Tomorrowland (2 page)

It was an offhand comment, but one that stayed with me. Consider the enormous influence that our spiritual traditions exert in today’s world. Think about the blood that has been spilled in the name of religion in just these past hundred years. Think about the ongoing hubbub surrounding the — shall we say — “philosophical question” of millions of years of evolution, versus the more economic six-day approach. Now, think about what’s coming.

Right now, researchers are storming heaven from every direction. In “Extreme States,” we’ll see how things like trance states, out-of-body experiences, and cosmic unity — all core mystical
experiences that underpin our spiritual traditions — are now understood as the product of measurable biology. The hard science has been done; the disruptive technologies are what come next. So forget about science putting something as flimsy as “philosophical” pressure on religion — pretty soon the direct experience of the numinous is going to be available via video game.

And that’s just the beginning of the storm. How many spiritual traditions rely on the premise of the hereafter to steer morality? Yet, as you’ll see in “The Genius Who Sticks Around Forever,” we are already poking at the possibility of downloadable consciousness — the idea that we can store self in silicon, loading consciousness onto a chip and loading that chip onto a computer, allowing us to hang on to our personalities forever — so what happens to morality in the face of immortality?

Or take synthetic biology, a technology explored in “Hacking the President’s DNA,” that allows us to write genetic code much like we write computer code, a development that gives us the power to create life from scratch. So now we can cheat death and jumpstart life and, as e.e. cummings once said, “Listen, there’s a hell of a good universe next door; let’s go.”

Well, folks, we’re already gone.

Of course, some might not be moved by the above “spiritual” arguments, so it’s worth taking a moment to examine these ideas in more secular terms. One of the most well-established facts in psychology is that the burden of consciousness confers on every human being an innate fear of death. In 1974, psychologist Ernest Becker won a Pulitzer Prize for
The Denial of Death
, arguing that death anxiety is the most fundamental of all our motivational drivers — more powerful than our need for food, drink, or sex. In fact, Becker claimed, everything we consider “culture” is nothing more than an elaborate defense mechanism against the awful knowledge of our own mortality. A great many researchers now agree. Fear of death is the fundamental human experience, the very cornerstone of our psychological foundation. Yet, right now, in labs all over the world, researchers are chipping away at
this cornerstone, hollowing out our very essence. So what happens when they succeed?

Who knows.

What we can say for sure is that the future that’s coming is unlike anything we’ve ever seen. I’ve heard it called the Age of Prometheus, I’ve heard it called the Age of Icarus, but either way the part that strikes me as truly strange is these mythic metaphors are no longer metaphors. We actually are stealing fire from the gods; we really might be flying too close to the sun.

Another thing I can say is that it’s been an astounding ride. On a number of occasions, I’ve been lucky enough to be in the room when history happens. In fact, when William Dobelle switched on his artificial vision implant for the first time, I wasn’t just in that room — I was what was seen.

That wasn’t my intention. Twenty seconds before Dobelle switched on the device, I realized that I was sitting directly across from Patient Alpha, smack in the middle of his line of sight. I didn’t feel right about what was about to happen, so I actually tried to get out of the way. In the final moments of the countdown to curing blindness, I slid back my chair, got up, and took a couple of quick steps to the left. What was I thinking? Patient Alpha was blind. He’d spent his entire life tracking motion through sound. Of course, when I moved, he tracked the sound and turned his head and that, as they say, was that.

I’ve come to see that moment as emblematic of these past few decades. Despite my best intentions and best efforts, I wasn’t stealthy enough. I wasn’t fast enough. I couldn’t duck. No matter what I did, there was no way to get out of the way of the future.

And so it is for all of us.

These are exponential times. The far frontier is no longer a distant dream. It is there today and here tomorrow, and that’s the thing: Luddite revolutions don’t seem to hold for long. Resisting the lure of technology isn’t really in us. In
What Technology Wants, Wired
cofounder Kevin Kelly argues that this is because technology is actually another form of life — a living, natural system
with ancient origins and deep desires. And while Kelly has a point, I also think there’s simpler truth at work. Life is tricky sport. It can be hard here, often harder than we want it to be, sometimes harder than we can take. And that strikes me as the emotional core of the story, the real reason we can’t put Pandora back in the box. When you strip everything else away, technology is nothing more than the promise of an easier tomorrow. It’s the promise of hope. And how do you stop hope?

