David Brin - Earth

Every culture before ours had codes that precisely defined acceptable behavior and prescribed sanctions to enforce obedience. Such rules, whether religious, or cultural, or legal, or traditional, were like those a parent imposes on a young child. (And which children themselves insist upon.) In other words, they were explicit, clear-cut, utterly unambiguous.

Eventually, some adolescents grow beyond needing perfect, delineated truths. They even learn to savor a little ambiguity. Meanwhile, others quail before it… or go to the opposite extreme, using ambiguity as an excuse to deny any ethical restraint at all. We see all three of these reactions in contemporary society as individuals and governments are asked to wrestle individually with complex issues formerly left to God.

For instance, while some insist that human life begins at the very moment of conception, others ideologically proclaim it absent until birth itself. Neither extreme represents the uncomfortable majority, who — supported by embryology — sense that the issue of abortion is being waged across a murky swamp, bereft of clear borders or road signs.

More quandaries abound. Has mankind yet “made life in a test tube”? That depends on how you define “life” of course. By one standard, that milestone was passed way back in the seventies. By another, it was reached in the mid-eighties. By yet a third, perhaps it hasn’t happened yet, but definitely will soon.

As the aged grow more numerous in industrial societies, and as the power and expense of modern medicine grow ever more spectacular, the question of death will also come to vex us. We’ve already spent a decade agonizing over the terminal patient’s “right to die” if faced with the alternative of prolonged, painful support by machinery. A consensus appears to be coalescing around that issue, but what about the next inevitable predicament… when young taxpayers of the next century find themselves paying for endless herculean care demanded by millions of octogenarian former baby-boomers who outnumber them, outvote them, and have spent all their lives used to getting whatever they wanted?

What will it even mean to be “dead” in the future? Some predict it may soon be possible to cool living human bodies down to near (or even past) freezing, suspending life processes, perhaps so people could be revived at a later date. In fact, by primitive standards, it’s already happened — for example, in cases of extreme hypothermia. The can of worms this might open is boggling to consider. And yet, enthusiasts for this nascent field of “cryonics” answer moral quandaries and strict definitions of death by asking, “Why pass binary laws for an analog world?” (In other words, most moral codes say “either-or”… while the universe itself seems to be filled instead with a whole lot of “maybes.”)

To some, this accelerating layering of complexity seems no more than a natural part of our culture’s maturation. To others, the prospect of all certainty dissolving into a muddle of ambiguity seems horrifying. If I were forced to make just one hard prediction for the twenty-first century, it would be that we have seen only the first wave of these puzzling, sometimes heartbreaking conundrums.

Will we face these issues head-on? Or flee once more to the shelter of ancient simplicities? That, I believe, will be the central moral and intellectual dilemma ahead of us.

Finally, let me close this rambling screed with a note on the central topic of this book. Much has been said in recent years about the so-called Gaia hypothesis, which though credited to James Lovelock, actually has a modern history stretching all the way back to the 1780s and the Scottish geologist James Hutton. Lately, there have been signs of compromise. Proponents have backed off a bit from comparing the planet too closely to a living organism, while critics like Richard Dawkins and James Kirchner now admit the debate over Gaia has been useful to ecology and biology, stimulating many new avenues of research.

In this novel, of course, I portray Gaia as more than a mere metaphor. Some of my scientist colleagues will surely shake their heads over my dramatic denouement, accusing me of “teleology” and other sins. And yet, doesn’t the renowned physicist llya Prigogine suggest that the ordering processes of “dissipative structures” almost inevitably lead to increasing levels of organization? Cambridge philosopher John Platt illustrates this progressive acceleration with one telling example — life’s ability to encapsulate itself.

It began with membranes enclosing the chemistry of a single cell, perhaps four billion years ago. For a long time, single cells were the limit, drifting and duplicating themselves in the open sea. But then, just four hundred million years ago, a big change came about. Creatures began moving onto land, covered with thick scales, or shells, or bark.

In the last half million years, clothing and artificial shelters provided the next opportunity, enabling humans to greatly expand their range… which in the most recent tenth of that time swelled to include even high mountains and arctic wastes.

Finally, in the last few decades we’ve even learned to take our climate with us, in self-contained, encapsulated environments, to explore outer space and the bottom of the sea.

In fact, there is nothing mystical or teleological about this speedup. Each species builds on the suite of hard-won techniques accumulated by its ancestors, and for us this process isn’t merely genetic. Our culture profits from insights slowly gathered by prior generations, who labored in semi-ignorance toward a distant light just a few only dimly perceived. If we now find ourselves on a launching point — poised toward either despair or something truly wonderful — it is only because there were always, amid those bickering, shortsighted people of past times, some who believed in gathering that light, in nurturing it and making it grow.

So, indeed, those who follow in our footsteps may think of us.

We search for solutions, arguing vehemently over ways to save the world. Amid all the self.-righteous speechmaking, we tend to forget that yesterday’s passionately held “solutions” often become tomorrow’s problems. For instance, nuclear fission was once seen as a “liberal” cause. So were wind and ocean power. (Though now that windmills and tidal barrages are being built — and money being made from them — there are those pointing out drawbacks, penalties, and tradeoffs.) It never used to matter to us what types of trees were planted by logging companies after they finished clear-cutting a forest, only that they planted “replacements.” (And this was enlightened, compared with still-earlier attitudes.) Now, though, we see vast, sterile stands of trash pine as just another form of desert.

How many other favored solutions will this happen to? We’re becoming so sensitized to making mistakes — will this soon leave us too paralyzed to act at all?

If so, it would be a pity. To quote Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University, “the situation is running downhill at a truly frightening pace. On the other hand, our potential for solving the problem is absolutely enormous.”

Some solutions really are obvious. “There’s no such thing as garbage ,” says Hazel Henderson. “We have to recycle… as the Japanese do. One reason they are so successful is that they recycle over 50%.”

Other solutions might prove controversial, even heartbreaking. The next fifty years may lead to pragmatism on a scale that would seem abhorrent by today’s standards. As Garret Hardin of the University of California puts it, we may even “… stop sending gifts of food to starving nations. Just grit your teeth and tell them ‘You’re on your own and you’ve got to make your population match the carrying capacity of your own land.’ ”