The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World (73 page)

This is also true of the problem of climate change, about which there is currently great controversy. We face the prospect that carbon-dioxide emissions from technology will cause an increase in the average temperature of the atmosphere, with harmful effects such as droughts, sea-level rises, disruption to agriculture, and the extinctions of some species. These are forecast to outweigh the beneficial effects, such as an increase in crop yields, a general boost to plant life, and a reduction in the number of people dying of hypothermia in winter. Trillions of dollars, and a great deal of legislation and institutional change, intended to reduce those emissions, currently hang on the outcomes of simulations of the planet’s climate by the most powerful supercomputers, and on projections by economists about what those computations imply about the economy in the next century. In the light of the above discussion, we should notice several things about the controversy and about the underlying problem.

First, we have been lucky so far. Regardless of how accurate the prevailing climate models are, it is uncontroversial from the laws of physics, without any need for supercomputers or sophisticated modelling, that such emissions
must
,
eventually
, increase the temperature, which must, eventually, be harmful. Consider, therefore: what if the relevant parameters had been just slightly different and the moment of disaster had been in, say, 1902 – Veblen’s time – when carbondioxide emissions were already orders of magnitude above their pre-Enlightenment values. Then the disaster would have happened
before anyone could have predicted it or known what was happening. Sea levels would have risen, agriculture would have been disrupted, millions would have begun to die, with worse to come. And the great issue of the day would have been not how to prevent it but what could be done about it.

They had no supercomputers then. Because of Babbage’s failures and the scientific community’s misjudgements – and, perhaps most importantly, their lack of wealth – they lacked the vital technology of automated computing altogether. Mechanical calculators and roomfuls of clerks would have been insufficient. But, much worse: they had almost no atmospheric physicists. In fact the total number of physicists of all kinds was a small fraction of the number who today work on climate change alone. From society’s point of view, physicists were a luxury in 1902, like colour televisions were in the 1970s. Yet, to recover from the disaster, society would have needed more scientific knowledge, and better technology, and more of it – that is to say, more wealth. For instance, in 1900, building a sea wall to protect the coast of a low-lying island would have required resources so enormous that the only islands that could have afforded it would have been those with either large concentrations of cheap labour or exceptional wealth, as in the Netherlands, much of whose population already lived below sea level thanks to the technology of dyke-building.

This is a challenge that is highly susceptible to automation. But people were in no position to address it in that way. All relevant machines were underpowered, unreliable, expensive, and impossible to produce in large numbers. An enormous effort to construct a Panama canal had just failed with the loss of thousands of lives and vast amounts of money, due to inadequate technology and scientific knowledge. And, to compound those problems, the world as a whole had very little wealth by today’s standards. Today, a coastal defence project would be well within the capabilities of almost any coastal nation – and would add decades to the time available to find other solutions to rising sea levels.

If none are found, what would we do
then
? That is a question of a wholly different kind, which brings me to my second observation on the climate-change controversy. It is that, while the supercomputer simulations make (conditional)
predictions
, the economic forecasts make almost pure
prophecies
. For we can expect the future of human
responses to climate to depend heavily on how successful people are at creating new knowledge to address the problems that arise. So comparing predictions with prophecies is going to lead to that same old mistake.

Again, suppose that disaster had already been under way in 1902. Consider what it would have taken for scientists to forecast, say, carbon-dioxide emissions for the twentieth century. On the (shaky) assumption that energy use would continue to increase by roughly the same exponential factor as before, they could have estimated the resulting increase in emissions. But that estimate would not have included the effects of nuclear power. It could not have, because radioactivity itself had only just been discovered, and would not be harnessed for power until the middle of the century. But suppose that somehow they had been able to foresee that. Then they might have modified their carbon-dioxide forecast, and concluded that emissions could easily be restored to below the 1902 level by the end of the century. But, again, that would only be because they could not possibly foresee the campaign against nuclear power, which would put a stop to its expansion (ironically, on environmental grounds) before it ever became a significant factor in reducing emissions. And so on. Time and again, the unpredictable factor of new human ideas, both good and bad, would make the scientific prediction useless. The same is bound to be true – even more so – of forecasts today for the coming century. Which brings me to my third observation about the current controversy.

It is not yet accurately known how sensitive the atmosphere’s temperature is to the concentration of carbon dioxide – that is, how much a given increase in concentration increases the temperature. This number is important politically, because it affects how urgent the problem is: high sensitivity means high urgency; low sensitivity means the opposite. Unfortunately, this has led to the political debate being dominated by the side issue of how ‘anthropogenic’ (human-caused) the increase in temperature to date has been. It is as if people were arguing about how best to prepare for the next hurricane while all agreeing that the only hurricanes one should prepare for are human-induced ones. All sides seem to assume that if it turns out that a
random
fluctuation in the temperature is about to raise sea
levels, disrupt agriculture, wipe out species and so on, our best plan would be simply to grin and bear it. Or if two-thirds of the increase is anthropogenic, we should not mitigate the effects of the other third.

Trying to predict what our net effect on the environment will be for the next century and then subordinating all policy decisions to optimizing that prediction cannot work. We cannot know how much to reduce emissions by, nor how much effect that will have, because we cannot know the future discoveries that will make some of our present actions seem wise, some counter-productive and some irrelevant, nor how much our efforts are going to be assisted or impeded by sheer luck. Tactics to delay the onset of foreseeable problems may help. But they cannot replace, and must be subordinate to, increasing our ability to intervene
after
events turn out as we did not foresee. If that does not happen in regard to carbon-dioxide-induced warming, it will happen with something else.

