Apart from the daily dishings on Tom DeLay, there’s not much encouragement in the news these days. The economy is faltering and the stock market tanked the last three days of last week – bonddad’s diary.
Iraq and Afghanistan are not exactly shining examples of stable democracies. President Karzai is begging for stronger security links with the US, while the US force commander warns of ‘desperate’ Taleban. Meanwhile, Iraq has it’s own problems.
Bill Frist is lining up with the theocrats, while Tom DeLay seems ready for his own little nuclear option.
And now this! I was reading this article in the Guardian about Sir Martin John Rees – the next President of the Royal Society.
Rees’s top-down approach to intellectual life is intriguing enough but takes on an immediacy given his new role in British public life – as the next president of the Royal Society, the world’s oldest scientific academy and arguably its single most influential academic organisation. For the first time in 100 years, an astronomer is now at its helm.
The article lead me to another with this heading: What a way to go
Super-volcano, robotic rebellion or terrorism? Kate Ravilious asks 10 scientists to name the biggest danger to Earth and assesses the chances of it happening
And I’m sorry to report that the news are not entirely positive. This is what the same Sir Martin Rees states:
According to Sir Martin Rees, author of Our Final Century, astronomer royal and professor of cosmology and astrophysics at the University of Cambridge, humans only have a 50-50 chance of making it through the 21st century without serious setback. “Some natural threats, such as earthquakes and meteorite impacts, remain the same throughout time, while others are aggravated by our modern-interconnected world. But now we also need to consider threats that are human induced.”
Here are the threats that the scientists assessed. Read the article.
- Climate Change
- Telomere erosion
- Viral Pandemic
- Terrorism
- Nuclear war
- Meteorite impact
- Robots taking over
- Cosmic ray blast from exploding star
- Super-volcanoes
- Earth swallowed by a black hole
Sorry folks, I was feeling bad for not participating in the “Happy Story” this weekend, and this is what I came up with. Bummer!
