RYviewpoint

K. Eric Drexler, the visionary behind nanotechnology has written a short autobiographical sketch tracing worries about Earth Day and the Club of Rome's Limits to Growth through to his work on nanotechnology. While the biographical sketch is interesting and leads him to envision a nano-tech future, I come away with a different lesson. Take this snippet:

I read The Limits to Growth soon after its publication early in 1972. It made a big impression on me. The authors used system dynamics models with broad, aggregate variables like population, economic growth, natural resources, and pollution to explore the outlines of a range of future scenarios. The scenarios without strict controls on growth all came to a bad end. Some of those scenarios resemble the world we’re in today.

The book scared me and helped crystallize my resolve to work toward a future outside the range of those scenarios — not toward an impossible future of unlimited exponential growth, but toward a future in which Earth’s forests and seas would be compatible with a prosperous human race for centuries to come. I was, and am, persuaded that this will require a profound change in the basis of our industrial civilization. This aim set the course of my life.

The lesson I learn from this is how scare mongering deeply effects us. Even very bright people can get caught up in these doomsday visions and deeply alter the course of their life. Most people get involved but after a short time lose interest and drop out. Others, like Drexler, have their whole life changed by the fear mongering.

I was caught up in the following apocalyptic dramas during my lifespan...

• Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, we poison our environment and then ourselves leaving a dead landscape


• Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb, we all die in a Malthusian overpopulation


• Club of Rome's The Limits to Growth, we outrun the resources of earth (oil, metals, etc.)


• The IPCC's Global Warming, the human injected greenhouse gases will cause the heat death of mother Earth


• Laurie Garrett's The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance, warning that human incursion into tropical spaces will let loose pathogens like Ebola that will wipe us out


• The World Health Organization's The Bird Flu, the H1N5 strain of influenza would jump species boundaries and wipe us out in a mass epidemic


• The Bush admin's War on Terrorism, the idea that the Moslem world was rife with suicidal maniacs bent on destroying the West and therefore justifying preemptive wars, "selling" WMD as a technique to mobilize a country for war, torture, and extraordinary rendition

Do you see the pattern here? It is a combination of a "likely story" promoted (sold by) a group or organization using apocalyptic fear mongering to achieve their end such as stopping some activity they dislike or, in the case of scientific groups, to get funding to pursue their interest in the area.

They all paint a horrible future and spread fear. And not a single one has developed as the most radical adherents would have us believe. In short, it is too easy to be caught up in cult-like fear mongering. It is hard to keep a balance and do enough without going over the edge. Each of the above is a real problem and deserved public attention and political action, but the mad adherents couldn't resist turning them into doomsday scenarios.