And why I'm not mad for thinking that

FACING THE END


Why I believe the Second Coming is imminent
(and am not mad for thinking so)


(c) Guy Blythman January 2011


Contents

(1) Predictions of the end

(2) Energy, Environment and Economics

(3) Science: Shrinking Horizons

(4) Science: Pandora’s Box?

(5) Culture and Anarchy: 1

(6) Culture and Anarchy: 2

(7) Culture and Anarchy: 3

(8) The Crisis of Government

(9) War and International Politics

(10) Conclusion




Foreword

This book is intended to be a warning. Essentially, its argument is that within the next few years, certainly by the middle of the present century, all the problems currently faced by humanity will have worsened to the extent of either destroying it or lowering its quality of life such that death would actually be the most attractive option for us. I appreciate that not everyone will agree with my thesis, although I venture to suggest that many will reject it simply because it isn't what they wanted to hear. It is understandable that there should be a negative reaction; after all, the end of the world isn’t everyone’s favourite subject. Most of us would want life to continue with at least a chance of its being comfortable and happy enough to make the experience worthwhile. But quite apart from the lives of individuals being finite (advances in medical technology may for all we know result in their being extended indefinitely, but as will be argued later on in the book this might not be altogether a good thing), we can’t say for certain that the world won’t end at some point in the future – for all we know, it could happen as soon as five minutes’ time – and it makes every sense, if we do want life to continue in some hopefully congenial form, to at least explore the possibilities of there being some lifeboat which enables us to achieve that goal. It amazes me that some people do themselves down sufficiently to not be interested in the possibility of eternal life and eternal bliss, especially when this world never meets all our expectations of it and gives some people – the poor, the unemployed, the enslaved, the bullied, those suffering from afflictions of body and mind – a particularly hard time. We’re not so bad that we don’t deserve at least the chance of it; at least, that is what God thinks about the matter.
I don’t claim to be perfect but I hope you will accept my assurances that the book was written from altruistic motives – from compassion, and not misanthropy. My brief isn’t to be some morbid prophet of doom but rather to warn people of what is to come so they can take the action necessary to gain entry to the much better world which I believe will replace this one. There are theological reasons why our current existence is imperfect, the imperfection carrying within it the seeds of ultimate destruction, and God has I believe been wise enough to allow the symptoms of final disintegration to serve as warning signs. Nor, even though I desire that the wicked should be punished for their sins, do I not think it would be far better if they were to repent and so be saved when the end comes, if they are still in their earthly bodies at the time.
In discussing all the things currently going wrong with Western society, I may seem much of the time to be describing what is first and foremost a British situation. In this country we are all very familiar with the problems of excessive political correctness and excessive bureaucracy, an over-mighty private sector, soaring costs of living, an absurd benefits system, increasingly antisocial behaviour, etcetera. To some extent it’s inevitable; I naturally have more experience of what goes on in my own country than of what goes on in others’, am more acquainted with its problems. But there’s also a justification for focusing so much on the situation here. The collapse of Western society will happen in Britain first because, due to its combination of small size and large population, it is the part of the West suffering most from overcrowding and stretched resources. Besides, what conversations I have had with people from other European countries suggests that the problems Britain is facing are being experienced there as well, if not - yet - on the same scale or in exactly the same way.
Since it’s easy when fervently believing that the Second Coming is imminent to get carried away and become a bit hysterical, I felt it was important to debunk one or two myths. Some things which people speculate, or fear, may happen in the future, such as machines taking over society and making people their slaves, will not, I believe, come about. They won’t be among the factors bringing about the End; although other things might be. At other times, I may describe a particular person as if they are still holding political office, when in fact they aren’t, or seem unawre of some important development in international affairs. Please bear with me; the world scene changes all the time, in all areas of human activity, and although of course it is my intention to regularly revise the content of the book where possible, inevitably where purely factual matters are concerned it will sometimes be out of date.
Some of the issues I refer to in the book may not seem to be quite so pressing at the time you read it. But problems have a habit of going away and then coming back again. They do have peaks and troughs, or maybe the media have simply lost interest in them, or people got tired of complaining. They will nevertheless remain in the long term problems and the general trend be for them to worsen.
You will have gathered that the book is written from an unashamedly Christian standpoint. I stress the “unashamedly”. I happen to believe in the orthodox Christian view that the earthly world will one day end, after which all humanity will be judged by God and those worthy of eternal life will gain it, while those who are not worthy of it won’t gain it. With respect to decent Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, Jains, Zoroastrians etcetera I also believe that Christianity cannot be viewed as only one out of a number of religions to which it is of equal, but not greater, value, since to accord all those belief systems the same value would be to debase them equally – though there are many similarities between them there are also many differences, and what is contradictory is rendered nonsensical. It has been the norm of late in western society to follow a philosophy of syncretism in religious matters (which includes not having any religion at all if you feel so inclined), but just because it is generally accepted practice does not mean it is right.
My Christianity was a matter of approaching the subject of “religion” with a spiritually and intellectually open mind. The conclusions reached in the book have been arrived at after much careful thought and observation over a period of five to ten years. Those who are not religious or are frightened by its message may respond by criticising it as arrogant or dismissing it as nonsense. They are of course perfectly at liberty to do so. All I ask is that they not be prejudiced against it by any dislike for Christianity but judge it on its merits. As I see it, its conclusions would be accurate even if I was not religious and the sceptics were right about there being no afterlife. Without that promise of a better world, however, they would be unbearably depressing. No doubt they are depressing anyway, to those who are accustomed to the familiar world we've all inhabited for however long we've been alive, but it is beyond my brief or my power, I’m afraid, to put that right.
People with whom I have debated religious topics often dismiss my views with the words "oh, well of course you would say that, you're a Christian." Yes, I am a Christian, but I am one because I happen to believe certain things, rather than someone who believes certain things because he is a Christian. Exactly why Christianity is the answer to the problem of a disintegrating world is set out in the final chapter. For a really comprehensive discussion of the subject I would have to refer the reader to my The Mills of God, or for that matter to the Bible, the works of C S Lewis, or indeed a great many other religious writings all of which were intended, after all, to point people in what their authors considered was the right direction.


(1)

Predictions of the End
People have been talking about the end of the world for years. I see no benefit in attempting to list all those others who in recent or not so recent years have indulged in predicting when it will come, explaining how it’s foretold in ancient writings and attempting to describing the precise form the catastrophe will take. That would be a subject in its own right, and there are other books which deal with it far more comprehensively than I have time to here.
One ought, I suppose, to mention Nostradamus, the most famous prophet of the end, who puts the date of the Second Coming of Christ, which precedes and heralds the Last Judgement, at July 1999 (near enough). He doesn’t seem to have been right all the time; some of what he says is difficult or impossible to understand, given that he was using the language of his time and translations may not always be accurate. Also, if we are to believe the majority of his predictions, most of human history over the past four hundred years would seem to have been predetermined, and without going into an in-depth philosophical discussion of the subject it is generally accepted that we have free will. Although it might be possible to be sure of the broad general trends, much else, including the identity of the leading protagonists who made their own decisions whether to go into politics, or the church, or soldiering, must be down to personal choice and not affected by any external factor.
Where did Nostradamus get his information, in any case; did he have a hotline to God? Unless the latter had personally revealed the truth to him, and neither the believer nor the secularist has any evidence for that, Christians should be wary of setting too much store by what he says. It is worth noting that he appears to have been right quite a bit of the time at least. It looks like he accurately predicted the rise of Hitler, whose name he gets wrong only by one letter (Hister), that the English parliament would rebel against the monarch and execute him, and the Gulf War, which among other things saw the sky over Kuwait darkened by smoke from Saddam Hussein's burning of the Kuwaiti oilfields ("Wicked and vile, a man of ill repute, the tyrant of Iraq comes in apace. With Babylon's Great Whore all plead their suit. Horrid the land shall be, and black its face"). On the other hand, although he might have been on the mark in informing his readers that “great efforts by a northern woman mannish” would “greatly vex the leaders of the Eastern peoples” – Margaret Thatcher, a champion of the free market, stood firmly against the potential threat to Western liberties from the Soviet Union and so was not popular with Russian leaders before Gorbachev – his forecast that this person would return to a position of prominence, having lost it, seems somewhat improbable in Thatcher’s case given that she is ageing, her powers impaired by the effects of a stroke, and was seen as increasingly distanced from reality and sound judgement even before she fell from power twenty years ago. The best approach to Nostradamus is to say that one is free to regard his predictions in whatever way one wants. It is impossible to decide whether the more accurate ones are simply an astonishing series of coincidences, or something more.
For a Christian, the greatest authority for what is likely to happen prior to the End must be the Bible. Here the Book of Revelations receives perhaps excessive attention. Some of it is bizarre and hard to make sense of anyway. But it’s often difficult to relate what happens in it to what is going on in the world today; it is possible that much of what it says concerns events which took place long ago, in particular the fall of the Roman Empire (“Babylon”). At the same time, there are other passages which seem to describe things that have yet to happen:
Revelation 8.7-11: "The first angel sounded: and hail and fire followed, mingled with blood, and they were thrown to the earth; and a third of the trees were burned up and all the green grass was burned up. Then the second angel sounded: and something like a great mountain burning with fire {a meteorite?} was thrown into the sea, and a third of the sea became blood; and a third of the living creatures in the sea died and a third of the ships were destroyed. Then the third angel sounded: and a great star fell from heaven, burning like a torch, and it fell on a third of the rivers and the springs of water; and the name of the star is Wormwood; and a third of the water became wormwood; and many men died from the water because it was made bitter."
Here we seem to be looking at some kind of massive natural disaster. Something like it may well have occurred in the past – an even more cataclysmic upheaval probably assisted in wiping out the dinosaurs – but there is a striking lack of historical evidence for it. And from the text these events do seem to immediately precede the end of the world.
Before we decide that this proves Revelations to be true, it’s worth noting that some doubt has been expressed over whether it (Revelations) is really canonical. I believe the impact of God’s interventions in the world during Biblical times was such that those who witnessed them could not have been mistaken about the main details – by which I mean that most of what is in the Bible deserves to be there, and so any doubts about the accuracy of Revelations needn’t be doubts about the truth of Christianity as a whole. However, we don’t really need to pay it as much heed as we do. Its fame, or notoriety, causes us to forget that it isn’t the only place in the Bible where predictions about the end of the world are to be found. There are also passages in the Gospels which describe the events of the End Time in a certain amount of detail:
Matthew 13 vs 17-23
"But woe unto them that are with child and to them that give suck in those days! And pray ye that your flight be not in the winter, neither on a sabbath: for then shall be great tribulation, such as hath not been from the beginning of the world until now, no, nor ever shall be. And except those days had been shortened, no flesh would have been saved: but for the elect's sake, those days shall be shortened. Then if any man shall say unto you, Lo, here is the Christ, or here; believe it not. For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and wonders; so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect."
Matthew 24 3-14
"Take heed that no man lead you astray. For many shall come in my name, saying, "I am the Christ; and shall lead many astray. And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for these things must needs come to pass; but the end is not yet. For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines and earthquakes in diverse places. But all these things are the beginning of travail. Then shall they deliver you up unto tribulation, and shall kill you: and ye shall be hated of the nations for my name's sake. And then shall many stumble, and shall deliver up one another, and shall hate one another. And many false prophets shall arise, and shall lead many astray. And because iniquity shall be multiplied, the love of the many shall wax cold. But he that endureth to the end, the same shall be saved. And this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in the whole world for a testimony unto all the nations; and then shall the end come."
Matthew 13 v.24-25
"But immediately after the tribulation of those days, the sun shall be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from Heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken..."
The account in Mark is essentially the same. Luke also, except for 25-26: "And there shall be signs in sun and moon and stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, in perplexity for the roaring of the sea and the billows; men fainting for fear, and for expectation of the things which are coming on the world..." And 21.25-27: "And there will be signs in the sun, in the moon, and in the stars; and on the earth distress of nations with perplexity, the sea and the waves roaring; men's hearts failing them from fear and the expectation of those things which are coming on the earth, for the powers of heaven will be shaken. Then they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory."
We should also mention Joel 2:10: "There will be darkness, gloom, clouds and thick darkness, devouring fire, devastation, and much running to and fro. The earth shall quake...the heavens tremble, the sun and the moon shall be dark, the stars shall withdraw their shining."
Some passages are hard to interpret; for example it is not clear why all the trouble should take place in the winter or on a Sunday, or where the “flight” from it would be to, or what the bellows are that roar in Luke 25-26. It may be that the worst of this is yet to come. But either it is going to happen, or it strikes a chord uncomfortably in the mind, suggesting that it is happening now. The trends which are forecast to precede the End are certainly ones we are very familiar with, and the correspondence between prediction and reality seems too close to be a coincidence. There have undoubtedly been “earthquakes in diverse places” during the past twenty years; in Japan, Iran, Haiti, the United States, New Zealand, Peru, Mexico, Colombia, China, Indonesia, India, Russia, Egypt, Samoa, Honduras, East Timor, Algeria, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Tonga, Italy, Afghanistan, Morocco, Greece, Chile, Azerbaijan, Venezuela, Mozambique, Congo, the Solomon Islands. There have even been one or two in this country: the Folkestone/Dover ‘quake in April 2007 and one in the Midlands/Lincolnshire region a little later. Earthquakes in Britain have tended to be isolated incidents (like that at Colchester, Essex, in 1884) and relatively slight. But when you get them here not just at all but with more than one occurring within a relatively short time, it is a sign that something fundamental really has changed, and gives some idea of what can happen, is happening, elsewhere in the world where quakes are in any case more frequent and more devastating. It must be part of an overall global trend, and as in many other things it is that trend which is the crucial point. The number of earthquakes and volcanoes that have been reported on our TV screens over just the last 20 years is striking, even given the fact that in the modern world these events are more likely to be recorded and studied and so may only seem to be more common. My 1995 edition of Larousse’s Pocket Factfinder lists sixty-four earthquakes known to have occurred between AD 526 and the year of publication. Of the 53 mentioned which had happened since 1906 (by which time more effective records including measurement of intensity on the Richter Scale had begun), twenty-two had occurred in the five years 1990-1995. Wikipedia records 873 earthquakes involving fatalities (and including aftershocks, which can destroy life or property just as the main shock does) between 1900 and 1990, and over half as many (439) from 1990 up to April 2010. These represent high enough percentages to suggest an increase in geological instability that has nothing to do with more efficient and assiduous record-taking.
An increase in earthquakes in those parts of the world where they already tend to happen, plus those where they don’t, indicates an overall worsening of this particular problem. Meanwhile “signs and wonders” could refer to the Halle-Bopp and Shoemaker-Levy comets, and the various eclipses which have occurred in the last few years. Major famines have afflicted Sudan and Ethiopia. The passages where the sea and waves roar will resound (in a manner of speaking) with anyone who experienced or was otherwise affected by the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami.
“And then shall many stumble, and shall deliver up one another, and shall hate each other.” There is little doubt that the last few decades have seen a general decline in moral standards, leading to a lack of trust in one’s fellow citizens and bitter litigation cases. There have certainly been many “false prophets”, in the shape of all those dodgy religious cult leaders, many of them claiming to be Christians, who turn out to be guilty of brainwashing, financial misconduct and/or spending their organisations’ money on prostitutes and concubines. “And because iniquity shall be multiplied, the love of the many shall wax cold.” The decline in virtue and morality has led us to become very cynical about society and to lose faith in any attempt to improve it, including on the part of those institutions such as the Church who are supposed to be in the forefront of thwarting the disaster but appear, at times, to have been caught up in it themselves or be simply ineffectual.
“Kingdom shall rise against kingdom.” Not necessarily an accurate description of what is currently happening geopolitically, because the worst problems - breakdown of law and order, poverty, the energy crisis and threats to the natural environment - are those affecting all nations, i.e. they are internal rather than external. It might however be accurate in the future. “Then shall they deliver you up unto tribulation, and shall kill you: and ye shall be hated of the nations for my name's sake.” Persecution of Christians goes in in Muslim countries and areas in Africa and Asia, and may even be said to take place, though in a very different (yet no less soul-destroying to the believer) form, in Britain, in the contempt shown towards the Church by the media and intellectual establishment, and the bringing of legal cases against Christian individuals (often elderly) and organisations for supposedly saying or doing something considered offensive in a multicultural society. “And this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in the whole world for a testimony unto all the nations.” And yet, with modern communications the opportunities for spreading the Gospel worldwide have never, in the last hundred years, been greater, and there are few if any nations which have not had some contact with Christianity. Even if people don’t always listen to what is being said.
Sceptics will of course point out that Jesus several times gives the impression that the End will come in the lifetime of his disciples, which it clearly didn’t. All that can be said in response is that Jesus was born into a particular culture at a particular point in history; he was a man of his time, sharing its beliefs (one of which was that the end of days was imminent). Those beliefs could sometimes be mistaken (he may have been without sin, but no-one who whatever else they may have been was truly human could possibly be without fault). The important thing is that his predictions do match, in a way I believe is more than coincidental, what is taking place in the world today; he was simply being a little premature.

There are times when prophesying the end of the world has become something of an industry, and of course when the end does not come the whole idea of it tends to be discredited. Some are extreme in the way they interpret the signs, reminding one of the Bishop of Carlisle who decreed (though not necessarily with the Second Coming in mind) that the floods which afflicted parts of central and northern England in the summer of 2007 were a sign of God’s wrath at the legalization of “civil partnerships” between homosexuals. Leaving aside the issue of whether or not homosexuality, and thus liberality towards it, is indeed immoral, something it is not this book’s brief to discuss, it seems a little odd that God would punish that particular sin, if it is a sin, in that particular fashion; one may as well suggest that in a few months’ time there will be a volcano in Cornwall because of yob culture.
However, just because there have been so many false alarms does not mean the end won’t actually happen some time in the future. We shouldn’t choose not to believe in the end of the world and the Day of Judgement just because the idea of them isn’t to our liking, or some people have got excited and jumped the gun. In the story of the boy who cried wolf, could it not be that the shepherds were at least partly to blame?
It is also unwise if one is going so far as to identify an exact, or almost so, date on which the End is supposed to happen. That is an area where neither the Bible nor anything else give us any clues, rendering it therefore a matter for speculation only; and there aren't even any grounds on which one can speculate. In Matthew 24 v.36 Jesus tells us, “Yet about that day and hour no-one knows, not even the angels in heaven, not even the Son; no-one but the Father alone.” Some have seen this as an excuse to be complacent about the End and not look for signs of its coming or warn others about it, but they ignore one very important point. By his own admission Jesus is not attempting to tell us the precise date but he does tell us what will precede it, the aim obviously being to give people a rough idea of the time period in which the End will take place – especially useful for those actually living in that era - so that they may prepare themselves for it. Only a couple of sentences before he urged his listeners, “Learn a lesson from the fig tree. When its tender shoots appear and are breaking into leaf, you know that summer is near. In the same way, when you see all these things, you may know that the end is near, at the very door.” I believe the people of this current period of history – the early twenty-first century – are capable of recognising the signs and acting on them, though too often they do not.
For the above reasons, the question "how long have we got left?" is not one we can answer with exact accuracy, but one of the passages from Matthew quoted above needs especially to be borne in mind: "And except those days had been shortened, no flesh would have been saved; but for the elect's sake those days shall be shortened." If the problems that the world has recently begun to experience continue to worsen, life for Man will be hideous in the extreme; the physical and mental suffering will be unbearable. God does not wish things to get to such a stage, for that would be unfair on those who are living their lives in the correct way and deserve to suffer far less than those who are not; although any sufferings they do go through would of course be more than made up for by an eternity of bliss in Heaven, there is still no reason, if God is a God of love and all suffering undesirable, why their Earthly tribulations should be unnecessarily prolonged or severe, if His purposes are accomplished and everyone has had ample time to repent and turn back to him. This suggests to me that the Second Coming will take place sooner rather than later, and is another reason to change one's ways now.
It may be significant, though I don’t know to what extent, to point out that it’s not only in the Bible, or indeed Christianity as a whole, that prophecies concerning the End are made which square with the increasing dysfunctionality and precariousness, presaging maybe a global disaster unparallelled in human history, of the world at the present time – even if some appear to be out, as far as dates are concerned, by a few years at least. William Butler Yeats, the poet who predicted a Celtic Armageddon in 1899, seems to have expected the end of the Christian era in 2000, when the rough beast, "its hour come at last", would slouch to replace Jesus. So does the Reverend Tim la Haye, and so did several other ecclesiastics: Protestant ministers like Robert Fleming in the eighteenth century and Robert Scott in the nineteenth; or the Catholic canon Rodriguez Cristino Morando in the twentieth. The prophecy of St Malachy, a twelfth century Irish monk, places the late John Paul II as the third Pope from the last. The Maya believed that they were living in the fifth age of the sun: that prior to the creation of modern men there had been four previous races and four previous ages. These had all been destroyed in great catastrophes, leaving few survivors to tell the tale. According to Mayan chronology the present age started on 12 August 3114 BC and is to end – ominously - on 22 December 2012 AD.(1)
Muslim teaching on the End is that only Allah knows when the end will come, but certain signs will signal its arrival. In the final days faith in true religion will have declined; morals will be loosened into chaotic permissiveness; and tumults and great wars will take place (sound familiar?). Before the end comes, wise men will wish themselves dead. Sikh predictions are similar.
Tyretta Muhammad, a numerologist belonging to the Nation of Islam (which organization is not everyone’s cup of tea, I will concede), once calculated the code of the Koran to conclude that we could expect the end in 2001.(2)
You might ask why I as a Christian should give any credence to the beliefs of other religions or of cultures that did not know Christianity. But most Christians nowadays would accept that even though those other religions may not represent ultimate truth in the same way that Christianity does there is nevertheless a lot of good in them, and a lot of things which may be accurate. Certainly it seems far too much of a coincidence that the predictions of the great religions, which in some cases involve a date for the final apocalypse that is not too far in the future, or which falls within roughly the same time frame, our own, even if the year specified has actually been and gone - should square so much with what is actually happening in the modern world, especially when, as this book is intended to show, there are sound reasons for thinking that things cannot continue for long without some enormous collapse in every aspect of human affairs, their nature and complexity being what they now are. It all rings a bell which echoes rather uncomfortably around the interior of one’s head.
*
On quite a few occasions during the past couple of decades people have been known to suggest that we have reached, or may have reached, "the end of history". They do not mean that events would cease to happen; because they see history in terms not of events, or only of events, but rather the different political and sociological systems societies may adopt and the rivalry between them. Their belief seems to be that human society has attained a form which is unlikely to change because (a) it more or less meets everyone’s needs, or will do once, in the fullness of time, it becomes truly universal; and (b), the alternatives have been discredited. What has given rise to such talk is the final triumph, or so it might seem, of capitalism over communism - those two systems being, in a secular world, the principal contenders for the hearts and minds of people - and capitalism's establishment as the dominant social and political philosophy. It is a little hard to see why the resolution of one particular issue, the end of one particular historical trend, should lead us to suppose history itself to be over; but the suggestion is of value in that it raises the whole question of whether history does have an ending, and whether we may be said to be approaching it. If history is moving towards a goal, then it would be correct once it was reached to say that history had ended, if "history" were identified as the progress towards the goal. If following its achievement time still went on and things - whether good or bad - still happened to people, then history would not have ended, if we see it as a succession of events (and particularly if those events were important). As for the desirability or otherwise of it ending, well if the goal was a good one – and the whole concept of what we are discussing here implies that its goodness would include its being so good that nobody would find the endless continuation of a particular state of affairs boring - then nobody would mind that it was over. They would, of course, history ended in something bad (in which category one may include boredom); while if the outcome was neutral in terms of its contribution to the sum total of human happiness then it would not be worth bothering about.
Whether, if it should actually happen, the “end of history” is going to be something unwelcome is either a matter of conjecture (we would hope it won’t be something unwelcome, of course) or, for a Christian, depends on the individual and whether he or she gets to Heaven. But one thing is clear to my mind; unless the way our minds work, and the nature of the world around us, are radically altered (as they will be in Heaven) then if the end of history means that things no longer change it undoubtedly is unwelcome, because then we would indeed get terminally bored. We thrive on novelty, or at least variety. We sometimes change things just for the sake of change, throwing out a government partly because it has been in power for too long and not necessarily because the opposition’s policies were more sensible. We want things to be exciting, different, new, which indeed is the whole way in which the triumphant capitalist system operates within the West. Fashions change, and companies selling a given commodity must take note of that or cease to make a profit. There doesn’t even have to be any technical deficiency on the part of the old product when compared to the new. And although proponents of the “end of history” thesis don’t seem to think in terms of some kind of utopia emerging and everything we could possibly worry about disappearing forever, it’s a pretty safe bet historians, journalists and probably everyone else too would find it impossibly dull and tedious if we always had to face the same kind of problems, the same kind of issues, enjoyed the same kind of benefits from life and suffered from the same kind of disadvantages. So we should not be celebratory, or at the other end of the scale apathetic, about the “end of history”. Presumably when historians and philosophers speak of it they do not mean the total destruction of the Earth and its inhabitants (which would certainly constitute the "end of history", if we leave out the question of whether intelligent life exists on other planets). But the end of all change would be just as terrible a catastrophe.
The problem with deciding whether history has a goal is that to speak of one seems odd in a mindless universe which has no creative intelligence, always assuming that the universe really is like that. We would have to bring some kind of God into the picture; and we'd also have to decide which God, since there are at least several. If the Christian one is the authentic version, then the goal is the salvation of Mankind through Jesus Christ so that it may be worthy of eternal life in the new world God is to create to replace our present, imperfect one. At this stage however I don’t want to discuss the merits of a theistic view of things but rather whether, if we divorce ourselves from our present situation and from millennial tension, we can find any reason to think the human race, or the quality - and thus the purpose - of its existence will inevitably end at some point, and when that might happen.
It occurs to me that we may be doomed simply by the passage of time. Our society needs to acquire knowledge in order to make progress and to properly manage the world in which it lives; and also to record that knowledge for the vital cultural purpose of commemorating the achievements of past generations while transmitting what they have discovered to future ones. Is there a limit to the amount of knowledge we can attain, and could the actual process of attaining it become a problem? The former would certainly be disastrous. Knowing everything, assuming that’s possible, might be a tragedy because then life might lose its interest. But regardless of whether it is possible to learn everything we are certainly in trouble if we can no longer learn anything, because then our societies would begin to stagnate.
Whether human knowledge can be infinite depends on the extent of our ability to acquire it and also the number of facts there are to be known. A fact can be one of three things:
(1) Something existing in a certain place
(2) Something having a certain nature
(3) Something behaving in a certain way
(1) depends on whether space is infinite. My view is that it is, for there is no particular reason why it should begin or end at any given point.
Since the nature of things, and thus their ability to behave in a certain way, ultimately depends on the manner in which the subatomic particles which ultimately constitute them up are arranged, (2) and (3) depend on whether there can be an infinite number of arrangements (I don't know if there can).
Knowing that something existed at a certain place might or might not be significant (I should stress here that what concerns us is the number of knowable facts that are interesting, since if they weren't we might as well be unaware of them, for we'd be as crushingly bored as we would if we couldn't know them at all). Whether or not it would be significant depends on what its presence there tells us about it, its location, or the universe as a whole. In other words, facts other than its presence at point X or point Y would have to be involved. So ultimately the location of something is not, in itself, of any value to us; it is still a question of the natures of things. If the number of the combinations of particles that creates their nature and determines their behaviour is infinite, then life will be forever fascinating as we unravel more and more of its mysteries without ever discovering so much that we become subject to grinding boredom. If it is not infinite, then we have a problem.
As stated above there is also the question of our ability to acquire knowledge, regardless of whether it is there to be acquired. If there are things we don't see, this may be because our relatively limited minds and relatively inefficient senses are incapable of perceiving them, and our science not yet sufficiently advanced, impressive though it may be, to compensate for that natural deficiency. Often, we would only know this to be the case if we could see them. We have no way of knowing how we, or our science, is going to evolve in the future; so whether the knowledge attainable to us is finite depends upon the number of combinations of particles being finite too.
There is one problem which would arise whether or not knowledge has an ultimate limit to it. It is clear that if human history is to go on indefinitely, or permanently, then a stage must at some point be reached when the records produced by all Man's activities become too extensive to be stored and managed effectively and will have to be gradually destroyed. Since to start the destruction with relics from the earliest period of human existence and continuing through antiquity, the Middle Ages, etc, at as fast a rate as was necessary to achieve the objective, would leave us without any knowledge of key periods of history the best thing would be to destroy only a selection of items (whether in the form of documents or physical objects), beginning with the least important. But since it is often difficult to assess the relative value of one piece of historic material compared to another, and with lack of space continuing to be progressively a problem over time, we would inevitably end up junking the important things sooner or later. Computers wouldn’t solve the problem since even on a computer information would, as bytes, take up a certain amount of space.
The point when we have to start this spring cleaning will obviously not be reached for some considerable time - many hundreds, if not thousands or millions, of years - but it must nevertheless come. And when it does it will be incalculably tragic. Of course we are free to have a bleak and fatalistic belief in a never-ending cycle of societies and civilisations, none of which can always be known to the others. Such fatalism would be quite congenial to the atheist, who believes in an ultimately purposeless universe, but it’s no less depressing for that. If we are honest with ourselves, we would like to think that some record of our achievements, our trials and our triumphs, of what we were and what we did, will endure permanently. Although individual societies may have collapsed and left little or no trace of themselves behind, it was never their deliberate intention, or that of humanity as a whole, to be completely erased from posterity.
Whatever the ultimate storage capacity of the human mind, we simply will not have the resources to study and to teach all the historical eras and phenomena which may come and go during, say, the next 200 years, as well as all those we have already had. There would have to be periodic, or ongoing, destructions of records. And the consequences of that are clearly unwelcome even though we would still have recorded knowledge going back thousands of years. The erasure of all records of a particular historical era (supposing that to be possible), meaning that its achievements would ultimately have been futile because it could bequeath no lasting legacy to its successors, must surely be unacceptable to those who, religious or otherwise, believe life has a purpose. Not least because the periods information on which has to be deleted will one day include our own, even if the records won’t have to be wiped for another few millennia.
When exactly the point at which we have to stop disseminating the information will be reached is hard to say. I think it will come about sooner than will the need to physically destroy records, but come it must eventually. Even if there were no physical difficulties of storage there is still the problem that the human selfconsciousness cannot accommodate too much historical knowledge because it simply cannot conceive of spans of time beyond a certain extent. Probably, once information overload becomes a serious enough problem, some psychological mechanism will simply shut out a sufficient number of facts, confining them to the subsconscious, in order to compensate.
The effect of the erasure of all the facts from our minds, assuming that were possible, would have far more serious implications than just the destruction of the physical evidence. It would mean we would not know our own history, and since it is essential for our cultural wellbeing and sense of identity to be aware of our past the result would be cultural degradation. (Obviously, the knowledge excised would eventually include that of our origins as a species, and if we have no clear knowledge or picture of our origins, however lowly they were, we are debased as a consequence.) The only way out would be to deliberately distort the historical record, lying about when events took place; as all historians will agree, this would be setting a dangerous precedent because it is culturally, as well as morally and intellectually, vital that the past is accurately represented.
The process of erasure would be a dauntingly onerous one. We would also have to destroy all the physical evidence for the Greeks, Romans, Babylonians, Victorians etc., because the sight or other experience of them would lead to their entry into our consciousness. We would have to stop all archaeological, and perhaps other, research because we might discover something about them, deliberately or accidentally; they would then re-enter our awareness and lead to confusion and information overload. Societies of which we had no previous knowledge would enter it for the first time, once we unearthed the bodies of their dead or specimens of their jewellery; and to attempt to discover everything still to be found so that it could be destroyed would be impossible and time-consuming. The discovery of any fact about a past era which had not previously been known would sabotage the whole process of rewriting the past so as to make it easier for our consciousness to manage (the physical evidence would clearly contradict the written version now being taught in schools and colleges), and indeed, by the accumulation of facts, make it necessary to erase more recent eras from our consciousness as well as distant ones. In any case the temptation to learn about either known or hitherto undiscovered cultures would always be impossible to resist and draconian laws would have to be passed to make sure that people did not try to do so. But even if we didn’t do so, and started forgetting what we did know automatically as a means of psychologically compensating for the info overload, the results would still be hideous. We can postpone the evil day by putting records underground, say, or on other planets once we have perfected the technology to send people there. The latter seems an ideal solution, given the sheer size of a universe which may be endless - as long as one was prepared to travel that far to consult the material, which they might not be. But that still wouldn’t solve the psychological problems of information overload.

Is it likely that the extinction of humanity will take place for purely biological/ecological reasons, because dominant species have died out before for one reason or another? It doesn’t follow that because plenty of other life forms have become extinct that we will necessarily do so too. There may be additional factors involved which from a biological point of view will prevent that happening, most importantly Man’s ability to adapt his environment to suit himself rather the other way round, which might enable him to survive any disruption caused by the continuing process of continental drift or (where it is natural in origin) climate change. But it’s as well to bear in mind that there undoubtedly is a precedent for a dominant species, or indeed many kinds of species, disappearing. The biologist Peter Ward tells us that during the last 570 million years there have been about fifteen mass extinctions. “Five of these may have involved as many as 50% of the earth's species, and two can be classified as "major", in the sense that they completely reorganised the ecosystems in the sea and, more relevant to humanity, on land.”(3) That we don’t yet fully understand why these extinctions occurred means that just as we can’t say with certainty one will happen to us, we can’t say with certainty that it won’t. We have good reason to feel vulnerable. Ward: “The first of….two major mass extinctions occurred 245 million years ago. Being the oldest, this first event is still the most poorly known, and its causes are largely unresolved. Many scientists believe that it was brought about by a slow, inexorable change in climate and sea level when continental drift caused the continents to merge into a single gigantic supercontinent. This was a new world of endless glaciers and waterless deserts, of temperature extremes between winter and summer: a land of extinction. By the time the continents had finally separated more than 90% of species had died. This great extinction swept away most of the marine and land-living animal life, ending a 200-million-year-long evolutionary history geologists have named the Paleozoic era.”(4)
Ward seems more certain about the reasons for the second major extinction, which took place some 65 million years ago and is thought to have wiped the dinosaurs from the face of the Earth. He attributes it to a combination of factors; first of all an increase in atmospheric temperature, which would have killed off many life forms, and a fall in sea level and then, on top of these upheavals, an impact with a large asteroid or comet, something for which there is actually geological evidence. The latter catastrophe caused widespread burning of forests and huge tidal waves, while great clouds of dust, along with poisonous gases from the fires, filled the atmosphere and blotted out the sun on whose light plants depended for their photosynthesis. Many of the plants died, both terrestrial and aquatic species, and with them the animals that fed on them. It is thought that well over 50% of all species on the planet perished, including the dinosaurs.(5)
There seems to be widespread agreement among scientists about the end of the dinosaurs being due to a multiplicity of causes. Besides the ones mentioned above, others that have been suggested include hormonal changes which meant they were not producing the right quantities of males or females; competition from mammals which ate their eggs; the evolution of new types of plant to which the dinosaurs’ digestion was not suited and which was poisonous to their metabolism; and, significantly perhaps, various factors which might be considered environmental. The heating of the atmosphere, with a rise in CO2 levels, may have been caused by an increase in the number of volcanic eruptions (such as appears to be happening now), or by the changes in sea level. The ash and dust in the air from the eruptions would have added to that thrown up by the asteroid (or comet or meteorite) hitting the surface and the volcanic gases stripped away the ozone layer so that the dinosaurs or the plants and animals they fed on were killed by ultraviolet radiation from the sun (whose energy would be reaching the Earth in the form of light if not heat). The planet’s magnetic field may have reversed, changing poles, and in the process left it exposed to harmful solar radiation. Freshwater spilling from the Arctic Circle reduced the salt content of the oceans, leading both to climate change and to the extinction of much marine life. Finally a supernova could have exploded in a nearby solar system, which would have had a destructive effect upon life in ours.(6)
Ward believes there is “mounting evidence that a third great extinction has begun.”(7) Not all scientists agree with him on this, or think that if he is right the actual experience of the extinction, as opposed to the prospect of it, is imminent. Some accept that it is happening but believe the overall effect will not be as devastating as is feared. I can accept that the catastrophe may be delayed, because no-one can ever predict the timing of such things with complete accuracy however scientifically skilled they are; it would require an omniscience which we don’t possess. What is harder to believe is that it will never happen. It seems to be an inbuilt feature of life on Earth that these extinctions periodically occur and there is no reason to suppose they will cease in the future unless some new factor in the equation alters the order of things in that respect. The only such factor that one can think of is of course the hand of Man; the emergence within the last few million years of a species with skills enabling it to change the natural environment to an extent and in a way no other has ever succeeded in achieving, especially within the two hundred and fifty years since the Industrial Revolution. And here, if anything, Man’s activities appear to have accelerated the rate of extinction rather than decreased it.
Ward is essentially correct in writing, “Like the previous two events the current mass extinction has a complex history and no single cause. It has been unfolding for millennia.”(8) Some of the causes of global warming and other environmental hazards threatening the Earth may be man-made. Others are probably natural, inbuilt somehow into the system (this is something which at the moment is insufficiently understood). That would not make them any less dangerous. In particular the likelihood that previous mass extinctions were caused, at least in part, by celestial bodies striking the Earth appears to hook up rather disturbingly with recent concern about the possibility, heightened by the astronomical phenomena like the Halle-Bopp comet, and with the apparent foretelling of such events in the Bible. And there remains the possibility that emissions of CO2 from industry and other by-products of our technology may be making the effects of climate change worse, and there are other ways in which our impact on the ecosystem may be damaging, overfishing being one example.
Commonsense and morality demand that if one has to make the choice, there is no arrogance in considering the loss of an intelligent, sentient species a greater tragedy than that of a non-sentient one (we are here leaving aside for simplicity’s sake the question of whether the distinction is valid, though most rational people however fond they were of animals would say that it was – and that of whether Man’s behaviour at times justifies his being called “intelligent”!), although it may well turn out that the survival of the sentient species is bound up with that of all the others. Here it’s worth noting that more than a hundred species of plants and animals are expected to be dying out each day by 2050, a higher rate than in most previous extinction crises(9). And even if we have been guilty of the most appalling environmental vandalism, that cannot mean our dying out should be regarded as a just punishment (we ourselves would not, for the most part, be excited by the prospect). The question therefore is whether Man can change his lifestyle sufficiently to stop the ecological rot, or in some way adapt to it (regardless of whether that itself involves lifestyle changes); or will himself be caught up in this latest mass extinction (however much he is responsible for it) and perish or his skills at moulding his environment enable him to pull through. A major upheaval in the global ecosystem does not necessarily mean the disappearance of a given species – there are, after all, some which are hundreds of millions of years old and still flourishing – and Man’s unique skills might be thought to give him a particular advantage. Though we should bear the fact of past extinctions in mind, we cannot say that we will die out simply because of what may have occurred in this planet’s history in the past. But without divine intervention, become extinct I think we will, our technical skills apart, and in due course this book will show why.
If the dinosaurs died out from a variety of causes, then so too will humans. Some of the causes will be due to our own actions, some may be beyond our control. In as far as Man is still a part of the natural environment then, if periodic mass extinctions are a feature of that environment he will be vulnerable. And he is still a part of it, affected by it, because he can drown in floods, be killed in storms and earthquakes and volcanic eruptions and heatwaves. Since he can’t eat metal and plastic he still survives on the products of agriculture rather than industry, on plant material that has been cultivated, or animals that have to be fed on plant material; if environmental conditions interfere with the growing of the crops he or his food animals need he is liable to starvation.
But the situation is partly of his own making. The extinction cycle will destroy Man, he is a part of it, because it is being exacerbated by the particular demands he as a species, his society being especially complex, makes on the ecosystem, demands it cannot meet; and because his efforts to escape the extinction cycle will lead him down paths which will be ultimately disastrous for him. It could be argued that it is only one of the various human societies, the West, which by its high level of industrialization is causing all the damage to the ecology. But it is a part of the complexity, the diversity, of the human world that such a society, different from those which have traditionally been agriculture-based and pastoral in outlook, exists, while some of the less developed societies are showing a keen desire to catch up with it technologically, feeling it to be most unfair if they are not allowed to do so.
The disappearance of species appears to be the result of a complex interplay of different factors and the extinction of Man will demonstrate that, the more so because his own society is complex, and particularly so. His impact on the natural environment, which however unavoidable is rebounding against himself, the development of increasingly advanced and thus destructive technology which the flaws in his nature will cause to be used for the wrong purposes, the difficulty as his society grows more and more complex and populous of meeting diverse and often conflicting needs and desires, the exhaustion of his opportunities for cultural advance and enrichment, will all combine to bring about either his physical destruction or a decline in the quality of his life to the point where it is not really worth living. Some of these problems have little or nothing to do with physical environmental factors such as global warming, however caused. Indeed they might be viewed as wholly social and cultural rather than biological in nature, although a culture is that of a society and the sociology of living species, including non-human ones (such as apes and ants) has always been considered an important part of a biologist’s brief. It may just be a matter of semantics.
It has been suggested that rather than die out, the dinosaurs simply evolved into a new form of life – most probably birds. Whether or not such a thing will happen to Man is anyone’s guess. He may perhaps have freed himself from any dependence on the operation of natural selection by improved medical technology and artificial enhancement of his physical abilities. Such a thing would not necessarily be harmful provided there continued to be quality to life, if it bettered the human condition or made no difference to it other than facilitating continued survival; but as we shall see, the costs of going down such a path may far outweigh the benefits. Nor can we be sure it will be enough to protect us from a catastrophe on the scale of a mass “extinction event.”
None of us would mind naturally evolving into a new species, if that was what it took to survive, as long as we did not have to get used to our new form too suddenly; and there is little danger of that since the process of natural selection is gradual enough for us not to see or feel its effects even though we may know it is nonetheless taking place. But if natural evolution is still going on in the case of Man, it does not provide us with a rock-solid guarantee of survival; with many disastrous things predicted to happen within the next fifty years (a timespan much shorter than that over which major evolutionary change, in which category I include not just the emergence of a new species but its becoming dominant, occurs), there is a real possibility we will not be able to evolve fast enough to cope with the crisis, even given the tendency of evolution to happen in leaps and bounds. Natural selection obviously did not benefit those species wiped out in the previous extinctions.
It is also worth considering that if Man solves his problems, ecological and others, by evolving into a form that is very different from his present one – as opposed to just making a few changes such as a tougher skin which would better withstand increased solar radiation – there could be no communication between the new species and the old, if the former was as different from the latter as it would have to be to solve the problem, however long the evolutionary process took before it was eventually complete. By this I mean that although by studying the right records our descendants might be able to decipher our language, especially if all intelligent life forms converge to some extent in their thinking (which seems plausible), they could never be able to truly fully emphathise with their forebears - as is necessary for history to be the culturally enriching factor which it is, a communication between the past and the present. The structure of the brain, and of the body in so far as it effects the language the life form uses and its way of thinking (which it does), would be too different. You are of course free to believe in a bleak Universe where there is a succession of intelligent species, whether existing on the same planet or different planets, none of whom can have any true understanding or empathy with their successor or predecessor. Concerning why I think the cosmos is not and cannot be quite so depressing, you would need to refer to other writings on religion.

