Rees, Sir Martin John

▪ 2004

      Armageddon is a favourite theme of science-fiction writers and filmmakers, but it is normally offered as escapist fantasy rather than serious prophecy. When a distinguished scientist, not known for extravagant assertions, calmly says that humankind has only a 50% chance of surviving until the year 2100, his remarks are apt to make news and provoke widespread concern. That was what happened in April 2003 following the publication of Our Final Century (published in the U.S. as Our Final Hour) by Sir Martin Rees, the U.K.'s astronomer royal. Rees argued not that the human race would be wiped out by aggressive aliens but that the pace of technological change threatened to outstrip the ability of humans to control it. Specific risks included engineered airborne viruses, nuclear terrorism, new forms of “bio” and “cyber” terror, and even rogue nanomachines (or “supercomputers”) that could run out of control.

      Rees was born on June 23, 1942, in Shropshire, in the English Midlands. After studying mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge (B.A., 1963), he pursued an academic career in cosmology, mainly at Cambridge but with interludes in the U.S. at Princeton and Harvard universities and at the California Institute of Technology. Rees became one of the world's leading authorities on the big-bang theory of the origins of the universe and on the related topics of black holes, quasars, pulsars, galaxy formation, and gamma-ray bursts. His early prediction that black holes would be found at the centre of the Milky Way Galaxy was borne out by subsequent observations. In 1973 he was appointed Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy at Cambridge; in 1995 he was named to the highly prestigious but essentially honorary position of astronomer royal.

      Rees was never content to keep within the narrow technical bounds of cosmological theory. In his books and lectures, he explored the links between science and philosophy and humankind's place in the universe. Our Final Century, in some ways a logical culmination of more than 30 years' work, belonged to a long tradition in which scientists, philosophers, and mathematicians warned of the dangers of uncontrolled scientific advance. In the 1940s and '50s, Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell feared that the newfound ability to split the atom might lead to a nuclear conflagration, and in June 1940, Prime Minister Winston Churchill spoke of “the abyss of a new Dark Age, made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.” In Our Final Century Rees warned of more varied and diffuse dangers, requiring newer and more varied responses, and argued that taken together those dangers were no less serious in 2003 than those faced by humankind 60 years earlier.

Peter Kellner

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