Seven Billion Baby

A few days ago, I found myself driving through the Duchy of Berg, on my way to a wedding in a neighbouring town. It was a beautiful late autumn morning; the sun, though growing inexorably weaker as the days become shorter, had gained enough strength to burn away the early morning fog and shone unobstructed from a bird-egg blue sky on the last glories of colour which the fading vitality of nature was able to provide. Red and green had largely disappeared – with the exception of the dark grey-green of the conifers and the brighter green of many of the fields – for the first autumn storms had already stripped many leaves from the trees and most of those remaining had very little chlorophyll left, so that the boughs and branches were already beginning to show signs of their winter starkness. November is just around the corner.

It was an idyllic scene, an overwhelmingly rural scene, rolling hills, fields and woodlands; one which could almost be pictured as Frodo’s Shire, if you just imagined the occasional house, power pylon and metalled road away. And then it struck me that the region I was travelling through was, in fact, part of the Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan area, the second largest polycentric urban area in Europe (after London), with over 12 million people and a population density of 1,422/sq.km It is, in economic terms, the largest economic area of Germany, accounting for around 15% of national GDP, one in which one city boundary frequently borders on the next – and yet, it is a region which is still predominantly green.

Of course, Germany is one of the richest countries in the world; a developed land, moving in many areas into a new technological, almost post-industrial phase, which has had the time and the wealth to deal with many of the worst excesses of heavy industrialisation, providing the vast majority of its population with a standard of living which would be longed for by billions of people throughout the world.

A world which, if we are to believe the experts, will welcome its seven billionth citizen sometime this weekend. The baby may be born in the Rhine-Ruhr area, or in Tokyo, in Beverly Hills or London; following statistical probabilities, however, it is more likely to take its first breath in the slums of Cairo or Mexico City, in the Gaza enclave or one of the camps in Northern Kenya, where the refugees from the hunger and chaos in Somalia are gathered in teeming hundreds of thousands. Though it may live its life in prosperity and privilege, it is more likely to grow up in poverty and existential uncertainty. If it lives a long life, that child will see a new century, having lived through one in which, in all likelihood, the human family will have taken the decisions which will decide whether the future will be bleak and increasingly uncertain on an increasingly wrecked planet, dominated by violence, poverty, a desperate struggle for mere survival by the vast majority of people, and death; or one in which humanity has faced up to the challenges it has created for itself and developed solutions which guarantee a life in dignity and relative security for its members.

The Parable of the Yeast

As a young man in Ireland, I spent a couple of years with some friends making wine as a hobby. We would never have described ourselves as oenologists; our primary aim was to produce significant quantities of a pleasant, drinkable, alcoholic product at an affordable price. While we experimented (sometimes successfully J) with different local fruits, the easiest way was to work with grape juice and kits, which could be bought relatively cheaply.

Apart from grape juice and the correct ambient temperature, the most important ingredient was the yeast. Basically, a small amount of dried yeast is added to the raw must and, in around two weeks, it converts nearly all of the sugar present into alcohol and carbon dioxide – the process known as fermentation.

It’s well worth looking at this process a little more closely. If the conditions are right, that small amount of yeast feels itself in yeast heaven and commences to behave accordingly. It starts to eat sugar, pissing alcohol and farting carbon dioxide for all it’s worth to get rid of the waste products. It also begins to reproduce like hell, being fruitful and multiplying at an incredible rate, creating a lot more yeast, which also starts to eat sugar, piss alcohol and fart carbon dioxide. A side effect of this is the generation of a large amount of heat, something the wine-maker has to keep a close eye on; the yeast does like it warm, but not too warm, a potential problem with all the reproduction and metabolising which is going on.

Towards the end of the process, the conditions change. The sugar starts to grow scarce and the amount of alcohol now present is proving increasingly poisonous for the yeast. As resources diminish and toxicity increases the yeast starts to die off, first slowly, then with increasing rapidity, until, in the end, all the yeast has died and fallen to the bottom of the fermentation vessel as a sediment known as the lees and the wine is basically ready (though to make it drinkable a slower secondary process, known as malolactic fermentation in which bacteria convert malic to lactic acid, must still take place).

