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families, later an entire class, and in recent times a minority of privileged
nations. When a privileged group entrenches itself, two things tend to happen:
one, a rationale is constructed, based on religion or some other belief
system, to justify the existing social order and induce the masses to accept
their inferior lot, e.g., by promising that they'll get theirs in some
hereafter; and two, good reasons are found why the progress that has enabled
the privileged to get where they are has gone far enough and should be halted
right now, before any more from lower down the pyramid move up to crowd the
limited space at the top. Today we see it as Malthusianism: "finite resources"
are the reason why everyone can't be rich, and the inevitability of "limits to
growth" means that global industrialization will have to plateau out at its
present level. Imposed worldwide, such an ideology would deny hundreds of
millions of human beings any chance to enjoy decent standards of health,
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education, and comfort, or the opportunity to live rewarding, productive
lives. Instead they would be forcibly kept at a subsistence level of existence
. . . or worse. It is estimated that holding back the introduction of nuclear
technologies to the Third World has already caused more deaths than the Nazis
were responsible for during their entire regime including all the casualties
of World War II. Malthus would say it's just as well, since those people would
have lived miserable lives anyway and besides, we don't have the resources to
change anything, which in any case are getting smaller. I say we do have the
resources, and they're getting bigger.
To apply the observed population dynamics of animal species to human societies
is to deny the qualities that set us apart. Unlike animals, who simply consume
resources and react to circumstance with fixed behavior patterns, human beings
are capable of creating new resources and adapting their behavior to the new
conditions that they bring about. In primitive, labor-intensive, rural
societies, with no life insurance, social security, retirement pensions, or
machines to do the work, having big families to ensure that at least one or
two of the children survive to adulthood to provide for one's old age makes
sound economic sense. When long-established customs like this persist for a
while alongside industrialization and rising living standards, of course the
population is going to increase. It happened in Europe in the eighteenth
century, in America in the nineteenth, and now it's happening in the
developing nations of the Third World. It's a sign that things are getting
better, not worse. Since World War II, improved health and diet had caused a
significant increase in the average height of Japanese children. But obviously
it would be ridiculous to infer from this by simple extrapolation that a
hundred years from now they'll be as tall as skyscrapers. The average height
is adjusting to a new equilibrium with changed conditions. It's the same with
populations. Our experiences with such advanced societies as those of North
America and Western Europe show that when human populations reach sufficiently
high levels of well-being and security, attitudes, values, and lifestyles
change, and they become self-limiting in numbers in ways that Malthus never
dreamed of.
Periodically, the process of evolution passes through abrupt phase changes
comparable to the ones in physics that given the transitions between solid,
liquid, and gas, in which completely new laws come into play and the old
limits cease to mean anything. A qualitatively distinct realm opens up, with
new resources available suddenly, which are not simple extrapolations of what
went before. Usually this results when a revolutionary ability of some kind a
new technology emerges. Thus, the earliest self-replicating molecules depended
on the supply of abiotically produced organic compounds washed down off the
land into a few favored environments, and we can imagine some primordial,
microscopic Malthus concluding gloomily that life would forever be restricted
to thin strips of coastal shallows and tidal pools. But that doomsday prophesy
collapsed when the blue-green algae invented the chlorophyll molecule and set
up the photosynthesis industry, opening up the entire surface of the oceans as
a planet-wide biomass factory. Sexual reproduction and DNA, the patenting of
hemoglobin and harnessing of oxygen as a higher-power energy source, all
represented breakthroughs into new realms of capability, and eventually the
development of the first functioning spacesuit in the form of the amphibian
egg paved the way for migration into and colonizing of a completely new,
initially hostile environment.
What these examples illustrate is that new technologies create new resources
and always on a scale dwarfing everything that went before. Human civilization
is a continuation of the same evolutionary process, operating at the level of
applied intelligence. And the same principle applies, in which new
technologies create new resources for a resource is not a resource and can
create no wealth until the knowledge and the means exist for using it. The
harnessing of steam, the application of electricity, and the exploitation of
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oil all opened up eras of wealth creation that were as qualitatively distinct
from each other as they were from the economies based on wind, water, and
muscle power of the Middle Ages. By the yardsticks that matter, the average
Englishman of today enjoys a better standard of living than Queen Victoria
did, and most Americans are millionaires by the measures of a century ago. And
all the world's peoples want to be living that way a century from now. They
could be, too. But when the demand is translated into energy needs no less
than providing a globally stabilized population of, say, ten billion, with
energy per person at a rate probably greater than that of the U.S. today the
amount needed is utterly beyond any approaches that are merely variations of
what we have. Only a breakthrough into the next realm of energy control could
do it. The nuclear-based technologies that we are just glimpsing, with yields
and densities orders of magnitude greater than anything attainable from
conventional sources, represent such a breakthrough. The so-called
alternatives do not.
The tiny pockets of energy that happen to be, fortuitously, trapped around the
surface of this planet are merely our starting capital for launching the
business. As with any business, it would be silly to suppose that we have to
exist on our starting capital forever. The capital must be invested to create
the earnings that will enable the business to grow and pay its way as its
bills get bigger. Just as the wealth of today's Western world is the payoff
from yesterday's investments in coal and steam, so a portion of the return
must be invested to provide the global payoff that will be tomorrow's nuclear [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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