| |
Shop
| |  |
|
Best Sellers | | Home OUR FINAL HOUR: A Scientist's warning : How Terror, Error, and Environmental Disaster Threaten Humankind's Future in This Century--On Earth and Beyond | |
|  | |  | | | OUR FINAL HOUR: A Scientist's warning : How Terror, Error, and Environmental Disaster Threaten Humankind's Future in This Century--On Earth and Beyond | | SKU:
| | In Stock | | Availability:
Usually ships in 1-2 business days | | Only 1 left in stock, order soon! | | | A scientist known for unraveling the complexities of the universe over millions of years, Sir Martin Rees now warns that humankind is potentially the maker of its own demise--and that of the cosmos. Though the twenty-first century could be the critical era in which life on Earth spreads beyond our solar system, it is just as likely that we have endangered the future of the entire universe. With clarity and precision, Rees maps out the ways technology could destroy our species and thereby foreclose the potential of a living universe whose evolution has just begun.Rees boldly forecasts the startling risks that stem from our accelerating rate of technological advances. We could be wiped out by lethal "engineered" airborne viruses, or by rogue nano-machines that replicate catastrophically. Experiments that crash together atomic nuclei could start a chain reaction that erodes all atoms of Earth, or could even tear the fabric of space itself. Through malign intent or by mistake, a single event could trigger global disaster. Though we can never completely safeguard our future, increased regulation and inspection can help us to prevent catastrophe. Rees's vision of the infinite future that we have put at risk--a cosmos more vast and diverse than any of us has ever imagined--is both a work of stunning scientific originality and a humanistic clarion call on behalf of the future of life. | | | |
List Price:
| $15.00 | |
Our Price:
| $3.50 | |
You Save:
| $11.50 (77%)
|
| | |
|
| | Product Details | | Author: | Martin J. Rees | | Paperback: | 240 pages | | Publication Date: | April 30, 2004 | | Package Length: | 7.8 inches | | Package Width: | 5.3 inches | | Package Height: | 0.8 inches | | Package Weight: | 0.2 pounds | | Average Customer Rating: |  based on 18 reviews |
| |
| | Customer Reviews | Average Customer Review:
Write an online review and share your thoughts with other customers.
2 of 3 found the following review helpful:
 Fascinating look at threats to our future.... Jun 25, 2006
I'm frankly interested in natural disasters such as tornados, floods, and hurricanes. I find it fascinating how the human spirit can remain strong despite an environment which might at any time become deadly. "Our Final Hour" contains a scientists warnings about spectacular disasters we as human beings might one day have to face, and what if anything can be done to prevent/overcome these unforseen disasters. From flooding, to terrorist threat, this book plays out many scenarios with stunning and interesting outcomes.
This book is not light reading and might take a while to plow through, but I enjoyed every minute. Its interesting stuff, and while I'm not particularly worried about these sort of cataclysmic events included in this book, its nice to be prepared- and it makes good fodder for science fiction writing.
5 stars.
4 of 5 found the following review helpful:
 Things we all need to think about Nov 18, 2004
A short but very thought-provoking book, this is not a 'doom and gloom' pessimistic view of the future, but an invitation to the reader to seriously think about humanity's long-term survival prospects. A good selection of both natural and human-caused dangers are considered here, though not in a great deal of depth.
There is a focus on space related dangers (and other space topics like interplanetary colonisation as a safeguard against disaster on Earth), which is not at all surprising given the author, and while I would have preferred to have had more coverage on other topics, it was probably a good decision by Rees to focus on those areas he knows best.
One particularly thought-provoking topic is the idea that technology is rapidly reaching a point where individuals (or very small groups) can cause catastrophic global damage, a very new phenomenon. While we generally find the idea of a society with no privacy distasteful, monitoring every individual may become necessary as the only real way to combat this danger. We all may have to seriously start considering how much privacy and freedom we wish to retain, versus how much danger we are willing to accept for the human race.
16 of 17 found the following review helpful:
A sobering assessment Nov 15, 2004
An important thing to realize when reading this book is that we will indeed have a "final hour." Whether it comes through extinction or self destruction or through our becoming "posthuman" is entirely uncertain, but come it will.
I have read several other doomsday books, including A Guide to the End of the World: Everything You Never Wanted to Know (2002) by Bill McGuire, and Extinction: Evolution and the End of Man (2002) by Michael Boulter. I have also read some books by futurists like Ray Kurzweil and Pierre Baldi (The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence [1999] and The Shattered Self: The End of Natural Evolution [2001], respectively); additionally I have read some of the books that Rees relied upon while writing this book, including, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (2002) by Francis Fukuyama, and so most of the things that Martin Rees is worried about are familiar to me.
But this book nonetheless broadened my perspective because Sir Martin Rees (the Astronomer Royal of Great Britain, and a distinguished astrophysicist) is persuasive in his argument that there may actually be scientific experiments that should not be tried. He warns against some kinds of genetic engineering, especially those attempting to change the DNA of dangerous pathogens, and even rates some experiments in physics as of dubious value. This is a somewhat surprising stance for a reputable scientists to take since most scientists do not relish the prospect of political restraints on their work, and usually afford the same courtesy to practitioners in other disciplines.
His call for taking a close look at experiments with a chance of a "doomsday downside," however remote, is well taken. His sense that some biological experiments have such an unsavory "yuck factor" (e.g., "Brainless hominoids whose organs could be harvested as spare parts," p. 78) that scientists themselves should not be alone in deciding whether such experiments should continue, is also an excellent point.
