MODERN TIMES
by Art Hobson
ahobson@uark.edu
GETTING THROUGH THE TECHNOLOGY TRANSITION
In case you haven’t noticed, humankind is for the most part making a mess of our lovely planet. I’m not at all sure that we’re going to pull through our ten-millennium (since the origin of agriculture) experiment with technology.
Consider: Among millions of species, one of them, Homo sapiens, has appropriated 40 percent of the planet’s photosynthetic growth. Sprawling growth such as we find in Fayetteville has transformed or degraded some 50 percent of Earth’s land surface, a process that is driving many fellow creatures to extinction. Two-thirds of marine fisheries are extinct or nearly so. Driven by mass-production agriculture such as the Arkansas chicken industry, harmful algal blooms are spreading widely. Humans now appropriate more than half of Earth’s reasonably accessible fresh water. Major rivers and lakes are drying and dying all over the globe. We are causing Earth’s sixth great extinction with species annihilation rates of 100 to 1000 times the natural rate, rivaling the fifth extinction wrought by an asteroid collision 65 million years ago.
The most ominous signal is carbon dioxide, a gas that controls the greenhouse effect that is in turn fundamental to the relation between our planet and our star. Industrialization has driven its atmospheric concentration to 33% above the highest levels of at least the past half-million years, and probably the past 20 million years. And so the Arctic is melting, glaciers are melting, sea levels are rising, extreme weather has increased, and the planet is the hottest it’s been in at least 1000 years. Global warming is probably playing a role in this season’s tornado activity, the most severe since U.S. record-keeping started in the 1950s.
The driving forces in all this are overpopulation and over-consumption. Earth might support 4 billion people at the consumption level of nations such as Italy, or 2 billion at gluttonous U.S. levels. Yet we have already reached 6 billion and are hastening toward 10 billion by mid-century.
Despite the jeremiads of some “endtimes” crackpots, we are not necessarily doomed, and certainly not by the gods. It is we ourselves who do this to ourselves. By the same token we can take vigorous action to fix things, as we did for example around 1990 when we globally banned the chlorofluorocarbon chemicals that were devastating Earth’s protective ozone shield. We could quickly begin to hold our own numbers down, cure our fossil fuel addiction, and so forth. It really wouldn’t be so difficult, requiring for example far less than the Herculean efforts that we put into war and preparations for war. And saving the planet would be a lot more fun than war.
But we not only continue our destructive ways, we do it at an accelerating pace that we are pleased to call “progress.” I think that the reason for this irrational and suicidal behavior runs deep into the history of our species.
Modern humans come from the forests and fields of Africa, some 100,000 years ago. But earlier humans, upright creatures who were our direct ancestors, separated from the apes far earlier, some 6 million years ago. Before and during those 6 million years, evolution adapted our genes, like those of all living creatures, to survival within the surrounding environment. There was a biologically-driven need to hunt, to be aggressive, to be protective, to procreate in large numbers, to move from one locale to the next. This worked fairly well among a total human prehistoric population of less than one million.
Quite recently, a mere ten thousand years ago, everything changed. The Bible recounts this transition in the eloquent poetry of Genesis, or see the journal Science, 25 April 2003, pages 597-603, for part of the scientific account. Ten thousand years is about 0.1 percent of human existence, two-millionths of the time since life began evolving on Earth. It’s an eye-blink.
During this eye-blink, we have developed not only agriculture but printing, modern medicine, modern communication, global religions, fossil fuels, nuclear weapons, megacities, and all the rest. This is not the world in which we grew up.
Can we survive this enormous and nearly-instantaneous transition? I’m not at all sure. The problem is that we certainly cannot do it by relying on the impulses that worked so well when procreation, hunting, and fire were the order of the day, impulses that were encoded in our genes during six million years of human evolution. If we are going to solve our modern predicament we must, for a change, stop and think through the long-term consequences of various courses of action, and choose the rational course rather than the one that feels good for the moment.
We must, in other words, learn to make public decisions in the light of observation and reason. It will no longer do to follow feelings, impulses, authority, tradition, or beliefs. The basic contradiction of modern times is that we have chosen to adopt science-based technological culture, but in our public policy decisions we have failed to adopt science’s path toward knowledge: careful observation and reason. It is a simple but demanding code, for it requires tough intellectual honesty and, sometimes, relinquishing cherished beliefs.
The great physicist Enrico Fermi once pondered the riddle of why there have been no visits to Earth by technological civilizations from planets around other stars. He concluded that the reason was probably that they all exterminated themselves, because they could not deal rationally with the consequences of their own technology. Will we continue deciding public policy issues such as family planning and energy resources by relying chiefly on prehistoric impulses and ancient traditions, or will we begin instead to use our universe-given senses and brains? It’s getting late.