The Century of Living Dangerously

Our technological civilization will face self-generated hazards to life of unprecedented complexity and scale during the 21st century, global warming among them. Although theology has served for millennia to sustain the human spirit when facing poorly understood threats-from a probabilistic risk assessment perspective, one hopes that, as in some historical instances, scholarship, formal analytic methods, and available technology will enable hazard apprehension with sufficient precision and reliability to facilitate timely mitigation. This will not be easy for both sociopolitical and technical reasons. Specific issues addressed include: risk subjectivism, the difficulty of mathematical and computer model prediction-validity assessment deriving from Smale's dynamical system structural-stability theorem, as well as standards of scholarship, the need to sustain independent professional journals, and the obstacle to societal reform posed by commercial consumer-driven mass-media journalism. Advice to scholars is offered: get it in gear.