| ||||||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £1.00
Trade in Our Final Hour: A Scientist's Warning for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £1.00, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Amazon.co.uk
Our Final Hour spells out doomsday scenarios for cosmic collisions, high-energy experiments gone wrong and self-replicating machines that steadily devour the biosphere. Just when you've stopped worrying and learned to love the bomb, Sir Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal, comes along with teeming armies of deadly viruses, nanobots, and armed fanatics. Beyond the hazards most of us know about--smallpox, terrorists, global warming--Rees introduces the new threats of the 21st century and the unholy political and scientific alliances that have made them possible.
If we can avoid driving ourselves to extinction, he writes, a glorious future awaits; if not, our devices may very well destroy the universe: "What happens here on Earth, in this century, could conceivably make the difference between a near eternity filled with ever more complex and subtle forms of life and one filled with nothing but base matter."
Rees places much of the blame for many technological debacles squarely on the shoulders of the scientists who participate in perfecting environmental destruction, biological menaces and ever-more powerful weapons. So is there any hope for humanity? Rees is vaguely optimistic on this point, offering solutions that would require a level of worldwide cooperation humans have yet to exhibit. If the daily news isn't enough to make you want to crawl under a rock, this book will do the trick. --Therese Littleton, Amazon.com --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
"Heady, scary--and very scholarly--Stuff.... Rees writes with beautiful simplicity. This is a conversational book, totally accessible to a general reader."
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
First Sentence
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY BROUGHT US THE BOMB, and the nuclear threat will never leave us; the short-term threat from terrorism is high on the public and political agenda; inequalities in wealth and welfare get ever wider. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY BROUGHT US THE BOMB, and the nuclear threat will never leave us; the short-term threat from terrorism is high on the public and political agenda; inequalities in wealth and welfare get ever wider. Read the first page
Explore More
Concordance
Browse Sample PagesConcordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
WARNING! same book, different covers and sizes !,
By
This review is from: Our Final Hour: A Scientist's Warning (Paperback)
The book is well worth reading, however be warned that the book is identical in content to "Our Final Century" !!
The books have different covers, and are different sizes, but they are both the same book! WORD FOR WORD. I felt cheated by Amazon for selling me the same thing twice!! BE WARNED !
10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
we're all doomed - maybe,
By 2cleverbyhalf (somewhere in the future) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Our Final Hour: A Scientist's Warning (Paperback)
Mr Rees obviously forgot to outline another doomsday scenario - everyone who reads this book dies of boredom. (So hopefully I can save the day by putting you off !)
The whole book (and it's a very small book at that) smacks of a sidelined project which has a great premise but no serious devotion. Almost all of the 'catasrophes' are well known and there's next to no 'in depth' analysis about statistical probabilities or objective viewpoints. In most cases it just boils down to Mr Rees saying 'X could happen, it probably won't, but then again there's a lot of nutters out there, so who knows.' To make things worse the last few chapters are nothing to do with 'our final hour' they're just Carl Sagan-esque musings about the possibility of aliens and space flight. I'd suggest you find something better to worry about.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Not constructive,
By
This review is from: Our Final Hour: A Scientist's Warning (Paperback)
This is a brief description of the major threats to the survival of life not just on Earth but in the universe itself. The title is suitably dramatic and given the weighty name of Sir Martin Rees the current Astronomer Royal I was expecting a lot. Unfortunately this book never quite lives up to its promise.
The book starts off describing some of the well known threats that we face as a race. I found this part of the book rather mundane. I was really looking for some revelations here and some food for thought on this important subject. It wasn't until the ninth chapter on experimental particle physics (about half way through the book) that I became truly engaged. Given Sir Rees' vocation it's probably not surprising that this is the area where he is most informative. His discussion here about the dangers of this kind of science and the responsibility of scientists to keep the rest of us informed was enlightening. I enjoyed the second half of the book much more than the first as it was more optimistic. This part of the book describes the potential that we have as a race and also discusses the level of our cosmic significance. My disappointment with this book was twofold. The first was that it is a rather brief book. I finished each chapter wanting to know very much more than the author told me. Secondly given the fact that Sir Rees rates our survival past this century as around 50% I was surprised to find that there was no practical advice as to what we as individuals could do to improve our chances. Rees puts our fate squarely in the hands of either scientists or terrorists. I have to say that given Rees' comments on the possibility of a post human future I was surprised to see him treat scientists such as Ray Kurzweil so scathingly. It seems to me that someone who can so eloquently speak about the possibility of parallel universes should be able to conceive of the world changing to the point where some of us may become immortal. Overall this is a rather negative view of the world. Rees believes that we are living at a critical time in history. In his view it is this century that will make or break us and on balance he doesn't think we have more than an even chance to survive. He may very well be right but while he should be congratulated for wanting to discuss these issues, I personally don't think a warning such as this is much use without some advice on what to do about it.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews |
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
- Books > Science & Nature > Engineering & Technology > Civil Engineering > Environmental
- Books > Science & Nature > Engineering & Technology > Education > Higher Education
- Books > Science & Nature > Engineering & Technology > Environmental
- Books > Science & Nature > Mathematics > Education > Higher Education
- Books > Science & Nature > Mathematics > Popular Maths
- Books > Scientific, Technical & Medical > Engineering > Environmental Engineering
- Books > Society, Politics & Philosophy > Social Sciences
- Shops > Amazon Green
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
