The stories in this book are set in the coming days of the Golden Centuries of Astronomy, so why does it begin with THE TRANSFORMATION CRISIS, written as a speech I wrote for a futurology conference in 1975? Would it not be long rendered obsolete science fiction in the 21st century?
No it has not, quite the opposite, nor can it ever be so, for we have been in the Transformation Crisis at least from Hiroshima we are deeper in it now, and it may always be so.
Did I realize in 1975 that it would be so half a century later? Did I think back then that it was of ultimate importance from the very beginning as a speech? Yes I did. Did I imagine then that through the following decades it would continue to be published and bounced around through the internet in various languages into a kind of nonfictional scientifictional lore?
Not really. I would have said that any backwards time journeyer who told me it would was a crazy liar.
But reading it now I’ve been amazed that while it was written before there was an internet, before even a single planet was known to exist outside our own solar system, before the great pandemic, before the realization of the full danger of the Climate Change decades before I wrote GREENHOUSE SUMMER, that we the species of homo sapience would still be in the middle of our own transformation crisis and what I wrote in 1975 is far from obsolete now or indeed in even in the Golden Age of Astronomy and for centuries beyond.
Ah, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.
The Transformation Crisis by Norman Spinrad
We are living in the most critical period in human history, indeed the most critical epoch in the evolution of life on Earth, an ongoing evolutionary crisis which came into full flower over Hiroshima in 1945, and which will probably persist well into the 21st Century, if we don’t destroy ourselves and the terrestrial biosphere itself first. That we have the nuclear power to do just that is the most starkly obvious aspect part of what I have come to call the Transformation Crisis, but far from the only ultimate evolutionary responsibility placed in the hands of generations now living.
Nor is such a Transformation Crisis likely to prove to be a uniquely human phenomenon; rather, I believe, it is an evolutionary inevitable that any intelligent species anywhere is sooner or later are going to confront.
Perhaps twenty billion years ago, the universe exploded into being from a dimensionless singularity in a presently unimaginable nothingness of quantum flux, and began to expand, cool, and evolve towards ever-increasing complexity, and with ever-accelerating speed.
The primal quarks condensed into subatomic particles, the We are living in the most critical period in human history, indeed the most critical epoch in the evolution of life on Earth, an ongoing evolutionary crisis which came into full flower over Hiroshima in 1945, and which will probably persist well into the 21st Century, if we don’t destroy ourselves and the terrestrial biosphere itself first.
That we have the nuclear power to do just that is the most starkly obvious aspect part of what I have come to call the Transformation Crisis, but far from the only ultimate evolutionary responsibility placed in the hands of generations now living.
Nor is such a Transformation Crisis likely to prove to be a uniquely human phenomenon; rather, I believe, it is an evolutionary inevitable that any intelligent species anywhere is sooner or later going to confront.
Perhaps twenty billion years ago, the universe exploded into being from a dimensionless singularity in a presently unimaginable nothingness of quantum flux, and began to expand, cool, and evolve towards ever-increasing complexity, and with ever-accelerating speed.
The primal quarks condensed into subatomic particles, the particles clumped into hydrogen atoms, which condensed into galaxies of first-generation stars. Fusion processes produced the heavier elements in the cores of these first-generation stars, the stars went through their life-cycles, and exploded into novas, enriching the interstellar medium with elements and compounds.
Proto-stellar nebulas formed out of this material, condensed into second-generation stars, many of them attended by planets, gaseous and solid, if our present understanding of cosmological evolution is correct.
Given a planet of roughly terrestrial mass and chemical composition orbiting its star at a distance allowing liquid water to exist on its surface, the universal physical laws would seem to deterministically dictate what happens next.
The planet begins to evolve.
Outgassings from the interior and/or commentary bombardment give it oceans and an early atmosphere. Preexisting complex carbon molecules rain down from space. The universal laws of organic chemistry cause them to link together in chains of ever-increasing length and complexity…
Whether the next stage is inevitable or the result of a chain of random recombinations we do not yet know, but given the likelihood of billions of suitable planets, and given the certitude of billions of years of time, it seems likely that what occurred on Earth can hardly be unique.
Molecules eventually evolved that were able to organize duplicates of themselves out of the raw materials of the nutrient soup.
On Earth, these molecules were RNA and DNA or the chemical precursors of same. It seems likely that different but functionally analogous chemical structures would have evolved elsewhere. But whatever the chemical specifics, the evolution of such replicating complex molecules, the simplest viruses, represents the birth of life.
Cosmic ray bombardment and random accidents cause variations in some of these copies. Those that are better adapted to duplication and survival increase their numbers at the statistical expense of the others.
