Preparing for the Miraculous

104 eleven talksand dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction,omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way.” 13This macabre gospel of what might be called “black science”has found a fertile field in the contemporary crisismood of fear and uncertainty. It is divulged in practicallyeach and every issue of the science magazines, followed inthis by the other media. The Earth is going to die. “The surfaceof the Sun, at a temperature of several thousand degrees,will come extremely close. The Earth will be charred;it will be a cinder.” The Sun is going to die. “We can foreseewith certainty that our Sun, about five billion years old, andwhich transforms its hydrogen into helium slowly but irreversibly,will soon be exhausted, and that it will explodelike the Crab Nebula in 1054.” (Here “soon” means at theearliest in another five billion years!) The universe is goingto die. It began with the Big Bang and will end with the BigCrunch. “The stars begin to fade like guttering candles andare snuffed out one by one. In the depths of space the greatcelestial cities, the galaxies, cluttered with the memorabiliaof ages, are gradually dying. Tens of billions of years pass inthe growing darkness. Occasional flickers of light pierce thefall of cosmic night, and spurts of activity delay the sentenceof a universe condemned to become a galactic graveyard.”“What happens in far-future eons may seem blazinglyirrelevant to the practicalities of our lives,” finds Rees. Indeedso. But in the meantime he contributes to the prevailingmentality by commenting on all the well-known causesof eventual doom by adding some of his own, staking forinstance one thousand dollars on a bet: that by the year 2020an instance of bio-error, i.e. a mistake or negligence involvingbiological matter (like a deadly virus or bacterium), willhave killed a million people. “I think,” he writes, “the odds13 In Russell on Religion, pp. 9 and 38.