50/50 Chance of a body to get enlightened in.

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Ace of space

 

Mankind has only a 50-50 chance of surviving the 21st century, says

the Royal Society's next president. It's a dire prospect, but one

the astronomer has the right credentials to deal with

 

Robin McKie

Sunday April 17, 2005

The Observer

 

Martin Rees has a simple message for those seeking solace in the

stars. The end is nigh: humanity has only a 50-50 chance of

surviving the 21st century. According to the Astronomer Royal,

nuclear war, biological terrorism, ecological mayhem or asteroid

collisions could take us out in less than 100 years.

Nor should these warnings be dismissed as the musings of a mere

depressive. They are the considered thoughts of one of the world's

greatest astrophysicists, a man who has used his cosmological

expertise to bring a new awareness of the risks to Earthly life.

Outlined in his latest book, Our Final Century , Rees's

prognostications demonstrate the perspective gained when our antics

are viewed from an astronomical perspective. (Forget the asteroids,

at the end of the day, it's most likely to be the A-bombs that do

for us, he concludes.)

 

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.

 

Rees's selection was confirmed on Wednesday when the Royal Society's

council agreed to propose him as its 59th president. Voting forms

are now being sent out to the society's 1,200 members across the

Commonwealth, though the fact these ballot slips contain only one

name - Rees's - suggests the result will not be a nail-biter

(following his election, he will have to stand down as Astronomer

Royal).

 

Thus this grey-maned, hunched figure of Martin John Rees - he has

suffered from curvature of the spine since adolescence - will join

Isaac Newton, Humphry Davy, and Ernest Rutherford as head of the

Royal Society, a post that is not without hazards, as many of Rees's

predecessors have discovered.

 

In the late 18th century, the society, which was founded in 1660,

conducted trials of the first lightning conductors and concluded

Benjamin Franklin's were the best. Sir John Pringle, then president,

was summoned by King George III to explain why he was backing an

upstart colonist. Pringle defended Franklin's design but shortly

afterwards felt obliged to resign.

 

Other ventures have had happier fates, however, and reveal the

extraordinary academic power of the Royal Society. It financed

Captain James Cook's first expedition in 1768 and used its influence

to ensure that his boats were not attacked by French or American

warships - countries with which Britain was then at war.

 

And on 6 November, 1919, at a Royal Society meeting, the astronomer

Sir Arthur Eddington revealed that observations, taken during a

solar eclipse, showed that starlight was being deflected by the

sun's gravitational field in a way that fitted Einstein's General

Theory of Relativity. 'Revolution in science. New theory of the

Universe. Newtonian ideas overthrown,' the Times announced the next

day on its front page. Einstein became a global superstar - thanks

to the Royal Society.

 

In those heady days, a society president did little more than bathe

in the reflected glory of its members and dish out sherry to the

government ministers who controlled their purse strings. (The

society currently gets £40 million, mainly to fund young

scientists.)

 

But science, and public attitudes to science, have changed in the

last few years and recent presidents have been obliged not just to

champion scientific views but to try to shape public opinions and

reactions to them. Six years ago, the then president Sir Aaron Klug

launched a furious attack on the medical journal the Lancet for

publishing a study by Arpad Pusztai in which the maverick biologist

suggested the processes of genetic manipulation could make plants

and crops poisonous.

 

This attack was followed up by Klug's successor, Lord Robert May,

the current Royal Society president, who upbraided Prince Charles in

no uncertain terms for the support that he had given to the GM

protest movement. 'One could occasionally wish that he took a wider

spectrum of advice,' May remarked. Clearly times have changed. It is

science, not royalty, that hands out the rebukes today.

 

Thus Rees takes over a post that has changed radically in recent

years and which will plunge him into a quagmire of scientific

controversies: stem cell research, nanotechnology, saviour sibling

selection, climate change, and other issues. It remains to be seen

how he performs, though most colleagues are confident he possesses

the right stuff.

