In July 1989 he traveled to Fairchild Air Force Base in Spokane, located in the lovely eastern part of Washington state. Climbing through one of the B-52 bombers kept on alert Dyson felt that the year could have been 1945. Just as in the days of Bomber Command, the crew size was seven and their jobs were still pretty much the same. One big thing was different: the nature of the bomb stored on board.
Dyson sat in the commander’s seat and fingered the red button, which, when supplied with a supplementary activation signal authorizing use, released the bombs. Touching the button inspired poignant insights. For the red button even to exist there must necessarily be an immense bureaucratic infrastructure supporting bomber, bombs, pilot training, and fail-safe mechanisms—the sort of national security state outlined by Garry Wills. The regular drills and alerts were highly elaborate forms of ritual combat. They reminded Dyson of the Samurai’s stylized exercises. The Samurai prepares often but fights seldom.24
Dyson had journeyed to this bastion of the Strategic Air Command as part of a site visit for Jason members. The rationale was that in order to advise the government on security matters it was good to see things in the field, up close. At Fairchild you couldn’t get any closer. Dyson had touched the red button that releases the bombs, and then he touched the bombs themselves. He’d modeled the explosive effect of bombs and had been himself briefly a bomb designer, but he’d never before stood next to the actual thing.25 He walked into a room where dozens of hydrogen bombs lay about on the floor.26 He felt that it was important to meet these monsters.27
Spending a day with the bomber crew, Dyson was reassured to see that conditions were nothing like those depicted in Dr. Strangelove. The pilots viewed their job professionally and were not swaggeringly eager to sally forth and lay waste to the Soviet Union. The death of millions did not seem to be in the offing. But the fact that the on-alert B-52s were there at all, ready with two minutes notice to begin a flight that delivered a payload that would light up the sky and scatter bodies and buildings for hundreds of miles around, was more than enough to remind visitors that our present civilization is not so far separated from the ancient Greeks and Trojans. Despite our many modern inventions and medical procedures we still have many things in common with Bronze Age cultures.
Dyson is not fatalistic about this. The human nervous system or hormonal makeup might not have changed much in 3,000 years, but this doesn’t mean we, as a species, are doomed to incessant warfare. We don’t have to accept a fate of nuclear destruction. In trying to find a way out of the nuclear labyrinth we’ve made for ourselves we can resort to political measures, such as negotiating treaties and shifting to a nonnuclear defense.
Searching for perspective on the vital issue of survival, Dyson, as he so often did, turned to literature. He pointed to two of the earliest and greatest works in the Western canon, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, to illustrate his point about coping with adversity on a colossal scale. The Trojan War inspired these two epic poems, one about glorious deeds that end in death, the other about clever deeds that end in a homecoming. The hero of the first, Achilles, wins renown but is, at the end of the Iliad, destined to die young. The hero of the second, Odysseus, performs most of his daring feats in private and is, at the end of the Odyssey, restored to home and family. The lesson that Dyson takes from these works of literature is that the business of society is not tragedy but survival.28
Dyson’s own odyssey among the armed camps of the U.S. arsenal took him to Long Beach, California, to the missile cruiser USS Princeton. Although he was impressed with the ship and crew, the visit prompted him to declare that the navy, with its own missiles, was as much a part of the strategic bombing business as the air force. Moreover, he argued that the arms race was fueled not only by the American-Soviet rivalry but also by the rivalry between the navy and air force of the United States.29 Dyson saw a further infra-rivalry within the navy itself—between its submarine fleet, armed with nuclear-tipped Trident missiles, and its surface fleet, some of which carried nuclear Tomahawk cruise missiles.