We are concerned in this book with the fate of the human race as a whole, rather than any particular part of it; but it’s relevant here to consider the question of how civilizations collapse, or whether they will do so at all, not least because we might, in an era of mass communication and international travel which has brought nations into contact with each other as never before, be said to be members of a single world civilization such as has not existed until now. Linked to this is the belief that we have reached “the end of history”, because that supposed culmination of all things is seen in terms of the position of global supremacy established for itself by Western capitalism, Western customs and Western political structures. In popular perceptions, the definitive expression of this theory is found in Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 book “The End of History and the Last Man.” Fukuyama, who has worked for the American government and might be seen as very much a product of the kind of society whose success in replicating itself he seeks to draw attention to, has been considerably reviled, or ridiculed as deranged, by left-wing thinkers yet he emerges in the end not so much the triumphalist champion of a system he declares to be now eternal and immutable as in fact somewhat uncertain. His book seems to give the impression that he thinks Western dominance cannot be challenged, yet on a number of occasions he questions whether it really will continue, eventually drawing all earthly societies into its orbit, or protest against the flaws in the system lead to a revolutionary upheaval that will see it dethroned or at least forced to retreat a little.
"What I had suggested {in an article in the journal "The National Interest" in Summer 1989, out of which the book developed},” he writes in the foreword, “had come to an end was not the occurrence of events, even large and grave events, but History: that is, history understood as a single, coherent, evolutionary process, when taking into account the experience of all peoples in all times…{on pages xi – xii} I argued that...while earlier forms of government were characterised by grave defects and irrationalities that led to their eventual collapse, liberal democracy would be arguably free from such fundamental internal contradictions. This was not to say that today's liberal democracies, like the US, France or Switzerland, were not without injustice or serious social problems. But these problems were ones of incomplete implementation of the twin principles of liberty and equality on which modern democracy is founded rather than of flaws in the principles themselves." Because of the impetus provided by technological progress, which is best facilitated by a democratic free market political system which can make full use of everyone’s talents, and pressure from the people or at least from important interest groups within society to have their status and their achievements recognized, in the fullness of time liberal democracy despite its admitted faults will triumph everywhere, including, eventually, in tribal societies which have not themselves remained entirely static throughout their history. And yet in his closing passage (p338-39), he implies that it is not necessarily the final irrevocable phase of human social, economic and political evolution. "...Mankind will come to seem like a long wagon train strung out along a road. {All} will discover that to get through the final mountain range they must use the same pass...the great majority of wagons will be making the slow journey into town and most will eventually arrive there. {But we cannot} in the final analysis know...whether their occupants, having looked around a bit at their new surroundings, will not find them inadequate and set their eyes on a new and more distant journey." The publisher’s blurb on the back asks if the discontent of the “last man in history”, meaning those who remain disadvantaged and excluded from the (relative) paradise of liberal capitalist domination (for there will always be some in this condition, with or without the best will in the world), will mushroom into a new situation of conflict, one which could challenge the status quo if not overthrow it altogether. What I think Fukuyama is arguing, in the end, is that liberal democracy will emerge as the dominant, universal system of government in the long run; but that “the long run” is not necessarily the same as forever. The achievement may not last. However unless there remains a degree of confusion in his approach to his subject – for no-one, unless they are talking only of earthly situations and reject the idea of a Second Coming followed by, hopefully, translation to eternal paradise in Heaven, can possibly view a dystopic outcome to everything with equanimity - the scenario of reversion to chaos and conflict, if it does become reality, is an alarming and depressing one. If as Fukuyama seems to be arguing liberal democracy is the best kind of government and society that’s attainable then its collapse (and for how long?) would inevitably lead to a deterioration rather than an improvement in the human condition.
It is part of the theme of this book (Facing The End} that the defects and contradictions in western capitalist democracy, which affect both its own citizens and those in areas which have not yet subscribed to it, are of such a nature that they will indeed lead to chaos and conflict, of a kind that many not be resolvable, if the earthly state of affairs continues for much longer. We have not yet reached the end of history because the issues which the flaws in the system, and the reaction to them, raise – such as the threat to the natural environment from continuing and rapid economic development; the misery felt by the poor and excluded; the socially damaging effects of technology; and the resentment at the general dominance of the white Western peoples, which may lead to a kind of inverted racism that itself engenders conflict, especially when combined with demographic and political changes that challenge both the whites’ position in the world and their sense of cultural identity - are only just beginning to emerge and many, for one reason or another, are not yet fully sensitive to them. But because of their capacity for causing violence and destruction they will in time bring about the end. We are not at the present time witnessing the end of history, but rather the beginning of its final, terrible, strife-ridden phase.
Perhaps liberal, capitalist democracy is the best form of government, whatever its drawbacks; it is the seriousness of the latter which is the problem. The growing threat of Islamic radicalism, which would be a source of trouble even if not dominated by evil people with a pathological hatred of Westerners, is but one argument disproving Fukuyama’s thesis. Even if, all things being equal, we are each of us destined to become democratic capitalists in the fullness of time, what happens when things are not equal? For all societies – and particularly those most distanced from it, such as the South American Indians and other tribal peoples - to become integrated into the democratic capitalist system will clearly take a very long time, however inevitable we see it as eventually, and the discontented state of the world, with so many potentially explosive issues bubbling just underneath the surface (and sometimes above it) suggests that disaster will overtake the process long before it has time to complete itself. Many tribal peoples, along with traditional Muslims in the Middle East, are quite happy to live in pastoral or monarchical societies and the obvious failings of the Western system, along with anger at its dominant position and perceived arrogance, are likely to strengthen their resistance against being absorbed into it.

Not only is Fukuyama uncertain whether such a point as “the end of history” will actually be reached, he does not say that it will be a thoroughly good thing if it is: "The end of history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one's life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination and idealism will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands. In the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history."
Quite. That is exactly what is going to happen, as chapter five of this book makes clear. And we should not relish it in the slightest.
Topical here, perhaps, is the question of what brings about the collapse of civilizations and whether those which are currently dominant are destined to go the way of the Greeks, the Romans, the Aztecs and the Incas, perhaps within the next hundred years or so, because of the stresses within and the tensions between them. I am here using the term “civilisation” as if it is synonymous within society – in other words any human community, within reason, that is governed by codes of conduct preventing behaviour that is socially or materially damaging is a “civilisation”. Whether the community is, for example, settled or nomadic makes no difference. Use of the term “civilisation” to distinguish between peoples who are technologically sophisticated and peoples who are not as derogatory and probably racist. To apply it to the Greeks and Romans but not to the “barbarian” tribes who inhabited northern Europe in classical times – a distinction which scholars have tended to observe in the past – would suggest the Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Vikings (along with the Celts) were simply brutish thugs who got what they wanted by violence, which is in fact was not the case. Some societies are simply different from others; or they may in fact be surprisingly complex if judged objectively, or by their own standards and not that of the society of the observer.
The collapse of one society is not the same thing as the collapse of the whole world. But given modern communications, the economic expansion and technological progress of the West – which others are now seeking to emulate – and the nature of the issues which face Mankind in the twenty-first century, it could be said that although the globe is still divided politically and administratively into various units, a division accompanied and often reinforced by important cultural differences, we have in a sense a single world civilisation; that all countries, all societies, are inextricably linked with each other – bringing into being the “global village” - so that what goes wrong in one part of the world will adversely affect another. War, or disruptions in the supply of important commodities, may damage international trade and prosperity. That is another theme of this book. There are many good reasons for thinking the West is in decline, and that other societies which in many ways rival, or have been subjected to, it are by contrast increasing in wealth and power – or at least in their determination to no longer put up with a situation they find increasingly unacceptable. But there are stresses and strains within China and Islam too. Sexual immorality, and violence and explicit sex in the arts, have led to or been a manifestation of the decline of many past civilisations, such as Rome, and we are certainly seeing them in the West right now – I am less sure about other societies about which I inevitably have less experience - but Western decadence is only one culture-context-dependent aspect of a very complex problem.
Because societies may be interconnected does not mean they have equal power and status. Tensions within the global village, between those who enjoy a dominant position within it and those who consider themselves the underdogs, will ultimately destroy it. The West is not going to give up its hegemony without a fight - for all kinds of prudent and understandable reasons, as we will see in later chapters.
Factors which in the past may have destroyed only one civilisation are now of such importance that they could destroy many, because of increasing globalisation and interdependence. In the past civilisations have flourished and fallen as a result of regional climatic changes and many "hydraulic civilisations" were formed around the need to control river flow, collapsing when the flow was diverted for some reason. Today environmental problems, most notably global warming and its consequences, affect the survival of all Mankind.


(1) Eugen Weber, Apocalypses: Prophecies, Cults and Millennial Beliefs Through the Ages (Pimlico 2000)
(2) Frederick J Baumgartner, Longing For The End: a history of millennialism in Western civilisation
(3) Peter Ward, "The End of Evolution: Dinosaurs, Mass Extinction and Biodiversity", Weidenfeld and Nicholson 1995
(4) ditto
(5) Ward, p158-9
(6) Ward
(7) Ward
(8) Ward
(9) Ward
(10) Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, Free Press 1992, Hamish Hamilton 1992

APPENDIX
Here is Bill Bryson in A Short History of Everything (p256-7) on the volcano in Yellowstone National Park, USA:

“{Scientists}…were able to work out that the cycle of Yellowstone’s eruptions averaged one massive blow every 600,000 years. Yellowstone, it appears, is due {to erupt again shortly}…the ash fall from the last Yellowstone eruption covered all or parts of nineteen western states (plus parts of Canada and Mexico) – nearly the whole of the USA west of the Mississippi. This, bear in mind, is the breadbasket of America, an area that produces roughly half the world’s cereals. And ash, it is worth remembering, is not like a big snowfall that will melt in the spring. If you wanted to grow crops again, you would have to find some place to put all the ash…and that’s not even to consider the climatic consequences. The last supervolcanic eruption on Earth was at Toba in northern Sumatra, 74,000 years ago. Greenland ice cores show that it was followed by at least six years of “volcanic winter” and goodness knows how many poor growing seasons after that. The event, it is thought, may have carried humans right to the brink of extinction, reducing the global population to no more than a few thousand individuals.”


(2)
Energy, Environment and Economics
It is clear that something is not right with the environment. There are obvious signs that the polar ice caps are melting, threatening to cause serious flooding in low-lying areas over the next fifty years. Then there are the odd weather patterns which have been experienced of late in the Northern Hemisphere; bitterly cold (or unseasonably mild, by traditional standards) winters, severe storms, and long hot periods in the summer leading to severe water shortages. As well as unseasonable the weather is often changeable, alternating frustratingly between sunshine and showers. The Australian tennis player Pat Cash once commented, visiting England for Wimbledon, that the UK had four different kinds of weather each day. Floods and/or typhoons in the USA, Europe, Africa and Asia (in other words, all all the continents) prove that global warming is not a myth. Then there are the earthquakes and volcanoes. As well as being a threat to the physical safety of humans, the latter can release great quantities of dust and ash into the atmosphere, which can have a damaging environmental effect. Many species are on the verge of extinction. Pollution is doing enormous damage to our health and to the ecology. Along with overfishing (at least a quarter of all fish stocks are thought to be overharvested(1)), it has disrupted the ecological balance in the North and other seas and along owith pollution means that we may soon have problems finding fish at all.
Tim Radford, science editor of The Guardian, reported in an article in the newspaper on 30 March 2005 that two-thirds of the world's resources were "used up". He wrote:
“The human race is living beyond its means. A report backed by 1,360 scientists from 95 countries warns that wetlands, forests, savannahs, estuaries, coastal fisheries and other habitats that recycle air, water and nutrients for all living creatures are being irretrievably damaged. Because of human demand for food, fresh water, timber, fibre and fuel, more land has been claimed for agriculture in the last 60 years than in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries combined and water withdrawals from lakes and rivers have doubled in the last 40 years. Humans now use between 40% and 50% of all available freshwater running off the land. Since 1980 about 35% of mangrove swamps have been lost, 20% of the world's coral reefs have been destroyed and another 20% badly degraded. Deforestation and other changes could increase the risks of malaria and cholera, and open the way for new and so far unknown diseases to emerge.
“Flow from rivers has been reduced dramatically. For parts of the year, the Yellow River in China, the Nile in Africa and the Colorado in North America dry up before they reach the ocean. An estimated 90% of the total weight of the ocean's large predators - tuna, swordfish and sharks - has disappeared in recent years. An estimated 12% of bird species, 25% of mammals and more than 30% of amphibians are threatened with extinction within the next century. Some of them are threatened by invaders. The Baltic Sea is now home to 100 creatures from other parts of the world, a third of them native to the Great Lakes of America. Conversely, a third of the 170 alien species in the Great Lakes are originally from the Baltic. Invaders can make dramatic changes: the arrival of the American comb jellyfish in the Black Sea led to the destruction of 26 commercially important stocks of fish. Global warming and climate change could make it increasingly difficult for surviving species to adapt.”
To add to the above, it is forecast that more than a hundred species of plants and animals will be disappearing per day by the year 2050. The rate is higher than for the previous mass extinctions which have occurred in natural history.(2)
The seriousness of these problems cannot be denied; we are still organic beings and as such remain dependent, despite our technological progress, upon the natural environment – even if the plants it produces are cultivated artificially - for the quality of our lives if not our very existence, and global warming threatens the food we eat as will be seen later on. And nature can kill through storms and other natural disasters. We therefore naturally try to identify the causes of the problems so we can then work out solutions to them (of which ceasing to be organic, like some of the beings one encounters in science fiction, is not one as will be made clear in a later chapter). Unfortunately to do the former, let alone the latter, can be extremely difficult.
In the case of the earthquakes and volcanoes, it is hard to say precisely why more of them are being experienced now than in any previous period of human history. It is not a question to which geologists have been able to come up with an answer. The cause does not seem to be underground nuclear testing – the explanation which comes most readily to mind - as this has very little effect on the stability of the Earth’s crust even though the latter is thinner, by comparison, than the shell of an egg. Without any other explanation, we can only speculate that (a) becoming geologically turbulent is something planets do from time to time, or (b) that the phenomenon occurs when a planet reaches a certain age – when it becomes old things start to break down, as they do with a living organism. Both possibilities are extremely worrying; the first because we don’t yet understand why it happens and its consequences may be catastrophic when combined with other environmental problems, let alone social and political ones. That the only comparable period of geological instability is that which preceded the demise of the dinosaurs is somewhat disturbing. The second possibility is even more alarming because it implies the ultimate destruction of the Earth itself, either through disintegration of the crust or because other equally disastrous things are happening as well. In either case there seems little hope of remedying the problem because the forces involved are too powerful to be tamed and managed successfully; whatever did have that effect would itself be potentially dangerous, since it could be used to cause earthquakes and volcanoes rather than prevent them, especially in the hands of terrorists or those who were simply power-crazed.
The causes of global warming are similarly hard to identify. But we can no longer seriously doubt that it is happening, as some people still did until just a few years ago; the real issue is over its cause. There are grounds for supposing that climate change, like geological instability perhaps, is part of a naturally occurring cycle or series of cycles; it has after all happened before without the hand of Man playing any part in the process, as shown by the successive Ice Ages we have had so far, plus evidence that the climate of Europe during the Middle Ages was much warmer than it later became (and was to remain until the present day). So awesome is Nature in its power, whether or not the effect is destructive, that one is inclined to wonder if puny Man can really make much overall impact upon the scheme of things. Yet we can’t discount the possibility that while it may not, on its own, be causing the phenomenon the industrialization of the last two hundred years has contributed to it and is making it worse.
The heating of the atmosphere by carbon dioxide emissions from transport (especially private cars and aircraft) and industry, and the methane produced by decomposing waste on landfill sites, disrupts weather patterns while the trapping of more of the sun’s heat through the CO2 in the atmosphere causes drought, resulting in famine, in the Third World as well as a rise in sea levels through thermal expansion and melting of the polar ice caps, leading to flooding in both the Northern hemisphere and the Southern. How severe the problem will become, and whether some kind of natural mechanism will operate to stop it eventually, is impossible to say at present – the full mechanics of how the atmosphere and climate and weather systems operate and interact are still insufficiently understood. With no firm evidence that it IS going to stop, at any rate before horrendous disruption and loss of life has occurred, we must assume we are heading for disaster unless we can find a way to halt and to repair the damage, especially when the effects of other problems, social and political in nature, are taken into account.
There are of course some benefits to global warming (there is a positive side to most things). Summers last longer (this could just mean though, going by recent experience, that they are humid and wet and stormy as in a tropical climate) and winters become milder (though personally I prefer those brisk, crisp, chilly autumns you used to get in England), and it may one day be possible in Northern Europe to harvest grapes and certain other products which could not be grown there before because the climate was too cold. By 2030 Edinburgh is expected to have the climate currently enjoyed in the Midlands and southern England that of the Loire valley in France(3). But seen alongside the disadvantages of environmental change this will be of limited benefit. It will be impossible to relax in one’s vineyard, sipping from a glass of the best quality wine grown there and basking in the glorious sunshine of a typical November day, when the other effects of global warming mean that all around law and order is breaking down to the extent that your personal safety and the security of your possessions cannot be guaranteed.
As well as the factors mentioned above, global warming causes flooding through the severe storms which follow from the heating of the atmosphere and its effect on weather patterns. This will have calamitous consequences all over the world, but I would like to focus for a moment on the effect in Northern Europe, the part with which I am after all most familiar. What is forecast is more storms on the pattern of the floods of 1953, in which sea defences were overwhelmed and thousands of people lost their lives along the British and European coastlines.(4) Clearly there is a risk of an appalling death toll and also considerable disruption of the infrastructure by which society’s needs are met. One possible consequence which comes particularly to mind concerns the Olympics due to be held in London in 2012. The capital and the Thames Valley have always been potentially liable to serious flooding and the Olympics will require the building of thousands of new homes in areas that are particularly vulnerable. This is on top of the pressure on public services, the diversion of funds from a wide range of important causes, and the financial burden it imposes on a capital, and a nation, already groaning under the weight of a large and expanding population crammed into a relatively small area (who in 2012 will be joined for a time by all those, whether British citizens or foreigners, visiting London for the event). My fear is that either something absolutely disastrous will mar the occasion or we will be forced, at a relatively late stage, to cancel the event, which will mean considerable ill-will and damage to the country’s international reputation, through the inconvenience caused to many, and the loss of the millions of pounds invested in it. It might be the right decision but it would also be a pity. Even if any material damage caused by the impact of the Olympics upon London were avoided, the blow to the nation’s pride and morale would be shattering.
Generally, in this country and other vulnerable regions of Western Europe, the floods – of which those affecting parts of western and northern England in the “summer” of 2007 were perhaps a foretaste - will cause widespread and costly disruption, and the measures needed to prevent them or minimise their consequences will be financially draining, involving a diversion of money from other vital services which may not be practical unless drastic changes are made to the organization of society and politics and to the way wealth is generated.
As the flooding becomes more frequent and more severe in its effects, there will be a migration of population inland, away from the flood plains and coastal regions and into areas which are already becoming seriously overcrowded. The new homes needed to house them may, of course, be built in the country rather than in the overpopulated towns and cities, but the effect will be just as
damaging in the long run. Villages are already losing their character as a growing population, many of whom want to live in the country because they believe life is better there and cannot be prevented from doing so, means more and more houses have to be built in rural areas. Those houses are often in the traditional local style, and thus more sensitive in their impact than they would otherwise be, but they are nonetheless there. And the larger a village gets the more it needs factories, shops, petrol stations and street furniture to service its needs. The result is that the countryside often no longer looks like the countryside and so doesn’t provide either those living there or those visiting it with the atmosphere of peace and quiet and beauty it needs to have to allow us to “get away from it all”, to relax. There is already talk of having to build on Green Belt sites, such is the housing shortage – something exacerbated by social changes, family breakdowns and the tendency towards single-person households, none of which can be reversed by pointing guns at people’s heads – in a population the size of ours, and even where the building is on brown field sites it still has a visual impact, dispelling the sense of rurality, simply because of the extent of it. A comparison between the Ordnance Survey map of a rural area of East Anglia published in the late 1960s or early 70s, and a map of the same area today, makes clear that despite a professed desire to protect the rural environment on the part of politicians the villages are slowly but surely expanding and joining up; in fact becoming towns.
As the villages grow in size and population, they acquire the same social problems as the urban areas, because they come to seem merely an extension of them. There has for some years been considerable concern about the increase in crime rates in the country. Towns and cities have their advantages; because of their importance there are often better facilities for meeting this or that requirement than in the country and there can sometimes be a sense of friendliness and community, coming from large numbers of people living together in the same relatively small area, which there isn’t in the more straggling rural settlements. (In some villages it used to be possible for everyone to know everyone’s business but this less the case today as the villages grow, the newcomers often being people from middle-class districts of the towns who don’t share the culture and outlook of the traditional rural population; there is nothing wrong of course in being middle class, but that makes no difference to the damage inflicted on traditional identities). But they also very often suffer from the sense of alienation and of being hemmed in that often accompanies the growth of a vast and densely-packed population. Numbers also make people aggressive. Because there are so many others living in the same area that it isn’t possible to know who are the bad guys and who the good, fear of encountering the aggression causes people to retreat into themselves as a form of self-defence.
For the urban areas of Britain are already overcrowded, the population swollen among other things by immigrants and asylum seekers, and experiencing a rise in crime and anti-social behaviour (which migrants from the countryside think they are getting away from). Public services are being placed under severe strain. Not building new houses – houses which are designed to cope with the general increase in and social fragmentation of the population, not with what one might call environmental migration as well – in the flood plains will merely result in overcrowding and urbanization elsewhere. The new housing will either create new towns/cities in what was formerly the countryside, or add to the extent of existing ones by being built on their outskirts or within a short distance to them. At any rate the massive shift of population inland will bring more people into the urban orbit, working if not living in the towns and making use of their services, which is enough to create congestion, because they are in closer proximity to them. Whatever the precise shape the changes take the result will be the same. It will be as if the habitable part of the nation has shrunk.
Since urban Britain is already seen to be groaning under the pressure, what the effects will be of a further large-scale influx of population don’t bear thinking about, especially given the growth which is forecast to take place anyway. Global warming has far-reaching social and political, as well as biological and economical, consequences. There will be a major if not total collapse of public services and indeed of the whole infrastructure of society. The result will be widespread public unrest and the breakdown of law and order, on a scale which only martial law and the establishment of a totalitarian state will be sufficient to deal with. Harsh measures possibly amounting to euthanasia, even genocide, will be necessary to reduce the population and so get on top of the problem. One can also envisage disastrous cultural consequences; thousands of historic buildings would be lost forever, rendered inaccessible or irreparably damaged, beneath the flooding because they could not all be dismantled and moved to safer inland regions for reconstruction there, owing to lack of space in the now much constricted habitable areas of the country. In the upheavals that the need to cope with the demographic and logistical crisis would entail, care for historic monuments would indeed be regarded as a relative luxury, for which the money and other resources could not be spared. In any case a historic building loses much of its character and identity if its structural integrity is compromised by dismantling and rebuilding – however skillfully and authentically the job is done - on a site other than its original one.
The only sure way of avoiding all these problems would be a massive programme of building sea defences, involving the construction of a wall around much of the east coast of Britain. But the cost of such an operation would be vast and possibly prohibitive, imposing further burdens on an overpopulated society already struggling to fund and otherwise cater for its manifold needs.
In Europe the Netherlands, used as the Dutch are to this sort of thing, face even greater disruption as the crisis unfolds. They are a smaller country with a history of vulnerability to the encroachment of the sea, and an urban population already experiencing social tensions because of a backlash against traditional (of late) Dutch liberalism and issues with the growing
Muslim and ethnic minority communities. Elsewhere in the developed world, Japan faces the loss of 1,100 harbours and neighbouring areas, the cost of protecting which is estimated at $92 billion(5). Migration from coastal to inland areas is likely to have the same effect as in Britain in a culture which, from tradition and in order to maintain its remarkable economic success, is highly urbanized and also very regimented and disciplined; where pressure to do well has resulted in a rise in suicides and other social problems, and people are crammed into high-rise apartments rather like hens in a coop. When the pressure becomes too great, one may snap. (The dangers of nonconformism in such a populous and urbanized society, which had to be tightly ordered to prevent things getting out of control, is thought to be one explanation for the militaristic and autocratic culture which arose in Japan in the years leading up to the Second World War; in such an environment xenophobia flourished and led to the appalling atrocities committed against Chinese civilians and later Allied prisoners of war). In the US – the economic powerhouse of the Western world and thus, actually or potentially, the world in general – an alarmingly, in view of the whole danger from storms and rising sea levels, heavy concentration of population and economic activity is found in coastal regions, a phenomenon not confined to America and explained by dependence on sea-borne trade in past centuries. Nearly 50% of the population lives within twenty miles of the sea, in major cities such as Miami, Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York(6). Because America is so much larger, with much more open space for people to live in, than most other Western countries the disruption might be less in the long run but major relocations, both of people and of industry, would still be needed and might prove logistically difficult, while the knock-on effect on the rest of the world is worrying to contemplate.
In the Third World the effect of global warming will be turbulent weather, serious flooding and drought (the latter more commonly in Africa). There will be famine and mass starvation as crops fail and livestock dies, along with the death toll from hurricanes and the like. Currently about one-tenth of the world's population, mainly in the southern hemisphere, is hungry and an even larger number seriously malnourished, partly because of drought. The problem is rendered worse by the fact that the regions in question tend to have large and growing populations, with very often more people than there is food to go round. In north-east Africa alone some 100 million people are in danger of starving(7). As the food becomes scarcer the price of it will rise, putting it further beyond the reach of the starving multitudes(8). A recent analysis predicts an extra 40-300 million people will be at risk of hunger in the year 2060 because of the impact of climate change, on top of a predicted 640 million people already at risk of hunger without it(9).
The massive loss of population would be tragic enough whether or not it had a negative impact on anything or anyone else. But it will also cause instability throughout the entire region known as the Third World, in the shape of a phenomenon that within recent years has already begun to be recognized; that of the environmental refugee. People displaced by natural disasters or whose lives and prosperity are threatened by crop failure will flee to those countries which are not as badly affected as their own (assuming there are any such places), leading to an increase in population and strain on available resources, as well as ethnic and cultural/political tensions. How badly this will affect the hitherto more prosperous parts of the world – which do still require the Third World’s agricultural products – is hard to say exactly but there is one way in which it might do so. If the environmental refugees go to the West, adding to the pressures that part of the world will already be experiencing because of political and economic ones, on top of the size of their own indigenous populations, it will worsen a situation which can already be regarded with justification as potentially explosive. If trade patterns are disrupted owing to the loss of crops and of large sections of the population which is working the land in the exporting countries, the West could make up for this by using the warmer climate to grow the desired commodities itself, but as made clear above it will not be in a position to enjoy these benefits (10). Around 800 million people in Northern India, Australia and parts of Northern and Southern Africa (as well as the “dust bowl” of the Mid-Western United States) are thought to be at risk from water shortages as the land dries up. Even if climate change is not taken into account, 40% of the world's population is suffering from water shortages and as that population rapidly rises demand will increasingly outstrip availability of supply(11).
The problem of “desertification” was recognized long before global warming became a buzz word and is expected to get worse with it. In North Africa, as well as making life more difficult in the region itself, by causing the water needed to irrigate crops to evaporate and reducing the amount of natural rainfall, the expansion of the desert belt may well with climate change hop the Mediterranean and render parts of southern Europe, particularly Greece, Sicily and southern Spain, much hotter and drier in the summer than at present(12). Bushfires due to drought, already not uncommon in Australia, are another symptom of rising temperatures and have recently become a problem in Greece, suggesting what may lie ahead for people in these regions.
At the other end of the scale many low-lying areas such as parts of the Maldives, Egypt and Bangladesh would be made uninhabitable by flooding. Brown estimates that through inundation of the Nile Delta region 10-15% of Egypt's productive land will be lost and up to 10 million people will become homeless. “In a city which has a fast-growing population and a shortage of housing,” he points out, “this will make already difficult social problems acute.” In southern and eastern Asia 85% of the world's rice production, which takes place in low-lying areas, is under threat.(13) Southern China will be affected by the flooding threat to the extent that her economic miracle may be threatened. Most at risk is thought to be Bangladesh, one of the world’s poorest countries and a nation that has suffered grievously from food shortages in the past. 80% of the country is built on the deltas of the rivers Ganges, Brahmaputra and Meguma and half of it is less than 16 feet above sea level(14). As we have seen the cost in the West of building sea defences against global warming is considerable, but it is likely to be far more so in Bangladesh. Undeveloped countries like this simply do not have the technical or economic resources to build effective barriers against the flooding; the irony is that if they did, it would imply them having just the kind of industrial infrastructure which results in global warming.
It is considered virtually impossible to protect some parts of the world, meaning that 36 countries may be rendered mostly or entirely uninhabitable by the mid-twenty-first century. Many small islands, particularly in the Pacific, will disappear. The situation in many places will be worsened because movements in the earth’s crust are causing the land to sink at a similar rate to the sea level rise.
Globally, because of the tendency for human economic – and thus other - activities to be concentrated on or near coastlines, over a billion people are thought to be at risk from the 3ft rise in sea level which is predicted). About 10% of agricultural production is in areas vulnerable to sea level rise, which threatens the food supply of more than 200 million people. “Such a sea level rise could create 50 million environmental refugees, more than three times the number of refugees from all causes in the early 1990s.” Lakes and rivers would be contaminated by salt water and health problems arise through the spread of water-borne diseases. Fisheries and the insurance, banking oil and gas industries would suffer(15). Many popular tourist destinations would also disappear, which would have a catastrophic impact upon local and national economies as well as reducing the quality of life, whether for visitors or indigenes, by denying one the pleasure of relaxing on a beach in glorious weather or of swimming in the sea. One of the nightmare scenarios which I find most often coming to mind is that where westerners are unable any more to visit beach resorts in Bali and other south-east Asian locations, or – even more devastatingly, from their point of view – their own countries because the tide is permanently in. The blow to the Asian economy will be considerable but the westerners will themselves, if prevented even at home from enjoying the pleasures of the beach, suffer both materially and physically. Inability to unwind or simply to do what one desires and finds pleasant results in a population that is restive and thus aggressive. Here is one case where a planned retreat from the coast – by everyone who likes to go there as well as by those already living there – the only course of action which may be possible in the end, in the belief of some environmentalists, would not solve the problem because it’s precisely the prevention from visiting the region and sampling its leisure facilities that is the problem. The awful consequence will be a population – in Britain for example a particularly dense one – penned into a smaller area where overcrowding leads to violence and a collapse of the transport and public service infrastructure, and without the chance to relieve tension by doing the things which have that effect, the things which they enjoy.
Climate change will also have a drastic effect upon health. In addition to all who perish in floods, hurricanes and droughts, many will die from the temperature increase itself. Heatwaves have the power to kill not just by heat but by the deterioration they cause in air quality. In Chicago and surrounding districts in 1995 600 people are estimated to have died as a result of a short summer heatwave. Scientists predict that in future there will be several thousand deaths each year in the big cities of North America, North Africa and East Asia. This number is expected to quadruple by 2050(16). In Europe, the exceptionally hot summer of 2003 – only just within many people’s tolerance levels, I expect – which among other things killed a large number of elderly people in France still serves as a foretaste of what is to come.
Then there is disease. As the climate of Europe becomes more like that of the tropics it will give rise to the diseases one finds in those hotter regions. For diseases flourish more easily in warmer climates – and with the benefit of air travel, which is set to increase even more than it has done in recent years – along with the animal species which carry them. As well as becoming more common in areas where they are already prevalent, they will also spread to those where they were not previously experienced. Cholera, dengue fever, African sleeping sickness and elephantiasis are all predicted to increase both in their range and their frequency(17). So too are cockroaches, a tropical importation, which in Britain have undergone a rapid increase in numbers during recent mild winters and are well known as bearers of disease; dust mites, thought responsible for an increase in childhood asthma in many temperate countries; ticks, which are parasites of sheep and cattle and also spread Lyme disease, a disability of the joints to which an increasing number of deaths have been linked, particularly among country people and walkers; and the mosquitoes which carry malaria. Already 300-500 million people, mostly in Africa, are estimated by the World Health Organisation to be infected with the latter. Now research shows that malaria is spreading both north and south from the tropical latitudes where it is most common and it is not impossible it will eventually reach northern Europe. Malarial mosquitoes were not, in fact, unknown in Britain up to the inter-war years of the twentieth century, when the last of them died out; it is likely that with the conditions created by global warming they will not only return but become much more common than in recent centuries(18).
Perhaps the most chilling threat of all comes from bubonic plague, which killed millions of people in Europe during the Middle Ages, wiping out perhaps a third of the population of Britain. Numbers of brown rats and fleas, the animals which carry it, have of late increased considerably in Europe during mild winters. Cases of the plague were diagnosed not long ago in Russia, North Africa and the USA (there were two substantial outbreaks of it in England, in Suffolk and Bristol, as recently as the first half of the twentieth century)(19).
We might also mention leishmaniasis, a disease which attacks skin and internal organs – in fact all bodily tissues – and requires prolonged and extensive treatment. It is transmitted by the bite of sandflies, and affects about 12 million people each year. Already common in the south of France, it is now creeping steadily northwards; the sandflies are known to be breeding in the Channel Islands and scientists believe it is only a matter of time before they become established in tourist areas of southern England(20).
We have already, as the effects of global warming start to be visible, begun to see tropical species of insect (along with scorpions, which in fact belong to those class of animals known as arachnids) appear in northern Europe, where one would not normally expect to find them, in the summer months; the likelihood is that other animals will in due course follow them. As we’ve seen some of these will be carriers of plague. Others, though they may not bear diseases, may be poisonous. There are of course parts of the western world (they may be counted as that, culturally if not geographically) where the risk of being bitten or stung by them is accepted quite stoically as a daily hazard of life – Australia, for example, has to put up with the stonefish, funnelweb spider and blue-ringed octopus. And the effects are not always as fatal as is popularly believed by Europeans. But they will need to be treated, at a certain cost in money, time and resources, and if they are not the result will often be a deterioration in the quality of life or the pain and heartbreak occasioned by loss of a loved one.
Diseases will spread not only because of the heat but because of the poor air quality and the lack of water (as well as, sometimes, the overabundance of it, with some bacterial organisms reproducing rapidly in water and thus thriving in flood conditions). A shortage of water affects personal hygiene and increases the chances of infection – by cholera or dysentery among other things (21).
In both the developed and the undeveloped world, it is the already most vulnerable groups within society who will suffer most from all these adverse affects of climate change: the poor, the overcrowded who live in slum or near-slum conditions (such as may still be found in a few places in modern Britain, and certainly elsewhere), the very old (well represented among the French victims of the 2003 heatwave) and very young, and those already suffering from illness, particularly heart and lung problems. But the general disruption and distress will undoubtedly be horrendous. On top of all the suffering the Third World has already undergone, and which ought to arouse horror and sympathy in the West, for it to be subjected to an even greater catastrophe is almost beyond the ability of our thoughts to conceive or our emotions to cope. But the West itself faces what in some ways will be equally nightmarish. My worry is that it will find itself experiencing, and having to deal with, problems which it has not had to cope with before, not in the modern era. The community as a whole, as opposed to individuals, has been accustomed to security from life-threatening diseases and the fear of them. The psychological damage inflicted by its new vulnerability, on top of the stress caused by overcrowding, loss of countryside and the denial of holiday and leisure opportunities, will have a shattering effect on the quality of life. And that is in addition to – though in many respects it amounts to the same thing – the practical problems involved. In Britain first of all, the health effects of climate change, both on particularly vulnerable groups and the population at large, will further strain an overburdened health service with the result that people will die, doctors perhaps having to sacrifice some lives in order to preserve others; officially or unofficially, there will be adopted a policy of euthanasia, something general overcrowding in the NHS is already creating pressure for. The alarming implications of this if it is adopted will be dealt with in a later chapter. If it is adopted but fails to solve the problem, the unrest as people don’t get the protection they desire and expect against disease will accelerate the breakdown of law and order and the collapse of society into anarchy.
Global warming has the capacity to cause wars. Because of drought resulting from the increased heat water will become a scarce commodity planetwide, and thus be fought over. Whether this problem, as opposed to others, will be encountered in the West as it too experiences changes in climate I don’t know, but it will certainly be encountered in the Third World which is in any case the hottest part of the globe. Many countries rely on the same rivers for their water and if one launches an irrigation scheme another may find its own supply drawn off. Indeed as the water becomes scarcer, the greater will be the number of countries each dependent on another for their life-giving H2O. If they cannot get it they will either die or take up arms to secure it. The regions where these issues are arising are already prone to political conflict. The most sensitive of these is the Middle East, with Syria and Lebanon having a claim on the headwaters of the River Jordan, acquired by Israel in the 1967 war. Another cause of tension in this volatile part of the world is Turkey’s control of the flow of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers; Syria depends on the Euphrates for survival and at one point complained that in 1990 the Turks had threatened to restrict the river flow to their country unless they stopped supporting to Kurdish rebels in southern Turkey, which Turkey denied it was doing. In Southern Africa, where there is a constant migration to the urban areas because of the impact of successive droughts upon subsistence farming, Zambia, Zimbabwe and South Africa rather uneasily share the water from the Zambezi; like everyone else on the planet they may soon find themselves fighting bitterly over scarce resources. India blames Nepal for disturbing the flow of the Ganges, vital for 300 million farmers, by deforestation and Bangladesh complains about that India is taking more than its fair share of water in the dry season(22).

Dealing with the problem
The cumulative physical, social and political effects of global warming, especially in combination with other factors, have the capacity to either destroy Mankind or permanently degrade its quality of life to a level where it may not be considered worth living. What are the chances, then, of doing something to prevent this obviously undesirable outcome? If it is true that only a small increase in atmospheric temperature can create a runaway greenhouse effect which it may be impossible to stop – the so-called “butterfly effect”, supposedly caused by the beating of that insect’s wings – then we may already be too late, given the amount of carbon dioxide still being pumped into the atmosphere and particularly from newly industrializing nations, whose contribution to overall CO2 levels may offset the benefit gained from environmentally friendly measures implemented by the developed world. If a small improvement in the situation would be sufficient to reverse the greenhouse effect then this gain is being totally wiped out. Altogether, it is difficult to be optimistic.
One could take the view that it is just one section of humanity, i.e. the West, which is responsible for the problem; it certainly looks that way a lot of the time. Because of its being the wealthiest and industrially most advanced one part of the world now has the capacity to destroy the rest, not through nuclear war but through environmental pollution. However, to condemn the West for this or to expect it to abandon the way of technology and industrialization is both unfair and unrealistic. The world is both a flawed place and also a highly complex one – meaning that unfortunately, when things go wrong they do so in complicated ways – exhibiting diversity and contrast in, among other matters, the different races and cultures that inhabit it. Logically speaking, if something is different from something else there must be some way in which it is different – in its skills, its way of thinking. This implies strongly marked and conflicting opposites. There are two options for any given culture: you either have a settled pastoral existence and stay at home to mind the ecology or you are an industrialized imperialistic culture with strong armed forces which goes out to annex other countries. Undoubtedly Western technology and political and commercial imperialism have done incalculable damage to the rest of the world, as well as bringing it considerable benefits; but in behaving in the ways it often has in the past, and to some extent still does, the West may up to a point have been/be motivated by things to do with its nature which it can no more help than the indigenous peoples of the South American rain forest are to blame for their culture – often honestly believing that it was doing good. The political imperialism is now a thing of the past, at least in overt form (some would argue, not entirely without justification, that it has been succeeded by commercial imperialism, especially on the part of the United States, and that since he who pays the piper calls the tune this is actually political imperialism as well). But the technological supremacy of the West remains one of the dominant – still, perhaps, the dominant – factor in world affairs, being rivalled only by China and by those countries in the Far East such as Japan which, being friendly towards it and in many ways admiring its culture, are in any case within its orbit. The drive towards industrialization has only been going on for some two hundred and fifty years, but it is a well-known fact that social and economic evolution, like biological evolution, can occur in jumps; and for the most part the West has hardly shown any tendency to look back during that time, except in the sense of wistfully contemplating lost worlds which were in some ways less complicated and stressful than today’s, but which no-one would want to return to. The West seems to have a capacity, once a certain set of factors come together to facilitate change, to make sudden rapid strides in particular directions; another example is the way the cultural level of societies which it was easy, rightly or wrongly, to dismiss as barbaric when contrasted with the classical civilizations of Greece and Rome, rose considerably once Christianity became accepted and gave a stimulus to learning. Westerners are good at applying a particular technique on the macro-scale once something occurs to provide the right kind of trigger for it; until recently they were better at it than China and other Asian countries, who originally invented many of the technologies now commonly in use in the West, such as explosives, but for one reason or other did not mass-produce them in a way that could radically change the way society was organised or make one’s country politically and militarily more significant on the global scale. And while first Japan, then China and India, have struggled during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to catch up with the West, there remain many tribal cultures who have not the slightest interest in the benefits of technology and indeed see them as something altogether harmful, needing therefore to be avoided.
The problem with global warming was always that few in the West, in view of the unwelcome, and politically unpopular, especially with governments of a right-wing nature, sacrifices which would be required in order to combat it - such as strict control over building design, restrictions on car ownership (which would be seen as both an attack on personal freedom and a reduction in standards of living, so important is the car for leisure and for giving the citizen a sense of independence), "green" taxes and the transfer of more freight from road to rail - were inclined to believe in it without unshakeable evidence. Given the nature of the problem, by the time that such evidence was available it might well be too late to do anything about it. At the same time, any measures to tackle global warming tended to be seen as pointless, and the sacrifices they would involve consequently unjustified, unless the USA - the world's largest producer of carbon dioxide, the principal "greenhouse gas" - was prepared to adopt them (this is but one manifestation of the problem that reaching an effective solution to the major environmental issues, which by their nature are international ones, require international agreement, which cannot always be guaranteed). People preferred to wait for this to happen rather than adopt the Quaker philosophy that it was better to light one small candle than curse the darkness.
But even if this situation has now changed to some extent, it may not have changed in time. And there still remain the psychological and practical difficulties of the West making the changes in lifestyle that will be necessary for it to stop global warming and thus the damage it is doing to the planet. Generally those who are keenest to recommend it does those things are also those who themselves live an eco-friendly alternative lifestyle and are happy to do so; they are making the mistake of thinking that what's good for them will necessarily suit others, that what they have been able to manage without difficulty the rest of society can too. We are not all of the same temperament and way of thinking.
To reduce the CO2 emissions from car exhausts means reducing car ownership, rather than cutting down on the frequency with which cars are used and resorting to them only when absolutely necessary, because if you had a car you would be tempted to use it all the time. Any scheme to limit the use of private transport would be dependent on the co-operation of fallible human beings, on their whims and weakness and foibles, and thus are not foolproof; it could not be guaranteed that they would be effective except by the imposition of Draconian laws which required some means of checking how many journeys an individual car owner made per a given time period in his or her vehicle – it could perhaps be done, such is the state of electronic surveillance nowadays – and punishing them by crippling fines, a jail sentence or confiscation of the car if they were deemed to have undertaken their journey for frivolous reasons. This could have the effect of imposing much-needed discipline, but the extent to which personal liberty was being interfered with would be resented, particularly because there might be some disagreement over what would constitute a frivolous use of the vehicle. For the scheme to be strictly voluntary would make nonsense of it, and thus of the claim to be putting the environment first, given the notorious tendency of human beings to not always do what they ought.
To have a car and be able to use it whenever one likes is an essential part of the freedom we have come to enjoy in the West, especially for young people striking out on their own for the first time and relishing the thrill of true independence. Without a car we are less likely to feel in control of our own destiny – because in truth, we are not. When we use public transport, buses or trains, we are dependent on the driver of the vehicle for our safety; and although most drivers are sensible and properly trained, accidents can happen. Many would entertain the sentiment that if they are to be crippled or killed in a crash they would much rather do it themselves; there may well be the not entirely unjustified feeling, when an incident does happen, that if they had driven themselves to where they were going instead they or their family might not have been killed/seriously injured (in fact they might, but that isn’t the point). It’s also possible for a train crash to kill more people than normally happens in a road traffic accident. To be reliant on public transport is also resented when there is poor customer service; it’s disagreeable to have to put up with, to be in a sense the prisoner of, a bus driver who is unfriendly or rude. For in a sense one is a prisoner when in a closed metal compartment, a sealed vehicle, that one cannot just jump out of any time one likes and must remain in if one wants to complete a journey that may be important. The sense that our liberty was being curtailed anyway by having to use the bus/train would be combined with a generally sour atmosphere, plus injured feelings if we were personally on the receiving end of the unpleasantness, to produce a whole experience that was depressing and upsetting. This applies whatever form of public transport we use and whether the facility is operated by a private company or the state. It’s part of the freedom we have become accustomed to that we don’t have to endure that sort of thing – we feel better, freer and happier when we can avoid it by taking the car, in which we are master of our own little house on wheels and thus insulated from another’s obnoxious and overbearing behaviour (ignoring, of course the issue of nagging wives and back-seat drivers!).
Generally speaking, in fact, I find staff on public transport are less overtly rude than they were often inclined to be at one time; but there are exceptions, and if we restrict ourselves, or are restricted, to public transport we are hostages to fortune, vulnerable to any deterioration in standards which might occur. But in any case, although some people – the elderly, for example, or those unable to have a car for medical or financial reasons - have no choice but to use public transport most of us would prefer not to be entirely shackled to it. To know that we were, that our options were so restricted, would be psychologically a blow. The expectations and thus the frame of mind of a person using public transport are different from those of a person driving themselves to their destination. In our capacity as car owners we can be our own bosses; on a bus or railway train we are rather passengers, more directly subject to rules and regulations and unable to exert any control over our journey, often helpless in the face of an accident or severe delays to the service, and more likely to feel we are travelling at the discretion of the powers that be rather than our own. This doesn’t matter if we don’t have to place ourselves in that position all the time because then it seems less of an imprisonment, whatever the necessity or otherwise of doing it on one particular occasion. But if we did, we would feel less
free, less fulfilled, and in some ways more vulnerable.
We generally don’t mind air travel so much, even though the restrictions apply there to an even greater extent, because we know that for purely practical reasons it’s the only option when we want to visit distant locations. To travel by sea would take too long, especially if one were going for business reasons rather than, or as well as, pleasure. For this reason, air travel can be regarded by rich executives as a sign of status and freedom in the same way as a motor car is, even though one is obviously more constrained in one’s behaviour on the plane than on the car. They (along with everyone else) don’t expect there to be an alternative anyway. The problem for modern society would be if air transport, along with private transport, were not available to us. Apart from the psychological consequences, the nature of the Western world in the twenty-first century, in matters of both business and leisure, is such that it depends on them for its proper functioning. The pace at which business is conducted may require one to leave London or New York and be in Tokyo within the space of a single day (though, oddly, it was found possible and even necessary to axe Concorde once the plane began to hit financial trouble) in order to finalise a deal, since not every matter can be dealt with over the phone or by e-mail, without a face-to-face meeting. It might work if the rest of society were radically reorganized in order to adjust to it, but that would be a mammoth operation involving other sacrifices of the same kind, which might be practically unfeasible and certainly not popular. Besides, the feedback from some of the consequences of restricting air travel would be negative, involving permanent inconvenience, in either our current society or one that has been drastically reorganized in order to be greener. If we wish to holiday, visit relatives, or both, in Australia, and have to be absent from work in order to do so, we clearly have to take the plane since otherwise we might be away for months (if passenger ships could travel as fast as aircraft the waves they would set up would have dangerous consequences for other vessels and for marine life, especially if traffic were particularly frequent). Bosses might not be willing to spare us and we’d have to wait until we retired – by which time some of our loved ones might have died – in order to pay Uncle Bruce in Brisbane a visit. Only the leisured independently rich could afford, financially or socially, to take such trips.
In the last resort, cars and planes are essential in order to cater for the needs and expectations of a heavily populated and highly complex society. Even making them slower, or limiting their use rather than banning them outright, would have shattering and negative consequences. At the same time the most powerful people within society, who would need these vehicles in order to conduct diplomacy and resolve important issues – something which, in crisis moments, requires speed – would have to be exempted from any of these restrictions. To leave mobility, and thus flexibility, as the preserve of the relatively small elite which any government necessarily is would further hasten the move away from personal freedom for the majority and towards totalitarian dictatorship.
The West would also be at a disadvantage compared to other societies, other powers, such as the awakening giants China and India, if it accepted the restrictions curbing air travel or private transport and their consequences but those other powers did not – and the converse would also apply. The loss of freedom and opportunity and the relative economic decline would be resented all the more if others were not making the same sacrifices.
Even if the sacrifices were practically possible that still leaves us with the other, non-physical factors. It may be something to do with the Western character, or it may be common to all cultures wishing to embrace the path of technology, and keep any benefits doing so has already given it, but we are simply unwilling and unable to undergo the psychological shock of giving up the high standard of living and leisure opportunities to which our culture has become accustomed. Global warming in the long run will itself destroy the health, happiness and prosperity of the West but better to have quality in the short run than not to have it at all. Global warming may threaten lives, but living is not an appealing prospect if you can't spend your time doing the things you like. You must admit there is a kind of sense, a kind of reason, in that. The thought of the damage being done to the Third World, some of whose inhabitants don’t belong to a technologically advanced culture anyway and so won’t be impressed by your arguments, makes no difference because when a culture is asked to make sacrifices for another which may be extremely damaging in one way or another, maybe prohibitively so, naturally puts itself first.
In the West expectations are higher than in the Third World so it can cause psychological harm when those expectations are not fulfilled. Relatively speaking this can be as serious for a Westerner as poverty and pollution are to an inhabitant of sub-Saharan Africa or a rain forest Indian in Brazil. It can drive individuals to suicide, or cause them to sink into a mire of depression, and collectively be infinitely disastrous. An over-swollen population such as that of the United Kingdom would be suffering not only from the constrictive effect of numbers, which if the scale on which certain things took place were reduced it might be even less able to cope with than it is now, but from being denied those pleasures which by allowing release of tension preserve social harmony. The words “powder” and “keg” come to mind.
Then there is the question of waste: Britons also throw away annually thousands of tons of packaging. The problem is that it is vital to modern methods of food supply, which rely on centralized processing, long distribution chains and long shelf-lives. We also dispose of vast quantities of electronic waste, or e-waste (a problem which grows the more society becomes dependent on computers): computers themselves, TVs, videos and camcorders plus kitchen items such as washing machines, cookers and dishwashers. These products are hard to recycle because of the toxic substances, such as the lead in the glass of TV screens and computer monitors, they contain. Again the problem is structural, in this case lying in the way businesses these days tend to operate; manufacturers do not design items to be repaired when they become defective, because more frequent replacement of the product brings quicker and higher profits.
About 70% of our household waste could in theory be recycled or turned into compost, but less than 17% actually is. As we shall see later success at implementing recycling measures would appear to vary from region to region – Lichfield, for example, having a far better recycling rate at 46.2% than has Liverpool at 4% (23) which limits their effectiveness in combating global warming if only a small increase in temperature is needed for it to go out of control. Incinerating the waste instead, which could actually generate energy for use in industry and the home, without producing too much CO2, and serve as a renewable alternative to fossil fuels, is difficult because of fears of local residents about the impact of toxic residues on their health, which in the past have provoked fierce opposition(24); an indication that what may be beneficial on the international scale can be harmful, or at any rate bound to arouse opposition, on the local, as with the visual impact of wind farms. And some environmentalists believe that items such as plastic, glass or metal could not be burnt safely(25).
The best-known and perhaps most talked-about of the suggested remedies for global warming is the adoption on a large scale of renewable energy sources – wind, wave, tidal, solar and geothermal energy – which do not pump vast amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. It seems an ideal solution to the problem – a technology which works with nature rather than against it, keeping the environment clean while still allowing us to generate the electricity we need to keep modern life going. Unfortunately, its effectiveness is limited in most cases by variability of supply; the sun cannot be relied upon to shine, the wind to blow, twenty-four hours a day. The sea may be too calm, or the tide out. Not enough energy can be stored to meet everyone’s requirements because not enough will have been generated in the first place. For this reason, renewables by themselves can only meet a certain percentage of the world’s energy needs. If you ignore the cost the visual impact of modern windmills could be reduced by building them out to sea, with undersea cables connecting them to land, but that does not necessarily have any bearing on their practical utility. The Earth's internal heat provides a more constant source of energy - it is, after all, always there – than those already mentioned but the technical and financial problems involved in drilling to the depth which is necessary to create the desired temperatures, flashing water into steam which drives turbines and generates electricity, are for the foreseeable future prohibitive. If renewables are eliminated from the picture we are presented with a choice between fossil fuels, which apart from being finite anyway - though they are predicted to last for at least the next 600 years - may be contributing to global warming, and undeniably cause pollution in any case, and nuclear power. Obviously strenuous efforts are and will be taken to ensure the maintenance

