![]() ![]() He does not revise the figure here, though it sounds more encouraging now than it once did.Ĭalling himself an "armchair theorist," the author begins with a tour of recent and current developments placing strain on both the natural world and human institutions: population growth, climate change, nuclear proliferation, dependence on extractive sources of energy, pollution and so on. He mentions conjecturing in a book published 15 years ago that "taking all risks into account, there was only a 50 percent chance that we would get through to 2100 without a disastrous setback," probably self-inflicted. He speculates from the vantage point of a well-placed nonspecialist - aware of developments in pertinent fields and good at evoking a sense of cosmic scale and this little planet's place in it. The author is astronomer royal and former president of the Royal Society. But we really ought to be able to bring other capacities into play when our continuing viability as a species is at issue.īy no means merely a happiness pill, Martin Rees's On the Future: Prospects for Humanity ( Princeton University Press) nonetheless encourages the reader to think beyond the new norms of diminished and collapsing expectations. (Best-case scenario? The terraforming of Mars, which could take a while.) Homo sapiens may be the only creature susceptible to depressive realism, and the 20th century may have left us prone to it. Roaming any further ahead than the next few decades, it seems all too likely to find oneself stranded in a dystopian landscape - or one made up of ruins. ![]() The horizon of our imaginable future has been downsized. The survival of humankind for another million years, let alone a billion, is almost as hard to posit as its extinction. ![]() The bedrock too will melt, eventually.Īnd yet somehow the thought may still break through, if only for a moment: "So, then what do we do?" The prospect is difficult to hold in the mind for long, for it means that everything we take to be bedrock permanent is transitory. Our oceans will evaporate sometime in the next billion years. Five billion years from now, give or take, the star we know as the sun will become a red giant - its radius extending to what is now the Earth's orbit, though the planet itself will be long gone by then. ![]()
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