In times when I am feeling pessimistic and negative – many would say realistic – I wonder whether there is any real difference between humanity and yeast. Looking at the past couple of hundred years, in particular, this view could well be seen as justified. As a process it is nothing special in nature, it happens all the time; species finding an environment which particularly suits them, over-reproducing and exhausting that environment as a result before dying back in massive numbers to make way for others and allowing new processes to begin. And we too are a species of life, just as yeast – or lemmings. The problem is that our environment has become the entire planet and the exhaustion of resources and the changes we effect on that environment are likely to become so dramatic that, when the tilt-moment comes and the die-back begins, we will have left an incredible mess behind us. If that die-back is not accompanied by widespread nuclear war (still a distinct possibility, particularly in times of increasing chaos, uncertainty and desperate battles for survival), the planet, and life, will survive us, but recovery from us will take quite a while.

Yet there is one aspect which makes us different from the yeast and the lemmings; we have the capacity to think, to plan, to imagine and envision the possible future and voluntarily tailor our actions in order to choose the direction in which that future will grow and thus influence its concrete reality. Up to around a hundred years ago, it can be argued, there were few enough of us, and the earth was big and bountiful enough, for such considerations to be unnecessary. That is no longer the case. We are becoming increasingly aware of our global interconnectedness in all sorts of ways – also of the consequences of our unthinking consumption of everything the planet has to offer and of our crazy merciless competition for increasingly scarce resources. Many major changes have already taken place and, just like the yeast, our “metabolising,” reproduction and ever-increasing production of carbon dioxide as a waste product is already showing signs of raising the temperature in our planetary fermentation vat to a level which is becoming uncomfortable for us. We have not yet learned to piss alcohol, but the other waste products we produce are quite poisonous and damaging enough.

The (symbolic) birth of Seven Billion Baby can perhaps be an event which helps us focus on what is at stake – the future of that child and his or her siblings; the future of all our children and grandchildren. It can be that beautiful world of the Duchy of Berg I drove through a few mornings ago, but it can also be the world of the Somali refugee camps in Kenya – or worse. But a world in which both can coexist and in which, above all, the residents of Berg can go about their lives largely unconcerned and untouched by the fates of those in the camps will not be able to continue to exist for much longer, for the strains and pressures we are creating planet-wide on all sorts of levels will become increasingly difficult to ignore. If we do not start to act much more decisively than we have done up to now, I very much fear that that tilt-point will come and the die-back will begin. And that is something which will profit none of us (except, perhaps, some fraction of that one percent who have so much power and money that they can barricade themselves away in enclaves to carry on some kind of sterile continued existence).

The signs are increasing that time is running out for us – that it is coming up to a minute before twelve. What gives me some hope is our capability, despite everything, for creativity, imagination and empathy. And our ingenuity and energy when it comes around to getting things done at the last minute.

Happy birthday, Seven Billion Baby. I wish you lots of luck – you’re going to need it. But maybe you’ll have it too; after all, seven is supposed to be a lucky number!

Pictures retrieved from:

http://www.geo-reisecommunity.de/bild/103303/Solingen-Deutschland-Herbst-im-Bergischen-Land

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e1/Red_wine_cap.jpg

http://www.baby-pictures.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/New-Born-baby-picture.jpg

Whatever happened to space travel?

Space, the final frontier …

Imagine you were transported by a time machine back to 1966, the year Star Trek first appeared on television. One of the things people might ask you about, after you told them when you came from, is the extent to which space exploration had progressed after nearly half a century.

Well, you’d say, we’ve got loads of satellites revolving the earth, and there’s the ISS space-station which is nearly finished …

One space station?

Yeah, well, everyone is cooperating on that because the US Space Shuttle won’t be flying anymore after this year, but luckily the Russian rockets can keep supplying it …

What about moon bases?

We don’t have moon bases. Neil Armstrong did land there in 1969, but nobody’s been back since 1972.

Mars? Venus?

Well, unmanned little probes have landed on Mars a couple of times. There are little toy robots driving around, filming things, analysing a few rocks … I think some of them are still sending information back …

Chances are, the people would just stop believing your claims that you came from 2010. After all, Sputnik was less than ten years before and the Apollo programme was going to put a man on the moon in the next couple of years. Satellites for chrissakes, we can do that! You mean more than forty years have gone by and, basically, nothing has happened?

So, what has happened to space travel?

There are many complex answers to this and one very simple one; economics. The space race of the 60s was driven far more by political and ideological exigencies than economic ones. In one way, the spirit of it all is captured in a speech by John F. Kennedy about the US space effort in September 1962 “we choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” And then the US went on to show the superiority of their efforts and technology while the Soviets got bogged down in engineering difficulties. The moon was reached, there was nothing immediately useful to be discovered there, détente broke out, the two superpowers cooperated on the Skylab project and suddenly the steam went out of the whole enterprise. Space exploration cost money and the payoff was meagre and, without issues of national pride and ideological competition to factor into the equation, the accountants were gaining more influence.

