Read The Scientist as Rebel Online
Authors: Freeman J. Dyson
The effects of such a powerful and versatile technology on human affairs are not easy to foresee. Used unwisely, it offers a rapid road to ecological disaster. Used wisely, it offers a rapid alleviation of all the purely economic difficulties of mankind. It offers to rich and poor nations alike a rate of growth of economic resources so rapid that economic constraints will no longer be dominant in determining how people are to live. In some sense this technology will constitute a permanent solution of mankind’s economic problems. Just as in the past, when economic problems cease to be pressing, we shall find no lack of fresh problems to take their place.
It may well happen that on Earth, for aesthetic or ecological reasons, the use of self-reproducing machines will be strictly limited and the methods of biological engineering will be used instead wherever this alternative is feasible. For example, self-reproducing machines could proliferate in the oceans and collect minerals for human use, but we might prefer to have the same job done more quietly by corals and oysters. If economic needs were no longer paramount, we could afford a certain loss of efficiency for the sake of a harmonious environment. Self-reproducing machines may therefore play on Earth a subdued and self-effacing role.
The true realm of self-reproducing machinery will be in those regions of the solar system that are inhospitable to humans. Machines built
of iron, aluminum, and silicon have no need of water. They can flourish and proliferate on the moon or on Mars or among the asteroids, carrying out gigantic industrial projects at no risk to the Earth’s ecology. They will feed upon sunlight and rock, needing no other raw material for their construction. They will build in space the freely floating cities that Bernal imagined for human habitation. They will bring oceans of water from the satellites of the outer planets, where it is to be had in abundance, to the inner parts of the solar system where it is needed. Ultimately this water will make even the deserts of Mars bloom, and humans will walk there under the open sky breathing air like the air of Earth.
Taking a long view into the future, I foresee a division of the solar system into two domains. The inner domain, where sunlight is abundant and water scarce, will be the domain of great machines and governmental enterprises. Here self-reproducing machines will be obedient slaves, and people will be organized in giant bureaucracies. Outside and beyond the sunlit zone will be the outer domain, where water is abundant and sunlight scarce. In the outer domain lie the comets where trees and humans will live in smaller communities, isolated from one another by huge distances. Here humans will find once again the wilderness that they have lost on Earth. Groups of people will be free to live as they please, independent of governmental authorities. Outside and away from the sun, they will be able to wander forever on the open frontier that this planet no longer possesses.
I have described how we may deal with the World and the Flesh, and I have said nothing about how we may deal with the Devil. Bernal also had difficulties with the Devil. He admitted in the 1968 foreword to his book that the chapter on the Devil was the least satisfactory part of it. The Devil will always find new varieties of human folly to frustrate our too rational dreams.
Instead of pretending that I have an antidote to the Devil’s wiles, I end with a discussion of the human factors that most obviously stand
in the way of our achieving the grand designs which I have been describing. When mankind is faced with an opportunity to embark on any great undertaking, there are always three human weaknesses that devilishly hamper our efforts. The first is an inability to define or agree upon our objectives. The second is an inability to raise sufficient funds. The third is the fear of a disastrous failure. All three factors have been conspicuously plaguing the United States space program in recent years. It is a remarkable testimony to the vitality of the program that these factors still have not succeeded in bringing it to a halt. When we stand before the far greater enterprises of biological technology and space colonization that lie in our future, the same three factors will certainly rise again to confuse and delay us.
I want now to demonstrate to you by a historical example how these human weaknesses may be overcome. I shall quote from William Bradford, one of the Pilgrim Fathers, who wrote a book,
Of Plimoth Plantation
, describing the history of the first English settlement in Massachusetts. Bradford was governor of the Plymouth colony for twenty-eight years. He began to write his history ten years after the settlement. His purpose in writing it was, as he said, “That their children may see with what difficulties their fathers wrestled in going through these things in their first beginnings. As also that some use may be made hereof in after times by others in such like weighty employments.” Bradford’s work remained unpublished for two hundred years, but he never doubted that he was writing for the ages.
Here is Bradford describing the problem of inability to agree upon objectives. The date is spring 1620, the same year in which the Pilgrims were to sail:
But as in all businesses the acting part is most difficult, especially where the work of many agents must concur, so was it found in this. For some of those that should have gone in England fell off and would not go; other merchants and friends that
had offered to adventure their moneys withdrew and pretended many excuses; some disliking they went not to Guiana; others again would adventure nothing except they went to Virginia. Some again (and those that were most relied on) fell in utter dislike with Virginia and would do nothing if they went thither. In the midst of these distractions, they of Leyden who had put off their estates and laid out their moneys were brought into a great strait, fearing what issue these things would come to.
The next quotation deals with the perennial problem of funding. Here Bradford is quoting a letter written by Robert Cushman, the man responsible for buying provisions for the Pilgrims’ voyage. He writes from Dartmouth on August 17, 1620, desperately late in the year, months after the ships ought to have started:
And Mr. Martin, he said he never received no money on those conditions; he was not beholden to the merchants for a pin, they were bloodsuckers, and I know not what. Simple man, he indeed never made any conditions with the merchants, nor ever spake with them. But did all that money fly to Hampton, or was it his own? Who will go and lay out that money so rashly and lavishly as he did, and never know how he comes by it or on what conditions? Secondly, I told him of the alteration long ago and he was content, but now he domineers and said I had betrayed them into the hands of slaves; he is not beholden to them, he can set out two ships himself to a voyage. When, good man? He hath but fifty pounds in and if he should give up his accounts he would not have a penny left him, as I am persuaded. Friend, if ever we make a plantation, God works a miracle, especially considering how scant we shall be of victuals, and most of all ununited amongst ourselves and devoid of good tutors and regiment.
