David Brin - Earth

One thing guaranteed over the decades ahead will be copious irony. Suppose, for instance, peace truly does break out among nations. The ingenuity and resources now spent on weaponry may be reallocated, unleashing fantastic creativity on our more pressing needs. But then, what will history say in retrospect about hydrogen bombs if we finally do get around to retiring them all? That the awful things scared twentieth-century man into changing his act? That they helped maintain a balance of power, allowing a smaller fraction of humanity to be soldiers — or be harmed by soldiers — than in any prior generation? (Small solace to those in Cambodia and Afghanistan and Lebanon, where the averages did not hold.) How strange, if the bomb came to be looked back on as the principal vehicle of our salvation.

What if all those engineers really do turn their focus from deterrence to productivity? Some prospects are awesome to contemplate… suspended animation, artificial organs, intelligence enhancement, spaceflight, smart machines… the list is dizzying and a bit daunting. If such godlike powers ever do become ours, we’ll surely face questions much like those so long asked about the bomb. Such as, How do we acquire wisdom along with all these shiny things?

There is a popular myth going around. It maintains that there is something particularly corrupt about Western civilization — as if it invented war, exploitation, oppression, and pollution all by itself. Certainly if this were so, the world’s problems might be solved just by returning to “older, better ways.” Many do cling to the fantasy that this or that non-Western culture had some patent on universal happiness.

Alas, if only it were so easy.

In his book A Forest Journey: From Mesopotamia to North America , John Perlin shows how the vast, fertile plains and mountains of Greece, Turkey, and the Middle East were turned into hardscrabble ravines by ancient civilizations. The record of pillage goes back thousands of years to the earliest known epic, the Tale of Gilgamesh, about a king who cut down primordial cedar forests to take lumber for his city-state of Uruk. Droughts and floods plagued the land soon afterward, but neither Gilgamesh nor any of his contemporaries ever saw the connection.

Sumerian civilization went on to seize oak from Arabia, juniper from Syria, cedar from Anatolia. The rivers of the Near East filled with silt, clogging ports and irrigation canals. Dredging only exposed salty layers below, which eventually ruined whatever soil hadn’t already blown away. The result, over centuries, is a region we now know well as a realm of blowing sands and bitter winds, but which was once called the “fertile crescent,” the land of milk and honey.

We don’t need mystical conjectures about “cycles of history” to explain, for instance, the fall of Rome. Perlin shows how the Roman Empire, the Aegean civilization of ancient Greece, imperial China, and so many other past cultures performed the same feat, ignorantly fouling their own nests, using up the land, poisoning the future for their children. Ecological historians are at last starting to realize that this is simply the natural consequence whenever a people acquires more physical power than insight.

While it is romantic to imagine that tribal peoples — either ancient or in today’s retreating rain forests — were at harmony with nature, living happy, egalitarian lives, current research shows this to be far from uniformly true, and more often just plain false. Despite a fervent desire to believe otherwise, evidence now reveals that members of nearly every “natural” society have committed depredations on their environment and each other. The harm they did was limited mostly by low technology and modest numbers.

The same goes for beating up on the human race as a whole. Oh, we have much to atone for, but the case isn’t strengthened by exaggerations that are just plain wrong. Stephen Jay Gould has condemned “… as romantic twaddle the common litany that ‘man alone kills for sport, but other animals [kill] only for food or in defense.’ ” Anyone who has watched a common housecat with a mouse — or stallions battling over dominance — knows that humans aren’t so destructive because of anything fundamentally wrong about human nature. It’s our power that amplifies the harm we do until it threatens the entire world.

My purpose in saying this isn’t to insult other cultures or species. Rather, I am trying to argue that the problems we face are deep-seated, with a long history. The irony of these myths of the noble tribesman, or noble animal, is that they are most fervently held by pampered Westerners whose well-cushioned culture is the first ever to feel comfortable enough to promote a new tradition of self-criticism. And it is this very habit of criticism — even self-reproach — that makes ours the first human society with a chance to avoid the mistakes of our ancestors.

Indeed, the race between our growing awareness and the momentum of our greed may make the next half century the greatest dramatic interlude of all time.

In that vein, I might have written a purely cautionary tale, like John Brunner’s novel The Sheep Look Up , which depicts Earth’s environmental collapse with terrifying vividness. But tales of unalloyed doom have never seemed realistic to me. Like the mechanistic scenarios of Marxism, they seem to assume people will be too stupid to notice looming calamities or try to prevent them.

Instead, I see all around me millions of people who actively worry about dangers and trends… even something as far away as a patch of missing gas over the south pole. Countless people write letters and march to save species of no possible benefit to themselves.

Oh, surely, a good dose of guilt now and then can help motivate us to do better. But I see nothing useful coming out of looking backward for salvation or modeling ourselves after ancient tribes. We are the generation — here and now — that must pick up a truly daunting burden, to tend and keep a planetary oasis, in all its delicacy and diversity, for future millennia and beyond. Those who claim to find answers to such complex dilemmas in the sagas of olden days only trivialize the awesome magnitude of our task.

So much for motivation. In my acknowledgments, I thank scores of people who kindly read drafts of this work and offered their expert advice. Still, this has been a work of fiction, and any opinions or excesses or errors herein can be laid at no one’s door but mine. Mea culpa .

In a few cases, the liberties I took demand explanation.

First, for the sake of drama, I exaggerated the extent greenhouse heating may cause sea levels to rise by the year 2040. Though real losses and suffering may be staggering, few scientists think glacier melting will have progressed as far as I depict by then. The consensus seems to be that the Antarctica ice sheet is safe until late in the next century. Likewise, I oversimplified weather patterns in India to make a dramatic point.

Another assumption I make is that energy shortages will return. Most experts consider this a safe bet, but I admit (and even hope) that declining petroleum reserves may be partially offset by new discoveries. Certainly breakthroughs in solar power, or access to space resources, or even something completely unexpected, might alter events for the better. (At the same time, our list of potential catastrophes also grows. Who can say we’ve even imagined the worst yet? I wouldn’t put money on it.)

Some of the geological features I describe match the best modern theories. Others, such as possible high-temperature superconducting domains far below, are highly speculative and not to be taken too seriously.

Along similar lines, the plot of this novel orbits around one particular wild beastie — a type of gravitational singularity to make even Stephen Hawking or Kip Thorne gulp in dismay. Those physicists, and others, calculate that the universe probably contains a great many of the large type of black hole people have heard so much about, and astronomers claim to see evidence for several already. There may even be gigantic cosmic “strings” occupying the voids between the galaxies. Micro black holes, on the other hand, remain totally theoretical. Tuned strings and cosmic “knots” are my own inventions.