Right now, in a deep forest in the South of France, researchers are completing work on the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, which is far and away the most complex machine ever built. When switched on, the reactor will ionize hydrogen to temperatures over two million degrees — which is ten times hotter than the sun. In other words, when ITER is switched on, we will be turning on a star. How far has hope taken us? From the very first time one of our primate progenitors sharpened a stick to a star. A freaking star. In a lab. Created by us.

Let there be light.

PART ONE

THE FUTURE IN HERE

Bionic Man

THE WORLD’S FIRST BIONIC MAN

Future technology has always been about pushing limits. Now, unless we’re talking about defying the fundamental laws of physics, then the limits that interest us most are the ones imposed by our biology. And there is no greater reminder of those limits than age-related decline, the loss of the use of our own limbs, the undeniable signal that the clock called life is winding down.

Bionics, of course, marks the beginning of the end for this particular trend. The creation of artificial limbs not only ushers in a new era of radically enhanced prosthetics — itself a boon for anyone who has suffered the horrors of amputation — but opens the door for a new era of rebirth, where platitudes about second childhoods can now be reinforced by some serious mechanistic heft. This means, I suspect, that the true impact of bionics is going to be as much mental as physical. We think we’re building new bodies, but my guess is we’re going to end up with new brains as well. Or, to put this in slightly different terms, I know very few adults who don’t share George Bernard Shaw’s opinion: “Youth is wasted on the young.” Well, not for long.

1.

The first thing David Rozelle did after the insurgents put a price on his head was up the ante. After all, this was Captain David Rozelle, the one they called Iron Man or Killer 6 or Kowboy 6 — the 6 being short for “six-shooter,” as in gunslinger, ass kicker, take your pick. His head for a measly thousand bucks? It was insulting.

This all went down in the summer of 2003, in a police station in the city of Hit (pronounced “Heat”), Iraq. Rozelle and the 139 men under his command, the Army’s Third Armored Cavalry Regiment K Troop, had already battled their way from Kuwait to Syria. They had followed the men on Thunder Run and scrapped beside the marines in Fallujah, and when they were done there, the brass had told Rozelle to secure a town in northwestern Iraq. What town? It didn’t matter. Everything was a bloody mess up there.

Rozelle started looking at maps. Hit caught his eye. There was no CIA data on the place. Aerial reconnaissance photos showed lots of fancy cars — Mercedeses, Rolls-Royces — but no major industry. All the earmarks of a significant Sunni stronghold. “Major bad guys for sure” is how Rozelle describes it.

So Rozelle and K Troop took Hit. In two months, they restored order. Under Rozelle’s command, the members of K Troop taught themselves counterinsurgency tactics: tracking snipers, putting money back into the banks, and restoring the electricity. Rozelle even put a woman on the city council, a fact he likes to brag about: “We were going to be the first town in Iraq to have equal rights for women.”

Then, in the sticky weather of early June, at roughly 6:30 p.m.,
Rozelle arrived at the new police station — new because insurgents had already burned down the old one in an attempt to scare off the police force Rozelle had built — for his nightly pre-mission briefing. Something was wrong. There was tension in the room, people talking in whispers. Demanding an explanation, Rozelle was told that Sunni insurgents had put a price on his head. He was not surprised. But he was curious — how much was he worth?

“I asked my translator,” says Rozelle. “It was this big moment. The room got quiet. He turned to me and said in a stage whisper, ‘One thousand dollars.’ ”

Rozelle knew there were spies in that room. He knew whatever he said would get back to the insurgents.

“That’s bullshit!” he shouted. “Tell those sons of bitches I’m worth way more than that. I’m worth ten thousand dollars. Tell them I’ll pay the bounty myself.”

