The pressures of social history will push industry off-planet. We cannot afford to cover the Earth with factories. Yet the alternative is a cessation of economic growth-as long as industrial operations are limited to our finite planet.
Although studies such as the MIT/Club of Rome’s “Limits to Growth” have urged a stabilized society, human nature usually wants to have its cake and eat it, too. It should be possible to maintain economic growth by expanding off-planet, and thereby avoid the catastrophic effects of polluting our world to death.
What about the ultimate pollution: overpopulation? Will our expansion into space simply allow the human race to continue its population explosion until civilization collapses under the sheer groaning weight of human flesh?
Many science fiction stories have depicted a rigidly stabilized future society, where vocation, recreation, and even procreation are strictly controlled by -the state. Given modern techniques of behavior modification and genetic manipulation, this might someday be possible. Indeed, this is the world that “The Limits to Growth” inevitably leads to.
There is an alternative. In all of human history, the only sure technique for leveling off an expanding population has been to increase the people’s standard of living. War, famine, pestilence inevitably lead to a higher birthrate. Modern science has reduced the death rate to the point where even a moderately rising birthrate is a threat to society.
If economic growth can be maintained or even accelerated by expanding the economy into space-and this growth is shared by all people everywhere on Earth-we may have the means for leveling off the population explosion without the repressions that most science fiction writers are haunted by.
Eventually, people will go into space to live. There will be no large-scale migrations-not for a century, at least. But within a few decades, we may see self-sufficient communities in orbit around the Earth, on the moon, and eventually farther out in space.
For the first time since the settling of the Americas, humankind will have an opportunity to develop new social codes. In the strange and harsh environments we will encounter in space, we will perforce evolve new ways of life. Old manners and customs will wither; new ones will arise.
Scientists such as astronomer Carl Sagan look forward to these “experimental communities.” They point out that social evolution on Earth is stultified by the success of Western technological civilization. Nearly every human society on this planet lives in a Westernized culture. Variety among human cultures is being homogenized away. The new environment. of space offers an opportunity to produce new types of societies, new ways of life that might teach those who remain on Earth how to live better, more fully, more humanly.
Which brings us to the last of humankind’s three wishes, the most important one of all, the wish for the gift of Athena. ,
Athena
The gray-eyed goddess of civilization and wisdom. The warrior-goddess who was born with shield and spear in her hands, but who evolved from Homer’s time to Pericles’ into a goddess of counsel, of arts and industries, the protectress of cities, the patron deity of Athens.
It is to Athena that we must turn if we are to succeed in our long struggle against the darkness. For human history can be viewed as an attempt to countervene the inevitable chaos of entropy. We succeed as individuals, as a society, as a species, when we are able to bring order out of confusion, understanding out of mystery. Athena, whose symbol is the owl, represents the wisdom and self-knowledge that we so desperately need.
Knowledge we have. And we are acquiring more, so rapidly that people suffer “future shock” from their inability to digest the swift changes flowing across our lives. Wisdom is what we need; the gift of Athena. Self-understanding.
Human beings are understanding-seeking creatures. But when we seek understanding from authorities-in ivied towers of learning, or marbled halls of government, or dark caves of mysticism-we fall short of our goal. Proclamations from authorities are not understanding. When we as individuals give up our quest for understanding and allow others to think and decide for us, we allow the inevitable darkness to gather closer. The brilliant Aegean sunlight is what we seek, and we must turn to Athena’s gift of wisdom to find it.
Science will be the crucial factor in finding Athena’s gift. As a mode of thinking, a technique for learning and understanding, it is central to our search for self-knowledge.
Our first two wishes were largely focused outside ourselves. They were aimed at manipulating the world outside our skins. Our third and final wish concerns the universe within us: our bodies, our brains, our minds. Until now, scientific research has been mainly concerned with the physical world around us. Physics, chemistry, astronomy, engineering-all deal with the universe that we lay hands on. Even biology and sociology have dealt mainly with matters external to the individual human being. Medical research has been confined to chemistry, mysticism, and sharper surgical tools, until very recently.
But starting with psychology, the major thrust of scientific research has been slowly turning over the past century or so toward the universe inside our flesh.
Molecular biology is delving into the basic mechanics of what makes us what we are: the chemistry of genetic inheritance. Ethnology and psychology are probing the fundamentals of why we behave the way we do: the essence of learning and behavior. Neurophysiology is examining the basic structure and workings of the brain itself: the electrochemistry of memory and thought.
Many view this research with horror. From Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s vision of Frankenstein, generations of writers and readers have feared scientists’ attempts to tamper with the human mind and body. “There are some things that man was not meant to know,” has become not only a cliche, but a rallying cry for the fearful and the ignorant.
Genetic manipulation could someday create an elite of geniuses who rule a race of zombies. Behavior modification techniques can turn every jailbird into a model prisoner, and make prisoners of us all. Psychosurgery is performed on the poor, the uninformed, the helpless.
Yet molecular biology may erase the scourge of cancer and genetic diseases, bringing the human race to a pinnacle of physical perfection. Behavior modification techniques will someday unravel the tangled engrams of hopeless psychotics and restore them to the light of healthy adulthood. Brain research could bring quantum leaps in our abilities to understand and learn.
Human societies have developed in such a way that new ideas and new capabilities are acquired by the rulers long before the ruled ever hear of them. All societies are ruled by elites. But the eventual effect of new knowledge is to destroy the elite, to spread the new capabilities among all the people. Far from fearing new knowledge, or shunning it, we must seek it out and embrace it wholeheartedly. For only out of the new knowledge that scientists are acquiring will we derive
the understanding that we need to survive as individuals and as a species.
The gift of Athena is what we must have. And it must be shared by all of us, not merely an elite at the top of society. The gift of Prometheus gave us mastery of this world. The gift of Apollo is bringing us powers so vast that we can turn this planet into a paradise or a barren lifeless wasteland.
Only the wisdom of Athena can control the powers of modern science and technology. Only when all the people know what is possible will it be possible to know what to do. As long as an elite controls the power of science and technology, the masses will be manipulated. And such manipulation will inevitably lead to collapse and destruction.
We stand poised on the brink of godhood. The knowledge and wisdom that modern scientific research offers can help us to take the next evolutionary step, and transform ourselves into a .race of intelligent beings who truly understand themselves and the universe around them. It is possible, by our own efforts, to climb as far above our present condition as we today are above primitive little Homo erectus.
The anthropologist Carleton Coon painted the prospect twenty years ago, in his book, The Story of Man:
A half-million years of experience in outwitting beasts on mountains and plains, in heat and cold, in light and darkness, gave our ancestors the equipment that we still desperately need if we are to slay the dragon that roams the earth today, marry the princess of outer space, and live happily ever after in the deer filled glades of a world in which everyone is young and beautiful forever.
We have the means within our grasp. The gift of Athena, like our first two gifts, actually comes from no one but ourselves.