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98 In his book Our Final Hour, astronomer Martin Rees issued a sharp warning about the dangers that science and technology might pose to our future. Technology has so highly leveraged the power of the individual or the small group that one person’s act of irrationality, or even one person’s error, could do us all in. Our timescale has contracted, claimed Rees; the odds are no better than fifty-fifty that our present civilization on Earth will survive to 2100. Our destiny depends on the choices we make during this century.”! Consider biological experimentation. Scientists are actively attempting to create life. The resulting artificial cells might be quite different from any existing or extinct form. The “top-down” approach aims to create such cells by simplifying and genetically reprogramming existing cells with simple genomes. By contrast, the “bottom up” approach aims to assemble artificial cells from nonliving organic and inorganic materials, a task tra- ditionally left to God or to the unplanned forces of evolution. “Like the medieval alchemists,” warned an article in Science, “today’s cloning and stem cell biologists are working largely with processes they don’t fully understand.” Creation by Mail Scientists already are reprogramming bacteria behavior under the rubric of “synthetic biology.” Some are designing and building living systems that in some cases operate with an expanded genetic code that allows them to do things that no natural organism can. Genetic researcher Craig Venter said in 2004 that engineered cells and life-forms will be relatively common within a decade. More disturbingly, anyone can order synthetic DNA; at least one laboratory hosts an online library of parts that can be built into genomes. Scientists already have made a poliovirus from mail-order segments of DNA. A Nature editorial, assuming that some of the results of synthetic biology have escaped into the environment, argued that it is time to assess the risks of this technology. In 2005, a group of researchers recreated the flu virus that killed an estimated 50 million people in 1918. The publication of the full genome sequence gives any rogue nation or terrorist group all the information that they need to make their own version of the virus, raising the threat of biological warfare to a new level.” The ultimate fright—which may or may not be feasible—is a terminal laboratory experiment in which even deadlier organisms escape into our environment and kill off the human species. Some worry that physics research could lead to disaster. Experiments planned for the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory in the United States were intended to make the densest, hottest Probabilities: Longevity