of proper standards of safety in the nuclear industry; but accidents can still happen, and their likelihood will obviously increase the more nuclear plants are in existence. If nuclear energy is in the long run to succeed fossil fuels as Mankind's principal energy source, the number of nuclear power stations it will be necessary to build, whether or not it will be as large as a Friends of the Earth survey a while back estimated, will be sufficient to increase the probability of one or more serious accidents quite considerably. And one needs to take into account not just the likelihood of an accident occurring, but the overall consequences when it does; in the case of a nuclear accident these would be horrific and widespread. At the same time, however, we cannot do without nuclear power altogether. There is a certain trade-off involved; although a nuclear disaster, or series of nuclear disasters, could kill millions it is likely that returning to a pre-industrial way of life would have the same effect and more. There would simply be no way of feeding or otherwise catering for the vast population that has grown up in the West since the Industrial Revolution (and because of it). Once again the word “euthanasia” rears its ugly head; and people would fight to avoid being victims of the practice, as they would to make sure of obtaining for themselves a share of the food. Those concerned about nuclear power because of the threat it poses to life would be well advised to bear this in mind. So if fossil fuels are too polluting, and renewables not completely reliable, nuclear energy will have to figure in the picture somewhere. The trade-off needs to be made regardless of what power source one is using, because deindustrialization would be catastrophic whether it was nuclear energy we were turning our backs on or coal/oil, and burning the latter will eventually through global warming cause more devastation and death than a dozen nuclear holocausts.
We could seek to mitigate the problem by ensuring that all remaining fossil fuel reserves are used as economically as possible (a necessity in any case when dealing with an increasingly scarce resource), so that the need to rely on dangerous nuclear or unreliable renewable energy could be postponed until the latter was somehow perfected, a wholly safe means of generating power from the atom (probably involving nuclear fusion) devised, or, though this has not yet moved out of the realm of science fiction, some totally new means of generating energy obtained from the exploration and exploitation of other planets. The best solution, for the foreseeable future, would be to balance safety with continued prosperity by fixing the amount to which each of the three main options – renewables, fossils and nuclear – could be allowed to contribute to the energy “cake” and adjusting the amounts as necessary over time. Renewables could generate the maximum quantity of available energy that they are capable of – in Britain, some 20% - the figure afterwards remaining at that amount, while the remainder would be divided more or less equally between nuclear and fossils, reducing both the probability of another Chernobyl (from what it would be if more nuclear plants were built) and the amount of CO2 going into the atmosphere. However, to ensure that the strategy was implemented and the necessary regulation carried out would require a degree of state planning which goes against the spirit of free enterprise as currently practised: no way could things be left to the vagaries of the market. We may well have to face a bleak choice between loss of life or welfare and extremely undesirable hindrances to our liberty.
The value of renewable energy, some suggest, is that it could be sold to the Third World as the means by which its countries could industrialise to the same extent as the West without adding horrendously to global warming. However, if the problem of renewable energy is that it could only generate a certain percentage of the electricity required by a modern industrial nation then that would be the case in a developing country, like China, just as in the West. If renewable energy cannot on its own fuel industrialization and the creation, potentially at any rate, of a higher standard of living for everyone then it is a poor man’s option and the developing world would be extremely angry at being expected to put up with it. Conversely, if the West in the interests of being green put all its eggs into the renewables basket and suffered as a result, but China did not, it would be the West that was at a disadvantage.
The political issue of the rise of the Asian and Far Eastern countries relative to the declining West has an effect upon the question of global warming. If the West, in order to cut its CO2 emissions, reduces its standard of living and technical efficiency, this will further weaken its general position compared to India and China and speed up the reversal of the current world order, leading to a situation where the West is itself dominated, disadvantaged and oppressed – especially if its rivals do not cut their own emissions by so much. It may be reluctant to put itself in that position, especially if it is sensed developing nations are angry about the West’s traditional dominance of the global economy and its desire to preserve that dominance (which they are), and that they may seek to exploit economic and technological weakness on the West’s part out of revenge (which would only be flawed human nature). China – say – for its part will be unwilling, having experienced the benefits of Western-style technological progress, to contemplate any sacrifice them that might be involved in adopting an industrial infrastructure based solely or largely on renewable energy. And the West won’t if she doesn’t, both from justified moral indignation and the natural desire to be strong; which means the problem will not be solved and the pollution will continue. Ideally, the sacrifices should be made by both sides, with some kind of UN regulatory body overseeing things; but it would always be impossible to know with absolute certainty that each country was keeping its side of the bargain, and there might well result an acrimonious and unedifying squabble.
The nature of world civilisation and the global village means that many people in poor countries are aware of aspire to Western levels of comfort and prosperity. If the Third World, from its most powerful and prosperous nation, China, downwards does industrialise in the same way as the West then the consequences for the Earth would clearly be terrible when we consider the damage to the environment that Western industrialisation has already caused. There is one ray of hope; perhaps a proper balance can be achieved between different energy sources, in the manner suggested above, in China and the totalitarian political system in operation there will make it easier for the regulatory measures which are needed to be adopted. But there are plenty in China who dislike that system and would like to complement economic liberty with political liberty; should future unrest lead to the system’s overthrow it may mean that state planning goes out the window too. And the West, which has of late enjoyed a very different political and economic culture, may be reluctant to impose the regulations on its own people and business sector; if consequently it didn’t, China would naturally consider itself to be hard done by and any agreement between the two sides would break down. And all this is assuming the shift towards renewables will by itself be enough to reduce atmospheric CO2 to whatever is considered a safe level.
Nor are the prospects for change good where the issue is not the environment but the alleviation of poverty (a related, and certainly important, subject). As pointed out in an article in the New Statesman in January 2005: “Millions in Africa live on less than 1 dollar a day. To bring them out of poverty we would, among other things, have to pay more for the goods we buy from them, and allow them more favourable terms of trade. That has "uncomfortable implications for western consumers, western jobs, western businesses and western economies". Then there is the reluctance of Western governments to take on domestic trade lobbies who would lose their monopolies if African imports were to flood the market.
The rise of the Asian and Far Eastern countries relative to the declining West has an effect upon the question of global warming. If the West, in order to cut its CO2 emissions, perhaps reduces its standard of living and technical efficiency, this will further weaken its general position compared to India and China and speed up the reversal of the current world order, leading to a situation where the West is itself dominated, disadvantaged and oppressed – especially if India/China do not cut their own emissions by so much. The West may be reluctant to do this.
The problem is that the West cannot help the Third World to achieve the levels of prosperity that it desires, and needs in order to solve the problems of poverty and famine, without impoverishing itself; and even if that impoverishment would only be relative it would still be serious, psychologically because of the high expectations westerners have in an affluent society – they are not used to extreme poverty like so many others - and practically because of the requirements of a complex society. In some respects it will be worse if the rich oppressors become the poor oppressed rather than if the previous state of affairs continues, because at least those who were the poor and oppressed in the past are used to it. On top of this, the amount of money the West feels it can give can only decrease proportionately as recession bites; this gives some idea of the disaster that faces the Third World.
The rise of the Asian and Far Eastern countries relative to the declining West has an effect upon the question of global warming. If the West, in order to cut its CO2 emissions, perhaps reduces its standard of living and technical efficiency, this will further weaken its general position compared to India and China and speed up the reversal of the current world order, leading to a situation where the West is itself dominated, disadvantaged and oppressed – especially if India and China do not cut their own emissions by so much. The West may be reluctant to do this.
There is no doubt that the West’s industrial expansion in recent centuries has inflicted enormous damage on the rest of the planet. In a television appearance the late Mother Teresa appealed to Westerners to recognise the harm they were doing “because you like to live the way you want.” One does not like to take issue with somebody like Mother Teresa, but here I’m afraid I must. A rain forest Indian likes to live the way he wants. The problem arises from our living in a world which is both diverse, as we would prefer it to be, and flawed, as we must admit it to be. Logically speaking, a sliding scale will be in operation. If something is different from something else there must be some way in which it is different – in its skills, its way of thinking. This logically implies opposites. There are two options: you either have a settled pastoral existence and stay at home to mind the ecology or you are an industrialized culture, with strong armed forces to impose its will with when necessary, and an expansive economy which inevitably, because of its nature, dominates, one might say annexes, other economies. The West can’t solve the problem by changing the way it is. And because of the imperfection of the world the contrasting lifestyles are in conflict, with one causing harm to the other.
Of course, quite apart from the negative feedback in the form of environmental damage, the West will be unable to sustain its current level of technological process, and thus standard of living, in any case; nor will any culture that matches or overtakes it in wealth and prosperity. All forms of modern technology depend to a greater or lesser extent on minerals – on the harnessing of silicon to a wide variety of industrial processes. Although some of the materials needed can be obtained naturally, e.g. rubber, others can’t. Once supplies of the latter are exhausted, as they will be eventually, the technology as a complete unit will no longer be possible. Even where the materials are wholly natural the machinery to process them and distribute the finished product will not be. Unless minerals can be grown as on a farm, unless they can be persuaded to reproduce in the manner of organic life forms, they will sooner or later run out. Indeed bioengineering, probably involving the creation of new organisms or the genetic reshaping of existing ones, may well be the future. It has been talked about. Yet almost by definition, at least some of the technology involved in the process, and enabling the organism to do its job, will itself have to be artificial, derived from minerals (nanotechnology, often touted as a way of achieving a lot of technological tasks in the future, involves the use of miniaturised non-biological machinery). So the problem isn’t solved. We might be able to prolong the technological society indefinitely by using the mineral resources of other planets, but we can’t be sure that they exist in the right form and in the right quantities and the means of exploiting them is not yet to hand, requiring as it does both considerable technological advance and a colossal amount of money which with all the other things we need to spend cash on may not be available for a long time. Meanwhile, here on Earth, there is the problem that as supplies of the right commodities become rarer, their price rises, generally making these essentials more difficult for the purchaser, whether an individual wanting to buy a new set of cutlery or a company seeking machinery for a new plant, to afford and to obtain. Severe hardship will be inflicted long before the minerals run out, and will become even worse when they do. In the meantime, of course, we will naturally try to keep the good times going as long as we can, wrecking the planet’s ecosystem in the process.
Nor can the West be self-sufficient in food, in order to avoid the consequences for it of the rising world prices of that commodity. This would mean an increase in agricultural activity on a scale that isn’t practical. Since not all of us can be farmers, households would have to at least have an allotment each which would enable them to grow their own food, and presumably rear livestock – a skill they would have to be taught. Unfortunately, there isn’t the land for it. The increase in the population over the last few hundred years has meant that much of it has had to go for housing, or for the various installations that service the needs of a complex modern society which requires facilities for leisure, education, culture, health, and all manner of other things. At the very least we would have to dismantle all that makes a modern existence comfortable and interesting; the reduction in the quality of life would have a shattering psychological impact which one does not like to contemplate. In fact, because agricultural self-sufficiency, if it was possible, would make no difference to the depletion of industrial materials, we would need in any case to dismantle industrial society in a manner which would leave unsupportable the huge population which has grown up on it (agricultural products still need to be processed and transported by industrial means). The overall consequences of these problems would either be mass starvation or deliberate culling of human populations in order to make the situation manageable.

It has been suggested that we should plant new forests in order to absorb the excess CO2 in the atmosphere. But this may reduce the amount of land that is needed for farming, for recreation or for house-building. All these are important sectors. Unfortunately as the population increases and social changes mean there are more households to be accommodated, and more and more new homes required; also more schools, hospitals and factories to serve the new communities created. Brown recommends that buildings be painted white as in the Mediterranean, to reflect sunlight and reduce the "heat island" effect which kills so many people in cities. But this goes against the modern culture of personal choice, combined with our need for an interesting diversity in our environment. The modern world wants variety, and otherwise tends to get bored and depressed; an all-white town would have the same negative effect as one painted a dull grey or black. We have already more or less identified an unattractive visual environment as one of the causes of alienation and anti-social behaviour in urban areas.
So Brown’s scheme is out. Nor, as made clear above, can we resolve the issue by a controlled regression to a more primitive kind of society, no matter how carefully it was carried out. The millions of people whose lives and welfare have been made possible by industrialisation and technological advance could not possibly be supported. We certainly could not support the increased population we are predicted to have in the future. Disease and starvation would wipe out many millions, and the dismantling of the modern communications network would render an effective way of dealing with the problem difficult. Having regressed, society would be unlikely ever to regain its technological advance, or if it did would regress again within a relatively short time, for by then fossil fuels would have been largely exhausted. It would be impossible for us to discover some new source of power on other planets, for we would not possess the capability of space travel. Fukuyama writes, and is worth quoting this in full: “Many countries have of course existed at the level of subsistence agriculture for generations, and the people living in them have doubtless achieved considerable happiness; but the likelihood that they could do so having once experienced the consumerism of a technological society is doubtful, and that they could be persuaded as a society to exchange one for the other even more so. “Moreover, if there were other countries which chose not to deindustrialise the citizens of the ones that did would have a constant standard of comparison against which to judge themselves {and be at an economic, military and political disadvantage}. Burma's decision after World War Two to reject the goal of economic development common elsewhere in the Third World and to remain internationally isolated might have worked in a pre-industrial world, but proved very difficult to sustain in a region full of booming Singapores and Thailands.
“Only slightly less unrealistic is the alternative of breaking selectively with technology by seeking to somehow freeze technological development at its current level, or to permit technological innovation only on a highly selected basis {apart from anything else it essentially involves a planned economy, which current establishment thinking would recoil at}. While this might better preserve current living standards, at least in the short run, it is not clear why life at an arbitrarily selected level of technology would seem particularly satisfying. It would offer neither the glitter of a dynamic and growing economy, nor a genuine return to nature. The effort to freeze technology has worked for small religious communities like the Amish or Mennonites, but would be much more difficult to realize in a large and stratified society. Selective innovation raises difficult questions as to what authority decides which technologies are acceptable. The politicisation of innovation will inevitably have a chilling effect on economic growth as a whole.” (26)
We can neither abandon technology nor, I believe, learn to accept the measures that will need to be implemented if it’s to be properly regulated, such as the carbon tax and laws to ensure energy-efficient design in new and existing buildings. Because there are already fears in Britain about the “nanny state”, the concern is that increased state intervention and planning to ensure energy efficiency and environmental friendliness will further tip the balance towards an intolerable restriction of personal liberty. Many also feel that such measures and the irritation they would cause are unjustified anyway unless the USA and China, the main actual or potential producers of CO2, also play their part, which at the moment China, at any rate shows no sign of doing. Hence although some progress may be made on a small scale, with for example the recycling initiatives launched by local authorities, it will not be possible to resolve the biggest issues, such as fossil fuel emissions from industry and transport, wiping out the benefits gained in other areas. What may be ecologically necessary is impractical for social and political reasons. Unsure how to solve the problem this creates, and occupied much of the time with equally important issues, governments vacillate. Meanwhile the deterioration of the environment continues to accelerate.
Scientists believe that by 2025 carbon emissions from cars can be

cut by about a third with more efficient engines and lightweight construction, without any loss of comfort or performance. But the benefits of this will be negated by the massive increase which is forecast in car ownership itself. However energy efficient they are, if there are more of them it will swallow up and render useless any gain for the environment if the total number of cars is such as to produce a net increase in emissions.
The problem of global warming is likely to get worse as the Western world becomes increasingly overpopulated, the British population alone being set to rise by 9 million in the next few years (2007 estimate). The more people there are, the more cars and the more airline flights there will be, and the more carbon dioxide will be produced making global warming and all its consequences more severe. By putting strain on scarce resources population increase, resulting in the West from improving standards of health care which lead to greater life expectancy and falling infant mortality, and likely to be accelerated in years to come by technology which enables women over the normal child-bearing age to conceive and bear children through artificial means, is ultimately the source of all our environmental problems; indeed, of all our problems. By putting a strain on scarce resources it causes starvation in places like Africa and may eventually have a similar effect in the West, where it is already contributing to overcrowding, pressure on public services and the transport system and social alienation.
Although the trend in the long run is thought to be for the rate of growth to slow it is not predicted to level out until 2050, which means it will be causing appalling problems until then. And the final figure of 10-12 billion people is not one which will be easy to feed; many are starving as it is, despite improvements in agricultural technology. The problem could be solved by genetic engineering, but only at a cost which may outweigh the benefits as well as being aesthetically and perhaps morally repugnant, i.e. cows which produce six times more milk than previously but are so fat they can hardly walk. Many feel we should revert to small farms where the animals are raised more humanely than is the case with the factory system; unfortunately, although these small farms might be more productive than factory farms they will make less profit for the big businessmen, who will use political influence to prevent their spread.
When one considers the extent to which population is projected to rise in Britain over the next twenty years the implications for the problem of traffic congestion, already severe, do not bear thinking about. There will be an increase too in poverty, homelessness and crime. Because each generation produces a certain percentage of criminals, problem families, and people with behavioural disorders the numbers of these people that society has to deal with will increase both in relative, because of harmful social trends, and absolute terms. The number suffering from mental or physical illnesses/disabilities, and requiring special care will also go up. One wonders whether the social services, already overstrained, will be able to cope.
When combined with the modern tendency for relationships and families to break up, increasing the overall number of households, population growth will lead to more houses having to be built in the countryside, and thus a reduction in the quality of life because the countryside is psychologically essential to us on account of its relative peace and quiet and the opportunities it provides for rest and recreation, especially given the mental stresses caused in an overpopulated society. As we have identified the problem stems not just from an actual increase in population but from a change in demographic patterns and social behaviour. More people may want to use cars, or for some reason live in a particular country - or a particular part of it - either permanently or as tourists or businesspeople. Some people, who have the social and financial base from which to do so, are becoming more affluent, and certain services less expensive which means they will be made use of on a larger scale - except by those disadvantaged and excluded in the long run, such as the long-term unemployed or the low wage-earners, who (a) resent the widening gulf between the have-nots (themselves) and the haves, and may become in the future increasingly restive as a result, and (b) would use cars and planes for travel if they could, thereby worsening pollution and congestion.
Whatever the exact cause of all these problems, their effects on a small but densely populated country like Britain will be crippling. I am using Britain as an example not just because it is the one I as a Briton am most familiar with; thanks to the combination of relatively limited geographical area and dense population it is the country where the problems, actual and potential, affecting the Western world are most acute and most clearly observed. The explosion may well happen in Britain before it does anywhere else; this could mean Britain gets over its problems first and subsequently becomes a relatively stable and peaceful place which serves as an example for everyone else to emulate, but such rests on an assumption that those problems can, in the long run, be got over. The tolerance and equanimity in the British character may in fact delay the explosion until some time after the rest of Europe has succumbed, but it will happen eventually - and if it does, despite the much commented-upon level-headedness of the British, it will if anything prove how serious is the situation facing the West. Whatever the case it does seem that many of the social problems Britain is experiencing are at least beginning to occur in other Western countries too, which means the British example is a valid one to cite. It stands as a warning of what others might be faced with in years to come; especially when a country that is still one of the world’s leading financial centres undergoes a total and shattering collapse.
The increased population will need cars and buses to get around, but if the numbers of these vehicles on the roads goes up it will render them considerably more dangerous as make it difficult to get to one’s destination anyway. Industry will suffer if people are unable to get to their jobs on time. For households to share a single car seems a thrifty solution but it will be seen as a disability, a step backwards from what is efficient and convenient, because if it can cause hold-ups and frustration in carrying out one’s business if you have to wait for your wife/partner or other family member to turn up with the car and they have been delayed. It may not be a practical option in any case, if your movements and theirs are going to be different because of different jobs in different parts of the country, or they simply happen not to be available for any one of the infinite number of reasons which might apply in this life. Bicycles are a healthy option which many people in fact do take up but they are not suitable for long-distance journeys – someone may live in London but work somewhere on the Sussex coast, or vice versa. It’s also true that in our society a car is a status symbol and icon, one that is necessary not just from the point of view of ego but because it implies the ability to succeed (by having earned the kind of money that will pay for the vehicle) and thus preserves not only the individual’s self-respect but the esteem in which he is held by others (I say “he” because I suspect this is primarily a male thing, but it matters because men make up roughly half of the total population). The pace at which modern society moves is such that having one’s own transport is all but essential to be able to interact with it and assist it in functioning (in all kinds of important matters, not just getting to work in the morning); which one might not be able always to do if dependent on someone else’s being available to do the driving, or on often unreliable trains and buses. The person who does not have a car may not the sort who employers, in this increasingly fast-paced world, are interested in or comfortable with. They may appear not only eccentric, but also something of a loser and therefore possibly not reliable. I suspect most people would therefore not give up use of their cars and walk or cycle everywhere unless they could be sure the rest of the population was going to do the same, so there was no chance of them being compared unfavourably with someone else; but that could not be guaranteed.
Unless people were so poor that they couldn't afford them, the government would have to pass harsh new laws restricting car ownership. We could have more trains instead – existing numbers of rolling stock would not be able to cope - but this would involve them travelling within a shorter time of one another than they do at the moment, which is not only impossible but extremely dangerous. At present the underground railway system in London takes away something of the strain imposed on this sector by sharing it, but at the cost of itself becoming frequently overcrowded, especially at peak periods when thousands are commuting to and from work (things get particularly nightmarish when a train breaks down in a tunnel and scores find themselves trapped inside it in soaring temperatures). In the future it will be even less able to play its part in reducing the burden.
The expansion of one sector of the transport industry will have considerable effect upon another, in terms of its ability to do its job and of the passenger's quality of life while using it. A growing world population is making greater use of air travel and so airports have to expand. London Airport's Terminal Five, once it is been built, will mean increased use of an already seriously overcrowded Tube as both the native-born, who have been abroad on business or pleasure and are now returning to their homes or workplaces, or visitors from overseas use it to get from the airport, where it starts, to the capital. Travel on the Underground can be a frustrating and uncomfortable experience as it is, one made worse by, in particular, those familiar tourists with backpacks and suitcases taking up almost as much space as they do – making a coach effectively twice as crowded as it would otherwise be. It does not take much intelligence or common sense to appreciate how awful conditions would become if the number of Tube passengers were to at least double. There’d simply be too many people for the network to cope. More frequent trains are impractical for the reasons stated above; you could have bigger ones, but the platforms at each of the stations – over a hundred of them – would need to be lengthened at massive cost and considerable inconvenience to the public while the work was in progress. Unable to use the Tube because it was too full up or not even functional, the public would switch to buses and overland trains and simply transfer the overcrowding problem there. I have no doubt, by the way, that someone will go to great lengths to prove that the figures will not be more than the system can possibly handle; but there have been plenty of cases in the past when officially approved estimates of the capacity of engineering projects, when completed, to meet their users’ needs have proved wildly optimistic.
Overexpansion – by which I here mean expansion that might be necessary, but is still dangerous in its consequences – also has serious implications for the commercial air travel. More people are taking the plane to go on holiday or attend business meetings overseas. To cope with the increase we cannot have more planes working from the same airport because aircraft already take off and land within a very short time possible of each other, placing great strain and responsibility on air traffic controllers (and making you realise just what exceptional human beings they are) if accidents which could kill hundreds of people are to be avoided. The solution is to build more airports (which has a destructive impact upon local communities, and also as we’ve seen leads to potential congestion in other transport networks). But if at the same time you are also building more planes, the skies are becoming progressively more crowded. This matters much less than congestion on the roads, for example, because the sky constitutes a very large area of open space in which there’s more room in which to manouevre. But mid-air collisions do happen, for one reason for another, and the more planes there are in existence the greater the probability that some of them at least will hit each other – or indeed come to grief for any other reason, such as equipment failure. At present the number of air crashes is not going down – even if most airlines still have an excellent safety record, getting the vast majority of their passengers down in one piece - but the number of flights is going up. This means that by 2015 we may have one crash a week. Even though the actual overall percentage of planes lost and passengers killed will be small, there will still take place an absolute increase in the number of air disasters, and they may be featured on the TV news often enough to put many people off air travel since there will seem to be a greater probability one may lose one’s life. It’s also true that the larger, more extensive and more complex a system becomes the harder it is for fallible human beings to keep it under control and ensure safety. The outcome will be loss of public confidence in the sector, which if revenues fall and the ability of the industry to perform effectively or be economic is hampered, could have a disruptive effect upon international business. (Another, particularly distressing, implication of the expansion of international air travel is that with bigger planes, to cope with greater numbers of passengers, more people will be killed when something goes seriously wrong. Sooner or later, going by the law of probabilities if nothing else, the new A380 Airbus will crash and when it does four to five hundred people will lose their lives).
The area where the effects of overcrowding constitutes the most emotive issue in the public mind is undoubtedly the health service. Unacceptably long waiting lists for operations and the poor performance which results from overstressing doctors and nurses mean loss of life. One's mother, father, son, daughter, wife, husband, brother, sister etc - or for that matter oneself - is a potential victim of the problem. Some would deny that population growth, though undoubtedly a factor, is its real cause. But there seems no other way to explain the failure of all governments, Labour and Conservative alike, to deal with it - it's all too easy to turn the issue into a party political one by blaming those who preceded you in government. Rising population growth is the one constant factor which can serve as an explanation for it; the British National Health Service is crumbling not because of financial shortages or administrative deficiencies but because it is simply having to deal with too many patients. Someone from a local health authority, being interviewed on British television two or three years back, actually stated that this was the case. A rare and refreshing admission, but one which is not made very often, due to the political consequences it might have. Suggest that the problems of the NHS are due to there being too many people in the country, forcing on it a workload which overstretches its resources, and some will be inspired to campaign more vigorously to keep out all asylum seekers, even those whose reasons for coming to Britain are more understandable, or solve the problem by the "repatriation" of those sectors of the community - the black and Asian ethnic minorities - whose presence here they object to.
Undoubtedly the overpopulation problem is being rendered substan-tially worse by immigration. In the 1950s, 60s and 70s the immigration whose consequences people feared most was that from Commonwealth, or former Commonwealth, countries in Asia, Africa and the West Indies. It has undoubtedly swollen our numbers, but has petered off considerably in the last twenty years. Its end result, due to differences in demographic patterns, will be an increase in the number of non-whites relative to whites rather than in the general population. Its consequences will be essentially social and political. Where matters like this are concerned, and looking at those matters from an economic point of view, the issue which has now displaced it in the public mind is the people who have become collectively known as "asylum seekers". They desire to establish themselves permanently in Britain and other Western countries either because economic conditions there are better than back home or because they are fleeing political oppression. The issue has cultural repercussions which will be dealt with in another chapter, but in the meantime it is the economic ones which are altogether most serious. One may sympathise with those who are fleeing genuine oppression. The "economic" migrants are sometimes no more than criminals after rich pickings and even where they are simply trying to build a better life for themselves and their families (which may be the case with the vast majority of them), the general view seems to be that the country cannot accommodate them all and that the best option would be to help them in their own lands. But that in some cases, particularly the migrants from Africa and the Middle East, will involve trying to change the political situation in those countries - the situation from which many of them are trying to escape - which could have dangerous consequences, bringing about a violent reaction and destabilising international relations.
And unfortunately it has not proved easy to prevent those migrants whose motive is simply the rich pickings to be gained from entering a country or from avoiding detection once they are there. Or indeed to distinguish the deserving cases from the undeserving ones. And some refugees from persecution could be criminals as well, people who may commit theft, rape or murder and so inflame tensions between migrants and the indigenous population. It ought also to be pointed out that even if an immigrant's reasons for going to live in a certain country are morally understandable they will still be making a contribution to the growth of its population and thus also to the general strain on resources in various sectors. How far this is the case will depend on how many political refugees there are, and as the world is clearly becoming a more unstable place there is every likelihood their numbers will grow until we are forced from sheer necessity to keep them out. The increase would offset any benefit to be gained from spreading the responsibility for accepting asylum seekers as thinly as possible among a wide range of countries, because each country would still find itself presented with an impossibly large number of immigrants to assimilate and provide for. If Britain brings as many people as are "fleeing from genuine persecution", as well as all those migrants who it quite simply needs for economic reasons, the ultimate total of newcomers will be something more than its society can possibly cope with.
We may find ourselves having to resort to measures such as that taken recently in Denmark, by which Danish citizens are forbidden from marrying foreigners (who would presumably go to live with them in Denmark), as a means of reducing the number of new arrivals and therefore the stresses on society. The really terrible aspect of the problem is that it may cause us to interfere with the normal - and in most other circumstances, sacrosanct - process of love and marriage. If asylum seekers are having a damaging enough effect upon the economy, and marriage (fraudulent or otherwise) is one means by which they enter the country, then the Danish action is justified, though I don’t say so lightly. It is not sensible to automatically condemn as racialist what may be rather a regrettable necessity.
(It might be pointed out that a lot of people are now actually leaving Britain. But their numbers are being replaced by immigrants and the number of people entering the country is greater than the number leaving. So neither the cultural nor the socio-economic issues are resolved.)
There has been much controversy over where asylum seekers should be housed. Whatever motivates them, it does not matter from the point of view of their socio-economic impact whether they are spread out or concentrated in one particular part of the country; there will still be the same number of people contributing to the pressure being exerted on a single national economy.
Some argue that immigration can be the solution to the problem rather than its cause. The problems of the NHS might for example be remedied by importing more doctors and nurses from overseas - and indeed we may have no option but to do that. But those people would themselves, as members of the public, require medical treatment at some time (as well as contributing to general overcrowding and strain on resources in other areas); and so the problem would not be solved. We would be like a person running very fast in order to get to a certain destination and yet always staying on the same spot.
Our dilemma, of course, is that in all walks of life, due to the increasing age of the population, we need more immigrants to fill jobs for which there would otherwise be a severe shortage of applicants; and yet the addition to the population will offset any beneficial socioeconomic effect of this migration, as well as raise very problematical issues of racial and national identity. Trying to solve the problem by federalising the country, by dividing it into self-governing regions each with its own responsibility for funding essential services, will not work because each region on its own will not have enough financial resources to run everything properly.
Even supposing that there will be a total ban on all further immigration, which is something we cannot guarantee and indeed seems unlikely at present, and that the ban will prove effective - which also cannot be guaranteed - the number of people already in the country will still be too great to allow the NHS to function properly. This is worrying because the only way to solve the problem will then be by forcing people out of the country - people who by then may already be British citizens. We would have to start with those who had entered the country only recently, and then if that did not lessen the pressure go on to expel all migrants, including those who may have been here for ten years or more. This would undoubtedly have unpleasant consequences; apart from the ugly scenes we would be witnessing, and that regrettable hardening – debasement, arguably – which comes from doing what is distasteful but necessary, there is the impact on political refugees. If countries close all their borders to asylum seekers, or deport those of them who are already here, we will have to assume things will get worse for them since there is no indication that the problems they face in their home countries will cease. To the pressures caused by immigration we might also add the contribution to the problem caused by greater numbers of foreign students (which some people would like to see increased even further) and tourists. As with the many of the economic and political migrants, they are not necessarily here for a bad reason. But even if they choose in the end not to reside in the country permanently, or are only here in any case for a few weeks, while they are here they are adding to overcrowding and making use of the country’s transport facilities and other services, subjecting the camel’s back to even more strain.
Then on top of everything else there is another issue which has long been recognized and talked about, that of dealing with an ageing population. Naturally we have sought to raise living standards and use science to eliminate disease, and in the past two hundred years our efforts have met with remarkable success. This means people live and often preserve their faculties longer but also that when they do get old and infirm, the cost of caring for them all in terms of pensions and medical care rockets. It’s one area where we would hardly wish to turn back the clock; but if medical technological progress continues on the path it seems to be taking, the outcome must be an even more significant slowing down of the ageing process or even its elimination altogether. Yet if we eliminate ill health, retard ageing and ensure longevity to even a fractionally greater extent than we have already we will place intolerable stress on our most important services, especially given all the other things they need to do, or will need to do in the future: namely cater for those, not necessarily old, who suffer from long-term illness or disability, who have been hurt in accidents, or who have contracted disease or suffered injury because of the consequences of global warming.
If the troubles being experienced by the NHS and other vital services cannot be dealt with by either injecting more money or by administrative reforms - if the problem is simply one of its having too many people to cater for – and freezing out immigrants will make only a small difference, then some form of euthanasia may simply become inevitable, however much the thought of it might be disliked by some. If we fail to deal with the population explosion we will be in danger of having to bring about through sheer necessity what we often condemn on grounds of moral principle. I imagine that the first people to be affected would be those who were both old and seriously ill, followed by the old in general and then the sick in general. The mass killing of the elderly would be tragic in that we would be deprived of their wisdom and knowledge and also lose a link with the past which is psychologically comforting.
The danger we face is that in a complex and highly populous society whose financial and physical resources are under considerable and increasing pressure we may reach a stage where personal freedom, defined by the range of options that are open to one, has to be curtailed if it is being used in a damaging fashion. It cannot be guaranteed that people will employ it in the way which is least expensive and creates fewer logistical obstacles to the practical running of society. A conflict is being created between liberty and order, between freedom and the need to resolve all-important practical problems. The tension has always been present in democratic societies but is now becoming worryingly greater. It is seen in health issues especially. With a large population which is both continuing to grow and at the same time in some respects ageing the problem of caring for everyone’s medical needs, in terms of both finance and the physical allocation of resources, are going to be considerable, as we have found; and sometimes an individual’s personal behaviour has an effect upon the state of their health. We would prefer to eat what we like and nothing else, but obesity and the illnesses resulting from it are subjecting the NHS to immense strain. The sheer practical consideration of survival may have to be given a higher priority than the moral and political principle of freedom. We will have to ban those foods which contain too much fat and cholesterol (which may psychologically be the most satisfying, entailing that it may cause depression if one is prevented from eating them), introduce penal sanctions or crippling fines for adults who overeat or parents who allow their children to do so. The larger the population is, the more essential it is that its behaviour is not such as to add to the difficulties of catering for it; that people do not endanger their own health or safety, or that of others, by reckless driving, other forms of irresponsible conduct, or any lifestyle choice whose medical consequences society is going to have to pay for. This is what has led to the Nanny State, to the CCTV society beginning to replacing the Open one. There always has been reckless behaviour, which damages the rest of society, on the part of some people, and always some kind of legal penalty for it; but because the potential consequences of misconduct are now more serious the severity of the penalty has had to be increased and the definition of what constitutes an offence widened to include lifestyle choices. Those who, quite rightly, have always championed the free society and argued that it can continue in being indefinitely as long as we are able to keep out any would-be dictator whether foreign or home-grown, have failed to take into account the increasing complexity of that society in the present era and the implications of same.
We may have to introduce restrictions on the number of children a couple are allowed to have, and the stages in life when they have them. We may be tempted to see abortion as a form of birth control, which, however effective it might be as such and whatever one’s views are on the issue anyway, would be a morally debasing way of looking at it. And, since any small alleviation of the pressure may be crucial in making the difference between what we can cope with and what we can’t, penalties will be introduced for those who have children as a result of casual sex.
Some would argue that a lot of these things are irresponsible and that imposing a penalty for them would be a jolly good idea. Whether it really is depends on what kind of culture you’re living in. In a society that has always had these or other harsh restrictions, and in which they would be accepted (though even there, significant elements are clamouring for change), they might not do too much harm. But the West is not used to them and their imposition would have a similar kind of effect to when a host of old laws that have been forgotten about, but are still on the statute book, are suddenly enforced with a vengeance (as happened in the seventeenth century under King Charles I, and helped bring about civil war). The difference between cultures is an important one; what in one would be accepted is in another seen as harmful and, because it is viewed that way, would be; it would amount to an assumption of power over the lives and behaviour of ordinary citizens that could easily be abused. Laws that are undoubtedly controversial might be followed by laws that are undoubtedly unjust, and the nanny state become a police state. One is also moved to point out that knowing that its birth carried a penalty would not be likely to make an illegitimate child feel wanted. True freedom in the modern world involves being able to make one’s own career choices. We don’t want to be regimented like ants or certain other species of insect, with the state deciding for ourselves what kind of job we should go into. However, there is now emerging a conflict between this freedom and the efficient running of a complex heavily-populated society. If, for whatever reason, not enough people want to join professions like the police or health service which are vitally important and already experiencing difficulty dealing with their vast workload, then you have a big problem. The nation’s practical needs are being prevented from being met by society’s values and political culture; and the latter are in this case understandable and desirable. That this conflict would occur, negating the advantages society might gain from a growing population who might be expected to fill all the jobs that need to be done, has not been anticipated until now by most people. But it’s there, so what are we to do about it?
The idea of forcing people into a particular occupation is repellent and would certainly be resented if put into practice. Trouble is, to resolve the issue one must either do that or import labour from overseas, adding to the nation’s overcrowding problem and actually in many ways making things worse. There is a kind of vicious circle. This is what is happening in Britain today; many important jobs (in hotels for one thing, but also in many other sectors) have to be filled by migrants from the EU, especially Eastern Europe, or further afield because British people don’t want to do them. In a society which places great emphasis, in itself not unhealthily, on individual empowerment and the freedom to pick ‘n’ choose it is possible for some career options to be discarded as unattractive. There is no sign yet that present trends will change and until they do the migrants will have to remain here, creating pressures in all sectors which can only be contained – if at all – by the employment of more migrants, since for political reasons and to give society some peace of mind the government has to be seen to be doing something about the nation’s problems.
The country is going to find itself financially seriously constrained, when to all the considerations already mentioned – an expanded transport system, an ageing population, a generally overburdened and creaking health service – plus a few which will be dealt with in later chapters, is added the need in future to spend massive amounts of money on building defences against the effects of global warming or on the alternative course of moving settlements in coastal areas inland. Though the latter process will happen fairly slowly over the course of the next 50 years or so, that will not make it any less damaging in its effects. Repairs to buildings damaged by the storms global warming causes will also be costly.
All but essential services will have to be savagely cut finan-cially. This means cancelling, or cutting off the funding to, things which might still be important to people, or to categories of people, in terms of quality of life and will therefore cause considerable unhappiness and resentment. Was the decision of Frank Dobson, former British Health Secretary, that Viagra in view of its costs should be bought rather than prescribed for the time being an admission that the NHS has a serious financial problem, that it is under considerable strain? If in future things like Viagra have to be denied to those who wanted them – and who might be faithfully married couples, not promiscuous types looking for a thrill – there may well be unrest, because sex matters to people. "Prestige" projects of the sort that uplift a nation's spirit will have to go; I’ve already said what I think about the 2012 Olympics (although I would like to be more positive about it). Because a nation needs something to lift its morale from time to time, this will contribute to an already depressed and thus potentially violent society. Britain may also have to cut or terminate its overseas aid because of its own pressing problems at home and the need to spend money on solving them. She may also have to end her overseas military engagements. Whilst this may in some cases be beneficial, it is also possible it could damage British interests abroad. In particular, it could prevent her acting effectively as a partner to America in operations designed to counter threats to the Western world such as al-Qaeda; this would be disastrous given that America when left to her own devices has a tendency to act in a rash and undisciplined fashion, and needs some kind of (potentially) restraining influence upon her, however (in)effective.
To fund the expansion of the infrastructure and the building projects that will be needed to absorb population growth and defend against environmental threats, the government will have to either raise taxes or cut benefits. This will be unwelcome regardless of the political ramifications, which may not matter quite so much if people can see the measures are strictly necessary. If taxes are raised, the wealthier members of society will be less wealthy, which will hit them hard because their expectations, given their financial position, are high. If benefits are cut even more hardship will be caused as those in a dire financial situation will find that situation made worse.
There is one factor which may act as a check upon population growth and therefore all our other problems. The effect of potentially dangerous trends may be offset by the increase in male infertility, and the spread of old and new diseases. Although plague is one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the advent of new diseases - AIDS, the Ebola virus and CJD to name but a few - and the return of old ones such as TB and scarlet fever may not in themselves amount to a threat to Man's survival. Life-threatening diseases, occasionally reaching epidemic proportions, have always been a fact of life. It is true that some of them are becoming resistant to antibiotics, but there is no reason to suppose the antibiotics themselves cannot be made more effective to keep pace with this trend. It is a race Man is never likely to win rather than one he is destined to lose. But apart from their being a rather drastic solution to the problem, the danger of diseases is that they may combine with other factors, other environmental hazards, to cause suffering and chaos on a scale unprecedented in human history. Along with overpopulation, the environmental disasters caused by global warming and political disruption in an increasingly unstable world, disease could lead to the collapse of health services and socio-economic meltdown, among other things causing mass movements of people who will place severe economic stress on the countries they migrate to (as well as carry the diseases there), lead to fears about cultural and racial identity, and prove a politically destabilising factor.
We might perhaps be able to solve many of the problems referred to above by moving to another planet. However, apart from the possibility that the trouble might simply start up all over again, with us ruining that planet just as we have ruined the earth, there is no guarantee that we could find a world which (a) had a natural environment suited to the biology of the human species and (b) possessed mineral resources of a kind we could use to create and maintain an industrial society. Certainly, no such planet is available within our solar system; though interesting to a scientist they are, nonetheless, still lifeless lumps of rock. As for those which have so far been discovered outside it, their nature is, it would seem, even more inhospitable. If any colonisable planets exist at all we do not have the technology to reach them within an acceptably short time, and its development, while perhaps possible, is not likely to occur in the near future. Meanwhile, people would not be happy to live there, whether or not they had any choice, and it doesn’t make sense to move from a planet with a threatened ecosystem to one that doesn’t have an ecosystem at all.
Regarding the planets in our solar system, and their moons, if we had the technology within a very short time to transform their environment into something in which humans could comfortably exist then we could also solve our environmental problems here on Earth without recourse to such an option (and then, of course, their mineral resources would have to be adequate for our long-term needs). In any case, the exploration and exploitation of outer space is not at present proceeding fast enough to keep pace with the environmental deterioration of the Earth (the situation has not been helped by the cutback in Congress funding for America's proposed space station (which installation is seen as a necessary preliminary to the establishment of bases on the Moon and Mars)). We are in danger of rendering our own planet uninhabitable before we have developed the means to conquer another.
Could scientific and engineering advances make it possible to solve problems of overcrowding by colonising and exploiting the oceans, or living underground, instead? The problem with undersea colonies is that no-one would want to live under the sea in protective domes, away from the fresh, open air and never being able to relish the feel of it on your face. You'd feel uncomfortably restricted and soon suffer psychological damage. Nor would you want to be operated on in the way that would be required to allow you to function in the water itself without having to continually decompress and wear protective gear all the time. Of the necessity the end result would not be entirely human, and people would balk at altering their appearance and metabolism so drastically from what they were accustomed to. And unless you were still human in your psychology and physical make-up, you'd still miss the open air, and the light. There would have to be some regulation of their mental processes to ensure they did not mind, and that would have alarming implications. All these problems would also be experienced in trying to establish underground colonies. Finally, the colonisation of outer space would be a dangerous thing if led to wars between planets, if the colonies were not on the same planet and seriously fell out with one another. On an interplanetary scale, war would presumably be conducted using the equivalent of nuclear weapons.

