After that speech, to which the representatives of the public powers responded by congratulating the directors of the Intercontinental Thermoelectrification Company and their collaborators, champagne was served, in order to drink a toast to the prosperity of the enterprise. Then the guests were at liberty to form groups to converse with one another.
Dr. Bormann had given Paul Chartrain the mission to attach himself particularly to the person of Wang-Ti-Pou, whom he suspected of being refractory to European civilization. The young man, assisted in that circumstance by Claire Nolleau, had therefore to gain the approval of the delegate from Peking, who was reputed to have a considerable influence on the Congress of the Asian Republics. Wang-Ti-Pou might be capable of bringing his people out of the routine that they had been obstinately following for centuries.
The dead weight formed by the enormous mass of several hundred million inhabitants spread over the Asiatic continent from the Urals to Kamchatka and from northern India to the Arctic Ocean was, in fact, a grave subject of anxiety for the Statesmen of Europe America, Africa and Australia. That considerable fraction of humankind, becalmed in outdated forms of civilization, which regarded the modern applications of science as a kind of insult to the divinity, represented a danger to the world. Poverty, famine, epidemics and the anarchy to which its stubbornness exposed it, determined reactions that had reverberations in the other continents.
Thus, the Europeans and the Americans, who were most directly affected by such perturbations, were striving to attract the Asiatic elite to their shores in order to inculcate its members with their concepts and methods. Philosophers, scientists and politicians came from India, Tibet, China, Mongolia and Siberia. They observed and admired what was shown to them, understood what was explained to them; their knowledge and intelligence could not be denied—but when they returned home, far from praising Euro-American civilization, they represented it to their people as the emanation of a diabolical mentality.
Dr. Bormann had been obedient to these preoccupations when he had confided to his young collaborator the care of informing Wang-Ti-Pou.
The latter was arguing with Paul Chartrain and Claire Nolleau, who had quickly become inseparable.
“The fate of humankind,” he said, laughing, “becomes a veritable challenge to common sense in the midst of all your inventions. The fragile creatures that we are, incapable of resisting violent shocks or strong pressures, great heat and great cold, which trivial things are sufficient to destroy, are dancing a fantastic ballet today with the monsters created by their demented genius—monsters whose steel arms and jaws threaten to crush them at any moment, their fiery breath to volatilize them, and electrical discharges to blast them….
“I’ve come from Peking in a rocket-plane at a speed of two thousand kilometers an hour. During the journey, watching the ground fleeing beneath me, I couldn’t help thinking about what would happen if we encountered another vehicle—or, rather, another projectile—of the same kind, or if we made brutal contact with the ground.”
“There was no risk of that happening to you, Excellency,” Chartrain protested. “The monsters we have created are docile slaves, not enemies.”
The Asiatic made a gesture of indifference. “Oh,” he said, “it’s not that I fear death. In my country, you know, we still believe that a superior power presides over human destiny, and marks a term for each of us.”
“We agree with you that the power in question exists,” replied Chartrain, “but your fatalism is unjustified. We’ve proved in Europe and America that the famous laws of nature, supposedly inevitable, can be corrected by human intelligence. It’s been more than two centuries since our physicians and physiologist found the means to slow down aging and prolong life. In the twentieth century, people began to get old at sixty, and often sooner; today, a centenarian is still at the peak of intellectual activity.”
“Do you think that’s a great advantage?” sniggered Wang-Ti-Pou. “The centenarians of which you speak bar the route to young people like you. In any case, that wouldn’t be a good thing in the Asiatic Republics, where an excessively numerous population is stifling for lack of space.”
“It would breathe more easily,” Paul said, “if it didn’t refuse obstinately to adopt our technology and methods, which have succeeded so well in other parts of the world.”
“I’d like to think so.”
“You’ll have the opportunity to convince yourself of the immense advantages that humankind will procure, for example from the great polar-equatorial thermoelectric linkage.”
Wang-Ti-Pou shook his head slowly. “Your marvelous inventions, your circuits, your machines, your trains that travel at three hundred kilometers an hour, your rocket-planes, your great ferry-gliders that go from Brest to New York in twenty-four hours, the miracles of your medicine and your surgery, all remain incapable of producing human happiness—for happiness results from internal contemplation and an equilibrium of the soul, which all the external advantages of your so-called progress can’t give us.”
“You’re speaking as a philosopher, Excellency,” Chartrain replied. “You’d be wrong to imagine that I don’t share your opinion on that point. Happiness is, first and foremost, a matter of mental discipline.”
“Certainly,” Claire Nolleau approved. “However, I think that humans are aided to acquire that discipline when they’re liberated from the scourges that torment them: disease, old age and poverty. That’s the essence of the progress that you doubt, Excellency, and our technology contributes to it.”
“Your faith is respectable,” said Wang-Ti-Pou, laughing, “and based on imposing arguments.”
Dr. Bormann, who had been conversing with a group on the far side of the room until then, came to join the trio. He suspected that the Asiatic delegate was in the process of expressing opinions unfavorable to European civilization, and feared that his young interlocutors might not have the strength to convert him.
