Our Final Hour: A Scientist's Warning: How Terror, Error, and Environmental Disaster Threaten Humankind's Future In This Century--On Earth and Beyond

Rating:
Summary: Frightening But Not Developed
Review: Martin Rees, in Our Final Hour (A Scientist's Warning), gets his point across. Humanity's chances on earth have a 50/50 probablility, in the author's opinion, of making it into the end of the century. The book is too short, though, to truly give the reader an understanding of the several ways briefly described that may end life as we know it. It is a blur of despair with elements of hope scattered throughout. The author should have trusted the intelligence of the reader a little more and actually been more descriptive in his science. The reader will come away with a numb feeling but no true understanding. This book is still important for what is does provide and is briefly illuminating in its descriptions of science gone too far, as well as the many other varied possible ending prophesied. An important book that will hopefully lead to more thorough accounts. Not for the light of heart.

Rating:
Summary: Just A Catalog of News Events
Review: Most of the book is simply a short summary of news events of the past few years, with a few 'shock and awe' highly unlikely events thrown in to amaze the reader. Rees argues that humanities days are numbered, but a good third of the book is dedicated to discussions of alien life, mankind's travel to the stars, and the future of science - all these activities with time spans much greater than the next 50-100 years that he predicts our 50% probability lies. Save your money- and simply listen to the news.

Rating:
Summary: Doom gloom and death
Review: This is a very clearly written exposition of the major threats facing mankind in the present and near future. It provides sensible discussions of incredible dangers that most of us do not think about most of the time. It is also reasonable in understanding that the nuclear threat has not vanished with the fall of the Soviet Union but has rather transformed. It too presents a picture of possible survival through colonization of other worlds. And it proposes a whole set of possibilities of transformation of humanity into some other form of being which would make our cosmic survival more likely. Its focus however is in discussing the kinds of dangers human tampering with nature and environment bring to the future.
The hopelessness which I personally felt in reading the work comes not only from the possibility that one of the ' doom scenarios' might be realized. It is rather from the strong feeling which Rees is not alone in presenting, that we human beings as we are, are only a temporary stage which will necessarily be transformed into some other more durable, more intelligent kind of ' thing.' I find that this approach undermines the central value of the 'human'as we know it. Human life,individual human beings, human relations in all their complexity, the human relation to the Divine seem to me to be more precious and holy, than our ' survival ' as another ' form of being'. This book is frightening in its negative prospects but too does not console in the picture of the non- human human future, it gives.