The End of the World: The Science and Ethics of Human Extinction (Paperback)

~ (Author) "In this chapter and the next, so many risks are listed that it could seem surprising that the human race has survived so long..." (more)
Key Phrases: doomsday argument, vacuum metastability disaster, nuclear revenge, United States, Doom Soon, Little Puddle (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

While the concept of "oneness" with nature is foreign to most western cultures, groups such as the Hindus and the Hopi Indians have long comprehended their role in an ever-cycling universe and the inevitable coming of the end of the world. As the earth reaches 8.64 billion years--the length of the Hindu's "creation-and-destruction" cycle--Professor John Leslie of the University of Guelph in Canada thinks that the end, at least for this course of humanity, is near. Impending threats to our survival include nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare; ozone depletion; the greenhouse effect; disease; natural disasters; and even the potential for accidental production of a new Big Bang. And while trying to forestall an apocalypse would be futile, Leslie promises it will all end quickly. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Library Journal

Will the human race become extinct fairly shortly? Have the dangers been underestimated, and ought we to care? In seeking to answer these questions, Leslie (Universes, Routledge, 1990) examines many "doom soon" scenarios but specifically centers on mathematician Brandon Carter's "Doomsday Argument," which applies bayesian reasoning to the idea that the risk of human extinction has usually been underestimated. Leslie has built on Carter's Doomsday Argument, stating that it doesn't generate risk estimates but is rather an "argument for revising the...estimates that we generate when we consider various possible dangers." Even so, Leslie estimates that the entire human race has a 30 percent chance of annihilation by nuclear war, disease, or some other means in the next 500 years. This intriguing work may be of interest to philosophers, population studies scholars, biologists, and human ecologists and is recommended for academic libraries.?Susan Maret, Auraria Lib., Univ. of Colorado, Denver
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Routledge; New edition edition (April 17, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0415184479
• ISBN-13: 978-0415184472
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,354,965 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A book to help overcome complacency, July 28, 2001

By A Customer

Some of the reviews below miss the point of John Leslie's book. Professor Leslie is a utilitarian philosopher at the University of Guelph in Ontario, and as such he's written this book with the express objective of providing a warning to civilization of the dangers that lie ahead. In spite of what the book's title may initially suggest, the book is not the work of some gloomy apocalyptic doomsayer; rather, it is a sensible consideration of the perils that an advanced civilization like our own must overcome over the next crucial period to advance. It's easy to simply take civilization for granted, but Leslie's point is that its survival is not guaranteed, but depends on the choices that we make in the near future. Prof. Leslie asserts that if humanity can make it past the next few centuries then civilization will be in fairly good shape; it's the period soon to be upon us that will be so rocky, with dangers in everything from the spread of nuclear weapons to the practice of biological warfare, from impacting asteroids to poorly thought-out particle physics experiments gone awry, from chemical weapons to the biggest threat of all-- the destruction of earth's fragile ecosystem upon which we all rely, but so often do not recognize. What Leslie is calling for is wisdom, and for the practice of restraint and discipline on a societal scale, to avoid the petty squabbles and foolish waste of resources that we can no longer afford. Admittedly some of the methodology used in the book is flawed and has been shown to be problematic, but this does not belittle its value. The book suggests that it's time to "shape up" and to put into practice, those qualities associated with "higher functioning" and a truly advanced society, and to recognize the dangers ahead of time-- thus applying foresight and planning far ahead for crises, and averting them in the first place. The book is therefore an excellent "wake-up call" to move us out of complacency, and for this reason alone it is quite valuable.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Deliciously disturbing, October 4, 2007

By	Joseph Davis (Calgary, Alberta Canada) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The End of the World: The Science and Ethics of Human Extinction (Hardcover)

John Leslie is a professor of philosophy at the University of Guelph. Much of this book is taken up with explorations of, criticisms of, and defences of the 'Doomsday Argument', championed by Leslie and cosmologist Brandon Carter. The 'Doomsday Argument' goes something like this:

-if humanity were to continue to prosper and multiply, eventually spreading beyond the solar system, and perhaps the galaxy, the total number of human beings today (6 billion) will seem insignificant compared to the potential trillions and trillions of humans in the future. But if this were to actually happen, humans today would be among the very earliest of the race -perhaps in the first 0.1 per cent or even 0.001 per cent. How likely is it that we are that special? In the year 2090 the population of earth might be 12 billion people. Of all the humans who had ever lived, one in ten would be alive in that year. Instead of expecting to be in a remarkably early stage of human civilization, say in the first 0.1 per cent, it is much more likely that an inhabitant of the year 2090 will be among that 1 in 10 present when humanity died.

