly technical work on black holes, cosmic evolution and the six numbers that define the universe. And this is certainly not a technical book - in many ways, it is not even a science book. At heart it is a series of generalised but coherent essays, written by a deeply worried man.
Rees says he doesn't know why others are so puzzled about the book. "Some people have asked me why I've written a book that seems a departure from the books I've written before as though I've suddenly shifted my interests, and that's not the case at all." After all, he's voiced his fears about the abuse of technology for many years, notably about the nuclear arms race. Now, he says, he's simply expanded his thesis to incorporate new and even nastier risks.
Has he always been so pessimistic? "I don't think the new book is irredeemably pessimistic. It says there are threats but there are also opportunities. There are some technologies that are benign socially and benign environmentally. Miniaturisation means we consume less raw materials and the internet democratises information and access." In short we should be able to feed the world, save the planet and redistribute power on a global basis. Which is fantastic. But (and this is where Rees gets into his stride): "We are inevitably empowering more people with the potentiality to harm on an ever growing scale. And we're in a society which is more brittle and interconnected, and I think this is something we are going to have to confront. Also some new technologies don't require very large-scale equipment. It needs a hell of a big facility to make a nuclear weapon, but it doesn't in order to tinker with a virus. So when we have people all over the world who experiment with biotech, then of course we are concerned that even one or two of them might misuse that knowledge with the possibility of disastrous outcomes. What I am saying is that a weirdo, someone with a mindset that could now make a computer virus, may one day be able to create a genetically modified real virus, which could cause thousands of fatalities."
Artificial intelligence is another worry. Soon enough, he says, we may make robots that are smarter than us and they may decide we are redundant. Or we may start inserting chips into our brain to make ourselves that little bit smarter or fitter and find that we end up more computer than human.
There is a chapter on asteroid impact, but he's relatively sanguine on this front. "The reason I introduced asteroid impact is that they set a baseline level of risk. But the point is that the risk of impacts is not getting any worse. The environmental risks that have increased are ones made by humans."
The more he talks about what is already happening with terror groups and anthrax scares, the more convincing he becomes. Rees says that by its nature, this jeremiad has to be generalised. When he talks about the horror that awaits us, he refers to it urbanely as a "major setback". It's a lovely way of putting it, I say, strangely comforting. "Well I can't be more specific than that. Although we can foresee what is going to happen in the next 10-20 years in science we can't foresee anything like the next 100 years ahead. In 1900 people like HG Wells and Lord Rutherford failed to foresee most of what happened in 20th-century science. All we can suspect is that the world is going to change faster and in more dimensions. Faster because certain technologies are running away, but in more dimensions because for the first time human nature isn't a fixed quantity. Over the past 2,000 to 3,000 years human beings as such haven't changed, but in this century human beings - as we know from the potentiality of genetics and targeted drugs and implants into our brains and all kinds of things could change."
I taste my tea, and try not to spit it out. Rees must have put about five spoons of sugar in it. You could imagine him distractedly filling the cup with sugar as he contemplates past, present and future - a spoonful for each new thought.
Rees is actually Sir Martin. But although he's rather posh, at times rather formidable, he does not seem like a Sir Martin. He's too nice, too human.
He shows me round the lovely old house, painted in pastel pinks. He lives here with his wife, the anthropologist and sociologist Caroline Humphries. It is crammed with culture - an eery painting of her childhood home in Edinburgh, an armless sculpture in the garden made by a friend with apologies to Michelangelo, a grand piano in the living room and books everywhere.
In one room, there is a tiny antique telescope. I ask if he still spends much work time observing. No, he says, he never has done: "It's just a hobby. I'm in close touch with people who do observations with telescopes, but the work I do is interpreting; trying to make sense of it all."
Martin Rees was born 60 years ago, and grew up in Shropshire. Both his parents were teachers - his mother taught at junior school, his father, a Cambridge graduate, taught English. I ask him if he was an inquisitive child, forever questioning the whys and wherefores of the universe. He laughs. "I do remember puzzling about particular phenomena, but normally they were rather parochial - like why do the tea leaves always pile up in the centre of a bowl when you spin it round. I only learned the answer when I was a student here." Which is? "It's a technical point to do with the way that water flows and the way the viscosity on the bottom causes circulation currents."