Life begins to evolve.
On Earth, at least, viral cores evolve protective envelopes of increasing complexity, become cells. The chlorophyll molecule evolves within some of them, enabling them to use the energy of the sun directly to turn simpler compounds, mainly carbon dioxide, into more of themselves–the first single-celled plants.
Evolution itself begins to evolve as living organisms alter the chemistry of their planet, replacing much of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere with free oxygen.
Driven by this radical environmental change, the pace of evolution quickens, as the planetary biomass rapidly expands.
Predatory microbes evolve to feed off the simple plants. Colonial organisms. Multicellular organisms, then sexual reproduction, which increases variation, and speeds up the pace of evolution yet again.
Primitive nervous systems evolve to coordinate activity. Spinal chords with neural nodes evolving towards central brains…
Vertebrates, fishes that crawl up on the shore, evolve into air-breathing amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals. And all the while, driven by the need to prey and avoid being preyed upon, nervous systems and brains evolve greater and greater complexity until…
Primates start picking up sticks and stones and using them as weapons, later as tools, requiring the evolution of still larger and more complex brains to coordinate these activities. Perhaps at the same time, they begin hunting in coordinated groups, using sounds and gestures with differentiated meanings.
These become language, a means of conveying information from one animal to another, but also a medium within which internal information processing can take place between stimulus and response, which is to say thought.
Consciousness has evolved.
How universal is this evolutionary process? Given the diversity of starting conditions and the abundance of random factors inherent in such long evolutionary chains, it seems highly unlikely
that sapient beings evolving on other planets will bear much physical resemblance to ourselves. But given billions of planets and given billions of years of time, and given the universal evolutionary drive towards greater and greater complexity, it would seem likely that consciousness will evolve at the pinnacle of many if not most biospheres.
And that is the point.
The point at which physical evolution produces an end product that transcends the physical evolutionary process itself.
Billions of years for planets to evolve from the Big Bang. A billion or two more to quicken to life. Perhaps another billion or so for microbes to become creatures that think and speak and use tools. But once they do, once cultural and technological evolution begins, it proceeds at blinding speed, mutating faster by many orders of magnitude than anything possible in the cosmological or even biological realm.
A million years or so from the first words and tools to the first cities. A few thousand years from early communities to the nation-state. A millennium or two between the birth of science and the industrial revolution. About a century between the first primitive mechanized transportation and the airplane, and about six decades later, men on the Moon. Men who, biologically speaking, have hardly evolved at all beyond the inhabitants of the first humans to master fire.
And who now, for better or for worse, hold the power of nuclear fire in their hot little hands.
Which bring us back to where we find ourselves today.
As surely as the Big Bang implied the formation of planets, as surely as organic chemistry led to the evolution of life, as surely as consciousness arises out of the evolution of the biomass, any sentient species which develops science and technology is going to is going to get its hands on the power of the atom, is going to find itself in possession of the power to destroy the biosphere which gave it birth.
Atomic destruction is certainly not the only means for destroying life on Earth, but it is sufficient, meaning that our species entered its mature Transformation Crisis with the first nuclear explosions in 1945.
How lucky we were!
Humans developed and used the first primitive nuclear weapons at the tag-end of a great war. If this technology had arisen a decade or two earlier, both the Allies and the Axis would have been in possession of large arsenals of fusion bombs and ICBMs when the war started, and the Earth might now be a dead planet. If the development of nuclear weapons had been retarded by a decade or two,
if the Soviet Union and the United States had built up their nuclear arsenals during a Cold War period without benefit of the relatively cheap lessons of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the result might have been much the same.
Fortunately for us, we seem to have successfully negotiated the crudest and earliest challenge of our species’ Transformation Crisis. For nearly half a century, we have lived with the power to destroy our biosphere without so doing. But that does not mean we have transcended this aspect of the crisis. We never will. For as long as our species endures, we will possess the power of total self-destruction.
As Robert Oppenheimer exclaimed in dismay upon viewing the awfulness of that first primitive nuclear explosion, “Now we have become Shiva, breaker of worlds.” Forever.
For better or worse, we lunatics are now fully in charge of the asylum. Permanently.
And the nuclear aspect is only the most obvious and dramatic consequence of the Transformation Crisis. Hiroshima brought us to full conscious awareness of that one, but the Transformation Crisis is a complex of inter-related evolutionary nexuses we are only now beginning to understand.
Prior to the evolution of photosynthetic cells, anaerobic fermentation of the organic soup, an inherently limiting chemical energy-source, provided the life-energy of the biomass. The mutant
photosynthesis-oxidation process allowed life to switch to much more abundant solar energy, but it changed the atmosphere, and the free oxygen released was toxic to most previous forms of life. There was an evolutionary crisis that lasted millions of years, and which might have destroyed life on Earth.