Rees is characteristically not dogmatic about any of this. He presents the dangers and the objections typically with the proviso that a wider public than an individual scientist, or an oligarchy of scientists, should participate in the decisions made. Indeed Rees is an eminently reasonable man who tries to have as few prejudices (or "yuck factors") about things as possible.
He emphasizes the unpredictability of future developments, noting that "straightforward projections of present trends will miss the most revolutionary innovations: the qualitatively new things that really change the world." (p. 12) Nobody before modern physics could have predicted the power of the atomic bomb, nor could the earliest experimenters with electricity have foreseen how electrical power would transform the world.
Like the futurists named above, Rees sees a posthuman future for our kind, a future in which cultural evolution transforms humans into something beyond human. He recalls Darwin, who wrote, "not one living species will transmit its unaltered likeness to a distant futurity" and notes that "Earth itself may endure, but it will not be humans who cope with the scorching of our planet by the dying sun..." (p. 186) What both Darwin and Rees are acknowledging is that all species eventually become extinct, and so too will humans.
The central point of this book I believe however is to be found further down the page where Rees writes, "Nuclear weapons give an attacking nation a devastating advantage over any feasible defense. New sciences will soon empower small groups, even individuals, with similar leverage over society. Our increasingly interconnected world is vulnerable to new risks; 'bio' or 'cyber,' terror or error. These risks cannot be eliminated: indeed it will be hard to stop them from growing without encroaching on some cherished personal freedoms."
Indeed, this is perhaps the central conundrum of our time made emphatic by the events of September 11th.
One of the most interesting ideas in this book is this from page 154: "Perhaps complex aggregates of atoms, whether brains or machine, can never understand everything about themselves." I am reminded here of Godel's incompleteness theorem in which he demonstrated that mathematics cannot have a truly rigorous logical foundation. I am also reminded of Russell's discovery that the logic of self-referential systems can lead to paradox. Rees's point here is that we may never really know ourselves.
Rees also makes the point on the same page that our machines will accelerate science, perhaps to the point where only machines can understand the new discoveries.
Clearly we are finite creatures in a world that we can never hope to fully understand. Furthermore there will always be dangers that we cannot predict or avoid. These are sobering thoughts for humans to think.
Rees closes by asking if the future will "be filled with life, or as empty as the Earth's first sterile seas" and he opines that "The choice may depend on us, this century."
Here I think he is waxing perhaps a bit melodramatic since, while we may have the ability to destroy civilization here on earth, life will indeed go on since it is highly unlikely that we will develop any time soon the ability to destroy all life. Furthermore, I agree with those who believe that life in some form exists beyond our solar system. Surely we will not be able to destroy them.
7 of 7 found the following review helpful:
Doom gloom and death Sep 21, 2004
This is a very clearly written exposition of the major threats facing mankind in the present and near future. It provides sensible discussions of incredible dangers that most of us do not think about most of the time. It is also reasonable in understanding that the nuclear threat has not vanished with the fall of the Soviet Union but has rather transformed. It too presents a picture of possible survival through colonization of other worlds. And it proposes a whole set of possibilities of transformation of humanity into some other form of being which would make our cosmic survival more likely. Its focus however is in discussing the kinds of dangers human tampering with nature and environment bring to the future.
The hopelessness which I personally felt in reading the work comes not only from the possibility that one of the ' doom scenarios' might be realized. It is rather from the strong feeling which Rees is not alone in presenting, that we human beings as we are, are only a temporary stage which will necessarily be transformed into some other more durable, more intelligent kind of ' thing.' I find that this approach undermines the central value of the 'human'as we know it. Human life,individual human beings, human relations in all their complexity, the human relation to the Divine seem to me to be more precious and holy, than our ' survival ' as another ' form of being'. This book is frightening in its negative prospects but too does not console in the picture of the non- human human future, it gives.
4 of 6 found the following review helpful:
Important, maybe even inspiring, but lacks depth Sep 03, 2004
I have the greatest respect for Martin Rees both as a leading scientist and as a scientist who believes in making science widely accessible. My sense is that in this book, he presents so much so briefly that the most important themes remain undeveloped.
The doom-and-gloom title only tells part of the story. Rees summarizes the many threats to our civilization, the biosphere, and even to the cosmos as a whole. These risks stem from natural events such as asteroids, comets, or super-massive volcanic eruptions, but even more from human activities. Rees does a good job of reminding us that science and technology are giving individuals, whatever their motivations, access to more and more power. It won't be long before a terrorist group or a Unibomber-type individual could cause enormous destruction, for example by unleashing homemade bioweapons. Other risks come from scientists heedlessly pushing the envelope of fields such as nanotechnology. The cumulative risk, Rees argures, has never been greater, not even during the depths of the cold war.
Still, Rees provides some hope. He advocates a renewed thrust into space, with the idea of establishing self-sufficient groups of humans (or our "descendants" in the form of intelligent machines) away from Earth, where even an Earth-destroying disaster would not bring human (and posthuman) history to a crashing stop.
These are important themes, which Rees backs up by brief references to those who have gone more deeply into them than he has.
I would have felt more satisfied by Our Final Hour if Rees had taken the time to go more deeply into his most important points himself.
Robert Adler, author of Scence Firsts: From the Creation of Science to the Science of Creation; and Medical Firsts: From Hippocrates to the Human Genome
| |
| |
| |  | |  |
|
| You may also like ... |
