Visions of the Future (77 page)

The twentieth century brought us the bomb, and the nuclear threat will never leave us; the short-term threat from terrorism is high on the public and political agenda; inequalities in wealth and welfare get ever wider. My primary aim is not to add to the burgeoning literature on these challenging themes, but to focus on twenty-first century hazards, currently less familiar, that could threaten humanity and the global environment still more.

Some of these new threats are already upon us; others are still conjectural. Populations could be wiped out by lethal “engineered” airborne viruses; human character may be changed by new techniques far more targeted and effective than the nostrums and drugs familiar today; we may even one day be threatened by rogue nanomachines that replicate catastrophically, or by superintelligent computers.

Other novel risks cannot be completely excluded. Experiments that crash atoms together with immense force could start a chain reaction that erodes everything on Earth; the experiments could even tear the fabric of space itself, an ultimate “Doomsday” catastrophe whose fallout spreads at the speed of light to engulf the entire universe. These latter scenarios may be exceedingly unlikely, but they raise in extreme form the issue of who should decide, and how, whether to proceed with experiments that have a genuine scientific purpose (and could conceivably offer practical benefits), but that pose a very tiny risk of an utterly calamitous outcome.

We still live, as all our ancestors have done, under the threat of disasters that could cause worldwide devastation: volcanic supereruptions and major asteroid impacts, for instance. Natural catastrophes on this global scale are fortunately so infrequent, and therefore so unlikely to occur within our lifetime, that they do not preoccupy our thoughts, nor give most of us sleepless nights. But such catastrophes are now augmented by other environmental risks that we are bringing upon ourselves, risks that cannot be dismissed as so improbable.

During the Cold War years, the main threat looming over us was an all-out thermonuclear exchange, triggered by an escalating superpower confrontation. That threat was apparently averted. But many experts—indeed, some who themselves controlled policy during those years—believed that we were lucky; some thought that the cumulative risk of Armageddon over that period was as much as fifty percent. The immediate danger of all-out nuclear war has receded. But there is a growing threat of nuclear weapons being used sooner or later somewhere in the world.

Nuclear weapons can be dismantled, but they cannot be uninvented. The threat is ineradicable, and could be resurgent in the twenty-first century: we cannot rule out a realignment that would lead to standoffs as dangerous as the Cold War rivalry, deploying even bigger arsenals. And even a threat that seems, year by year, a modest one mounts up if it persists for decades. But the nuclear threat will be overshadowed by others that could be as destructive, and far less controllable. These may come not primarily from national governments, not even from “rogue states,” but from individuals or small groups with access to ever more advanced technology. There are alarmingly many ways in which individuals will be able to trigger catastrophe.

The strategists of the nuclear age formulated a doctrine of deterrence by “mutually assured destruction” (with the singularly appropriate acronym MAD). To clarify this concept, real-life Dr. Strangeloves envisaged a hypothetical “Doomsday machine,” an ultimate deterrent too terrible to be unleashed by any political leader who was one hundred percent rational. Later in this century, scientists might be able to create a real nonnuclear Doomsday machine. Conceivably, ordinary citizens could command the destructive capacity that in the twentieth century was the frightening prerogative of the handful of individuals who held the reins of power in states with nuclear weapons. If there were millions of independent fingers on the button of a Doomsday machine, then one person’s act of irrationality, or even one person’s error, could do us all in.

Such an extreme situation is perhaps so unstable that it could never be reached, just as a very tall house of cards, though feasible in theory, could never be built. Long before individuals acquire a “Doomsday” potential—indeed, perhaps within a decade—some will acquire the power to trigger, at unpredictable times, events on the scale of the worst present-day terrorist outrages. An organized network of Al Qaeda-type terrorists would not be required: just a fanatic or social misfit with the mindset of those who now design computer viruses. There are people with such propensities in every country—very few, to be sure, but bio- and cyber-technologies will become so powerful that even one could well be too many.

By mid-century, societies and nations may have drastically realigned; people may live very differently, survive to a far greater age, and have different attitudes from those of the present (maybe modified by medication, chip implants, and so forth). But one thing is unlikely to change: individuals will make mistakes, and there will be a risk of malign actions by embittered loners and dissident groups. Advanced technology will offer new instruments for creating terror and devastation; instant universal communications will amplify their societal impact. Catastrophes could arise, even more worryingly, simply from technical misadventure. Disastrous accidents (for instance, the unintended creation or release of a noxious fast-spreading pathogen, or a devastating software error) are possible even in well-regulated institutions. As the threats become graver, and the possible perpetrators more numerous, disruption may become so pervasive that society corrodes and regresses. There is a longer-term risk even to humanity itself.

Science is emphatically not, as some have claimed, approaching its end; it is surging ahead at an accelerating rate. We are still flummoxed about the bedrock nature of physical reality, and the complexities of life, the brain, and the cosmos. New discoveries, illuminating all these mysteries, will engender benign applications; but will also pose new ethical dilemmas and bring new hazards. How will we balance the multifarious prospective benefits from genetics, robotics, or nanotechnology against the risk (albeit smaller) of triggering utter disaster?