 

'Martin will be great,' says Baroness Susan Greenfield, president of

the Royal Institution. 'He is direct, does not weasel words, lacks

any kind of pomposity and is a first-rate speaker. These days

politicians, journalists and scientists badly need to understand

each other and Martin is just the man to help that happen.'

 

The only son of two Shropshire teachers, Rees had a relatively happy

youth in which he revealed little interest in scientific matters and

in the end only chose to pursue mathematics because the alternative -

languages - were a lost cause to him. However, after graduating

from Trinity College, Cambridge, Rees branched out into cosmology.

In the Sixties, Cambridge had become a world centre for its study

and was bursting with astronomical talent: Fred Hoyle was Plumian

professor and Stephen Hawking was already a bright new star. At the

same time, astronomers were making dramatic observations that showed

the cosmos had been created in a Big Bang eruption 13 billion years

ago and was peppered with exotic objects like black holes -

collapsed stars so dense that light cannot leave their surfaces.

This was the subject to follow, Rees decided.

 

From the start, the young scientist demonstrated a remarkable talent

for synthesising astronomical observation into coherent theoretical

frameworks. (In fact, he has never carried out experiments or made

observations. The only telescope he possesses - in the Cambridge

farmhouse he shares with his sociologist wife Caroline Humphrey- is

an antique.) In 1973, Rees replaced Hoyle as Plumian professor

before becoming the Institute of Astronomy's chief in 1977. After

that, he swept up dozens of visiting professorships, prizes and

posts, culminating in his 1995 appointment as Astronomer Royal.

 

At the same time, his imagination continued to rove the universe and

he has played key roles in providing theoretical muscle to a number

of critical cosmological issues. Scientists had long been puzzled by

bursts of gamma rays that satellite detected in space in the

Sixties. Some argued that the sources must be local and relatively

puny.

 

But Rees, and others, were adamant they were distant and colossal.

In fact, we now know that gamma-ray bursters are incredibly remote

and are also the biggest bangs the universe has experienced since

the Big Bang itself. In a few seconds, as much energy as will be

released by the sun in its 10,000,000,000-year lifetime is blasted

into space - either by a giant exploding star or super-dense neutron

stars colliding.

 

It is boggling stuff, but meat and drink to Rees who has also

continued his investigations of the 'universe's dark ages' when

stars first formed and foun dations of galaxies were laid down.

 

This is not the output of an ivory tower loner but of an

enthusiastic academic team-player. Indeed, according to an analysis

of international scientific papers, carried out by the Sante Fe

Institute, Rees is the world's most collaborative physicist, and is

linked as an author with more scientists than any other researcher.

Step forward science's answer to Kevin Bacon who has played a

similar pivotal linkage in appearances in Hollywood films.

 

Nor has Rees been afraid to share his cosmological thoughts and has

produced a stream of elegantly-written popularisations: Our Cosmic

Habitat , Gravity's Fatal Attraction , not to mention Our Final

Century - which he has promoted with energetic, if not to say

obsessive, enthusiasm. Whatever else, Rees is no aloof, snooty

Oxbridge don.

 

His politics are 'old Labour', he says, and at the last general

election, he happily endorsed Blair's government: 'The best the

country has had since Clement Attlee's,' he insists. Following the

Iraq war, which he opposed, Rees's backing has become more strained,

though he insists he will still vote Labour on 5 May.

 

Such support should not be taken for granted by Labour, however.

Rees fully endorses his recent predecessors' interventionist stand

and is clearly bursting to have a punch-up - alright, a rigorous

debate - over a number of issues, in particular the question of UK

energy generation. Most of our nuclear power plants are old and will

soon need decommissioning, he points out. Will we replace them with

new nuclear plants, or wind turbines, or turbines that burn Russian

gas, or what? 'The government cannot fudge this one any longer,'

Rees insists.

 

Should we get it wrong, then we could face a cold uncertain future

with insufficient power to warm our homes. On the other hand, we

could enhance global warming and trigger climatic mayhem, or we

could even suffer a devastating nuclear meltdown. These are uneasy

prospects. Rees, to his credit, has perfect credentials for dealing

with them.

 

Sir Martin Rees