As well as the strain to which they subject the natural environment, numbers make people aggressive, especially when combined with the ethnic, cultural and political differences over which, given the imperfections of the world and in human nature, they are liable to fall out with one another – and, since hot weather also tends to have that effect, global warming. Which brings us back to the main subject of this chapter.
It has been suggested that even the beating of a butterfly’s wings (which would raise the overall atmospheric temperature, if by an extremely small amount), or some other factor which in itself seems insignificant can tip the balance between a degree of global warning which is manageable and one which is catastrophic. If this is true then it may make a crucial difference if I do not always turn my printer off at the wall because the plug is awkwardly positioned, the bed being in the way, and there is no room for the bed anywhere else (in fact both of these are the case). If preventing global warming is down to the individual, and if the severity of the problem is determined by such small differences, then it is questionable it can ever be solved because the individual’s cirumstances cannot be of such a nature that it’s possible to eliminate all factors which make it worse – unless he or she imposes on themselves an impossibly stressful degree of care which would be every bit as damaging psychologically as pollution can be materially. There are too many variables. We may already have passed the point of no return. Fear of any sort of regulation of the private sector and the way it runs industry, or of the world economy in general, has caused us to tackle global warming in too gradual and piecemeal a fashion, or to do nothing about it at all; and thus sleepwalk, or stumble, into a situation where it cannot be reversed. Yet always there is this preference for targeting the individual, getting them to change their lifestyle in ways which may not be practical or desirable for them rather than dealing with the real problem which is failure on a national governmental level to implement measures such as the expansion of renewable energy. It carries with it the danger that eco-friendly measures will fail to achieve a great deal while purely annoying ordinary people; something evident in the case of energy-saving lightbulbs which can cause migraines, partly because in the interests of benefiting the environment they often don’t give out enough actual light (I find it extremely annoying having to wait for a dimmer to come on fully, even if only for a short time).
With global warming there is simply no way of knowing whether, and by what degree, a small difference can have any effect on the overall consequences of global warming and this the safety of the planet. How therefore can I be sure my behaviour is making a difference in combating the problem? Especially when it is not always going to be possible for it to. I am simply not going to remember or to find it feasible to do everything that is necessary to reduce my carbon footprint. For example, I dislike leaving my computer on standby because this uses up energy and would prefer to switch it off altogether, but it takes a while to shut down and I very often may not be able to wait until the process is complete because I have an important appointment somewhere and need to be out of the house as soon as possible.
If any one of millions of people could potentially make a difference to the problem by what they do, how do I know whether it is my behaviour or theirs which is doing so, is performing the role of the butterfly’s wings? How far is something I do that is eco-friendly countered by something they do that isn’t? The problem with placing all the onus on the individual is that because of the conflicting demands they must meet, and their particular circumstances, which are always unique to a greater or lesser extent, the complex situations, the need to balance competing considerations, which arise in their affairs it cannot be borne. Even if I do everything possible in my own life to reduce my carbon footprint, how can I be sure that others are doing the same or compel them to do it if they are not? There is also confusion. According to one set of statistics my carbon footprint was tiny; according to another, based on a quite different set of criteria, it was huge.
It is not clear that every aspect of global warming, or of environmental pollution in general, actually threatens our very existence or merely, because we take pleasure from the beauty of nature and the diversity of the animal and plant kingdoms, damages the quality of our lives. But even so, damage to the quality of life is a serious enough business even if it doesn’t result in actual death. And forms of pollution other than global warming may still contribute to our demise even if they could never bring it about by themselves, whether singly or collectively.
Nor does it follow that we would necessarily be safe from environmental upheavals and their implications if there were no global warming at all. It has been suggested that the greenhouse effect, whether or not it is exacerbated by emissions of CO2 from industry, prevents there being a Third Ice Age. The theory is probably correct, given that global warming tends to melt ice caps rather than cause them to spread. But as we have seen this is rather a mixed blessing. And if we could not prevent another Ice Age, we might find the changed conditions hard to adjust to; in the worst case scenario, the disruption could bring about the collapse of modern industrialized society, with massive (and terrible) demographic consequences. It is hard to say exactly what the effects may be. I nonetheless feel, however, that cold is easier to adapt to and to withstand than heat (after all, killing animals and wearing their skins, and learning how to make fire, to keep himself warm was how Man survived). Cold can be invigorating since it stimulates intellectual and physical activity in order to generate life-saving heat while hot climates may make one sluggish, even lazy. I like to think the cold made northern European civilization, even though it may be erroneous to attribute racial characteristics or the course a given society’s development takes to climate (I don’t know what the climate was like in the Middle East during the “Dark Ages”, when the Arabs were going through a period of remarkable cultural flowering). But there would, unfortunately, be a serious downside. We would miss being able to lie on the beach or cool off with a swim at Biarritz, Brighton or Miami – things which have become psychologically necessary for us over the past century or so – and
would either seek to prevent the new Ice Age in the first place or, if we could not do that, reverse the climate change once it had happened. And anything which could have such a profound and widespread effect upon environmental conditions, by artificial means, would along with our hypothetical earthquake-preventing machine mentioned above be so powerful as to be downright scary.
In any case, it looks like heat is what we’re getting rather than cold. In many ways this is more dangerous. Whereas cold preserves, heat destroys. It makes people lethargic, and less able therefore to solve the problems global warming itself, and a host of other factors, creates. It makes them irritable, which could be even more dangerous. And for the foreseeable future, it is here to stay. In so far as it is caused by our own activities, I am regrettably convinced we do not have the ability to halt it by changing the way we live. And even if global warming on the scale predicted to take place is natural, something a planet like Earth does after a while, it will still amount to something catastrophic for Man. It may, like the earthquakes and volcanoes possibly, be a sign that the planet is entering a natural, and irreversible, phase of decline. Or it may not; but if so, it will still take centuries to return to something like a proper equilibrium. In the meantime, to be sure of protecting ourselves from its full consequences, which cannot precisely be calculated, would mean ceasing to exist as vulnerable, organic beings, and in the process losing our humanity. Of course, there are some who fear science may be leading us in that direction.

(1) Radford
(2) Ward, see previous chapter
(3) Paul Brown, “Global Warming: Can Civilisation Survive?" (Blandford 1996)
(4) ditto
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(23) The Week magazine, c2007
(24) ditto
(25) ditto
(26) Fukuyama, The End of History, p84-88



(3)
Science 1: Shrinking Horizons?
It’s an inescapable part of our nature that we should always seek to find out more about the universe, and use our increased knowledge to make life easier, happier and more interesting for everyone. In many ways science has succeeded in this task, creating new technologies which raise the standard of living and afford us greater protection against disease than was available in previous centuries. It’s a force for good as well as harm, plus an inalienable part of the modern world-view, and there’s nothing to be gained by being afraid of it. The mad scientist who tries to take over the world using some fantastic new device he has invented – whether from a desire for power or an altruistic but misguided belief that he is going to make life better for everyone – is more or less non-existent in reality, stock-in-trade though he is of science fiction. Scientists can in practice do very little without the support of governments, as a good many of them have found to their extreme frustration when their grants are cut or money that has been promised seems to take a very long time to
trickle down to them. The ruling regime must make available to them the financial and physical resources they need to carry out research and experimentation. Totalitarian political systems, of the kind which persecute their citizens (or some of them) as well as, if possible, those of other countries may harness a decent scientist to their service by exploiting his quite legitimate patriotism or through fear, and employ cranks of the dangerous kind such as Dr Josef Mengele, but that is the fault of the regime rather than of science. There are of course those who lend their scientific skills to terrorist organizations, helping them make bombs which kill thousands of people; but generally scientists, though they may not be entirely admirable as individuals – Isaac Newton could be vindictive towards his colleagues and Albert Einstein’s relations with his family were somewhat dysfunctional – and are I am sure capable of being intellectually narrow-minded, mean only to add to our understanding of the universe we live in and to do so for the benefit of society. The problem with science, and it’s one that can’t (nor shouldn’t) be solved by trying to abolish it, is that (a) it isn’t a universal panacea, and can’t always help us to deal with personal problems or domestic tragedy or raise the moral tone of society; and (b), in a complex and flawed world it may end up doing as much harm as good, despite the best intentions on most people’s part. To put all our trust in it is not a good idea. It’s the contention of this chapter that in other respects than its effects upon the natural environment, it’s likely that unless it is to permanently stagnate, something which our nature renders an unappealing prospect, scientific and technical progress will if carried to its logical conclusion take us into areas which are terminally disastrous. In more ways than one, it can seem to open up to us a dangerously enticing world; dangerous because it isn’t actually there.

1

The future is exciting to us because we see science as enabling us to explore wonderful new realms. We should certainly hope to be able to do that. We naturally want the Universe to be multi-faceted, multi-layered, and absolutely fascinating, and science to be able to reveal that wonder to us. Neither a religious person (of the open-minded sort) nor a secular scientist has any problem with that. My concern is that the prospect of rendering accessible some of these new worlds may become a dangerous distraction from the necessary business of re-examining our lifestyle and outlook and, I believe, rediscovering God. We want to explore parallel universes, to meet intelligent extra-terrestrial beings and to travel in time. A universe where time and space form a closed, steady state, immutable system and where Man is the only sentient, reasoning species that can possibly exist does seem rather limited, stale and boring, not doing justice to either God’s glory or our own desire to enjoy all Creation to the full, sensually and intellectually. Maybe there are aliens, and maybe one day we will meet them; most people, including the majority of Christians, would probably describe themselves as being open-minded on the question. But perhaps some things are simply impossible. Perhaps there are other wonders, not entirely accessible through scientific or philosophical reasoning, which can be counted even greater. And perhaps there are good reasons for concluding that some of these new worlds will not be accessible, or useful to us in any practical fashion, within the foreseeable future.
Before we go any further, we need to take into account quantum physics, under which whatever we might say about the Universe is thought to be suspect. According to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle it is difficult to analyse the fundamental particles which make up everything because the mere act of analysis affects their behaviour and changes their nature from what it may have been before, giving a result which might be misleading. And if this is the case, nothing else about the universe is a foregone conclusion. They also point to the scenario of the hypothetical experiment involving Schrodinger’s cat, in which there is a fifty per cent chance of the radioactivity decaying and triggering the poison that kills the cat, so the cat is both alive and not alive which is an absurdity, but nonetheless true.
Commonsense and everyday experience prove that there is much we can be sure of. The Uncertainty Principle cannot contradict the laws of logic. It is quite simply impossible that the cat can be both alive and not alive; whatever produces such a conclusion must be false. It is quite simply impossible that effect can precede cause, as Heisenberg claimed. Abstract truths, (such as that there is no reason why the Universe should begin at any one point), and from which valid conclusions are derived, are unaffected by the physical problem of being unable to analyse the particle without altering its nature. Besides, the difficulty of gaining accurate information about the particle makes no difference to the fact that the particle exists in the first place, that there is something already there which we can attempt with or without success to investigate, and we ought to ask why the particle exists and what its existence shows about the Universe. We wouldn’t be here to discuss whether quantum theory was true in the first place without this universal constant. Quantum mechanics are undoubtedly a true fact about the Universe, but if we think they mean logic can be discarded we have misunderstood them.
Michael White writes in The Science of the X-Files, “as mystifying as Schrodinger’s cat experiment may be, it is based upon sound theory and decades of reasoning within the discipline of quantum mechanics. It does not feel comfortable because it appears to contravene the logical processes we have been educated to appreciate and some that may be instinctive to us as humans. Yet those principles may be right and our intuition wrong.”(1) But apart from the fact that intuition (not the same as simply assuming something to be true on face value) has often turned out to be right, it and logic are in fact two different things. It is logic I am trying to defend here rather than intuition, because however important intuition is logic (a) is clearly essential for a proper understanding of the Universe, and (b) cannot be denied. It’s undoubtedly true that quantum mechanics, as White points out, is the foundation of the science of lasers, advanced electronics and telecommunications, of television, advanced computing, and space travel among other things, which would seem to prove the validity of the theory. But without some unshakeable factual reality which remains constant there could be no progress, no connection, between the supposed facts about the universe on which the theory is based and the creation, and continued existence and operation, of the actual technology derived from it and which is a real feature of our everyday lives.
I expect those who like to maintain that quantum physics renders everything an open question would dismiss what I am saying as narrow-minded and dogmatic. Neither term can be used to describe simply stating what one believes to be true, merely because it is in opposition to what someone else thinks, and especially if one is actually talking sense. We always call something arrogant if we
don’t happen to like it, whereas if we did like it we would praise it as forthright and courageous. We might also be tempted to think that because something makes the Universe seem more interesting, it must necessarily be true; a fallacy which will be discussed again later in this chapter when dealing with wormholes and time travel.
In a bid to reconcile quantum theory with commonsense, some scientists have suggested that the equal probability of the cat dying or living creates two different universes, in each of which one of the two outcomes occurs. I intend to show that this cannot be the case and that parallel universes cannot be created merely by possibilities.
(1) Parallel Universes
It’s easy to see why the idea of these appeals to people; it would be interesting to see how our lives would have turned out if we had made different decisions on important issues from those we took in our own universe, or what course history would have taken if the Russian Revolution or the Second World War had never happened. I therefore deeply regret that I can’t find any reason to suppose parallel universes exist.
The first thing which comes to mind when considering the subject is that the whole notion of parallel “universes” implies a con-tradiction, if one defines the universe as everything that is. It might, though I tend to doubt it, be possible for there to be a realm in which there is absolutely nothing, not even the smallest sub-atomic particle (though if you could travel through it it could still be called a part of the universe, if “the universe” is defined in spatial terms regardless of whether there is anything in that space – and of course there would be something in it, i.e. oneself and any machine in which one was making one’s journey). But it would not be a very interesting place.
The idea of there being more than one universe represents a contradiction in terms, for there must by definition be just one, apart from possibly the Nowhere realm posited above. Parallel dimensions is a better term to use because it does not involve any contradiction, if a “dimension” is of such a nature that more than one unit of it can exist spatially within the same universe. We need to decide whether there is more than one space (the different spaces being the different dimensions). We could certainly speak of there being unity of space if the different dimensions were accessible to one another by any means, but even if they were not (a state of affairs which would render them insignificant to us) I think space must be one for the following reason. Everything must originate from one source; to argue otherwise would be to imply that things come into existence spontaneously, entirely indepen-dently of each other, or, if they did not have a moment of birth but have always been around (as we are told is the case with God), that they just happen to exist. And that, I find, goes against all reason. Everything must therefore be an aspect of the one single reality, and thus connected through it with everything else. Two or more separate spaces could not possibly have come into being, ever.
Why must there be only one space? Well, if there are two kinds of space and it is possible to move from one kind to the other then that involves a spatial link. If there isn’t, if one kind of space and the other are entirely separate with no means of communication between the two, then that implies an illogicality. If we accept it to be a logical truth that everything must come from the same source, then there must be something which it all has in common – i.e. the thing that everything comes from, whether in a pure or rearranged form. This would involve everything being spatially linked, being in the same space. Space is either a thing or a property of a thing (in other words, an aspect of that thing, dependent on the thing’s existence for its own, if existence is something properties have) and is thus subject to the above consideration.
Some scientists/science fiction fans believe there may be “wormholes”: short tunnels linking vastly separated regions of space, or different kinds of space, between which they serve as shortcuts. Their name is derived from the little tunnels bored by worms in apples, whose length is less than the circumferences of the apples. But an apple is of a certain size and has a certain extent, i.e. is finite, whereas space is infinite. If there can be only one universe in spatial terms (as opposed to other dimensions occupying the same space as this universe but on a different plane, which is what I mean by different kinds of space) then there can be no wormholes. I can conceive of a wormhole as a region of space where, in some way, things may be such as to enable someone to travel to another part of the universe faster. I cannot conceive of it as a gateway to another universe, a separate universe in its own right, or part of another universe. There can only be one universe because there is no limit to its size, and by definition there is nothing outside it. Therefore it has no structure (that would apply an independent existence relative to something else, some background against which the structure is delineated), whether solid and integrated or a network of interconnected large and small components (the main universe, the wormholes connecting it to the mini-universes and the mini-universes themselves).
It has become acceptable to be a Doctor Who fan now, perhaps because of the accession to positions of power and influence of the generation that grew up on it, so I can quote from the programme unrepentantly. A remark made during the 1970 story Inferno suggests that the different dimensions, or some of them, exist not in space but in time. Returning from his visit to a parallel “universe”, the Doctor afterwards spoke of his TARDIS (for the uninitiated, the machine by which he travels in space and time, the initials standing for Time And Relative Dimensions In Space) as having moved him sideways in time. I am not sure that moving “sideways” in time makes sense in the context of the story, because the impression we are given is that he has travelled to another dimension rather than another time zone, unless he is saying that parallel universes exist at different points in time (an interesting notion which we have absolutely no way of proving or refuting). If everything happens in time then in a sense the Doctor was speaking the truth. But in that case it could just as truthfully be said that when I stepped to one side just now to avoid that car which was about to run me down, I was moving sideways in time (as well as in space), then too. I was certainly not travelling into a parallel dimension.
It is indeed more likely that he moved sideways in space (in other words, dimensions are arranged horizontally in rows). Besides, “sideways” is spatial direction, a spatial value (as are “alongside”, “above” and “below”). But where in space was the Doctor going?
If our own and other dimensions all exist within the same space, does this make them no different from planets in “ordinary” space, such as Mars and Venus? Evidently it doesn’t, for in science fiction our own and other dimensions are not accessible to each other in the ordinary way (that is, by foot, car, horse, plane, boat, train or spacecraft). Specialised equipment, or an accident to your TARDIS (the good Doctor was trying to kick-start his, it having been deactivated by his superiors the Time Lords when they exiled him to Earth, by linking it to a nuclear reactor and there was a sudden unexpected power surge) is required in order to make the journey. We can only speculate why this is so, but whatever the reason it is clear that dimensions are not interconnected by ordinary means. But if they exist within one space, they are not so much parallel dimensions but simply areas of space which are cut off from other areas of space (presumably by mysterious, invisible barriers which, for all those encountering them were to know, might conceal other “dimensions” but could only be proved to do so if we actually succeeded in penetrating them (and who knows, we might not)).
There is a possibility that parallel dimensions, whilst they (a) exist in our own universe and (b) are undetectable (at present) from each other, are something different from little pocket universes existing within the main one. If they do exist in the same universe as our own, where in it do they exist (for logically, whatever exists in any form must exist somewhere?) If they exist in the same kind of space as ours, but are clearly something fundamentally different from a planet in our own dimension, then there is a possibility they may occupy the same positions in space and time as objects in this dimension. That is clearly impossible if they have any sort of physical reality. Though it is conceivable that something or other (I don’t know what) might prevent us from detecting them with any of our senses, the consequences if they tried to exist at the same points in space as things in our universe would be unfortunate. They would fail, and most likely fail painfully (for us as well as themselves).
There may be a way of getting around this difficulty. Some scientific theories about which I have heard suggest there are gaps between the molecules which make up matter (human bodies included). If that is the case, the molecules of beings and objects in the other dimension could exist within those gaps (there would therefore have to be a limit – and who or what would impose, and maintain, that limit – to the number of dimensions that existed, in case the gaps filled up and all things exploded as they tried to occupy the same positions simultaneously). There would also have to be an agency – the same agency, or a different one? – which prevented the molecules of an object or person in one dimension from colliding with those of objects or people in another dimension whenever either of them moved. The collision would presumably have catastrophic consequences; although molecules are very small, physical objects and living bodies – agglomerations of molecules – often are not. I don’t know, not being a physicist, whether anything disastrous ever happens when one molecule hits another, but a body hitting another body is clearly a different matter.
This means we could only move in the ways, and in the directions, which the agency wanted, and thus would not be free agents; and our everyday experiences suggest we do have free will, even if beings in other dimensions do not. The whole theory would therefore seem to be washed out.
I am also inclined to doubt the molecular gaps exist, whether anything inhabits them or not. I think the universe must be endless, because any limits there might be to it would be essentially arbitrary. There is no reason why it should begin or end at any particular point or points. Thus there could be no place where it ended and something which was not the universe began – and no gaps in it either.
Parallel dimensions fall into two types; those which mirror, to a greater or lesser extent, things in other dimensions, and those which do not. Where different dimensions do mirror each other, this strikes me as strange.
In science fiction parallel dimensions some of the differences are caused by a person in one dimension taking a different decision, in the same sort of situation, from that taken by their counterpart in another dimension. It is said to be the various possibilities, the various choices, inherent in certain situations which create each of the different parallel universes. There must initially have been only one universe, and on the first occasion when a life form in that universe which had developed intelligence found itself in a situation where a decision to do something was necessary one or more (the exact number would depend on the number of possible options) other universes came into being. As people in those universes made decisions on this or that matter, still more universes would be created, and the process could go on forever with an infinite number of universes being brought into existence.
Such a notion can be refuted. Something which is only a possibility, or a probability, and not a certainty, does not exist and, if it is an event, is not happening. This is not the case where something might be existing/happening now and actually is doing so, regardless of whether anyone knows it is existing/happening, because its reality gives it significance and the ability to influence events. For example, we cannot prove there is no intelligent life on other planets, and if that life does exist and is discovered by us the consequences for science and for our perception of ourselves will be tremendous. But when we are talking about the mere possibility/probability that something will exist/happen in the future – in other words, it is not existing or happening now – what we have is essentially nothingness. And things cannot originate out of nothing (the Book of Genesis appears to suggest they do, but one can identify reasons for its exaggerating somewhat; the relatively simple, pastoral people who made up its original audience would probably not have understood atoms and molecules, and besides God may have wanted humanity to work out the existence and functioning of such things for itself, which would have been more exciting for it). The molecules which make up the objects which exist, and whose behaviour constitutes what we call events, will always be present, but since the form the parallel dimension takes, like the form anything takes, consists in the way those molecules are arranged and behave, and that behaviour is not predetermined, no difference is made to the point I am trying to get across. Therefore “mirror” universes cannot be created by the mere possibility of one or more given contingencies being realised. If they exist, it is not because of the decisions taken in other universes. They must have existed right from the beginning of things.
It seems far too much of a coincidence that there should be a variety of universes each with the same people and objects in them, unless there were some purpose behind it, assuming we can speak of “purpose” in nature. So we must ask why nature would have copied herself thousands of times over, what she could possibly have gained by it, and why the different universes should be inaccessible to each other. This is such uncharted territory, scientifically speaking, that we have no means of answering the question. A lot depends here on whether everything originates from a God, a creative intelligence. If it does, then creating parallel universes seems a strange thing for Him to have done. If He did it because he wanted to create variety, and thought that that variety would be of a particularly interesting kind if it involved people being different but not entirely so, He could have achieved that aim just as well by having lots of different planets, with different (to some extent) people on them, in “ordinary space” and thus accessible to each other so that the variety could be fully appreciated.
Someone suggested to me recently that an infinity of different universes, or at least more than one universe, was necessary for there to be free will. Since we are only acquainted with one, our own, and have at present no means of establishing whether there are any others, it may seem impossible to answer this point. However we do not require access to any other universes which may exist in order to do so.
It is my belief, set out above, that it is an absolute logical truth that imperfect knowledge must inevitably produce free will. You don’t need more than one universe for it to be true; its truth is a necessary truth, and in any set of circumstances. In any case the implication of the idea, if I have understood it correctly, is that people in any one universe would not have enough criteria with which to make free choices. In other words, nobody in any of the universes would have free will, which rather destroys the point of having more than one if its purpose is to make free choices possible. Although the circumstances in each universe would be different, what we would need would be for people to experience the circumstances prevailing in all universes; something which could be achieved just as easily by only having one. Situations in which there are no obvious criteria determining one’s actions, leading to free will, occur with sufficient regularity in our own universe for no other universes to be necessary.
Parallel universes are among the things science buffs seem to get most easily overexcited about. Paul Parsons in The Science of Doctor Who asks us to “Imagine an alien on a planet in a galaxy 100 billion light years away. He, she or it will be so far away that we on Earth won’t have seen its galaxy, and it won’t have seen our Milky Way. In fact neither party is due to clock the other’s patch of space for another 86.3 billion years. The alien is, in effect, totally disconnected from us – as if it’s living in another universe. And this is the basic idea with {what is termed} a Level 1 multiverse. Because inflation has made space so big, the universe is made up of a vast number of disconnected volumes, each of which can be thought of as an independent universe in its own right.”(2) But this is a metaphorical rather than a physical truth and too much should not be made of it – spatially it’s still all the same universe. Extent is being confused with what is or isn’t able to exist within it.
“Tegmark {Professor Max Tegmark of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology} calculates that there are so many universes in a Level 1 multiverse that there’s likely to be an exact copy of you, reading this very same book, on a planet just like Earth somewhere. “There are an infinite number of other inhabited planets, including not just one but infinitely many that have people with the same appearance, name and memories as you, who play out every possible permutation of your life choices,” he explains.”(3) I can accept that probability makes this possible if the Universe is a certain size, but it would still be the same universe. It is important to note that not all scientists or sci-fi buffs would necessarily endorse the view apparently expressed here that the mere possibility of something implies its actually existing or happening.
“If it sounds crazy, then – according to some physicists and mathematicians – that’s because it is. “Tegmark seems to be saying that anything you can think of must exist, just because you can think of it,” says Professor Ian Stewart, a mathematician at the University of Warwick. “He’s confusing the mathematical space of all the things that could happen with the physical things that do happen. If nothing else, this falls outside the normal range of what we consider to be science, because there’s no way you can test it.””(4)
To be fair, tendencies towards rather bizarre reasoning, producing arguments which can be shot down pretty easily and not necessarily only those with qualifications in physics, are maybe a result of the sheer difficulty even for a brilliant scientist in comprehending the very concepts we are discussing here, the vast areas of space and time involved. In the circumstances they are a kind of wishful thinking, an option which seems cosy because no other is available. ““These are tricky concepts because they’re idealizations of mental thought processes as much as anything,” admits Ian Stewart. “Indeed, it’s easy for us to be sloppy about what we mean by infinity, and to use the word as a catch-all term even when we don’t really know what we’re talking about. Stewart cites the commonly uttered statement, “in an infinite universe everything possible would happen somewhere,” as one of the worst misconceptions. “Then how about an infinite universe consisting of large numbers of copies of a chair?” he wonders.(5) Or one that doesn’t, and it must be one or the other – there is an equal probability of two eventualities happening that are mutually contradictory, and as this breaks the law of reason there must be something wrong somewhere. These kinds of objection could be levelled against a good deal of what is suggested by some scientists and their followers, including time travel, dimensional transcendentality and the idea that relativity theory distorts time and space themselves rather than the things in them.
In The Physics of Star Trek Lawrence Krauss suggests the existence of multiple universes could derive from that of the mind, along with the operation of quantum physics. “Our consciousness is always unique, never indeterminate. Is the act of consciousness a measurement? If so, then it could be said that at any instant there is a nonzero quantum mechanical probability for a number of different outcomes to occur, and our act of consciousness determines which branch we inhabit, but an infinite number of other possibilities exist a priori.”(6) Since the mere idea of something does not automatically bring it into existence or cause it to occur, and never has done (even for God; being omniscient he must clearly have the idea of the moon being made of green cheese, yet obviously it is not), this theory can be discounted.
Nor is Krauss correct in thinking that General Relativity proves parallel dimensions to be possible. On page p142 he writes, “Once three-dimensional space was tied with time to make four-dimensional spacetime by Hermann Minkowski, it was natural to suppose that the process might continue. Moreover, once general relativity demonstrated that what we perceive as the force of gravity can be associated with the curvature of spacetime, it was not outrageous to speculate that perhaps other forces might be associated with curvature in yet other dimensions.” But since, as we will see later, space and time cannot be “curved” in the first place, they cannot by being that way bring other dimensions into existence. It is perfectly correct to speak of “spacetime” since things exist and happen in both, and both are essential features of the Universe, fundamentally and equally important in determining the behaviour of entities within it. It is also correct to see “spacetime” as four-dimensional since objects in it have the dimensions of height, length and breadth and also that of timefulness, that is continued existence in whatever form. Beyond this, however, Krauss is wrong.
Parsons, quoting Professor Andrei Linde of Stanford University, suggests that “random quantum fluctuations in our universe are constantly creating new inflationary universes, which are budding off from our own. And so a multiverse picture starts to emerge of an interlinked network of universes and baby universes. If this is correct then our own universe may actually be a baby universe – a bubble of spacetime that sprouted away from its parent universe 13.7 billion years ago.”(7) Parsons also writes: “if gravity obeys the laws of quantum physics then in the same way that space on small scales is bubbling with subatomic particles, so spacetime itself on the smallest scales will then be a frothing mass of loops, bubbles – and wormholes which could be used to time travel…by threading it with exotic matter.”(8) But whatever its implications, quantum theory cannot break the laws of logic any more than relativity can. Fascinating and unpredictable as the Universe is, it must obey those laws; so, unfortunately perhaps (or should one rather be grateful, considering the issues that might arise,) neither quantum physics nor, for example, string theory can be used to prove the existence of these wonderful parallel universes or the feasibility of travel between different “time zones”. The neutrino particle appears to vanish from a particular position and reappear somewhere else without passing through the intervening space. Since this is quite simply impossible – logically, for anything with some sort of physical reality to move from A to B entails it has to first traverse what lies between them – there must be some other explanation for this undoubtedly intriguing phenomenon. When you have eliminated the impossible then whatever remains, however improbable (it might be improbable to a dedicated quantum physicist, must be the truth). Besides, if the universe is a strange, wonderful and not yet fully understood place then, if anything, it is quite possible for the neutrino to do its stuff without breaking all the laws of sensible physics, despite what appears to be the case.
(2) Time travel
In science fiction, time travel most often takes place in the sense of an object or person, or groups of objects or persons, travelling bodily backwards or forwards through time, usually in some kind of craft specially designed for the purpose. The rest of the universe stays where it is.
This entails that the past, present and future are continuously existing places, unless perhaps it is the case that the whole, or a part, of time itself is being moved backwards or forwards rather than that individuals are travelling through time. Apart from the fact that the past and future would not be the past and future – the past never exists because it has ceased to be – we would need to ask, if they are all continuously existing places, exactly where they existed, for laws relating to space would still have to apply regardless of what one could or could not do with time.
When a time traveller arrives in, say, Renaissance Italy, they are in a place which clearly has a physical existence, and within which movement between various points is possible, and which must therefore occupy a certain amount of space. Where is that space? It cannot be the space which is taken up by modern Italy. It is probable that there are many points in space which have, either successively or at points in time which may be fairly widely separated, been occupied by more than one object. There may be, say, a spot down the road from me which is now taken up by a 1960s office block, which replaced a Victorian warehouse on the same site, and which in ten years’ time will itself be demolished and replaced by a leisure centre. If the world of today occupies the same position in space as that which existed in the fifteenth century or any other period of history before our own, along with that which will exist in the future, then there must, if time travel is possible, be a certain number of objects existing in exactly the same spatial location, something which is physically impossible.
As indicated above, the problem would be overcome if it were the whole world or universe which had travelled back in time. Then, objects would simply return to the positions they occupied before they occupied other positions, or take up entirely new ones; if they were/will be at some point physically broken up, their mole-cules will disperse into the atmosphere or assume new forms elsewhere. But this is clearly a different sort of thing from what happens when Doctor Who goes somewhere (temporally) in his TARDIS. It would also involve certain dangers. In the case of time going forwards, the person wanting to see the future would have to be somehow isolated from the effects of the process; otherwise a point might be reached at which they died (the cause of their death perhaps being something entirely unexpected). If time went backwards they would immediately reach the point just before the process began; it would thereupon cease, and they would never reach their destination.
The point of space where they arrive might become occupied at some stage by a physical object such as a wall, perhaps with nasty consequences. The possibility of ending up in an unpleasant or dangerous environment, such as the interior of a furnace or the bottom of the sea, is a hazard which must face all time travelers whether their destination is the past or the future (though a lot depends on whether you are inside some kind of machine and how fireproof/waterproof it is; it means they must have a detailed and 100% accurate knowledge of where they are going in space, which in the case of the future would amount to ESP. Quite apart from the impossibility, unless free will is denied, of ever being able to predict the future – to know what will exist in it, in what form, and where – the knowledge would for both past and present be prohibitively difficult to acquire.
The only other way the physical restrictions on the concurrent existence of a past, present and future might be overcome is if, whenever anything in the world changes, the world is somehow duplicated and the copy transferred to a different point in space from that which will be occupied by the original and still existing world. This process would have to take place every second or so, as the changes do. Apart from the fact that any time machine which was ever developed would have to have a mechanism for locating, in space, each of the countless worlds which would be created by it, the whole scenario inevitably seems unacceptably absurd.
That’s not to say it is impossible. But there is another important reason why rolling time, whether over the whole universe or just a part of it, backwards is unfeasible. It’s logically impossible for time to go backwards, whether naturally or as a result of temporal tinkering by intelligent life forms. Nothing can happen without a reason, so everything is a matter of cause and effect (“cause” and “reason” are more or less the same thing, in so far as both terms mean an explanation for why something happens or exists in the way it does). Since, logically, cause must precede effect unless it is simultaneous with it, events can only happen in a forward direction. If the cause follows the effect then it cannot be a reason for it, and the effect simply happens, which is absurd. Therefore time, if it moves at all – and regardless of whether it moves of its own accord or is given a push by the hand of some intelligent life form – must move in only one direction, and that is forwards. This is so because logic must apply to all things, time included. What’s logically impossible is absolutely impossible.
If you were to roll time forwards, you could not then roll it back again to the present; so you would not be able to enjoy any of the benefits which might accrue to you from the knowledge you would have gained from your knowledge of the future (such as knowing which horse to bet on in the Grand National). So there wouldn’t be any point in accelerating time forwards; it would mean only that people would all live faster than normal, and thus be prevented from really enjoying their experiences, and that would be a terrible tragedy, especially when we live much too fast as it is.
It will be apparent that time travel by individuals is also ruled out by the above. One could not go back in time to a point before one was born, since one’s birth would have been the cause, albeit indirectly, of one’s journey, and one cannot arrive somewhere before one has been born (and thus rendered able to set out for one’s destination). Neither could you travel to the future, because when you returned to the present you would be affected by things that had not yet happened, possessing memories of things that you experienced in the future time to which you travelled and being able to make decisions and perform actions as a result of them.
Whether I am right in what I’m saying, i.e. that the imposs-ibility of backwards causation makes travel to the past impossible, depends on the nature of time, because in one sense things would not be happening before their causes. If time were analogous to space in the sense that you could travel backwards and forwards in it, the “cause before effect” principle would not apply. There could simply be two kinds of time, “real” time (in which the time traveler is born and later sets off in their time machine), and time as it is when travelled through. Though there is still, in a sense, backwards causation, it is not of a sort which makes the temporal journey logically impossible. In an important respect, the causal arrow would still be travelling forward.
We must decide whether, if time were of a certain nature (i.e. analogous to some extent to space), backwards causation could not be said to be involved; whether time being of this nature would infringe, or not prevent other factors infringing, the principle that things cannot happen before their causes? If it does then the possibility of time travel is disproved. We have here a situation where A is an essential truth, and B is incompatible with it, rendering B impossible, but an additional factor, C, which may alter the situation, has been introduced into the equation. Logically, if A is an essential truth C must be compatible with A as well as B if it is to perform the task of reconciling the two. It is not compatible with it. For time to be analogous to space, in that you can go through it from A to B without contravening any of the rules of logic, would involve the past, present and future being concurrently existing places, which as I argued above embodies a contradiction. This I think is the real objection to the idea of travel to the past. The only way of getting round it is for the whole world to go back in time, and this is not what is normally envisaged when we think and speak of time travel.
If a time traveller goes into the past then they must clearly, in order to make their journey, already exist. Even if it is possible for them to exist before they have been born – to exist in one timeframe but not in another – where do they exist? Again it is clear there must be a past, present and future existing concurrently. It may also be considered that for them to make their journey implies that the future of the time to which they travel – a future in which they are born, grow up, come to understand time travel, build their time machine and pull the starter lever – is preordained (regardless of whether something shifts it to a different spatial position so as to get round the problem of it existing at the same point in space as the past). This would deny free will, which the evidence suggests we do possess, as I’ll be arguing later.
In any case, as made clear above, I do not believe time is analogous to space. It would help here to establish its exact nature. There is no evidence that it is a medium, a substance, through which one could travel.
There must clearly be a fundamental element, which cannot be created or destroyed, at the root of everything. If there weren’t, nothing could exist in any coherent form and we wouldn’t be around to discuss this article and agree or disagree with its conclusions. There would be no base on which to build an ordered universe. An important part of this fundamental element would be matter – which science says can’t be created or destroyed – and without which the universe would certainly be a very odd place. We will leave aside for the moment the question of whether the fundamental element is God.
Logically, what cannot be destroyed must continue to be. It is that continuation, the fact that something is enduring, which creates time. Since everything comes in some way or other from the fundamental element, everything endures forever, though not in the same form (the fundamental element, to do its job, must itself be unchanging).
Since time is a property of things (their continuing to be) rather than a thing in itself – you can’t point to, or produce in a laboratory, any entity of which it could be said “look, that’s continuation” – then it cannot itself have properties, such as extension, and so can’t be analogous to space. A property must be a property of something.
*
Going back in time implies the ability to commit actions which in some cases at least would be logically impossible. It may not appear possible to change history in that for things to have happened and yet not happened seems absurd and inconceivable. In one sense it is conceivable. An “event” is not the same thing as a physical object or a thought impulse. It is merely the way in which the object or the thought impulse behaves. Events happen, but they do not exist. The objects whose behaviour constitutes events are composed of particles, and the events are caused by some action or rearrangement of those particles. When we change the past so that different events happen from those which happened in “original” time we are merely altering the positions of the particles making up the entities whose actions constitute the events. To the question of how something can have happened and yet not happened, the answer must be that in a sense everything happens, because events are essentially the actions and interactions of physical objects and energy-states, and the molecules which compose those objects and energy-states will always exist regardless of whether anyone has been messing about with time.
However, there is clearly a qualitative difference between an object when it has any given property or location in space and the same object when it has any other given property or location, regardless of whether it always remains numerically identical with itself, and that qualitative difference is a causal factor of great importance. Let us ask ourselves whether, if time is changed – either deliberately, or accidentally as a result of some natural phenomenon or the unintentional action of a person, we can say that an event/object which was thus prevented from occurring/existing really happened/existed? Yes we can – because if time is now on the course onto which it was shifted by the temporal change(s), there must be a reason for that. It was shifted onto it for a purpose, and something must have “happened”, or existed, to create that purpose. The agency which did the shifting, whatever that agency was, shifted it from one course onto another, and its being on its current course is therefore a result, and effect, of having previously been on another (because, in the case of human action, someone wanted to change its course). A “change” must necessarily be a transition from one state of affairs to another, and the original state of affairs is the cause of the state to which they have altered. To deny this would entail that things could happen without reasons, without causes, and that’d be silly. We are presented here with a paradox that proves the impossibility of time travel, because things would both have happened and (because we went back in time and changed the past) not have happened. But they could only have done one or the other. Attention has often been drawn to such paradoxes in the past, and I see no reason why they should not ensue from the ability to travel in time. Some are not really paradoxes at all. Parsons at one point brings up the scenario where a time traveller presents the young William Shakespeare with a complete edition of his own works, which the Bard then publishes under his own name. Who then actually wrote the plays?(9) Well, Shakespeare would have done if the time traveller hadn’t intervened, and it was his having done so in unaltered time which was the cause of the time traveller making his journey into the past and changing it, mischievously or perhaps with genuinely good intent. There is still a causal chain connecting Shakespeare to the publication of the works, it’s just that the nature of it has changed because of the time traveller’s intervention. The situation isn’t as absurd as it seems and is certainly more likely than those where someone goes back in time to stop a certain event from happening, only to find that their action in doing this was in fact its cause – their intention to prevent it not actually having a cause itself. But that doesn’t mean time travel is possible in the first place. For one thing, there are other paradoxes which undoubtedly are that, the most famous of which has you journeying back in time to kill your grandfather when he was a child. If you succeed you would never have been born, so you could not have gone back in time to kill Grandad. You would both have travelled in time and not travelled in time, been born and not been born.
Logic dictates what is or is not possible within our universe, or for that matter any universe. It cannot be denied. It is the underlying structure which constantly determines what can and cannot exist/happen, the form which events and objects must take. If there is this internal consistency to things, and if logic really is logic, then it follows (in some way we can’t perhaps fully explain in words) that whatever would inevitably result in a logically impossible occurrence must itself be impossible. If logic is logic it must apply everywhere, whether directly or indirectly.
Some scientists claim to have found a way round this problem where time travel is concerned. Professor Igor Novikov suggests that in line with the principle of least action, one of the basic tenets of physics (although not a qualified physicist I would imagine that it is much the same thing as the principle of conservation of energy, for it appears to dictate that the energy being used in any physical system is only as much as is absolutely necessary to do the job) there is a non-paradoxical, self-consistent sequence of events. We are asked to imagine a billiard ball going through a wormhole and back in time (wormholes are thought to make this possible because they result from a distortion of the fabric of the universe). Something {erhaps the operation of logic as I suggested above, if it is equivalent to Novikov’s “self-consistency” principle?} aims the ball so that when it emerges from the mouth of the wormhole it collides with its earlier self and prevents it from entering the time machine in the first place.(10) Assuming time travel is possible in the first instance, Novikov may be right. The trouble is, there is still a logical impossibility at the heart of things. There are two billiard balls in existence (or one could not collide with the other) where there should only be one because (a) the ball is qualitatively and quantitavely identical only with itself and (b) if it can be duplicated then so can everything else in the universe be duplicated by the process that we see here, namely the possibility of time travel and its effects, and it is not clear how the copies of each entity would be accommodated.
Yet another problem with time travel is that free will would be contradicted. It is a matter of debate whether we possess this faculty, and I do not wish to diverge too far from the subject of this chapter. In my view, for proving that we do possess it it should suffice that:
(a) If our thoughts and thus our actions were not our own we would have no self-consciousness, but we do.
(b) There are some situations where we simply don’t know what to do about something, but nevertheless act in the end in one way or another. Where commonsense and our knowledge of our environment make it inevitable we will do a given thing, unless illness has disrupted the normal functioning of our minds, we could say our decisions and thus the resulting actions were determined by those factors. However if there are no such determining factors, but a decision is still made, the decision can only ensue from free will.
When we think we have made the wrong/right decision regarding something we feel a sense of guilt/warm glow of satisfaction, which we don’t when we do something because we simply can’t help it. This suggests there is a qualitative difference between the two kinds of action, and thus points to the existence of free will even though it may not decisively prove it.
If free will is not an illusion then strict limits on the way one can time travel are implied. If we could travel to the future, our exact destination could not be an object such as a building, or indeed any particular point in space if points in space are to be identified using nearby objects or agglomerations of matter (the planets, land masses etc on which they are located), as is in fact the case. We could not be sure that those objects or matter formations existed for us to travel to; they might have been demolished, or devastated by nuclear war, unless the future is predetermined. This also means that people from our future cannot travel into their past – our present – to meet us, since they do not yet exist. If we had gone into the future and then returned to the present, we would be travelling back to the latter through territory whose existence would always have been inevitable. The only sense in which we could go into the future would be that of travelling to a point in the past and then journeying back to one’s present; one would be journeying through what would to the people living at the point in the past to which we had gone be the future.
Possibly the future exists as a kind of void, in which objects and people appear if, as time moves on, nothing happens to prevent their continuing to be. The only things that would exist there would be those whose nature was such that nothing, natural or man-made, could ever destroy them – the subatomic particles out of which everything is constructed (whether this would have the effect of making the realm look like a void I am not sure, but whatever kind of world we are talking about here would not in the long run be of any great interest to us). As time caught up with one without anything happening to prevent the continued existence of an object, its particles would come together to create it. If we travelled to the future in a time machine, and it really was “the future”, we would have to wait for time to catch up with us before anything interesting could be observed. How long the waiting would be would depend on how far into the future one had travelled (although spatially it would have nothing about it to recommend it, time would presumably still be going on in some way). I imagine our time traveller would not be prepared to wait more than a day or two unless they had gone into the future for some very important reason. Waiting for periods such as a billion years would be particularly irksome! But in any case travelling to the future would be rather a dead loss since it would exist only as a void until events caught up with it, after which it would of course no longer be the future but the present.
If, as time moves on, nothing happens to prevent an object from continuing to exist at that point in space, such as its being moved or destroyed (that is, molecularly destructured), and it becomes a part of the future, of what in one sense would be my present, it will materialize at exactly the point where I am standing, possibly with unfortunate consequences for myself. However I doubt on grounds of logic whether such intriguing scenarios are possible; that the future can exist even as a void. If the future cannot be predetermined, then it will not have been “decided” whether it is to be a void or a place with at least some objects existing in it. It will be neither of those things; and therefore, just as a cat is either a cat or not a cat, it will not exist at all. If it does not exist, one cannot travel to it.
Not everything would of course be affected by the variable of human free will. Anything which wasn’t would be found to exist in complete, rather than basic molecular, form, in the future realm. But given the ability of Man to devastate his entire planet through nuclear weaponry, perhaps even physically destroying it if enough nuclear bombs were detonated on a major fault line, it seems safe to conclude that the future would be entirely a void. If there is anything existing in it apart from in basic molecular form, or performing any particular action, it will have to have been preordained (because of how human free will might otherwise affect things).
Travel into the past does not contradict free will quite so much, because past events have already happened. By undertaking it we would not be restricting the freedom of people living in the past. Indeed, we might be doing quite the opposite. Once the past happens, its nature must change (assuming that it can be said to continue existing at all). From being creatures possessing a substantial measure of free will – when they did whatever they were doing at a particular moment in time, a moment which became the past, they probably did it willingly – the people there, along with the inanimate objects which exist in their world, become like recordings, which either exist as inanimate particles or are continually performing the same actions, and whatever the way in which they have their being cannot be said to possess free will. If they did have free will, that would imply that the future (our present) had not yet been shaped, and we did not exist to travel into the past and meet them – because any action they might decide to perform, however trivial, could influence history in any number of possible ways, and the future cannot exist until it has been decided upon, much of the future including our own birth would be a non-certainty. Much depends on whether these recordings are interactive – on whether, among other things, we can influence their behaviour. If this is the case then our actions may well change the course of history. We would be altering the pattern of events, just as one could wind back a tape recording and then erase something or record over it. Unless we are impossibly careful, we will do this in such a way as to alter time (partly by creating new possibilities for the people living in the past, reintroducing free will to their lives by performing actions which they might respond to). That would make the future of everything, including ourselves, undecided, and we would consequently cease to be, not coming into existence again unless events should happen to result in our birth. We would have to make absolutely sure that our actions when in the past would not have unfortunate consequences. This would require a detailed knowledge of it which, since we do not always know why a thing happened, whether it was a seemingly trivial occurrence or something of global import, or what caused an individual to make a particular decision, and any event however apparently insignificant can change the course of history, would have to encompass not only wars, battles, major treaties, great discoveries and inventions, and the identities of the leading politicians and soldiers, but everything that happened, whether caused by human action or something natural, on every day since the creation of the universe. We’d have to be certain that any action we performed, including scratching an itch, was consistent with the “proper” course of history; it is clear that attempting to satisfy this requirement would be a nightmare. And how could we acquire such knowledge in any case, unless we were omniscient, or were in communication with a God who was, and could advise us what to do and not do? Without these safeguards travel to the past would, in view of its potential dangers, be morally irresponsible.
If there are a host of other inhabited planets in the universe, then this information, if we were at all altruistic, would have to include their histories too, especially if we were travelling to their past or future, or they visited Earth at some time and had an influence on its development. We would have to have discovered the existence of all of them, which the size of the cosmos would render a dauntingly protracted, if not impossible, task, if we were not to leave some of them out of our calculations and thus run the risk of interfering in the course of their history with possibly calamitous results – for us as well as them, possibly. The collection of all this information would be an impossibly tedious business unless entrusted to a computer, and even then it would take a prohibitively long time. So Man will probably not be in a position to safely undertake temporal travel for possibly hundreds, if not thousands, of years.
It’s possible the race doing the time travelling are themselves not human, and therefore might not encounter such obstacles as those mentioned above. Their technology may be far in advance of ours and their psychology very different too. But one has to assume they are capable of making mistakes, and the consequences of such mistakes, which might for example mean that Hitler won the Second World War, are not nice to think about. If they are incapable of mistakes, they must have evolved to such a degree of perfection that they in effect constitute God.
There have been many occasions in science fiction where the actions of time travellers are actual historical events, or accord so closely with them that no real damage is done. What the time traveller does when he goes into the past is not so much to change history as to fulfil the role it has assigned to him. But he seems to do it so often that free will must be called into question, everything apparently being preordained, unless he is simply being irresponsible, with his irresponsibility fortunately having had no bad effects thus far; and if he knows it was he and no-one else who performed/is to perform the action which makes history, and has free will, might he not choose to perform a totally different action or none at all? Maybe it’s unlikely he would be so foolish, but it is not impossible unless he is (a) morally perfect and (b) absolutely immune from any disease or other agency which could cause him to act irrationally or against his will; and for either of these conditions to be met it would be necessary for him to be God. Hopefully, if disaster is to be avoided, either he is God or the latter exists and has created some safeguard against the consequences of the time traveller’s doing the wrong thing; if the latter is the case, there would be little point in giving him freedom to change or not change history at all.
It would be irresponsible to travel into the past when the risk of it having unpleasant repercussions (and that’s a bit of an understatement) would be so high. From a moral point of view it is therefore undesirable, or only desirable if there is some infallible agency controlling our actions and those of the people we encounter there so as not to produce changes in the course of history. It could be that the actions we commit while in the past would in fact agree with actual historical events; but if this is a way of preventing time travel from having dangerous consequences it is a mixed blessing. Only if it was always the case would it be a sure guarantee that no disasters would ever happen, and if it was always the case that would result in the depressing situation where everything which had happened in the past was predetermined; free will had always been an illusion.
If there is anything existing in the future apart from in a basic molecular form, or performing any particular action, it will have to have been preordained (because of how human free will might otherwise affect things). So if one went into the future one would risk upsetting, by one’s actions, a predetermined pattern, just as one would risk altering the course of history if one went into the past.
The belief that time travel is possible stems from a failure to consider the whole range of different issues that have a bearing from it. Its most common cause, however, is a misunderstanding of Einstein’s theory of relativity. Because Einstein talks about space and time being “bent”, some have seen relativity as demonstrating that it is possible to cover a million miles in a few minutes or to drop in on Julius Caesar or Napoleon for a cup of tea and a chat. To dispel this notion we need to look through the smokescreen unintentionally created by Einstein’s choice of words to isolate what he was actually saying.
Gravity, because of its cumulative effects over distance, influences everything which exists in what Einstein calls “Space-Time”. It bends light waves, sound waves etc and also affects the atoms of which solid objects (including human beings and clocks) are made, causing measurements of time to differ. Because gravity lessens/increases with relative distance from a body which exerts it, such as the Earth, the events by which we measure time happen more slowly. An observer on the ground hears and sees a different time from a clock than one high up on a tower, and thus further away from the earth, does from the same kind of clock.
In addition to being bent by gravity and the curvature of the Earth, light and sound both have to travel a certain distance to get from A to B, no matter how fast they move (and light in particular, according to Einstein, travels very fast indeed). Each observer is looking at/hearing their own clock not the other’s, so it is not because of the distance sound and light must travel that there is a difference between the results, the two sets of data. One might object that since light travels faster than sound, would there not be a strange interval between seeing the clock and hearing it tick? But there isn’t, because the actual speeds of sound and light are not affected by distance except of course in that they take longer to get to their destinations. Light and sound will still travel at the same fixed speeds relative to one another. The sound will be heard, and the position of the clock hands observed, by each observer at the same fixed (for them) moments according to the speeds of sound and light respectively, as would occur anywhere and at any time, under experimental conditions or not. In neither observer’s case is there any actual distortion of time, as we will see later.
Despite the language sometimes used by exponents of the theory of relativity the clock itself does not affect time, by definition of its being essentially a device for measuring it and nothing else. It’s merely that whatever affects the behaviour of everything in time will by that token affect the clock too, so it keeps in line with the changes. Apart from the fact that time doesn’t exist to be influenced by it or by anything else, as we’ll see later on, the clock is no more likely than any other mechanical instrument, such as a washing machine, an airliner or a soft drinks dispenser, to have any power over the succession of events. Clocks may not always be accurate in any case, since rather than forming part of the laws of nature they’re designed by fallible human beings who don’t even agree on the standards by which time should be reckoned, let alone maintain that standard properly from one moment to the next.
Over very long distances, gravity will cause differences in the rate at which biological processes take place, so that an astronaut on a journey to a distant solar system (if such a journey were possible), would age more slowly than his brother back home on Earth. This is the famous “Twins Paradox”, which isn’t really a paradox at all; not because there’s no such thing as absolute time, as relativists claim, but because it’s only perceptions of time which are involved here and not the thing itself.
Albert Einstein was a brilliant man. Nonetheless NASA used Newton’s theories rather than his when planning and carrying out the Apollo missions, because it was simpler, and it worked (fortunately, since the consequences of getting things wrong in a matter like this would be disastrous); proving that Newton’s science was not so much replaced by Einstein’s as subsumed by it in a wider understanding of the physical universe. Einstein was perhaps too clever for his own good – even some university physics graduates don’t understand him. It is also true that millions of people live, and have lived, their lives quite happily without understanding or even knowing about the TOR (or Newton for that matter). But if the TOR only explains the behaviour of things in the Universe and is incorrect about the Universe itself, it is obviously still doing something extremely important. There is nothing wrong with it in itself. Where I disagree with it is in its apparent claim that time is itself in some way responsible for the changes observed in the Twins Paradox, in some other sense than their happening, by definition, over a period.
I believe that Einstein, Stephen Hawking and all other scientists who have proceeded from an acceptance of the Theory of Relativity have allowed time to enter into their calculations without first establishing exactly what it is – something no scientist has ever effectively done. This is a serious error, though it may be due more to misuse of language than to anything fundamentally wrong with relativity theory itself.
It is important to appreciate that Einstein wasn’t suggesting, for example, that time travel in the form encountered in science fiction is possible. “Passing back and forth through time like that entails horrendous logical problems in the workings of the Universe, which Einstein himself would abhor”(11). But he does appear to be saying that it can be malleable in a way I don’t believe it is. And talk about “time” being warped by gravity tends to encourage such misapprehensions as the possibility of time travel. I have come across one sci-fi yarn in which the following conversation takes place:

Doctor Who: “If you are looking at a distant star you may be seeing it as it was at the time of the birth of Jesus {I think probably longer}. If that star, or sun, has a planet and there are people living on it with a telescope strong enough to observe events on Earth, what would they see?”
Assistant: “The Romans invading Britain.”
Doctor Who: “...it puts to question the idea that time is inflexible. On Earth it was that chap Einstein who began to realise what was happening. Time, you see, moves at different speeds in different parts of the universe.”

Doctor Who and the Dinosaur Invasion, W H Allen 1976, p41-2

In another book in this series, Einstein’s theories are clearly cited as a reason for thinking time travel in the science fiction sense is feasible.
The writer who penned this story, whatever his literary merits (and they were not negligible), was in any case recognised among Who fandom as a rather poor scientist. But we have to be on our guard against taking routes which will end in a cul-de-sac. Our task is to search for the truth and so we can’t embrace ideas that are unsound merely because they make the universe more interesting (I say this with some regret). Apart from anything else it’s a waste of intellectual effort.
Time is certainly the continuation of things – as I think all of us would agree – and the perception of the universe which we have as a result of it. There is no actual evidence, on which all can be agreed, or even a hint of evidence, that it is anything else. However clever scientists may be in relation to philosophers, religious people etc, they have to admit that none of them have ever isolated and analysed a piece of “time” in a laboratory test tube, amalgamated it with any other substance in a centrifuge, bred it with something else to see how it’s affected by natural selection, put it through a particle accelerator to see how fast it can go. Therefore we should be careful about how exactly we introduce it into our calculations about the nature of the universe and the behaviour of things in it. Someone like Hawking would insist that we can’t dismiss a reversal of time’s normal direction, so that, for example, people would die before they were born, as impossible because theorists we don’t yet know enough about time. But this very lack of knowledge about time means that we have no authority to speak of it the way the Theory of Relativity does. I doubt that when the scientists come to know more about time they will find that it can defy the laws of logic, which are the reason why it cannot be reversed. No scientific research can possibly prove what is purely and simply, in all possible worlds, im-possible. Logically, what cannot be destroyed must continue to be. It is that continuation, the fact that something is enduring, which creates time. Refusal to believe time can flow backwards is not just imposing on things our subjective view of them, because of the way our minds perceive the universe (a universe where time always appears to move forwards). It is intellectually justified.
It is a scientific truth that matter cannot be created or destroyed. And if it cannot be destroyed, then logically it must continue to exist. It doesn’t necessarily exist in anything other than basic particle form (though clearly it can or I wouldn’t be sitting here at my word processor typing out this article). Although you can break it down into its constituent particles you can’t destroy the particles themselves.
If basic particles continue to exist then so must the things which are formed out of them, though not always in the same form (a collection of amino acids and proteins can come together to form a human being, and a human being will on death decompose until they break down again into their basic molecular constituents). We are therefore around to perceive the continuity. Only, of course, as long as we inhabit the kind of body that has the sense organs which enable it to do so, but if you take a materialistic non-Berkelian view of the universe then time would still be going on if there were no minds in existence at all.
A follower of a monotheistic religion, particularly if they were a Berkelian, might see continuity in terms of an omnipresent, indestructible intelligence – a God – in which all things ultimately have their origin and their being. They might perhaps
maintain that everything, including the phenomenon of existence, must be a concept in the mind because the concept of things not being so would essentially be a mental one. The mind continues in being because the idea of non-continuation is in the same category. Since we also are concepts in this universal mind – God’s mind – and we share in His perceptions, we continue to exist for the same reasons that He does.
My point is that whichever view you take of the cosmos, an idealist/religious view or a materialist/scientific one, things continue. That continuity creates time because it involves a succession of states – moments when things are in existence are followed by other moments in which they are still in existence –
and a succession of states is essentially what we mean by “time”.
They may not always be the same states, not exactly; because things can change their nature. But they will be states, and they will succeed one another, generally in a forward progression.
Time is not then a commodity, an entity, a thing; it is simply the product of a logical truth, namely that things must endure because they cannot be destroyed. Although it has a physical effect, namely the continued existence of matter and hence its ability to behave in this or that manner, it is itself an abstract quality. A property must be a property of a thing, and therefore since time isn’t a thing it cannot have properties, such as the ability to move at different rates in different parts of the universe. It can’t move in different directions, it can’t be made to stop, it can’t expand in size or become more or less widespread, it can’t be influenced by any other agency, it can’t be of different kinds in different parts of the Universe, because all those things imply malleability and malleability is a property. It is misleading for scientists describing how relativity theory works to speak of “regions of slower time”, or of time “increasing”.
Let’s suppose that as I’ve argued above, logic brings time into existence by things being indestructible. But it won’t do anything it doesn’t have a brief for, that it has no reason to do, as such would be illogical. And at this stage it has no call to make things of a particular nature, only to ensure that they continue to exist. So if logic means time is a reality, emerging inevitably from the continuity of things, that does not necessarily entail that it will have physical properties, such as flexibility. In fact, since the secondary properties of a thing must be derived from its essential nature, and time’s essential nature is merely the fact of continuity, then time cannot have any secondary qualities which are physical because a physical quality cannot originate from an abstract one. Matter cannot be created out of nothing. (At this point I ought to stress that I’m defining “physical” as anything which is made up of particles, or particles/waves, whatever the arrangement of those components which obviously differs considerably between, say, a light ray or a block of wood, a human being or a sound wave).
Regardless of how it has been represented to us the Theory of Relativity, therefore, can only be describing how we perceive time. If perceptions of time are affected by gravity then obviously this would apply to the experiment which is used to verify the theory; so naturally it will be verified. It is not correct in respect of what time exactly is, if time is anything.
Though relativity theory gives us a model of the universe which suits us, it should not be confused with the real thing. The scenario of the astronaut and his twin brother, for example, merely describes the behaviour of entities that exist within time, not time itself; namely, the effects of gravity upon living organic tissue. Nor is the perception of time, the measurement of it, which results from such behaviour the same thing as its object, any more than a photograph of a person is quantitatively or qualitatively identifiable with the person themselves.
Einstein appears to define time according to what happens in it; it is because he fails to realise that time must still be going on when nothing is happening that he is led to commit the error of talking about it as if it’s malleable. The big flaw with relativity theory is that it defines time in terms of events rather than of continuation. (In fact it is measurable by both, although continuation is the more difficult method for us to manage (how easy it might be for a God, or a being approaching Him in ability, I cannot say). Events achieve the purpose by implying a period before they occur, a period during which they are occurring, and a period after they have occurred, and we find this particularly useful in reckoning what we call time).
Because things exist in time everything they do happens in time, the action of a thing being depending on its being around to do it. We therefore make the mistake of thinking that the action and the speed at which it is performed are determined in some way by time, acting as a concrete external agency operating on the things within it, and that the reverse can also occur. In fact the action merely contributes towards our awareness, and our measurement, of time and does not interact with it in any other fashion. If it is particularly energetic it can make time appear to go faster, but not only is this something subjective to particular individuals who happen to be engaged in strenuous exercise, it is so by virtue of being a mental and physiological characteristic of human beings – of entities that exist within time – and thus more a matter of biology and psychology than of physics. It just means that if things continue existing they will also continue to perform whatever actions they are physically capable of, and because of the whole phenomenon of continuity they will also be continuing while they are acting (or the action would not logically be theirs). Time is inevitably a continuation of both existence and occurrence – within the same frame of reference, because one is dependent on the other.
One of the implications of all I have been saying is that because the theory of relativity is only describing people’s perceptions of time, or the behaviour of things within it, rather than making a statement about time itself, it is not necessarily correct in maintaining that time is not absolute. Measurements of time are not absolute because of the way our limited human nature affects our perception of events. Since logically the perception of a thing is different from the thing itself, Einstein in fact says nothing about the nature of “time” at all. As the fact of continuity is not altered by differences in the way time is perceived, time is absolute.
So there we are. The way relativity theory is described leads to serious misconceptions which badly distort our view of the cosmos we live in. The reason why this did not occur to Einstein and does not occur to his followers is because they were/are scientists and not philosophers, and the former don’t think they are answerable to the latter. The mistake they made is not allowed to seem very important because of the poor standing of philosophy in the modern world. And as long as people continue to listen to scientists rather than philosophers it will be impossible to clear up the confusion.
Many, I am sure, would ask me: “How can the confusion possibly have arisen in the first place? There isn’t one, surely. It’s a matter of plain facts. Einstein was one of the greatest scientists who ever lived, if not the greatest. You, on the other hand, are not a qualified scientist, you are a philosopher, and in any case experiments have proved Einstein’s theories to be correct. Given the choice, I know who I’d believe. Einstein must be right.” But it becomes plausible if one appreciates that from fallibility, rather than stupidity – which is hardly a characteristic of theirs – or a deliberate attempt to deceive, Einstein and other scientists have been using a kind of language peculiar to their discipline, one which is very different from that in which philosophers might speak and not always the correct one to use. Einstein talks as if the perception of time is the same thing as time itself, or effectively so, but judged from a purely philosophical viewpoint things may seem very different. Relativity means that people can age differently in one part of the universe from people in another, but this is only a difference in the behaviour of objects existing in time and not in that of time itself. There is still time whether it is absolute or not.
If I were to sum up as briefly as possible why I did not believe time travel was possible (leaving out some of the arguments set out above, pertinent as I believe them to be), I would do so as follows:
(1) If the past still exists (and exists now, or it does not exist) somewhere in the same way that an object in space does, then it is not the past, it is the present; the past ceases to exist once it happens. So it cannot be travelled to. If the past does not exist in this sense but is a real world where people think and act and make decisions, decisions which may affect what happens in the future, then again the time-traveller cannot go there; any of the decisions might mean he was never born and so couldn’t undertake his journey.
(2) The future never exists until it has ceased to be the future, becoming the present, so how can you travel from it to the past? (wd be the future from the standpoint of people in a past era, which might be hundreds of years before the time traveller was born). The future would have to be existing permanently somewhere as something analagous to an area of space, and then where would it exist?
(3) To travel into the past would imply that your birth in the future was a foreordained certainty, or you could not be alive to undertake your journey, and this would deny free will as there are any number of decisions someone could take that might prevent it. Because the future by definition never exists and is always yet to happen one can never travel from it to the present or past. Your future self does not exist to do so.
White seeks to resolve the absurd paradoxes that would arise from the ability to time travel by bringing in the parallel universe theory, in which the creation of a situation to which there are at least two possible outcomes creates also two different universes in each of which one of the outcomes is a reality, regardless of time travel. If you can time travel you can also both kill and not kill your grandfather, but because each outcome happens in a different universe there is no paradox. However, if you accept my argument that mere possibilities are not enough to create universes this is not a way out of the dilemma(12).
The misuse of quantum physics or the theory of Relativity to suggest that time travel or the manipulation of time are possible, indeed any other assertion by a scientist to that effect, arises because of the divergence that has come about between scientific and philosophical logic. There are philosophers who believe in time travel, but for all the reasons set out in this chapter I believe them to be wrong. The scientific way of looking at things has merely been accepted, rather than the philosophical way, because scientists are more popular and well-known to the general public and because philosophers by their own insistence tend to write in a very abstruse fashion which isn’t easily comprehensible to ordinary people. Philosophers have also made things worse for themselves by being over-concerned with language (even though it has proved necessary to talk about it here) and by being too narrow and elitist in their approach to their subject, not allowing outsiders – talented people who just don’t happen to have the right qualifications – to contribute to their journals.
Certainly the scientists themselves appear to believe they hold the Ark of the Covenant. Nigel Calder believes that our lack of knowledge about time has been since Einstein “a problem for physicists, not philosophers.”(13) The first thing that needs to be said about this suggestion that scientists alone can explain the Universe is that it’s very arrogant and very misleading. I hope to have already indicated by this very section of the book that philosophy can supply some of the answers Calder seeks, because it uses a different but no less valid method of reasoning.
Some scientists seem to positively prefer rubbishing philosophy, from a conscious or unconscious desire to discredit and thus neutralise anything which offers a serious challenge to their ascendancy. Hawking writes rather mockingly of the decline in its status within society:

“The people whose business it is to ask why, the philosophers, have not been able to keep up with the advance of scientific theories. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, science became too technical and mathematical for the philosophers, or anyone else except a few specialists. Philosophers reduced the scope of their inquiries so much that Wittgenstein, the most famous philosopher of this century, said: “The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language.” What a come-down from the great tradition of philosophy from Aristotle to Kant!”(14)

Not so. Philosophers are simply using different methods of enquiry, to the extent that the nature and complexity of science in the modern world doesn’t necessarily have any bearing on the relevance of their findings. Nor is it the case, as you will realise from perusing any philosophical journal, that modern philosophers are only concerned with analysing language. Merely because not all philosophers think alike, because not all people do, Wittgenstein’s approach has come to be reconsidered in recent decades. As for science proving too difficult for philosophers to understand, that applies only to the detail; the basic aspects of relativity theory or natural selection are well within the capacity of any sufficiently intelligent person. Since the finer, more complex details of a theory are derived from its basic points, if one demonstrates philosophically that the existence of God, for example, is compatible with the basic details then it must also be compatible with the finer.
In seeking to explain the universe philosophers must not be deterred by the fact that they are not scientists. If there appears to be a difference between scientific logic and philosophical logic, it is not necessarily the latter which is wrong. In fact though the difference is an illusion, because by definition there is only one kind of logic; either something goes against the laws of reason or it does not. Therefore if by logic a philosophical principle is correct, any scientific principle which contradicts it must be incorrect. If something is philosophically valid then it must be scientifically valid too because science and philosophy are merely different ways of describing the same universe, the same system, even though they may use different terminology to describe it, or confine themselves much of the time to different aspects of the system. I say again, it isn’t that the scientists are wrong about relativity, only that they exaggerate its full importance in describing things.
Any actual inaccuracy there appears to be in their statements is due merely to misuse of language. Philosophers and scientists therefore can, and should, accept that they both have crucial roles to play in understanding the universe: one looking at things from a physical, materialist point of view and the other dealing with the science of abstract qualities. They need to function as partners, not rivals. Logic must be a crucial part of science because it is essentially the use of reason, and science involves reasoning from what we observe in the world around us, directly or through experimentation. However scientific and philosophical reasoning have grown apart, which because there can only be one kind of reason, i.e. reason, means that where they differ one or the other of them must be wrong! Science has developed a language and a thinking of its own that has become myopic and very arrogant, one might say incestuous. Applying scientific logic, one may come to a particular conclusion about some aspect of the universe’s functioning; applying philosophical logic, which as I see it is simply logic without the distorting effect, one may come to a very different conclusion. Philosophical logic is simply logic without the distorting effect caused by professional peccadilloes, although it may be flawed as practised by individuals; so although I have no formal qualifications in science (or philosophy for that matter), as long as I have sufficient intelligence, am sufficiently rational in my approach, and have sufficient understanding of science from what others have discovered (assuming one can accept what they say to be true) I am qualified to pass judgement on scientific theories and may even be right where scientists are wrong. I cannot quarrel with what is fact rather than just theory, having been proven to be so by observation (I had proof of the Theory of Relativity the other day, when the figures on one of the two clocks on Sunbury-on-Thames station appeared to change fractionally before those on the other), but I can with the interpretation of the evidence.
There are reasons for thinking that certain matters should be a common concern of both scientists and philosophers. We have established that science depends on logic for its operation (it may sometimes, inevitably, be reasoning from incomplete evidence and so reaching false conclusions, which is why a theory is only that, but this is unavoidable if one is to have terms of reference). Philosophy is also concerned with logic, and since one way by which the operation of logic is demonstrated is by analysing the relationships between physical entities and their properties (as in the rhyme by A A Milne: If John were I and I were John, I wouldn’t have these trousers on {because it’s John who’s wearing them}), philosophy is led to consider questions like the age of the universe and whether it can be infinite. And such matters need to be discussed if one is trying to prove or disprove the existence of God, a long-standing concern of philosophers throughout the ages.
Einstein and his relativist followers speak of “Space/Time” being warped by gravity. Like other things about relativity theory this needs to be understood as not literally true. Again, it is the poor use of language which makes the correction necessary. If time, as we have I trust established, is not a physical entity it can have no shape and therefore can’t be curved. As for space, if it is infinite it cannot be curved, because that implies something exists other than it, to form a background against which it possesses its shape. Since there is no logical reason why space should begin or end at any particular point, it must be endless – at any rate we haven’t conclusively proved that it isn’t, and that Einstein’s use of language is therefore correct. Newton is thought of as having proved there was no absolute space, but by “absolute space” I am talking of space as in extension, rather than the qualities – gravity, light, sound, radiation etc – which exist within it, or the spatial location of a particular entity. As with time, however, Einstein is really saying not so much that space is curved but rather that what makes it up is curved. Everything in space, and no area of space is empty but is instead made up of particles, is curved by gravity. It is a series of curves – which, if space is endless, must be an infinite series of curves. The area in which those curved things exist is another matter.
So relativity doesn’t mean you can take a trip in your TARDIS to Ancient Rome or the days of the dinosaurs or, as some have suggested, use a wormhole to time travel by putting it on a fast-moving spaceship and so stretching it out to create a corridor between two points in time. Time isn’t that flexible. Nor can it permit you to fold space around itself like a piece of Origami. However those who would disagree with me on all these counts, if unable to appeal to the court of relativity, might go to that of quantum theory – which combines gravity with the laws governing the behaviour of the subatomic particles which make up all entities and which it is thought will eventually replace Einsteinian physics and subsume it in a general theory of everything – instead. Or of string theory. Both can be interpreted as demonstrating that the universe is structured in such a way as to allow distortions of normal time and space.
You may say to me, you have no evidence that time and space are only the facts of continuation and extension. But there is no evidence that they aren’t. It might help for example if a scientist could discover a small fragment of time, or something physically solid which in itself could be called space, in a test tube in their laboratory, but what is noticeable is the total failure of this to even remotely happen. Besides, whatever they might or might not be nothing can break the laws of logic, if you don’t mind me constantly repeating this essential point, so time travel is still impossible if it means you would be existing before you were born.
Time in defined by there being a past, present, and future; a then, a now, and a “will be”. But it is not of course a physical line. If in the first instance it is just the fact of continuation then it can’t in this or any second or subsequent instance be anything else. Something must be able to proceed from something else being true in the first instance, and that is not possible if the particular nature or what is true in the first instance prevents it. For example, if time is in the first instance just the fact of things continuing then it cannot move on from there to be a physical commodity (meaning a liquid, solid, gas or energy state) since it is just an abstract fact and thus has itself no physical substance out of which, according to scientific law, another physical substance has to be created in order to exist, although it may nonetheless affect the behaviour of physical objects, i.e. they continue to exist. The same applies with space being in the first instance the mere fact of extension.