His visage barely marked by a few slight wrinkles, the bright eyes, abundant brown hair and supple body of the chief engineer of the Intercontinental Thermoelectrification Company would have passed in the twentieth century for a man of forty, fit and in his prime, but he had celebrated his ninety-fifth birthday a few days earlier. He was not wearing spectacles; no one did any longer, except in refractory Asia, for opticians corrected visual defects by medical or surgical methods.
The doctor sat down beside Claire Nolleau, facing Wang-Ti-Pou.
“I was philosophizing with these young people,” said the Asiatic. “You have in them two collaborators of whom you can be proud, and with whom it’s a real pleasure to debate. But if you’ve come to take part in our discussion, I’m particularly honored and my pleasure is doubled. I’d be glad to have a few clarifications regarding the thermoelectric sector whose construction you’re on the point of completing. Some people claim that humankind already disposes of sufficiently considerable energy sources not to need that excess of power.”
“That’s talking lightly,” Dr, Bormann assured him. “The consumption of mechanical energy per head is increasing by the day in a geometric progression.”
“Then you Europeans must really be squandering it.”
“The energy we employ in powering our machines, heating, lighting, cooking our food, adding to the comfort and pleasure to our lives, increasing agricultural yields by electrification, propelling our trains, airplanes and airships, and replacing the muscular labor of the human creature everywhere, can’t be considered as squandering. Remember that today, thanks to the utilization of waterfalls throughout the territory of Europe—only to speak of our own continent—and the numerous tidal power stations established on the coasts, every European represents an average mechanical power a hundred times superior to that which muscles alone confer upon him. The creation of the Great Current will double that proportion. Thus, by comparison with the humans of ancient times—the eighteenth or nineteenth century—the modern human being is a kind of giant.”
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p; “Assuming that that’s an advantage!”
“It is one, for the physical power of the human body, such as nature has constituted it, is not in proportion to that of an intelligence capable of disciplining immense forces.”
“Yes, but in addition to the mechanical energy that coal procures you….”
“Let’s not talk about coal!” Dr. Bormann interrupted. “We no longer make use of it, except in the chemical industries.”
“In Asia we extract a great deal, as much for industry as for domestic usage.”
“I know that,” said Dr. Bormann. “That’s the real squandering! You’re extracting without counting them the last reserves of coal that can still be exploited at moderate expense. It’s been a long time since we adopted a more rational policy in Europe. As long ago as the nineteenth century our scientists were uttering cries of alarm. They calculated that by the year 3500, humankind would run out of coal. As for oil, which, has, in fact, become extremely scarce, they thought that the last wells would dry up toward the end of the twentieth century.
“Of course, they weren’t taking account of deposits located at great depths, between a thousand and five thousand meters, which the people of their epoch were incapable of reaching, and, more, especially of exploiting economically with the poor means at their disposal. Improvements in telemechanics, and the complete substitution of automata for the labor of the human hand, now permit us to extract from the profound entrails of the Earth in Europe the treasures they still contain. But the fact that nowadays, almost all the deposits situated less than a thousand meters from the surface are exhausted, proves that the fears of our forebears were justified.
“You can, Excellency, criticize our civilization, which is characterized by the intense utilization of natural forces and the extraordinary development of technology, but we can scarcely imagine how it could revert, without catastrophe, to the form of ancient civilizations, in which human beings scarcely had at their disposal anything but the energy of their own muscles and those of domestic animals.
“It’s necessary to admit that we’ve made mistakes. As soon as human beings sensed that they were the masters of their planet and capable of exploiting its resources, they hastened to profit from those that were the most accessible, such as coal and oil. They had found a treasure; they were in haste to enjoy it; but in their precipitation, they used up indiscriminately reserves that nature had constituted for them. For a long time they burned coal to extract only a tenth—and often less—of the energy it contains. Oil and its derivatives were no better employed. Humankind indulged in a wastage that only the illusion of possessing inexhaustible resources prevented them from deeming insane.
“Thinkers perceived the danger, and they predicted that the exhaustion of coal and oil would sound the death-knell of the great civilizations. Consumption increased year by year; from fifteen million tons per annum in 1800 it surpassed one thousand five hundred million—which is to say, a hundred times as much—at the beginning of the twentieth century. Then it rose to four and finally to five billion tons a year.
“At that rate, if our modern civilization had only depended on coal, it would have passed into history like a brilliant meteor. Fortunately, nature offers us other sources of energy, for example those of waterfalls, the tides, wind and solar heat. Hydraulic power, throughout the world, amounts to about seven hundred million horsepower, equivalent to two billion eight hundred million tons of coal per year. Today, we employ more than half of it. We’ve also learned to make use of the force of the tides, which is colossal. Just think that in the bay of Mont Saint-Michel alone, it represents about six million horsepower, the equivalent of all the hydraulic power of France.
“But by far the most important source of energy, which is also the great motive force of wind and waterfalls, is solar heat, from which everything that lives, plant or animal, obtains, directly or indirectly, its substance and its activity.
