Another generation later, building on the work of Tsiolkovsky and Goddard, extending von Braun’s technological genius, we were up there in space, silently circumnavigating the Earth, treading the ancient and desolate lunar surface. Our machines—increasingly competent and autonomous—were spreading through the Solar System, discovering new worlds, examining them closely, searching for life, comparing them with Earth.
This is one reason that in the long astronomical perspective there is something truly epochal about “now”—which we can define as the few centuries centered on the year you’re reading this book. And there’s a second reason: This is the first moment in the history of our planet when any species, by its own voluntary actions, has become a danger to itself—as well as to vast numbers of others. Let me recount the ways:
• We’ve been burning fossil fuels for hundreds of thousands of years. By the 1960s, there were so many of us burning wood, coal, oil, and natural gas on so large a scale, that scientists began to worry about the increasing greenhouse effect; the dangers of global warming began slowly slipping into public consciousness.
• CFCs were invented in the 1920s and 1930s; in 1974 they were discovered to attack the protective ozone layer. Fifteen years later a worldwide ban on their production was going into effect.
• Nuclear weapons were invented in 1945. It took until 1983 before the global consequences of thermonuclear war were understood. By 1992, large numbers of warheads were being dismantled.
• The first asteroid was discovered in 1801. More or less serious proposals to move them around were floated beginning in the 1980s. Recognition of the potential dangers of asteroid deflection technology followed shortly after.
• Biological warfare has been with us for centuries, but its deadly mating with molecular biology has occurred only lately.
• We humans have already precipitated extinctions of species on a scale unprecedented since the end of the Cretaceous Period. But only in the last decade has the magnitude of these extinctions become clear, and the possibility raised that in our ignorance of the interrelations of life on Earth we may be endangering our own future.
Look at the dates on this list and consider the range of new technologies currently under development. Is it not likely that other dangers of our own making are yet to be discovered, some perhaps even more serious?
In the littered field of discredited self-congratulatory chauvinisms, there is only one that seems to hold up, one sense in which we are special: Due to our own actions or inactions, and the misuse of our technology, we live at an extraordinary moment, for the Earth at least—the first time that a species has become able to wipe itself out. But this is also, we may note, the first time that a species has become able to journey to the planets and the stars. The two times, brought about by the same technology, coincide—a few centuries in the history of a 4.5-billion-year-old planet. If you were somehow dropped down on the Earth randomly at any moment in the past (or future), the chance of arriving at this critical moment would be less than 1 in 10 million. Our leverage on the future is high just now.
It might be a familiar progression, transpiring on many worlds—a planet, newly formed, placidly revolves around its star; life slowly forms; a kaleidoscopic procession of creatures evolves; intelligence emerges which, at least up to a point, confers enormous survival value; and then technology is invented. It dawns on them that there are such things as laws of Nature, that these laws can be revealed by experiment, and that knowledge of these laws can be made both to save and to take lives, both on unprecedented scales. Science, they recognize, grants immense powers. In a flash, they create world-altering contrivances. Some planetary civilizations see their way through, place limits on what may and what must not be done, and safely pass through the time of perils. Others are not so lucky or so prudent, perish.
Since, in the long run, every planetary society will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring–not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive. And once you’re out there in space for centuries and millennia, moving little worlds around and engineering planets, your species has been pried loose from its cradle. If they exist, many other civilizations will eventually venture far from home.[39]
A means has been offered of estimating how precarious our circumstances are—remarkably, without in any way addressing the nature of the hazards. J. Richard Gott III is an astrophysicist at Princeton University. He asks us to adopt a generalized Copernican principle, something I’ve described elsewhere as the Principle of Mediocrity. Chances are that we do not live in a truly extraordinary time. Hardly anyone ever did. The probability is high that we’re born, live out our days, and die somewhere in the broad middle range of the lifetime of our species (or civilization, or nation). Almost certainly, Gott says, we do not live in first or last times. So if your species is very young, it follows that it’s unlikely to last long—because if it were to last long, you (and the rest of us alive today) would be extraordinary in living, proportionally speaking, so near the beginning.
What then is the projected longevity of our species? Gott concludes, at the 97.5 percent confidence level, that there will be humans for no more than 8 million years. That’s his upper limit, about the same as the average lifetime of many mammalian species. In that case, our technology neither harms nor helps. But Gott’s lower limit, with the same claimed reliability, is only 12 years. He will not give you 40-to-1 odds that humans will still be around by the time babies now alive become teenagers. In everyday life we try very hard not to take risks so large, not to board airplanes, say, with 1 chance in 40 of crashing. We will agree to surgery in which 95 percent of patients survive only if our disease has a greater than 5 percent chance of killing us. Mere 40-to-1 odds on our species surviving another 12 years Would be, if valid, a cause for supreme concern. If Gott is right, not only may we never be out among the stars; there’s a fair chance we may not be around long enough even to make the first footfall on another planet.
To me, this argument has a strange, vaporish quality. Knowing nothing about our species except how old it is, we make numerical estimates, claimed to be highly reliable, about its future prospects. How? We go with the winners. Those who have been around are likely to stay around. Newcomers tend to disappear. The only assumption is the quite plausible one that there is nothing special about the moment at which we inquire into the matter. So why is the argument unsatisfying? Is it just that we are appalled by its implications?
Something like the Principle of Mediocrity must have very broad applicability. But we are not so ignorant as to imagine that everything is mediocre. There is something special about our time—not just the temporal chauvinism that those who reside in any epoch doubtless feel, but something, as outlined above, clearly unique and strictly relevant to our species’ future chances: This is the first time that (a) our exponentiating technology has reached the precipice of self-destruction, but also the first time that (b) we can postpone or avoid destruction by going somewhere else, somewhere off the Earth.
These two clusters of capabilities, (a) and (b), make our time extraordinary in directly contradictory ways—which both (a) strengthen and (b) weaken Gott’s argument. I don’t know how to predict whether the new destructive technologies will hasten, more than the new spaceflight technologies will delay, human extinction. But since never before have we contrived the means of annihilating ourselves, and never before have w e developed the technology for settling other worlds, I think a compelling case can be made that our time is extraordinary precisely in the context of Gott’s argument. If this is true, it significantly increases the margin of error in such estimates of future longevity. The worst is worse, and the best better: Our short-term prospects are even bleaker and—if we can survive the short-term—our long-term chances even brighter than Gott calculates.
39
Might a planetary civilization which has survived its adolescence wish to encourage others struggling with their emerging technologies? Perhaps they would make special efforts to broadcast news of their existence, the triumphant announcement that it’s possible to avoid self-annihilation. Or would they at first be very cautious? Having avoided catastrophes of their own making, perhaps they would fear giving away knowledge of their existence, lest some other, unknown, aggrandizing civilization out there in the dark is looking for Lebensraum or slavering to put down the potential competition. That might be a reason for us to explore neighboring star systems, but discreetly.
Maybe they would be silent for another reason: because broadcasting the existence of an advanced civilization might encourage emerging civilizations to do less than their best efforts to safeguard their future—hoping instead that someone will come out of the dark and save them from themselves.