The Ghost in the Machine (48 page)

 

 

All this has often been said, and repetition tends to blunt rather than
sharpen our awareness. The public is aware that there is a problem;
it is not aware of the magnitude and the urgency of the problem; it is
not aware that we are moving towards a climax which is not centuries,
but only a few decades ahead -- that is, well within the lifetime
of the present generation of teenagers. What I am trying to prove
is not that the situation is hopeless, but that it is indeed unique,
unprecedented in man's history. De Beer's parable of the aeroplane which
skims along the runway for thousands of miles, but within a mile or two
from takeoff changes into a rocket, shooting straight up into the sky,
is meant to illustrate what the mathematician calls an 'exponential curve'
(Figure 14).

 

 

The curve should be extended to the left -- into the past -- for
miles on end, along which its rise would only be discernible through
a microscope. Then comes the critical moment when Pasteur et al. took
the brakes off. The brakes, of course, symbolise the high mortality rate
which, balancing the 'lift' of the birth rate, kept the population curve
nearly horizontal. It took about a century -- half an inch on our scale
-- until the consequences became apparent; from then onward the curve
rises steeper and steeper, until, in the second half of our century, it
starts rocketing towards the sky. It took our species something like a
hundred thousand years to spawn its first billion. Today we are adding
a further billion to the total every twelve years. In the first few
decades of the next century, if the present trend continues, we shall
add a billion every six years. After that, every three years; and so
on. But long before that de Beer's crazy aeroplane is bound to crash.

 

 

 

 

Population curve from the beginning of the Christian era
extrapolated to 2035 A.D.

 

 

An exponential curve reflects a process with the brakes off, which has
got out of hand. Even the draughtsman attempting to extend the curve
into the future will be defeated because, as the curve gets steeper and
steeper, he must run out of paper -- as the world must run out of food,
of Lebensraum, of beaches and river shores, of privacy, of smiles.

 

 

The uncanny properties of exponential curves reflect the uniqueness of
our time -- not only the population explosion, but also the explosion
in power, communications, and specialised knowledge.

 

 

To take the last item first, Dr. Ian Morris of University College writes:
'As measured by manpower, number of periodicals or number of scientific
papers, science is growing exponentially with a doubling time of about
fifteen years. Figure 1 shows the increase of scientific journals since
they began in 1665. . . .' The figure shows a curve similar to the one
above, indicating that the number of scientific journals in 1700 was
less than ten, in 1800 around a hundred, in 1850 around a thousand,
in 1900 more than ten thousand, after the First World War around a
hundred thousand, and by A.D. 2000 is expected to reach the one million
mark. 'The same picture is obtained if the number of scientists or
scientific papers is measured, and appears to be comparable for widely
different scientific disciplines. During the past fifteen years, the same
number of scientists were produced as existed during the entire previous
period of science. Thus because the average working life of a research
scientist is about forty-five years, seven out of every eight scientists
who have ever lived are alive now. Similarly, almost
ninety per
cent
of all scientific endeavour has been undertaken during the past
fifty years.' [7] The United States National Education Authority sets
the doubling time since 1950 even lower: ten years. [8]

 

 

Take power next. Again we have that long flat stretch of the curve from
Cro Magnon to about five thousand years ago. With the invention of the
lever, the pulley and other simple mechanical devices, the muscular
strength of man would appear multiplied, say, five- or tenfold; then
the curve would again remain nearly horizontal until the invention of
the steam engine and the Industrial Revolution, just two hundred years
ago. From then on, it is the same story as before: takeoff, steeper and
steeper climb to the rocket-like stage. The exponential increase in the
speed of communications, or in the range of penetration into the depths
of the universe by optical and radio telescopes, is too well known to
need stressing; but the following illustration is perhaps less familiar.

 

 

At the end of the nineteen twenties we could impart to atomic particles
about half a million electron-volts of energy; in the 1930s we could
accelerate them to twenty million electron-volts; by 1950 to five hundred
million; and at the time of writing, an accelerator of fifty thousand
million electron-volts is under construction. But more bemusing than
all these figures is to me an episode in 1930, when I nearly lost my job
as a science editor because of indignant protests against an article I
wrote on the progress in rocketry, in which I predicted space travel 'in
our lifetime'. And a year or two before the first Sputnik was launched,
Britain's Astronomer Royal made the immortal statement: 'Space travel is
bilge.' Our imagination is willing to accept that things are changing,
but unable to accept the
rate
at which they are changing, and to
extrapolate into the future. The mind boggles at an exponential curve as
Pascal's mind boggled when, in the Copernican universe, infinity opened
its gaping jaws:
Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis
m'effraie.

 

 

That is the position in which we find ourselves today. We dare no longer
extrapolate into the future, partly because we are frightened, mainly
because of the poverty of our imagination.

 

 

 

Two Curves

 

 

But at least we can look back over our shoulders into the past, and
compare the chart which we have just discussed, showing the explosive
increase in people, knowledge, power and communications, with another
type of chart indicating the progress of social morality, ethical
beliefs, spiritual awareness and related values. This chart will field
a curve of quite different shape. It, too, will show a very slow rise
during the nearly flat prehistoric miles; then it will oscillate with
inconclusive ups and downs through what we call civilised history; but
shortly after the exponential curves get airborne, the 'ethical curve'
shows a pronounced downward trend, marked by two World Wars, the genocidal
enterprises of several dictators, and new methods of terror combined
with indoctrination, which can hold whole continents in their grip.