Indeed, we did not foresee the global-warming disaster. I call it a disaster because the prevailing theory is that our best option is to prevent carbon-dioxide emissions by spending vast sums and enforcing severe worldwide restrictions on behaviour, and that is already a disaster by any reasonable measure. I call it unforeseen because we now realize that it was already under way even in 1971, when I attended that lecture. Ehrlich did tell us that agriculture was soon going to be devastated by rapid climate change. But the change in question was going to be global
cooling
, caused by smog and the condensation trails of supersonic aircraft. The possibility of warming caused by gas emissions had already been mooted by some scientists, but Ehrlich did not consider it worth mentioning. He told us that the evidence was that a general cooling trend had already begun, and that it would continue with catastrophic effects, though it would be reversed in the very long term because of ‘heat pollution’ from industry (an effect that is currently at least a hundred times smaller than the global warming that preoccupies us).

There is a saying that an ounce of prevention equals a pound of cure. But that is only when one knows what to prevent. No precautions can avoid problems that we do not yet foresee. To prepare for those, there is nothing we can do but increase our ability to put things right if they
go wrong. Trying to rely on the sheer good luck of avoiding bad outcomes indefinitely would simply guarantee that we would eventually fail without the means of recovering.

The world is currently buzzing with plans to force reductions in gas emissions at almost any cost. But it ought to be buzzing much more with plans to reduce the temperature, or for how to thrive at a higher temperature. And not at all costs, but efficiently and cheaply. Some such plans exist – for instance to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by a variety of methods; and to generate clouds over the oceans to reflect sunlight; and to encourage aquatic organisms to absorb more carbon dioxide. But at the moment these are very minor research efforts. Neither supercomputers nor international treaties nor vast sums are devoted to them. They are not central to the human effort to face this problem, or problems like it.

This is dangerous. There is as yet no serious sign of retreat into a sustainable lifestyle (which would really mean achieving only the
semblance
of sustainability), but even the aspiration is dangerous. For what would we be aspiring to? To forcing the future world into our image, endlessly reproducing our lifestyle, our misconceptions and our mistakes. But if we choose instead to embark on an open-ended journey of creation and exploration whose every step is unsustainable until it is redeemed by the next – if this becomes the prevailing ethic and aspiration of our society – then the ascent of man, the beginning of infinity, will have become, if not secure, then at least sustainable.

The ascent of man
   The beginning of infinity. Moreover, Jacob Bronowski’s
The Ascent of Man
was one of the inspirations for this book.

Sustain
   The term has two almost opposite, but often confused, meanings: to provide someone with what they need, and to prevent things from changing.

– Rejecting (the semblance of) sustainability as an aspiration or a constraint on planning.

Static societies eventually fail because their characteristic inability to create knowledge rapidly must eventually turn some problem into a catastrophe. Analogies between such societies and the technological civilization of the West today are therefore fallacies. Marx, Engels and Diamond’s ‘ultimate explanation’ of the different histories of different societies is false: history is the history of ideas, not of the mechanical effects of biogeography. Strategies to prevent foreseeable disasters are bound to fail eventually, and cannot even address the unforeseeable. To prepare for those, we need rapid progress in science and technology and as much wealth as possible.

‘This is Earth. Not the eternal and only home of mankind, but only a starting point of an infinite adventure. All you need do is make the decision [to end your static society]. It is yours to make.’

[With that decision] came the end, the final end of Eternity. – And the beginning of Infinity.

Isaac Asimov,
The End of Eternity
(1955)

The first person to measure the circumference of the Earth was the astronomer Eratosthenes of Cyrene, in the third century
BCE
. His result was fairly close to the actual value, which is about 40,000 kilometres. For most of history this was considered an enormous distance, but with the Enlightenment that conception gradually changed, and nowadays we think of the Earth as small. That was brought about mainly by two things: first, by the science of astronomy, which discovered titanic entities compared with which our planet is indeed unimaginably tiny; and, second, by technologies that have made worldwide travel and communication commonplace. So the Earth has become smaller both relative to the universe and relative to the scale of human action.

Thus, in regard to the
geography
of the universe and to our place in it, the prevailing world view has rid itself of some parochial misconceptions. We know that we have explored almost the whole surface of that formerly enormous sphere; but we also know that there are far more places left to explore in the universe (and beneath the surface of the Earth’s land and oceans) than anyone imagined while we still had those misconceptions.

In regard to theoretical knowledge, however, the prevailing world view has not yet caught up with Enlightenment values. Thanks to the fallacy and bias of prophecy, a persistent assumption remains that our existing theories are at or fairly close to the limit of what it is knowable – that we are
nearly there
, or perhaps halfway there. As the economist David Friedman has remarked, most people believe that an income of about twice their own should be sufficient to satisfy any reasonable person, and that no genuine benefit can be derived from amounts above that. As with wealth, so with scientific knowledge: it is hard to imagine what it would be like to know twice as much as we do, and so if we try to prophesy it we find ourselves just picturing the next few decimal places of what we already know. Even Feynman made an uncharacteristic mistake in this regard when he wrote:

I think there will certainly not be novelty, say for a thousand years. This thing cannot keep going on so that we are always going to discover more and more new laws. If we do, it will become boring that there are so many levels one underneath the other . . . We are very lucky to live in an age in which we are still making discoveries. It is like the discovery of America – you only discover it once.