Dyson visited the General Dynamics factory, where Tomahawk cruise missiles are manufactured. Again he was impressed with the professionalism of the workers and the pride they took in their product. On this occasion Dyson was accompanied by Sidney Drell, who said “These people build cruise missiles the way Stradivarius built violins.” This made Dyson wonder why the workers couldn’t just build violins.30
His thoughts about the actual use of nuclear bombs were made more vivid by a visit to Hiroshima in 1985 as part of a lecture tour of Japan. “Coming to Hiroshima,” Dyson said, “we feel guilt not so much for the slaughter of 1945 as for our persistence in the same habits of thought and action which made that slaughter inevitable and now may lead us, if we are unlucky, to slaughter on an even grander scale.”31
How grand? How bad could the slaughter be? A classified report from 1960, relatively early in the strategic buildup of America’s nuclear arsenal, laid out the potential lethal details. The Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP) was the master blueprint for launching a comprehensive attack on targets in countries ruled by Communist governments, including the USSR, China, and those of Eastern Europe. As the years went by many more thousands of nuclear weapons would enter the stockpile, allowing still more cities to be targeted. In 1980 the collective U.S. and USSR stockpiles amounted to the equivalent of a million Hiroshimas.32
The plan for 1960 was devastating enough. The armaments and aims for the maximum U.S. mission were as follows: 3,500 nuclear bombs, carried by 800 planes, delivered to 1,000 ground-zero targets, would produce an estimated 285 million prompt deaths. The eventual death count might have gone as high as 425 million.33 President Eisenhower, the man who had launched the D-Day invasion in 1944, was himself startled when he saw SIOP. The numbers “frighten the devil out of me,” he said. President Kennedy, when it was his turn to see SIOP, wasn’t any more pleased: “And we call ourselves the human race,” he said.34
While in Hiroshima, Freeman Dyson’s resolve to work for total abolition of nuclear weapons hardened.35
BERLIN WALL TIME
And then it was over. Not the existence of nuclear weapons. They would persist indefinitely. What ended was the formal footing of the Cold War. The recessional began in the 1980s in places like Poland and Czechoslovakia, where disenchantment with Communism was becoming more common, and then within the Soviet Union itself. In 1989 the Berlin Wall came down. In 1991 the Hammer and Sickle flag, the symbol of the Soviet Union, was withdrawn from atop the Kremlin. Many of the bombers were taken off alert. “The world of strategic bombing changed more in 1991 than in the previous forty-five years,” Dyson said.36 It might be hard for a person born after about 1980 to appreciate the magnitude of the nuclear peril—as portrayed in the SIOP report—and how it shaped government policy during the Cold War.
Was the Cold War really over? A Jason study in the mid-1990s anatomized the end of the nuclear arms race. The “science” phase of the arms race ended as early as the 1960s, with the help of the limited test ban treaty in 1963. The military phase dissipated, with the help of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks treaties, in the 1970s and 1980s. Even the political phase of the arms race started to wind down in the 1980s, with the help of the START treaty, when both sides, East and West, realized that an immense inventory of nuclear materials was not only expensive to maintain, but represented a potential environmental disaster and security risk.37
Had the possession of nuclear weapons all those years made the world safer? Dyson thinks not, but recognizes that his is a minority view. At one meeting he attended (of mostly physicists) when the proposition was put to a show of hands, Dyson was one of the few who signified that he would feel safer if nuclear bombs disappeared all together. Sadly, he had to admit, even most of his “liberal and enlightened” friends, in the United States and in other countries, “do not believe that abolition would be desirable, even if it were possible.”38
In the past, to contradict a majority of politicians and a majority of one’s fellow scientists on a topic of such overriding importance to national security would land a person in jail, or at least earn (from the government) an official rebuke or (from scientific colleagues) impatience or condescension or indifference. But not in this case. Freeman Dyson, by force of his cheerful courtesy, thoughtful remarks about his critics, and his imaginatively argued views, has maintained the respect of his adversaries. In January 1995 he received the Department of Energy’s Enrico Fermi Award, the most prestigious honor given by the U.S. government for a lifetime contribution to nuclear matters and for his broad career in science and letters.39
In the early 1960s Dyson headed the Federation of American Scientists. The man who headed the FAS forty years later, Charles Ferguson, was a junior officer serving on a ballistic missile submarine in the U.S. Navy in the 1980s. Ferguson read Weapons and Hope and was impressed by the argument that society didn’t have to be held perpetually in bondage to nuclear slavery. “One of the reasons I am now heading FAS is due to Dyson’s Weapons and Hope,” Ferguson said.40
Each year in August, on the anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, the Coalition for Peace Action (the new name for the Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament) holds a commemoration, which has often occurred at the Institute of Advanced Study where, by virtue of Dyson’s faculty status, they were allowed to congregate. Just like the commemoration each year in Hiroshima itself, the Princeton observance is marked by a simple ceremony in which candles are lit at nightfall and launched on tiny rafts out onto water. The candles float about the bucolic pond lying behind the Institute buildings.41 Dyson attends as often as he can. Sometimes he is fresh from his customary summertime attendance at Jason’s deliberations in California, which often deal with the stewardship of America’s nuclear arsenal. The arsenal, though smaller than it was, is still enormous.