“The quantity of solar heat received per year and per hectare corresponds, according to the region, to an energy of between five and twelve million kilowatt-hours. That’s enormous. The production of one kilowatt-hour consumes 1.3 kilograms of coal. Five million kilowatt-hours is therefore equivalent to six thousand five hundred tons of coal, or one thousand six hundred and twenty-five horsepower. It would suffice to absorb and transform integrally the quantity of that received by a surface area of twenty-five thousand hectares—which is to say, two hundred square kilometers, to replace all the coal consumed by a country like France, whose surface area surpasses five hundred and forty thousand square kilometers.
“Even if, in practice, one could only transform a tiny fraction of that heat, it’s evident that one could still count on the sun to furnish the energy needs of the civilized world. Our Great Current is merely one means of utilizing solar heat. We intend to construct immense thermoelectric piles between the North Pole and he tropics. Perhaps you know about those that already exist in the Alps, the most important of which is the Mont-Blanc-Mediterranean Generator….”
“No,” said Wang-Ti-Pou. “I haven’t had the opportunity to visit them.”
“One of the electrodes is plunged into the eternal snows of the mountain, the other exposed on the coast to the rays of an ardent sun. Everyone learns in school that if the ends of a copper wire and a bismuth wire are welded together, in such a way as to constitute a closed circuit, and then one of the junctions is exposed to cold and the other to heat, an electric current is produced, which passes from the bismuth to the copper across the heated junction.
“The invention isn’t new; it dates from the nineteenth century19 and has had numerous applications since that epoch. But it’s only in our day that we’ve had the audacity to utilize it for the direct capture of solar heat, the source of all terrestrial energies except for that of the tides.
“The thermoelectric organization in our North Africa is the most important endeavor of this kind. It comprises a thousand generators, utilizing as a cold source, the great marine depths, where a constant temperature of four degrees is maintained, and as a heat source, either the sunlit coast or even, for some highly developed sectors, the desert regions of the interior.”
“Yes, I know that the electrification of North Africa has contributed greatly to the economic development of the entire continent.”
“Thanks to that, we can now send great express trains at three hundred kilometers an hour from the Cape to Cairo, Pointe-Noire in Algeria and Tangiers, and transversally from Dakar via Timbuktu and Chad to Zanzibar.”
“Why not develop instead,” Wang-Ti-Pou asked, “hydrothermic factories of the Georges Claude20 and Paul Boucherot type, which utilize differences in temperature between the bottom and the surface of the sea?”
“Many of them have been established on the tropical coasts of Africa and America. Since the twentieth century, Georges Claude’s invention has been greatly improved, but it doesn’t provide a general solution of the problem of capturing solar heat, whereas thermoelectric generators permit the direct absorption of the solar radiation that animates everything on earth.”
Dr. Bormann, excited by the grandeur of his subject, was speaking in an increasingly vibrant tone. He was eager to win over the Asiatic, whose suspicion reflected that of his people, to the cause of progress.
Wang-Ti-Pou was intelligent, to be sure, but he rejected Euro-American civilization, which seemed to him to be impotent to provide human happiness. What was the point, he asked himself, of so many inventions, which only ended up making people more demanding and always creating new needs for them? What was the point even of prolonging youth and life, since human beings could only achieve happiness by abolishing all desire in their hearts?
Beneath his cold gaze, Dr. Bormann continued to expound the thesis of progress enthusiastically.
“The sources of energy that civilized human beings have been able to capture in the last three centuries permit them to look to the future with confidence. Even so, all the installations created t
hus far have been, one might say, of local interest. They don’t respond to a plan for the general organization of the globe. The Great Current proceeds from a much higher conception: we want to make the entire Earth into a vast generator of energy.
“The regime of marine currents, and that of winds and rains, and, in consequence that if the condensation of snow and the formation of glaciers on high mountains, are the consequence of the large difference in temperature that exists between the poles and the equator. Whereas the polar ice caps freeze in winter to nearly fifty degrees Centigrade below zero, the tropical soil causes the temperature to rise to fifty degrees above zero, and more. That hundred-degree difference makes the Earth resemble an enormous alembic whose cucurbit is at the equator and its refrigerant at the poles.
“Here the loss of heat by radiation isn’t compensated by the action of the sub and cold precipitates atmospheric humidity. The resulting void summons new humid masses from the equator, where the seas are subject to intense evaporation. All the water on the globe would end up condensing thus, in the form of snow and ice, if the seasons didn’t transport the coldest surface alternately from one pole to the other; winter is rife at the South Pole when summer prevails at the North Pole. Here the ice-cap melts and shrinks; it aliments the oceans, which the tropical evaporation tends to dry up, and the South Pole collects the condensations that the warmed North Pole no longer provokes. Then the seasons change; summer is transported to the South Pole and winter to the North Pole; the phenomena are reversed.
“There is, in sum, always one polar cap that is increasing at the expense of the other, the oceans and the atmosphere serving as vehicles for that back-and-forth movement. It’s immediately evident that the forces brought into play to transport from the Arctic to the Antarctic, or vice versa, the masses of water that give rise to enormous accumulations of winter snow and ice are prodigious. Now, they simply represent a fraction of the energy that the sun pours on the earth in the form of heat, since it’s precisely that solar heat which, in the final analysis, activates everything.
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