The Notion of Progress and the Terminal Experiment

Abstract

Not very long ago, a less than eminent politician, commenting on the views of Dr Ehrlich, remarked that people had been forecasting the end of the world for a long time but it hadn't come to pass. The obvious rejoinder was that modern forecasts of the end of the world were a little different from previous ones, which were based on religious, not on scientific, premises. Since science has replaced religion as the modem faith, and religious forecasts of the end of the world now attract only a handful of believers while nearly all of us are now convinced that what scientists say must be right, or at least well-founded, this is certainly a new twist to doom-forecasting.