ABSTRACT
In recent years, scientific doomsday literature has surged. Remarkable about this trend is that doomsday warnings no longer come from just popular and pseudo-scientific sources but also from mainstream science. A representative instance is Our Final Hour, which carries the subtitle: A Scientist’s Warning: How Terror, Error, and Environmental Disaster Threaten Humankind’s Future in this Century—on Earth and Beyond (2003). It is written by none other than Martin Rees, the onetime Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy at Cambridge University, and President of the Royal Society of London. Admittedly, the title Our Final Hour, which is given to the book’s American edition, carries a pseudo-scientific flavor (the title of the original British edition, less sensationally, is Our Final Century). 1 All the same, today’s scientific establishment shares the doomsday anxieties that used to be the domain of religion and science fiction. ‘The end’ has entered scientific discourse as a serious subject of research and science policy.
