Our Final Hour - Further Reading

Further Reading

  • Rees does not object to the probabilistic argument for human extinction offered by the Doomsday argument (as championed by John Leslie in the 1996 book The End of the World: The Science and Ethics of Human Extinction (Routledge, hardcover: ISBN 0-415-14043-9, paperback: ISBN 0-415-18447-9)), but he does not consider it to describe the practical threats and solutions that he discusses.
  • In The Singularity is Near, Raymond Kurzweil reaches the same conclusion as Rees on the probability of human extinction within the 21st century.
  • In the 2004 book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (Viking Adult, ISBN 0-670-03337-5), Jared Diamond suggests that Sir Martin's hopes of worldwide cooperation in avoiding extinction scenarios may be in vain.
  • Ronald Wright, who quotes Martin Rees with approval in A Short History of Progress (at p. 125–6), is just as pessimistic – much more so than Jared Diamond – and argues that human history reveals a disastrous series of technological progress traps.

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