Why the West Rules--For Now (98 page)

That will be a messy business, and as so often in the past, new challenges will call for new thought. But even if we manage in the next half-century to create institutions that can find global solutions for global problems, this will still only be a necessary rather than a sufficient condition for the Singularity to win the race.

We might compare our situation with what happened in the first, eleventh, and seventeenth centuries, when social development pressed against the hard ceiling at forty-three points on the index. I suggested in
Chapter 11
that the only way the Romans or the Song could have broken through in the first and eleventh centuries was by doing what Europe and China did in the seventeenth century: that is, by restructuring geography by closing the steppe highway and creating an oceanic highway. Only then would they have bought themselves security from migrations, raised the kinds of questions that called for a scientific revolution, and begun creating the kinds of incentives that would set off an industrial revolution. Neither the Romans nor the Song, of course, were able to do this, and within a few generations migration, disease, famine, and state failure combined with climate change to set off Eurasia-wide collapses.

When Europeans and Chinese did restructure geography in the seventeenth century, they pushed the hard ceiling upward, though as we saw in
Chapter 9
they did not shatter it. By 1750 problems were mounting once again, but by that time British entrepreneurs had used the time that geographical restructuring had bought to begin a revolution in energy capture.

In the twenty-first century we need to follow a similar path. First we must restructure political geography to make room for the kinds of global institutions that might slow down war and global weirding; then we must use the time that buys to carry out a new revolution in energy capture, shattering the fossil-fuel ceiling. Carrying on burning oil and coal like we did in the twentieth century will bring on Nightfall even before the hydrocarbons run out.

Some environmentalists recommend a different approach, urging us to return to simpler lifestyles that reduce energy use enough to halt
global weirding, but it is hard to see how this will work. World population will probably grow by another 3 billion before it peaks at 9 billion around 2050, and hundreds of millions of these people are likely to rise out of extreme poverty, using more energy as they do so.
David Douglas
, the chief sustainability officer at Sun Microsystems, points out that if each of these new people owns just one 60-watt incandescent lightbulb, and if each of them uses it just four hours per day, the world will still need to bring another sixty or so 500-megawatt power plants on line. The International Energy Agency expects world oil demand to rise from 86 million barrels per day in 2007 to 116 million in 2030; and even then, they estimate, 1.4 billion people will still be without electricity.

The double whammy of the world’s poor multiplying and getting richer as they do so makes it most unlikely that energy capture will fall over the next fifty years. If we use less energy for fertilizers or for fuel to move food around, hundreds of millions of the poor will starve, which will probably bring on Nightfall faster than anything. But if people do not starve, they will demand more and more energy. In China alone, fourteen thousand new cars hit the roads every day; 400 million people (more than the entire population of the United States) will probably flee low-energy farms for high-energy cities between 2000 and 2030; and the number of travelers vacationing overseas, burning jet fuel and staying in hotels, will probably increase from 34 million in 2006 to 115 million in 2020.

We are not going to reduce energy capture unless catastrophe forces us to—which means that the only way to avoid running out of resources, poisoning the planet, or both, will be by tapping into renewable, clean power.

Atomic energy will probably be a big part of this. Fears about radiation have shackled nuclear programs since the 1970s, but may fall away as the new age gets new thought. Or perhaps solar power will be more important: only one-half of one-billionth of the energy that the sun emits comes to Earth, and roughly one-third of that is reflected back again. Even so, enough solar energy reaches us every hour to power all current human needs for a year—if we could harness it effectively. Alternatively, nanotechnology and genetics may deliver radically new sources of energy. Much of this of course sounds like science fiction, and it will certainly take enormous technological leaps to usher
in such an age of abundant clean energy. But if we do not make such leaps—and soon—Nightfall will win the race.

For the Singularity to win, we need to keep the dogs of war on a leash, manage global weirding, and see through a revolution in energy capture. Everything has to go right. For Nightfall to win only one thing needs go wrong. The odds look bad.

THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME

Some scientists think they already know who will win the race, because the answer is written in the stars. One day around 1950 (no one remembers exactly when) the physicist Enrico Fermi and three of his colleagues met for lunch at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. After laughing about a
New Yorker
cartoon showing a flying saucer, they moved on to extraterrestrials in general before turning to more conventional scientific topics. Suddenly Fermi burst out: “
But where are they
?”

It took Fermi’s lunch mates a moment or two to realize that he was still worrying about spacemen. Running a few numbers through his head while eating, it had struck him that even if only a vanishingly small proportion of our galaxy’s 250 billion stars have habitable planets,
*
outer space should still be teeming with aliens. Earth is relatively young, at less than five billion years, so some of these species should be much older and more advanced than us. Even if their spaceships were as slow as our own, it should have taken them at most 50 million years to explore the whole galaxy. So where were they? Why had they not made contact?

In 1967 the astronomers Iosif Shklovskii and Carl Sagan offered a sobering solution to Fermi’s paradox. If just one star in every quarter of a million is orbited by just one habitable planet, they calculated, there would be a million potential alien civilizations in the Milky Way.
The fact that we have not heard from any of them,
*
Shklovskii and Sagan concluded, must mean that advanced civilizations always destroy themselves. The astronomers even suggested that they must invariably do so within a century of inventing nuclear weapons, since otherwise the aliens would have plenty of time to fill the cosmos with signals that we would pick up. All the evidence (or, strictly speaking, the lack of it), then, points to Nightfall by 2045, the centenary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (By a slightly unsettling coincidence, 2045 is also the year Kurzweil nominated for the Singularity.)

