Not necessarily the end of the world

Not necessarily the end of the world: Not necessarily the end of the world thecritic.co.uk/issues/november-2022/not-necessarily-the-end-of-the-world/ Bryan Appleyard3 November 2022 This article is taken from the November 2022 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10. Martin Rees gets briskly to the point on page two: “The Earth has existed for 45 million centuries, but this is the first century in which one dominant species can determine, for good or ill, the future of the entire biosphere.” That’s an alarming sentence: first, 45 million centuries is more vertiginous than the usual 4.5 billion years; even more vertiginous is the terrible truth that all life now suddenly depends on the sanity or otherwise of humanity. Would that we were all Martin Rees. Rees, Astronomer Royal, former Master of Trinity, Cambridge, and President of the Royal Society, is certainly an establishment figure but, unusually for such folk, he is eminently sane. If Science is to Save Us, like his previous books and articles, is a balanced and careful assessment of evidence and possible outcomes.  If Science is to Save Us, Martin Rees (Polity, £20) The big, terrifying ou