To me this argument seems flimsy, sophistic, and somehow just wrong, but Leslie does an impressive and thorough job of refuting the many objections to it. My eyes glazed over during some of these detailed and convoluted defences, but then I only took one philosophy course in university. What I liked this book for was the exploration of the many delicious ways in which humanity could be wiped out. Some of these faces of doom might seem quite far-fetched and unlikely, but all have some formidable scientists and philosophers backing them. Here is an abbreviated list:
-nuclear war. "Small nations, terrorists, and rich criminals wanting to become still richer by holding the world to ransom, can already afford very destructive bombs." Suitcase bombs in particular worry me. I believe a few well-placed bombs could de-stabilize the United States almost overnight.
-biological warfare. Such weapons are less costly than nuclear weapons, easier to conceal, and could be more dangerous because their field of destruction is harder to limit.
-chemical warfare.
-destruction of the ozone layer. "...by chlorofluorocarbons or other things."
-'Greenhouse effect'. "On Venus, greenhouse effect temperatures are sufficient to melt lead."
-poisoning by pollution. "Hundreds of new chemicals enter the environment each year. Their effects are often hard to predict."
-disease. Many deadly diseases are developing immunity to our best drugs. New viruses are thought to filter down from outer space. Global warming could thaw out some virulent disease from the past, such as the 1918-1919 flu, which preferred younger, healthy victims. ("They died horribly, their lungs filling with fluid, becoming stiff and solid, literally drowning them. As they expired, they vented pints of the highly infectious liquid from their mouths and noses." -Calgary Herald, October 4, 1997)
-volcanic eruptions. Which might produce a 'volcanic winter' akin to 'nuclear winter'.
-hits by asteroids or comets. If Shoemaker-Levy had hit earth instead of Jupiter, we would all be having drinks with the dinosaurs right now in the Restaurant At the End of the Universe.
-an extreme ice age due to passage through an interstellar cloud.
-a nearby supernova. Earth would be bathed in deadly rays, cleansing it of all life.
-essentially unpredictable breakdown of a complex system. As investigated by Chaos Theory: "the system in question might be earth's biosphere; its air, soil, its water, and its living things interact in highly intricate ways."
-something-we-know-not-what. "It would be foolish to think we have foreseen all possible natural and technological disasters."
-unwillingness to rear children. Seen already to a certain extent in rich nations.
-a disaster from genetic engineering. "Perhaps a 'green scum' disaster, in which a genetically engineered organism reproduces itself with immense efficiency, smothering everything."
-a disaster from nanotechnology. "Very tiny self-reproducing machines -they could be developed fairly soon through research inspired by Richard Feynman -might perhaps spread world-wide within a month in a 'gray ooze' calamity." Sounds like something from a Philip K. Dick story.
-disasters associated with computers. Okay, so Y2K was a bust. That doesn't mean a real computer disaster isn't possible. We are becoming more and more reliant on them.
-production a new Big Bang in the laboratory.
-the possibility of producing an all-destroying phase transition. 'Comparable to turning water into ice", as in Ice 9 from Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle. "In 1984, Edward Farhi and Robert Jeffe suggested that physicists might produce 'strange quark matter' of a kind which attracted ordinary matter, changing it into more of itself until the entire earth had been converted ('eaten')." In contrast, there might be a very real vacuum meta-stability danger associated with experiments at extremely high energies. The vacuum we live in is not stable, it is meta-stable. This is because it is not a true vacuum. It is filled with a force field (a scalar field) and so is a pseudo-vacuum. While stable at low energies, a high energy experiment (such as planned in conjunction with the new super particle-colliders due to come on line in the near future) might provide enough of a jolt to destabilize it (like a ball bearing resting in a hollow on a wooden incline that starts rolling because of a nudge). An experiment might produce a bubble of 'true vacuum' which would then expand at nearly the speed of light, destroying everything in sight. "Rather as a tiny ice crystal changes a large volume of super-cooled water into more ice crystals."
-annihilation by extra-terrestrials. If and when E.T. finds us, he/she/it might not be cuddly or even friendly; he/she/it might just be hungry.
-risks from philosophy. Suppose a fundamentalist U.S president or general wanted to hasten Judgement Day a wee bit by pressing a certain red button (see Dr Strangelove). Alternatively, someone in a position of power might, when looking at the prevalence of evil in the world, agree with Schopenhauer that "it would have been better if our planet had remained like the moon, a lifeless mass." So why not release a humanity-destroying plague (see Twelve Monkeys).
Leslie goes into much more depth concerning these threats, and isn't saying that any of them are inevitable. He is just saying that when we look at these areas of concern in the light of the 'Doomsday Argument' we should take their potential very seriously. We should be asking ourselves as individuals, as nations, and as a species, what we can do to lower their risk of occurring. Our survival is far from assured.

