Hyperspace (48 page)

To concretize our discussion, using the knowledge at our disposal, we can identify several important hurdles that must be crossed over during the next several aeons before we can become masters of the tenth dimension: the uranium barrier, ecological collapse, a new ice age, astronomical close encounters, Nemesis and extinction, and the death of the sun and the Milky Way galaxy.

Jonathan Schell, in his watershed book
The Fate of the Earth
, points out how perilously close we have come to mutual annihilation. Although the
recent collapse of the Soviet Union has made possible sweeping arms cuts, there are still close to 50,000 nuclear weapons, both tactical and strategic, in the world today, and with deadly accurate rockets to deliver them. Humanity has finally mastered the possibility of total annihilation.

If the missiles do not destroy everyone in the opening shots of a nuclear war, we can still look forward to the agonizing death caused by nuclear winter, during which the soot and ash from burning cities slowly chokes off all the life-giving sunlight. Computer studies have shown that as few as 100 megatons of explosives may generate enough fire storms in the cities to cloud the atmosphere significantly. As temperatures plummet, crops fail, and cities freeze over, the last vestiges of civilization will be snuffed out like a candle.

Finally, there is the increasing danger of nuclear proliferation. United States intelligence estimates that India, which detonated its first bomb in 1974, now has a stockpile of about 20 atomic bombs. Archenemy Pakistan, these sources claim, has built four atomic bombs, one of which weighs no more than 400 pounds, at its secret Kahuta nuclear facility. An atomic worker at Israel’s Dimona nuclear installation in the Negev desert claimed that he saw enough material to build 200 atomic bombs there. And South Africa admitted that it had made seven atomic bombs and apparently tested two atomic bombs in the late 1970s off its coast. The U.S. spy satellite
Vela
picked up the “fingerprint” of the atomic bomb, a characteristic, unmistakable double-flash, on two occasions off the coast of South Africa in the presence of Israeli warships. Nations like North Korea, South Korea, and Taiwan are poised at the brink of going nuclear. It’s highly probable, given recent U.S. intelligence disclosures, that 20 nations will possess the bomb by the year 2000. The bomb will have proliferated into the hottest spots around the world, including the Middle East.

This situation is highly unstable, and will continue to become more so as nations compete for diminishing resources and spheres of influence. Not just our society, but every intelligent civilization in the galaxy building an industrial society, will discover element 92 (uranium) and with it the ability for mass destruction. Element 92 has the curious property of sustaining a chain reaction and releasing the vast amount of energy stored within its nucleus. With the ability to master element 92 comes the ability either to liberate our species from want, ignorance, and hunger, or to consume the planet in nuclear fire. The power of element 92, however, can be unleashed only when an intelligent species reaches a certain point of development as a Type 0 civilization. It depends on the size of its cohesive social unit and its state of industrial development.

Fire, for example, can be harnessed by isolated groups of intelligent individuals (such as a tribe). Smelting and primitive metallurgy, necessary for the manufacture of weapons, requires a larger social unit, perhaps numbering in the thousands (such as a small village). The development of the internal-combustion engine (for example, a car engine) requires the development of a complex chemical and industrial base, which can be accomplished by only a cohesive social unit numbering in the millions (for example, a nation-state).

The discovery of element 92 upsets this balance between the slow, steady rise of the cohesive social unit and its technological development. The releasing of nuclear energy dwarfs chemical explosives by a factor of a million, but the same nation-state that can harness the internal-combustion engine can also refine element 92. Thus a severe mismatch occurs, especially when the social development of this hypothetical civilization is still locked in the form of hostile nation-states. The technology for mayhem and destruction abruptly outpaces the slow development of social relations with the discovery of element 92.

It is natural to conclude, therefore, that Type 0 civilizations arose on numerous occasions within the past 5- to 10-billion-year history of our galaxy, but that they all eventually discovered element 92. If a civilization’s technological capability outraced its social development, then, with the rise of hostile nation-states, there was a large chance that the civilization destroyed itself long ago in an atomic war.
⁶
Regrettably, if we live long enough to reach nearby stars in our sector of the galaxy, we may see the ashes of numerous, dead civilizations that settled national passions, personal jealousies, and racial hatreds with nuclear bombs.

As Heinz Pagels has said,

The challenge to our civilization which has come from our knowledge of the cosmic energies that fuel the stars, the movement of light and electrons through matter, the intricate molecular order which is the biological basis of life, must be met by the creation of a moral and political order which will accommodate these forces or we shall be destroyed. It will try our deepest resources of reason and compassion.
⁷

It seems likely, therefore, that advanced civilizations sprang up on numerous occasions within our galaxy, but that few of them negotiated the uranium barrier, especially if their technology outpaced their social development.

If we plot, for example, the rise of radio technology on a graph, we see that our planet evolved for 5 billion years before an intelligent species discovered how to manipulate the electromagnetic and nuclear
forces. However, if we annihilate ourselves in a nuclear war, then this curve will become a spike and return to zero. Thus in order to communicate with an advanced civilization, we must scan at precisely the right era, to an accuracy of a few decades, before the civilization blows itself up. There is a vanishingly small “window” through which we may make contact with another living civilization, before it destroys itself. In
Figure 13.1
, we see the rise of alien civilizations throughout the galaxy represented as a series of peaks, each representing the rapid rise of a civilization and the even more rapid fall due to nuclear war. Scanning the heavens for intelligent life, therefore, may be a difficult task. Perhaps there have been many thousands of peaks within the past few billion years, with thousands of planets briefly mastering radio technology before blowing themselves up. Each brief peak, unfortunately, takes place at different cosmic times.