The space-shuttle was swallowing more and more money, was badly designed and over-engineered and then some modules started to blow up. NASA had become an inefficient bureaucratic monster and there were other uses for the money.

Ironically, the plodding Soviet project was more successful. They got Mir up there and kept it up there for a long time, often held together with little more than wire and spit and positive thinking and today, when the space-shuttle is being retired, it’s good old dependable Soviet-designed rockets that will keep its international successor going. But, while there is renewed talk about missions to the moon and Mars and the Europeans and, increasingly, the Chinese have got into the satellite business, nothing is going to happen very fast in the next few years in the area of space exploration.

So what? Don’t we have enough to worry about and spend money on, given that it still costs around $ 10.000 to lift one kilo of payload into orbit? Our contemporary knowledge of applied physics suggests that we are limited to our solar-system anyway, given that everything else is so far away that faster-than-light travel would be practically necessary to send manned missions to other stars and all models of FTL propulsion remain firmly in the domain of science-fiction. And our solar system is an environment which is not exactly friendly to humans – basically, when we go out there, we have to take everything we need to live with us and protect us and it all from an environment which is continually and indifferently trying to kill us in all sorts of interesting and effective ways. What’s the point?

In fact, there are a number of points. There are resources out there; abundant resources of many of things which are going to become scarcer on earth. Only this week, I saw a report about some studies currently being made about mining dumps and land-refills for metals thrown away in the past century, which are becoming rarer; even copper for wiring. Once you get out of earth’s gravity well, movement in space – even over large distances – becomes relatively cheap because, once you give something a push in a zero-gravity environment, it will keep going indefinitely until you just give it an equal pull to stop it. Asteroid mining is a staple in science-fiction and, even if you just follow economic laws, it will, at some time in the future, become economically feasible and sensible to go there to get the stuff we need. The fuel of the future, even – increasingly – of the present, is hydrogen, and there are the gas-giants, like Jupiter and Saturn, which are basically made of hydrogen. So, increasingly, space-based human endeavours or settlements would become more independent of earth.

But the more important points go deeper. Economics are important considerations but raise a number of questions. Economic viewpoints, particularly those put into practice, are generally limited and short-term because long-term profits, far down-line, are not interesting because, in the long-term, we’re all dead and what did posterity ever do for me? The fact that politicians, who are always involved in the planning of really large economic matters because these things always have a large public dimension and involve public funding, subsidies, capitalisation or taxation issues, have to ensure that they get re-elected gives their vision a very short-term perspective too. As a result, if we simply follow the economic indicators then nothing is going to happen in space until it has to happen because everything else has become more expensive. And there are two big problems with that; firstly, because it means that we are reacting rather than acting and that isn’t usually a good way to deal with major questions, and secondly, because we’ve had enough painful experience, in recent years alone, to teach us that economic experts often don’t know what they’re talking about it.

But the deepest of all reasons for looking to space is, perhaps, the most nebulous, but the most important. For all the dangers they may pose, like fanaticism, intolerance, and senseless competitions, people need visions and ideals. I think this was the insight Kennedy, all those years ago, had with his image of “the new frontieah”, a meme which also served to strike to the heart of the American Dream.

As Gene Rodenberry put it in the intro to Star Trek, space is the final frontier, and an endless one at that, one which calls to the adventurer, the wanderer in all of us; the science fiction writer Robert Heinlein’s Glory Road, which is the same road that Bilbo warned Frodo of, because you would never know where it would take you or what would happen to you when you put your foot on it. And speaking of Heinlein, he was the one who gave another cogent reason for space exploration with his famous comment about planet Earth being much too fragile a basket for the human race to keep all its eggs in.

In the end, we have to go to space simply because we can and, as the mountain climber explained his passion, because it’s there. It is a magnificent, powerful ideal; one which can bring us to cooperate with each other, to push at the limits of what we think we can do in order to discover how much more we can actually do. Something which can inspire us to go on widening our horizons even if (or, perhaps, especially if) it occasionally means us telling the economists to f*** off.

Or maybe, just maybe, the SETI people (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) will finally pick up a signal from some of the other intelligent beings out there trying to find out whether they are not alone in the universe on the radio-telescope in Arecibo. And then we’ll have yet another good reason “to boldly go where no man has gone before …”