Novel solutions to the planet’s problems

Don’t despair! The Internet may be coming to the rescue of all mankind and our planet. This is the mind-boggling, yet not entirely incredible, notion at the heart of David Brin’s future-techno-thriller Earth.

When a local bookstore remaindered hardcover editions of the novel Earth for $9.95, I immediately snapped up four copies. One was for my own indulgence (no matter that I still had my original dog-eared paperback). The others were to give, with personal explanatory notes on the flysheets, to each of my three children when they had finished secondary school and were about to enter university.

Earth, set 50 or so years into the future, moved me like no other novel I had ever read. I wanted to share it with my children who would live most of their lives in the 21st century. Hopefully, before they were tempted to begin abandoning old-fashioned books and the like for new-fangled information technologies, my children would enter adulthood enlightened, no less excited and similarly moved by Brin’s thoughtful and expansive depiction of one possible tomorrow for their world.

This extraordinary novel (still available new and second-hand in paperback and hardcover) speculates on how planet Earth and its people will be faring after the “Helvetian holocaust” and just before the ultimate “Gaia conflict”. Wars have always been part of human history and, as Brin frankly anticipates, will continue to be part of our future. Meanwhile, the fastest growing communication medium in history, the Internet, will clearly remain well and truly entrenched in tomorrow’s world.

Yes, our net/Internet/world wide web/information super-highway will be used and abused in Brin’s not-too-distant future by millions of humans beneath a still-failing ozone layer, in the grip of a thickening greenhouse effect and under terminal threat from a microscopic black hole in the earth’s core.

One reviewer has explained how a multi-faceted struggle to save the planet gives Brin the occasion to recap a number of imagined but plausible global events:

... a world war fought to wrest all caches of secret information from the grip of an elite few; a series of ecological disasters brought about by environmental abuse; and the effects of a universal interactive data network beginning to turn the world into a true global village.

Initially in the novel the internet provides a vehicle for a constant commentary on Brin’s central topic - the so-called “Gaia Hypothesis”. This posits that the earth may be legitimately compared to a living organism. When our living planet faces imminent death and destruction, Brin’s radical resolution of several global conflicts involves the net, metamorphosised into the ultimate saviour of humanity, civilisation and the very planet itself. Trust me, salvation in this complex context involves more than a simplistic deus ex machina or dues in machina. Think, perhaps, a little fiat lux (“let there be light!”).

David Brin has a doctorate in astrophysics, has been a consultant to NASA and is a graduate-level physics professor. A natural story-teller, he is the award-winning author of several popular science fiction novels and two collections of short stories. Another of his future novels, The Postman, was made into a less-than-successful, post-apocalypse movie directed by and starring Kevin Costner.

Earth is much more than science fiction, although you will most likely find it on science fiction book-shelves and catalogues. This novel, dedicated to “our common mother”, transcends every genre in scope and significance to become, in effect, a predictive and impassioned testament about humankind’s responsibility to an endangered planet.

Yet Brin himself has explained that he did not intend to make predictions of what the future would hold: “it is an extrapolation - nothing more”. His prime purpose, he acknowledges, is essentially to ask questions. Will we wake up quickly enough to save ourselves and our world? How will we acquire the necessary wisdom to accompany increasingly god-like scientific powers?

In a short preface to his novel he candidly remarks:

As writers go, I suppose I’m known as an optimist. So it seems only natural that this novel projects a future where there’s been just a little more wisdom than folly ... Maybe a bit more hope than despair. In fact it’s about the most encouraging tomorrow I can imagine right now.

Brin, in his afterword, also offers a challenge to our generation:

… pick up a truly daunting burden, to tend and keep a planetary oasis, in all its delicacy and diversity, for future millennia and beyond.

If we should accept, we are obliged not only to take on such a “burden”, but also to pass this heavy baton on to our children, the next generation.

Finally Brin invites his readers to become across-the-board activists. Nevertheless, if you want to be interested in planetary issues without being too active, he suggests you join some worthy cause, pay your membership subscription, make donations and thus enable others to save the planet for you: “Pick a problem,” he writes, “and there’s probably some organization already in tune with your agenda that will add your small contribution to others’ and leverage it into serious effort … How can anyone complain that they can’t influence the future of the world when it’s so easy to get involved?”

