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Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"maff" |
| Date: |
13 Jun 2006 04:52:33 AM |
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Dark materials |
Dark materials
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1794321,00.html
Nuclear scientist Joseph Rotblat campaigned against the atom bomb he
had helped unleash. Is it time for today's cyber scientists to heed his
legacy?
Essay by Martin Rees
Saturday June 10, 2006
The Guardian
Joseph (Jo) Rotblat was a nuclear scientist. He helped to make the
first atomic bomb. But for decades he campaigned against what he had
helped unleash. Until he died last year, aged 96, he pursued this aim
with the dynamism of a man half his age, inspiring others to join the
cause. He was born in Poland in 1908. His family suffered great
hardship in the first world war but he was exceptionally intelligent
and determined, and managed to become a nuclear physicist. After the
invasion of Poland, he came as as a refugee to England to work with
James Chadwick at Liverpool University. He then went to Los Alamos, New
Mexico, as part of the British contingent involved in the Manhattan
Project to make the first atom bomb.
Martin Rees
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.atheism/msg/e0779a94985a4022
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| User: "stoney" |
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| Title: Re: Dark materials |
18 Jun 2006 04:09:29 PM |
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On 13 Jun 2006 02:52:33 -0700, "maff" <maff91@yahoo.com> wrote in
alt.atheism
Dark materials
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1794321,00.html
Nuclear scientist Joseph Rotblat campaigned against the atom bomb he
had helped unleash. Is it time for today's cyber scientists to heed his
legacy?
Essay by Martin Rees
Saturday June 10, 2006
The Guardian
Joseph (Jo) Rotblat was a nuclear scientist. He helped to make the
first atomic bomb. But for decades he campaigned against what he had
helped unleash. Until he died last year, aged 96, he pursued this aim
with the dynamism of a man half his age, inspiring others to join the
cause. He was born in Poland in 1908. His family suffered great
hardship in the first world war but he was exceptionally intelligent
and determined, and managed to become a nuclear physicist. After the
invasion of Poland, he came as as a refugee to England to work with
James Chadwick at Liverpool University. He then went to Los Alamos, New
Mexico, as part of the British contingent involved in the Manhattan
Project to make the first atom bomb.
In his mind there was only one justification for the bomb project: to
ensure that Hitler did not get one first. As soon as this ceased to be a
credible risk, Jo left Los Alamos - the only scientist then to do so. He
returned to England and became a professor of medical physics, an expert
on the effects of radiation on human health, and a compelling and
outspoken campaigner.
In 1955, he met Bertrand Russell and encouraged him to prepare a
manifesto stressing the extreme gravity of the nuclear peril. He secured
Einstein's signature too; this "Russell-Einstein manifesto" was then
signed by 10 other eminent scientists. The authors claimed to be
"speaking on this occasion not as members of this or that nation,
continent or creed, but as human beings, members of the species Man,
whose continued existence is in doubt". This manifesto led to the
initiation of the Pugwash Conferences - so called after the village in
Nova Scotia where the inaugural conference was held. There have been 300
meetings since then. Jo attended almost all of them.
When the achievements of these conferences were recognised by the 1995
Nobel peace prize, half the award went to the Pugwash organisation, and
half to Jo Rotblat personally, as their "prime mover" and untiring
inspiration. Particularly during the 1960s, the Pugwash Conferences
offered crucial "back-door" contact between scientists from the US and
the Soviet Union when there were few formal channels. These contacts
eased the path for the partial test ban treaty of 1963, and the later
anti-ballistic missile treaty.
During the cold war, the superpowers could have stumbled towards
armageddon through muddle and miscalculation. Robert McNamara was the US
defence secretary during the Cuba missile crisis. He later wrote that we
then "came within a hair's breadth of nuclear war without realising it.
It's no credit to us that we escaped - Khrushchev and Kennedy were lucky
as well as wise." The prevailing nuclear doctrine was deterrence via the
threat of "mutual assured destruction" (with the apt acronym Mad).
Each side put the "worst case" construction on whatever the other did,
and overreacted. The net result was an arms race that made both less
secure.
Another who spoke out after retirement was Solly Zuckerman, the UK
government's longtime chief scientific adviser. He said "ideas for new
weapon systems derived in the first place not from the military but from
scientists and technologists merely doing what they saw to be their job:
the momentum of the arms race is fuelled by technicians in governmental
laboratories and in the armaments industries". In Zuckerman's view the
weapons scientists were "the alchemists of our times, working in secret
.... casting spells which embrace us all". The decisions that racheted up
the arms race were political, but scientists who developed new weapons
could not disclaim their share of the responsibility.
The great physicist Hans Bethe also came round to this view. He was the
chief theorist at Los Alamos and worked on the H-bomb, but by 1995 his
aversion to military research had hardened, and he urged scientists to
"desist from work creating, developing, improving and manufacturing
nuclear weapons and other weapons of potential mass destruction".
Some of Bethe's colleagues started a journal called the Bulletin of
Atomic Scientists. On its cover is a clock, and the closeness of its
hands to midnight indicates the editor's judgment on how precarious the
world situation is. Every few years the minute hand is shifted. When the
cold war ended, and the nuclear threat eased, the Bulletin's clock was
put back to 17 minutes to midnight. There was less chance of 10,000
bombs devastating our civilisation.