My special scientific interest is cosmology: researching our environment in the widest conceivable perspective. This might seem an incongruous viewpoint from which to focus on practical terrestrial issues: in the words of Gregory Benford, a fiction writer who is also an astrophysicist, study of the “grand gyre of worlds… imbues, and perhaps afflicts, astronomers with a perception of how like mayflies we are.” But few scientists are unworldly enough to fit Benford’s description: a preoccupation with near-infinite spaces doesn’t make cosmologists especially “philosophical” in coping with everyday life; nor are they less engaged with the issues confronting us here on the ground, today and tomorrow. My subjective attitude was better expressed by the mathematician and philosopher Frank Ramsey, a member of the same College in Cambridge (King’s) to which I now belong: “I don’t feel the least humble before the vastness of the heavens. The stars may be large, but they cannot think or love; and these are qualities which impress me far more than size does. My picture of the world is drawn in perspective, and not like a model drawn to scale. The foreground is occupied by human beings, and the stars are all as small as threepenny bits.”

A cosmic perspective actually strengthens our concerns about what happens here and now, because it offers a vision of just how prodigious life’s future potential could be. Earth’s biosphere is the outcome of more than four billion years of Darwinian selection: the stupendous time spans of the evolutionary past are now part of common culture. But life’s future could be more prolonged than its past. In the aeons that lie ahead, even more marvelous diversity could emerge, on and beyond Earth. The unfolding of intelligence and complexity could still be near its cosmic beginnings.

A memorable early photograph taken from space depicted “Earthrise” as viewed from a spacecraft orbiting the Moon. Our habitat of land, oceans, and clouds was revealed as a thin delicate glaze, its beauty and vulnerability contrasting with the stark and sterile moonscape on which the astronauts left their footprints. We have had these distant images of the entire Earth only for the last four decades. But our planet has existed for more than a hundred million times longer than this. What transformations did it undergo during this cosmic time span?

About 4.5 billion years ago our Sun condensed from a cosmic cloud; it was then encircled by a swirling disk of gas. Dust in this disk agglomerated into a swarm of orbiting rocks, which then coalesced to form the planets. One of these became our Earth: the “third rock from the Sun.” The young Earth was buffeted by collisions with other bodies, some almost as large as the planets themselves: one such impact gouged out enough molten rock to make the Moon. Conditions quietened and the Earth cooled. The next transformations distinctive enough to be seen by a faraway observer would have been very gradual. Over a prolonged time span, more than a billion years, oxygen accumulated in Earth’s atmosphere, a consequence of the first unicellular life. Thereafter, there were slow changes in the biosphere, and in the shape of the land masses as the continents drifted. The ice cover waxed and waned: there might even have been episodes when the entire Earth froze over, appearing white rather than pale blue.

The only abrupt worldwide changes were triggered by major asteroid impacts or volcanic supereruptions. Occasional incidents like these would have flung so much debris into the stratosphere that for several years, until all the dust and aerosols settled again, Earth looked dark grey, rather than bluish white, and no sunlight penetrated down to land or ocean. Apart from these brief traumas, nothing happened suddenly: successions of new species emerged, evolved, and became extinct on geological time scales of millions of years.

But in just a tiny sliver of Earth’s history—the last one-millionth part, a few thousand years—the patterns of vegetation altered much faster than before. This signaled the start of agriculture: the imprint on the terrain of a population of humans, empowered by tools. The pace of change accelerated as human populations rose. But then quite different transformations were perceptible, and these were even more abrupt. Within fifty years, little more than one hundredth of a millionth of Earth’s age, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which over most of Earth’s history had been slowly falling, began to rise anomalously fast. The planet became an intense emitter of radio waves (the total output from all TV, cellphone, and radar transmissions).

And something else happened, unprecedented in Earth’s 4.5 billion year history: metallic objects—albeit very small ones, a few tons at most—left the planet’s surface and escaped the biosphere completely. Some were propelled into orbits around Earth; some journeyed to the Moon and planets; a few even followed a trajectory that would take them deep into interstellar space, leaving the solar system for ever.

A race of scientifically advanced extraterrestrials watching our solar system could confidently predict that Earth would face doom in another six billion years, when the Sun, in its death throes, swells up into a “red giant” and vaporizes everything remaining on our planet’s surface. But could they have predicted this unprecedented spasm less than halfway through Earth’s life—these human-induced alterations occupying, overall, less than a millionth of our planet’s elapsed lifetime and seemingly occurring with runaway speed?

If they continued to keep watch, what might these hypothetical aliens witness in the next hundred years? Will a final squeal be followed by silence? Or will the planet itself stabilize? And will some of the small metallic objects launched from Earth spawn new oases of life elsewhere in the solar system, eventually extending their influences, via exotic life, machines, or sophisticated signals, far beyond the solar system, creating an expanding “green sphere” that eventually pervades the entire Galaxy?

It may not be absurd hyperbole—indeed, it may not even be an overstatement—to assert that the most crucial location in space and time (apart from the big bang itself) could be here and now. I think the odds are no better than fifty–fifty that our present civilization on Earth will survive to the end of the present century. Our choices and actions could ensure the perpetual future of life (not just on Earth, but perhaps far beyond it, too). Or in contrast, through malign intent, or through misadventure, twenty-first century technology could jeopardize life’s potential, foreclosing its human and posthuman future. What happens here on Earth, in this century, could conceivably make the difference between a near eternity filled with ever more complex and subtle forms of life and one filled with nothing but base matter.