Helpless Earth

Knowledge is power.
Breakthrough science has brought immense advantages along with ghastly threats.
Indeed, the modern scientific civilization has recurrently endangered its own survival.
That is no longer a sensation.
Today's school children casually list the global perils, one by one:
Nuclear warfare, engineered diseases, polluting engines, hormone disruptors, self-replicating robots, uncontrolled AI, and so forth.
On that tense background, this book offers a concise investigation that focuses on upsetting questions:
Is any scientific discovery potentially hazardous?
Do apocalyptic scenarios tend to increase?
Is something wrong with the ethics of science?
Is our current risk of extinction at least 50%?
Is something wrong with human intelligence?
Have scientists created new problems far more severe than the old problems they had solved?
Do scientists commonly exaggerate the positive and downplay the negative impacts of their achievements?
Have scientists failed to review their traditional presuppositions, policies, and ambitions?
Do hazardous scientific projects repeatedly bypass a test of risk assessment?
Could risking humanity yield high rewards?