Untitled - Bedales Schools

More documents

Recommendations

Info

The Final Century?t the end of World War II a group of scientists based in Chicago, many of whom had worked atA Los Alamos, founded the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. The cover of each issue was a clockface, the closeness of the hands to midnight indicating how close the human civilisation is to destruction.The bulletin is still published and the clock is now closer to midnight than it was during eventhe 1970s, when the Cold War was at its peak. Many scientists today believe that mankind may notsurvive the 21st century, come our downfall from the environment or from ourselves.The first threat that springs to mind when people think of global destruction is that of nuclear war.The nuclear stockpiles during the 1980s were equivalent to 10tons of TNT for each person in America, Russia and Europe,and today it is predicted that it will be another ten years beforeAmerica’s arsenal falls even to two thousand nuclear warheads.Furthermore, those warheads that are decommissioned will notbe destroyed irreversibly but merely held in storage. The collapseof Soviet Russia has done little to help the nuclear situation.“We have slain the dragon, but are now living in a junglefull of poisonous snakes”, said James Wolsey, former directorof the CIA, referring to the turmoil of the post Soviet era. Ifterrorists were to obtain an old Soviet warhead (of which thereare thousands yet to be decommissioned) or to construct theirown (which is shockingly easy, given sufficient uranium-235), no amount of anti-ballistic missilesystems – as are currently being developed by the US – would be able to stop the low-tech deliveryof a warhead by truck into a major city.The other weapon that could destroy our civilisation is a bio weapon. The US, UK, Russia and evenSouth Africa, to name but a few, have all had biological weapons programmes attempting to modifyorganisms to make them more virulent and more resistant to vaccines. So far the few terrorist attacksusing biological weapons have been largely ineffective, but this is more due to the unsophisticatedways in which they were released than to a lack of deadliness of the weapon itself. In July 2001 anexercise entitled ‘Dark Winter’ was carried out in the US, simulating the effects of a small terroristattack releasing smallpox. The exercise concluded that in such an attack three million people wouldbe infected. It would also be incredibly easy to manufacture such weapons. The US Academy ofSciences released a report in 2002 claiming that just a few individuals with specialised skills and accessto a lab could produce such lethal pathogens, and that they could be manufactured using equipmentthat is available commercially for purposes such as beer production. However, a terrorist attackis not the only way in which biological weapons could be released, for as long as countries continueto carry out biological weapons research and to stockpile pathogens, there is a risk that some may bereleased entirely by accident. In 1992 Boris Yeltsin admitted what had long been feared: that 66mysterious deaths in Sverdlovsk in 1979 had in fact been caused by anthrax spores leaked from aRussian biological weapons lab.This year’s Eckersley Lecture was on nano technology and although the ideas that Professor BrianJohnson talked about seemed harmless, there are fears that should the field advance further, it couldbecome extremely dangerous. Scientists hope that some day we will be able to produce tiny selfreplicatingnano machines capable of entering the human body for medical purposes. What somefear is that should these nano machines be released they might begin to consume surrounding organicmaterial in order to self-replicate. As Eric Drexler writes: “They could spread like blowing pollen,replicate swiftly and reduce the biosphere to dust in a matter of days … We have trouble enough controllingviruses and fruit flies”. This theory is known as the ‘Grey Goo’ scenario, named after the‘dust’ that the biosphere would be reduced to.6
The last, and perhaps the most subtle, way in which the human civilisation might cease to exist is ifwe ourselves cease to be human. Currently we use drugs such as Prozac to counter depression andRitalin to dampen hyperactivity, but some believe that other drugs could be developed that narrowand impoverish the range of human character, threatening the very essence of our humanity. Alreadythe hormone PYY3-36 has been used to eliminate feelings of hunger, and the region of the brain onwhich the hormone acts also influences behaviour such as sex drive and sexualorientation. In his book Beyond Freedom and Dignity, psychologist B.F.Skinner predicts that a form of mind control will be necessary in order to preventa breakdown of society and that ‘conditioning’ of the entire populationwill be essential for a society in which all members are content and that nonewish to destabilise. The thought of a world in which the population is rendereddocile and law-abiding by ‘designer drugs’ and where genetic interventionis used to ‘correct’ extremes of personality forces one to think: at whatpoint do we cease to be human?The above means of destruction are all highly scientific and technologicallyadvanced, but does that mean that science is becoming too dangerous? Onepossible way to avoid our destruction would be to slow down or stop all scientificprogress. It is thought that should scientific research be halted we would never be able to gainthe technology necessary to destroy ourselves. However, as with many things, it is a balancing actand one must consider the enormous benefits of science along with the risks. It is also extremelyunlikely that any nation will ever halt its scientific research, for fear of being overtaken by, andthereby left at the mercy of, any rogue state that chose to continue its scientific advancement. It istherefore left to the scientists undertaking such research to ensure that their discoveries and creationsare not used in the wrong way.Many talented scientists have failed at this task, such as Fritz Haber who produced chemical weaponsfor the German military during World War I. There are many others though who have set a shiningexample to the world and used their influence as renowned scientists for truly noble purposes. AfterWorld War II many scientists, some of whom had worked on the Manhattan project, turned againstthe American nuclear programme and went to great lengths to stop the build-up of nuclear arsenalswith initiatives such as the Russell–Einstein Manifesto and Pugwash.As long as scientists do not lose their morals whilst walking the road of scientific discovery it seemsthat there is still hope we shall survive the next century.Yamez Collopy 6-27
Page 2 and 3: Contents:An Interview with Harry Pe
Page 4 and 5: The Bedales Science Magazine
Page 6 and 7: An Interview with Harry PearsonCan
Page 8 and 9: 6-2 Physics Trip to CERN, Genevaver
Page 12 and 13: Spring at the North Polehere’s a
Page 14 and 15: PC hazards and the lawHAZARDOUS WAS
Page 16 and 17: Incinerators are some of the larges
Page 18 and 19: IJoseph Rotblatfind myself writing
Page 20 and 21: Many resins are brittle and unstabl
Page 22 and 23: RECYCLINGThe reprocessing of plasti
Page 24 and 25: and processed to drinking water sta
Page 26 and 27: Interview with Professor Tony Marmo
Page 28 and 29: Finally, what should Bedales be doi
Page 30 and 31: Hydrogen Fuel Cell Car(We built one
Page 32 and 33: • Less land needed for landfill s
Page 34 and 35: The Science of the Sune know very l
Page 36 and 37: The 6-1 Physics Trip to Thorpe Park
Page 38 and 39: Stem Cell Researchlthough medicine
Page 40 and 41: The potential for technological adv
Page 42 and 43: How Aspirin Worksrostaglandins are
Page 44 and 45: effectively a single species model
Page 46 and 47: References and notes:[1] Roy Porter
Page 48: The B-Sci CrosswordAcross1. The pro

Untitled - Bedales Schools

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?