Nothing illustrates the consequences of scientific illiteracy better than the situation in the United States. President George W. Bush received an education at Yale University, one of the top institutions in the world, and rose to head the wealthiest and most powerful nation in history. Yet the country founded on a separation of church and state has seen the intrusion of a Christian fundamentalism into the very center of power. One shocking consequence is the debate about evolution, which has flared into a national movement, putting enormous pressure on teachers and educational institutions to relegate evolution to a theory that must compete with the biblical version of Creation. Once called “scientific creationism,” this literal interpretation of the Bible has been modernized into Intelligent Design, with all the trappings and jargon of molecular biology. The fact that it continues to be considered a serious scientific alternative to evolution is a disgrace. Evolution is as real as the existence of an atom, DNA, or a black hole; we see it everywhere, not only in living systems, but in the geology of Earth and the dynamic universe. The mechanisms and processes of evolution are far from understood, but the fact of its occurrence is not. Scientists have failed to inculcate an understanding of what lies within the scientific realm and where religion intrudes without justification.
But President Bush's kind of faith in science and technology also enabled him to push an agenda of space travel to Mars within a decade or two. I have visited the Houston Space Center many times to film and have shot the mock-ups for the Mars trip. They are unbelievably crude, and I don't believe for a minute that getting to Mars and back will be possible within my children's lifetime, if ever; nor is the cost of trying worth it. It is a political gimmick, a proposal Bush will not have to be accountable for, merely a bauble offered to the electorate if it demonstrates leadership and vision.
Of a more serious nature is the proposal to build a space-based missile defense system reminiscent of Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, or Star Wars. Now deprived of an Evil Empire, the Soviet Union, to justify such a costly boondoggle, Bush is left pointing to an Axis of Evil that may include North Korea, Cuba, and who knows who else among this terrifying group — Libya's three million people? Grenada?
The dangers posed by nuclear-tipped missiles are their speed, accuracy, and destructive power. Armed with multiple, independently targeted warheads, such weapons might be loaded with reflective materials to confuse radar. A defence system would have to pick up a missile immediately after it is launched to maximize the time window in which to respond. Computers would have to identify the missile correctly and not mistake commercial planes, flocks of ducks, or UFOs for the missile. The trajectory, probable target, and payload would have to be analyzed very rapidly to respond in time to knock down the attacking vehicle before it reached the United States (chances are this scenario would be played out over Canada).
Now here's the rub. Someone — a human being — is going to have to recognize the implications of what the entire system has detected and spat out: namely, that one or dozens of missiles are headed to the United States. If I were going to launch such an attack, I would do it at an inconvenient hour, like 3:00 am on New Year's Day or after the Super Bowl. Some poor military person sitting in a silo somewhere in the Midwest, quietly playing a computer game or more likely napping, would have to notice what's going on and calmly assess the information and immediately pass it up the line. Assuming his or her superior was available, awake, and alert, he or she would have to assess the material and pass it on until eventually someone would have to go and wake the president so that he could push the red button or put in a key or whatever it takes to release the defensive weapons.
Can we assume all of the assessment and decision making would take place in seconds as it was passed up the chain of command and that finally someone somehow would enter, knock, blow a whistle, or do something else to wake the president? Can we assume the president would be fully awake instantly, able to assess the information lucidly and with care, ponder the consequences of not acting or responding, and not be distracted by thoughts of the country, his loved ones, or the stock market? Would he become sick or, as we saw him do in Michael Moore's documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 after Bush received the news that two jetliners had crashed into the Twin Towers in New York in 2001—sit there for several minutes with a totally blank look? I know I would.
With a response-time window of minutes, even with the most efficient system the pressures would be too great for any human being to respond rationally. So if one believes in the technology, it has to be programmed to assess what is happening as each second ticks by, measure the effective time for response, and then decide when that critical moment is reached and order a response without interference by fallible humans.
The technology required to detect and respond to any possible threat — space satellites with sophisticated detectors and systems to relay information to ground stations, underground command centers, missiles in silos, and so on — is enormously complex. I do not believe for a minute that such a vast array of components will function perfectly from the time it is in place (my smoke detector didn't work the one time it was needed), but the only time we will know will be the first occasion it is put to the test. To function properly, the entire system will depend on the speed and accuracy of the supercomputers that are at the heart of the defense program. The computer program required to analyze all of the data will be more complex than any software ever designed, because every possible contingency has to be anticipated and programmed for without countermanding or interfering with different sets of instructions.
We know that any new program has numerous “bugs,” and the only way to eliminate them is through thousands of people beginning to use it and finding them. Can a program be designed to respond to an attack without being tested by the real thing? It will have to be perfect the first time, something scientists not working for the military or receiving grants from the military tell us is virtually impossible. Only a scientifically literate president can even begin to truly assess the technical aspects of the proposed system.
SINCE I WROTE Metamorphosis, I have abandoned the doing of genetics, which had consumed me for a quarter of a century. In the 1970s, when geneticists began to learn to isolate and manipulate DNA in very sophisticated ways, it was immediately obvious there were enormous social, economic, and ecological implications. For decades writers, philosophers, and geneticists had been speculating about genetic engineering and discussing the potential ramifications of such powers. I never dreamed that within my lifetime, not only would the entire dictionary of sixty-four three-letter DNA words be deciphered, but we would also be able to purify, read, and synthesize specific sequences of DNA and insert them into virtually any organism at will. The day of human-designed organisms was at hand.
I knew there would be tremendous repercussions. Having belatedly recognized the dangers that our inventiveness posed from the battles over the insecticide DDT and then CFCs, I felt genetic engineering would encounter the same problems — our manipulative powers were great, but our knowledge of how the world works is so limited that we would not be able to anticipate all of the consequences in the real world. In my view, we had to be very cautious.