the end is nigher
Thursday 1 February 2007 | I like a cookie
From John Tierney’s NYT piece (courtesy of Only in New Mexico):
Sixty years ago, a group of physicists concerned about nuclear weapons created the Doomsday Clock and set its hands at seven minutes to midnight. Now, the clock’s keepers, alarmed by new dangers like climate change, have moved the hands up to 11:55.
Dr. [Martin] Rees, a cosmologist at Cambridge and Britain’s astronomer royal, doesn’t just issue gloomy predictions. He doesn’t just move the hands of an imaginary and inscrutable clock. […] No, Dr. Rees is braver. He gives odds on doomsday and offers to bet on disaster. In his 2003 book, “Our Final Hour,” he gives civilization no more than a 50 percent chance of surviving until 2100.
Dr. Rees is not a knee-jerk technophobe—he expects great advances as researchers around the world link their knowledge—but he fears that progress will be undone by what he calls the new global village idiots…. Five years ago, Dr. Rees posted this prediction: “By 2020, bioterror or bioerror will lead to one million casualties in a single event.” He reasoned that “by 2020 there will be thousands—even millions—of people with the capability to cause a catastrophic biological disaster….”
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