In order to make the Universe more interesting we would wish not only to travel in time but also to journey faster through space. The latter would enable us to reach distant planets, and return to Earth, much faster than is possible with the current technology and so we could expect a quick return on our investment if we were seeking to colonise them or make contact with any intelligent species that might live on their surface. The whole process of space exploration would be much more satisfying, much more exciting; and with the “warp drives” possessed by fictional spaceships like the USS Enterprise, which some scientists believe could eventually developed in real life, it would be possible in the words of Captain Jean-Luc Picard to “make it so”. Warp drive seems to produce a distortion of space rather than of time, though manipulation of the latter would also produce the desired result, i.e. to cut down the distance from one point in space to another. However there does appear to be some temporal factor involved, in some cases anyway, as demonstrated in the Doctor Who story City Of Death where the explosion of the warp motors of an alien spaceship splinters the crew member operating them in time, causing him to end up as multiple personalities each inhabiting a different period of Earth’s history. Distortion of time, which is merely the fact of things continuing and thus not itself a “thing” which can be altered, would as we have seen be a non-starter. But what of space?
To answer that question we have first to establish what space is. It is simply the fact of extension, an extension produced because there is no reason why the Universe should begin or end at any particular point; if it did it would just happen to, which would be absurd, according to chance a greater role than it is likely to play in any ordered cosmos (and if the cosmos were not ordered, and thus not analysable, there could be no such thing as science). There is no evidence that it is space is anything other than this; it doesn’t need to be. It exists simply because of the lack of a logical reason why it should be finite, and so it doesn’t have a brief to be something more. Now if space as opposed to the things in it is the mere fact of extension, and time the mere fact of things continuing, neither can be distorted by anything. There is no physical quality which can be manipulated. The existence of objects within space helps distance to be reckoned by the human mind, and those objects can only have extension because space itself does, but they must not be confused with space itself.
Warp drive is therefore unfeasible because space is not a “thing” that can have properties such as malleability, and, being infinite and universal, does not exist against a background in relation to which it can have a shape such as it may acquire by being warped. The latter effect cannot be produced either by warp motors or by black holes and wormholes, another means by which it is thought by scientists to be possible. This restricts the ability to travel in space without prohibitively long journeys.
Parsons and others nonetheless suggest ways in which the problem can be overcome. “Since you can’t travel faster than the speed of light, physicist Dr Miguel Alcubierre proposes we forget trying to move our spacecraft through space and instead try to bend the space around it to form a kind of wave that sweeps it along to its destination. This is done by surrounding it by with a bubble of a rare substance called exotic matter which has negative pressure and, in some forms, negative mass. The exotic matter causes the space in front of the craft to shrink rapidly (making use of relativity theory) while the space behind it expands at exactly the same rate, creating the wave effect.”(15) But the difficulty is, how can any part of space shrink relative to the rest, if space is (a) primarily extension, (b) infinite, and (c) quantitatively identifiable only with itself? Some think that there can be dimensional transcendentalism, as seen in Dr Who’s TARDIS, and that this can be used to achieve faster-than-light travel. According to Dr Chris Van Den Broeck exotic matter, by shrinking the space around a spacecraft, effectively makes it bigger inside than out – the same applying, it seems to all the objects within that space.(16) This distortion of things means, I take it, that the craft is enabled effectively to cover much greater distances. However, although I confess I don’t fully understand the science Van den Broeck admits that the laws of physics as currently understand do not allow one to break the local speed of light within a given region of space. In any case, no part of space can move with respect to the rest because space is indivisible. Then there is the question of whether dimensional transcendentality is possible in any case.
Parsons shows us how Van den Broeck’s idea works: “imagine a two-dimensional rubber sheet with a “lobe” attached to it. The lobe looks rather like a balloon, with a narrow “throat” connecting it to the rubber sheet. Now picture an ant crawling on the surface of the sheet. Where the sheet joins the throat, the ant finds a hole with a very small circumference. But if it crawls through the hole and along the throat it emerges into the lobe, a big bubble with a huge surface area. Essentially the ant has encountered a large area that’s enclosed by a very small circumference. Now scale all that up a dimension, so the 2D sheet now becomes 3D space. “Replace the circumference of the throat by surface area, and the surface area of the bubble by volume,” says Van Den Broeck. “What you then get is a large volume with a small surface area.”(17)
It seems we are extrapolating from one dimension to another, forgetting that what applies with one will not necessarily apply to both. The total area of an internal space may be greater than that of the substance enclosing it, if the latter is spread very thinly. But the question is one of extent, and of spatial location, rather than area or mass or volume. The substance will still be the perimeter enclosing the space. For the space to be bigger than it would mean that it wasn’t. And it either is or isn’t the enclosing agency, either is or is not in the spatial position where it would have to be to perform that function. It can’t be both, and the laws of logic may not be infringed. So it is doubtful if anything, whether a TARDIS or the universe in general, could be dimensionally transcendental. The same obstacle also prevents the existence of wormholes allowing shortcuts to be taken between points in space that would otherwise be too far apart for one to be reached from the other.
The bunching/distorting of space that occurs through the operation of a wormhole or when a wormhole is created cannot be a property of space itself as any distortion or other alteration in the form of space implies the assumption of a certain shape and thus a background against which that shape is defined – in other words, the existence of a realm other than space, which can’t exist because there is no reason why space should begin or end at any one point, in whatever direction. Space can’t be bunched up or elongated as wormholes are supposed to allow it to do. It can’t contract or fold in on itself (as in the Dr Who stories Warrior’s Gate and Castrovalva) as that implies shape and thus separateness from other things (to “fold in on itself” implies a finite extent relative to some other quantity).
Space can’t behave differently in one part of the Universe from how it behaves in another, because that would be a property and a property can only be a property of a thing – and space isn’t a “thing” but rather the fact of extension. We could only distort the things in space, from the hydrogen atoms which fill it and ensure it is not a true vacuum to whole planets and galaxies. Krauss uses relativity theory to claim spatial distortion is possible. “Because light is the thread that weaves together space and time, the trajectories of light rays give us a map of spacetime just as surely as warp and weft threads elucidate the patterns of a tapestry.”(18)“Curved space opens up a whole universe of possibilities. One can do many things on a curved manifold which are impossible on a flat one. For example it is possible to keep travelling in the same direction and yet return to where you began – people who travel around the world do it all the time…the curvature of spacetime is determined by the distribution of matter in the universe, but this distribution is in turn governed by the curvature of space. It is like the chicken and the egg. Which was there first? Matter acts as the source of curvature, which in turn determines how matter evolves, which in turn alters the curvature, and so on.”(19)
But although gravity bends things in space it cannot bend space itself. Again, we must distinguish properly between space itself and the things in it. Since space is the mere fact of extension, and has in effect no existence physically or as a form of energy, it is irredeemably separate from the things in it, and cannot be bent by gravity or indeed anything. Even if the universe or a part of it had no light there would still be extension. A universe with no physical objects in it (and thus no light or gravity) would continue to exist as an area of space. We would not be able to reckon distance because we can only do that using points of reference – objects – and without light we could not see them, but the distance would still be there.
The belief of those who maintain that relativity can distort space and time so that it is possible to travel in them in ways other than one normally does appears to be that since time and space are connected, if relativity warps one then it must warp the other. But since the TOR can’t warp time the idea that by doing so it can also warp space falls flat, and vice versa. It can only be true that the TOR bends space/time metaphorically (i.e. if we are consciously referring to the things existing and the events happening in them, rather than space and time themselves, as we do when we say “the world has gone mad” (meaning that the people in it are behaving stupidly and not the physical structure of the Earth)). In one sense (other than in their non-malleability) time and space are united because everything must ultimately have the same cause. We can see how they are connected by reflecting that if we proceed from one point to another it implies both time – then I was there, now I am here – and space by the same token, because during time’s passage I have moved from one position to another, the element of progression implying a temporal value as well. So it can be said that time and space are both effectively part of the same entity. But so too are my teeth and my foot and if I stub my toe it does not mean that I get a toothache. It is not a foregone conclusion that because quantities X and Y share property B they should also share property C. So it doesn’t follow that time and space should both be malleable any more than that they should both be pink. They are linked in the general sense I have described above, and have in common the fact of the way in which they are perceived being changeable (because of the operation of relativity); but that’s all.
Suppose, however, that over a period of time we do succeed in perfecting long-distance space travel, at least. What benefits would this bring us? The practical and other issues involved in our colonising alien planets have been or will be discussed elsewhere in this book. The other reason why we want to explore the universe is the possibility we may meet alien civilisations, more advanced than and fascinatingly different from our own, from whom we may benefit enormously in terms of knowledge and practical assistance. There is no proof that I can see for the non-existence of these beings, either theologically or scientifically. A lot depends on whether there is a creative intelligence, because such a being might for one reason or another have decided to confine life to Earth. But we have no proof that He did; certainly there’s no passage in the Bible which categorically says so. This might mean that having given us free will and the ability to experience intellectual pleasure, he wanted us to find out the truth for ourselves, whatever it might be, in the spirit of enquiry (though if intelligent life is for whatever reason rare we could spend a very long time searching for it without result, and perhaps never, on our current plane of existence, find it – which would make this
munificence a bit pointless). Or it might mean there aren’t any aliens; it’s still not something we can be sure of. Most Christians nowadays would probably describe themselves as open-minded on the subject. It’s true that Man is supposed to be unique in God’s Creation, but the definition of human could be regarded as applying to any sentient and reasoning life form, wherever it was to be found and even if it were descended from an insect or reptile rather than an ape, or not organic at all. In addition, the existence of a multitude of different intelligent (as well as, presumably, non-intelligent) species throughout the cosmos could be seen as a further, and necessary, sign of the greatness and wonder of the Creator, an extension of the diversity seen here on Earth.
If one eliminates God from the picture and looks at the matter from a purely scientific point of view, the probability of there being intelligent aliens is high, given the huge size of the Universe (and the possibility it may have no limit at all). This would compensate for the conditions needed for sentient life being very finely tuned, and thus rare – although such need not be a problem in any case if it’s possible for there to be intelligent life forms that don’t function in the organic way with which we’re familiar, i.e. they’re composed of silicon or pure energy, and this remains an open question. However if life does have to be basically organic in composition, and the right conditions for it are rare, then although there could be an infinite number of intelligent species in a very big Universe each might never encounter any of the others, even if it was using advanced methods of space travel.
We’re also assuming the aliens won’t behave towards us in ways that are actually harmful; that they’re benevolent. There is no particular reason why they should not be, but nor is there any reason why they should, given that their psychology could be vastly different from ours. If sentient and sapient they are presumably capable of acting morally, but that doesn’t mean they will, especially if the example of our own species is considered. In Earth history, when different races encountered each other, the result, after an initial period when the dominant emotion was probably curiosity at the simple fact of having encountered something different from oneself, was too often hatred and prejudice, manifested in war, slavery and even genocide. If we did not ourselves behave in this way towards the aliens, they might towards us, so that the problems which have been encountered in racial and international relations on this world might be transferred, disastrously, to a galactic scale. Those problems were never avoided because some people, at least, on each side tried to be moderate and reasonable.
In any case, unless the aliens are the equivalent of God, in which case UFO-lovers should be Christians, they may not save us – or themselves, if the same problems come to threaten them, assuming they don’t already do so – from the grave difficulties the human race currently faces. Even assuming they can, we have so far not discovered them (and time is running out). Nor do they appear to have discovered us – else why would they not land, unless they were unable to communicate with us or considered the human race beneath them (either of which would render them useless to us). Conspiracy theories abound which maintain that aliens have landed but been kidnapped by agents of the Establishment in order to avoid the more negative implications of their existence being revealed – the culture shock, the mass panic - and so that their technology can be requisitioned for military purposes. If these theories are true then our aliens, despite their supposed awesome powers, would seem to be rather ineffective, for they are unable to prevent these kidnappings and appear to be put off by them. A direct landing in Trafalgar Square or Central Park would be rather difficult to cover up (the kidnappings imply that the UFOs are able to reach the surface without being shot down by the military in mistake for hostile enemy aircraft). It is rather strange that the aliens don’t object to the abductions or to the theft of their property (in which respect they can’t be like the Daleks or Klingons of fiction who would probably occupy or devastate large areas of the planet in retaliation); in the human world, at least, such behaviour would cause a serious diplomatic incident. It rather suggests they have a callous attitude to their own kind, in which case why should they be too concerned about our welfare, and for them to be such uncaring creatures doesn’t incline us to think that the reason for their visits – for they must have some purpose in coming here – is benign. Similarly sinister is the theory, beloved in one form or another by the X-Files, that the aliens are actively colluding with Earth governments, or factions within them, and intelligence agencies in what is going on, allowing scientists to take alien genetic material and inject it into unwilling or unwitting human subjects as part of some dubious experiment. Perhaps the aliens themselves have factions, some of whom don’t actually approve of all this, but in that case why haven’t one or two, at least, of the good guys made contact with a sufficient number of humans (as opposed to the lone individual who can easily be dismissed as crazy) in a bid to warn people? If they cared that much about the matter they would make the attempt even if language difficulties prevented them being properly understood. Or maybe they are simply ineffectual.
Alien beings are often claimed to have carried out abductions (of humans) themselves, for the purposes of study or of genetic experimentation. White considers this unlikely because “any race advanced enough to manipulate space-time and travel across the galaxy would not need to conduct physical examinations or to physically extract genetic material…putting aside the argument that any race so advanced would probably consider such behaviour immoral…”(20) This isn’t really the objection, as I see it. Apart from the fact that you can’t manipulate space-time, the science of genetics and that of clairvoyance (in some form), which the aliens would presumably be using to remote-scan human bodies, may nonetheless be different in nature, entailing that the problems encountered in attempting each are also different and that a civilisation could have made greater progress with one than with the other. As for the belief that they would be ethically repelled by the whole idea in any case, I don’t see why mental and technical advance should necessarily be accompanied by moral development, so White’s supposition may be wishful thinking. If the aliens have been experimenting on humans without their consent, then that says something rather disturbing about them.
Not all the alleged cases of alien abduction have been unpleasant for the victim. It’s impossible to prove but I suspect they, like all other close encounters, of whatever kind, with visiting aliens are a delusion arising from the need in a secular, supposedly post-Christian society to have a substitute for God; something which like Him is powerful and mysterious and will eventually bring enormous benefits to Mankind. In this they fall down; however clever and advanced the aliens might be, if they are not themselves the equivalent of God then one still has to ask who created them. Certainly, though they may exist they don’t seem able to help us right now and the seriousness of our current problems suggests those hazards will overwhelm us before they are.
It’s also worth considering that if the aliens have powers greater than ours, we could not share those powers unless we became like them (because obviously they must be able to avoid misusing them, which we given our flawed nature are probably not) and therefore we would be at a disadvantage if they became hostile towards us. “Powers greater than ours” would presumably be things like telepathy (the ability to read another intelligent being’s thoughts) and telekinesis (the ability to affect the behaviour of matter and energy, of the physical world, by one’s mind). It’s worth considering what the consequences would be if these faculties, which might be thought of as opening up a new world, were to be in our possession. We cannot speak for aliens, but it’s clear that were humans to have them it would lead to trouble.
A society which had telepathy could not lie. This means that things could never be kept secret from those people who it might not be wise to supply with the information, depending perhaps on the timing and circumstances (some people one wouldn’t trust it with at all). We would have to lock up/kill all the bad people because they would have become more dangerous! This has alarming implications for civil liberties, not least because it is difficult to arrive at a just and fair definition of what is “bad” – it couldn’t just be those who were recognised as having committed what was legally a crime. If, to limit the dangers, telepathy were restricted to a very small group of people (which would have to include the government, since a government’s first instinct is to maintain control and preserve order) it would give those people an unfair advantage over everyone else, probably resulting in them establishing autocratic rule.
There would be no privacy, no secrets; information could be learned that might have unfortunate consequences, causing someone to act angrily and aggressively, before the dispute that led to the situation could be resolved. The effect could be to make human affairs more confrontational and even violent. And people would learn upsetting things before they could be properly prepared for them, resulting in all manner of psychological harm. An unpleasant thought could be deliberately implanted in someone’s mind, against their will, if the technology works that way.
Telekinesis would also raise the stakes to an unacceptable level. The result would be perpetual chaos and destruction. People would live in fear, either of what others could do to them or what they themselves could do. They would be too easily tempted to destroy what they hated or simply did not like, especially if they were in an angry state of mind. It is best if things are not done too easily, as they would be with telekinesis, because apart from the loss of initiative, and opportunity to build physical strength and moral fibre, if tasks could be performed simply by thinking about them a given action may turn out once committed to be not quite as beneficial as it seemed beforehand.
There would of course be some attempt to legislate against misuse of telepathy or telekinesis; but, as seen, the former could be dangerous even if one were not committing what would normally be regarded as a criminal act, so we’d have to give up the power altogether if we wanted to make ourselves safe (I’m not clear as to how it could be acquired or lost). If the telekinesis was powerful enough, extending to the ability of causing nuclear reactors to malfunction or a lot of less catastrophic but equally nasty things, then any criminal with the power would be able to flout the laws unless they could be overcome by a devastating psychic battle which might lay waste the combatants’ environment. Since they would presumably still be subject to physical harm or restraint they’d have every incentive to make a fight of it, especially since actual killing might be the only way to make a telekinetic criminal permanently safe or subdue them in the first place (if the powers were genetically derived they could be removed using gene therapy, but you’d first have to get the subject where you wanted them).
If any being not only possesses paranormal powers but also the ability to invariably use them wisely, that being must be God or His equivalent; almost by definition anything less than that, anything human, is flawed. For such lesser beings any supernatural ability, whatever form it took, would be difficult to control; people could use it to commit crimes unless it were unfairly restricted to a few, who could then use it to control everyone else unless they too suffered from its harmful consequences. It would be catastrophic unless Man’s psychology was very different from what it was; in other words, was something we cannot imagine. Yet at the same time as you feared their implications, you would be experiencing a strong temptation to use your super powers because of the benefits it might bring. If there were some way of blocking it, you would always be tempted to remove the block.
Also not without its hazards (although in some ways less dangerous to anyone other than oneself, because useless) is the facility of transmutation – shape-shifting. I doubt if it’s what it’s cracked up to be. You could change yourself into another person (that is, assume their physical characteristics), but if too many people did this, whatever the reason in each person’s case, it might cause untold confusion. If you changed into some species of animal you would presumably lose your human consciousness because the structure of your brain would be such as to be incapable of accommodating it (the genetic/molecular change would have to be complete or one part of the resulting organism would be incompatible with another and it wouldn’t be able to function properly). For one thing, you then wouldn’t be able to change back into a human – you would go on behaving as a bird, a mouse, a whale or whatever it was you’d changed into would behave.
If you’d changed yourself for a specific reason, e.g. you wanted to spy on someone without their suspecting, you’d automatically forget what that reason had been. Nor is it much cop being a bird if some sportsman decides to take a pot shot at you, or a mouse if you’re grabbed by a cat. Real mice or real birds have to put up with these hazards as part of the job, but to a human they don’t seem worth it if they can be avoided. The problems would be even more severe – or at any rate it is much more difficult to say what might happen – if you became an inanimate object.
We have no idea what form an intelligent alien being, if it were proved conclusively to be that, would take. But aliens, to be sufficiently interesting to us, to not make a nonsense of the whole thing if the aim is to have a wonderful diversity, would have to be so different that we couldn’t communicate with them or would experience severe difficulties in doing so because of the dissimilarity between the ways their minds and bodies, and ours, functioned. It is so almost by definition. A reptile or insect, for example, would think as a reptile/insect would, however evolved. A silicon life form, or a being made out of pure energy, would be even more incomprehensible in its culture and speech. The bafflement would of course be mutual. And where we cannot conceive how an alien thinks – any alien, if it is significantly different from our own species – we cannot interact with it.
There would have to be some common ground on which we and the aliens could debate but if there wasn’t, they would either avoid us or be led to conduct their business with us by aggression. The implications if there were to be a serious misunderstanding, and we were thought to have acted towards them in a hostile fashion, or vice versa would be utterly disastrous on a galactic scale.
Even if it was possible, in physical and psychological terms, to master an alien language and understand an alien culture the time, expense, and practical difficulty involved in doing so would be prohibitive. The problem is particularly daunting when the diverse nations and races of Earth itself often do not understand each other’s language or culture; and when that knowledge is not necessarily sufficient to prevent differences still arising and ultimately leading to war. Although they may not be inevitable, wars can come about simply because a conflict of interest has developed between two different powers. If this is true on Earth it will also be true on a cosmic level. Even if the aliens were very similar to Earth humans with, for example, the same ethnic groups there would still be that many more people to understand and deal with.
In the absence of conclusive evidence either way, I do not want to suggest that aliens definitely don’t exist or that it would inevitably be disastrous if they did. Nevertheless I often find myself inclined to think that if that if there is any underlying controlling factor that prevents the universe from disintegrating due to the conflicts between those who inhabit it, there will be only one planet with an intelligent life form on it. That planet merely happens to be Earth (because it’s me who’s writing this piece); why this should be so is the same question as “why am I me and not anyone else”. It is probably unanswerable. But any other life form who had found themselves in our unique position would be asking it; there need not be any arrogance involved. The situation merely happens to be fortuitous for us.
If I were forced to stake my life on it my opinion would be that we could not possibly identity with an intelligent life form that was not at least mammalian in its biology and way of thinking. Because of this and because of the attendant danger of wars we would have to be forever apart from it, unable to interact closely with it, which would be in the first place a depressing, unsatisfactory, rather pointless scenario.
Even if we don’t meet any aliens, space travel may nevertheless still seem exciting and also practically useful to us. We might colonise other planets, which among other things would help us to solve the problem of overcrowding here on Earth. Unfortunately, the other planets of our solar system and their moons are to be frank little more than unappetising chunks of rock. There is no indication that any life exists on them. So far the planets which have been discovered in other solar systems have proved even less appealing. There may nonetheless be worlds where life exists, and which are habitable by Man, but if there are they must be so far away as to be inaccessible at present. The lack of a fast enough means of propulsion places them beyond our reach unless astronauts are prepared to travel for many decades, centuries even, in suspended animation – and the technology for that has not been developed either. We cannot say at present whether such technical advances are even possible, let alone how long they would take to accomplish. The likelihood is that the hazards we face here on Earth will overwhelm us long before we know. In the case of astronauts going on a deep-space mission in suspended animation (which would have to have the effect of suspending the ageing process), in search of something which might not exist, the venture itself presupposes a disaster so severe as to be about to destroy humanity or at any rate its quality of life unless we moved to a new home, as otherwise it would not be attempted.
We could “terraform” a planet in our (or perhaps in another) solar system, transforming its atmosphere and topography (both would have to be changed to produce the desired result) into something like that of Earth’s, but such a huge operation would take some considerable time and be very expensive. If we could finance and carry it out successfully within a reasonably short period, we could solve all our problems here on Earth and would not need to be thinking about colonizing other planets! Since we are talking about the shaping of a planet, including its climate and weather systems, into a form which is entirely suitable for us, where no natural disasters occur that are serious enough to threaten life or the quality of it on a big scale, why don’t we use the technology required to do the same on Earth here and now? The problem is that such technology is a long way off and the disintegration of the Earth’s ecosystem a lot more advanced than the process necessary to develop it. We might, as suggested again in a later chapter, be emigrating to a larger planet, or generally spreading ourselves as much as possible, to avoid the effects of overcrowding or the destructive effects in a relatively small world of political conflict. But terraforming would make other worlds boringly similar to Earth and thus reduce much of the appeal of space exploration. And yet it might prove to be necessary, unless other measures were implemented that could be prohibitively undesirable. It is the particular physical/environmental circumstances prevailing on this planet, and the interaction between them, between the climate and ecology it possesses, that explain why we have the physiognomy we do or indeed exist at all. Other conditions either could not support life or would produce life forms, intelligent or otherwise, which were vastly different from ourselves. Unless we wish to change our physical bodies and metabolisms drastically we could not exist on a planet that had a green sky, or seas of glass, or forests of metal, without cumbersome and oppressive protective clothing, which would always diminish our enjoyment of it. We may not be willing to make those changes.
If the main obstacle is distance teleportation, if perfected, could be used to solve it, permitting faster travel both to other planets and between different places on Earth. It may well be possible; I certainly have always found it conceivable. In 1993 a team of researchers pointed out that you didn’t actually need to know the complete state of every subatomic particle of an object in order to be able to teleport it, as had previously been thought and would have made the process virtually impossible. But you would still need to transmit an enormous amount of data to teleport something like a human being, and is thought the transmission would take a vast amount of time, something like 4,000 times the age of the Universe {though that might depend on where you wanted to go}(21). Even if that time were cut drastically you would still need, if you were travelling to, say, a planet in another solar system, to place a receiver at the destination unless you wanted the person’s atoms to go on journeying endlessly through space. This would involve a voyage by “conventional” spacecraft, which might take hundreds of years and would thus have to be a labour of love. It might even be said to defeat the objective; you might, for example, set up a colony on the planet instead.
We ought to consider here the implications if teleportation were to be perfected as a means of travel on Earth itself, where the problems of distance would be less of an obstacle. Undoubtedly one’s business and other affairs could be conducted much more speedily and efficiently, because you wouldn’t have to wait for a bus, train, plane or taxi, or walk long distances if none of those methods of transport were available, to get where you wanted to go. Yet again though the minuses are at least in proportion to the pluses and may even outnumber them. If teleportation, because it was a fast and convenient method of travel, became popular then there would be thousands, if not millions, of people using it each day, travelling one presumes across national borders as well as within their home countries. Although proper regulations would no doubt be introduced, and laws relating to passports and visas apply, it does seem that for customs to keep control of all these people’s movements, for the purpose of preventing illegal immigration, apprehending criminals etc, would be impossible. Any major failure of the system might have consequences the thought of which would result in nightmares for those entrusted with maintaining law and order and avoiding overpopulation and its dangers nightmares. The system could easily be overstrained if, while others used the new teleportation networks, a significant number continued to prefer conventional means of transport which would still have to be policed. However wonderful teleportation might seem to businesspeople and others it will be rather less so when introduced into the crowded, complicated and often dysfunctional world that is twenty-first century society.
Its other hazards are more to do with psychology and sociology. We would lose the joy of travel, the sense of adventure that comes with it, if it was simply a matter of stepping into a cubicle in London, pressing a button, and arriving almost instantaneously in a similar cubicle in New York or Sydney or Tokyo. And along with virtual reality, computers and the Internet teleportation would assist that process of atrophy to which the human race has begun to be subjected in an environment where many of the tasks that hitherto required sustained physical effort on one’s parts are now performed by machinery, operating automatically or at the mere touch of a button. Along with the spirit of adventure initiative (though it amounts to much the same thing) and the opportunity for healthy physical exercise would also be squandered for the sake of making life easier. Nor are even these things the end of the matter as far as the harmful cultural consequences of teleportation are concerned; it goes much deeper than that. Human affairs are essentially about manipulation and manoeuvring. There is nothing necessarily wicked or unethical about this; it is what makes us such a fascinating species. Because we are all different individuals each with their own way of thinking, our agendas are never entirely the same, and we are also very conscious of each others’ faults and limitations, even where we know no evil is being planned (though where there is evil, it makes the situation much worse). Before a meeting with another person or persons, where we will be talking matters, important matters, over which we may disagree with them, we need time to think how best to put our case, how to speak with tact on sensitive matters, how to respond to this or that awkward question. This is so in the home, in politics, at the workplace and even, I am sure, in churches. It is so everywhere. Official meetings would normally be planned in advance anyway so that everyone had time to consider the matters that needed to be discussed, but a lot of very important meetings are actually informal and ad hoc. We often don’t want a particular person to show their face until we have rehearsed how we are going to bring up a particular matter or how to reply if it is they who raise it. If people flit about much more easily between A and B because of teleportation this might not be possible. We’d have to think on our feet a lot more and thus be more likely to make the wrong move, say the wrong thing. Without so many opportunities to plan ahead, and in a world that’s increasingly busy and fast-paced as it is, there is a risk that human affairs in all walks of life could become more aggressive and confrontational, especially when much is considered to be at stake.
This section wouldn’t be complete without mentioning the physical dangers that are supposed to attend upon using a teleportation system. We’ve probably all been influenced in our thinking on this by the film The Fly (both the original and the 1980s remakes), where a scientist builds a matter transmitter and tests it on himself unaware that a bluebottle has flown into it at the same time. Result: his atoms and the fly’s become mixed up, with grotesque consequences. In the 1958 original – hammy compared to the later versions, but still with some genuinely horrific moments – we are presented with a man who has a fly’s (man-sized) head and hand and a fly which has a man’s (fly-sized) head and hand. This seems strange given that the machine’s brief is to transmit objects and not to change their size or otherwise alter them; how does it do it, anyway? In the 1986 film the fly and the human merge on a genetic level, the scientist undergoing a gradual transformation, from having appeared normal when he stepped from the machine, to eventually stabilise as a hybrid between the two, which seems a lot more conceivable although it still raises the question of whether the fly’s consciousness (if it has one) inhabits the hybrid’s brain jointly with the human’s. This last is also raised in the original where the different consciousnesses appear to be divided roughly between the two creatures (or duplicated?); the human-headed fly behaves like a fly, among other things blundering into a spider’s web, but can speak, while the fly-headed human starts with what is evidently a human brain but later says “strange things” to him, as if there is an insect part of his mind that’s becoming dominant (he seems to have difficulty controlling his fly hand, suggesting the brain is sending signals to it he has no control over).
Whether we’d get either of these two scenarios if something did go seriously pear-shaped is a moot point; that of the first film is unlikely, that of the second perhaps less so. It certainly seems possible that human and animal genetic material could become mixed and the possibility of this happening is in itself disturbing particularly when we don’t know what the exact consequences would be. It’s quite likely an insect or small mammal could get into a teleportation cubicle without anyone noticing (there would be safeguards against such things of course, but they’d never be 100% effective). An evil person could even cause such a thing to happen deliberately to see what the result would be (the plot of one of the original Fly films, dreadful as it was, back in 1965). The other gruesome possibility that comes to mind, one that may be more plausible, has the transmitted person’s atoms failing to arrive at the other end – as happens with the cat on whom the scientist on the 1958 film initially experiments. A rather distressing, for animal lovers, scene results where the scientist finds himself listening to the pathetic cries of the unfortunate moggy as a “stream of cat atoms” streak through the ether with him having no power to stop them; presumably the poor animal will remain in this state eternally, although how it can call out isn’t apparent since in its incorporeal form it has no vocal chords with which to do so. Obviously nasty accidents can occur with motor cars, planes, trains and other conventional forms of transport, but we know they are necessary in order to get about in the modern world, if nothing else is, and besides the results of car and train crashes, horrendous though they may often be, are more familiar. We accept them as a necessary risk. It’s not the certainty that things will sometimes go wrong which is going to put people off using teleporters in the first place; it’s the form the consequences will take when they do, and moreover they may happen to oneself and not someone else. A trade-off takes place in the human mind by which the undoubted advantages of teleportation are forsaken in preference for something which is less efficient but whose attendant risks seem of a more acceptable nature (whether being horribly burnt in a car crash, regardless of whether or not one survives, is better than being amalgamated with a creepy-crawly is at least a moot point).
It’s possible, I guess, that a life form could evolve the ability to teleport itself naturally. This would make it even more difficult for the authorities to track down criminals and illegal migrants (we would need to be able to monitor someone’s movements anyway in some circumstances, if we needed to get hold of them urgently but weren’t quite sure where they were), and there would still be the dangers of loss of initiative and mental and physical fitness.
The Fly films and their sequels raise important questions about the nature of the soul and of individuality (as does Star Trek ¬– it will be recalled that Dr McCoy was never entirely happy about using the Enterprise’s transporter beam, fearing that it was destroying his immortal soul). For a Christian immortality depends upon God’s ability to reconstruct the soul and body following whatever, in each person’s case, might be said to constitute death – teleportation could very well amount to it, temporarily, because while a person was physically dematerialized they could neither be aware, not having a brain to think with, nor function biologically in the normal sense. But even Christians don’t like to die before their time, while to someone who was not religious the consequences of failing to be rematerialized at your destination would be irreversible and thus even more awful. Since we don’t yet know whether a teleporter could transmit minds – which can be regarded as roughly the equivalent of electrical impulses – as well as physical objects, it could be that teleportation would sever the mind and body and result effectively in death (certainly, life in the same fashion and on the same plane as it is normally lived would cease), the subject arriving at the reception point as a corpse. Before the first human was transmitted experiments would first have to be carried out on animals, which if the vociferous objections sure to be met with from the animal rights lobby were ignored would still leave us with the question of whether animals had minds or souls in any case – if they didn’t, the results of the experiments could not be reliable. For myself I see no problem with identifying the mind, along with the emotions, as equivalent to “soul” nor, if a person were reconstructed at the end of their journey exactly as they were when they set out, is there any reason to think they are not immortal. What happens to them when they arrive is simply a return to normal physical, earthly existence following a brief interruption, and is obviously different from reconstruction in what will hopefully be a blissful (and permanent) afterlife by a supernatural creative intelligence. Though the next world will not function on quite the same lines as this one, those religions which believe in afterlives generally see them in terms of a restoration of the physical body, and not as a collection of disembodied minds.
The real problem with teleportation is (a) whether it would work in the first place and (b) the attendant risks and their somewhat off-putting nature. Apart from anything else it would seem to involve, according to Parsons, the annihilation and subsequent replacement of each of the particles that make up a person. There’s something decidedly unwelcome about this; I wouldn’t like to be teleported if this was what happened, because I’d rather think I was the same person all the time! So, I imagine, would you. It’s another reason why teleportation probably won’t find many takers. It might be possible to present the problem as not being one if you still retained your memories and thus had the same personal identity; but they would only be copies of those memories. You still wouldn’t quite be you, and the thought would I suspect be sufficient to deter those people intelligent enough to understand what the process involved (it might be wrong to try to persuade them to use it if they didn’t have that discernment). I expect that even if you were in every respect the same person as before you stepped into the teleporter booth, the mere idea that you weren’t, however unfounded, could scupper the chances of public acceptance. There’s another objection too; isn’t it the case that by definition, a memory can only be a memory of something that actually happened to the person who has it, not copied from it in the same way that one reproduces a photographic image or a sound recording. If that’s the case, and teleportation really does entail this process of annihilation and replacement, then going by the laws of logic teleportation isn’t possible anyway, let alone repugnant or otherwise in its effects. (The question of how it bears on such things as personal identity and the “soul” would of course justify an article in its own right).
Even if it didn’t depend on teleportation, any new means of travel would have to be faster than existing ones in order to have an advantage over them and so justify itself. And this would make it especially dangerous if anything went wrong, especially when the problem of congestion wouldn’t go away. It never does with new methods of travel, unless we are to restrict its use to a small elite. If you invented aerial cars in order to avoid traffic jams, you might not still get them (only they’d be twenty feet off the ground) – the vehicles would be moving about the much wider area of the sky instead of confined to a relatively narrow strip of roadway, and by that same token there might seem to be less scope for accidents. But controlling this vastly increased amount of aerial traffic, which would still have to be regulated in some way, would be a nightmare. And you could still get some very nasty pile-ups if people weren’t looking where they were going.
If ultimately it is not possible, for some reason, to transmit people safely from one point in the universe to another by breaking them down into their constituent atoms, that could be viewed as a scientific not a logical impossibility. Although, since logic ultimately determines what can and cannot happen in the Universe, it can be called a logical impossibility as well; ultimately it all boils down to whether one particle/wave can interact with another particle/wave in a certain fashion and if it cannot, then logically it cannot be used to produce the result one wants, if the interaction has been found to be a necessary prerequisite for doing so. The fact is that because of the complexities, scientifically speaking, of the matter we do not know whether a given future technology would be ruled out by logic in this way.
There are some things, such as the matter transporter seen in Star Trek and other fictional worlds, which one can’t regard at the moment as necessarily impossible; they may be, but that will be for the future to discover. There is nothing in them which, at the moment, appears to me to defy the laws of logic. It is quite possible, therefore, that although the technology is beyond our capability at present they may become realities in a couple of hundred years’ time, say, or perhaps sooner, especially given the relative swiftness of technological and scientific progress over just the past three centuries. But the dilemmas caused by other scientific advances which are already much more noticeable, plus our social and political problems, will have overwhelmed us long before that time.

(1) Michael White, The Science of the X-Files: The Truth, Legend books 1996, p96
(2) Paul Parsons, The Science of Doctor Who, Icon Books 2007 p292-300
(3) ditto
(4) ditto
(5) Parsons, p314-15
(6) Lawrence M Krauss, The Physics of Star Trek, Basic Books 1995, p152
(7) Parsons, p295
(8) Parsons, p40
(9) Parsons, p43
(10) Parsons p44-45
(11) Nigel Calder, Einstein’s Universe, BBC 1979, p101
(12) White, p161
(13) Calder, p147
(14) Hawking, p175
(15) Parsons, p229-232
(16) Parsons p231
(17) Parsons, p15-20
(18) Krauss, p31
(19) Krauss, p34
(20) White, p20
(21) Parsons, p21-26


