Being built on an island of almost 62 hectares, the resort will have 20 restaurants, some of which will be helmed by top chefs from worldwide
Advances in microbiology may also prove to be a double-edged sword. True, better diagnostics, vaccines, and antibiotics should help to sustain health, control disease, and contain pandemics. But this very progress has sparked a dangerous evolutionary counter-attack by the pathogens themselves, with bacteria becoming immune to the antibiotics used to suppress them.
This growing resistance has already led to a resurgence in tuberculosis. Without new antibiotics, the risks posed by untreatable postoperative infections will rise back to where they were a century ago. Preventing the overuse of existing antibiotics - including in American cattle - and incentivizing the development of new treatments is thus an urgent short- and long-term priority.
And yet, there are also risks associated with the race to develop improved vaccines. Rapid innovation in biotech demands that we explore regulations to keep experiments safe, control the spread of potentially dangerous knowledge, and police the ethics of how new techniques are being applied. But effective worldwide enforcement of such rules would be virtually impossible. If something can be done, then someone, somewhere, will do it. That is a potentially terrifying prospect.
Whereas producing a nuclear weapon requires elaborate special-purpose technology, biotech involves small-scale, dual-use equipment. In fact, biohacking is an increasingly popular hobby and competitive game. Because our world has become so interconnected, the magnitude of the worst potential bio-catastrophes is greater than ever.
Nor is it scaremongering to highlight the human risks of bio-error or bio-terror. After all, that fact inhibits the use of bio-weapons by governments, or even by terrorist groups with specific aims. But an unbalanced loner with biotech expertise would not necessarily feel so constrained if he or she believed that there were too many humans on the planet.
Both bio error and bio-terror are possible within the next ten to 15 years. And the risk will become even greater in the longer term once it becomes possible to design and synthesize viruses. The ultimate nightmare would be a highly lethal bioweapon that has the transmissibility of the common cold.
Yet perhaps the greatest dilemma concerns human beings themselves. At some point in the future, genetic modification and cyborg technologies could make humans mentally and physically malleable. Moreover, such evolution - a kind of secular "intelligent design" - would take only centuries, in contrast to the thousands of centuries needed for Darwinian evolution.
That really would be a game changer. Today, when we admire the literature and artifacts that have survived from antiquity, we feel an affinity across thousands of years with those ancient artists and their civilizations. "Human nature" has not changed for millennia.
But there is no reason to assume that the dominant intelligences a few centuries from now will have any emotional resonance with us, even though they may have an algorithmic understanding of how we behaved. Will they even be recognizably human? Or, will electronic entities have taken over the world by then? It is anyone's guess. - Martin Rees, a cosmologist and astrophysicist, has been Britain's Astronomer Royal since 1995. He is a former Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and former President of the Royal Society. - Project Syndicate
Being built on an island of almost 62 hectares, the resort will have 20 restaurants, some of which will be helmed by top chefs from worldwide
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