The terrestrial biomass transcended that crisis, and the result was a much larger total biomass operating at a higher energy level, and a consequent increase in the pace of evolution.
Beginning with the first use of fire, technological civilization has produced a similar evolutionary crisis, but in a much more compressed time-frame. In a very real sense, the use of larger and larger amounts of energy via the burning of fuels is the story of the rise of our technological civilization, enabling us to smelt metals, occupy hostile climes, build great cities and sophisticated machines, make medicines to conquer disease, travel at supersonic speeds, go to the Moon, increase our numbers exponentially.
And all the while, as blindly, until quite recently, as those first photosynthetic organisms, we have been changing the atmosphere in ways that may ultimately prove fatal to life on Earth. So too, in obedience to the evolutionary drive of any organism to replicate itself as widely as possible without regard to the survival of competitors, have we been diminishing the diversity of the biomass, mindlessly destroying complex webs of ecological interaction in our natural passion to fill every available ecological niche with more of ourselves.
Physical evolution unfolding on a geological time-scale has been superseded by immensely more rapid cultural and technological evolution, the mindless “natural” evolutionary process by choices
made by consciousness. What we do now dominates the composition of the atmosphere, the albedo of the planet, the climate, the nature of the biomass.
Indeed, for centuries, via selective breeding, we have been consciously crafting the evolution of species, as a quick visit to a modern barnyard or pet store easily enough demonstrates. Now, via
the infant science of genetic engineering, we are beginning to control evolution on an ultimate molecular level. Presently we are tailoring the genetic material of bacteria for our own purposes,
experimenting with mammalian chimeras, but we are already thinking about playing with our own genes.
A “DNA synthesizer” already exists. Projects to map the complete human genome are already under way. In a few years, if it is not possible already, we will be able to synthesize simple viruses from off-the-shelf chemicals. A decade or two later, we will be able to do the same with human life.
And before that, we will have the capability of creating Artificial Intelligences whose consciousness transcends our own. With the growing ability to take all of the above beyond the bounds of our native planet, to colonize other worlds, to terraform them, to create new artificial habitats in space.
The evolutionary process which began with the Big Bang has produced a race of conscious beings whose transformational powers exceed those of that evolutionary process itself. But, alas, power does not inevitably imply wisdom.
The evolutionary process, via science and technology, has placed these awesome powers in human hands, without regard to whether the minds behind those hands have evolved the moral and
philosophical maturity to wield them wisely.
That is the crux of the Transformation crisis, a crisis that must come on any planet where consciousness arises as the crown of the biosphere. Consciousness must evolve full self-awareness of the godlike ultimate responsibility such godlike powers imply or it will
die.
Science fiction, no less than current events, elucidates many paths to extinction. Nuclear destruction. A runaway greenhouse effect that destroys the viability of the atmosphere and the climate. The stripping of the ozone layer, exposing the planetary surface to lethal radiation. The release of some lethal artificial organism. Unforeseen results of genetic tampering. Worse things waiting. But science fiction, unlike current events or any other form of literature, also presents a vision, or rather a series of visions, of transcendence, of what could, indeed must, emerge out the other side-the next stage in evolution, a dynamically stable Transformational Civilization capable of enduring for millions of years.
What would such a post-Transformation Crisis civilization be like?
Science fiction presents several alternatives, some of them much more attractive than others. If we do end up destroying the natural biosphere, it would be at least theoretically possible to construct a stable successor civilization on a dead Earth, even as it is possible to construct entirely artificial habitats in space, and by much the same means.
Nuclear fission and fusion as sources of abundant energy, an artificial atmosphere created and maintained by industrial means, food sources based on artificial photosynthesis, perhaps eventually
a new biosphere created in the genetic engineering labs. Few people would advocate such a desperate solution as a matter of choice, it would give the familiar cliche “Spaceship Earth” an ironic and highly unpleasant new meaning.
The Greens, or at least the more extreme wings of the movement, advocate a reverse course to long-term stability. Give the preservation of the biosphere top priority, and cut back world
energy use to a level sustainable by renewable ecologically benign sources such as solar and wind power. Eliminate the use of pesticides and genetically-engineered organisms and return to
“natural” and organic means of food production.