It is a clever argument, but as always, there is more than one way to do the numbers. A million civilizations rushing into Nightfall is only a guess, and most solutions of the Drake Equation
^†
(dreamed up by the astronomer Frank Drake in 1961 as a rough way to calculate the number of civilizations in the galaxy) in fact generate much lower scores. Drake himself calculated that our galaxy has produced just ten advanced civilizations in its entire history, in which case ET could be out there without us knowing.

In the end Fermi’s paradox is not very helpful, because the answer to how the great race will turn out lies not in the stars but in our own past. Even if history cannot give us the precise tools of prediction that Asimov imagined in
Foundation
, it does provide some rather solid hints. These, I suspect, are the only real foundation for looking forward.

In the short term, the patterns established in the past suggest that the shift of wealth and power from West to East is inexorable. The transformation of the old Eastern core into a Western periphery in the
nineteenth century allowed the East to discover advantages in its backwardness, and the latest of these—the incorporation of China’s vast, poor workforce into the global capitalist economy—is still playing out. Bungling, internal divisions, and external wars may hold China back, as they did so often between the 1840s and 1970s, but sooner or later—probably by 2030, almost certainly by 2040—China’s gross domestic product will overtake that of the United States. At some point in the twenty-first century China will use up the advantages of its backwardness, but when that happens the world’s center of economic gravity will probably still remain in the East, expanding to include South and Southeast Asia. The shift in power and wealth from West to East in the twenty-first century is probably as inevitable as the shift from East to West that happened in the nineteenth century.

The West-to-East shift will surely be faster than any in earlier history, but the old Western core currently has a huge lead in per capita energy capture, technology, and military capacity, and will almost certainly maintain its rule in some form through the first half of this century. So long as the United States is strong enough to act as globocop, major wars should be as rare as they were when Britain was globocop in the nineteenth century. But beginning somewhere between 2025 and 2050, America’s lead over the rest of the world will narrow, as Britain’s did after about 1870, and the risks of a new world war will increase.

The speed of technological change may well add to the instability by making access to high-tech weapons easier. According to Steven Metz, a professor at the United States Army War College, “
We will see
if not identical technologies, then parallel technologies being developed [outside the United States], particularly because of the off-the-shelf nature of it all. We’ve reached the point where the bad guys don’t need to develop it; instead they can just buy it.” A RAND Corporation report even suggested in 2001 that “
the U.S.
and its military must include in its planning for possible military conflict the possibility that China may be more advanced technologically and militarily by 2020.”

The United States will probably be the first nation to develop a functional antimissile shield, as well as robots and nanoweapons that render human combatants obsolete, cybertechnology that can neutralize or seize control of enemy computers and robots, and satellites that militarize space. One risk is that if—as seems probable—the United
States can deploy some or all of these wonder weapons before 2040, its leaders might be tempted to exploit a temporary but enormous technological edge to reverse their long-term strategic decline. Yet I suspect that is unlikely. Even in the feverish atmosphere of the early 1950s the United States resisted the temptation to strike the Soviet Union before it could build up its nuclear arsenal. The real risk is probably that other nations, fearing American military breakthroughs in the next few decades, might prefer striking first to falling even further behind. That kind of thinking played a big part in taking Germany to war in 1914.

It is going to take great statesmanship to preserve the peace in the bewildering twenty-first century. I have argued throughout this book that great men/women and bungling idiots have never played as big a part in shaping history as they have believed they did. Rather than changing the course of history, I suggested, the most that chaps could do was to speed up or slow down the deeper processes driven by maps. Even the most disastrous decisions, such as the wars that Justinian of Byzantium and Khusrau of Persia launched between 530 and 630
CE,
just accelerated a collapse that was already under way. Without Justinian’s and Khusrau’s wars, Western social development might have started recovering sooner, but even with them, development did eventually bounce back.

Since 1945, however, leaders really have had the ability to change history. Khrushchev and Kennedy came close to doing so in 1962. Nuclear weapons leave us no margin of error, no second chance. Mistakes used to cause decline and fall; now they cause Nightfall. For the first time in history, leadership really is decisive. We can only hope that our age, like most before it, gets the thought it needs.

I concluded in
Chapter 11
that explanations for why the West rules have to be couched in terms of probabilities, not certainties, and this is even truer of the twenty-first century’s great race. Right now the odds are apparently against us, but it does seem to me that if our age is able to get the thought it needs, the odds will steadily shift in the Singularity’s favor.

If renewable, clean energy sources replace hydrocarbons across the next fifty years, they should reduce (though certainly not eliminate) the risk of great powers coming to blows over resources or being drawn into feuds in the arc of instability. They should also slow the process of global weirding, reducing the pressures within the arc, and may boost food production even more dramatically than the industrial revolution
did. If robotics makes the advances many scientists anticipate, intelligent machines may save wealthy Europe and Japan from demographic disaster, providing cheaply the labor and care that their aging populations need. If nanotechnology similarly lives up to the hype, we might even start cleaning up the air and oceans by the 2040s.

In the end, though, there is only one prediction we can rely on: neither Nightfall nor the Singularity will actually win the great race, because the race will have no finishing line. When we reach 2045 (Kurzweil’s estimated time of arrival for the Singularity, and Shklovskii and Sagan’s latest date for Nightfall, a century after Hiroshima and Nagasaki) we will not get to declare the end of history and announce a winner. If, as I suspect will happen, we are still holding Nightfall at bay in the mid twenty-first century and social development is soaring past two thousand points, the emerging Singularity will not so much end the race as transform the race—and above all, transform the human race.