He says he was always interested in numbers too, whether they were the height of mountains or the speed of cars. "But I wouldn't say I had any profound worry about the meaning of nature at that stage. So I wouldn't have predicted that I would have ended up doing this particular kind of science or indeed doing science at all."
At Cambridge, he studied maths. "I was quite good at mathematics, but I knew I didn't want to be a mathematician. Because as you know they are rather a strange mindset of people, and I wasn't one of them." He grins. Rees has a handsome, mischievous face. At times he resembles Christopher Lee playing Dracula.
He says he was attracted to astrophysics because it was such a happening subject. "The evidence for the big bang had just been discovered, the first evidence of black holes was being discovered, and when a subject is opening up in that way, as a young person you can really make a mark quickly because everybody is just beginning a new subject." Astrophysics suited him because he preferred synoptic thinking - making sense of a whole lot of facts and trying to see patterns in things, rather than making elaborate deductions.
Rees started off as a research fellow at Cambridge, did a couple of stints in America, and by 1972 he had been appointed professor of astronomy at Sussex University. A year later he applied for the job as head of the institute of astronomy at Cambridge and, to his surprise, got it. Ten years ago, he was given a Royal Society research professorship which freed him up from some of the teaching and allowed him more time to write and tour. As for the astronomer royal title, he says it is a purely honorary title these days given to a senior academic.
I tell Rees about a friend who wrote a book which featured an astronomer who felt so small and insignificant when he stared at the stars that he killed himself. "Well I quote [Frank] Ramsey [mathematician and philosopher], the former member of my college, on this, saying in his perspective we are more important than the stars. And I certainly don't have that despairing attitude because it seems to me what makes things important is not how big they are, but how complex and intricate they are, and human beings are more complicated and intricate than either atoms or stars. So we needn't feel subordinate to the stars because we are smaller."
Rees says that astronomy, the science of the very large, and atomic physics, the science of the very small, are easy compared to the science of the everyday scale - the human scale. "It's rather amusing," he says, "that we are exactly halfway in scale between an atom and a star in that it would take as many human bodies to make up the mass of the sun as there are atoms in each of us."
And although the earth is tiny compared to the rest of the universe, he says, that is no reason to downplay our significance. "If it's the only place where intelligent life exists, then tiny though it is on the cosmic scale, our earth is the most important place in the universe." Which is another reason why we have a responsibility not to screw things up.
It's incredible, I say, how much of science is focused on the questions of existence - how and why. He nods. "The question of whether there is life out there is a scientific question we might one day answer, but the question of why there is something rather than nothing is a question beyond science.
"I think people differ between those who need to have some answer, and if there is no scientific answer they get a flip answer from religion, and those who are prepared to accept that it is just a mystery. And what I learned from science is that even a single atom is pretty hard for most of us to understand and therefore I would never expect to have more than a very incomplete and metaphorical understanding of any deeper aspect of reality."
D oes he think it is possible to reconcile religious belief with the big bang and evolutionary theory? "Oh yes, of course it is." In fact, he says, in a strange way he has managed it. "I describe myself sometimes as a practising but non-believing Christian. I don't believe in any dogmas. But on the other hand I do believe there is a benefit and value to be gained from participating in common rituals."
Rees is waiting for a call from a radio station in America for a live interview. We walk out into the garden for a break and he apologises for the disruption it will cause. You know, he says, however general the book may be, as a cosmologist he does bring a special perspective to it. Over his working life, he and his colleagues have discovered that the universe is bigger than they ever thought and continuing to expand; that stars exist farther away than they could have ever imagined, and so calculating in light years the universe is also much older than they had reckoned.
"People are just getting to grips with our billions of years of evolutionary history, but many people still tend to think we are somehow the culmination. But we've learned enough about how our universe has evolved to realise that our sun, which has been shining for 4.5bn years, has another 6bn years to go, and the universe may have an infinite future. So we shouldn't see ourselves as anything other than an early stage, and that makes it even more important that events here this century do not foreclose those potentialities."
