The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World (72 page)

In 1971, while I was still at school, I attended a lecture for high-school students entitled ‘Population, Resources, Environment’. It was given by the population scientist Paul Ehrlich. I do not remember what I was expecting – I don’t think I had ever heard of ‘the environment’ before – but nothing had prepared me for such a bravura display of raw pessimism. Ehrlich starkly described to his young audience the living hell we would be inheriting. Half a dozen varieties of resource-management catastrophe were just around the corner, and it was already too late to avoid some of them. People would be starving to death by the billion in ten years, twenty at best. Raw materials were running out: the Vietnam War, then in progress, was a last-ditch struggle for the region’s tin, rubber and petroleum. (Notice how his biogeographical explanation blithely shrugged off the political disagreements that were in fact causing the conflict.) The troubles of the day in American inner cities, rising crime, mental illness – all were part of the same great catastrophe. All were linked by Ehrlich to overpopulation, pollution and the reckless overuse of finite resources: we had created too many power stations and factories, and mines, and intensive farms – too much economic growth, far more than the planet could sustain. And, worst of all, too many people – the ultimate source of all the other ills. In this respect, Ehrlich was following in the footsteps of Malthus, making the same error: setting
predictions
of one process against
prophecies
of another. Thus he calculated that, if the United States was to sustain even its 1971 standard of living, it would have
to reduce its population by three-quarters, to 50 million – which was of course impossible in the time available. The planet as a whole was overpopulated by a factor of seven, he said. Even Australia was nearing its maximum sustainable population. And so on.

We had little basis for doubting what the professor was telling us about the field he was studying. Yet for some reason our conversation afterwards was not that of a group of students who had just had their futures stolen. I do not know about the others, but I can remember when I stopped worrying. At the end of the lecture a girl asked Ehrlich a question. I have forgotten the details, but it had the form ‘What if we solve [one of the problems that Ehrlich had described] within the next few years? Wouldn’t that affect your conclusion?’ Ehrlich’s reply was brisk. How could we possibly solve it? (She did not know.) And, even if we did, how could that do more than briefly delay the catastrophe? And what would we do
then
?

What a relief! Once I realized that Ehrlich’s prophesies amounted to saying, ‘If we stop solving problems, we are doomed,’ I no longer found them shocking, for how could it be otherwise? Quite possibly that girl went on to solve the very problem she asked about,
and
the one after it. At any rate, someone must have, because the catastrophe scheduled for 1991 has still not materialized. Nor have any of the others that Ehrlich foretold.

Ehrlich thought that he was investigating a planet’s physical resources and predicting their rate of decline. In fact he was prophesying the content of future knowledge. And, by envisaging a future in which only the best knowledge of 1971 was deployed, he was implicitly assuming that only a small and rapidly dwindling set of problems would ever be solved again. Furthermore, by casting problems in terms of ‘resource depletion’, and ignoring the human level of explanation, he missed all the important determinants of what he was trying to predict, namely: did the relevant people and institutions have what it takes to solve problems? And, more broadly, what
does
it take to solve problems?

A few years later, a graduate student in the then new subject of environmental science explained to me that
colour television
was a sign of the imminent collapse of our ‘consumer society’. Why? Because, first of all, he said, it served no useful purpose. All the useful functions of television could be performed just as well in monochrome. Adding
colour, at several times the cost, was merely ‘conspicuous consumption’. That term had been coined by the economist Thorstein Veblen in 1902, a couple of decades before even monochrome television was invented; it meant wanting new possessions in order to show off to the neighbours. That we had now reached the physical limit of conspicuous consumption could be proved, said my colleague, by analysing the resource constraints scientifically. The cathode-ray tubes in colour televisions depended on the element
europium
to make the red phosphors on the screen. Europium is one of the rarest elements on Earth. The planet’s total known reserves were only enough to build a few hundred million more colour televisions. After that, it would be back to monochrome. But worse – think what this would mean. From then on there would be two kinds of people: those with colour televisions and those without. And the same would be true of everything else that was being consumed. It would be a world with permanent class distinction, in which the elites would hoard the last of the resources and live lives of gaudy display, while, to sustain that illusory state through its final years, everyone else would be labouring on in drab resentment. And so it went on, nightmare built upon nightmare.

I asked him how he knew that no new source of europium would be discovered. He asked how I knew that it would. And, even if it were, what would we do
then
? I asked how he knew that colour cathode-ray tubes could not be built without europium. He assured me that they could not: it was a miracle that there existed even one element with the necessary properties. After all, why should nature supply elements with properties to suit our convenience?

I had to concede the point. There aren’t that many elements, and each of them has only a few energy levels that could be used to emit light. No doubt they had all been assessed by physicists. If the bottom line was that there was no alternative to europium for making colour televisions, then there was no alternative.

Yet something deeply puzzled me about that ‘miracle’ of the red phosphor. If nature provides only one pair of suitable energy levels, why does it provide
even
one? I had not yet heard of the fine-tuning problem (it was new at the time), but this was puzzling for a similar reason. Transmitting accurate images in real time is a natural thing for people to want to do, like travelling fast. It would not have been
puzzling if the laws of physics forbade it, just as they do forbid faster-than-light travel. For them to allow it but only if one knew how would be normal too. But for them
only just
to allow it would be a fine-tuning coincidence. Why would the laws of physics draw the line so close to a point that happened to have significance for human technology? It would be as if the centre of the Earth had turned out to be within a few kilometres of the centre of the universe. It seemed to violate the Principle of Mediocrity.