Such a civilization could indeed survive indefinitely, but would only be capable of supporting a much lower standard of living or a much smaller human population, and probably both. Even if one
agreed that such an end result was desirable, getting from here to there would require a government capable of ruthlessly enforcing limits on living standards and population, as well as the deaths of billion of people now living. Hardly a utopian alternative either. As both of these dystopian alternatives make clear, energy is the key to the construction of a viable long-term civilization. The
continued reliance on any form of combustion as a major energy source even at present levels is not a viable long-term option. Sooner or later, the carbon dioxide inevitably produced even by so-
called clean fuels will render the atmosphere toxic to our form of life.
A Transformational Civilization must be based on one or more “Ideal Energy Sources.” An Ideal Energy Source is one which is abundant, environmentally neutral and inexhaustible, at least in
relatively cosmological terms, say over a time-span of several million years. Wind power, hydroelectrical power, and solar power, fulfill twoof the three requirements of Ideal Energy Sources–they release no chemical wastes into the environment, and are, for all practical purposes, inexhaustible.
Wind and water power, however, will never provide enough energy to replace combustion on a world-wide basis. The sources may be inexhaustible, but the available energy is limited, and could only support the energy needs of a much smaller and/or poorer population. Nor does solar power seem to offer a viable alternative at least on a planetary surface. One would have to cover much of the Earth’s surface with solar cells, and even then energy production would be constrained by the theoretical limits of photo-electric conversion, even with a future ideal technology.
In space, however, the sun could indeed serve as an Ideal Energy Source. Surface area constraints no longer apply, immense collecting surfaces need not be immensely massive, there is no
intervening atmosphere to attenuate sunlight, and so it would be merely a matter of some formidable engineering to construct collecting surfaces large enough to secure the desired amount of
solar energy, conversion systems to turn it into microwave energy to be beamed to the Earth’s surface, and receivers to collect it. Indeed, Freeman Dyson has suggested that sufficiently advanced
civilizations may deconstruct whole planets and use the materials to enclose their suns in a spherical shell–a so-called Dyson Sphere–in order to collect all of the available solar energy.
For the present and the practical future, though–meaning before our reliance on combustion destroys the biological viability of the atmosphere–the only available Idea Energy Sources will be
nuclear.
Despite the horror of the Greens, fission reactors are Ideal Energy Sources. Heat from entirely-contained nuclear reactions boils entirely-contained water into steam to generate electricity,
and nothing is released into the environment. Breeder reactors can turn relatively abundant uranium-238 into more fuel than they consume, and if we mine other bodies of the solar system, fission can provide abundant energy for millions of years.
The problem, of course, is that a malfunction at a fission reactor can release truly deadly poisons into the environment that can persist for thousands of years. And the burned-out cores of the reactors we already have have already piled up huge mountains of deadly radioactive wastes.
At present, nuclear power represents an uneasy stopgap wager–convert to fission power at the risk of an environmental catastrophe sooner or later, versus continued reliance on combustion and the certain destruction of the atmosphere within a century or two. Perfected nuclear fusion, however, would be another matter.
Heavy hydrogen extracted from water would release energy by being fused into chemically inert helium. There would be no toxic fuel and no toxic waste product for even an accident to release into the environment, and no possibility of a China Syndrome meltdown or a runaway chain-reaction. What is more, at fusion plasma temperatures, any material injected into the so-called fusion torch would be dissociated into its constituent atoms, which could then be collected as pure elemental material. A perfected fusion torch technology would not only provide an abundant environmentally benign energy source, it would serve as the perfect waste recycler for all byproducts of a Transformational Civilization.
A long-term stable civilization might and probably will eventually develop other and even better Ideal Energy Sources– direct conversion of matter into energy being the theoretical ultimate–but it seems clear than any civilization that successfully transcends its Transformation Crisis must have something at least as good as space-born solar power or the fusion torch. So, without really having to predict the technological specifics, we can indeed imagine in a general way what such a Transformational Civilization would have to be like in order to have survived a hundred thousand years or so of its own history. For all practical purposes, it would have access to nearly unlimited, virtually inexhaustible, environmentally neutral energy.
Fusion torch technology (or something even better) will mean that virtually anything can serve as raw material for the production of anything else, and it will all be perfectly recyclable, even food, via artificial photosynthesis, or some even more efficient process. If it so chooses, and it probably will, it will be a solar- system wide civilization, able to terraform planets, and construct huge artificial space habitats.
Given another few decades, we ourselves will be able to synthesize living organisms out of off-the-shelf chemicals, so, given the inclination, a Transformational Civilization will even be able to construct new living planets with their own tailored biospheres
.
Given even ten thousand years, a Transformational Civilization will be able to do just about anything that is possible within the ultimate limits set by the universal laws governing the interactions
of mass and energy.
