Sunday Sermon: The Next Fifty Years

by Phineas Dash

I was asked for my views on what I believe are the most important issues in science and technology. Here they are. Because I define importance in terms of the future, I offer a very broad outline of science and technology of the next 50 years.

The next 50 years will be critical years for humanity. Throughout the twentieth century, industrial nations created monstrous technologies of destruction. Many of these were deliberately destructive, to be used in war, and most of them were so used. The culmination of these resulted in thermonuclear arsenals (which still exist). But at points of highest tension, these few nations succeeded in not destroying civilization. The next 50 years will amount to at least as great a challenge as that, but the choices and their consequences will be less clear, and will require more sustained and varied efforts by many more nations.

Science and technology of the next 50 years, as well as international relations and most everything else, will be dominated by the climate crisis, which is beginning as the world nears the end of oil reserves. The future of civilizations will depend on how humanity responds.

The climate crisis is a result of industrial technologies not meant to be destructive, but which were, and will continue to be. Their effects on health as well as climate will be an acknowledged or unacknowledged challenge that will be part of the climate crisis era.

If advanced nations work on clean energy technology, new technologies to ease the pain and to mitigate what will inevitably happen, these technologies will dominate. But clean energy will not in itself affect the climate crisis for several generations, perhaps not for a century, although they are likely to have immediate positive effects in health. Going ahead with these technologies anyway (even if spurred by the disappearance of oil) will be a measure of humanity's maturity as a thinking species.

No one knows if new technologies can help lessen the severity of the climate crisis, but it seems certain that new attitudes towards the use of existing technologies will be necessary, and will require some economic and social restructuring. But the economic benefits of clean energy technologies should help the societal comfort level, both in terms of individual and community savings, and the new jobs and economic activity that would result from clean renewable energy technologies. The Apollo Alliance has broad labor as well as environmental support for this reason.

However, because the climate crisis will be felt more acutely in some areas of the world than others, and one of the major consequences is likely to be competition over fresh water resources, an era of highly destructive conflicts could occur, with concentration on the technology of war not seen since WorldWar II and the early Cold War.

It's likely that over the next 50 years, both kinds of technology will be developed, and the proportion of peace technology versus war technology will spell the fate of human civilization. Even if the peace technologies predominate, they might not be enough, if the climate crisis becomes too severe.

The dominant technology story of the past 20 years was computer/information systems. These technologies developed very quickly and prospered in the U.S. because this is now a consumer economy, and this technology led quickly to consumer products and services, including new ways of selling consumer products. At the end of the 90s, the investment speculation bubble burst, and with consumption growth slowing, so did investment. But though development may be slower because fewer resources and bright minds are in it now, it is still a dominant area of technology.

But the major battles involving these technologies in the next 5 to 20 years will be resisting attempts by governments and corporations to control the flow of information, by controlling the Internet or whatever the Internet evolves into, as well as aspects of the Internet (like blogs and email), and by mandating various controls and monitoring systems in communications technologies, in the guise of "fighting terrorism" (especially aimed at the Internet) or some other more specific enemy, or in efforts to enforce "morality."

Biotechnology will also be a primary area of controversy and conflict, from the future of cloning to the present of corporate control of food by monopoly of bioengineered seeds that, through law and biology, replace natural seeds. It is this area of food that is most likely to be the source of major conflict as the climate crisis changes regional agricultural patterns.

The sources of these problems are in policy, society, politics, culture etc. and they will test humanity's maturity. But in science and technology themselves, there are far more reasons to hope than to despair. Though the technology of destruction gets ever more powerful, with ever more deadly unintended consequences, the technology of hope also improves. Though obscured by propaganda and inattention, many clean energy technologies are already practical, efficient and cost-effective, or soon will be. If resources are devoted to them, and other socially beneficial uses of computer technology, then humanity has a fighting chance. But as usual, it is not the technology or the science that is the chief problem. It's what society does and doesn't do, which is a much more complex problem than any in rocket science.

Science itself is poised to develop a virtual theory of everything in the next fifty years, bringing together physics and cosmology, "brain science," biology, psychology, ecology, systems theory, etc. as well as less currently reputable areas of conjecture, such as ESP. This will be due not only to advances within sciences, but to increasing cross-fertilization among sciences (and those brave individuals who produce books for the general reader that attempt synthesis), and to increasing acceptance by scientists of data from sources and categories previously scorned as non-scientific, such as the investigations into mind that Tibetan Buddhists have been conducting for centuries, the myths and stories and approach to life of indigenous cultures, and the so-called psychic phenomena. Even in the past twenty years, previously out-of-bounds ideas have become accepted, such as relationships of mind and body.

But a period of chaos and societal breakdowns could slow or end such a quest. Or it may come too late, like the woman in Douglas Adams' "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," who suddenly comes up with the perfect workable formula for world peace, but a moment later the Earth is destroyed by a spaceship, paving the way for an interstellar highway.

Political activity to oppose destructive use of technologies and encourage positive uses and development will be important, but its effectiveness is likely to be limited without major shifts in how individuals and polities view themselves and the world. Science, together with other modes of thought, can provide those insights, which would include (it seems to me) concepts from Jungian psychology, Gregory Bateson and systems theory, and Buckminster Fuller's anticipatory design science, as well as a broader, deeper and more thorough ecological ethic.

We must reconnect and recommit ourselves to the future. We must enact hope where hope must exist: in the present.