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In his book, Our Final Hour, Cambridge professor and Britain’s “Astronomer Royal” Martin Rees predicts humanity has no more than a 50/50 chance of survival into the next century and that by 2020 a million people will perish due to scientific error or terror. Some would call him prescient, while others would interpret his words as alarmist, resembling a layer cake with environmental fears on top of nuclear fears on top of chemical and biological threats, ad infinitum. With a sci-fi flare, he warns of runaway technology, human clones and an ability to insert memory chips into the brain.