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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: T L Comiskey who wrote (20224)	6/11/2003 12:54:35 PM
From: abuelita	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 89467

Volcanoes, asteroids, bombs, black holes ... Scientist says the world will end by 2020 -- one way or another Tom Spears, CanWest News Service Wednesday, June 11, 2003 OTTAWA - Duck, it's nearly the end of the world, says a renowned British scientist who foresees Armageddon, or something like it, is less than 20 years away. Sir Martin Rees, the United Kingdom's honorary Astronomer Royal, has taken a grim look at all the bad things that science or natural disasters could do to us. He says there's at least a 50-50 chance something really, really bad will kill untold millions by the year 2020. There isn't much Rees likes when he surveys the world. He wonders, what if the terrorists who hit the World Trade Center used plutonium weapons instead? If such weapons seem unimaginably big, there are always tiny little machines. Nanotechnology is the art of making machines the size of a single molecule. Most scientists talk about using it to make useful things such as little sensors, or gadgets that will deliver drugs to precise targets in our cells. Rees takes the gloomier view that nanotech machines will replicate themselves on an out-of-control scale. That is, if we aren't hit already by natural disasters such as volcanoes. Sure, we've had lots of those in the past, but the veteran astronomer hypothesizes about a "super-volcano" so huge that its smoke blots out the sun and makes Earth unlivable. There's one waiting to pop right now under Yellowstone National Park in the U.S., he believes. Speaking of climate, it may become hot enough to evaporate huge amounts of fresh water and transform farmland into wasteland. That is, if we aren't hit first by an asteroid. One wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Are we overdue? Martin's worried sick about that. But not as sick as bioterrorism will make us if we genetically engineer nasty bugs and they escape and breed and spread before we have a chance to build up immunity to them. But even bugs won't stand a chance from a black hole. Scientists who study matter may some day squash matter together in such a dense mass that it forms a black hole that grows bigger and bigger until it just sucks in all of Earth and anything else in this part of space. Or so goes Rees's apocalyptic theory. His musings blur an old line between astrologers, who foretell the future, and astronomers. Rees is 60 years old, a theoretical astrophysicist and black hole expert at Cambridge University. He has been busy writing a book, just published, with the cheery title Our Final Hour. Buy it before 2020. canada.com