Earth

AFTERWORD

This novel depicts one of many ways the world might be fifty years from now. It is only an extrapolation — what a physicist might call a gedankenexperiment — nothing more.

And yet, as I sit down to write this postscript, it occurs to me that we can learn something by looking in the opposite direction. For instance, exactly fifty years ago Europe was still at peace.

Oh, by August 1939 the writing was on the wall. Having already crushed several smaller neighbors, Adolf Hitler that month signed a fateful pact with Joseph Stalin, sealing the fate of Poland. China was already in flames. And yet, many still hoped that world statesmen would stop short of the edge. The future seemed to offer promise, as well as threat.

At the New York World’s Fair, for instance, you could tour the Westinghouse exhibit and see the wonders of tomorrow. A futurama showed the “typical city of 1960” — brimming with every techno-gadget Depression-era Americans could dream of, from electric dishwashers and superhighways to robot housemaids and personal autogyros. Naturally, poverty wouldn’t exist in that far-off age. The phrase “ecological degradation” hadn’t yet been coined.

We may shake our heads over their naivete, those people of 1939. They got it right predicting freeways and television, but who knew anything back then about atom bombs? Or missile deterrence? Or computers? Or toxic waste? A few science fiction writers perhaps, whose prophetic tales nevertheless seem quaint and simplistic by today’s standards.

Fifty years is a long time, and the pace of change has only accelerated.

Still — and here’s the funny thing — there are a great many people still around at this moment who lived through every single day from August 1939 to the present. To them, the world of the Nineties doesn’t seem bizarre or astonishing. It evolved, bit by bit, step by step, each event arising quite believably out of what had come the day before.

This is what makes half-century projections among the most difficult speculative novels to write. In order to depict a near-term future, say five or ten years ahead, a writer need only take the present world and exaggerate some current trend for dramatic effect. At the other end, portraying societies many centuries from now, the job is relatively easy also. (Anything goes, so long as you make it vaguely plausible.) But five decades is just short enough a span to require a sense of familiarity, and yet far enough away to demand countless surprises, as well. You must make it seem believable that many people who are walking around at this very moment would also exist in that future time, and find conditions — if not commonplace — then at least normal.

Therefore my apologia. This novel isn’t a prediction. Earth depicts just one possible tomorrow — one that will surely strike some as too optimistic and others as far too gloomy. So be it.

What is a world? A myriad of themes and contrary notions, all woven up in a welter of detail. And so Earth had to include everything from the failing ozone layer and thickening greenhouse effect, to geology and evolution. (And while we’re at it, let’s throw in electronic media, the Gaia hypothesis, and the nature of consciousness!)

In the course of researching this book, I would listen to news reports from Armenian earthquakes and Alaskan supertanker disasters, and constantly find myself struck by how foolish our illusions of stability and changelessness seem, perched as we are on the trembling crust of an active planet. History and geology show what an eyeblink it’s been since our current, comfortable culture came about. And yet that culture is using up absolutely everything at a ferocious rate.

Still, there are positive signs — evidence that, at the very last moment, humankind may be waking up. Will we do so quickly enough to save the world? No one can possibly know.

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.

Interestingly, though, after finishing Earth I learned that two astronomers at the University of Cambridge, Ian Redmount and Martin Rees, now predict beamlike gravitational radiation might be emitted from certain superheavy objects out there. So who knows? In any event, although I have my union card as a physicist, I don’t claim to be qualified in the specialized area of general relativity. The science of “cavitronics” can safely be dismissed as bona fide arm waving.

Of course, Beta served a higher function in the book than perpetrating wild-eyed conjectures on physics. The taniwha let me include the very guts of the planet — its complex mantle and layered core — as central concerns of my characters. (What book could claim to be about the entire Earth if it left out over ninety-nine percent of the planet’s volume and mass?) Anyway, nothing spices up a novel like a monster threatening to gobble up the world.

Sociological trends are even more problematical than tomorrow’s physics. While this book was in the works, changes in the real world seemed ever about to overtake my wildest speculations. One result — readers of early drafts suggested I was being much too optimistic in predicting an end to cold war tensions. But by the final draft some were turning around and complaining that I was shortsighted, because security alliances like NATO couldn’t possibly still exist in fifty years’ time! There wasn’t that much difference between drafts. It was the world that went into fast-forward rewrite mode.

(Not that I’m convinced we’re in for relaxing times just because a few walls have come down. It might be argued that the cold war is ebbing in large part because neither side can afford it anymore. Other serious threats loom to take its place. And nations will probably still make and break alliances as they wrestle over dwindling resources.)

Likewise, I find myself bored with the current fashion of depicting a tomorrow dominated by Japanese economic imperialism. Doesn’t anyone remember when it seemed that the Arabs were bound to own everything? Before that, Europeans expressed dismay at American industrial dynamism. Beware of assumptions that seem “obvious” in one decade. They may become quaint in the next.

Daily life may be even harder to predict than global politics. One crisis I see looming involves the plight of women, which seems bound to go far beyond matters typically addressed today by feminists. Equality under law and in the workplace must be achieved, of course. (And in many parts of the world that battle has barely begun.) But of growing concern to women in the West is a problem I hardly ever hear spoken of by all those learned theoreticians in ivy halls. That problem is the decay of marriage and family as a dependable way of life. This is a subject so difficult — and so dangerous for a male author to deal with — that I’m afraid it got short shrift in this novel, despite my belief that it will reach a dire climax during the decades ahead.