No one claimed Rozelle’s bounty that first night. Or the next. No one got close for almost two weeks — but that only exacerbated the situation. The insurgents started burying land mines on frequently traveled roads, including the one just outside the soccer stadium. On June 21 Rozelle was leading a convoy down that road. Unwilling to subject his men to dangers he would not face himself, Rozelle had his Humvee take point. He rode shotgun. As was his custom, he held a pistol out the window in his right hand, his left staying firmly atop the Bible his father had given him before he departed for Iraq.

Up ahead, the road looked disturbed, like something had pushed the dirt around. Rozelle halted the convoy and surveyed the area. He told the driver to proceed slowly. Seconds later all hell arrived. The truck hit a land mine. The explosion shot the front end of the Humvee four feet into the air. Doors and windows blew out, scattering debris more than a hundred yards. Rozelle’s flak jacket saved his life. He took shrapnel to the face and arms. His left foot was pinned between the ground and the engine block. His right foot? His boot was still on, but blood and bone oozed out of the side. When he tried to step on it, he drove
his tibia and his fibula straight into the ground. Wow, did that hurt like a motherfucker.

The first surgery took place in a dusty tent outside Baghdad. The setup looked like something out of
M*A*S*H
. Rozelle couldn’t believe anyone would operate under such conditions. Operate they did. Doctors are trained to salvage as much of the limb as possible, so they performed a tricky ankle-joint amputation known technically as a Syme’s.

Amputation is one of the greatest possible shocks. Children cannot help staring at amputees, as psychologists have said, because losing a limb is literally the worst thing a child can imagine. Adults may have better manners, but the internal damage is no less severe. The patient must endure a period of heavy grief, as if the mind cannot tell the difference between a lost limb and death itself. “When I woke up from surgery without my foot,” says Rozelle, “I had no frame of reference. I had never known an amputee before. It was like being completely reborn.”

Not long afterward, Rozelle was loaded onto a transport plane for Ramstein Air Base in Germany. Before departure, his commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Butch Kievenaar, paid him a visit. He’d come to deliver a message, telling Rozelle that if he got himself patched up, he could come back to Iraq and be given another command.

Rozelle was pissed. Maybe this was motivational bullshit, something the shrinks dreamed up to keep him from killing himself. But Kievenaar was a straight shooter, so perhaps the offer was good. Either way, at that point, with the bedsheets pressed flat where his foot should have been, all Rozelle could think was,
I have given enough
.

2.

Twenty-one years before anyone put a price on David Rozelle’s head, during the winter of 1982, Hugh Herr, then seventeen, and
Jeff Batzer, then twenty, left their homes in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, for an adventure in New Hampshire’s White Mountains. Both were experienced rock climbers, Herr already something of a legend. Known as Boy Wonder, he had been the youngest to ascend several North American mountaineering classics, including Mount Temple in the Canadian Rockies, which he scaled at the age of eight.

Herr and Batzer had their sights on Odell’s Gully, an ice-climbing route atop Mount Washington, one of the world’s most dangerous destinations. Since 1849 more than 135 people have died on this mountain and its surrounding peaks. Freezing temperatures, frequent avalanches. The average wind speed is 35 mph, but in 1934 a weather station on its summit clocked 231 mph — the strongest recorded blow in history.

Herr and Batzer knew all this but still decided to leave their extra backpack — containing food, clothes, and sleeping bags — at the base of the climb. Herr figured that without the added weight they could make it up and back more quickly, an important consideration, as a big storm was heading their way.

They did make good time, climbing four pitches of ice in less than an hour and a half, reaching the top of Odell’s before 10 a.m. But the top of Odell’s is not the top of Mount Washington. The apex lies some 1,000 feet higher. Not many climbers, at least not in winter, make a summit bid. Herr and Batzer decided to give it a try.

The storm arrived soon after. Temperatures fell far below zero; the wind gusted over 70 mph. Maybe they made it to the summit, maybe they turned back early; in those whiteout conditions it was impossible to tell. What we do know is that they never made it back to their planned descent route, instead trekking into the largest ravine in the White Mountains, a vast icy wildlands known as the Great Gulf.