My last quotation describes the fear of disaster, as it appeared in the debate among the Pilgrims over their original decision to go to America:
Others again, out of their fears, objected against it and sought to divert from it; alleging many things, and those neither unreasonable nor improbable; as that it was a great design and subject to many inconceivable perils and dangers; as, besides the casualties of the sea (which none can be freed from), the length of the voyage was such as the weak bodies of women and other persons worn out with age and travail (as many of them were) could never be able to endure. And yet if they should, the miseries of the land which they should be exposed unto, would be too hard to be borne and likely, some or all of them together, to consume and utterly to ruinate them. For there they should be liable to famine and nakedness and the want, in a manner, of all things. The change of air, diet, and drinking of water would infect their bodies with sore sicknesses and grievous diseases. And also those which should escape or overcome these difficulties should yet be in continual danger of the savage people, who are cruel, barbarous and most treacherous, being most furious in their rage and merciless where they overcome; not being content only to kill and take away life, but delight to torment men in the most bloody manner that may be.
I could go on quoting Bradford for hours, but this is not the place to do so. What can we learn from him? We learn that the three devils of disunity, shortage of funds, and fear of the unknown are no strangers to humanity. They have always been with us and will always be with us, whenever great adventures are contemplated. From Bradford we learn too how they are to be defeated. The Pilgrims used no technological magic to defeat them. The Pilgrims’ victory demanded the full range of virtues of which human beings under stress are capable;
toughness, courage, unselfishness, foresight, common sense, and good humor. Bradford would have set at the head of this list the virtue he considered most important, a faith in Divine Providence.
I end this sermon on a note of disagreement with Bernal. He believed that we shall defeat the Devil by means of a combination of socialist organization and applied psychology. I believe that our best defense will be to rely on the human qualities that have remained unchanged from Bradford’s time to ours. If we are wise, we shall preserve intact these qualities of the human species through the centuries to come, and they will see us safely through the many crises of destiny that surely await us. But I will let Bernal have the last word. Bernal’s last word is a question which Bradford must often have pondered, but would not have known how to answer, as he watched the first generation of native-born New Englanders depart from the ways of their fathers:
We hold the future still timidly, but perceive it for the first time, as a function of our own action. Having seen it, are we to turn away from something that offends the very nature of our earliest desires, or is the recognition of our new powers sufficient to change those desires into the service of the future which they will have to bring about?
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New edition, Indiana University Press, 1969.
2.
This lecture was given at Birkbeck College in London, originally founded as a night school where working people with an ambition to better themselves could get an education. Bernal, as a radical Marxist, found Birkbeck congenial and spent most of his working life there. He died in 1971 and I gave the lecture in his memory a year later. The ideas expressed in the lecture provided the foundation for most of my later writings about the future, especially the chapters “Thought-experiments” and “The Greening of the Galaxy” in my book
Disturbing the Universe
(Harper and Row, 1979).
HERE ARE TWO
famous scientists expressing their opinions about science and religion. Richard Feynman gave a series of Danz Lectures at the University of Washington in Seattle in 1963.
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John Polkinghorne gave a series of Terry Lectures at Yale University in 1996.
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Two characters as different as it is possible to be, Polkinghorne the conscientious academic scholar, Feynman the impulsive rebel. Polkinghorne prepared the text of his lectures carefully for publication, giving us a polished and logically coherent argument. Feynman was invited to prepare a text for the University of Washington Press to publish in 1963, but never did. The University of Washington recorded the lectures and preserved the tapes.
What we have here is a verbatim transcript of the lectures as Feynman gave them, speaking extemporaneously from fragmentary notes. Feynman’s voice and personality come through clearly. He talks about real people and their problems, not about philosophical abstractions. He is interested in religion as a way for people to make sense of their lives, but he is not interested in theology. Polkinghorne has the opposite bias. He is a scientist who is also an ordained minister of the
Church of England. To be ordained, he went through formal training in theology. For him, theology is as real and as serious as science. His book has more to say about theology than about religion.
To display the contrasting styles of the two books, I pick out an outstanding passage from each. From Polkinghorne I pick out his second chapter, with the title “Finding Truth: Science and Religion Compared.” This is a remarkable tour de force. Polkinghorne compares two historic intellectual struggles, one from science and one from religion. From science he takes the discovery and development of quantum mechanics, a struggle that has lasted from the beginning to the end of the twentieth century. From religion he takes the theological understanding of the nature of Jesus, a struggle that lasted from the time when Saint Paul was writing his letters shortly after Jesus’ death to the modern era of diverse views and diminished certainties. He divides each of the two struggles into five periods, and shows how events in each of the five periods in the development of quantum mechanics correspond in detail to events in the matching period in the development of theology. In the first period, the breakdown of classical mechanics, the enigma of atomic spectra, and the discovery of the light-quantum by Max Planck and Albert Einstein correspond to the death of Jesus, the enigma of his resurrection as experienced by his disciples in Jerusalem, and the new understanding of these events by Saint Paul.
In the second period, confusion reigns both in physics and in theology: classical and quantum pictures in conflict in physics, orthodoxies and heresies in conflict in theology. In the third period, there was the great triumph of quantum mechanics as it emerged in 1925 and solved most of the outstanding problems of physics, and the great triumph of Christology in the year 451, when the assembled theologians at the Council of Chalcedon promulgated the doctrine concerning the nature of Jesus that orthodox Christians were thereafter required to believe. In the fourth period, a continued wrestling with unsolved problems, the paradoxes of interpretation of quantum
theory in physics and the paradoxes of the incarnation of Jesus in theology. In the fifth period, recognition in both physics and theology that the new insights have deep implications and that we are very far from any final truth.