Why 'Sky Catch Fire'?

Trinty Test: July 16, 1945 - Public Domain

Arguably, the 20th century's most significant singular technological development event was the achievement led by Enrico Fermi of the first sustained nuclear chain reaction on the squash courts under Stagg field at the University of Chicago in 1942. One of the earliest parts of one the greatest technological sprints in human history, the Manhattan Project, the achievement demonstrated that "the super" or a weaponized hydrogen bomb, was in fact possible and it allegedly inspired intense speculation among Edward Teller, Robert Oppenheimer and Fermi as to the most extreme dangers of further development and testing. 

While some of the expressed fears are surely apocryphal, both the competing groups of Nazi German physicists and the Americans leading the Manhattan Project were allegedly very concerned that a weaponized chain reaction could lead to world-wide destruction, specifically by igniting nitrogen in the atmosphere. The haunting question that allegedly hung over the rest of the project, up until the Trinity Test in 1945, was "Will the sky catch fire?" The fact that the project proceeded anyway, despite the possibility that such fears were held by lead scientists in charge of it, has often been used as an arresting example of the dangerous hubris of human progress and scientific development and the willingness of its leaders to role the dice in the face of the highest stakes and most dire possible consequences.

While the extent of Teller's, Oppenheimer's and Fermi's actual concerns, prior to the Trinity Test, about the possibility of world-wide atmospheric destruction have likely been exaggerated, perhaps greatly, the equally apocalyptic fears of some of the leading minds involved in the development of artificial intelligence are even now becoming well documented, as is the seeming inability of these same individuals in slowing even their own headlong rush toward what a great many of them admittedly see as a potentially extremely dangerous achievement. If the Vinge/Kurzweil singularity really is near, and artificial super intelligence (ASI) arrives according to the schedule folks like Kurzweil have outlined for it - almost exactly a century after the first sustained nuclear reaction - humanity will again be faced in the middle of this 21st century with the question of whether our most supreme intellectual and scientific achievement will lead to our own swift and pitiless extermination. 

Will the sky catch fire?