Our final hour: A scientist's warning: How terror, error, and environmental disaster threaten humankind's future in this Century—on earth and beyond

Martin J. Rees

New York, 2003

Abstract

Bolstered by unassailable science and delivered in eloquent style, Our Final Hour’s provocative argument that humanity has a mere 5050 chance of surviving the next century has struck a chord with readers, reviewers, and opinion-makers everywhere. Rees’s vision of our immediate future is both a work of stunning scientific originality and a humanistic clarion call on behalf of the future of life.

Quotes from this work

The first aquatic creatures crawled onto dry land in the Silurian era, more than three hundred million years ago. They may have been unprepossessing brutes, but had they been clobbered, the evolution of land-based fauna would have been jeopardised. Likewise, the post-human potential is so immense that not even the most misanthropic amongst us would countenance its being foreclosed by human actions.

future of humanity · human extinction
p. 183

It may not be absurd hyperbole—indeed, it may not even be an overstatement—to assert that the most crucial location in space and time (apart from the big bang itself) could be here and now.