Perhaps I did a little better with the generation gap. Unlike authors of so-called “cyber-punk” stories, I just don’t find it plausible that undisciplined, hormone-drenched, antisocial young males will forsake thousands of years of fixation on muscular bluster and come instead to dominate high tech during the next century. Putting aside that unlikely cliche, I had some fun suggesting instead that the descendants of portable video cameras might be used as weapons by elderly committees of vigilance. The demographics in countries like the United States, Japan, and China do seem to point to a period some are already calling the “empire of the old.”

Meanwhile, in Kenya, the average age at present is just fifteen, and the birth rate skyrockets.

For some notions I owe a debt to other authors. I’ve already referred to John Brunner, whose award-winning novel Stand on Zanzibar was among the very best fifty-year projection novels of an earlier day. Likewise, Aldous Huxley’s work was inspirational.

The idea of a human “cultural singularity” — in which our power and knowledge might accelerate so quickly that the pace grows exponentially in months, weeks, days — making all current problems academic in a flash — is one that’s been brewing for a while, but was depicted especially well in Vernor Vinge’s Marooned in Real Time. The notion of capital punishment by “disassembly” came from the novels of Larry Niven.

Many authors since de Chardin have written about the creation of some sort of “overmind,” into which human consciousness might someday either evolve or subsume. Traditionally this is presented as a simple choice between obstinate individualism on the one hand, or being homogenized and absorbed on the other. I have always found this either-or dichotomy simplistic and tried to present a different point of view here. Still, the basic concept goes back a long way.

The idea for depicting a space shuttle, crash-landed on Easter Island, was provoked by a Lee Correy science fiction story, “Shuttle Down,” which appeared in Analog Magazine a decade ago.

Likewise, much of the discussion of human consciousness was inspired by articles in respectable neuroscience journals, or cribbed from innovative thinkers like Marvin Minsky, Stanley Ornstein, and even Julian Jaynes, whose famous book on the origin of consciousness might well have made a splendid science fiction novel.

The Helvetian War, on the other hand, I can blame on no one but myself. (I expect it will probably cause me no little grief.) Nevertheless, for this book I needed some dark, traumatic conflict to reverberate in my characters’ past — as Vietnam, World War II, and the Holocaust still make contemporary folk twitch in recollection. It had to be something at once both chilling and surprising, as so many events over the last fifty years have been. (And frankly, I’ve had it with stereotyped superpower schemes, accidental missile launches, any other cliches.) So I tried to come up with a scenario that — if not very likely — was at least plausible in its own context. Then I chose to center it around a nation that’s presently among the very last anyone would think of as a serious threat to peace. I don’t know if it works, but so far it has rocked a few people back and made them say, “Huh!” That’s good enough for me.

Speaking of war — one reader asked why I barely refer to one of today’s principle concerns… the Great Big War On Drugs. Will it have been solved by the year 2038?

Well, not by any program or approach now being tried, that’s for sure. I’m not fatalistic. It makes some sense to regulate when and how self-destructive citizens can stupefy themselves, especially in public. Social sanctions have already proven more effective than laws at driving down liquor and tobacco consumption in North America. So much that distillers and cigarette makers are in a state of demographic panic.

But as for trying to eradicate drugs, right now we just seem to be driving up the price. Addicts commit crimes to finance their habits, and convey billions of dollars to pushers who are, inarguably, among the worst human beings alive. Anyway, it’s been shown that some individuals can secrete endorphins and other hormones at will, using meditation or self hypnosis or biofeedback. If such techniques become commonplace (as no doubt they will… everything does), shall we then outlaw meditation? Should the police test anyone caught dozing in the park, to make sure he isn’t drugging himself with his own self-made enkephalins?

Reductio ad absurdum. Or as Dirty Harry once said, we’ve got to learn our limitations.

Which only leads to a much deeper problem that has plagued society ever since before Darwin. That problem is moral ambiguity.

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.’ ”

A harsh way of looking at things, and terrifying in its implications for today’s fragile consensus of tolerance. Is it any wonder I wanted to experiment in this novel with a somewhat kinder tomorrow? One where people have grown at least a little wiser, in tempo with their growing problems?

After all the philosophy and speculations are finished, we’re still left with just words, metaphors. They are our tools for understanding the world, but it’s always well to remember they have only a nodding acquaintance with reality.

Reality is this world, the only oasis we know of. Every astronaut who has had a chance to see it from above has returned a fervent convert to saving it. As glimmers of peace and political maturity break out here and there around the globe, perhaps the rest of us will turn away from ideologies and other self-indulgences and start to take notice as well.

Quoting Hazel Henderson again, “It’s almost as if the human family is being nudged by Mother Nature to grow up. We are all in the same boat now, and it’s no good playing these games of which end is sinking.”

What our grandchildren inherit is entirely up to us. And frankly, I’d rather they remember us as having left them a bit of hope.

—David Brin, August 1989

And now, to reward those who actually stuck it out through the afterword, here’s an encore of sorts… a special bonus story, set in the same universe as Earth, but a few years later.