Where can you find out more about any particular planetary concern and the appropriate group you might support? A good place to start looking will be, of course, on the Internet.

Meanwhile the Internet may have been but a hyper-twinkle in the eyes of its creators when Gregory Benford wrote his science fiction thriller Timescape. While I never really had a particularly burning desire to share it in any deep and meaningful way with my children, I still found this novel not only extremely thought-provoking but also truly unforgettable - the concepts and the plot anyway, if not all the details. And like Earth it is still available. Benford, who is also an astrophysicist, professor of physics, and no less a prolific novelist sets this time-centric story both in the near future and in the recent past - with more than a touch of autobiography.

In his acknowledgements Benford states that his aim was to “illuminate some outstanding philosophical difficulties in physics”. Benford believes that this book will have served its purpose if readers conclude that time represents a “fundamental riddle in modern physics”.

He begins with apt quotations from two well-known scientist-philosophers: The first is from Sir Isaac Newton:

Absolute, true, and mathematical time, of itself and from its own nature, flows equably without relation to anything external.

The second is, surprisingly, from Advance Australia Award winner and Order of Australia recipient Paul Davies:

How is it possible to account for the difference between past and future when an examination of the laws of physics reveals only the symmetry of time? … present-day physics makes no provision whatever for a flowing time, or for a moving present moment.

A future world, as in Brin’s Earth, is threatened with ecological disasters - algae blooms, viral clouds, diebacks and extinctions. Moreover, civilisation is in decline. Most of us are familiar with cinematic solutions to such problems involving messengers from the fictional future sent back in time to warn earlier generations of mistakes being made, and to offer preventative guidance to anyone willing to listen. More than a few popular movies have been made on this theme over the past couple of decades.

Benford takes a different approach: tomorrow’s concerned scientists in his award-winning novel send not a courageous messenger on a rescue mission into the past, but rather a comparatively simple time-travelling message of deepening gloom, impending doom yet hopeful salvation.

In a recent interview he subsequently elaborated on the origins of this work:

My first thoughts were: is time travel possible? You have to have the right physics. Is there any physics around today that might make it happen? Maybe tachyons. Suppose I was a real scientist - wait, I am a real scientist! What would I do first? Build some kind of phone booth that you walk into, and it turns you into tachyons and transports you? That sounds appetizing. Why don’t we test these ideas by sending a couple of tachyons into the past to see if we can convey some information? My first notes said, time telegraph? I want to send a signal to the past, and that’s actually enough. My God, if you do that, wow. Marconi wanted to send signals to other people; he didn’t want to transport human beings through radio waves. It was the investigation of how I would do it, what would be the first step. That led me through the logic to build the novel. I never got around to the phone booth that transmits people into the past. Bill and Ted did that eventually.

How would any message sent back in time affect the present. Would it cause a paradox?

Benford’s future scientists decide to employ faster-than-light tachyon particles (still theoretical) to convey a series of morse code (don’t laugh!) messages to interrupt experiments conducted by scientists in the past. The tachyon beam is projected to the astronomical position occupied by the earth at that earlier time.

The idea is to give past scientific colleagues - should they receive, unravel and understand this information - sufficient details to commence solving the forthcoming ecological crises. But these must not be entirely solved otherwise a paradox could be created, and an alternative universe could emerge. OK, this is science fiction but the incredible questions concerning time-travel-paradoxes have long intrigued physicists. Of course you will have to read Timescape to find out and (disturbingly discover) how Benford resolves this issue.

In the meantime (not in the novel), according to the Internet Encylopedia of Science, Raymond Fox of the Israel Institute of Technology has actually proposed another faster-than-light particle called a dybbuk (Hebrew for “roving spirit”). Such a particle may possibly avoid the resulting paradox “problem of tachyons”.

So perhaps, while contemporary scientists continue to work on alleviating the planet’s present and prospective ecological threats, we all might remain alert for any helpful messages being communicated from a gloomy but hopefully saveable future. Who knows? Novel solutions to the planet’s problems may even come backwards in time via the Internet.

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