THE TRANSFORMATION CRISIS--a book proposal for a major publisher
THE TRANSFORMATION CRISIS
by Norman Spinrad
a book proposal
This orginated as a proposal for a book which was way
ahead of it’s time and never got written. It became a free-standing
essay in several languages, and several speeches, and then the
speculative basis for several novels. And now its
time has come, and urgently so. Major publication is required.
To read this is to know why, but the book will go deeply into
the hows in all modes and all directions.
normanspinrad@hotmail.com
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 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
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