by Guy Murchie
Within a decade or two of course the picture had changed completely and it became obvious that any good engineering firm, even in 1903, given a million dollars to research and develop a flying machine, might have done as well as the Wright boys. Some believed better. But the fact is that no one in 1903, including the Wright family, had thought flying was worth a million dollars or, for that matter, a thousand, even though within a half century almost every big corporation and government on a germinating Earth would be putting a major portion of its budget into research and development. And vision was still so lacking that it took the Wrights several years just to convince the United States War Department (which urgently needed reconnaissance airplanes) that they had invented one and had flown it successfully for thousands of hours.
During and after World War I, however, flying developed at an accelerating pace, as I described in Song of the Sky, and both vision and knowledge germinated explosively all over the planet while fundamental revolutions occurred in all the main branches of science. Not only have the chemists since then learned how to create new chemical compounds at a rate approaching 1000 per day, but the physicists have opened the atomic age, the biologists cracked the genetic code, medical researchers doubled the length of an average life and the concept of evolution that won acceptance along with electricity near the end of the nineteenth century synergized with it to illumine the whole earth, these two concepts forming the vanguard of a hundred new sciences from acoustics to zymology.
If we measure the growth of knowledge in terms of books, pamphlets, journals, maps and pictures in the world's libraries, this accumulation is estimated to total something over a billion different copyrighted items today and, although still outnumbered by people, to be growing at the rate of 3 percent per year and gaining on the people who are multiplying at less than 2 percent. And if you want to count all the duplicate copies of everything printed, the books, etc., have long since passed the people. It isn't just a problem of physical space though, for it is already technically possible to reduce the size of print by 100,000 times in each dimension, so that all the written knowledge of Earth could literally be stored inside the head of a pin. It is rather a problem of mind, of sorting, of availability, of order. Indeed if you break all these library items down into the individual two quadrillion "bits" of information they are estimated to contain, the whole earth's volcano of knowledge turns out to be erupting at a steady two million "bits" per second, which is an alarming million times faster than babies are being born.
And this means, in simplest terms, that by the time a baby born today finishes college, the amount of knowledge available to him will have quadrupled. Which imposes an unprecedented strain on twentieth-century children, for, like the gene's blueprint of the whole body, every human who expects to function constructively must carry some sort of a working mental image of his world. Moreover, it creates what is probably germination's greatest challenge to the collective mind of man on a planet where knowledge is accumulating so much faster than it is evaporating that a major task of the next century may well be man's taming, sorting and harnessing it in the service of his newly germinated domain.
7. THE PROLIFERATION OF COMPUTATION
A major offshoot from the tree of knowledge of course is automation, which in one generation has revolutionized the management and technology of the world. At its heart is the computer, whose relation to the earth's explosions in speed and information is obvious in the fact that man now not only doubles his computation rate (a blend of speed, complexity and accuracy) every year, but, through electronic miniaturization, annually halves its equipment size and (to some degree) its cost. Thus the mental work of multiplying two 14digit numbers, which took a trained mathematician with pencil and paper twenty minutes in World War II, can now be done electronically in less than one hundredth of a second and with much less chance of error.
The greatest single breakthrough in this revolution came when John von Neumann discovered how to store sets of instructions inside a calculating machine so it could work unassisted, step after step, by consulting only its own memory. Called programming, this unprecedented development in communication between man and machine soon spread to conversation between two or more machines, to automatic language translation, machine hearing and (now in the experimental stage) electronic "thought reading" by tuning directly into brain waves.
Computers are already being taught how to play games so well, I am told, that they hold a national championship in checkers and have been making steady gains on the world championship in chess. They learn primarily through a programmed prohibition against making the same mistake twice, although, in a new situation, they may be allowed a human tutor until they've had time to "catch on." Also when certain breeds of advanced computers get into difficulties attempting unfamiliar work, they have the option of calling up older "friends" (more experienced computers) on the long-distance phone for advice. And should they suffer "nervous breakdowns" from being overloaded with "impossible" tasks (like one who was inadvertently ordered to divide by zero), they may seek what has been called electronic psychotherapy, which could result in their being given a day off to compose a little music, fantasize in "freely associated ideas" or even jot down a quatrain of poetry such as
Darkly the peaceful trees crashed In the serene sun While the heart heard The swift moon stopped silently.
If it doesn't sound quite human, at least it was a feather in the console of the naive young IBM 709, with third-grade vocabulary of 77 poetic words who "dreamed" it up in Florida in 1964.
Other machines, under the tutelage of pioneers like B. F. Skinner of Harvard, have developed sophisticated feedback to become patient, impersonal teachers of children, indeed remarkably inexpensive ones over the long term. On the farm, as in the factory, computer-guided machines have learned to adapt to extraordinarily delicate problems, from picking tomatoes to hulling rice, enabling one farmer in America to do the work of three hundred in Asia. Meanwhile in space, computers orbit the earth in unmanned observatories. Others in megalopolises help people find people by registering and classifying them by the million for jobs, business contracts, selling, swapping, car pooling, baby sitting, house hunting, spouse hunting. ... One science-struck young lady, recovering from a date prescribed by an electronic cupid, was reported to sigh: "It's frightening to find out what you deserve."