The final question, of course, is how do we get from here to there? How do we transcend our Transformation Crisis? Vast shelves of science fiction novels could and have been written around the question, several of which I’ve already published, so perhaps I should close with a brief consideration of what a long-term civilization would have to be like in political, psychological, and, yes, spiritual terms, to survive thousands of years of its own history.
One thing is immediately clear–such a civilization will not engage in warfare, for the simple reason that any civilization possessed of such physical powers will be unable to survive such
behavior. Indeed, given unlimited energy, unlimited raw materials, unlimited room for territorial expansion, no rational reason for warfare can exist. Only a bout of cultural madness could lead to war in such conditions; such a civilization might survive one such war, two, maybe three, but over thousands of years, war will either disappear, or the beings that cannot give it up will.
As with warfare, so with other all forms of self-destructive cultural and technological activity capable of destroying planets, stars, or biospheres. Given even another thousand years, we ourselves, like any other sufficiently technologically advanced civilization, will possess nine and sixty ways of ending our species’ days, and every single one of them will be wrong.
So finally, the next step in our evolution, the one we need to make to get us through the Transformation Crisis that is the consequence of all that has gone before, is neither biological,
scientific, technological, nor even merely political. We must evolve the level of moral awareness and spiritual consciousness needed to attain particles clumped into hydrogen atoms, which condensed into galaxies of first-generation stars. Fusion processes produced the heavier elements in the cores of these first-generation stars, the stars went through their life-cycles, and exploded into novas, enriching the interstellar medium with elements and compounds.
Proto-stellar nebulas formed out of this material, condensed into second-generation stars, many of them attended by planets, gaseous and solid, if our present understanding of cosmological
evolution is correct. Given a planet of roughly terrestrial mass and chemical composition orbiting its star at a distance allowing liquid water to exist on its surface, the universal physical laws would seem to deterministically dictate what happens next. The planet begins to evolve.
Outgassings from the interior and/or cometary bombardment give it oceans and an early atmosphere. Pre-existent complex carbon molecules rain down from space. The universal laws of organic
chemistry cause them to link together in chains of every-increasing length and complexity…
Whether the next stage is inevitable or the result of a chain of random recombinations we do not yet know, but given the likelihood of billions of suitable planets, and given the certitude of billions of years of time, it seems likely that what occurred on Earth can hardly be unique. Molecules eventually evolved that were able to organize duplicates of themselves out of the raw materials of the nutrient soup.
On Earth, these molecules were RNA and DNA or the chemical precursors of same. It seems likely that different but functionally analogous chemical structures would have evolved elsewhere. But
whatever the chemical specifics, the evolution of such replicating complex molecules, the simplest viruses, represents the birth of life.
Cosmic ray bombardment and random accidents cause variations in some of these copies. Those that are better adapted to duplication and survival increase their numbers at the statistical expense of the others.
Life begins to evolve.
On Earth, at least, viral cores evolve protective envelopes of increasing complexity, become cells. The chlorophyll molecule evolves within some of them, enabling them to use the energy of the sun directly to turn simpler compounds, mainly carbon dioxide, into more of themselves–the first single-celled plants. Evolution itself begins to evolve as living organisms alter the chemistry of their planet, replacing much of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere with free oxygen.
Driven by this radical environmental change, the pace of evolution quickens, as the planetary biomass rapidly expands. Predatory microbes evolve to feed off the simple plants. Colonial organisms. Multicellular organisms, then sexual reproduction, which increases variation, and speeds up the pace of evolution yet again. Primitive nervous systems evolve to coordinate activity. Spinal chords with neural nodes evolving towards central brains.… Vertebrates, fishes that crawl up on the shore, evolve into air-breathing amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals. And all the while, driven by the need to prey and avoid being preyed upon, nervous systems and brains evolve greater and greater complexity
until.…
Primates start picking up sticks and stones and using them as weapons, later as tools, requiring the evolution of still larger and more complex brains to coordinate these activities. Perhaps at the same time, they begin hunting in coordinated groups, using sounds and gestures with differentiated meanings. These become language, a means of conveying information from one animal to another, but also a medium within which internal information processing can take place between stimulus and response, which is to say thought. Consciousness has evolved.
How universal is this evolutionary process? Given the diversity of starting conditions and the abundance of random factors inherent in such long evolutionary chains, it seems highly unlikely that sapient beings evolving on other planets will bear much physical resemblance to ourselves. But given billions of planets and given billions of years of time, and given the universal evolutionary drive towards greater and greater complexity, it would seem likely that consciousness will evolve at the pinnacle of many if not most biospheres. And that is the point.
