Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist David Gross has a concern that transcends the boundaries of his field of study. That’s what he wanted to convey in an interview he gave to Live Science on the occasion of receiving an award, where he was asked about the main obstacles to achieving a theory of quantum gravity. His response here did not point to technical deficiencies or mathematical limitations, but to the hourly clock of our own survival.
Your statement. “I spend part of my time trying to convince people that their chances of living another 50 years are slim” was exactly the answer the scientist gave and it shows a really pessimistic future for our society.
The reason? The figure does not arise from a new predictive model of the physicist, but from a personal extrapolation. Here Gross puts the risk of nuclear conflict at 2% per year in the current geopolitical context, also saying he considers his position quite conservative.
This is based on post-Cold War estimates, which were about a 1% annual probability of a nuclear disaster. And from that premise, Nobel Prize builds its doomsday scenario, but it has some important mistakes.
We get out the calculator. With a constant risk of 2% per year, pure math tells us that the median, i.e. average life during this period of peace is about 34 years. However, the expected time or statistical average is exactly 50 years. This means that the actual probability of reaching half a century without nuclear war is about 36%, a number that drops to 13% if we project a hundred years into the future.
Thus we may encounter a confusion of terms here, although in previous forums, such as the closing of a conference of the Almena Physics Society, he specifically spoke of a half-life of 35 years.
Guess. Beyond the dance of statistics, the base risk percentage using gross is well supported. Here cryptographer and Turing laureate Marty Hellman popularized the idea that 10% annual risk is too high and 0.1% too low in light of our recent survival. This is why it limits the actual danger of experiencing a nuclear war to between 0.3 and 3% per year.
Subsequently, in more recent assessments, expert consensus estimates a 6% chance of human extinction before 2100.
warning By David Gross should not be read as a scientific article, but as a distress cry from a brilliant mind firmly invested in institutional activity. And we have other warnings, like the apocalypse clock, which was only 85 seconds from midnight earlier this year.
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