Mankinds Last Century

U.K. Astronomer Royal Martin Rees says the human race has only a 50/50 chance of surviving another century. In his new book "Our Final Century," he says this will be caused by a combination of natural events, such as global warming and asteroid impacts, and man-made disasters, like engineered viruses and nuclear terrorism. He says, "I think the odds are no better than 50/50 that our present civilization will survive to the end of the present century."

www.unknowncountry.com...

The guy has a point.

Only time will tell, I guess.

So either we will survive...or we won't?

Gee....this guy's a genius!

Hell naw your funny, but what I think he saying is that the chance of us making it is not GOOD

"Doc, is it going to be a boy or a girl?"

"Well, it's about a 50/50 chance of being a boy..."

Haha! See my point?

we all gonna die!!!!!!!

we all gonna die!!!!!!!


um i'm serious though, we will. someday. most of us in this century too. weird?

High time to respect the environment.

High time to respect the environment. Posted by VzH

I would agree, although I think it may be too late by now...

Actually I think that humanity can survive this century. We will probably lose a couble billion people thought.

There have been prophets of doom from the 70's on, yet it has come to nothing. We didn't run out of water, pollute ourselves to death, all die of starvation, or get fried with the ozone hole.

I think I have more faith in the ability of humanity to get itself out of a crisis.

Good way to sell a book though, just get negative and scare people.

Well, as Rees and everyone posting on ATS will have died -of old age, if nothing else by 2100: we'll have to keep an open mind.

You won't catch me down at the bookies placing bets with odds like that.......Oh no I've got a sure thing.....
15 cents at odds of 20 million to one that Elvis will ride Shergar in to London, and play Lord Lucan in a Tennis match at Wimbledon.

Do you know what I stand to collect

3 million New Zealand, plus your stake back, minus tax.
Sounds a pretty good bet to me.

Well we're already in the third year in the 21st century and it's already looking #ty so I think the author might be correct, unfortunately.

This imbecilic obsession with multiples of 100 is baffling -and let us disregard the inability of many to calculate when centuries start and end, as in the folly of 31/12/99.
The 19th Century had its fin de siècle nonsense, we've just had the media and cyber-spam drivel about the millennium, Y2K etc.
No doubt the great-great-granchildren of ATS's favourite spam'n'scam drivel-mongers will be here in 95 years' time pulling the same stunts.

sadly i think he might be right

but c'mon it takes a doctor to write this, i should have done it and made millions

First of all, I want to say hello, I am new to this forum

Ya know, you hear how bad things are all over the world, but when you think about it. Things really aren't any worse then they were hundreds of years ago. We--as the media culture that we have become--just get to hear about it from all over the world.

Just imagine how things would be like for ants, if they had thoughts and emotions like humans--and media. Could you imagine the kind of horror stories that would be on "Ant's CNN or Ant's Fox or Ant's BBC?"

"A human in the Phx Arizona area has dropped a chemical weapon of mass destruction, killing thousands of ants in the colony..."

Humans have to die by the thousands to make room for many more newborn thousands, just like all creatures do. Be it by disease, murder, starvation; nature doesn't discriminate.

Seems there is another Y2K similar issue with this date as well. At least there are 47 years to correct it this time... I know with our software, we can't have anyone use dates past 2049....

I'm resigned to wondering how we managed to survive ever since we left the trees and first walked on two legs. Since evolution we've faced countless threats to our existence.
Yet we've always survived and always adapted.

That's because people rock!

Also, it's because we don't just adapt - we think, which allows us to predict future obstacles while they're still small.