Is humanity’s extinction just over the horizon?

Aided by a host of self-styled prophets, humanity’s capacity to envision — and invent — new ways of self-destruction appears boundless.

Conventional wisdom has it that the end will occur in a blaze of glory — perhaps amidst a fiery Armageddon of nuclear fireworks.

Just within the past few months, however, a group of people who normally spearhead technological progress — scientists — have shown unusual concern about the potential dangers of recent scientific developments.

Renowned theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking argues that humans may have less than 100 years to establish space colonies before the earth becomes uninhabitable, singling out the dangers of Artificial Intelligence (AI), nuclear war, global warming and genetically engineered super viruses.

Seth Shostak, Senior Astronomer at the SETI (Search For Extra-terrestrial Intelligence) Institute, says this may be the last century for humans as we know them, contending that designer babies and AI will lead to a new “alien” species that take our place at the top of the evolutionary chain. “Re-engineering our children will transform our species even faster. We will eventually produce offspring that are as different from us as dogs are from gray wolves.”

Think such predictions are far-fetched? Just within the past few months some alarming developments have greatly increased their probability.

On February 1st The Guardian reported that Britain’s Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority had just approved a scientist’s application to perform genome editing on human embryos. While such experimentation has probably already been done in China, until now these “germ-line modification” procedures have been costly and considered unethical due to unpredictable effects that could be passed on to future generations. Indeed, one of the scientists who developed the technology has issued a stern warning against its misuse.

Although these occurrences may seem shocking, over 70 years ago the visionary British writer and thinker C.S. Lewis saw them coming. In “Abolition of Man” Lewis warned that man’s extinction could result from a small group of elitists being given free rein to disregard natural law and objective values in the effort to create a “better” human society via social and scientific engineering.

Lewis asserted that naïve attempts to improve human nature are fundamentally different from cultural and scientific advances in other areas because they are replete with unknowables that could result, for example, in a species biologically advanced but morally regressed. Consequently, and especially in view of the contentiousness already inherent in human nature, the ethical foundations delicately undergirding humanity’s cooperation and continued survival could be totally lost.

Lewis further lamented that contemporary thinking, particularly in science, embraces something else which facilitates a bold recklessness: the total disbelief in anything other than the physical universe. Besides being close-minded, this approach engenders a false sense of power, leading to the misguided notion that humans can improve anything, even their own nature (which, Lewis believed, has been determined by forces not totally comprehensible).

The stakes have never been higher. Whether humanity proceeds with greater caution or continues plunging full speed ahead into the brave new world of cultural and scientific experimentation is, of course, up to humans. Therein lies the triumph … and the tragedy.

This story was originally published May 1, 2016 at 3:01 PM with the headline "Is humanity’s extinction just over the horizon?."