"Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" has a corollary. Others will do unto you as you do unto them. And that encapsulates, among other things, the history of the nuclear arms race. If this can't be done, then I think politicians who are practitioners of such religions ought to confess and admit that they are failed Christians or aspirant Christians but not full-fledged, unqualified, unhyphenated Christians.
I therefore think that the perspective of the Earth in space and time is something with enormous, not just educational but moral and ethical, force. I believe it is lucky for us that this is the time when pictures of the Earth from space are fairly routinely available. We look at them on the evening weather reports and hardly pause to think what an extraordinary item that is. Our planet, the Earth, home, where we come from, seen from space. And when you look at it from space, I think it is immediately clear that it is a fragile, tiny world exquisitely sensitive to the depredations of its inhabitants. It's impossible, I think, not to look at that planet and think that what we are doing is foolish. We are spending a million million dollars every year, worldwide, on armaments. A million million dollars. Think of what you could do with a million million dollars. A visitor from somewhere else-the legendary intelligent extraterrestrial- dipping down to the Earth and inquiring what we are about and finding such prodigies of human inventiveness and such enormous fractions of our wealth devoted not just to the means of war but to the means of massive global destruction- such a being would surely deduce that our prospects are not very good and perhaps go on to some other, more promising world.
When you look at the Earth from space, it is striking. There are no national boundaries visible. They have been put there, like the equator and the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn, by humans. The planet is real. The life on it is real, and the political separations that have placed the planet in danger are of human manufacture. They have not been handed down from Mount Sinai. All the beings on this little world are mutually dependent. It's like living in a lifeboat. We breathe the air that Russians have breathed, and Zambians and Tasmanians and people all over the planet. Whatever the causes that divide us, as I said before, it is clear that the Earth will be here a thousand or a million years from now. The question, the key question, the central question-in a certain sense the only question-is, will we?
Nine
Without knowing what I am and why I am here, life is impossible. • Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina •
If we don't find life literally impossible without answering that question, at least its difficulties increase. It is very reasonable for humans to want to understand something of our context in a broader universe, awesome and vast. It is also reasonable for us to want to understand something about ourselves. Since we have powerful unconscious processes, this means that there are parts of our selves that are hidden from us. And this two-pronged investigation into the nature of the world and the nature of our selves is, to a very major degree, I believe, what the human enterprise is about.
Our success as a species is surely due to our intelligence, not primarily to our emotions, because many many different species of animals surely have emotions. Many, many different species of animals also have varying degrees of intelligence. But it is our intelligence-our interest in figuring things out, our ability to do so, coupled with our manipulative abilities, our engineering talents-that is responsible for our success. Because surely we are not faster than all other species, or better camouflaged, or better diggers or swimmers or fliers. We are only smarter. And, at least until the invention of weapons of mass destruction, this intelligence has led to the steady-in fact exponential-increase in our numbers. And in the last few thousand years, our numbers on this planet have increased by much more than a factor of a hundred. There are human outposts not just everywhere on the planet, including Antarctica, but in the ocean depths and in near-Earth orbit. And it is clear that if we do not destroy ourselves, we will continue this progressive, outward movement until there will be human settlements on neighboring worlds.
It seems to me also clear that historians of a thousand years from now, if there are any, will look back on our time as being absolutely critical, a turning point, a branch point in human history. Because if we survive, then this time will be remembered as the time when we could have destroyed ourselves and came to our senses and did not. It will also be the time in which the planet was bound up. And it will also be remembered as the time when, slowly, tentatively, haltingly, we first sent our robot emissaries and then ourselves to neighboring worlds.
Now, all of these are extraordinary and unprecedented activities. Never before have we had the capability of destroying ourselves, and therefore never before have we had the ethical and moral responsibility not to do so. A way of looking at the time we happen to inhabit is as follows: We started hundreds of thousands to millions of years ago as itinerant tribespersons, in which the fundamental loyalty was to a very small group, by contemporary standards. Typical hunter-gatherer groups are maybe a hundred people, so the typical person on the planet had an allegiance to a group of no more than a hundred or a few hundred people.
The names that many of these tribes give to themselves are touching in their narrowness. All over the world, people call themselves "the people," "the men," "the humans." And all those other tribes, they aren't people, they aren't men, they aren't humans. They are something else. Now, that doesn't mean that a state of constant warfare existed among these tribes, as Thomas Hobbes, for example, imagined. A significant fraction of those early groups, there is reason to think, were benign, calm, peace-loving, not interested in systematic, bureaucratized aggression, which is the function of states at a later time.
As time passed, groups have merged, sometimes voluntarily, sometimes involuntarily, and the unit to which personal identification and loyalties are due has grown. The sequence is known to all of those who take courses in the history of civilization at universities, in which we pass through allegiances to larger groups, to city-states, to settled nations, to empires. Today the typical person on the Earth is obviously a patchwork quilt of political, economic, ethnic, and religious identifications, owing allegiance to a group or groups consisting of a hundred million people or more. It's clear that there is a steady trend, if the trend continues, there will be a time, probably not so far in the future, when the average person's typical identification is with the human species, with everyone on Earth.
The more we view the Earth from the outside, the more we come to see it as an exquisite, tiny world, everyone dependent upon everyone else, the sooner that general perception will come into being. Despite all the faults of international organizations, it is nevertheless striking in our time, in this century and the last few, but especially in this century, that organizations of global purview, involving essentially every nation on Earth, have grown up, have persisted, and we would, of course, not expect them to be perfect. Their imperfections are a function of the newness of the organization and the fact that human beings are imperfect. But it is a trend, a token, of the direction in which we are headed, provided we do not destroy ourselves.