"We shall nobly save or meanly lose the last best hope of Earth." Lincoln was talking about an entirely different conflict when he said that; but it is a statement that applies to this generation in a way that was never true of Lincoln's. No one today seriously believes that human chattel slavery would have survived into the present era no matter what the Union did in 1860; but I do seriously believe that a generation a hundred years from now might curse our memory.
With increasing frequency I am asked to lecture at various colleges and universities. My message is generally the same: that we don't have to die. Western Civilization need not be finished. This generation can, if it will, make advances at least as significant as the control of fire, the discovery of the wheel, yea, the invention of agriculture. We have only to make the decision, and a few sacrifices. The technology exists.
When I am done I find a curious and almost universal response. First, the audience is somewhat overwhelmed, which doesn't surprise me because I have developed a lot of data and, bluntly, I'm pretty good at presenting it. Next, I find the message welcome, and few in the audience want to argue. Again not surprising: why would anyone, particularly the young, want to believe anything else? But third, what was once a surprise but happens so frequently it no longer is: "Where have you been? Why has no one told us this? All we hear is that Earth is polluted, technology can't save us and is evil to boot, we're running out of resources, there's Only One Earth. . ."
Nor does that response come only from students. At a major southwestern research institution I got the same response when I spoke to the technical staff Presumably each of the engineers had opinions not too different from mine: but the prevailing climate of opinion led each to believe the others thought we were doomed. At the university's the students find the faculty members, if they comment on the future at all, crying doom.
So I shuttle back and forth across the country, to this institution and that, trying desperately to convince America's youth that they have a future. But do they?
Because of course I cannot tell what the future will be. I know what it can be: a world of plenty, a world of "Survival with Style"; a world in which the United States is wealthy but is not merely an island of wealth in a vast sea of misery; a world in which everyone has more than enough to eat, and, if they want it, a standard of living at least as good as that we enjoyed in the 50's; but that's only what can be.
It need not be that way at all. Our grandchildren may curse our memories. There are times when I am convinced that my world can never be.
But what could happen to us? We have the technology. There is no "energy crisis" in any meaningful sense—that is, we know how to produce the energy we need to sustain our high-technology society until such time as we can develop eternal sources.
We know how to get to space, and we could, if we had to, begin right now the development of capabilities for mining the Moon and the asteroid belt. The world already grows more than enough food to support its population (although the distribution system is terrible and insects, rodents, bacilli, fungi, and other pests eat more of our crops than ever we do, particularly in the developing nations). We can survive, and with style; why might we not?
To begin with, there are the final two horsemen. War is hardly impossible. True, there are signs that many rational planners in the Soviet Union realize that their own development—yea, and survival—depends on not conquering the West; that the West is more valuable as a trading partner than ever it would be as part of an empire managed as badly as the Soviet Union now is. True, but not decisive. There are dinosaurs in the Soviet Union, real communists whose moral position is intolerable if ever they abandon chiliastic Marxism. For an analogy: could an Inquisition priest ever have admitted even the possibility that his religion was not true? Could he have lived with himself if ever he did?
And the Soviet Union continues to build weapons long after any discoverable need. Recall the theory? US weapons development stimulated the Soviets; once we called a halt, and they achieved parity, they would see the wastefulness of it all—after all, weapons cost them far more than us (in terms of respective Gross National Products), and they need the resources for development far more than we do—and they would cease the arms race.
So we stopped, and they achieved parity, and they achieved superiority, and they seem headed for supremacy, and they halt not, neither do they slow; indeed, their rate of arms procurement tends rather to increase. No, war is no impossibility.
Then there are the fears of cogent men like Robert Vacca, whose book THE COMING DARK AGE cannot be ignored.
Vacca points out the increasing complexity of our civilization, its increasing dependence on centralized planning and control, the interdependence of all parts on each other, the far-reaching consequences of seemingly trivial errors—recall the power failure in the Northeast caused by one generator going and kicking out all the others? If the margins get thin enough, and Vacca believes they will, collapse of our civilization could be much quicker, and much more thorough, than might be supposed.
After all, no country is more than three meals from bread riots; and rioters have been known to act as if they believed the best way to feed themselves is to burn the bakeries. Urban firestorms are hardly impossible, and the water supply and fire fighting systems are vulnerable. You might or might not be surprised to know just how easily such systems could be knocked out, by accident or by design.
Imagine the colossal traffic jams if the traffic signals ceased working. Couple that with snowfall and ice. Barges frozen in mid-stream, unable to supply coal-powered electric plants; coal yards frozen solid; insufficient electricity to operate the pipelines, thus cutting off oil and gas; railroads not working; people freezing in the dark; trucks not working (it takes electricity to get the gasoline out of our environmentally-protected tanks in filling stations); goods not moving—but you need not imagine it, because it happened to some of you, briefly, and on a smaller scale. Fortunately the nuclear power plants continued to operate, and the Great Freeze of '76 was essentially local; but it takes no great imagination to envision a much wider-spread catastrophe, and to couple it with deliberate action by, say, the authors of THE ANARCHISTS' COOKBOOK, to see how easily the nation could be crippled.
