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