For climate scientists, the future looks pretty bleak. If their projections are correct then severe droughts and rising oceans will create fierce competition for resources, wars, starvation, and many a climate refugee. And, get this: humanity is in the same spot we were a century ago.
I’ve been reading a book by Thomas Hager, The Alchemy of Air. It’s about how the discovery of synthetic fertilizer enabled us to feed a population that was outstripping the resources of contemporary farming at the turn of the previous century. Advances in sanitation and medicine precipitated a population explosion, and new farmland was no longer being put into service. The turn of the century equivalent of climate scientists were predicting starvation and wars. There were skeptics, of course, and the parallels to today are striking.
No doubt, the White Knight of science saved the day, and we now have an obesity epidemic. The book goes on to describe how synthesizing fertilizer also enabled synthesizing gun powder and served as a precursor to World Wars I and II. The general tone of the book is that science is our friend, albeit there are unintended consequences.
Of course scientists are friendly and they mean well, but a slightly different perspective is that science didn’t actually solve the problem. Rather, science kicked the can. The real problem is that we live in a “box.” Whether or not you believe that human activity is at the level where we are bumping up against the sides of our box, one day we will be. Yeah, Elon Musk wants to colonize Mars, but that looks more like the ultimate gated community rather than any real solution to solve our box problem.
There’s no telling what scientific discoveries are lurking in the future, not to mention the unintended consequences accompanying them. However, even if you can imagine something as wonderful as nuclear fusion and presume there’s no downside, there is still a problem. There will be yet another industrial giant that we can’t imagine life without; or, more precisely, if it went away many would die because it became woven into the fabric of our communities. And the more our communities are dependent on outside interests, the less freedom we have. To engineer is human, and I wouldn’t expect science and technology to slow down any time soon. However, I would be interested in a backup plan where we figure out how to live together in this box.
–Joe Criscione