The point at which physical evolution produces an end product that transcends the physical evolutionary process itself. Billions of years for planets to evolve from the Big Bang. A billion or two more to quicken to life. Perhaps another billion or so for microbes to become creatures that think and speak and use tools. But once they do, once cultural and technological evolution begins, it proceeds at blinding speed, mutating faster by many orders of magnitude than anything possible in the cosmological or even biological realm.
A million years or so from the first words and tools to the first cities. A few thousand years from early communities to the nation-state. A millennium or two between the birth of science and the industrial revolution. About a century between the first primitive mechanized transportation and the airplane, and about six decades later, men on the Moon. Men who, biologically speaking, have hardly evolved at all beyond the inhabitants of the first humans to master fire. And who now, for better or for worse, hold the power of nuclear fire in their hot little hands.
Which bring us back to where we find ourselves today. As surely as the Big Bang implied the formation of planets, as surely as organic chemistry led to the evolution of life, as surely
as consciousness arises out of the evolution of the biomass, any sentient species which develops science and technology is going to is going to get its hands on the power of the atom, is going to find itself in possession of the power to destroy the biosphere which gave it birth. Atomic destruction is certainly not the only means for destroying life on Earth, but it is sufficient, meaning that our species entered its mature Transformation Crisis with the first nuclear explosions in 1945.
How lucky we were! Humans developed and used the first primitive nuclear weapons at the tag-end of a great war. If this technology had arisen a decade or two earlier, both the Allies and the Axis would have been in possession of large arsenals of fusion bombs and ICBMs when the war started, and the Earth might now be a dead planet. If the development of nuclear weapons had been retarded by a decade or two, if the Soviet Union and the United States had built up their nuclear arsenals during a Cold War period without benefit of the relatively cheap lessons of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the result might have been much the same.
Fortunately for us, we seem to have successfully negotiated the crudest and earliest challenge of our species’ Transformation Crisis. For nearly half a century, we have lived with the power to destroy our biosphere without so doing. But that does not mean we have transcended this aspect of the crisis. We never will. For as long as our species endures, we will possess the power of total
self-destruction.
As Robert Oppenheimer exclaimed in dismay upon viewing the awfulness of that first primitive nuclear explosion, “Now we have become Shiva, breaker of worlds.” Forever. For better or worse, we lunatics are now fully in charge of the asylum. Permanently. And the nuclear aspect is only the most obvious and dramatic consequence of the Transformation Crisis. Hiroshima brought us to full conscious awareness of that one, but the Transformation Crisis is a complex of inter-related evolutionary nexuses we are only now beginning to understand.
Prior to the evolution of photosynthetic cells, anaerobic fermentation of the organic soup, an inherently limiting chemical energy-source, provided the life-energy of the biomass. The mutant photosynthesis-oxidation process allowed life to switch to much more abundant solar energy, but it changed the atmosphere, and the free oxygen released was toxic to most previous forms of life. There was an evolutionary crisis that lasted millions of years, and which might have destroyed life on Earth. The terrestrial biomass transcended that crisis, and the result was a much larger total biomass operating at a higher energy level, and a consequent increase in the pace of evolution.
Beginning with the first use of fire, technological civilization has produced a similar evolutionary crisis, but in a much more compressed timeframe. In a very real sense, the use of larger and larger amounts of energy via the burning of fuels is the story of the rise of our technological civilization, enabling us to smelt metals, occupy hostile climes, build great cities and sophisticated machines, make medicines to conquer disease, travel at supersonic speeds, go to the Moon, increase our numbers
exponentially.
And all the while, as blindly, until quite recently, as those first photosynthetic organisms, we have been changing the atmosphere in ways that may ultimately prove fatal to life on Earth. So too, in obedience to the evolutionary drive of any organism to replicate itself as widely as possible without regard to the survival of competitors, have we been diminishing the diversity of
the biomass, mindlessly destroying complex webs of ecological interaction in our natural passion to fill every available ecological niche with more of ourselves.
Physical evolution unfolding on a geological time-scale has been superseded by immensely more rapid cultural and technological evolution, the mindless “natural” evolutionary process by choices
made by consciousness. What we do now dominates the composition of the atmosphere, the albedo of the planet, the climate, the nature of the biomass.
Indeed, for centuries, via selective breeding, we have been consciously crafting the evolution of species, as a quick visit to a modern barnyard or pet store easily enough demonstrates. Now, via
the infant science of genetic engineering, we are beginning to control evolution on an ultimate molecular level. Presently we are tailoring the genetic material of bacteria for our own purposes,
experimenting with mammalian chimeras, but we are already thinking about playing with our own genes.
