Biotech Disaster by 2020? Martin Rees Weighs the Risks September 15, 2010

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Complete video at: http://fora.tv/2010/08/02/Martin_Rees_Lifes_Future_in_the_Cosmos

Long Now Foundation president Stewart Brand interviews cosmologist Martin Rees about his 2002 Long Bets prediction that "by 2020 a biological catastrophe (either bioterror or bioerror) will lead to one million casualties in a single event. " "Obviously, I desperately hope that I'm wrong," says Rees. "But biotechnology is developing very fast, and there are greater risks of error."

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President of the Royal Society, England's Astronomer Royal, Lord Martin Rees brings a lifetime of cosmological inquiry to a crucial question: What if human success on Earth determines life's success in the universe?

He thinks that civilization's chances of getting out of this century intact are about 50-50. He is hopeful that extraterrestrial life already exists, but there's no sign of it yet. But even if we are now alone, he notes that we may not even be the halfway stage of evolution.

There is huge scope for post-human evolution, so that "it will not be humans who watch the sun's demise, 6 billion years from now. Any creatures that then exist will be as different from us as we are from bacteria or amoebae."

Appropriately, Rees's Long Now talk was at the Chabot Space and Science Center in the hills above Oakland, in the planetarium. - The Long Now Foundation

Martin Rees is Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics and Master of Trinity College at the University of Cambridge. He holds the honorary title of Astronomer Royal and also Visiting Professor at Imperial College London and at Leicester University.

After studying at the University of Cambridge, he held post-doctoral positions in the UK and the USA, before becoming a professor at Sussex University. In 1973, he became a fellow of King's College and Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy at Cambridge (continuing in the latter post until 1991) and served for ten years as director of Cambridge's Institute of Astronomy. From 1992 to 2003 he was a Royal Society Research Professor.