A planet at risk

It’s special because it's the first when one species, namely human beings, has the power to affect the entire planet's fate. That's because there are more of us on the world than ever before; the world population is now about seven point eight billion, and we're each more demanding of energy and resources. For the very first time, we are affecting the entire planet.

Another related question is whether we can avoid causing mass extinctions, because the biosphere obviously is a complicated and rather delicate system, and if we encroach too much on it, because we need to use more land to grow food, etc., if we change the climate, then of course that will make conditions suboptimal for the existing plants and animals. One of the big concerns is that we should not only control the change of the climate, but also we should control any despoliation of the natural world by causing mass extinctions. To quote the great ecologist EO Wilson, if our generation causes mass extinction, it's a sin the future generations will least forgive us for.

Even if the birthrate falls, the population is going to rise for at least the next 20 or 30 years. We can't predict beyond that stage. We hope it'll start falling, but we can't predict what will happen beyond about 2050. Prediction of the climate and of the population can be made about 20 to 30 years ahead.

We can't be sure about how technology will develop. We can, of course, be fairly confident that there will be more powerful computers, etc., and we can hope that there will be benefits in medical sciences, which have been accelerated, of course, by COVID-19; we hope we'll be able to cope with diseases, etc., and that we'll understand genetics better, and also that we will be able to make energy without burning fossil fuels. Clean energy and better biotech are two areas of science that we hope will develop.

They can't be made in a clandestine way that's hard to monitor. Although we quite rightly worry about nuclear weapons, they are a huge danger overhanging the world still, and we've got to make sure that they're controlled. We can monitor any facilities where nuclear weapons could be made because they’re large, conspicuous and the international topic of energy does this. Biotech, making engineered viruses even more virulent and transmissible than COVID-19, is something which can be done by people using facilities available in many university or industrial labs. Likewise, computer power and computer networks allow a small group or even just an individual to cause a cyber attack that could cause really massive devastation, knocking out the power grid in a large region or causing some other global disaster. One of my worries is how we can control the misuse of these technologies and harness their benefits without feeling too threatened by their downsides.

They are trying to address what regulations should be imposed on biological developments on grounds of both prudence and ethics. Of course, that's great, but even if these regulations are agreed by all countries, the question is, can they be enforced? We don't have much success in enforcing the drug laws globally or the tax laws globally, and likewise my nightmare is that we can't enforce the regulations on use of these dangerous technologies. That's why we will have a bumpy ride through this century.

Of course, we can well imagine events far worse than COVID-19, an event which has the transmissibility of COVID-19, but the fatality rate at, say, Ebola or something like that. We can fear something still worse that would happen. We're much more vulnerable. Let me give one example. In the 14th century, we know that Europe suffered bubonic plague, the Black Death, which killed up to half the population of many towns and villages, but the other half went on fatalistically. Now, if we had a pandemic which killed even 1% of the population, then it would overwhelm hospitals and probably lead to a social breakdown, because our expectations are so high. It's perhaps ominous that COVID-19 has killed about 0.3% of the population in some European countries and in the United States. 1% would be really catastrophic. We've got to bear in mind that these threats are very hard to cope with, but we could be better prepared and we could be more resilient.

In Germany, they intentionally kept at least 20 or 25 percent of beds free, in case there was an emergency. You've got to accept that is worth spending a bit extra in order to be prepared for an emergency, and also to manage our industry, so it's more resilient and doesn't depend on the breakdowns of a single long supply chain. Those are lessons we can learn.

The reason for that is that sub-Saharan Africa is one of the places that has not yet experienced the so-called demographic transition. The birth rate is still very high; the population is rising there, even though it's leveling off in Europe and North America. That's going to make it harder for Africa to get out of the poverty trap. Another reason it’s going to be harder is that the way in which the East Asian countries, the Asian tigers, as they're sometimes called, developed, was by undercutting the manufacturing costs in Europe and North America, and having cheap labor so that we bought their goods. That gave a huge boost to places like South Korea and Vietnam and Taiwan. Of course, now robots are taking over manufacturing. Countries in Africa won't have that advantage; that ladder’s been kicked away. We've got to make sure that the wealthy nations ensure that countries in Africa can develop industry and develop a better standard of life. Because the one thing they do have in Africa is they have mobile phones, and so they know what they're missing. 100 years ago, they knew nothing about the injustice and deprivation they faced. Now they do. For reasons that aren't purely altruistic, it's very important for us in Europe to ensure that there is a sort of mega Marshall Plan to develop Africa and ensure it catches up rather than falling behind the countries of Europe and the United States.

Editor’s note: This article has been faithfully transcribed from the original interview filmed with the author, and carefully edited and proofread. Edit date: 2025