by Alok Jha
The 20th-century version of eugenics was controlled by governments. By the 1950s, “population controllers” were everywhere, wringing their hands in NGOs and United Nations agencies, worrying about the coming Malthusian population catastrophe, looking to the poorest parts of the world to curb population growth. Mass US-funded family-planning programs were targeted at countries such as Turkey, Malaysia, Egypt, Chile, Morocco, Kenya and Jamaica (with foreign aid and even trade sometimes dependent on an adherence to Western demands to reduce numbers). In India, the government paid its citizens to be sterilized (sometimes coercively), while China famously enacted a one-child policy that led to brutal forced abortions for those who broke the rules.
The declines to come
Though Malthus was proved wrong in his predictions (he did not foresee the improvements in agricultural technology that would feed millions more people), environmentalists still predict population crashes in future, as a result of the new pressures of climate change. Increasingly, water-stressed areas (or those that will be uninhabitable due to flooding) will compromise crop harvests, they say, and force people to migrate for basic resources. Countries will go to war for food and water, and all the while, many millions (perhaps billions) will perish from hunger or diseases that have increased their range because of the warmer temperatures.
In the past two decades, scientists have also noted pointers toward a drop in natural fertility. Sperm counts in men, for example, are on the decline around the world by between 25 and 50 percent, according to various studies. “It has been presumed that they reflect adverse effects of environmental or lifestyle factors on the male rather than, for example, genetic changes in susceptibility,” says Shiva Dindyal, of the Imperial College School of Medicine. “If the decrease in sperm counts were to continue at the rate that it is then in a few years we will witness widespread male infertility. To date it remains unknown why this is happening and the available preventative measures, which can be taken to avoid a continuation of this trend, are not common knowledge.”
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If the decrease in sperm counts were to continue at the rate that it is then in a few years we will witness widespread male infertility.
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One hypothesis is that sperm counts are falling due to the increasing cocktail of chemical pollutants present in our modern environment, particularly those that can mimic the female hormone estrogen. “These chemicals are present in the plastic lining of food cans, in pesticides, in plastics and in paints. In laboratories many designed chemicals have been shown to have oestrogenic effects,” says Dindyal. “Oestrogenic hormones exert their many effects by binding to intracellular oestrogen receptors, which consist principally of specialised proteins located within the target cells; they recognise the hormone and allow it to regulate specific oestrogen responsive genes within the cell.” These “false” estrogens might stick to human cells, stopping a person’s natural hormones from working properly.
Additional pressures on sperm counts could include smoking, drinking and unnecessary drug-taking. Scientists at the University of Idaho found that toxic chemicals can damage sperm, which then pass altered genes on to babies. In experiments on rats, they found that some garden chemicals lead to conditions such as damaged and overgrown prostates, infertility and kidney problems, all of which are present up to four generations later.
What can we do?
The Russians are already on to the problem. In 2006, then-president Vladimir Putin brought out a plan to offer financial incentives to women to have children. The population in Russia had been falling since the end of the Soviet Union, and was being further reduced by emigration and disease, including HIV infections. These pressures could, thought the government, reduce the overall population by a third by 2050.
Similar schemes have operated in other countries: Australian couples were offered $4,000 for every baby and got their childcare costs paid for too; France, Italy and Poland have all had bonus schemes for families.
In Japan, couples with babies in the town of Yamatsuri, just outside Tokyo, receive a bonus and yearly payments for every child for its first 10 years. Singapore tops the list, though, with $3,000 for the first child, $9,000 for the second and double that for subsequent children.
Declining populations are not going to end human civilization, though they will have serious and profound implications for how societies are organized and what importance they have on the global stage. It might just be part of the natural cycle of things, as different countries take the lead depending on their demographic advantages.
Will the world change with fewer people in it? Definitely. Will it end in calamity? Perhaps only for a few.
Cyberwar
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In 2002, a group of concerned scientists wrote a letter to President George W. Bush. Their message was blunt: the US was at grave risk of suffering an attack that could damage the national psyche and the economy much more broadly than even the heinous crimes committed by terrorists on September 11 the previous year.
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The entire critical infrastructure of the country, including electrical power, finance, telecommunications, health care, transportation, water, defense and the internet, was vulnerable. The scientists called for “fast and resolute” mitigating action to avoid a national disaster. “We, as concerned scientists and leaders, seek your help and offer ours,” they wrote.
The letter-writers came from a wide range of institutions—technology companies, the halls of academia and policy think tanks. In their message to the President, they outlined the consequences of inaction.
