The September issue of Scientific American has a bunch of interesting articles, including this introductory essay on why humans always seem to be fearing one doomsday or another. Here's the irony:
You might think that the enterprise of science, with its method and its facts, would inoculate us against the most extravagant doomsday obsessions. But it doesn't. If anything, it just gives us more to worry about.
And who are the biggest worry warts? You guessed it:
Some of the most fervent and convincing doomsayers, after all, are scientists. Bill Joy, co-founder and former chief scientist of Sun Microsystems, has warned that of out-of-control nanobots could consume everything on earth. Astronomer Royal Martin Rees has publicly offered a bet that a biological catastrophe"”accidental or intentional"”will kill at least one million people by 2020 (so far, no takers). Numerous climatologists sound the alarm about the possibility of runaway global warming. They all stand on the shoulders of giants: British economist Thomas Malthus predicted in the 19th century that the rise in population would lead to widespread famine and catastrophe. It never happened, but that didn't stop Stanford biologist Paul R. Ehrlich from renewing the warning in his 1968 book The Population Bomb when he predicted that global famine was less than two decades away. Catastrophe didn't arrive then, either, but does that mean it never will? Not necessarily. Still, people often worry disproportionately about disasters that are unlikely to occur.
Now we come to the objective of the article:
Science may be a culprit, but it also offers some explanation for why we can be so fearful. Some researchers think that apocalyptic dread feeds off our collective anxiety about events that lie outside our individual control.
There's more to tease you, but it's just a web preview. To read the whole thing (as well as other articles with titles such as, "The Brief, Eventful Afterlife of a Human Corpse"), I suggest buying a print copy. Seems like perfect beach reading as we wind down summer.