11 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Hint: the end is surely scarier with books like this..., February 27, 2004

By	Takis Tz. (InYourHead) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

To begin with, if you tend on the masochistic side this book will definately serve ya well. No, not because of the subject matter, absolutely not. The fact that the probabilities we're heading into extinction are increasing daily is undeniable unless you've turned your brain off and that I'd be willing to believe after having lived 37 years and watched my fellow humans go on about their affairs they way they do.

No, that would not be why this book is actually a torture. After you're done with the first half of the book you might feel a little tired if not somewhat numb. You'll just be done with going over various disasters that are threatening us, most of which are self-caused: comets about to blast us to kingdome-come, nuclear wars intending to fry us ruthlessly into oblivion, diseases which either "jumped" out of labs or out of nature's arsenal, overpopulation and pollution and the combination of thse two, shortage of food, nanotechnology and the machines taking over (where's Arnie when ya need him) and so on and on.

Now this is all a reality most of us are too irresponsible to face up to, indeed, as a species we are what i call "perversely intelligent", that is, we have intellectual horsepower which is incredibly difficult to groom in a a truly meaningful way and we are thus subjects to dangers caused by that very intelligence.

Writting a book about this, should be, again perversely, highly entertaining. It would by default be humorous because how can you actually discuss so much shortshightedness, idiocy, and the impending doom as the direct product without seeing the humour in it? The author of this book can. He takes us through these fist chapters with a language so dry and lifeless you'd think the end is already behind us and books are now written by left-over survivor computers which were not programmed for humour.
Ah, but wait. You thought this is heavy, and if you havent quit by then (being possibly not the lion-hearted type) you're in for a major treatment that will suck out all your life force and leave you connected to another machine checking for a pulse:

the latter part of the book (its second half practically) is basically a ridiculous attempt to tie all this together with philosophy. Now philosophy, for the uninitiated, isnt supposed to be a life-threatening experience. Not really. Professor Leslie though, puts in a courageous effort to convince us of the opposite, and I'd be lying if i said he doesnt coming damn close.

Taking up highly insignificant theories few ever heard of, and elevating them to the holy grail of philosophy, the author transforms his book to a readscape as fertile as the Sahara. Hundreds of pages of pretentious pomp about not much really isnt what i associate with philosophy. Especially when it's coupled with aggresive arrogance : not too few times, the author basically praises himself after he argues on his own with his imaginary opponents in the philosophy field, beats them and then triumphantly announces his victory. That's downright pathetic and even if the philosophical quest in this book was enjoyable (far, very far from) this would still spoil it beyond recovery.

Look elsewhere. You dont need the suffering really. The author does convince us that the end is near (which isnt hard actually) but then, since it is, why make it all the more agonisingly painful by going through unbearable books such as this? Save the precious little time you have left.