Temporarily: for now. We have vast resources, surpluses, and a residuum of collective loyalty and humanitarianism. Neither of these conditions need prevail. Taxes can end both, and there are signs they are working to that goal as I write this.
But I don't imagine "the collapse," the "knockout blow" that Vacca foresees, as happening this year or next. So far we have a great deal of survival-surplus in our system, and it would take no miracles to insure against the knockout; but the trend is in the other direction.
Consider. One of the most influential books of the past few years is E. F. Schumacher's SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL: ECONOMICS AS IF PEOPLE MATTERED. The "appropriate technology" movement has gained many adherents. After all, as Joe Coates (Office of Technology Assessment) said, "Who can be in favor of inappropriate technology?"
At the Denver meeting of the AAAS in 1977 the appropriate technology movement had a seminar and an exhibit. I attended both in the hopes of learning something useful. Instead I saw an interminable series of slides showing true ugliness as if it were beautiful. Photos of privies dominated: not only those $3000 Swedish gizmos that more or less automatically compost the stuff right in your own home, but also old-fashioned ODT's of the kind my wife and I experienced in our childhood; the kind with the crescent cut in the door and a Sears catalogue handy in case you run out of corncobs. "You only have to fork the stuff over about every two weeks," we were told. "Of course you can run into problems with city departments of health."
To which my reaction was that I sincerely hoped if any of my neighbors install a privy the Department of Health will give them not merely problems, but citations.
There was more. Bathtubs made of wine vats. A speaker who told how Appropriate Technology changes your head: when the wind c
omes up at 2 AM and the batteries are all charged up, and you've got work to do, why, you get up and do it. Don't waste that wind energy, because the windmill can't power things to your convenience: it is you who must adapt.
And make no mistake: appropriate technology is not merely for the developing nations alone (if at all); it's for us. So just what is it? According to the fact sheet prepared by the National Center for Appropriate Technology, the characteristics are "(1) small scale, (2) decentralized, (3) simple to understand and operate, (4) ecologically sound, and (5) labor intensive."
So. Leave out the first four points, and come to the last: labor intensive. That is not a mere necessary evil. It is the heart of the AP movement. Given the choice they'll take hard labor over machinery every time. I call to evidence their exhibit: a bicycle seat with pedals attached to a chain that ran a wheat grinder. You are to sit and knead bread with the hands while pumping away on the bicycle to grind the wheat with your own muscle power. There was also a film strip showing how the bicycle seat system could be attached to plows (dragging the plow through the dirt) or water pumps, etc., etc.
Now as an advance over the mortar and pestle, a leg-powered crank system is great; but blind donkeys walking in circles to turn the upper on the nether millstone would be a lot less dull. In fact, on seeing that particular vision of the future—and make no mistake about it, those people mean that to be the future—Larry Niven had a suggestion. I should, he said, put on jackboots and revolver, and carry a whip; and we would find a gentleman of the black persuasion and dress him in rags and have him sit on the bicycle seat to grind our bread. It should, Larry mused, make a good photograph. A picture of the future.
I can't quarrel, except for details. The person seated on the bicycle seat might not be black, and might not be made; the person with whip might not be white or male; but if grinding one's corn to make one's bread requires that kind of labor, then slavery is not far away. In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread; and mankind has been trying to get someone else to do the sweating ever since, and rather successfully at that. As a lark, as something chic, as a diversion for the middle-class student spending a summer in an appropriate technology commune, labor-intensive systems are all very well; but as a necessity it gets regular; it is not amusing as a way of life.
Nor am I merely having a laugh at some silly people. There is a great deal to be said for conservation: but it is not a goal in itself. Look: why shouldn't we have heated swimming pools? What's wrong with big, comfortable, fast automobiles? Why is it evil to have throwaway flashlights, electric can-openers, warm houses in winter, air conditioning, patent medicines, luxury foods, electric typewriters, plastic models, fiberglass yachts with Dacron sails, pocket computers, my own postal scale in my office so I don't have to go down to the Post Office before mailing this manuscript—all the myriad conveniences, yea, luxuries of this marvelous modern civilization?
True, they may cost too much; we may not be able to afford wasteful items; and we may of necessity be forced to put away some of our luxuries. If so, then we must; but these new anti-technology intellectuals who have so much influence over the next generation would do it gladly. Look at Carter's energy policy. See Schlesinger on conservation. Look at the research budgets.