He says he'd like to show me something, and goes off to find a book to illustrate the multitude of newly discovered smudges in the sky. He doesn't walk, he runs. And when he runs, you notice that his back isn't straight. Actually, his hunch is pronounced. Has it caused him problems? He seems surprised that I've noticed and even more so that I have asked. "Not really, no. Well a slight reduction in energy and athleticism but apart from that _" The curvature of the spine started in his teens, and he says he was fairly relaxed about it. Was he really an athlete? He grins. "No. No. In a sense because I've never been athletic and because I've never had children that probably means I'm less oriented age-wise than some people. I'm 60 but I don't really feel any different from when I was 30."
I remind him about a newspaper article he wrote years ago in which he said we had to place our trust in young scientists because, on the whole, ageing scientists aren't up to it. "Yes!" he grins again, and tactfully corrects me. "What I may have said is that there are three different ways in which scientists grow old. Some just stop doing science and become administrators or something. Some go on doing science accepting that they won't get better but will stay on a plateau and they go on doing what they're good at. But there's a third lot, which is perhaps the ones I was warning against, who get impatient with routine science and over-reach themselves by going into some field they are not expert in or trying to solve an overambitious project and then they become rather like cranks, the people who try to solve everything in one go."
Does he ever think he is reaching the crank stage? He wheezes with laughter. But there will be people who read Our Final Century and dismiss you as a crank, I say. "I hope it won't be perceived as cranky because I would have said in retrospect our chances of avoiding nuclear catastrophe in the last 30 years was not much below 50-50, so when we look at the greater risks of a whole century looking ahead I think there is tremendous uncertainty. So to be entirely openminded about a catastrophe, to be 50-50, is realistic."
Yes, he says, there is a high chance of a catastrophe, but he also wants to stress how much there is left to discover, how much life is left to be lived. For starters, we may well find new dimensions of space, and in doing so we could find parallel universes. He takes two pieces of paper to illustrate. He holds up one: "Imagine there are bugs crawling around it. They could imagine they were in a two-dimensional universe because they have no concept of up and down." He takes the second piece in his other hand and holds that above the first. "Then on another piece of paper you have another set of bugs in another two-dimensional universe and they would have no concept of the different sheets. So some people think there might be another universe just an inch away from ours but that dimension is measured in a fourth dimension that we can't move in because we are imprisoned in our three dimensions."
The phone rings, and Rees is instantly into the swing of things. Calm, measured, and pretty scary. He talks about the threats from terrorist groups, genetics, man-made viruses, robots, the whole shebang. "We can't dismiss as crazy those Californian futurologists who say that we will have super-human intelligences 50 years from now. I think the main message is that the more catastrophic the potential downside is, the more careful we have to be." He concludes the radio interview with immense charm. "It's been a great pleasure and privilege to be with you. Thank you very much indeed."
Responsibility, he says, is ultimately what it's all about. Rees, who describes himself as old Labour, says that today's politicians have an even greater duty to act justly, not to fuel hatreds. "Because of the greater risks it is all the more important to minimise the number of people who have grounds for being disaffected or aggrieved."
Rees gives me a lift to the station. In the car, there is a copy of the American version of the new book - retitled Our Final Hour. He tells me that he's not happy with this, that it's melodramatic. Just as politicians have never had as great a duty to act responsibly, he believes the same is true of scientists, and such a title doesn't help. Scientists must always remember that they are part of society rather than an isolated priesthood, he says. "Scientists do have an obligation to ensure that the wider public is aware of what they've done and of its implications and they also have an obligation to do what they can, even if it's not very much, to ensure that the work they do is applied beneficially rather than the opposite. The analogy I use is of the parent and grown-up children; you may not be able to control what they do, but it's thought very odd if the parent doesn't care at all what happens to their children."
Our Final Century: Will the Human Race Survive the Twenty-first Century? is published by William Heinemann on May 1, price £17.99