A “DNA synthesizer” already exists. Projects to map the complete human genome are already under way. In a few years, if it is not possible already, we will be able to synthesize simple viruses from off-the-shelf chemicals. A decade or two later, we will be able to do the same with human life. And before that, we will have the capability of creating Artificial Intelligences whose consciousness transcends our own.
With the growing ability to take all of the above beyond the bounds of our native planet, to colonize other worlds, to terraform them, to create new artificial habitats in space.
The evolutionary process which began with the Big Bang has produced a race of conscious beings whose transformational powers exceed those of that evolutionary process itself. But, alas, power does not inevitably imply wisdom. The evolutionary process, via science and technology, has placed these awesome powers in human hands, without regard to whether the minds behind those hands have evolved the moral and philosophical maturity to wield them wisely. That is the crux of the Transformation crisis, a crisis that must come on any planet where consciousness arises as the crown of the biosphere. Consciousness must evolve full self-awareness of the godlike ultimate responsibility such godlike powers imply or it will die.
Science fiction, no less than current events, elucidates many paths to extinction. Nuclear destruction. A runaway greenhouse effect that destroys the viability of the atmosphere and the climate. The stripping of the ozone layer, exposing the planetary surface to lethal radiation. The release of some lethal artificial organism. Unforeseen results of genetic tampering. Worse things waiting.
But science fiction, unlike current events or any other form of literature, also presents a vision, or rather a series of visions, of transcendence, of what could, indeed must, emerge out the other side–the next stage in evolution, a dynamically stable Transformational Civilization capable of enduring for millions of years.
What would such a post-Transformation Crisis civilization be like? Science fiction presents several alternatives, some of them much more attractive than others. If we do end up destroying the natural biosphere, it would be at least theoretically possible to construct a stable successor civilization on a dead Earth, even as it is possible to construct entirely artificial habitats in space, and by much the same means.
Nuclear fission and fusion as sources of abundant energy, an artificial atmosphere created and maintained by industrial means, food sources based on artificial photosynthesis, perhaps eventually
a new biosphere created in the genetic engineering labs. Few people would advocate such a desperate solution as a matter of choice, it would give the familiar cliche “Spaceship Earth” an ironic and highly unpleasant new meaning.
The Greens, or at least the more extreme wings of the movement, advocate a reverse course to long-term stability. Give the preservation of the biosphere top priority, and cut back world energy use to a level sustainable by renewable ecologically benign sources such as solar and wind power. Eliminate the use of pesticides and genetically-engineered organisms and return to “natural” and organic means of food production.
Such a civilization could indeed survive indefinitely, but would only be capable of supporting a much lower standard of living or a much smaller human population, and probably both. Even if one agreed that such an end result was desirable, getting from here to there would require a government capable of ruthlessly enforcing limits on living standards and population, as well as the deaths of billion of people now living. Hardly a utopian alternative either.
As both of these dystopian alternatives make clear, energy is the key to the construction of a viable long-term civilization. The continued reliance on any form of combustion as a major energy source even at present levels is not a viable long-term option. Sooner or later, the carbon dioxide inevitably produced even by so- called clean fuels will render the atmosphere toxic to our form of life.
A Transformational Civilization must be based on one or more “Ideal Energy Sources.” An Ideal Energy Source is one which is abundant, environmentally neutral and inexhaustible, at least in relatively cosmological terms, say over a time-span of several million years. Wind power, hydroelectrical power, and solar power, fulfill two of the three requirements of Ideal Energy Sources–they release no chemical wastes into the environment, and are, for all practical purposes, inexhaustible.
Wind and water power, however, will never provide enough energy to replace combustion on a world-wide basis. The sources may be inexhaustible, but the available energy is limited, and could only support the energy needs of a much smaller and/or poorer population. Nor does solar power seem to offer a viable alternative at least on a planetary surface. One would have to cover much of the Earth’s surface with solar cells, and even then energy production would be constrained by the theoretical limits of photo-electric conversion, even with a future ideal technology.
In space, however, the sun could indeed serve as an Ideal Energy Source. Surface area constraints no longer apply, immense collecting surfaces need not be immensely massive, there is no intervening atmosphere to attenuate sunlight, and so it would be merely a matter of some formidable engineering to construct collecting surfaces large enough to secure the desired amount of solar energy, conversion systems to turn it into microwave energy to be beamed to the Earth’s surface, and receivers to collect it.
