To some, this accelerating layering of complexity seems no more than a natural part of our culture’s maturation. To others, the prospect of all certainty dissolving into a muddle of ambiguity seems horrifying. If I were forced to make just one hard prediction for the twenty-first century, it would be that we have seen only the first wave of these puzzling, sometimes heartbreaking conundrums.
Will we face these issues head-on? Or flee once more to the shelter of ancient simplicities? That, I believe, will be the central moral and intellectual dilemma ahead of us.
Finally, let me close this rambling screed with a note on the central topic of this book. Much has been said in recent years about the so-called Gaia hypothesis, which though credited to James Lovelock, actually has a modern history stretching all the way back to the 1780s and the Scottish geologist James Hutton. Lately, there have been signs of compromise. Proponents have backed off a bit from comparing the planet too closely to a living organism, while critics like Richard Dawkins and James Kirchner now admit the debate over Gaia has been useful to ecology and biology, stimulating many new avenues of research.
In this novel, of course, I portray Gaia as more than a mere metaphor. Some of my scientist colleagues will surely shake their heads over my dramatic denouement, accusing me of “teleology” and other sins. And yet, doesn’t the renowned physicist llya Prigogine suggest that the ordering processes of “dissipative structures” almost inevitably lead to increasing levels of organization? Cambridge philosopher John Platt illustrates this progressive acceleration with one telling example — life’s ability to encapsulate itself.
It began with membranes enclosing the chemistry of a single cell, perhaps four billion years ago. For a long time, single cells were the limit, drifting and duplicating themselves in the open sea. But then, just four hundred million years ago, a big change came about. Creatures began moving onto land, covered with thick scales, or shells, or bark.
In the last half million years, clothing and artificial shelters provided the next opportunity, enabling humans to greatly expand their range… which in the most recent tenth of that time swelled to include even high mountains and arctic wastes.
Finally, in the last few decades we’ve even learned to take our climate with us, in self-contained, encapsulated environments, to explore outer space and the bottom of the sea.
In fact, there is nothing mystical or teleological about this speedup. Each species builds on the suite of hard-won techniques accumulated by its ancestors, and for us this process isn’t merely genetic. Our culture profits from insights slowly gathered by prior generations, who labored in semi-ignorance toward a distant light just a few only dimly perceived. If we now find ourselves on a launching point — poised toward either despair or something truly wonderful — it is only because there were always, amid those bickering, shortsighted people of past times, some who believed in gathering that light, in nurturing it and making it grow.
So, indeed, those who follow in our footsteps may think of us.
We search for solutions, arguing vehemently over ways to save the world. Amid all the self.-righteous speechmaking, we tend to forget that yesterday’s passionately held “solutions” often become tomorrow’s problems. For instance, nuclear fission was once seen as a “liberal” cause. So were wind and ocean power. (Though now that windmills and tidal barrages are being built — and money being made from them — there are those pointing out drawbacks, penalties, and tradeoffs.) It never used to matter to us what types of trees were planted by logging companies after they finished clear-cutting a forest, only that they planted “replacements.” (And this was enlightened, compared with still-earlier attitudes.) Now, though, we see vast, sterile stands of trash pine as just another form of desert.
How many other favored solutions will this happen to? We’re becoming so sensitized to making mistakes — will this soon leave us too paralyzed to act at all?
If so, it would be a pity. To quote Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University, “the situation is running downhill at a truly frightening pace. On the other hand, our potential for solving the problem is absolutely enormous.”
Some solutions really are obvious. “There’s no such thing as garbage,” says Hazel Henderson. “We have to recycle… as the Japanese do. One reason they are so successful is that they recycle over 50%.”
Other solutions might prove controversial, even heartbreaking. The next fifty years may lead to pragmatism on a scale that would seem abhorrent by today’s standards. As Garret Hardin of the University of California puts it, we may even “… stop sending gifts of food to starving nations. Just grit your teeth and tell them ‘You’re on your own and you’ve got to make your population match the carrying capacity of your own land.’ ”
A harsh way of looking at things, and terrifying in its implications for today’s fragile consensus of tolerance. Is it any wonder I wanted to experiment in this novel with a somewhat kinder tomorrow? One where people have grown at least a little wiser, in tempo with their growing problems?
After all the philosophy and speculations are finished, we’re still left with just words, metaphors. They are our tools for understanding the world, but it’s always well to remember they have only a nodding acquaintance with reality.
Reality is this world, the only oasis we know of. Every astronaut who has had a chance to see it from above has returned a fervent convert to saving it. As glimmers of peace and political maturity break out here and there around the globe, perhaps the rest of us will turn away from ideologies and other self-indulgences and start to take notice as well.
Quoting Hazel Henderson again, “It’s almost as if the human family is being nudged by Mother Nature to grow up. We are all in the same boat now, and it’s no good playing these games of which end is sinking.”
What our grandchildren inherit is entirely up to us. And frankly, I’d rather they remember us as having left them a bit of hope.
—David Brin, August 1989
And now, to reward those who actually stuck it out through the afterword, here’s an encore of sorts… a special bonus story, set in the same universe as Earth, but a few years later.
AMBIGUITY
1.
Back when he was still a student, Stan Goldman and his friends used to play a game of make-believe.
“How long do you think it would take Isaac Newton to solve this homework set?” they would ask each other. Or, “If Einstein were alive today, do you think he’d bother with graduate school?”
It was the same sort of lazy, get-nowhere argument he also heard his musician friends debate on occasion: “What d’you figure Mozart would make of our stuff,” they’d pose over bottles of beer, “if we snatched him from his own time to the 1990s? Would he freak out and call it damn noise? Or would he catch on, wear mirror shades, and cut an album right away?”
At that point, Stan used to cut in. “Which Mozart do you mean? The arriviste social climber? The craftsman of the biographies? Or the brash rebel of Amadeus?
The composers and players seemed puzzled by his non sequitur. “Why, the real one, of course.” Their reply convinced him that, for all their closeness, for all their well-known affinity, physicists and musicians would never fully understand each other.
Oh, I see. The real one… of course…
But what is reality?
Through a thick portal of fused quartz, mediated by a series of three hundred field-reinforced half mirrors, Stan now watched the essence of nothingness. Suspended in a sealed vacuum, a potential singularity spun and danced in nonexistence.