Because I have the title Astronomer Royal, I’m often asked: ‘Did you do horoscopes for the Queen?’ Sadly, the answer’s ‘no’. I’m just an astronomer, not an astrologer. Scientists are poor forecasters – almost as poor as economists. But I fear I’ve become typecast as a doomster because I predict a bumpy ride through the next few decades.
We’re deep in the ‘anthropocene’. Humans are so numerous and so demanding of energy and resources that our collective footprint is changing the world’s climate, and despoiling the natural environment. Politicians like to focus on immediate threats, but they won’t prioritise measures needed to deal with long-term global issues – especially when it’s countries far away that are most threatened – unless there’s a clamour from voters. We need technical advances that enable the ‘global south’ to leapfrog directly from smoky stoves to clean energy, just as they leapfrogged to smartphones without ever having landlines.
And we face challenges from bio and cyber technologies which, despite offering huge benefits, have scary downsides. Scientific breakthroughs are viewed with ambivalence rather than enthusiasm. By the turn of the century, biology may have transformed healthcare, but genomics may have advanced enough to render ‘designer babies’ conceivable, in both senses of that word. Would we welcome that? And what about the new Altos Labs – two in California and one in Cambridge – which focus on extending our lifespan? When their billionaire founders were young, they wanted to be rich; now they’re rich they want to be young again. That’s not so easy. In any case, would we welcome such a fundamental and unnatural inequality that such technology would bring?
Some worry, though, that they will die before this research succeeds. The Alcor company in Arizona has a solution: it will store your body, it claims, until immortality is on offer and you can be resurrected or have your brain downloaded.
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