Samuel Florman: The Aftermath

The selection committee sought representation from all the major engineering disciplines, and also from the various engineering career tracks, such as research, development, manufacturing, and teaching. They also looked for ethnic diversity and gender equity (although they had to deal realistically with the fact that only 10 percent of the world’s engineers are women). My father was determined to have international representation, and even though the organization being celebrated is American, about 20 percent of the participants were from nations outside the United States.

Compiling the list of invitees, while of course challenging, was simplicity itself compared to the seemingly insurmountable difficulty of arranging for them to attend. How is one to persuade several hundred of the busiest, most productive people in the world to take seventeen days out of their lives to attend a seminar on a cruise ship? Here my father came up with an idea so wondrous, and carried it out with such mastery, that I have never ceased to marvel at his accomplishment.

He took as his theme the desperate need for technologists to address, in an integrated way heretofore unknown in human history, the scourges of hunger, disease, and privation. He dreamed of engineers joining together in an effort to ameliorate the age-old calamities of poverty, war, and injustice, and the relatively new menaces of environmental degradation and large-scale terrorism. Bring our best technological minds together, he argued, and let them devote their attention to the big picture, looking up for a brief period from the concerns of their workaday world.

What should we be doing about energy, food, water, health care, education, disarmament, communications, urban blight, population pressures, and fanatical terrorists…? This was the time for a holistic, interdisciplinary review of our engineering abilities vis-a-vis our most vexing human problems. This was the time for such a new beginning, just as the end of World War II was the time to found the United Nations. In the first decade of the new millennium, the world was free from cold war and superpower tensions. We had grown rich—at least some of us. Computers, the Internet, and genetic engineering had put powerful new forces at our disposal. Engineers could accomplish much, not just by meeting and talking but by having the world take note of their meeting.

Dad took his vision to the Pacific coast, to Bill Gates and his zillionaire colleagues and competitors. To fund the proposed conference, my father sought an outlandish amount of money. But in the larger scheme of things, and especially in the high-flying high-tech world, the sum was relatively insignificant: a mere $30 million. He had in mind a group of fifteen hundred people at a cost of $20,000 each, which covered the cost of the trip, including $5,000 per head for spending money. Only with an extravagant gesture, he argued, can we attract the best and brightest to our enterprise. And only with the best and brightest can the enterprise succeed.

He sold this vision, incredible as it may sound. My father, an aging civil engineer, senior partner in a firm that designs dams, tunnels, and bridges—something of a hardhat, despite his doctorate degree—sold this vision to the slickest, sleekest techies in the world. He sold them on the idea that all professional engineers, from muddy boots builders to geniuses of software application, are linked in a fellowship, and that this fellowship has the genius, the opportunity—and the obligation—to ease human suffering.

And among the invitees, who could resist? A fully paid luxury cruise aboard a brand-new ship on an exotic, seldom-traveled route, partway around the coast of Africa! Bring your family, including children (up to the age of thirty, as long as they are still enrolled students), and pocket $5,000 spending money for everyone in your party. More important than the money and the travel, how about the excitement of being with talented peers who are seeking the Holy Grail of human salvation? The inevitable attention of the world’s media to this remarkable enterprise was also a plus for career builders.

Most of the people who were invited accepted enthusiastically. With fifteen hundred passengers aboard, we were a veritable village. It is hard to believe that we embarked, in such high spirits and with such high hopes, just a little more than a year ago.

Today, we are indeed a village, although not at all like a village that any of us has ever seen before. But we have survived, and the mood of crisis that prevailed for so many months has recently begun to lift. It seems as if we can now look ahead to more than a few days at a time.

Yes, we have survived. But our magnificent ship is sunk, and the few precious objects that we were able to salvage from it don’t really amount to very much. Complex appliances—a radio, a few flashlights, a laptop computer—only mock us now. Most of our batteries were quickly used up, and we have few sources of new energy—no fuel, other than wood and a little coal, no electricity, yet. We have the use of animal power, most notably herds of powerful oxen. And we have ample running water in nearby rivers, which we have already put to use with a number of rudimentary waterwheels. Also, we have embarked on an ambitious program of technological recovery. But we have had to start from such primitive circumstances—from so far back—that one has to wonder about our long-term prospects.

I recall in one of my history courses reading about Curtis E.

LeMay, longtime commanding general of the Strategic Air Command, who eventually became chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force. A darling of right-wing extremists, and known as a zealous proponent of carpet-bombing, he retired from the military and in 1968 ran for vice president with George Wallace on the American Independent Party line. During the Vietnam War, LeMay proposed telling the North Vietnamese that unless they put an end to their aggression, we would “bomb them into the Stone Age.”

Well, yes indeed, General LeMay. Not exactly the circumstances you had in mind, but it happened very much like you suggested. We’re living proof. Bombed into the Stone Age!

In the course of just a few hours we were transported back to Neolithic times, before 4000 B.C.E., when the first copper was smelted in Sumeria. Like our Neolithic ancestors, we could cultivate crops and domesticate animals. Those two talents—momentous in the history of Homo sapiens —date to about 10,000 B.C.E.. We could make lots of clever devices out of stone, wood, and bone. We could manufacture pottery and cloth—not very well, but we knew the basic principles and could develop the skills. Indeed, some of our Inlander neighbors, who had in the past been less reliant than we upon modern machines, turn out some very good pottery, and serviceable cloth from wool, cotton, and miscellaneous plant fibers. These skills are, come to think of it, remarkable, bespeaking a natural human genius for adaptation and survival. It took hundreds of thousands of years for hominids to progress from the first stone-cutting tools to the Neolithic revolution of agriculture and animal domestication.

Then it took six thousand years of Neolithic living to bring us to where weare—or rather, where we were twelve months ago. Thinking of this passage of multiple millennia, what hope has our small group to make its way back to the modern age? Assuming—as seems so farto be the case—that a return to the modern age is the course we wish to pursue.

Jane Demming Warner, a professor of planetary sciences at the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, had come on the cruise along with her husband, Jacob Warner, one of the leading computer engineers in the United States. It was to be their first vacation together in several years. Jane’s life had long been devoted to the study of comets, meteors, and asteroids; but she had planned to take a break from all that for three weeks, just kick back and enjoy the trip.