 

 

The contrast between these two curves gives certainly an oversimplified,
but not an over-dramatised view of our history. They represent the
consequences of man's split mind. The exponential curves are all, in
one way or another, the work of the new cortex; they show the explosive
results of learning at long last how to actualise its potentials which,
through all the millermia of our prehistory, have been lying dormant. The
other curve reflects the delusional streak, the persistence of misplaced
devotion to emotional beliefs dominated by the archaic paleo-mammalian
brain.

 

 

To quote v. Bertalanffy once more:

 

What is called human progress is a purely intellectual affair, made
possible by the enormous development of the forebrain. Owing to this,
man was able to build up the symbolic worlds of speech and thought,
and some progress in science and technology during the 5000 years
of recorded history was made.
Not much development, however, is seen on the moral side. It is
doubtful whether the methods of modern warfare are preferable to the
big stones used for cracking the skull of the fellow-Neanderthaler.
It is rather obvious that the moral standards of Laotse and Buddha
were not inferior to ours. The human cortex contains some ten
billion neurons that have made possible the progress from stone axe
to airplanes and atomic bombs, from primitive mythology to quantum
theory. There is no corresponding development on the instinctual
side that causes man to mend his ways. For this reason, moral
exhortations, as proffered through the centuries by the founders of
religion and great leaders of humanity, have proved disconcertingly
ineffective. [9]

 

As a further illustration of the gulf between our intellectual
and emotional development, take the contrast between communication
and co-operation. Progress of the means of communication is again
reflected by an exponential curve: crowded within a single century are
the invention of steam-ship, railway, motor car, air-ship, aeroplane,
rocket, space-ship; of telegraph, telephone, gramophone, radio, radar;
of photography, cinematography, television, telstar. . . . The month I
was born, the Wright brothers in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, managed for
the first time to stay in the air for one entire minute in their flying
machine; the chances are that before I die we shall have reached the
moon and perhaps Mars.
No generation of man ever before has witnessed
in its lifetime such changes.

 

 

Within that lifetime, our planet has shrunk to Lilliputian proportions,
so that instead of Jules Verne's Eighty Days, it can be orbited in
eighty minutes. But as to the second curve -- the bridging of the
distance between nations did not bring them 'closer' to each other
-- rather the opposite. Before the communications-explosion, travel
was slow, but there existed no Iron Curtain, no Berlin Wail, no mine
fields in no-man's-lands, and hardly any restrictions on immigration or
emigration; today about one-third of mankind is not permitted to leave
its own country. One. could almost say that progress in co-operation
varied in reverse ratio to progress in communications. The conquest of
the air transformed limited into total warfare; the mass media became
the demagogue's instruments of fomenting hatred; and even between close
neighbours like England and France, the increase in tourist traffic has
hardly increased mutual understanding. There have been some positive
advances such as the European Common Market; they are minute compared
to the gigantic cracks which divide the planet into three major and
countless minor, hostile, isolated camps.

 

 

The point of labouring these obvious facts is to make them fall into the
general pattern. Language, the outstanding achievement of the neocortex,
became a more dividing than unifying factor, increasing intra-specific
tensions; progress in communications followed a similar trend of turning
a blessing into a curse. Even from the aesthetic point of view we have
managed to contaminate the luminiferous ether as we have contaminated
our air, rivers and seashores; you fiddle with the dials of your radio
and from all over the world, instead of celestial harmonies, the ether
disgorges its musical latrine slush.

 

 

Of all exponential curves, that referring to progress in destructive power
is the most spectacular and the best known. To sum it up as briefly as
possible: after the First World War, statisticians calculated that on
the average ten thousand rifle bullets or ten artillery shells had been
needed to kill one enemy soldier. The bombs dropped from flying machines
weighed a few pounds. By the Second World War, the block-busters had
acquired a destructive power equal to twenty tons of T.N.T. The first
atomic bomb on Hiroshima equalled twenty thousand tons of T.N.T. Ten
years later, the first hydrogen bomb equalled twenty million tons. At the
time of writing, we are stockpiling bombs the equivalent of one hundred
million tons of T.N.T.; and there are rumours of a 'gigaton bomb' --
a 'nuclear weapon packing the power of a billion tons of T.N.T. that
could be detonated a hundred miles off the U.S. coastline and still set
off a fifty-foot tidal wave that would sweep across much of the entire
American continent . . . or a cobalt bomb that would send a deadly cloud
sweeping forever about the earth.' [10]

 

 

 

The New Calendar

 

 

I have said that there are two reasons which entitles us to call our
time 'unique'. The first is quantitative, expressed by the exponential
increase of populations, communications, destructive power, etc. Under
their combined impact, an extra-terrestrial intelligence, to whom
centuries are as seconds, able to survey the whole curve in one sweep,
would probably come to the conclusion that human civilisation is either
on the verge of, or in the process of, exploding.

 

 

The second reason is qualitative, and can be summed up in a single sentence:
before the thermonuclear bomb, man had to live with the idea of his death
as an individual; from now onward, mankind has to live with the idea of its
death as a species.