That brings us to my previous point. The trend is against technology and high energy; against development, and in favor of the "Small Is Beautiful," "Only One Earth" philosophy of the appropriate-technology movement. But surely, Pournelle, the Appropriate Technology movement is the best insurance against the knockout that so worries you? Making people self-sufficient, in small groups, building communes, conserving energy, taking care of one's own wastes, reducing the dependency on The System—
If you'll believe that you'll believe anything. Leaving out whether it's possible, either physically or politically, to insure against disaster by inducing large numbers of people to be "self-sufficient," if the Appropriate Technology movements succeed, my world will vanish because they want it to vanish. One of their goals is to suppress the kind of technology and development I want. They like "labor-intensive" industry.
The doomsters, neo-Malthusians, appropriate technology advocates, "ecologically concerned," and all the others, have set Zero-Growth as their goal; and my world is doomed if they succeed.
We need not envision either war or Vacca's knockout to imagine a world in which my vision of man's vast future remains the mere ravings of a science fiction writer. Merely continue as we are now: innovative technology discouraged by taxes, environmental impact statements, reports, lawsuits, commission hearings, delays, delays, delays; space research not carried out, never officially abandoned but delayed, stretched-out, budgets cut and work confined to studies without hardware; solving the energy crisis by conservation, with fusion research cut to the bone and beyond, continued at level-of-effort but never to a practical reactor; fission plants never officially banned, but no provision made for waste disposal or storage so that no new plants are built and the operating plants slowly are phased out; riots at nuclear plant construction sites; legal hearings, lawyers, lawyers, lawyers . . .
Can you not imagine the dream being lost? Can you not imagine the nation slowly learning to "do without," making "Smaller Is Better" the national slogan, fussing over insulating attics and devoting all attention to windmills; production falling, standards of living falling, until one day we discover the investments needed to go to space would be truly costly, would require cuts in essentials like food—
A world slowly settling into satisfaction with less, until there are no resources to invest in That Buck Rogers Stuff?
I can imagine that.
I even see trends in that direction. Mr. Carter has said no to plutonium, a decision we could live with; and followed that with an energy message that in a full hour had not one reference to the word "fusion," while out at Livermore and Los Alamos they are laying off people whose entire professional lives have been spent in fusion research. Our President has told us we will have to make sacrifices, but he has given us nothing to sacrifice for. We shall insulate our attics, but mostly we shall use the energy crisis as a means for redistributing income and increasing taxes and increasing the bureaucracy. (And we shall penalize hell out of those who, like myself and Poul Anderson, long ago insulated and learned to keep our automobiles in tune. . .)
Where is the innovation? The imagination? I expected a lot more from the President's energy message. I expected at the very least a massive research campaign: a Manhattan Project in agricultural research to develop plants capable of harnessing larger fractions of the solar energy falling on them; another to develop means for extracting energy and fertilizer from our sewage and trash; a specific plan to insure the safety of nuclear power plants while also assuring investors that the plants will be built, will not be unreasonably delayed by perpetual hearings and court challenges; perhaps a promise of restoration of some of the funds for fusion research; more funding for the ocean thermal energy system; something for the "slow" breeder, which uses the uranium-thorium cycle and doesn't produce any plutonium and can't be used to make bombs or terror weapons; something. Perhaps not all of the above, but something.
Instead we were promised an income-leveling tax system and told to tighten our belts while insulating our attics. Make do. Expect less. The "spree" is over. There's only one Earth. . .
Now- look: conservation is not going to get us to space. At best conservation can save us about half what is used for space heating: a few' years' growth increase. There's nothing wrong with that, but there's nothing right about it either. I hate to say this, but the only problem with waste is that it's costly. Suppose, just suppose for a moment, that we suddenly discovered a million years' worth of fossil fuels. Better yet, suppose, just suppose, that we really had workable solar power systems of great efficiency such that they could supply us with all the power we ever wanted at trivial costs. Would it be worthwhile insulating the attic? Obviously not, unless it could be shown that an uninsulat
ed attic was somehow harmful to the rest of us. There's nothing good per se about conservation, and nothing bad per se about throwaway cigarette lighters or Cadillac's. It happens that at the moment we may not be able to afford them and perhaps we'd best do without; but surely not-having-Cadillac's is not a positive goal? Surely not the only positive goal?
But aren't we going after solar power? And won't that ultimately solve all problems? Yes, to both; but we won't get it in time. Sony: we may not get it in time. Solar power is risky and expensive technology. It is inevitable that some form of it will eventually power the Earth, but that may take far longer than Mr. Carter seems to believe.
Freeman Dyson: "In the very long run we must have energy that is clean and perpetual. We shall have solar power. In the long run we must have energy that is obtainable and available in large quantities. We shall have fusion. In the near term we must have energy that is now available. We have fission power. For the present we must have energy that is cheap, convenient, and easily obtained. We have coal, oil, and natural gas. Nature has been kinder to us than we had any right to expect."
I wish I were that confident; but I am not. The trends, in my judgment, do not augur well for us getting to the long run; and trying to skip the near term and long run and jump directly to the very long run is comparable, in my judgment, to Congress ordering Goddard to send a ship to the Moon by 1935 or give up those crazy rockets.
A Step Farther Out Page 33