Some evolutionists theorize that, because man and his artifacts are part of nature, the man-conceived computer must also be part of nature, evolving not just a new phylum of life but a new kind of phylum, specifically a mutant phylum containing several 'mutant classes, orders and many species of computers. "Why not?" asks Marvin Minsky of M.I.T.'s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. "The human brain, after all, is just a computer that happens to be made of meat." This idea is bound to be opposed by biologists for a time but it seems worth consideration, especially in view of the possibility that the evolution of protoplasm may eventually yield to the evolution of circuitry with all consequent implications for earthly germination and philosophy. Have you heard of the classic test devised in 1950 by Alan M. Turing of Britain to decide whether or not a machine can think? It called for a long, intensive course of teaching the most sophisticated of computers how to answer the prying questions of a blindfolded human so plausibly that, after some finite number of years of its programming and grooming, the human would no longer be able to tell whether he was conversing with a man or a machine. Already a few advanced computers have impersonated humans so well that teen-age children were taken in by them during several minutes of conversation, and Turing conjectured it might be only a matter of time before the most articulate machines could achieve complete man-computer indistinguishability for anyone.
Then there's the eerie question of machine consciousness, supposedly a new phenomenon on Earth, an example of which is the nationwide moment-to-moment awareness of the computerized airlines' reservation system, which in a few seconds can tell you what no human can: which seats are
available on any scheduled flight in the country on any day or night of the indefinite future. To those who oppose the whole fantastic notion of evolving artificial consciousness or "life" on the ground that machines, not being genetically fertile, cannot by themselves maintain their populations, the answer is as surprising as it is authoritative: they are fertile! For von Neumann definitely showed that, in principle, the computer may reproduce as readily as any vegetable or animal, the patterns in its abstract programming corresponding to the patterns in abstract genes that choose and modify all the food or materials needed to build and assemble new structures like itself - and that, despite the extremely complex chemical and engineering problems to be solved, this function of artificial life might well someday become reality.
This in turn brings up one of the ultimate questions of planetary germination: Are machines getting out of hand? Can they be trusted? Or must we domesticate them before they domesticate us? If they should learn to outthink us parents in enough ways, like a whiz kid outsmarting his knucklehead pa, is there anything to restrain them, say in a million years, from deciding to keep us as pets, guinea pigs, or beef? This (or worse) now begins to loom as one of the more ominous aspects of the evolving pollution problem, one of whose Bs (for blight) must include the proliferation of mental parasitism in a germinating world, and this is evidenced by man's rising overdependence on his own devices (from travel agencies to TV), in the same way that certain ant species have become enslaved by their own servants.
In other words, while the computer's artificial mind is earning at least its vicarious niche within the finite realm of man and reaching as far as it can into dimensions beyond it, man will do well not to take the machine too seriously. Indeed he should always remember that it sprang not from his loins but from his head. Nor is there any way, so far as anyone knows, that the machine could have got a soul.
8. THE RISE OF WEALTH
At the beginning of the twentieth century only one percent of humanity could fairly be called the "haves," for they were the relatively wealthy 15 million people, living mostly in Europe and America, who enjoyed an annual income estimated to be above $100, while the remaining 1.5 billion "have nots," in Asia, Africa and all over, got along on practically no money. This world ratio of 1 "prince" to 99 "paupers," moreover, had been the accepted disparity for wealth distribution all through history.
But a sudden change came in the early decades of this century as the industrial revolution spread swiftly over all continents, diffusing the wealth, so that by the early I970s half the world's people had an average income of about $2000 and world production was climbing 3 1/2 percent a year or almost double the rate of the population. This naturally led to predictions that the "haves" might increase to 90 percent of the world's population by the year 2000.
The rise in dollar income of course needs to be tempered by the rise in prices if one wants to ascertain the net increase in buying power or true wealth, a value that is climbing worldwide in this germinal century at around 2 percent a year. Like pollution, the inflation problem is an annoying but inevitable aspect of germination, whose dimensions, are more than they seem, nicest evidence of which may be the inflation of talk about inflation, as revealed in facts like the space allotted to inflation in the Encyclopaedia Britannica having tripled just since 1930. The net effect of world germination, notwithstanding, has made earthlings in general so much richer than they used to be that the slightly-above-average human of today (with his car, TV, fridge, washer, camera, airline credit card, etc.) enjoys a lot more luxury than did the wealthiest king in centuries gone by.