Assuming that a Type 0 civilization can master uranium without destroying itself in a nuclear war, the next barrier is the possibility of ecological collapse.

We recall the earlier example of a single bacterium, which divides so frequently that it eventually outweighs the planet earth. However, in reality we do not see gigantic masses of bacteria on the earth—in fact, bacterial colonies usually do not even grow to the size of a penny. Laboratory bacteria placed in a dish filled with nutrients will indeed grow exponentially, but eventually die because they produce too much waste and exhaust the food supply. These bacterial colonies essentially suffocate in their own waste products.

Like bacterial colonies, we may also be exhausting our resources while drowning in the waste products that we relentlessly produce. Our oceans and the atmosphere are not limitless, but ultrathin films on the surface of the earth. The population of a Type 0 civilization, before it reaches Type I status, may soar to the billions, creating a strain on resources and exacerbating the problems of pollution. One of the most immediate dangers is the poisoning of the atmosphere, in the form of carbon dioxide, which traps sunlight and raises the average world temperature, possibly initiating a runaway greenhouse effect.

Since 1958, carbon dioxide concentrations in the air have increased 25%, mostly from oil and coal burning (45% of carbon dioxide comes from the United States and the former Soviet Union). This, in turn, may have accelerated the mean temperature rise of the earth. It took almost a century, from 1880, to raise the mean world temperature 1°F. However, the mean temperature is now rising at almost 0.6°F per decade. By the year 2050, this translates into a rise of coastal waters by 1 to 4 feet, which could swamp nations like Bangladesh and flood areas like Los Angeles and Manhattan. Even more serious would be a devastation of the nation’s food basket in the Midwest, the acceleration of the spread of deserts, and destruction of tropical rain forests, which in turn accelerates the greenhouse effect. Famine and economic ruin could spread on a global scale.

Figure 13.1. Why don’t we see other intelligent life in the galaxy ? Perhaps intelligent life forms that could build radio telescopes flourished millions of years in the past, but perished in a nuclear war. Our galaxy could have been teeming with intelligent life, but perhaps most are dead now. Will our civilization be any different ?

The fault lies in an uncoordinated planetary policy. Pollution takes place in millions of individual factories all over the planet, but the power to curb this unbridled pollution resides with a planetary policy, which is difficult, if not impossible, to enforce if the dominant cohesive social unit is the nation-state, numbering only in the hundreds of millions. In the short term, this may mean emergency policies and the sharp curtailment of the internal-combustion engine and coal and oil burning. The standard of living could also drop. It means additional hardships in
developing nations, which need access to cheap sources of energy. In the long term, however, our society may be forced to resort to one of three possible solutions that do not give off carbon dioxide and are essentially inexhaustible: solar energy, fusion plants, and breeder reactors. Of these, solar and fusion hold the most promise. Fusion power (which fuses the hydrogen atoms found in sea water) and solar energy are still several decades away, but should provide ample energy supplies into the next few centuries, until society makes the transition to a Type I civilization.

The fault once again lies in the fact that the technology has outpaced social development. As long as pollution is produced by individual nation-states, while the measures necessary to correct this are planetary, there will be a fatal mismatch that invites disaster. The uranium barrier and ecological collapse will exist as life-threatening disasters for Type 0 civilizations until this mismatch is bridged.

Once a civilization passes Type 0 status, however, there is much more room for optimism. To reach Type I status requires a remarkable degree of social cooperation on a planetary scale. Aggregates on the order of tens to hundreds of millions of individuals are necessary to exploit the resources of uranium, internal combustion, and chemicals. However, aggregates on the order of billions are probably necessary truly to harness planetary resources. Thus the social organization of a Type I civilization must be very complex and very advanced, or else the technology cannot be developed.

By definition, a Type I civilization requires a cohesive social unit that is the entire planet’s population. A Type I civilization by its very nature must be a planetary civilization. It cannot function on a smaller scale.

This can, in some sense, be compared to childbirth. The most dangerous period for a child is the first few months of life, when the transition to an external, potentially hostile environment places enormous biological strains on the baby. After the first year of life, the death rate plunges dramatically. Similarly, the most dangerous period for a civilization is the first few centuries after it has reached nuclear capability. It may turn out that once a civilization has achieved a planetary political system, the worst is over.

No one knows what causes an ice age, which has a duration measured in tens to hundreds of thousands of years. One theory is that it is caused by minute variations in the earth’s rotation, which are too small to be
noticed even over a period of centuries. These tiny effects, over hundreds of thousands of years, apparently accumulate to cause slight changes in the jet stream over the poles. Eventually, the jet streams are diverted, sending freezing polar air masses farther and farther south, causing temperatures to plummet around the globe, until an ice age begins. The ice ages did considerable damage to the ecology of the earth, wiping out scores of mammalian life forms and perhaps even isolating bands of humans on different continents, perhaps even giving rise to the various races, which is a relatively recent phenomenon.

Unfortunately, our computers are too primitive even to predict tomorrow’s weather, let alone when the next ice age will strike. For example, computers are now entering their fifth generation. We sometimes forget that no matter how large or complex a fourth-generation computer is, it can only add two numbers at a time. This is an enormous bottleneck that is just beginning to be solved with fifth-generation computers, which have parallel processors that can perform several operations simultaneously.