4
Science: Pandora’s Box?
So much for what we can't do. With those things which it seems we will be able to do, though they may not be fully possible at present, the problem lies in the dangerous consequences they may have. It is often the case with progress that its harmful effects balance the good ones. Technology can allow things to be done more efficiently but also dehumanize or destroy initiative. Science causes problems simply by enabling people to live longer and protect themselves more effectively against illness and disease, which adds to overpopulation. Machines and techniques are invented which, as they are perfected, become potentially more dangerous in the hands of criminals, terrorists or aggressive nation states (here computers present a particular problem). Society can become dangerously reliant on a new – but in the nature of things always imperfect - technology, particularly if it has a strong appeal to those who like to think and to show to others that because they can master it they are modern and “with it”, as well as competent. Lastly, progress can create agonizing dilemmas of the sort which were never encountered in the past, when the techniques which are proving so controversial simply weren’t possible.
A view often expressed is that Man’s scientific abilities have outstripped his moral development, with the result that we are creating technology that is ever more destructive before we have evolved the wisdom to use it sensibly, and that is the cause of many of our problems. This may be true, but one could put things somewhat differently – although at present our technological development is certainly outstripping our intellectual development, with the result that we may not see the wisdom of curbing the former when we need to. It isn’t necessarily the morality of society - not all of society, at any rate, since whatever our faults not everyone is like the Nazis – which is the problem. It’s rather that the inherent weaknesses within both the general world we live in and our own human nature, which can’t entirely be eliminated no matter how hard we try, both impel us to make scientific and technological progress and result in us suffering from their effects. We don’t know just how much, or what, will be possible in the future or why someone might want to do it but it’s a pretty safe bet that some things would not be attempted anyway.
I don’t know if ultimately a way could be found to breed an army of giant spiders, nor what the point of doing so might be, but it’s virtually certain no-one, probably not even a madman, would try it; people don’t like spiders. There remain though vast areas where there is a perceived need, on the part of a sufficiently large number of people, for progress to continue but where the things concerned are controversial. There would never be unanimous global agreement that the research should be outlawed; some countries would uphold the ban and others not. And laws are always subject to appeal at some future date. But what seems clear to me regardless of the politics of the matter is that where there are dangers, these cannot be avoided without an impractical reversal of the course human history has taken over the past three hundred years.
Many of the dilemmas are medical in nature; two in particular spring to mind. One consequence of advances in the science of tissue transplantation and organ donation is that they enable parents to have a child primarily to serve as a donor to keep an existing child, whose DNA is sufficiently similar to its own and with whose tissue it is therefore compatible, avoiding rejection problems, alive (at no physical cost to itself) when they would not otherwise have had it. This to many debases what ought to be the whole purpose of childbirth; the child should be brought into the world purely for its own sake, in other words not as a useful commodity for the benefit of others, which dehumanizes the process. There is undoubtedly something disturbing about the practice. It cannot be denied that without the need to provide a suitable tissue donor for its brother or sister the child would not have been born; there is bound to be the risk that when it eventually learns this it will suffer severe emotional shock, even if the intentions of the parents towards it once it is born are the best possible, and that is in addition to the other dangers which stem from this inescapable fact. In those cases which have already occurred where a child has been conceived to keep another alive, the parents have professed their willingness to love and care for the donor child as much as they do the first; it may well be they are sincere, and that most other parents in this situation would also be sincere. How, though, could one possibly be sure that anyone else would live up to this promise in the long run? If in enough cases they do not, serious moral and spiritual damage is inflicted on society.
What can be done in a noble spirit can also be done in an ignoble one. Even as it is, with no medical dilemmas necessarily involved,
there have been plenty of cases where parents’ feelings for a child have evaporated once it has been brought into the world, leading to neglect or ill-treatment, often precisely because more affection is felt for one of its siblings. They might in any case be merely professing good intent so that the law will give them what they want. But this is altogether a very finely-balanced issue. Since, where the existing child is terminally ill, the parents would have lost both children anyway, or condemned the existing child to a lower quality of life – the quality of life being one essential reason for preserving it – one might be inclined to think there is every justification for what they are doing. It is nonetheless done at the cost of setting a very dangerous example. In practice, if not entirely in principle, it is only a few steps from breeding humans for spare parts anyway. The trouble is that once the principle is accepted that you can conceive and bear a child for primary reasons other than the child’s own benefit, it can be misused at a later date by those whose motives for wanting the child to be born are less altruistic than we would prefer. If the idea of the practice, which has now become established, appeals to people sufficiently they will not bother about the principle. It may depend on whether it is done by parents or by the state and what the reason for it is. Since the trend in Britain at any rate is towards governments who have got into the habit of being increasingly more authoritarian, because of the nature of the problems they are faced with, we ought to be particularly worried. The full dangers of it may not yet have materialized, but they might do so in ten, twenty or thirty years’ time. Yet in the meantime, who would deny the chance to give life to at least one of the children? Human nature determines we must do that which contains within itself fortune’s Trojan horse.
The scenario might be thought to be less tragic if the donor child were given up for adoption, perhaps because the parents felt they could not cope with two, the second having in any case been conceived partly for the benefit of the first. After all, adoption is not illegal. But like the very conception of a child for reasons unconnected with its own wellbeing, to bear one which would not be incorporated into the family unit but given to another, especially if it happened on a fairly widespread scale, would be a dehumanization and thus a degradation of the parent-child relationship and what it represents. In what is meant to be both a biological and an emotional/spiritual experience – and it’s that in which its sublime nature consists – the child is potentially at any rate a member of the family into which it is born, even if it was illegitimate and unplanned, as may be the case, and the “family” consisted of just a single mother. The severing of this relationship wouldn’t be permanently harmful if we could be sure the parents would establish contact with the adoptee at a suitable time later on, and restore their family relationship with it, but if they were of the selfish kind (possessive towards the one child and uncaring towards the other) they would turn their backs on it once adopted and regard the matter as being permanently out of their hands.
An equally agonizing dilemma stems from our ability to freeze sperm so that if a child is desired, but the present time is for some reason not thought a convenient one to have it, it may be conceived and born at a later date instead. As a recent high profile legal case demonstrates this can lead to complications if, in the meantime, a relationship breaks down. In the example I have in mind the father won a high court case in which he had defended his right to prevent his former partner using the sperm to impregnate herself. It is another finely balanced issue, and one where I personally would tend to take the father’s side, while not doing so lightly. Once the sperm is in the woman’s body and a child has been conceived by it it cannot be retrieved in any case without terminating a life already begun (and going against the mother’s wishes, which means the pro-choice argument in favour of abortion does not apply). Most people would rightly regard such an action as abhorrent. But if the sperm is not yet in the woman’s body it can still be regarded as the man’s property, not to be used without his consent, and redeemable without causing physical damage to another individual. There is a need therefore to uphold the father’s wishes, to which the fact that he may be being mean or cruel in denying the prospective mother the right to use the sperm makes no difference, I’m afraid – despite the psychological damage caused her by refusing her request.
Some might disagree. But whatever the rights and wrongs of this matter, the dilemma will only affect individual cases, whatever legal precedents are set. Since the matter is at least controversial, it being possible to argue that if we stop a woman using her husband’s frozen sperm to conceive we may as well stop her having a child by him anyway whatever the means by which she became pregnant, it is not quite so much the case here that any moral damage is being done to society. The distinction between having a baby using a man’s frozen sperm and having it by him in the normal fashion is not sufficiently clear-cut to resolve the issue in the public mind, once it has been seriously considered. The damage arises when something that can more clearly have negative moral consequences as well as positive ones is accepted throughout society. Meanwhile, though, the dilemma is no less tragic if it does only affect individuals. It can result in a situation where either a man is left feeling that his body or an intimate product of it, particularly intimate because of its nature in this case, is not his property but has in a sense been made that of the state so another person can procreate – or a woman is agonizingly denied what may, for reasons of age among others, be her only chance to have children.
In the future authoritarianism will extend to very personal areas which should ideally be a matter of individual choice. What science makes possible, supposedly for Man’s benefit, the law might have to ban because of the practical consequences of its effect upon society and culture. Apart from legal wrangles and emotional damage – though it can certainly cause those – there is another problematical consequence of being able to freeze either embryos or sperm. It has a lot to do with the nature of the times and the way we live now. Because there is so much more to life the sacrifice, in terms of one’s free leisure time, of having children and caring for them – an often stressful business - will be greater. They like to think they will have a decent innings without such ties. A parent’s obligation towards their child conflicts not only with the former’s very understandable desire to have a good time, which one would after all wish for the child when it was their age, but also with their career aspirations. Many professional people in their thirties are saving having children until a later stage in life, often freezing the husband’s/male partner’s sperm until it is ready to be used, or will take this option in the future. And these days, because of improved medical care which has to some extent slowed down the ageing process, “young” can mean up to the age of forty or even after it. The consequence of this is that there will grow up a generation of children whose parents are too old to really cope with them when they misbehave, or to play and thus bond with them. The psychological and social problems, which will include and result in crime, will need a lot of time, money and resources to deal with.
The generation born in the 1960s and 70s is in many ways a tragic one. It is inevitable, perhaps, that it acts the way it does but such behaviour can have disastrous results, not least for itself. Because we can now have children at a later stage in life, medical advances again being responsible, and this trend is set to continue with the period of fertility probably being extended even further people are jumping the gun, the outcome sometimes being children who are stillborn or do not long survive their birth – an otherwise rare occurrence nowadays. And that is apart from the even more damaging, in social terms, consequences of the wider generation gap between parent and child, which will imposed severe strain on the social services at a time when, as everything else in this book makes clear, they can least afford it.
Still more, if not most, of the dilemmas originate from our increasing ability to understand and influence genes. Genetic engineering will be, in the twenty-first century, a scientific advance comparable in its importance to, say, railways in the nineteenth. The Human Genome Project, which allows us to map out the entire human genetic code, gives us the ability to identify those genes which will lead to disease or deformity (or to characteristics such as homosexuality which, although not everyone would classify them as diseases, are nevertheless still seen by some people as undesirable) in an individual prior to their birth, and thus manipulate them to remove the problem (something easier done when the embryo is still developing in the womb than when it is a fully formed, live baby). It also raises the possibility that parents will be able to design their children and, if wealthy enough, also buy their genetic characteristics for them - since there would probably be a fee for it - as they can buy their education. The ultimate debasement of life is to make any part of it a financial commodity.
Genetic science is starting to make possible the removal of genes from a human or animal or the addition, perhaps to replace what has been taken out, to that human or animal of genes from another human or animal; if the latter, the donor may be of an entirely different species. The aim again is to give the recipient new qualities or eliminate those that are undesirable. To mention just two of the technology’s applications, crops can be made hardier and beans given human genes to make them produce human proteins that can be used in medicine.
It’s even possible that artifical fibres could be replaced by genetically – or molecularly – re-engineered organic, or semi-organic, materials which could be programmed to change their form as desired by their owners, whether for aesthetic or practical purposes. This would presumably mean you could change your clothes, and perform a wide range of other tasks which were previously more complex and called for more sustained effort, at the mere touch of a button.
Genetic engineering potentially covers a very wide range of activities and techniques, and it is impossible to say what exactly we will be able to do with it in the future; just as one cannot say with certainty that all its applications will to a greater or lesser extent be harmful. Nonetheless the possible dangers, should they be realised, will be far greater than with, say, cloning or stem cell/embryo research.
There is much controversy about the supposed hazards of, for example, genetically-modified crops. It is claimed that there is no evidence such crops behave abnormally, producing adverse environmental consequences. That would still leave the moral ramifications. There is the seeming hideousness of putting genes from a human being into a tomato, for example; it just feels wrong, even if in practical terms there is nothing to worry about. The issue may well have resolved itself in any case; there has been so much public disquiet over it, whipped up by the media for the understandable purpose of increasing newspaper circulation and viewing figures, that GM crops could be finished anyway. Partly because of the public's reaction, scientists and politicians will be very careful not to allow anything dangerous to happen, and won’t permit commercial availability until trials are complete. But if all the confusion and hysteria has destroyed any prospect of genetically modified crops being fully introduced, that may be unfortunate since they are a means of feeding an ever-growing population (though it should be pointed out that however resilient they may be they are not immune from the effects of global warming, which may in the end wreck their effectiveness).
The Human Genome Project is not something which in itself can be considered dangerous; we have a right and a need to increase the extent of our knowledge, and the crux of the matter is rather the use to which that knowledge is put. I’m sure that use will be carefully regulated by law. However, there will always be individuals, organizations or governments who do not respect the law.
One problem with genetic engineering is, as mentioned above, the nature of some its applications - even where there are obvious benefits (making it easier for farmers to grow a wider range of crops in a wider range of conditions is perfectly OK, as far as it goes). They seem physically grotesque both in themselves and because they are so clearly against nature. It is something that is not physically quantifiable and indeed altogether difficult to describe in words; it’s just the idea of it which gives rise to a certain feeling of revulsion. The best I can do to explain and justify my position on this matter is to say that if we can mix the genes of vastly different species, or our own genes with those of animals – or for that matter transplant animal organs into human bodies as part of surgery, although here there’s a much more immediate justification in terms of benefiting lives, it is such a departure from what has normally been considered right and acceptable that if we are prepared to see nothing wrong in it we will see nothing wrong in anything else either.
Perhaps the most commonly (and by now, it has to be said, rather predictably) expressed fear about genetic engineering is that the ability to implant or remove genes before birth will result in the creation, either by parents or the state, of a supposed “master race.” We are obsessed with this bugbear because of Adolf Hitler and his belief in Aryan racial supremacy, one of whose expressions was the experiments carried out at the Auschwitz concentration camp by Josef Mengele; the latter included attempts to change characteristics like eye colour using chemicals. Our master race scenarios therefore involve the creation of armies of identikit blue-eyed, blond-haired (and therefore white) supermen and women of the Aryan physical type, as if this was the only form biological racism could take. There is, in fact, no reason why black racists (they do exist) of the kind to which Malcolm X at one point in his career, and some Black Power activists of the 1960s and 70s, belonged shouldn’t try to genetically alter whites or to give their own race properties which would enable it to become dominant, since black people aren’t so stupid they don’t understand science. (Incidentally, one cherished belief of the more extreme black activists of the late twentieth century was that whites were the creations of an evil scientist). If the science could be perfected then it could be used by any one ethnic group against any other, racial antagonism being something which can affect all human nations and societies as the whole history of Mankind makes clear.
In some ways the "master race" fear is exaggerated. Most of us know that it is not intelligence, strength, good looks, ethnicity, or cultural talent which makes someone a good human being, but virtue, which is something the current, "imperfect" version of humanity can still possess. A child created by Nazi-style genetic manipulation and breeding would not be any more or less a human being than anyone else in this respect, despite the circumstances of its birth (although Hitler did not of course have access to the scientific techniques currently being perfected, those children who were born and raised as part of Nazi breeding programmes, with the aim of creating a pure Aryan race, and who are now adults behave just like anyone else). Since the child had no say in the manner of its creation, no blame accrues to it, as most people at least would accept. Nor could it be guaranteed that it would share the philosophy of its creators, unless that is something which can be bred into people scientifically and not through education and environment, which I doubt is the case since we must be capable of having our own thoughts in order to possess any self-consciousness. If it had virtue it would at least try not to use any exceptional powers it possessed to oppress those less superlative. Nor, in one respect, is it a foregone conclusion that if Nazis came to political power in any given country, with all the modern science of genetics (in the form it’s predicted to take in the future) at their disposal, events would necessarily follow quite the same course they did in Germany in 1933-45. Hitler’s regime practised euthanasia against people who were mentally or physically disabled, or merely had some kind of imperfection. But if genetic engineering could be used to get rid of genuine defects either at birth or afterwards, such might be a good thing because the Nazis would do that rather than actually kill the people concerned (who would themselves probably want the defects removed in the first place). There’d be no point in the latter. Nor I suspect would the Nazis actually seek to create a whole nation of people who were uniformly blonde and blue-eyed; in practice, especially where what we might call basic desires are concerned, they’d probably prefer a bit of diversity. Though they might mistreat people of other genetic types, they would also recognise, if not for the right reasons, a need not to wipe them out altogether. It’s worth remembering here that fair hair and blue eyes are far from universal even in the parts of the planet most associated with those characteristics, such as Germany and Scandinavia; and that has probably always been the case. Blondeness from the point of view of aesthetics works best as something relatively rare, in the world as a whole, and thus more appreciated; cause it to become too common and the result would be a state of affairs rather dull and also, somehow, a little scary, even I would imagine to diehard Nazis.
Nonetheless, there does seem to be a preference in the West, and to some extent outside it, for certain physical characteristics against others. That “gentlemen prefer blondes” is to a great extent true, as surveys have revealed, and many women take to dyeing their hair in order to gain favour and advancement, and not just achieve the kind of look they feel comfortable with. There often seems to be more interest in celebrities who have blond(e) hair, or concern for people with such characteristics when they appear to have been abducted or otherwise placed in danger. Whilst it might not want to make everyone quite the same, there is a danger that the wrong sort of government could try to influence ethnic minorities from before birth to acquire the physical characteristics of the majority race; it could seek to ensure, for example, that everyone looked at least reasonably white and Caucasian even if blondes remained a relative minority of the population. Individuality would be preserved, but only within members of a particular ethnic group. That race could also be given powers which bestowed advantages on them over other people; by implanting within them genes from certain individuals or from the right animal species they could be made physically stronger and more resilient, among other things rendering them highly effective as soldiers. There are limits to how useful this would be – they would presumably for example be unlikely to survive a nuclear blast – but they’d still have an unfair advantage over others, and one which could make them physically dangerous in certain circumstances. Genetically augmented individuals could also be cloned so there’d be more of them to serve as soldiers, policemen, spies or in any other capacity where they could be useful to the ruling regime. A cloned/genetically engineered army wouldn’t necessarily be without any thought or will of its own, but it could be controlled by the same means that any regime uses to enforce its servants’ obedience, the psychology of discipline and threat of punishment (which in totalitarian states could mean execution and perhaps victimsation of one’s family). The leaders of the regime would be reasonably safe provided they made sure they possessed the same powers as their soldiers, to prevent the latter successfully rebelling against them. There would then be no more likelihood of them overthrowing their rulers than with a normal army, and at the same time there’d be the additional benefit of their super powers.
It would be most alarming and potentially dangerous if it was the state that had the power to reshape human genetic make-up. But there are dangers enough if parents or other relatives could do it; in other words, if it became a fashion among the public to have children with certain characteristics. They might prefer a blond(e) child over a dark-haired one, or a male child over a female, or seek to give their offspring the qualities that would make them an Olympic standard athlete (they might not have the mental inclination to develop their physical attributes in that way, their interests perhaps lying more with the intellectual side of things, which means they would have to be mentally influenced as well – a rather nasty idea – if the genetics were capable of having that effect). Now I don’t know what the overall effect on society would be if the number of fair-haired people were to undergo a significant increase, but it’s apparent that if you influenced people to think a certain way, or gave them abilities which if they decided to misuse them could be highly dangerous, we might all suffer in moral and material terms. And too many of one sex as opposed to the other would gravely effect society’s ability to reproduce. In a more general sense the "designer baby" is undoubtedly an abhorrence, even if it’s the next of kin who are exercising the option. The child itself may not be anything grotesque or evil, but the process by which it comes about is certainly disturbing. The wonder of childbirth in the normal fashion is of course so sublime that it is difficult to express in words; suffice to say the whole beauty of a child is that its form is a product of nature rather than conscious human planning, something that delights us precisely because we did not know how it was going to turn out exactly, even it is sure to be like us to some extent. If you can correctly analyse and predict, or deliberately fashion, it all that wonder is destroyed. We may of course be justly proud of something we have created in this way, as with a painting or novel, but it’s clear to all of us that that isn’t why a child is valuable. To contrive it in all its mental and physical details cheapens and degrades it.
In fact, I expect laws would be passed to prevent parental control, or for that matter anyone else’s control, over a child’s genetic development. Though like all laws they would sometimes be broken, or exemptions be granted for one reason or another, I believe the will is there to apply them generally – always assuming, that is, we remain under a democratic (whatever one considers that word to mean in real life) system where there are proper inhibitions about doing questionable or dangerous things. The fact that not everyone wants to take the opportunity to even know the sex of their unborn child, preferring it to be a surprise when the time comes, suggests that parents themselves will probably approve of the laws. It remains possible that individuals might themselves wish to be changed genetically, supposing the technology were ever such as to permit this to be done post-natally (using viruses as the carrier for the implanted genes might be one way). Here there would be less controversy, since for one thing people ought to have a right to choose their physical appearance and configuration. It’s already possible for people to change their sex and the general opinion of society is that they should be allowed to if an imperfect world has resulted in them not being happy the way they are; the practice is harmless – it doesn’t happen often enough to upset the balance of the sexes – and shouldn’t be condemned. People can also choose to look like members of another ethnic group (if that was what Michael Jackson was trying to do when he had his plastic surgery, the results of which might fairly be described as outlandish). We can also change the profile of our face, the shape of our chin or nose or the set of our jaw, on the operating table; dye our hair. In some cases the desire behind the revamp might be questionable, indicative of psychological weakness or trauma to which a different and probably healthier remedy might be found if the person concerned only put their minds to it; we shouldn’t be so obsessed with what we look like or ashamed by it. Or there might simply be a genuine wish for self-improvement. We can also choose to find their choice not to our aesthetic liking. Whatever the motive, however, there is a public acceptance that those who can afford any or all these alterations ought to be allowed in a free society to have them; genetic engineering would simply be a change in the means, not the end. The only cases where it could be objected to would be those where someone wanted to give themselves abilities, such as telekinesis or exceptional physical strength, which could be harmful to others if, for example, they lost their temper; here, all things being equal, society would see every sense in prohibiting such a choice.
Unfortunately, even if it were a case of freedom of choice being exercised by generally responsible individuals that wouldn’t eliminate any moral dangers involved. There is a likelihood that genes (or for that matter genetically engineered life forms intended to perform certain tasks for humans) could be patented, the whole business thus becoming commercialized. You couldn’t buy genes for your child because, as we have seen, you probably wouldn’t be allowed to use them and you couldn’t guarantee that the child once old enough to have a choice would want to do so itself; but you could buy them for yourself. Even where the genes came from an animal – and perhaps especially if they did - there’d be something horrible about this, whether implanted in another animal or in a human. It seems an offence to the dignity and the wonder of nature, which is sublime even when humans don’t come into the picture except as observers – and if you are religious, also against God who after all in your view made the whole thing in the first instance – to treat these building blocks of the natural world as a saleable, purchaseable commodity. This seems so even if adult animals can be bought and sold as pets or livestock for farms and no-one, give or take a fairly small minority, sees anything wrong with it. If it’s hard to say exactly why it’s wrong, then that is in fact an indication of why I might be right to be uneasy about these practices; if the sublimity of the thing is something that can’t be described in words (and it is) then so too will be the reasons why that sublimity can’t be debased. And if it’s an offence against decency and dignity to do it with animals it has to be even more so to do it with human genes, even if the donor gave them up willingly.
The creation of a whole genetically-engineered life form (GELF), the bringing of a new organism – even a non-sentient one – into existence, where it did not exist before, purely to benefit Mankind also seems questionable. Some might argue that it’s merely an extension of our using animals for food or, in earlier times, as beasts of burden. In fact, if the GELF fulfils some vital need which has to be satisfied or people will die then its creation in my opinion would be justified; there would have to be laws against ill-treating it in any case, but permission to create it cannot be dependent upon those laws being observed as that would effectively imply an animal’s needs were as important as or greater than a human’s. If there were an overriding good reason for making a GELF and the laws were observed I don’t see that it would be a bad thing or that most people would object to it.
Genetic engineering seems most justifiable when we are talking about curing an undoubted illness or disability (“gene therapy”). There must be many people, not just parents, who, given the chance to eliminate undeniable mental or physical defects in a child, would do so. I suspect most of us would. We may leave aside here those rather scary people who embrace a narrow-minded and very fundamentalist kind of Christianity and think that if a child is born with spina bifida it is in some way God’s will and that they should not try to change it. It’s possible for their views to be admirable; in fighting against a disability and its effects they and the child have an opportunity to build character and acquire strength through adversity. But if you can fight against the condition at all, you can equally choose to prevent it before birth – which, after all, we are told is better than cure. The desire to do that is so natural and human it cannot be objected to. The real problem is that while it is understandable, and to such an extent that it’s also permissible, it can by curing diseases that may be terminal or removing a predisposition to them add to the overpopulation problem the way medical advance in general does. On the other hand this will be offset from the point of view of the harm caused to society by the money saved that would otherwise be spent on caring for sufferers, while (a) there will remain plenty of diseases that one can die from simply by being human, (b) people can still die in accidents etc, and (c) if one’s worried about the effect on moral fibre there’ll still be plenty of opportunities to acquire it, because of (a) and (b) and because not all one’s problems are of a physical nature.
Unfortunately this doesn’t eliminate the possible social problems since there is some controversy over whether or not certain things should be regarded as illnesses. Getting rid of the latter is fine as it’s something we would all do if we could. But what about the gene that causes homosexuality? To some the condition is an illness, and the fact that the political correctness which insists it isn’t happens to be common among a sufficient number of influential people for that philosophy to be dominant makes no difference to their views. To others the gene merely disposes one to behave in a different way from most of the rest of society. Both views can be held with passion and sincerity and this makes the issue being raised here potentially more bitter and divisive. Parents who honestly believe that homosexuality is undesirable, or who wish quite reasonably out of love and compassion to spare the child the psychological trauma that often accompanies the realization one has desires they may not be entirely comfortable with – even if that trauma can be overcome by counselling plus a strong will - will want the gene removed. Gay rights activists, however, will see this as insulting because of the implication that their lifestyle is based on something harmful. Still others feel that a person should have the right to choose his or her sexuality, regardless of whether their choice is right or wrong. Obviously, identifying and removing the "gay gene" before birth is not according them that right. I concede that it’s a matter of opinion whether homosexuality is a good thing, a bad thing, or morally neutral; and if it is eradicated, we will therefore be imposing on them our own particular view of what is correct. Besides that, it is in such matters as making the choice and overcoming any psychological torment uncertainty over sexuality might cause that we build character and become fully adjusted to life’s vicissitudes. And yet I suspect that most parents would, if they found out that their child was a potential homosexual, seek to have the offending gene removed; it might seem ludicrous not to do so and thus avoid any possible future hang-ups on the part of the child. For one thing, they might by their action be ensuring that they had grandchildren to carry on their line – a selfish but also thoroughly forgiveable motive – if it turned out for whatever reason that no other natural child of theirs survived. Given this and the desire to give the child a life free of potential complications, it seems thoroughly wrong to deny them their wish. There is a potential here for conflict between different approaches which could very well lead to violence. The matter wouldn’t be resolved by keeping the existence of the gay gene, once identified, in unborn babies a secret, because the parents would be very angry at not having been told.
The other, more general problem with genetic engineering is that if, by the nature and variety of the different genes people were given, it resulted in immunity against a wider range of diseases, injuries being healed at a much faster rate, and the ability to perform strenuous tasks with a minimum of effort – or have a genetically-engineered organism do them for you – it could result in a life so easy much of the time that we’d become idle and weak from lack of exercise and lose any incentive to improve ourselves. The fact that we might still suffer from mental adversity wouldn’t reduce the social damage created, which would be worse if the idea were to benefit everyone rather than particular groups within society (a policy of levelling having been thought best in the long run). Whether the genetic engineering had been performed at one’s own wish or that of one’s parents, before birth, would make no difference. It’s likely that there would be some exclusion at the outset, whether or not it was anyone’s specific desire, because all new technology is initially quite expensive and thus denied to a significant section of society. If the genetics included making one physically stronger the super-rich could then dominate the rest of us more easily and perhaps prevent us from ever acquiring the same benefits as themselves. The aim would not necessarily be to create a master race in the sense of benefiting a particular ethnic group but there would have emerged, as a consequence of events and of human nature, a new plutocracy. Even if the technology didn’t work that way those who hadn’t had the augmentation would feel themselves at a disadvantage contrasted with those who had, fomenting social unrest and creating new divisions within society.
Terminal boredom, threats to the moral tone of society and potential for causing social disharmony are, one must assume, likely hazards of genetic engineering. Yet it seems totally ludicrous not to take any opportunities it offers, once they have become fully available, to cure obvious and damaging illnesses and diseases. That is the dilemma. Putting up with the various ailments might seem the safest option, if hardly a palatable one, given that they are problems we are at least familiar with whereas genetic engineering presents us with a whole minefield of uncertainties. But the human mind isn’t made that way – perhaps if we were that objectively rational we wouldn’t be human - and we may have no choice in any case if global warming means the incidence of many diseases and other natural hazards will increase, along with their range. The diseases and natural hazards may become such a threat to life and health that people will demand gene therapy if it enables them to cope with the that threat, and make a fuss – quite possibly a violent fuss – if they don’t get it.
The fact is that there is no sure way of knowing whether or not someone could use genetic engineering to create a “master race” or achieve any other dubious purpose. Another problem with it is precisely that while some aspects of it are dangerous and impermissible others aren’t, and so there is a particular danger of taking a few, in themselves excusable, steps until one falls over a cliff.
A word or two needs to be said here about genetic art, though it’s a concept which at the moment belongs more to the realm of science fiction. It’s been suggested that organisms might be created, or genetically fashioned, purely to look nice. There’s undoubtedly something disturbing about the concept when it’s Man who’s doing it; although a Christian, for example, believes that God created the world in all its beauty purely for its own sake, God (a) had the right and (b) knew what He was doing. The life forms involved would probably be fairly simple, unintelligent creatures, but how could we ever be sure what we were doing to them wasn’t causing them any pain or distress?
If we found the results of the genetic art were attractive, we would not want to outlaw it. There would be a temptation to keep it. Could artists claim that because art is art, they should be allowed to do whatever they like to them? And if we legalized genetic art, the creation or modification of life simply because the result looks nice, we will also be tempted to do anything else with genes, including dictating a child’s appearance at birth, because we will have established the principle that genes can be manipulated for aesthetic purposes. Genetic art would be the route by which those forms of bioengineering which are unethical and dangerous could become accepted within society, bypassing the inhibitions and restrictions against them. Actually, I’m not convinced there’s much likelihood of this. There seems something so fundamentally abhorrent about the principle that most people, including most artists, wouldn’t countenance the creation of life purely to look nice. It would however be acceptable if their role as art was secondary, if they had been created in the first place and were being used to meet some vital practical need of Man’s without which he couldn’t survive (the only excusable reason for the technology), though I don’t know what that need would be. Then, reconfiguring them or making them behave so as to form attractive patterns would be no different in principle from Crufts. (Dogs, horses etc, which have a far more developed nervous system than the lower forms of life, don’t seem to mind taking part in such shows and may even appear to enjoy it, so we would have to assume the GELFs weren’t suffering from what was being done to them). There would still be laws against someone creating GELFs entirely for the sake of art. Some people might try to break it, but this would be no more likely to happen than with any other crime, including some things equally reprehensible, and thus society would not be especially debased, certainly not the whole of it.
When a particular technology or ability - any particular technology or ability - is dangerous in terms of the powers it gives people yet cannot be uninvented, what do we do with it? If we tried to restrict it to an elite that elite could use it to oppress the rest. The elite could fall out among themselves and destroy each other by fighting with the power, enabling others to seize their chance and grab a share of it. But it was widespread throughout society, people could end up fighting each other with it and causing untold damage and suffering. If it was not, they would protest. As long as we are flawed and human, we could never hope to avoid such outcomes.
As well as genes, we have come to understand much about the process of cell development in living matter and this has led us to the science of cloning. In its best-known form cloning, still a relatively new practice, involves taking the nucleus of a cell from a living organism and implanting it in a reproductive cell of an organism of the same species, from which the nucleus has been removed. This is then inserted into the womb of a female of the species where it grows into an embryo, a foetus and finally a baby before being born in the normal fashion. The new organism is an almost identical copy of that from which the cell it developed was taken, since it didn’t come about in the same way – at least, not directly – as one growing from an egg fertilized by a sperm usually does, i.e. through sexual intercourse between a male and a female partner.
Animals have been successfully cloned and the cloning of humans is thought to be not far away. The cloning for purposes of medical research of human embryos – leaving aside for the moment the question of whether it amounts to the same thing, and of whether embryo research should be permitted at all – is allowed and has already taken place, although only at a very early state of the embryo’s development. The intention is that the embryos are destroyed after their fourteenth day of life, which is when the earliest signs of a nervous system can be seen (so in terms of physical pain and suffering, no wrong is being committed). This is cloning in a different sense from creating Dolly the sheep, recreating Shakespeare or bringing into existence a vast army of super-soldiers.
At the moment, it seems likely to be some decades before the technical problems involved in cloning are solved in such a way as to permit the creation of a complete human baby, which will grow into a normal adult individual, out of the tissue of another (reproductive cloning). Some people are opposed in principle to the use of animals in scientific/medical research, but it would hardly be more ethical to experiment on humans without having first done so on animals as is the current procedure, where new and possibly dangerous (for the subject of the experiment if not for others) techniques are concerned. Consequently, animals are the only example we have to go by and there the success rate has not been high; Dolly was born only after 277 eggs were used to create 29 embryos, which only produced three lambs at birth, only one of which lived. Seventy calves have been created from 9000 attempts and one-third of them died young; Prometea (the first horse clone) took 328 attempts to create. Although Dolly’s early death is thought to have been due to a respiratory infection common among sheep raised in certain conditions, there does seem to be some fear that cloned tissue may be particularly liable to degeneration. If these problems do exist and cannot be overcome, there is no doubt that full human cloning would never be allowed, since it would be undoubtedly cruel for the clone if it could only degenerate and die, nor would anyone see any point in attempting it.
But supposing the problems can be overcome, what are the practical and moral objections to cloning? It occurs to me that it could add to the general population and thus to overcrowding, or maintain it at its present large and growing size, at a time when we can least afford it. But this depends on what scale it is practised. Large-scale cloning would only be thought necessary if there had been a massive loss of population, and since the present trend worldwide is towards population growth it is unlikely for the foreseeable future to be attempted. Otherwise, there are no purely practical problems in terms of the effect on society – apart from reintroducing extinct animals, perhaps from a well-meaning desire to make up for Man’s past ecological crimes, in environments where they would no longer be appropriate. The latter would probably, however, be a disaster on a small scale only; it is unlikely that it would happen on a large enough one to cause serious problems to Man, nor would the escape of a significant number of cloned animals lead to overpopulation among the species to which they belonged, because the nature of the process is not such that new animals are turned out at the rate of a million a minute as if off some kind of conveyor belt. The escape of even one cloned animal from a laboratory might be a problem if it was of a species that was poisonous or in some other way dangerous, but this kind of thing happens from time to time without cloning.
With animals, cloning would be morally acceptable if it took place for zoological research or conservation purposes, or if there is a shortage of livestock on farms because of disease or famine, or if it could be established that recreating the dodo or the great auk or the thylacine would have no adverse ecological consequences. With humans, the most defensible reason for doing it would be to help couples who have fertility problems and who have not benefited from in vitro fertilisation, which doesn't always work (it is allowed in such cases). It can either be used to create a child who cannot be brought into the world through the normal means, or to assist research into the causes, not always known to scientists, of infertility and miscarriage. In the latter case it would be a form of what is called therapeutic cloning, and might well render reproductive cloning unnecessary anyway. In the former case, where reproductive cloning is desired, the parents would either not have been able to conceive in the first place or the aim would be to replace an individual who had died (presumably from a sample of their tissue), one or both parents then becoming infertile for some reason. The latter scenario might not be all that common but it could happen. In these cases it would be both humane and probably harmless to permit the cloning. There might have to be laws to stop the parents making multiple copies of the child; it’s not clear why they would want to or what exactly would be wrong with it if they did, but the point is that the cloning would not be wrong in itself. The only complication I can see is that there might be some confusion over the clone's exact relationship with its progenitors and how to describe it, but no more so than is sometimes caused by marital breakdowns and remarriages. A system of designations and associations could be worked out that would satisfy most people. Much depends on whether the child was cloned from the tissue of a dead brother or sister or, because they were infertile or none of the sibling’s tissue was available, one or other of the parents themselves. If from a dead brother or sister, they would still be the son or daughter of their parents because they’d have originated, indirectly, from the same set of cells as the sibling – cells which grew from a union of their mother’s egg and their father’s sperm. The donor would still be their brother and sister, though dead, and the donor’s parents their parents too. Any children the clone had would be its parents’ grandchildren, its parents’ sisters and brothers would be its uncles/aunts. Things seem a little less acceptable if the clone is derived from the tissue of one of the parents; since it was biologically related only to that one, the other would be not its father or mother but something analogous to its step-father or mother, and you’d also be raising as your son/daughter what was really your brother/sister. Even here, though, it’s possible to ask how much harm has really been done. Lots of people have had stepfathers or mothers, or siblings of a different age group, and got on perfectly well with them. And when you grow to maturity your relationship with your parent changes, in the sense that as well as your still being their child the two of you are blokes (or girls) together – friends, in the same way that two people of different ages or sex groups can be. The situation is in a way no more daft or problematical than having an uncle or aunt the same, or a similar age, to yourself (of which there have been quite a few examples). We have to remember that there are plenty who live quite happily with foster parents who aren’t biologically related to them at all, except through the common bond of being human, and can adjust to not even knowing who those parents to whom they do have a biological connection are (sometimes they may not want to know!). Once this is taken into account there’s less reason to suppose cloning will necessarily lead to irresoluble and damaging confusion in inter-personal relationships, though this may be more so when it is a matter of replacing one (dead) child with another than when it is the parents themselves, or one of them, who is being cloned. For much the same reason, if cloning involves surrogate motherhood rather than the cloned cell being replaced in the womb of the female from whom it or the donor originated (I believe it does in some cases) then this too could be seen as acceptable. Though surrogate motherhood, because there is a potential danger of emotional confusion and conflicting attachments, should only be permitted when it’s the only way for a child to be born, the fact that there are people who don’t even know who their parents were, let alone if one of them was a surrogate, yet manage perfectly well nonetheless perhaps means it needn’t be seen as that much of an evil. (However surrogate motherhood can cause problems, not the least of which are battles over custody, and divided loyalties). The real difficulty with reproductive cloning is that although there are grounds for thinking it will cause no more psychological harm to the clone than results from being adopted – some people suffer shock and distress when learning for the first time that they were, but that doesn’t mean we ban adoption – we cannot be altogether sure, precisely because the circumstances haven’t come about in the first place. It will be a completely new phenomenon which no-one has yet experienced and whose effects can’t be predicted with any certainty. It’s likely that reactions to finding out one is a clone will vary according to individual personality and strength of character. But if any widespread harm is caused, and depending on how often cloning actually occurs, there will be maybe hundreds of people requiring counselling and other help and putting yet more strain on overburdened social services. Yet to ban cloning on these grounds would be to condemn some parents to the agony of childlessness.
The other main reason for reproductive cloning would be to recreate an individual, or individuals, whose skills might be needed for a particular and very important purpose. What this might be is hard to say but the cloning would perhaps be justified if the cloned individual’s talents could be used to save lives; the good of the many would outweigh the good of the one (if its being born is somehow an injury to the clone). Not everyone however would be prepared to take such a utilitarian view (I’m perhaps just a bit more ruthless than others). And as with having a child to serve as a tissue donor for another, once you have established the principle, however correct, that someone can be brought into the world primarily for the benefit of others it leaves the way open for all kinds of misuse of science, particularly by totalitarian governments; genetically engineered humans (or other life forms for that matter) to serve as slave labour is one possibility that comes to mind. This would be so even if one made every effort to ensure the clone was treated with the same respect and accorded the same dignity, rights and opportunities for happiness as anybody else. That’s not the issue anyway since once the clone was old enough to think about such matters it would obviously be grateful for the fact of its birth, assuming it enjoyed at least a reasonable quality of life and could come to terms with its parenthood, and most would see no reason not to provide it with all its needs. Even if we did not approve of the process by which it came into the world, to regard it as tainted and a bastard for that reason would in today’s society be as absurd as stigmatizing illegitimate children once was. It’s debatable whether someone would be cloned for the reasons we’ve just been talking about anyhow, since a clone is not from the start a fully-formed adult; once born it has to be allowed to grow to maturity and it may therefore be some years before you can reap the benefit of their skills. This mightn’t matter if you didn’t need the skills just yet, but could do in say twenty or thirty years’ time (again I don’t know what the precise situation making all this necessary would be). Yet even so there remains one important variable which could render the whole process pointless, from the point of view of its utilitarian value to society. A clone isn’t a completely identical copy of its original because any organism developing from a single cell undergoes mutations; it’s part of natural selection. The clone may not actually have all the skills you desire so sorely to harness. Or it might not have the mental inclination or aptitude to make full use of them – this is a different business altogether – and then to avoid the whole thing having been pointless, and make sure society’s needs were met, you’d have to force it to work for you, which raises once more the whole nightmarish spectre of an alliance between science and totalitarianism, even though the clone would probably be prepared to comply if the danger to society was great enough to threaten itself. Any danger less serious might not have been of sufficient magnitude to justify its being created in the first place, but if it were only a relatively small number of people who were endangered we might still find ourselves in the awful position of needing to bring some human lives into existence to benefit others.
Therapeutic cloning involves the taking of undifferentiated “stem” cells from embryos and using them to grow organs for transplanting, or to regenerate diseased parts of a body. Personally I can’t see that there’s a great deal wrong with this, especially when the embryo is of necessity at a very early stage in its development, and recent research suggests it should be possible eventually to obtain stem cells without taking them from an embryo anyway. There remain obstacles to applying the technique in full, which may require years of further research to overcome; evidence indicates some stem cells assist in the proliferation of cancer or act as cancer stem cells themselves. But if these difficulties are ironed out I can see nothing wrong in stem cell research, in itself, if the embryos used are just a collection of cells that have barely begun to differentiate, and a long way from anything we would normally call a human being. Even if embryo research became commercialized, like everything else in a still basically Thatcherite society, with private firms buying embryos or the stem cells taken from them to use in their research, the wrong committed would not be that great. If research on stem cells (not embryos) is acceptable, so then must commercializing it be, unless you’re objecting in principle to a capitalist society.
And growing a new ear, say, from a stem cell so that it can be grafted onto someone who has lost one may sound gruesome but it is not in itself unethical. The real moral problems lie elsewhere. I argued above that if we can mix our genes with those of other species, or receive organs from them, it is such a departure from what has normally been considered right and acceptable that if we are prepared to see nothing wrong in it we will in due course see nothing wrong in anything else either; this would apply to the creation of chimeras, fusing human and animal embryos, which has recently been accomplished. It would also apply to things which whatever their medical value are nonetheless grotesque, especially when at the same time they may be turned into a saleable commodity. Something about the commercial marketing of a complete, disembodied human ear sitting in its culture dish in a laboratory – rather than just its surgical implantation - chills the blood. The thing to be borne in mind is that with the medical advantages so obvious, and increasingly important in a world which is becoming more and more dangerous with global warming threatening to spread new diseases and revive old ones and where the strain of caring for the seriously ill is placing an intolerable burden on the ability of health services to cope, it will be impossible in the long run to resist pressure for the research to continue. If any debasement of the human condition is involved, whether through embryo research itself or the uses to which it is put, it will be impossible to avoid it. It is the contention of this chapter that something in our nature makes certain courses of action irresistible despite their dangers, and this will be particularly true when there is an obvious benefit to be gained from the point of view of such an important consideration as saving life.
About some applications of embryo research, such as creating an embryo that has three parents, I know too little to be able to comment, except that there is probably no damage done if the embryo is not human. Where it is, I suspect that what is being planned is such a ghastly distortion of what is natural and normal that it wouldn’t be possible anyway.
Cloning isn’t something that’s wrong in principle. It doesn’t deny the sacrosanct individuality of each (God-created, in the Christian view) person because a human clone would in practice be no more different from an identical twins, who (a) represent a form of natural cloning and (b) aren’t 100% identical anyway. Whether it’s wrong depends on why it’s being done and whether in each case the arguments for it outweigh the arguments against. There are still too many uncertainties for us to say what problems it will cause in practice. Certainly, like genetic engineering it’s not something whose effects can be seen as necessarily bad and for this reason I believe it will probably be permitted for reproductive purposes in the long run; the arguments in favour of it are such that people will be inclined to give it the benefit of the doubt. It does nevertheless, once the myths are dispelled, involve possible dangers whose full extent, should they be realised, can’t be predicted.
It is often suggested that cloning, IVF and similar techniques may eventually lead to the total separation of sex and procreation (which is what in fact happens with IVF). This would undoubtedly be something awful, though not in any purely physical sense. The child is ennobled by having been the result of an act which is a sublimely - and, depending on the circumstances, innocently - beautiful experience for the partners, even though it cannot consciously share in it. This is why at a child’s funeral a priest says “We give thanks for the love in which s/he was conceived”. For this reason it isn’t desirable that children should be conceived through any other means than sexual intercourse. Just because these things are difficult to describe in words – it would infinitely cheapen them if they were – doesn’t mean they make no sense, as secular materialists probably believe.
There is an excuse if the baby cannot be born otherwise. This sound motivation prevents what is done from being grotesque. To conceive by IVF all the time, unless there were some good reason for it, i.e. something caused us to all become infertile for some reason, would of course be terrible but resort is only had to it in any case when the normal means of conceiving will not work. With IVF the mother still, it should be remembered, has to give birth in the traditional - and sometimes painful, though perhaps less so in the modern age - fashion. (Otherwise, if people wanted a baby at all they might as well do it, in their eyes, through sexual intercourse, which also has the benefit of being highly pleasurable).
In fact, sexual reproduction may always be necessary; it’s suspected that the more an organism gets cloned the more mutations, some of them harmful, are likely, perhaps explaining some of the problems already encountered with the technique and ultimately making it unworkable. Doing things the traditional way avoids that problem. Even if our children are clones, they themselves will need to have sex to reproduce (unless they inherit the genetic deficiencies which made their parents resort to IVF and it’s found those deficiencies cannot be cured by scientific means). It’s also the case that fathering children through sexual prowess (hopefully with just one woman!) is seen by men as a mark of virility and manhood. Artificial means will only ever be a supplement to the natural method of procreation, to be used when things go wrong, and no more.
This is just as well. While recognising that some might question whether sex can ever be totally divorced from procreation, Parsons nonetheless thinks it could happen. He suggests that by the 51st century everyone will be bisexual, like Captain Jack the Doctor Who character from that period {implying that the genes for bisexuality have somehow multiplied and spread to everyone, whereas those for red hair, for example, haven’t}: “You might question how realistic this is…reasoning that evolution should favour heterosexuals in order to keep population numbers up…{but} as new technologies enable humans to transcend the limitations of biology, it may be that 3,000 years from now we’ll no longer need to have sex to reproduce. “The imperative then will be sex for pleasure,”, says Petra Boynton of University College London. “And any form of sexuality will be valid if you’re just having it for pleasure.”(1)” Apart from the fact that sex for pleasure has never been necessarily the same thing as sex for reproduction in any case, I do question how realistic this vision of the future is. I don’t BELIEVE that everyone will become bisexual in the future. As with homosexuality, whether a person is bisexual in their orientation depends on whether they are genetically inclined to be in the first place, and as with any genetic characteristic (hair colour, height, etc) not everyone will be. More seriously, there are also social and moral implications in what Parsons and Boynton suggest. If everyone is bisexual, then given that intercourse with a partner of the same sex is meant to parallel that with a partner of a different sex, the scenario Parsons envisages would amount to infidelity. And as made clear above, the whole business of separating childbirth from sex is in any event grotesque. There’s also something very alarming, and very dangerous, about believing that “any form of sexuality will be valid if you’re just having it for pleasure”. Not only do some people, not necessarily bigots, seriously believe that homosexuality for example is wrong – however much it may be politically incorrect to let them say so – but there are other forms of sex, such as that with animals, which undoubtedly are distasteful, lowering the tone and compromising the dignity of society and individuals. It’s true that someone with no other outlet for their sexual desires might be forgiven for trying it on with a dog or farm animal, but Parsons is talking here about sex as a lifestyle choice. With respect to him, his views are a symptom of that kind of free-for-all individualism which has become too dominant in Western society during the past few decades and which seems to think that in some areas anything goes which isn’t obviously illegal, regardless of the finer moral points involved.
But the scenario envisaged by Parsons and Boynton will never become reality. Neither cloning, nor IVF, nor any form of genetic engineering will bring about an end to sex itself, because we like it too much). The parents of a test tube baby may still experience orgasm; the man can still climax and ejaculate. It won’t separate sex from procreation because if you want to both enjoy the first and bring about the second it makes sense to do both at the same time. If you want to have kids then you may as well do it by a process that’s pleasurable to yourself, which kills two birds with one stone. It doesn’t even eliminate the indignity of childbirth because someone, the mother or a surrogate, still has to go through it (might as well be the mother). At the moment there’s no reason to suppose it’ll ever be possible to grow an embryo into a baby in a test tube (a “test tube” baby isn’t that) and so, applying the principle of William of Occam’s Razor, there’s no call for the idea to enter our calculations.
Another reason why cloning will never become the sole means of reproduction is that it would lead to too many people who looked similar to each other. They shouldn’t be despised for that, as for one thing it wouldn’t be their fault, but we’d still find it boring, scary and, since our normal relations with people involve recognizing significant physical differences between them would probably be disorientating even if we learned after a while to register what features, not perhaps noticeable at first, did distinguish them from each other. This is why even Nazis wouldn’t want to create too many identikit blond supersoldiers, who were identical to the extent that clones are. By combining the two sciences they might still create, and clone so as to have as many of them as possible, genetically-engineered organisms of some kind to serve in a military capacity, but it would be as much the genetic engineering that was responsible for the problem as the cloning.
We can alter and control our bodies not only through genetic engineering, but also through chemical means, using drugs - which will be able in the future to act directly on the genes - and hormones. In the not too distant future, safer (meaning they have less side effects) and more effective drugs will appear, capable of working on the appetite centres of the brain and the DNA that controls metabolism, so that we can eat what we like, and as much as we like, and still keep our weight down, or will be content to eat what is good for us rather than what is pleasing but unhealthy. It appears that by means such as this we will eventually be able not only to ensure that we are healthy and able but also slow down the ageing process and even make ourselves immortal. We can see at once that all these things wouldn’t actually be for the better. The drug that can cure you of your craving for cigarettes is rather alarming in its implications – it means drugs might be developed that can determine any aspect of your behaviour and inclinations. In the wrong hands…and there’s also the problem of immortality, along with rejuvenation, leading to overcrowding and the complications of too many people able and wanting to do the same things. The harmful consequences of immortality couldn’t be avoided by not having children, who would seem less necessary in the circumstances, because people could still die in accidents in such an event you’d like to think someone was around to carry on your genes. Lastly, if all conflicting needs could be balanced in the way suggested above, without much trouble on the part of the individual, we would lose our ability to build discipline and strength of character. Reaching a sensible compromise between what is good for us and what we like but might be dangerous if we are tempted to take it in too large quantities is one way to acquire moral fibre.


*

Another of the most common fears about the consequences of scientific progress is that the machines which automatically peform many of the essential tasks of life, or will do so in the future – robots, computers or any device which is controlled by a computers and may therefore be said to have some kind of brain, enabling it to “think” in one way or another, will end up taking over. In the science fiction scenarios which express this fear the machines, developing the ability to think for themselves, decide that because they can now do so many tasks more effectively than people Man is therefore redundant and should be either destroyed or, because he nonetheless may still come in useful at times, be pressed into service as a slave (though why a thinking agency should necessarily come to these particular conclusions isn’t clear). Usually there is a central computer (such as Skynet, originally developed by the military, in the Terminator films) which controls all the machines and can mobilise them against the humans. A scenario less commonly encountered, but potentially just as dangerous for the running of society if it actually happened, is one where the machines develop different personalities and fight among themselves for control, resulting in general collapse and anarchy.
In one sense the machines probably will take over, but they are unlikely to do so in that of making a conscious decision to destroy, or conquer and enslave, Mankind. For one thing, humans would probably have built in some kind of safeguard against such a possibility. They certainly would not WANT the machines to take them over. The computers wouldn’t have been programmed to assume control; they will if anything have been instructed to obey humans, not to give them orders. So for it to decide to appoint itself boss, a computer would have to have undergone a major malfunction, which could affect it in other ways, impairing its efficiency and making it possible for the humans to regain control; or (b) be experiencing a conflict between its directive to obey humans and its directive to do things by the most efficient means possible. At a guess the latter would cause it to shut down; it’s a bit like the conflict between duty and survival which androids sometimes go through in sci-fi and is used by Doctor Who in one of his stories, Earthshock, to confuse one hostile example long enough for it to be overcome. There is no way, in normal circumstances, for the computer to get from the state of being an obedient servant to the state of wanting to be master of all. So if machines do decide to take over it will be as the result of an accident, and would therefore be less likely to happen. The only way to get round this would be if the computer decided to forego purely logical thinking and instead become like a human – emotional and often irrational, even though it may nevertheless still be capable of reason. It might, among other things, develop a lust for power. But this might require it to have a conscious intelligence – it is perhaps an open question - and the only conscious intelligence with which we are acquainted is that of an organic being (Man) who evolved it over millions of years. We can’t be sure, but there’s no reason just yet to suppose it could be possessed by an inorganic machine designed for a utilitarian purpose. In any case we’re assuming in this scenario that the computer wishes to dominate the humans out of a desire for self-aggrandisement, or the aggrandisement of its own kind, and a contempt for Man’s weakness and stupidity. It would then be no different from the various organic beings in science fiction who want to rule the universe because they are ruthless, arrogant, cruel (or, at best, misguided). That would be bad enough, but the computer would have lost any advantage it might have gained from being a machine.
So the machines will only take over in any sense if we let them. From laziness we might allow them to do everything for us and become weak and atrophied as a result, but the machine could not consciously take advantage of that decline to conquer us. In the first instance there’s no proof machines will ever be able to think, in the sense of conscious reasoning and self-awareness, at all. They aren’t generally meant to do so because people’s intentions are simply that they do their jobs, jobs which they after all perform automatically – that is, without thinking about what they’re doing. A computer that did think for itself might decide to rebel and not do the task it had been programmed to carry out, something the humans would find inconvenient. However efficient a computer might be, when it appears to think its internal processes are merely an analogy, a far from exact one, of what a human brain does; it is in any case always responding to a programmed series of instructions, no matter how complex these are, and so can never be said to act for itself in any significant sense. When asked a question any extrapolation from its instructions to form a conclusion, which might not have occurred to humans and might also be correct, would still be an (indirect) result of the programming and of the properties the humans had built into it (the conclusions would multiply blindly, once left to themselves, evolving in the way natural selection does) rather than anything conscious. And there are obstacles to it always giving the correct answer, since scientific discoveries, for one thing (much of the time, the computer would be being asked to find solutions to scientific problems so that practical needs could be met and more learned about the universe) often depend on intuition – a characteristic of a human, rather than a purely logical, mind - as much as anything else. (Many theories are, after all, an attempt to build a model of the universe, necessary to have something to work from, based on what seems most likely at the time to be the truth rather than an unmistakeable identification of the latter; otherwise it would not be possible for them to be discredited and superseded by other theories (even if the latter are themselves wrong), as happens. For the computer to always hit on the actual truth it would have to be infallible, and nothing ever is, however fantastic it might be in other respects).
While humans possess the advantages that emotion gives them, and know they do, they are less likely to allow machines to replace them, at least not entirely, unless it is for humans’ own benefit. There remains the possibility of creating a synthetic organic being which can be designed to function the same way as a computer, while possessing human feelings, but once something, whether organic or inorganic, has acquired both emotion and the ability to reason – is, in other words, an intelligent life form - it becomes a matter of debate whether it should be forced to work for you anyway.
Machines cannot become either physically or mentally superior to humans. To be the former some of them at least would have to have bodies which were the equivalent of organic ones, perhaps made from synthetic tissue, since organic matter is in many ways more flexible and adaptable than hard, unresisting metal. To be mentally superior they would need, as the above makes clear, to have emotion as well as excellent reasoning abilities. They would end up altogether not much different from humans mentally or biologically, so it’d be hard to see why they should bother trying set themselves up as a master race. They might perhaps have a greater ability than we do to balance emotion with reason and so run society better, but such perfection would put them on a par with God and we’d then be functioning within entirely different parameters if not going off the scale altogether.
A particular scientist or team of scientists, working for a particular organization, might specifically aim to see if a computer with human-like, in every respect, intelligence could be developed but at present we’ve no reason to suppose they’d get very far. They might think they had. If a computer were particularly good at solving problems we could perhaps award it a degree. But this would, all things considered, be rather silly. As with sporting excellence, academic success depends to a greater or lesser extent on the dedication and ability of the individual, even if most people once they apply themselves have a good chance of getting the right qualifications. A computer is only as good as what others have programmed into it and if one computer scored higher marks in a test than another computer this would only be because the company that built the other were less efficient, perhaps using outdated techniques and equipment. Nor could the computer be capable of feeling the emotional satisfaction that would make the degree really worthwhile.
The machines may not take over; but will we become the machines? Here the dangers are on the whole much more real. We already have cybernetic surgery to some extent – artificial hearts, hip replacements, pacemakers. These by themselves do no harm whatsoever and in fact, quite clearly a lot of good. It’s a long way from becoming like the Cybermen in Doctor Who or the Borg in Star Trek, heartless creatures whose organic bodies have either been destroyed, except for the brain, or so augmented with mechanical parts that they have come to see themselves merely as components of a machine (which functions like a collective intelligence, possessing no individuality) concerned with a particular task, and accordingly banished emotion as irrelevant. There is clearly, however, an increasing trend towards “cybernisation”, and it is hard to say where exactly it will end. Research has demonstrated that electronic cameras can feed images directly into the brain’s visual cortex. In 2005 a scientist at a university in Belgium announced he had implanted prototype bionic eyes into two blind patients. The devices work by recording images and relaying them to the optic nerve, where they are converted to electrical stimuli. It is thought artificial eyes could eventually enable a person to see in all spectrums – infrared, ultraviolet, X- and gamma rays as well as visible light. This is in some ways an extension of the night-vision goggles soldiers use to detect infrared radiation. Parsons reminds us that the ability to “see” in these wavelengths would allow one to see through walls and inside the bodies of other people. “Virtually nothing would be secret any more.”(2)
Then there is ultrasound vision. In 2002 Professor Kevin Warwick, cyberneticist at the University of Reading, had a radio receiver and transmitter implanted in one arm, surgically linked to his nervous system and the nerve fibres and used to link a host of computers and electronic equipment with his brain. By picking up signals from an ultrasonic sensor, the chip enabled him to identify objects and avoid obstacles, when blindfolded, using sound.(3)
Kevin Warwick has also had a sensor chip implanted in his body to serve as a transponder; other sensors would detect it and open doors and switch on lights for him. To avoid potential medical complications it was removed after nine days, during which Warwick felt entirely comfortable with it both physically and mentally. In 2002 he had another chip implanted, directly linked to his nervous system, through which he could transmit signals to his computer by hand movements. The signals could then be played back and received by the chip in an attempt to replicate the same movements. He also found that emotional responses, such as shock, could be picked up by the chip, recorded on his computer and played back in the same way. His wife had a similar chip implanted and via the internet the two were able to send signals directly to each other’s nervous systems. Warwick even used his implant to control a robot hand at Columbia University in New York via the internet from his lab in Reading.(4)
Certain beach clubs in Rotterdam and Barcelona require members to have microchip implants which can be read in order to pay your bar bill. It is said they have a waiting list of people who want the implants. The American Medical Association is looking at implanting chips in patients {presumably with their consent} in order to access their medical records. And one firm specializing in medical technology has produced brain implants which can send signals that block those responsible for the tremors experienced by sufferers of Parkinson’s disease. In recent years a number of disabled people have been given implants which enable them to operate their home computers, as well as change the channel and volume on their TV sets, by thought alone. Kevin Warwick thinks developments of this technology could eventually allow amputees and paralysis victims to control prosthetic limbs or regain control of their normal ones via artificial nerves. The benefits go beyond medicine. Warwick believes cybernetic implants will one day, through the links with computers and the Internet, vastly improve our abilities at mathematics, allowing us all to solve highly complex equations and also, for example, visualize what a ten-dimensional universe {if there can be such a thing} looks like, “a feat way beyond the capacity of our present organic brains.” Through the Net we could obtain instant access to an almost limitless amount of information and also link our brains directly to one another via the chips they contained, communicating at a faster rate and in a more effective way by transmitting our thoughts as electronic data rather than speech. Cybernetic components will also be of benefit physically, giving us greater speed, strength, agility and endurance.(5)
If anything that’s normally done organically can be done even better through cybernisation – replacement with mechanical components that parallel their function – and we intend to take full advantage of that (taking this path rather than that of genetic engineering to achieve perfection), the logical outcome will be a human being who is almost completely cybernetic. I say “almost” because there are some organic features and functions we might prefer to keep. We might still prefer to be organic on the outside because the idea of not looking like a flesh-and-blood human being isn’t appealing, not according to the current way we think. And basic instinct might incline us to have sex the traditional organic way. But are there any circumstances in which we could become entirely mechanical, except perhaps for the brain, and at the same time emotionless, like certain creatures in science fiction, putting cold logic before everything else? This would certainly count as a nightmare scenario.
My conviction is that it is not realistic. Admittedly, although an intelligence without emotion is hard to conceive of, it seems wrong to deny one could exist just because we haven’t so far encountered one. But if I think it couldn’t it’s because of philosophical reasoning (with which you may or may not agree) rather than because of anything which is lacking or otherwise in my experience. An intelligent life form whose brain was functioning rationally would orientate its behaviour around some kind of purpose. Our own example, which is the only one we have to go by, suggests that the pursuit of happiness, in whatever form, is the only purpose there could possibly be to life. Although history has known many people who have wreaked havoc and caused misery on a massive scale in order to satisfy their negative emotions, there has never been anyone who has consciously tried to eradicate emotion altogether, from their own life or the lives of others, because they believed that to be sensible or for any other reason. There are undoubtedly people who lack humour, and sometimes seek to deny others the opportunity to experience pleasure; these people, however, act in the way they do because they have been unsuccessful at achieving happiness. There is usually some sort of psychological trauma at the root of their attitude. Some individuals, if they were particularly perverse, might seek to eradicate emotion from society out of spite, because it would make for a dull and uninteresting existence, but we would still be talking about an attempt to satisfy an emotion, albeit a negative one (i.e cruelty). They’d make themselves an exception to the rule so they could gain the greatest possible malicious pleasure out of what they’d done. It’s not that likely they’d do it in the first place, because cruelty essentially involves causing unhappiness in others, through mental or physical pain, and unhappiness is an emotion.
Similarly, if the Cybermen or the Borg pursue the way of logic because it has for them a kind of beauty (as it does to many human philosophers), or because they think they will be happier without the hang-ups and stress emotions cause (despite this being a paradox) then their ultimate motive is still emotional. Logically, one can only either like to exist (or not like to exist, i.e. be in a suicidal frame of mind - in other words be acting emotionally, the emotion experienced being sadness), or simply exist. If the latter is the case, the existence is simply existence. It has no purpose and is therefore illogical, unless one is a life form which has no concept of "existence" at all - in other words is not sentient. For this reason a sentience which does not possess emotion is to me inconceivable. Of course, in a person who has been drugged emotion may be dulled or even suppressed entirely, but in their drugged state they could not in any case be counted as fully sentient.
Since the gratification of emotions is the only purpose for the

