Seeing further: the story of science & the Royal Society — 18 MAGGIE GEE

1. 1. Human beings fear endings but also crave them, finding excitement in imagined apocalypses while safe in the present.
2. 2. Martin Rees' book 'Our Final Century' argues that 21st-century humans face unprecedented risks from new technologies like bioerror, bioterror, rogue nanoreplicators, and nuclear mishaps, in addition to natural threats.
3. 3. Norman Cohn traced millenarian cults from ancient times to the 16th century, and John Gray echoed that mid-20th-century movements like Communism and Nazism also anticipated the death of the old order.
4. 4. Isaac Newton's 1704 letter predicting the world would end in 2060, based on biblical 'evidence,' was displayed in 2003 when apocalyptic fears were already high due to the Iraq War.
5. 5. Some collective fears have proved well-founded, such as the 1930s fear of totalitarianism leading to WWII, while others like the Y2K bug were overblown.
6. 6. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists' Doomsday Clock remains at five minutes to midnight in 2009, reflecting ongoing nuclear proliferation despite the end of the Cold War.
7. 7. Global warming has become the pervasive dread of the early 21st century, shaping a vague terror of the end that each generation carries from childhood.
8. 8. Many apocalyptic novels, such as those by Margaret Atwood and Cormac McCarthy, ultimately make readers feel relief that civilization still endures, refreshing their love of life.
9. 9. Gee's own novels use 'double endings' to offer readers an active choice: the narrative ends in disaster, but an epilogue returns to a peaceful present, emphasizing 'against ending.'
10. 10. The Royal Society has been active in climate change advocacy since 1988, producing policy statements and joint G8+5 academy calls for urgent action, while the Royal Society of Literature did nothing.
11. 11. Writers can contribute by defamiliarizing the present, critiquing scientific overconfidence, and using irony to question proposed solutions like geoengineering.
12. 12. Both scientists and artists are 'antennae of the race,' able to look beyond immediate survival and imagine the future, but if they fail, civilization may collapse, losing libraries and laboratories.