Stephen Hawking, cosmologist and author of A Brief History of Time, has issued a call to the lifeboats. He says we need to colonize space by the time of the next millennium if we are to survive the big brothers of the current deadly viruses. Jonathan Roberts takes issue with Hawking and looks at the contradictions of salvation by science.
"THE HUMAN RACE is likely to be wiped out by a doomsday virus before the millennium is out, unless we set up colonies in space, Prof Stephen Hawking warns today. In an interview with The Daily Telegraph (London), Prof Hawking, the world's best known cosmologist, says that biology, rather than physics, presents the biggest challenge to human survival."
This is the un-enticing prelude to the Telegraph's current serialization of Hawking's new book, The Universe in a Nutshell. The serialization has been prefaced with an interview in which Hawking makes his apocalyptic overture: "I don't think the human race will survive the next 1,000 years, unless we spread into space," because "either by accident or design, we will create a virus that destroys us."
IN THE FACE OF the current anthrax alarm (presumably the reason why the topic was broached in interview) Hawking's words will inevitably be understood in the context of futuristic terrorism. As such, his proposed solution of protecting ourselves by spreading out through space sounds as hollow as it does unappealing.
As the events of September 11th have shown, the synchronized attack of multiple targets presents merely practical challenges that a little ingenuity will overcome. This would surely hold true for astro-terrorism: if we could poison one planet, we could presumably poison any number simultaneously.
This instance points up the fundamental inadequacy of Hawking's vision, which is that it is blind to human agency – it sees only scientific threats and seeks to redress them through scientific solutions. However, technological solutions forged by human ingenuity are inherently susceptible to subversion through that same human invention.
The shield protects from the sword, but the advent of the gun renders it useless. Spears give way to missiles, gunpowder to hydrogen bombs, and when the weaponry becomes too technologically or logistically difficult to wield, we simply open a new dialogue – that of anthrax, car bombs and passenger jets.
AS THE 20TH CENTURY spectacularly demonstrated, no arms race will ever generate a preventative solution to violence. And the insufficiency of any technological panacea has now been made clear with regard to the most elaborate of such schemes, the US National Missile Defense programme. Conceived and marketed as a solution to the perceived threat of so-called "rogue states", its impotence to protect America from external attack has become apparent before the technology itself has even been proved viable.
Hawking's thesis might be dismissed as merely a benign bit of speculation if his ideas were not so widely influential. But he is, as the Telegraph notes, "the world's best known cosmologist", and it does matter when his speculations fail to disclose (as such scientific hypotheses generally do) their own political ramifications.
When the Telegraph states that "this method of space exploration and colonisation could be one possible escape from the human predicament", it is worth asking "which human predicament"? Apparently not the human condition beloved of existentialists, nor the chronic poverty that afflicts so much of the world's population.
HAWKING MAY UNFOLD a vision of a physical universe with 11 dimensions, but that vision betrays a social awareness that is barely two dimensional. As a depiction of the future of humankind, it is most notable for its total omission of humanity itself.
Well, almost total. There is a sort of human presence. The article states that "Cyborgs, humans with computers linked to their brains, will be needed to prevent intelligent computers taking over."
In other words, we face the grim prospect of having to mechanically modify our own bodies in order to maintain control of the machines that we have (thankfully not yet) created. There is a dark parody here of Irenaeus' assertion that "God became what we are that He might make us what He is."
It doesn't stop at mechanical modification however: "Prof. Hawking believes that genetic engineering could be used to 'improve' human beings to meet the challenges of long-duration space travel." These solutions, characteristically, depend on the very technology by which we are threatened.
UNDERLYING HAWKING'S ARGUMENTS is a brutal survivalism which suggests that the continuation of existence (regardless of its form) is the only thing that matters: we could blithely do away with the inhabitants of one planet, provided that humanity (if that's what this mechanically and biologically modified hybrid is still to be called) could continue to survive on another.
The key question is, who would be doing the surviving? Starvation currently threatens an estimated 7.5 million Afghans. Flying over their heads are American Stealth bombers that technologically outstrip the hardware that put Armstrong on the moon. If planet Earth looks like going down, it's not difficult to imagine who'll be in the intergalactic lifeboats ready to boldly go.
As for the "humanity" that is to be preserved, that promises little more than a group of beings that have become ever more clever, but never more wise: fools in spacesuits chasing themselves from planet to planet across the galaxy with the sole aim of surviving as a vaguely recognizable biological entity.
THE DAY AFTER Hawking made his pronouncements on our future, film director Robert Altman denounced violent Hollywood blockbusters for providing the imaginative ingredients for the September 11th attacks.
He said: "I just believe we created this atmosphere and taught them how to do it."
Altman's comments are contentious and impossible to prove, but they do raise two important issues. Firstly, the mass media (and Hawking as a pop scientist is every bit as important culturally as he is scientifically) has an extremely pervasive effect on the thinking of its consumers – if it didn't, propaganda and advertising wouldn't exist.
Secondly, all human events that come to pass have their origins in the human imagination. In William Blake's words, "all who see, become what they behold", and if we cut personal responsibility, humanity, morality and love from our visions of each other and of our future, then we have already taken the first step towards becoming the terrified extra-terrestrial cyborg refugees that Hawking so readily envisions.
Hawking's predictions for the future may come to pass if science continues to be driven forward at a break-neck speed by irresistible market forces. But there is an alternative future if the next great development in science, rather than being just another shunt along its present linear trajectory, is a lateral development that takes into account the aesthetic, humanitarian, and ethical concerns of all of those (that is, all of us) who are inevitably subject to its burgeoning dominion.
Links
- Colonies in space may be only hope (Daily Telegraph)
- The answer to the universe and everything (Daily Telegraph)
- Hollywood inspired US attacks (BBC News)