What made this even more puzzling was that, as with the real fine-tuning problem, my colleague was claiming that there were
many
such coincidences. His whole point was that the colour-television problem was just one representative instance of a phenomenon that was happening simultaneously in many areas of technology: the ultimate limits were being reached. Just as we were using up the last stocks of the rarest of rare-earth elements for the frivolous purpose of watching soap operas in colour, so everything that looked like progress was actually just an insane rush to exploit the last resources left on our planet. The 1970s were, he believed, a unique and terrible moment in history.

He was right in one respect: no alternative red phosphor has been discovered to this day. Yet, as I write this chapter, I see before me a superbly coloured computer display that contains not one atom of europium. Its pixels are liquid crystals consisting entirely of common elements, and it does not require a cathode-ray tube. Nor would it matter if it did, for by now enough europium has been mined to supply every human being on earth with a dozen europium-type screens, and the known reserves of the element comprise several times that amount.

Even while my pessimistic colleague was dismissing colour television technology as useless and doomed, optimistic people were discovering new ways of achieving it, and new uses for it – uses that he thought he had ruled out by considering for five minutes how well colour televisions could do the existing job of monochrome ones. But what stands out, for me, is not the failed prophecy and its underlying fallacy, nor relief that the nightmare never happened. It is the contrast between two different conceptions of what
people
are. In the pessimistic conception, they are wasters: they take precious resources and madly convert them into useless coloured pictures. This is
true
of static
societies: those statues really were what my colleague thought colour televisions are – which is why comparing our society with the ‘old culture’ of Easter Island is exactly wrong. In the optimistic conception – the one that was unforeseeably vindicated by events – people are problem-solvers: creators of the unsustainable solution and hence also of the next problem. In the pessimistic conception, that distinctive ability of people is a disease for which sustainability is the cure. In the optimistic one, sustainability is the disease and people are the cure.

Since then, whole new industries have come into existence to harness great waves of innovation, and in many of those – from medical imaging to video games to desktop publishing to nature documentaries like Attenborough’s – colour television proved to be very useful after all. And, far from there being a permanent class distinction between monochrome- and colour-television users, the monochrome technology is now practically extinct, as are cathode-ray televisions. Colour displays are now so cheap that they are being given away free with magazines as advertising gimmicks. And all those technologies, far from being divisive, are inherently egalitarian, sweeping away many formerly entrenched barriers to people’s access to information, opinion, art and education.

Optimistic opponents of Malthusian arguments are often – rightly – keen to stress that all evils are due to lack of knowledge, and that problems are soluble. Prophecies of disaster such as the ones I have described do illustrate the fact that the prophetic mode of thinking, no matter how plausible it seems prospectively, is fallacious and inherently biased. However, to expect that problems will
always
be solved in time to avert disasters would be the same fallacy. And, indeed, the deeper and more dangerous mistake made by Malthusians is that they claim to have a way of
averting
resource-allocation disasters (namely, sustainability). Thus they also deny that other great truth that I suggested we engrave in stone:
problems are inevitable.

A solution may be problem-free for a period, and in a parochial application, but there is no way of identifying in advance which problems will have such a solution. Hence there is no way, short of stasis, to avoid unforeseen problems arising from new solutions. But stasis is itself unsustainable, as witness every static society in history.
Malthus could not have known that the obscure element uranium, which had just been discovered, would eventually become relevant to the survival of civilization, just as my colleague could not have known that, within his lifetime, colour televisions would be saving lives every day.

So there is no resource-management strategy that can prevent disasters, just as there is no political system that provides only good leaders and good policies, nor a scientific method that provides only true theories. But there are ideas that reliably
cause
disasters, and one of them is, notoriously, the idea that the future can be scientifically planned. The only rational policy, in all three cases, is to judge institutions, plans and ways of life according to how good they are at correcting mistakes: removing bad policies and leaders, superseding bad explanations, and recovering from disasters.

For example, one of the triumphs of twentieth-century progress was the discovery of antibiotics, which ended many of the plagues and endemic illnesses that had caused suffering and death since time immemorial. However, it has been pointed out almost from the outset by critics of ‘so-called progress’ that this triumph may only be temporary, because of the evolution of antibiotic-resistant pathogens. This is often held up as an indictment of – to give it its broad context – Enlightenment hubris. We need lose only one battle in this war of science against bacteria and their weapon, evolution (so the argument goes), to be doomed, because our other ‘so-called progress’ – such as cheap worldwide air travel, global trade, enormous cities – makes us more vulnerable than ever before to a global pandemic that could exceed the Black Death in destructiveness and even cause our extinction.

But
all
triumphs are temporary. So to use this fact to reinterpret progress as ‘so-called progress’ is bad philosophy. The fact that reliance on specific antibiotics is unsustainable is only an indictment from the point of view of someone who expects a sustainable lifestyle. But in reality there is no such thing. Only progress is sustainable.

The prophetic approach can see only what one might do to
postpone
disaster, namely improve sustainability: drastically reduce and disperse the population, make travel difficult, suppress contact between different geographical areas. A society which did this would not be able to afford the kind of scientific research that would lead to new antibiotics. Its
members would hope that their lifestyle would protect them instead. But note that this lifestyle did not, when it was tried, prevent the Black Death. Nor would it cure cancer.

Prevention and delaying tactics are useful, but they can be no more than a minor part of a viable strategy for the future. Problems are inevitable, and sooner or later survival will depend on being able to cope when prevention and delaying tactics have failed. Obviously we need to work towards cures. But we can do that only for diseases that we already know about. So we need the capacity to deal with unforeseen, unforeseeable failures. For this we need a large and vibrant research community, interested in explanation and problem-solving. We need the wealth to fund it, and the technological capacity to implement what it discovers.