“Consider the following scenario. A terrorist organization announces one morning that they will shut down the Pacific Northwest electrical power grid for six hours starting at 4:00 p.m.; they then do so. The same group then announces that they will disable the primary telecommunication trunk circuits between the US East and West Coasts for a half day; they then do so, despite our best efforts to defend against them. Then they threaten to bring down the air traffic control system supporting New York City, grounding all traffic and diverting inbound traffic; they then do so.”
Other threats follow, said the scientists, demonstrating the adversary’s capability to attack critical infrastructure. Finally, the terrorists promise to cripple e-commerce and credit-card servicing unless their long list of demands is met. “Imagine the ensuing public panic and chaos. If this scenario were to unfold, Americans everywhere would feel that our national sovereignty had been compromised; we would wonder how, as a nation, we could have let this happen.”
The example was America, but they could be describing any modern country in the world. Such a disaster scenario is the consequence of a society dependent on computers, and the warning was against a new type of battle that could bring the world’s economies to the edge of oblivion: cyberwarfare.
Our world, the network
Ever since the 1980s, Hollywood films have featured lone hackers taking over distant military computer networks from their bedrooms. Real-life concerns about potential damage by cyberterrorists, though, had to wait for the widespread use of the World Wide Web in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Before then, private computer networks (mainly military or corporate) had existed in relative isolation and were limited to sharing messages between each other. The critical infrastructure of cities lay in physical human hands; any computers present were there to help with information rather than control.
We all know what has happened since. The price of computer chips has fallen every year, computers become ever more powerful and we have given over control of almost everything to the machines. In addition, every one of them is linked into the Internet. Computers keep our modern world turning, relaying information and commands to each other in the background, monitoring power stations, operating traffic lights, keeping planes safely in the air and chemical plants running at top efficiency.
This network has brought untold advantages to our society. But, like anything that is valuab
le, it has also become a prime target for anyone wanting to hold the world to ransom.
Computers have transformed modern warfare, allowing pilots in a control room in the US to operate drone aircraft thousands of miles away. Bombs are guided by GPS satellites, and fighter planes and warships have become moving data-processing centers. Each additional use of networked computers has brought advantages, but each one is a new point of attack or control.
On the civilian side, shutting down a country’s critical infrastructure for a week or more would cripple it, costing the economy billions of dollars per day and leading to widespread panic and fear. If all a country’s power stations were switched off from afar, or damaged in some way, how long before cities were overrun with fear and crime? Without electricity, banks cannot give out money, hospitals cannot look after the sick and building security is gone.
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Shutting down a country’s critical infrastructure for a week or more would cripple it, costing the economy billions of dollars per day and leading to widespread panic and fear.
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If that happened to lots of countries at once, we would have been hacked back into the first half of the 20th century. Which might not sound too bad until you bear in mind how much of your modern life depends on being connected though the Internet. Sending messages, contacting colleagues, looking up information and accessing your bank account is all done online. The logistics that mean that your nearest supermarket is stocked with the freshest food depend on networked computers; the balanced loads of electricity that flow to your home and office depend on networked computers. We modern humans could live without them, but we’ve chosen to forget how to do so.
In an article on the dangers of cyberterrorism, The Economist described cyberspace as the fifth domain of warfare after land, sea, air and space. To highlight the importance of the issue, President Barack Obama recently declared his country’s digital infrastructure a “strategic national asset,” and the Pentagon has appointed General Keith Alexander, director of the National Security Agency (NSA), to head up a new Cyber Command to defend American military networks and attack those of other countries.
Much of our world is controlled by computers, and this extends to weapons such as this MQ-1 Predator unmanned aircraft. Hackers could do great damage if they seized control of these systems by force.
In the UK, GCHQ, the equivalent of the NSA, has a cybersecurity unit, and countries including China, Russia, Israel and North Korea are known to be preparing for cyberwar.
The electronic war
Before wars became virtual, it was relatively straightforward to work out the strength of your opponent. Your enemy’s main assets were missiles, tanks and soldiers. It would be easy to work out what kind of threat they posed and how quickly they could mobilize against you.
In a cyberwar, the enemy is hidden. A hacker can live anywhere in the world, hijack a computer in a second country and use that to launch attacks on a third nation. And that is the simplest scenario—teams of hackers all over the world using computers all over the world to prey on a single country’s networks from a multitude of angles at the same time.