Unfortunately the economic disparity between the multiplying "haves" and the dwindling "have nots" has hardly lessened despite their overall average enrichment. For it seems that although the "average" American has increased his consumption of energy 100-fold in 100 years until he is now using 50 times as much of it as the "average" Hindu in India, the Hindu has increased his consumption only by a comparatively moderate 5 or 10 times. The extreme rich-poor disparity thus goes on and on, despite general world enrichment, mainly because the "have nots" have been relatively deprived not only of food but of education to the degree that too many of them still lack the kind of vision and discipline it takes to put off eating donated seed grain now in order to plant it for a permanently better crop in the future.
Another critical wealth factor is the sudden, almost cancerous, growth of cities on this planet that never had a village until a dozen or so millenniums ago and hardly a real town before the fifth century B.C. Plato once opined that the ideal city should contain 5000 citizens, served by 25,000 slaves. It is true there had been a few larger cities before Plato, like Ur, Mohenjo-Daro and Sybaris, but world urbanization developed very slowly because it took time to discover how to organize the necessary concentration of food, water and other supplies to build and maintain a city. Even, as recently as A.D. 1800 there were only fifty cities on Earth with populations as big as 100,000 people.
But then came the ignition point when industry, machines, plumbing, transport, electricity and the telephone really germinated the urban seeds so that by 1970 Earth was rich enough to have more than fifteen hundred cities of over 100,000 and a good hundred between 1 million and 10 million. In the United States now, for example, country land is being paved over and urbanized at the unheard-of rate of 5 square miles a day! The majority of Americans, western Europeans and Japanese are already living in cities and it appears that the majority of all humans will be urban by 1990.
Inevitably such germinal inequities will have to be controlled since a finite planet obviously cannot support infinite material accumulation, so the countermigration of people out of the centers of cities into the suburbs should not surprise anyone nor the planned dispersal of future populations into idealized metropolises like automated Babelnoah, designed by Paolo Soleri for 6 million people in Arizona, or the 15-square-mile galaxy-shaped Auroville, already being built in southern India.
I hardly need mention such other predictable innovations of global finance as a world currency, massive investment in undeveloped nations and whole Earth market treaties to hasten the essential elimination of the present dangerous imbalance in world trade.
9.THE LIBERATION OF WOMEN, MINORITIES AND SLAVES
During the past century a great movement to liberate the captive peoples of Earth has swept the planet and now, for the first time, women are being given equal rights with men almost everywhere, and not only slaves but exploited races and minorities of nearly every sort are progressively gaining equal status with other citizens in all but a few totalitarian states.
Slavery is an ancient social perversion that goes back farther than history, even into animal and vegetable orders, like the ants, a few of whose species have practiced it for millions of years (page 375). But primordial ice-age man who, unlike ants, had no permanent houses, no domesticated animals nor private property, probably never heard of slaves. Indeed the evidence shows it was only with settled living and civilization that owning slaves and other property became feasible. And this explains why human slavery evolved so gradually, along with agriculture, villages, animal domestication and particularly the invention of war, which, after all, is what provided the prisoners who became the first slaves. So, from a by-product of war, slavery in time became a product of it, and eventually a major reason for it.
By Roman times slavery was so widespread it necessitated constant raiding into "barbarian" countries and began to be abused with distressing consequences, such as gladiatorial exhibitions and the revolt of Spartacus, the Thracian swordsman who armed and trained 90,000 slaves and made the world tremble by defeating several Roman armies before eventually being overcome and crucified in 71 B.C. Julius Caesar, who had briefly been a slave himself, later put on an exhibition featuring 600 slave gladiators dueling simultaneously; Domitian staged a weird "battle to the death" between women and dwarfs and a few years later 9882 gladiators and uncounted wild beasts fought an extravaganza in the Colo
sseum that lasted 117 days!
One of the most important uses of slaves, surprisingly enough, was for the publishing of books, which of course was done all by hand, yet with astonishing speed and efficiency. With one highly trained slave dictating the text and a hundred scribe slaves copying his words in a clear, swift hand, others could collect the copies, check and correct them, still others roll them up, bind, title and adorn them for the market. Thus a single Roman publishing house could "print" a 1000 copy edition of the short Volume Two of Martial's Epigrams in a 10 hour work day, each copy containing over a thousand words and retailed at the equivalent of ten cents, earning a net profit on the edition approaching fifty dollars.
All in all, slavery seemed such an ingrained aspect of nature that the great philosophers of the day accepted it, including Socrates, Plato (rather reluctantly) and Aristotle. Even Christ is not known to have spoken against it, for, as Paul wrote to the Corinthians: "Every man has his own calling; let him keep to it."
As Earth's population grew in the next two millenniums, slavery grew with it and, by the nineteenth century, the planet's slave population numbered something over 25 million, depending on definitions. The number of blacks alone, captured in Africa and shipped to Europe and America, has been estimated in excess of 15 million, some 8 percent of whom died from the crowded and brutal conditions in the holds at sea. But a great change soon took place, ironically initiated by England, the most seafaring, most slave-trading nation of all. It was something definitely mystic and spiritual, in which a great nation, voluntarily and relatively peacefully, abolished on humanitarian grounds for the first time in history a world commerce that had long been a mainstay of her prosperity.