existence of sentient life forms, to reject emotion would if

anything be illogical. If, therefore, creatures like the Cybermen

could actually exist in real life, it must be accepted that they

would not, strictly speaking, be emotionless, although they might

perhaps believe themselves emotionless, or find it advantageous to

portray themselves as unemotional to other races (thus appearing

less vulnerable, and so more frightening, to them). A desire to destroy emotion and replace it with logic would itself constitute an emotion; so if we are not talking about a contradiction in terms, the Cybermen must at best have feelings of a sort practising emotion of a sort which is simply different from that experienced by humans. The cause of pure logic would have to be a passion in itself, and if believed in sincerely enough would have to be pursued with sufficient emotional intensity for the whole point of it to be destroyed. Maybe this is what has happened to the Cybermen, although they do not realise it or for one reason or another don’t care to admit it.
The removal of emotion from themselves by the Cybermen was probably done in order to adapt to their new, wholly mechanical existence. But if they had been real, they could never have adapted to it in any case without ceasing to be fully conscious; they would have to be mere robots, simply obeying a set of programmed tasks essential for their survival, their higher faculties (including the ability to feel emotion) suppressed so that they could cope better with their situation. Not a very satisfactory state of being. Perhaps this is what happens with cybernetic races; we won’t know until it actually does happen. But someone who was not cybernetic would have to be controlling them, and could use them as an army or labour force for whatever possibly unethical purpose took one’s fancy. No-one would let themselves be put into such a state willingly, but it could nonetheless be done without their consent. Let it suffice to say that we are talking about something very different from a whole race becoming cybernetic through its own negligence or deliberate intent.
Since they could not fail to be, in truth, emotional no intelligent life form would find a fully cybernetic existence possible, for reasons already gone into. The psychological shock and damage would be too much. Nor would emotional beings wish to become Cybermen in the first place, if given a straightforward choice, because our emotions incline us to think such a course unappealing. Sensual experiences could perhaps be simulated, as if one were still physically organic, but not to be able to feel emotion would prevent us from appreciating them.
The chances are, therefore, that cybernisation of an entire race would take place either very slowly or so suddenly that no-one realised what was happening and could try to stop it. Regarding the scenario in which it occurs slowly, it’s certainly true that bad things can creep up on us without our being aware of them. But where the process is slow it’s equally likely that we’ll be able to realise what’s going on and have time to stop it – and with total cybernisation, the nature of the danger would be so awful that there’d certainly be a considerable incentive, among some people at least, to do that. The cybernisation would be much more likely to come about swiftly as the result of action by a single individual or group of individuals against the will of the majority. Their actions might be evil or they might, if undemocratic, be nonetheless altruistic in spirit. If evil – to create slave labour for a particular purpose other than the (supposed) wellbeing of the slaves – it would have to be for the benefit of one’s ethnic group or nation, at least, and not just for oneself plus one’s followers. The perpetrators would exempt themselves from the cybernisation and thus limit drastically their scope for company in the future; they wouldn’t want to associate too much with people who were incapable of showing or reciprocating emotion and who’d probably for that reason make them feel uneasy. It’s more conceivable that hardline racists, Nazis for example, could do it – a labour force to serve the master race, one which won’t complain or rebel and will at the same time be more efficient in technological terms. But there’d always be the uneasy suspicion that something might go wrong, however unlikely that was, and if it did the stakes would be that much higher; your cyber-slaves could use their superior strength and machine-like imperturbability to pain to overcome you with ease. It’s unlikely, in the end, that cybernisation could be carried out by a small elite (who presumably would not be so noble as to submit to the same process themselves) because they would still want the company of enough normal, unaugmented humans and they could not take the chance that some factor wouldn’t destroy most of their own number.
I’m not being naïve in arguing that the motive for forced cybernisation would probably be altruistic. Environmental disaster, disease, pollution and famine – all problems the human race really does face – could make it impossible for us to function as organic beings. To do it as a temporary measure to save the human race Cybernisation in at least the short term, while a more lasting, and congenial, solution was worked out would then be a sensible option (for it to be possible at all implies a technology of a quality which could also regrow the original organic body, or allow it to go on living within a cybernetic outer body whose components would take the place of its various functions and also act as a life-support system). But this would be a non-starter because when would we ever improve enough to run the world properly, at the best of times? And people still wouldn’t care for it despite the noble motives – they might be drugged or otherwise conditioned to make such an existence bearable but what if, for some reason or other, the conditioning wore off? It would have to be down to our theoretical “noble but misguided” individual and their chums; because their motives were noble, they would derive from them a strength and courage different from what you get from the mere knowledge that you have power, and therefore in many ways much greater, and they might therefore be able to endure the loneliness of the situation they’d placed themselves in. Trouble is, of course, that human beings are flawed, and if the non-cybernetic ruling elite fell out with one another – easy to happen in a small community – there might follow a destructive civil war with the “Cybermen” as troops, if one side could programme them to obey only itself. Or, since power corrupts – a cliché by now, but true all the same – the rulers, or some of them, might decide to return some of the Cybermen to organic form, once the crisis had passed.
In the end, then, cybernisation would probably be a gradual process which we would be able to arrest once we knew it was going too far, or which would be overtaken by all the problems which are currently threatening to destroy us. But I doubt if anyone in the long run would willingly take the option to the extent seen in science fiction. It’s true that when people are surly and depressed they also become lazy – meaning that if they are mentally crushed by living in an atomised and overpressurised society where they are not sure of their identity, it is more likely they will rely entirely on computers and mechanical devices, perhaps implanted in their very bodies, to do everything for them, until they become entirely cybernetic. But even if this kind of social malaise could ever produce such a result anyway, it’s unlikely to while there are other ways to work it off – the ones humans traditionally use, i.e drinking oneself to death, withdrawing into oneself, indulging in anti-social behaviour.
If not Cybernised like the machine men from Doctor Who, we might be absorbed into a collective like Star Trek’s Borg, whose members would transmit their thoughts to one another in the form of radio or electronic impulses using the Internet, into which they could plug themselves physically and mentally, as the medium, to the extent that they become effectively a single consciousness. This is still too far away for us to fully envisage, but the technology is at least conceivable. Whether the result will be as predicted, and as hideous as it somehow seems, is a moot point. First, there is the matter of whether “thought” really functions in this way. Secondly, given the current state of the art, the implants if perfected at some point in the future would be unobtrusive affairs, not even visible except at close quarters, and a human plugged into the Net in the manner of an electrical appliance would look visually no more grotesque than someone wearing headphones. And a collective mind in which all individuality was suppressed would not emerge as long as you had control over whether to receive someone else’s thoughts or transmit your own – as by and large is the case with current methods of telecommunication - and it is hard to imagine that such safeguards wouldn’t be built in, not least because the public would be in favour of them. Privacy, and protection from “calls” which might be threatening or obscene, must be maintained. Whether any situation could result whereby someone wanted to remove the safeguards and succeeded in doing so is difficult to say. That person would not want to be a part of the collective themselves - most likely they would be seek rather to be in control of it so it could be exploited for their benefit and that of associates – because no-one would. Except where political restraints are desired (usually only by influential minorities, despite efforts to persuade everyone to the contrary), society currently favours an arrogant individualism which brooks no limit to self-expression; this would be compromised by subsuming one’s own identity within a gestalt. On the Internet, as with anything else, people want to leave their own personal signature to what they do; that’s why they set up their own websites, to make what are in a sense personal statements about themselves. There’s no prospect that I can see of it destroying individuality, whatever other harm it might do. If thought is different in nature from a radio impulse a true collective intelligence would be impossible anyway without actual telepathy, which we don’t at the moment possess and in any case would create its own problems.
There could still be some applications of the Internet which would be disturbing and dehumanizing. We’ve been hearing talk of using it to send orgasms via e-mail, by transmitting electrical impulses which simulate the sensations experienced during sex(6), the implant establishing a connection between the computer and one’s nervous system. There undoubtedly would be something grotesque, as well as not entirely satisfying, about this. Sex to be really pleasurable needs two people in actual physical contact, it can’t be done impersonally in the way being suggested. And in the form in which it ought to take place, i.e. between two people who love each other and if not married are at least in a stable relationship, it is something so sublime that no transmission from an inorganic machine can possibly compare with it; for that very reason, to attempt to do such a thing would be demeaning. It’s important though to appreciate that whereas any sex outside the parameters mentioned is a departure from what ought ideally to be, this particular example of it doesn’t dehumanise in the sense of turning one into a machine. For sex to happen in this way will be degrading, but no more so than when someone goes to a brothel. It is merely an extension of the sad debasement of sex, and of society, that has come about in the modern world. At the risk of being vulgar, one can get what are called “cheap thrills” by masturbating over a pornographic magazine, riding a bike down a cobbled street or standing against a washing machine when it is in operation. I imagine Cybersex would be an extension of this which people could enjoy in moments of boredom or sexual frustration (when it might perhaps be excusable), and might be more satisfactory than the cobbled street or the washing machine, but it’d still be no substitute for the real thing (even if the latter were a loveless act that you had to pay for) and so the real thing would be preferred if you could get it - the same applying to any other natural pleasure which it was sought to imitate. If the technology were advanced enough you could probably achieve a pretty good simulation of the sex act, but most punters wouldn’t substitute it for a visit to the local red light district unless they had to. There is undoubtedly a mechanical, robotic kind of way in which one can perform casual sex or hook up to and view an Internet porn site, but it is still a organic, natural desire which is being gratified, however illicitly, and an emotional one too in that the frustration of it for some reason would presumably make one unhappy or angry. The process still leaves one in most respects an organic, emotional being.
In science fiction Virtual Reality experiences often involve use of a hologram or android (to lower the tone of things somewhat, Arnold Rimmer in the first Red Dwarf novel has an encounter with an android prostitute, who in pleasuring him nearly removes an intimate part of his anatomy, while boy and sheep ‘droids are available if he wishes). It is questionable whether this kind of experience would be possible anyway. By definition, if a certain substance or arrangement of substances, a particular juxtaposition of molecules, is needed to create a given object or make it behave in a given way, and thus constitute an experience which some people find desirable, then it and only it will have that effect – it’s simple logic – and nothing else. Consequently, and whether the pleasure sought was sexual or of another kind, an android or a hologram could not possibly give the same sort of satisfaction as the real thing. An android would have to be composed of real flesh – not synthetic flesh, or any inorganic substance – to be any good as a hooker and a hologram would be even less likely to please for it would have to be at least solid, and then wouldn’t be a hologram. A robot composed of organic flesh and genetically engineered to do the job, probably being programmed with no more intelligence than it needed to do its job, might be an alternative, but the whole idea makes one feel sick if it is to be working as a prostitute.
Either the hologram or the android could dance or perform acrobatics, say, and might make a very good job of it, nor need anything dubious be involved. But using them for sexual pleasure wouldn’t work – unless, where the sex was paid for, it simply rendered the experience even more cold and loveless than usual. And it might be considered immoral, depending on whether one sees prostitution as sometimes a necessary evil. So maybe people shouldn’t be doing this sort of thing anyway. But if an android or holographic prostitute couldn’t give satisfaction in any case, ignoring the ethics of the matter, nor by the same token could holographic wine, a comfortable holographic armchair, holographic food, holographic water for swimming in, etc (presumably the hologram is an attempt to provide experiences which in a certain environment would not be possible in the normal fashion, or too expensive). A physical, but synthetic, substitute would be better than the hologram but still wouldn’t do the trick. The people and objects one encounters on Star Trek’s Holodeck solve this problem by being not true holograms but actual solid matter created, if I have understood correctly, using the patterns (of real things) programmed into the Enterprise’s transporter beam so it can lock onto a particular person, or object if desired; but even though these simulacrums are not intended to be sentient and supposedly follow a strictly controlled behaviour pattern (which doesn’t, intentionally at least, include prostitution, of which Starfleet would presumably not approve), the idea still seems grotesque to me.
Simulating living people is particularly repellent if the intention is to imitate the finer aspects of human nature rather than or as well as sensual gratification (the latter can be good in itself but only, in any other sense than a pragmatic releasing of sexual tension, when it proceeds from love). This would be making a claim that is at best presumptuous. On page 107-8 Krauss, while admitting that a hologram’s lack of actual physical form would render it useless for a lot of things, suggests rather disturbingly that Star Trek: Voyager’s holographic doctor could nevertheless dispense “a good bedside manner and compassionate words of advice, which are at the heart of good medical practice…as easily as by the real thing.” Hardly, because real compassion (which must be intentional, and thus proceed from a thought as much as an emotion) can only, to be itself, come from an actual sentient and conscious being. To be fair to be Krauss he may be suggesting the hologram in this case actually is sentient – I’m not familiar with the series so I don’t know – in which case the question is one of whether such a being could actually exist and be happy to do so, bearing in mind it cannot interact with physical objects and may accordingly be limited in the kind of pleasures it can enjoy.
Matter replication, when involving only inanimate objects, is something different from holography (as made clear above) and by itself doesn’t involve any moral issues, though it would have to be regulated in case it resulted in an overabundance of certain commodities. In terms of quality it could be a more satisfactory substitute for a hologram.
Holography is one branch of human science which will never be of value for other than artistic purposes, clever though it is. But simulating objects and people in more than optics, for whatever purpose, would at best achieve no more than an ersatz parody of the real thing. Virtual Reality if developed to such an extent might not render society much more depraved than it is at the moment – in matters of sex it may replace rather than add to existing “perversions”. But it would certainly be another symptom of its degradation by being enslaved to the cold, mechanical and (though we may not think so) second-rate; or it simply couldn’t happen in the first place.
An obsession with sex has come to characterize modern Western society precisely because it is a way of countering the dehumanization of mass technology. It’s a very basic, natural, human (though also animal) desire. Human affairs, and the problems encountered in them, are still a matter of the appeasement of such desires - sex, status, territory etc, which are threatened by the increasing complexity of global society and the pressures caused by change (and also come into conflict with our higher needs and ambitions). Some things will never change, but they will come into disastrous opposition to those things that will.
I expect the wisdom and desirability of taking cybernisation any further will be questioned when (a) we feel it is taking away too much of our organic humanity; (b) it starts to make everything too easy and thus boring; or (c) it compromises our individuality by standardising everything too much. Or all, or any two, of these things. The real danger will come about precisely because we will be unwilling to sacrifice our humanity, in this and other ways, and yet progress will logically mean going into areas that have this dehumanizing effect. Whatever path we choose the result will be stagnation and ennui.
Now we have, one might say, chosen in a sense to make progress in an inward rather than an outward direction these last thirty or so years. When I was a child/teenager the most exciting thing about the future seemed to be the prospect of exploring and colonizing outer space; of moonbases, manned landings on Mars and the other planets of our solar system followed by the establishment of permanent colonies there, and finally a great break-out into the wider Universe with starships shuttling between galaxies to establish contact with exotic alien life forms. Disappointingly in many ways, this hasn’t happened (it may yet, although personally I doubt we’ll ever get to that stage). Partly because of the cost (which rose after successive oil crises and global recessions) and technical difficulties involved, along with lack of public interest, we have instead chosen to scale back manned space exploration, relatively speaking, and concentrate mainly on scientific missions using robot probes; putting most of our effort into advancing technological progress here on Earth, through industries like telecommunications and computerisation with which we have developed a dangerous obsession. Cybernisation will be an extension of this. Of course the manned space programme isn’t entirely dead; there’s still the international space station, a stepping stone back to the Moon and from there to Mars, although public interest and thus media coverage was so sparse I’d no idea it had been built. The need to dispel post-modern boredom by rekindling the pioneer spirit, to find clean and safe sources of energy which can meet both our potential fuel shortage and the need to be green (there are minerals on the Moon and perhaps elsewhere which it’s thought could help here), and to relieve our overcrowding problems by maybe finding new territories where people can settle, justifies a renewed assault on the “final frontier” whatever the practical and financial obstacles. Civilisations and societies have often in the past been given renewed life and vigour by the opening up of new physical territories, creating new markets, new opportunities for expansion, and new safety valves. This might divert our attention from our current obsession with computers etc and the developing interest in cybernetics which is not unrelated to it; we would still continue to explore those areas, especially where the space programme required it, but less intensively than hitherto. But there are grounds for scepticism. I’ve already mentioned the cost. Secondly there isn’t enough out there, so far as we can see, to make space appealing enough; that is, there are no inhabited or habitable planets and no exotic aliens. That means it won’t serve as enough of a distraction from Cyberspace – inner space, in a way – where the public, inventors and business entrepreneurs alike are concerned.
Assuming there is a roughly midway point at which people will be able to arrest the process of cybernisation before it destroys their organic or psychological humanity, but where they will be able to enjoy the significant advantages that it gives them, conflict could arise between those who have cybernetic implants (because they can’t yet afford them) and those who don’t. But whoever does have the implants will suffer as a result, the damaging becoming more widespread the more common the technology does become. Their purposes, beside those already discussed, will be to augment the functioning of the brain so that people will all be able to learn faster, handle mathematical equations better, and become better at sport in so far as this activity requires mental ability and agility (as it does to some extent, through the need for quick reactions to an opponent’s move). The awful culmination of this will be that ability at any activity, whether or not it is competitive, becomes so standardised that no individual could ever take personal pride and satisfaction in their success at it; it would not be they which had triumphed, but the implants. The outcome would be particularly tragic where the business was competitive; it would be little different from athletes taking drugs to boost their performance, even if the practice was legal. Since everyone would (presumably) be able to improve themselves to the same level there would be no such thing as competition anyhow, which removes the whole point of sport, or of quiz shows (which amount to the same thing). Of course, precisely because people are individuals, to a greater or lesser extent, in terms of their character, inclinations and abilities the implants would probably be made by different companies who wouldn’t always get things right (unless their personnel had the implants themselves); some cybernetic implants would be more effective than others. But then it becomes a competition not between the people who have the implants but between the manufacturers of the implants – just as, if drug-taking among athletes becomes too common, sporting events effectively turn into a contest between the manufacturers of the drugs, whether or not they as opposed to the drugs’ actual users have done anything illegal.
This isn’t a state of affairs we want to bring about. That possibly means it won’t become a reality; since ego is still important – to anyone, but especially those sportsmen and women who it must be said are a bit big-headed (this is one of those things that never change!) – people taking part in any competitive activity wouldn’t like the fact that it was the implant winning, not them, and would spurn its use. Chances are the implants would be regarded by sporting authorities as giving an unfair advantage anyway, and banned. That doesn’t mean people wouldn’t use the implants illegally, but they also use drugs illegally, just as they also (though not athletes, as a rule) from time to time rob banks or defraud old ladies.
However, there’s always a certain satisfaction, not necessarily egotistical, in having a (natural) skill others don’t, whether or not it serves as the basis for competitive sport. And the implants might be desired not necessarily for the benefit of sportspeople, but to give humans in general a better chance of surviving life’s diverse hazards and accidents; of leaping out the way in time when an out-of-control car hurtles towards you, for example. Since this would obviously make our existence much easier and safer, the demand for the implants will be impossible to resist. This will mean we won’t be able to avoid their less healthy consequences. We could arrange for the implant to be switched off while someone was taking part in a sporting event, so that they were using only their natural, biological skills whenever they threw the javelin, lifted a heavy weight, won the 400 metres or scored the winning goal in the world cup. But accidents, which can sometimes leave people permanently crippled, happen during sport and what if the implant would have prevented it? No-one would want to expose themselves to that vulnerability, to any likelihood of serious injury or of death, for any length of time once it had been removed. To take the smooth would mean taking the rough also, and in this case it’s a very big “rough”. It wouldn’t only debase sport, it’d also debase life in general because no-one would succeed at anything they put their mind to through their own efforts and there’d be no focus for personal pride in oneself. We all need that sense of triumph, of successfully meeting a challenge; not just champion footballers, athletes or cricketers or successful authors and artists. Without it, life would have no purpose. I can’t experience any sense of satisfaction at completing a three-mile run, whether it was done just for the pleasure of the exercise or in order to win a trophy, if it wasn’t down to me but rather my artifical implant. The implications might not affect the creative arts, where success is down to something very different from practical ability, whether mental or physical, and can’t be measured by any objective, calculated standard. But there would be so many other activities where an implant would be used, and would take over from the person given it, that the quality of life is sure to be lowered. And yet while they mean we will be better able to sense danger and avoid it, when otherwise our very lives might be lost, we will always be tempted to have the implants. If the government bans them we will seek, by direct action if necessary, to overturn the ban – although the government will be subject to the same temptation to use them as ourselves. Because we value our children, we will want them to be given the implants at birth or even in the womb, so that they will safe – safer, at any rate – from hazard from as early a stage as possible.
I am sceptical as to how far the cybernisation will go without subjecting humanity to a psychological and sociological crisis from which it will not recover. But there is evidence that in some cases the dehumanization has already begun, though in the example I am about to cite it isn’t cybernisation itself, as such, which is the problem and the subject isn’t Man but rather his best friend. In 1999 Japanese electronics company Sony launched the first of its Aibo robot dogs, which can allegedly see, hear, touch and make decisions of their own. They have personalities which evolve over a period of months, depending on the personalities of their owners, which they imitate, and on their surroundings. This is simply emergent behaviour, arising from the machine’s programming as the only logical consequence of the combination of that programming and the particular situation the machine is faced with, and observed by scientists over a period during tests. But whatever its explanation, the Aibo seems to be popular. One would have thought nothing could replace the company of a real, flesh-and-blood dog, the bonding which comes about between the animal and its owner because of the former’s loyalty and the affection the latter shows it. Parsons tells us however that in 2000 Kevin Warwick replaced a family’s well-loved dog with an Aibo for a week, as an experiment; at the end of that time the family were asked if they wanted their original dog back or to keep the Aibo. They said they wanted to keep the Aibo. I mean no disrespect to them, but as with so many of the predicted technological changes discussed in this book, either this kind of thing won’t catch on or there will be something very scary about it if it does.(7)
Augmentation by cybernetic implants could also give us information overload, through enabling us to see the full spectrum of light and hear sounds that otherwise would be too low for our ears to detect (telepathy might well have a similar effect). The succession of extra data, in addition to what our five natural senses can already tell us, bombarding our brains would be more than they could cope with unless we really did become fully cybernetic, the brain no longer functioning like a human one at all, and I expect this would be a step way beyond what any of us would be prepared to take. Kevin Warwick thinks we would adapt to the change fairly easily (in the same way, perhaps, that a blind person develops exceptionally acute hearing, though we would still be left in full possession of all our faculties). Warwick suggests (this is in Parsons’ words) that “the brain would spread its processing power intelligently across the senses, depending which senses were most important at a given time. In the same way that you might not hear someone talk to you when you’re engrossed in a good book, so perhaps smell or taste might temporarily diminish to let us make the most of a night-time vista in infrared.”(8) Unfortunately, we’ll have no way of knowing whether this will be the case until the technology is possible at all. If Parsons is talking about an inbuilt property that the brain has, then maybe he is right; if it’s something that has to be acquired through evolution, there is a question mark. Evolution can happen relatively fast, over thousands, or even hundreds, rather than millions of years, but it could still be that the technological advances are taking place so fast they are outstripping its capacity to keep pace with them. In any case the real problem may turn out to be the social consequences rather than the physical, even if these might vary according to culture. As we’ve seen, for society to function properly secrets need to be kept, at least for a time, and privacy ensured. This enables proper social conventions to be maintained and people to feel secure, knowing that their dignity has not been compromised, and nothing has been seen or heard that might be dangerous in the hands of others, whether individuals or society as a whole. X-ray vision, giving you the ability to see through walls or a person’s clothes – through any solid structure, perhaps – and enhanced hearing would take away all the safeguards. You’d always be seeing or hearing things others wouldn’t want you to (and which, sometimes, you wouldn’t want to either). It’s true that few of us are a Venus or Adonis, but no decent person would feel comfortable knowing their naked body was constantly on show; apart from nudity being, in all except some tribal cultures, still a powerful taboo save for within the confines of one’s own home, in specially reserved areas or within the pages of certain magazines, the sight of it might entice some people to rape. As with teleportation, the lack of which allows people you may be at loggerheads with to be kept out of your way until you’re ready for a fight (so to speak), enhanced sensory perception may also have unfortunate consequences for the politics of the office, home or club. Your colleague or professional rival might hear/see you planning something that affected them or their aspirations in ways they didn’t like. If, as soon as their improved senses had given them information, they acted on it these matters would become more aggressive and confrontational. The ability would of course be two-way but that’d only make the dispute fiercer. In national and international politics the effect could be even more disastrous; although people get annoyed whenever any matter of importance is kept from them, there are times when revealing the existence of a threat to public safety before measures had been put in hand to deal with it would only cause panic (for which the public themselves wouldn’t be grateful).
Even if it doesn’t dehumanize us or lead to embarrassing social situations, there are other potential problems in becoming too reliant on mechanization. The logical consequence of the way technology is going, at some point in the future, will be to have everything done by computer, or some other machine which may well be automated and probably doesn’t even need to respond to the touch of a button, though if did it wouldn’t make a great deal of difference. We quite naturally do not do anything ourselves if there is someone, or something, else that can do it for us, because it always seems pointless whatever the downside. It would seem we have an emotional and psychological impulse, which is impossible to resist, to do what is disastrous for us. It is not, I think, in our nature to refrain from inventing or making use of machines which can do tasks previously performed by humans on the grounds that it would make the latter into lazy, unhealthy beings with no sense of purpose. And yet it will. Why leave one's house, or even a particular room within it, to do learn this or that piece of information or do such-and-such an activity if it can be accomplished simply by plugging oneself into the Internet or some kind of Virtual Reality machine? It is a serious danger precisely because, even though the effects on an abstract level may be thoroughly harmful, it will inevitably seem stupid not to use the tool when you have it.
Even if it doesn’t lead to physical and mental stagnation the trend towards greater and greater mechanization and computerization can still prove fatal for us. As science progresses, so in proportion do the potential effects when criminals, terrorists or the agents of aggressive powers, who are always keeping pace with developments, exploit it for their own nefarious purposes. This applies with any new invention, but in particular with computers. As more and more of the world comes to be controlled by them, the consequences of the wrong people learning how to manipulate them and so cause havoc become potentially more alarming. The aim might not be to bring about the total destruction of human civilization, but the effect of such sabotage, especially if the aim behind it was political, could nonetheless be widespread and shattering. At the very least the criminals and the terrorists could gain a valuable advantage at the expense of causing disruption and misery to many. A war between two or more states conducted by computer virus could be catastrophic even if neither side succeeded in gaining a permanent advantage over the other. Not that the catastrophe need be brought about deliberately. The more is computer-controlled, the more devastating the results will be if systems “crash”, especially if all computers everywhere are linked for the sake of greater efficiency and ease of communication (I expect this will be the trend as society becomes more and more complex and harder to run unless by such a rapid-fire process). A very large reserve body of people would have to be recruited in case this happened, so that they could step in and put everything back on line. But unless they are frequently being used, human skills will ossify. To keep them in the state of readiness they need to be in if they are to do the job when the occasion demands it, when they are necessarily inactive most of the time because generally the system operates efficiently would be virtually impossible. The only sure way of averting disaster, in the case of preserving vital records, would be to have a paper backup for everything. But there would be problems finding the space to accommodate it all, and meeting the cost of producing and storing it. It’d eliminate the whole point, or an important part of the point, of computerization, which is to generate and store information much more easily and cheaply, in the form of tiny electronic impulses, than is possible with manual filing cabinets. Computerised systems already encounter this problem to some extent but may be expected to do so on a much bigger scale in decades to come.
Computers and the Internet are something of a Pandora’s Box, precisely because they are too valuable an invention to be discarded (I’m typing this on a computer, in case you hadn’t guessed). For one thing, they allow rapid access to information that might be urgently required, in a way that wasn’t previously possible; I’m still staggered by Google, and if I had to name one good reason why we should have them it would be that. But they are all the same a double-edged sword. Because they allow such speedy gathering and processing of information, and because to be computer-literate and thus more effective is a bit of a status symbol nowadays, we invest so much in them that we forget their downside to our cost, and leave ourselves without the kind of backup that’s maybe a bit old-fashioned but essential in an emergency. Some material that once upon a time would only appear in book, or at any rate paper, form is now being committed only to the Internet. This has the obvious disadvantage that if the system crashes you are unable to access the information, whereas a printed book or booklet is solidly there on your shelf whenever you want it. The problem is that since the Net is the most common, and commonly used, means of storing the data most of the time it may not be cost-effective, efficient in economic terms, for a company or even an individual to produce the book. This is a particular contradiction, a particular dilemma, of our modern high-tech, fast-lane society; that something can be practically efficient in one respect but practically very inefficient in another. Here one might also observe that while computers save money by effectively miniaturizing storage systems, they also at the same time run up your electricity bill. And it shouldn’t be forgotten that they, wonderful and dazzling and indicative of status as they are, still have one vital thing in common, which has been discovered for over two hundred years and without which they could not function. We have already mentioned it – electricity. They’re all as likely to shut down if the plug or its equivalent is pulled as a light bulb made by a nineteenth- century scientist.
There’s something rather sinister in the way those who control so much of society in a Thatcherite, business-dominated world, the employers, regard the Net. A Washington Post news story explained the benefits of e-mailing thus: “It increased employees’ productivity by 1.8 hours a day because they took less time to formulate their thoughts.”(9) This is reminiscent of the military philosophy that one is not paid to think, which is alright within the armed forces themselves – though not perhaps universally applied, or appreciated there - but certainly highly disturbing in civilian life. It rather suggests worker drones conditioned to be such, as in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World except that computers are the agent of control rather than selective breeding, surgery or genetic engineering.
The social problems caused by computerisation, the way they serve to widen the gap between rich and poor, will be dealt with in the following chapter. We may here discuss, however, one consequence of it, often talked about, whose effect without the computers necessarily being implanted in us is to dehumanise - not in the same way that cybernisation might, though it does involve the latter to some extent. Warfare is becoming increasingly automatised. Fighter planes, for example, are so heavily computerised in most of their functions that it is predicted human pilots will soon become redundant. The soldier on the battlefield will probably go the same way, as tanks for example, will be computer-controlled too. You could have the soldier wired into their vehicle/aircraft via implants, so (s)he controls them directly as an extension in many ways of his/her own brain. Or better still, do without them and have the craft operated by remote from your base, by someone who effectively isn’t a soldier while they’re doing their job but rather a computer technician playing a glorified (and to those on the receiving end of it, deadly) game of Space Invaders (remember it?). This person might still need implants to interface with the computer and thus the weapon it was controlling, or they could get by with just goggles and a headset – I suspect not, if reactions needed to be of a certain speed – but if any dehumanisation were involved it would only be while they were actually engaged on the task in hand. At any rate, it wouldn’t be warfare alone that turned them into a machine. But they’d never see the enemy personnel, the people they were ultimately fighting, nor vice versa. Of course, if it is sadly necessary to fight wars at all, and this is the best way to do it in the twenty-first century, then so be it. But it will mean the complete destruction of the military ethos and way of life, with all that is good about it as well as what’s bad. If warfare is reduced to a group of technicians on opposing sides monitoring the progress of automatic tanks, aircraft, warships and submarines on a screen which could be thousands of miles from the battlefield it becomes depersonalised, with the loss of all the opportunities it can present for valour and for magnanimity towards the enemy when called for. By extension, Mankind in general will become dehumanised too since feats of courage (rather than technical skill or mental agility, which are all that’s needed in a computer war) and acts of nobility by a country’s army are what maintain or enhance that country’s dignity, one might say its greatness, and allow it not just to have pride taken in it by its own citizens but also be respected by others, thus imparting some decency to international relations and helping prevent them becoming too embittered. When you never see your enemy face-to-face, or at any rate at close quarters, it’s impossible for one side to appreciate the other’s bravery or to show goodwill (as far as is possible in war) by helping its wounded, allowing it to collect its dead without being fired upon, or spare the lives of its troops when killing them as opposed to some other action would serve no purpose. Nor could you develop the team spirit and moral fibre you’d otherwise gain from working in partnership with those on your own side, and backing them up when things get tough and you can help them out without compromising the success of your mission. Platoon it ain’t.

*

“Evolutionary biologist Professor Christopher Wills of the University of California, San Diego, says there’s growing evidence that human evolution is accelerating. “It is true that people who might otherwise have died can now survive, but such relaxation of selection will have little effect on our gene pools over hundreds or even thousands of years,” he says. Instead he thinks that evolution is taking off apace in other areas. The genes that are changing the fastest are those involved in brain function. As our application of technology makes our environment increasingly complex, so our mental abilities are improving in order to deal with that. Wills adds that as well as overall brain power, the evolution of our species in also selecting for diversity in brain function keeps the human race stocked with specialists in every field, from nuclear physicists to musicians. He thinks that this trend will continue in the future.”(10)
It is, however, quite clear that evolution in some areas is being offset by regression in others; by the cultural phenomenon which has become known as “dumbing down”, and of which more will be said in the next chapter. At the same time, it’s often been asked whether improved medical technology has resulted in our circumventing the process of natural selection, with people whose genes are “weak” and thus ill-equipped to carry them through life’s physical adversities now surviving; meaning effectively that we have ceased to evolve. Wills thinks not. The workings of evolution are still imperfectly understood, so it’s impossible to prove or disprove him. However, the fact that with such a complex society as ours hazards may be mental as much as physical, and by their nature much harder to develop a standardised let alone effective remedy for, suggests Darwinian natural selection will continue, if mental qualities are carried in the genes as well as physical ones, since mental problems require a mental solution even where physical factors are also involved. Only by eliminating emotional and medical problems altogether, through complete mental and physical cybernisation – something either dreadful or, perhaps because of that very dreadfulness, unworkable – could we escape its influence. Any part of us that remained organic would still be subject to it.
Nobody’d mind in any case whether evolution had stopped or not as long as we all lived reasonably happy lives. It probably wouldn’t harm us biologically as there are some species still living which haven’t changed much since the days of the dinosaurs and aren’t any the worse for it. I’m minded to conclude that we don’t need to evolve, if we can get by without doing so, and should be grateful for that; it would be cruel to let people die because of natural selection if it could be avoided. But perhaps in a way we have reached the end of our evolutionary line. The increasing complexity of the society we live in is the cause of many of our current problems, problems which both seem insoluble and are potentially disastrous; it doesn’t look as if evolution has so far managed to keep pace with that complexity and so enable us to cope with it. We may well end up being destroyed before our genes have a chance to change much further; the mere fact that genes do change, allowing organisms to adapt to altered circumstances and life-threatening hazards, doesn’t automatically guarantee a species’ survival, as the high extinction rate makes clear. At present we are likely to die out before continuing evolution or the lack of it has had time to take effect. Our scientific abilities give us a natural advantage in the daily struggle to meet our needs; for example, if our nature and our scientific skills (for which there must be genes) cause us to design artificial perfumes whose scent makes a woman attractive and thus more likely to secure a mate - in effect playing the same role as pheromones (which humans may or may not have) - in the natural world, they are merely an extension of our and other species’ natural abilities. But while in some ways they merely extend what nature does, at the same time they also replace her. How much we have really gained by doing this is hard to say. But as science progresses, so in proportion does the harm it can do, as well as the good. In a flawed world the gene for it can have destructive consequences, whatever its short-term advantages.
I’ve spoken of its being misused by the evilly minded; but there need be no element of deliberate intent to do harm, accidents will be enough, especially when there is a military application (we are supposed to have come close to World War Three on several occasions during the Cold War era because a flock of geese on a radar screen were mistaken for NATO or Warsaw Pact missiles). With plenty of atomic weapons still in existence, their number increasing if anything with nuclear proliferation, and new issues arising to create global divisions and raise international tension, the opportunity for such calamities to happen, because of technical failure or misunderstanding, will in future be even greater. There operates a scale in which the dangers of progress are in proportion to its benefits and although most of the time they may not be misused, the consequences if they are are that much greater.
Even where the scientific effort is directed towards peaceful purposes, and there is no doubt whatsoever as to its good intentions, it’s not being unduly pessimistic to suggest the negative consequence will balance the positive ones and even outweigh them. Delaying, or even preventing altogether, the ageing process will have both physical and moral implications. I suspect we know, and always did know, that they would be problematic. In some respect the dangers can be exaggerated. Women staying fertile longer, because the menopause has been stopped and they can have children in their 40s, 50s or even 60s and 70s, will not by itself lead to an increase in population if they are simply delaying childbirth, as will very often be the case given current trends and aspirations. But there remains the general pressure on resources, much alluded to already, from a generally bigger population and also from an ageing one. In the longer run, as I have pointed out there will be psychological problems to face, if the physical ones have not by then already brought about political and economic collapse. It will surely not have escaped our notice that increasing our lifespans will mean, as well as an extended youth, an extended middle age and - even worse - an extended old age. This means a long decline which in its later stages will be very depressing for those having to undergo it as well as very expensive for the state which has to provide the medical care.

The world of the future will be one where, thanks to computers and other automatic devices, or genetic engineering, or cybernisation, or some combination of these things we can do whatever is necessary or pleasurable for us without even getting out of bed. Wherever we are in the world, we will be able to order food and other essentials, cook meals, make business appointments and indeed carry out any other vital task via our own websites operated remotely by a mobile phone link or some other gadget.(11) There’s a justification, indeed a necessity, for this if you have to do it and you’re stuck in a traffic jam miles from home or in another part of the world on business. The trouble is, if we can do it in those circumstances then we’ll want to do it at home as well. It’s predicted that clothes, along with all other practically or socially vital commodities, can be programmed to behave the way we want them to by computer, radio message, or genetic engineering. In the latter case they will actually be specially created, or modified, living organisms, assuming any moral or legal qualms about creating a life form – rather than breeding an existing species such as a cow, chicken, sheep or horse - simply to serve a practical purpose have been overcome. It is hard to say whether such practices would be outlawed or the courts decide that they are no different from what farmers already do with cattle (what we currently do with horses, and is seen as quite acceptable, might be viewed as even more unethical since they are now bred mainly for our recreation, not being food animals and no longer, in developed parts of the world, required for transport most of the time). Even if genetic manipulation of this kind didn’t occur, we would still be making use of computers and other artificial devices in the ways described; and we might not see anything wrong in letting our own bodies do the job if genetic augmentation became a fad. How far the latter would happen is difficult to say but the dangers of increasing automation and of advancing genetic science does seem particularly dangerous when considering modern society’s obsession, except during economic recessions which no-one wants, with fashion and leisure.
In the future, provided the technology can be perfected, we will be able to put on and take off our clothes partly, or wholly, by remote control, and create them instantaneously using a spraycan, once the right instructions have been input; change our hair or eye colour and skin tone simply by triggering the implants which had earlier been inserted in us and which can also secrete pheromones to make us attractive to the opposite sex; carry out repairs and redecorations in the home indirectly through tapping in a certain code on the keyboard of our personal computer every now and then. If almost any physical action, whether its purpose is to make us look good or ensure that we and our families are properly fed and watered, then we will end up very unhealthy and unfit. If we were sufficiently depressed, as we ought to be, by our scrawny and wasted physiques we could of course programme ourselves to look like Venus or Adonis, independently of our diet and lifestyle, but we’d gain no sense of pride and achievement from doing so, not if (a) it was done just by pressing a button and (b) everyone else was doing it too. If the mundane tasks no longer provide a necessary and healthy opportunity for mental and physical exercise, there might to compensate for that be a renewed interest in more challenging activities such as mountaineering, orienteering, diving and the exploration of hostile foreign environments such as the jungle, desert or polar ice cap. But even if the dangers involved didn’t still put us off, there are the practical problems of organising such activities if everyone wanted to do them. And there wouldn’t be sufficient demand for them if Virtual Reality could simulate both the physical and the mental sensations involved in the experience; if you could be a deep-sea diver or a polar explorer just by putting on a headset and plugging yourself into a computer. These exploits need to be pleasurable as well as good for the physical body, and if the sensations can be had just as easily at home an important part of the incentive to do them is taken away. Given that, people would see less justification in exposing themselves to possible danger. The thrill of the experience would be lost, since Virtual Reality obviously isn’t meant to involve actual hardship or peril.
But we will, nonetheless, be suffering psychological damage as well as physiological. Without challenges to overcome, and the joy that lies in the overcoming, life becomes mundane and boring. From endurance of strenuous, dull or irritatingly difficult tasks, we learn the virtues of patience, perseverance and stoicism. Meeting adversities such as illness and injury leads to the development of courage and moral fibre, so the moral tone of society will be lowered. We will lose initiative and imagination and originality, because it is always adversity that produces original thought. We are also (potentially) capable of ennobling ourselves, proving our moral worth, by resistance to the temptation to be embittered by suffering, and this temptation will be eliminated if the push-button world, once the technology becomes affordable by everyone, makes life significantly easier and less stressful, in some ways anyhow. Finally there is the very practical consideration that with automation in all kinds of occupations making it less necessary for people to work the state would have to pay vast sums to vast numbers of people more or less to do nothing; after all, it wasn’t their fault that they became unemployed.
Boredom could lead to mass suicides, or to people seeking entertainment by inappropriate means such as the inflicting of cruelty on others, like those serial killers who torture and murder for kicks. Maybe we could turn the problem to our advantage by having our cyber-implants programme us to be happy. What a horrible thought; true happiness is something so wonderful that it’s debased by being instantly attainable at the touch of the button, and in fact it’s all the more rich from having its origin in endeavour, sometimes even adversity.
Science has the ability in the modern world to create particularly agonizing moral dilemmas, both for individuals and for society as a whole, as seen in the case of bringing a child into the world to help an existing one live, or of deciding between a man’s right to do what he likes with his own sperm and a woman’s natural desire to have a child. The problem is that where the issues are so finely balanced there will seem in the case of each side less reason to refuse its desires, and thus more bitterness when the desires are refused. In some cases there will be social unrest, anger and violence. At the same time, as well as the social tensions caused, the nature of the issue will be such that whatever side of the fence one comes down on permanent damage will be caused. It is doubtful, you will object, whether any moral issues have ever been satisfactorily sorted out; but now the stakes are much higher than ever before, and the consequent damage to society, whichever course is taken, greater, and increasingly so unless scientific progress actually ceases or is reversed.
The advance of science will make it possible for people to do certain things which, because of the damage they will or may do, will have to be prohibited by law. The justification for such prohibition will be clear, but since we would still be obstructing fundamental desires there would inevitably be the feeling that we lived in a Fascist state, which would lower the morale of society. Since the advances cannot be reversed the problem would be permanent, as with the other moral and practical consequences of progress.
Technological progress also creates problems with the represen-tation of itself in popular culture. In the recent Thunderbirds film, a remake of the 1960s fantasy television series, the new versions of the Thunderbird craft were supposed to be more high-tech than the old ones. The trouble is that as scientific and technological advance continues, there will be no difference between the machines in a fantasy adventure film or TV programme and those which are a daily part of our real lives. Hence these films will lose their power to excite and enthuse. They have always depended for their appeal on being able to present a future world that is not unbelievable yet enchanting and gripping in its wonder. Once they cannot do that, where are we going to look for the escapist entertainment which is a vital, because extremely healthy in hectic and stressful times, part of our lives? The films could attempt to deliver the goods on the level merely of drama, but we have always wanted more than that, and spy thrillers or sci-fi movies are appealing partly because we like the genres concerned, finding in them a (psychologically important) escapism if nothing else.
This may not be the case if society kept on progressing indefin-itely with there being for each stage of progress a conceivable future stage the prospect of which is even more dazzling. But there is a limit to how far it can advance without shooting right off the scale. The next stage in the development of aircraft technology is thought to be a flying saucer, but a flying saucer is just that; its plain geometric simplicity makes it uninspiring. Perfection usually does involves simplicity, for the more complex something is the more it is likely to go wrong; but simplicity is boring.
History seems to be moving towards a goal. Certainly what is undeniable is that the trend is towards scientific progress; the fact that the process takes place in leaps and bounds, much of the change having been compressed into the last 250 years, should not surprise us for it merely parallels what happens in biological evolution, which doesn’t take place at a steady rate either. There was technological progress before the industrial revolution began around 1750, even though it may not have been so rapid. It is, it could be argued, mainly the West which goes through these rapid periods of change, but that is only another manifestation of the complexity of the world and the differences between its various cultures. Even tribal cultures don’t remain entirely static, as Fukuyama points out. But given the tendency for one culture to dominate, and the fact that we live in a global village, the West’s scientific advances undeniably affect the rest of Mankind in fundamental respects.
Logically, if events continue to take place according to a certain pattern then they must have inevitable consequences. Using the methods of science itself, and going by observable data, if something appears to be a fundamental trend then it will continue unless some powerful external factor intervenes. If the trend is towards greater automation/mechanisation in everything we do it must lead to totally cybernetic, in many ways manufactured, human beings or a state of affairs where we are so reliant on technology to do things for us that we become little more than mindless vegetables. Logically scientific advance, like any kind of process, must either continue, halt or reverse. It cannot halt because that course is not consistent with the way people’s minds work, their aspirations. It seems the case that once certain things acquire a momentum they become unstoppable, whatever their consequences. We have become accustomed to the excitement that the prospect of change brings. If it continues it must take people into areas which must be disastrous. Yet abandoning new technology would always seem stupid in view of the advantages it gave – the human mind is certainly (and inalienably) structured on the kind of lines where one thinks this – and so we can’t escape from its harmful consequences. And if we halted scientific progress to avoid this dystopic outcome we would become terminally bored simply by token of the fact that nothing was changing.
Either we will not be able to continue to progress – there are still significant obstacles to the development of a lot of the technologies I have mentioned – or it would take us onto too dangerous ground if we did. Either way we face stagnation. This will have profound and damaging psychological consequences, removing any purpose or appeal from our existence. I suggest the result would be mass suicide. If all this seems too far-fetched to be believed it is because we have never experienced these problems before, science having only now created the possibilities which have led to them. It reinforces the assertion that we cannot say, because we have faced ethical dilemmas and other pressing problems before and overcome or learned to live with them, that we will be able to do so in the future.
The important thing which should be remembered is that given the nature of scientific and technological progress, these disastrous developments (a) are imminent within a relatively short time and (b) will be irreversible. If there is some earthly way of solving the problem, human progress is simply taking place much too fast for it to be identified and have time to work. When we considers the incredible pace of change during the LAST century, the differences between 1900 and 1999, it becomes clear that we will have reached the point of inevitable catastrophe well before 2100.
We cannot solve the problems science creates by a deliberate technological regression, either. Fukuyama:

“But let us examine the more extreme case, where the choice is not voluntary but forced on us by some cataclysm, either a global nuclear war or an environment which, despite our best efforts, attacks the physical basis for contemporary human life. It is clearly possible to destroy the fruits of modern natural science; indeed, modern