Richard Clarke, a cybersecurity and counterterrorism adviser to several successive US presidents, believes that an electronic attack could bring about a catastrophic breakdown in less than 15 minutes. “Computer bugs bring down military e-mail systems; oil refineries and pipelines explode; air-traffic-control systems collapse; freight and metro trains derail; financial data are scrambled; the electrical grid goes down in the eastern United States; orbiting satellites spin out of control. Society soon breaks down as food becomes scarce and money runs out. Worst of all, the identity of the attacker may remain a mystery.”
Between 2007 and 2008, computer hackers broke into the computer systems of the Joint Strike Fighter, an advanced US fighter jet, leading to the theft of details of the plane’s design and electronic systems. The attack seems to have come from China, but that could have been a smokescreen by the attackers, who made off with several terabytes of information.
Estonia, a country with one of the world’s most sophisticated computer networks, was the target of a series of cyberattacks in 2007. Banks, newspapers and government departments all saw their websites swamped by requests and spam, crippling the country’s web access and computer networks. The attacks came from computers in more than 100 countries, but the perpetrators have never been identified.
These are just two of the attacks that we know about. Governments around the world might be planting sophisticated sleeper viruses into the networks of other countries as you read this, ready to spring into action at their master’s bidding, sabotaging an enemy country’s computers. And who is to say that a well-funded terror group is not doing the very same thing? Of the almost 150 billion emails sent every day, 90 percent are known to be spam. Within those fragments of electronic communication could lurk unfathomable dangers, and it only takes one person to click a dubious email for the infection to spread through a country’s network.
Computer viruses used to be all about the programmers’ delight in infecting as many computers as possible: the ILOVEYOU virus in 2000, for example, caused almost $10 billion of damage by overwriting files, and infected around a tenth of the world’s Internet-connected computers. Nowadays the viruses sit on computers and try to find out sensitive data such as bank details or passwords. According to The Economist, more than $1 trillion was lost in 2009 to cybercrime—an amount larger than the value of the world’s drugs trade.
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More than $1 trillion was lost in 2009 to cybercrime—an amount larger than the value of the world’s drugs trade.
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Can we do anything about it?
Like any weapon that could have huge deleterious impacts, the only check against cyberwar is human behavior. Keith Alexander welcomes the idea of a treaty between the major economies to agree common standards and rules when engaging in cyberwarfare. “That said, a START-style treaty may prove impossible to negotiate,” says The Economist. “Nuclear warheads can be counted and missiles tracked. Cyberweapons are more like biological agents; they can be made just about anywhere.”
In their letter to President George W. Bush, the concerned scientists proposed that the problem was so important it deserved a focused plan akin to the Manhattan Project during the Second World War, which employed hundreds of scientists and engineers to build an atomic bomb to create a cyberdefence policy. “To prevent attacks, we need a coordinated effort to work with our criticalinfrastructure providers in defending their most critical information systems,” they wrote. “To detect attacks, we need to permeate our critical networks with a broad sensor grid imbued with the capability to detect large-scale attacks by correlating and fusing seemingly unrelated events that are, in fact, part of a coordinated attack. To respond to attacks, we need to devise strategies and tactics to pre-plan effective actions in the face of major cyber-attack scenarios; we need to augment our national infrastructure with mechanisms that support the defined strategies and tactics when attacks are detected and verified.”
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I LOVE YOU VIRUS (2000)
Caused
$10 billion damage
Infected
10% of webconnected computers
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Some of that has been done in the decade since those scientists wrote their letter. But technology has changed too—ten years is a vast amount of time in the computer world, and the networks in place today are even more complex and woven into our lives. Citizens are connected almost all the time via their mobile phones, and data flies through the air like never before. Still, the sentiment of that letter in 2002 is as important as ever. The cybercatastrophe could come sooner than anyone thinks, and it would pay to get ready. “The clock,” wrote the scientists, “is ticking.”
Biotech Disaster
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In the past half century, our ability to manipulate plants has reached the level of me
ssing with the most basic molecular machinery. The technology holds the potential for producing better foods but, as with anything that might become part of our environment, also the danger of unintended consequences.
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Understanding proteins and DNA has the potential to help scientists and farmers grow better crops: wheat that is resistant to herbicides or which can thrive in the most arid conditions; or tomatoes that stay fresh for longer and potatoes or rice supercharged with vitamins.
But when we mess with the basic elements of life, we also need to be careful. What if the transplanted genes, never meant to be in that plant in the first place, leak out into the surrounding, wild environment? Might the genes that confer herbicide protection to the wheat end up in the weeds on the side of the road? What if the pesticides used on those plants force the evolution of resistant bugs that spread across a country, unstoppable by even the most potent chemicals?