But this catastrophic threat could be merely in abeyance. In the next
100 years, geopolitical realignments could lead to a nuclear standoff
between new superpowers, which might be handled less well than the Cuba
crisis was. Moreover, we are confronted by a proliferation of nuclear
weapons (in North Korea and Iran for instance). There is now a growing
risk of nuclear weapons going off in a localised conflict, and the
Bulletin's clock stands at seven minutes to midnight. The nuclear threat
will always be with us.
But what are the promises and threats from 21st-century science? Science
offers immense hope, and exciting prospects. There are genuine grounds
for being a techno-optimist.
The technologies that fuel economic growth today - IT, miniaturisation
and biotech - are environmentally and socially benign. They are sparing
of energy and raw materials. They boost quality of life in the
developing and the developed world, and have much further to go. That is
surely good news. But opinion polls reveal public concern that science
may be advancing too fast to be properly controlled. It is not only
advancing faster than ever, it is opening up the prospects of new kinds
of change.
Whatever else may have changed over preceding centuries, humans have not
for thousands of years. But in this century, targeted drugs to enhance
memory or change mood, genetic modification, and perhaps silicon
implants into the brain, may alter human beings themselves. That is
something qualitatively new in our history.
Our species could be transformed within a few centuries. And there are
other disquieting prospects. Collective human actions are transforming,
even ravaging, the biosphere - perhaps irreversibly - through global
warming and loss of biodiversity. We have entered a new geological era,
the anthropocene. We do not fully understand the consequences of rising
populations and increasing energy consumption on the interwoven fabric
of atmosphere, water, land and life.
We are collectively endangering our planet, but there is a potential
threat from individuals too. "Bio" and "cyber" expertise will be
accessible to millions. It does not require large, special-purpose
facilities as do nuclear weapons. Even a single person will have the
capability to cause widespread disruption through error or terror. There
will always be disaffected loners, and the "leverage" each can exert is
ever-growing. It would be hard to eliminate such risks, even with very
intrusive surveillance.The global village will have its global village
idiots.
Some commentators on biotech, robotics and nanotech worry that when the
genie is out of the bottle, the outcome may be impossible to control.
They urge caution in "pushing the envelope". But we cannot reap the
benefits of science without accepting some risks. The best we can do is
minimise them. The typical scientific discovery has many applications,
some benign, others less so. Even nuclear physics has its upside: its
medical uses have saved more people than nuclear weapons actually
killed.
The uses of academic research generally cannot be foreseen. Ernest
Rutherford, the leading nuclear physicist of his time, famously said in
the mid-1930s that nuclear energy was "moonshine"; the inventors of
lasers did not foresee that an early application of their work would be
to eye surgery; and the discoverer of x-rays was not searching for ways
to see through flesh.
Science in the 21st century will present new threats more diverse and
more intractible than nuclear weapons did. It will pose ethical
dilemmas. But a blanket prohibition on all risky experiments and
innovations would paralyse science and deny us all its benefits.
Scientists sometimes abide by self-imposed moratoria on specific lines
of research. A precedent for this was the so-called "Asilomar
declaration" in 1975 whereby prominent molecular biologists refrained
from some experiments involving the then new technique of gene-splicing.
Just last month, experts in the more advanced techniques of "synthetic
biology" proposed a similar ban.
But a voluntary moratorium will be harder to achieve today: the academic
community is larger, and competition (enhanced by commercial pressures)
is more intense. To be effective, the consensus must be worldwide. If
one country alone imposed regulations, the most dynamic researchers and
companies would migrate to another that was more sympathetic or
permissive. This is happening already in stem cell research.
How can we prioritise and regulate, to maximise the chance that
applications are benign, and restrain their "dark side"? How can the
best science be fed in to the political process?
There is an ever-widening gap between what science allows, and what we
should actually do. There are many doors science can open that should be
kept closed, on prudential or ethical grounds. Choices on how science is
applied should not be made just by scientists. That is why everyone
needs a "feel" for science and a realistic attitude to risk - otherwise
public debate won't get beyond sloganising. Jo Rotblat favoured a
"Hippocratic oath" whereby scientists would pledge themselves to use
their talents to human benefit.
Scientists surely have a special responsibility. It is their ideas that
form the basis of new technology. They should not be indifferent to the
fruits of their ideas. They should forgo experiments that are risky or
unethical. More than that, they should foster benign spin-offs, but
resist dangerous or threatening applications. They should raise public
consciousness of hazards to environment or health.
At the moment, scientific effort is deployed sub-optimally. This seems
so whether we judge in purely intellectual terms, or take account of
likely benefit to human welfare. Some subjects have had the inside
track. Others, such as environmental research, renewable energy,
biodiversity studies and so forth, deserve more effort. Within medical
research the focus is disproportionately on ailments that loom largest
in prosperous countries, rather than on the infections endemic in the
tropics. The challenge of global warming should stimulate a whole raft
of manifestly benign innovations - for conserving energy, and generating
it by "clean" means (biofuels, innovative renewables, carbon
sequestration, and nuclear fusion).
These scientific challenges deserve a priority and commitment from
governments, akin to that accorded to the Manhattan Project or the
Apollo moon landing. They should appeal to the idealistic young. But to
safeguard our future and channel our efforts optimally and ethically we
shall need effective campaigners, not just physicists, but biologists,
computer experts, and environmentalists as well; latter-day counterparts
of Jo Rotblat, inspired by his vision and building on his legacy.
· Martin Rees is president of the Royal Society. This essay is based on
a talk he gave at the Guardian Hay literary festival
/end
--
Fundies and trolls are cordially invited to
shove a wooden cross up their arses and rotate
at a high rate of speed. I trust you'll
be 'blessed' with a plethora of splinters.
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