Indeed, Freeman Dyson has suggested that sufficiently advanced civilizations may deconstruct whole planets and use the materials to enclose their suns in a spherical shell–a so-called Dyson Sphere–in order to collect all of the available solar energy. For the present and the practical future, though–meaning before our reliance on combustion destroys the biological viability of the atmosphere–the only available Idea Energy Sources will be nuclear. Despite the horror of the Greens, fission reactors are Ideal Energy Sources. Heat from entirely-contained nuclear reactions boils entirely-contained water into steam to generate electricity, and nothing is released into the environment. Breeder reactors can turn relatively abundant uranium-238 into more fuel than they
consume, and if we mine other bodies of the solar system, fission can provide abundant energy for millions of years.
The problem, of course, is that a malfunction at a fission reactor can release truly deadly poisons into the environment that can persist for thousands of years. And the burned-out cores of the reactors we already have have already piled up huge mountains of deadly radioactive wastes. At present, nuclear power represents an uneasy stopgap wager–convert to fission power at the risk of an environmental catastrophe sooner or later, versus continued reliance on combustion and the certain destruction of the atmosphere within a century or two.
Perfected nuclear fusion, however, would be another matter. Heavy hydrogen extracted from water would release energy by being fused into chemically inert helium. There would be no toxic fuel and no toxic waste product for even an accident to release into the environment, and no possibility of a China Syndrome meltdown or a runaway chain-reaction.
What is more, at fusion plasma temperatures, any material injected into the so-called fusion torch would be dissociated into its constituent atoms, which could then be collected as pure elemental material. A perfected fusion torch technology would not only provide an abundant environmentally benign energy source, it would serve as the perfect waste recycler for all byproducts of a Transformational Civilization.
A long-term stable civilization might and probably will eventually develop other and even better Ideal Energy Sources– direct conversion of matter into energy being the theoretical ultimate–but it seems clear than any civilization that successfully transcends its Transformation Crisis must have something at least as good as space-born solar power or the fusion torch. So, without really having to predict the technological specifics, we can indeed imagine in a general way what such a Transformational Civilization would have to be like in order to have survived a hundred thousand years or so of its own history. For all practical purposes, it would have access to nearly unlimited, virtually inexhaustible, environmentally neutral energy.
Fusion torch technology (or something even better) will mean that virtually anything can serve as raw material for the production of anything else, and it will all be perfectly recyclable, even food, via artificial photosynthesis, or some even more efficient process. If it so chooses, and it probably will, it will be a solar- system wide civilization, able to terraform planets, and construct huge artificial space habitats.
Given another few decades, we ourselves will be able to synthesize living organisms out of off-the-shelf chemicals, so, given the inclination, a Transformational Civilization will even be
able to construct new living planets with their own tailored biospheres.
Given even ten thousand years, a Transformational Civilization will be able to do just about anything that is possible within the ultimate limits set by the universal laws governing the interactions of mass and energy.
The final question, of course, is how do we get from here to there? How do we transcend our Transformation Crisis? Vast shelves of science fiction novels could and have been written around the question, several of which I’ve already published, so perhaps I should close with a brief consideration of what a long-term civilization would have to be like in political, psychological, and, yes, spiritual terms, to survive thousands of years of its own history.
One thing is immediately clear–such a civilization will not engage in warfare, for the simple reason that any civilization possessed of such physical powers will be unable to survive such behavior. Indeed, given unlimited energy, unlimited raw materials, unlimited room for territorial expansion, no rational reason for warfare can exist. Only a bout of cultural madness could lead to war in such conditions; such a civilization might survive one such war, two, maybe three, but over thousands of years, war will either disappear, or the beings that cannot give it up will.
As with warfare, so with other all forms of self-destructive cultural and technological activity capable of destroying planets, stars, or biospheres. Given even another thousand years, we ourselves, like any other sufficiently technologically advanced civilization, will possess nine and sixty ways of ending our
species’ days, and every single one of them will be wrong. So finally, the next step in our evolution, the one we need to make to get us through the Transformation Crisis that is the consequence of all that has gone before, is neither biological, scientific, technological, nor even merely political.
We must evolve the level of moral awareness and spiritual consciousness needed to attain long-term viability as a species. This is no airy pious hope but a cold hard evolutionary inevitable. Any species that does not achieve it will sooner or later destroy itself and its biosphere. Those that do will be the survivors. There will be no others.
And while the development of the technology to achieve a long- term stable Transformational Civilization may lie in the future, the power to destroy our species and our biosphere exists in the present.
So we can’t fob off the responsibility for achieving this necessary moral and spiritual transformation on our hypothetical descendants, We are the Transformation Crisis generations. We get the job done right, or we won’t be having any.
END
Norman Spinrad
1 rue de la Bucherie
75005 Paris
France
normanrspinrad@gmail.com
Source: Auto Draft