When Dyson was selecting essays to include in one of his books, he chose to retain his description of those visits to the missile cruiser and to the bomber base. As a relic of the Cold War, the essays might be out of date, he explained, but he wanted them around anyway as a sort of memorial—the nuclear equivalent of the War Memorial at Winchester College—and as a sign that we have further to go.42
15. The Arc of Life
Dyson as Biologist
(1980s AND 1990s)
When Freeman Dyson met Francis Crick in 1945, Crick was actually in a modest mood. The war was just over but both were still nominally associated with the armed forces, Crick with the navy and Dyson with the air force. Both were at a loss as to what to do with themselves. Crick was depressed, since he felt the war had drained away his chances for making a brilliant career in physics, and felt he was too old to start over in a new field.
In 1946 the two met again. By this time Dyson had left mathematics for physics and Crick had left physics for biology. Dyson agreed that biology was exciting, but he estimated that physics would remain the premier science for at least another twenty years. You really ought to stick with physics, Dyson argued. Crick ignored his advice.1 In the following half decade or so, both young men were to do their most famous work, Dyson with quantum fields and Crick with chromosomes. And if in the years after that biology overtook physics in preeminence it was partly because of Crick’s work with James Watson in deciphering the structure and then the function of the genetic molecule deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA).
Dyson himself came over to biology in the 1980s, at least part-time. He drew inspiration from another quantum physicist, Erwin Schrödinger, who in 1945 published a brief book with the provocative title What Is Life? Twenty years before that Schrödinger had helped to tease out the quantum nature of atoms, but in 1945 he was a refugee in Ireland during World War II. He did not do experiments and did not generate new factual information about biology. His chief service was to ask pesky questions about the central role of chromosomes.
Dyson would also write a pithy biology book that asked more questions than it answered. It too would have a provocative name: Origins of Life. It too was filled with interesting speculations but no new biological facts.
As a bookend to this topic of origins Dyson would, decades later, engage in a profound debate over the possible demise of life in the distant future. We’ll look at these prospective starts and stops and what Dyson has to say about everything that comes in between.
HANGING ON
It’s not as though physics wasn’t fun anymore. But Freeman Dyson really liked biology too. His interest had been nudged along by a sabbatical year (1964–65) spent at the relatively new San Diego branch of the University of California. In numerous discussions with biochemist Leslie Orgel, Dyson became attracted to the crucial question of how, 4 billion years ago, living cells emerged from nonliving chemicals.
Later, at a 1981 meeting at Cambridge University, he was part of an ecumenical group of biologists, chemists, physicists, and mathematicians that pored over the problem of early life. A few years after that, in 1985, Dyson was asked back to Cambridge, and now he came armed with more ideas, more equations, more speculations. He delivered a series of talks, the Tarner Lectures, which were to grow into another Dysonian manifesto.
These are some of the milestones he identifies along the trajectory of life, as it has existed on our planet and as it might be in the cosmos into the distant future.
RNA Life
Which came first, the chicken or the egg? The molecular equivalent of this question is to ask which came first, the nuclei acids that constitute the blueprint for making all the biomolecules in a living cell or the proteins that help to process the nutrients in the cell’s environment and build the cell’s own substance? Many biologists believe that the nucleic acids, and specifically RNA, came first. Why RNA, which in many modern cells acts as a sort of handmaid for DNA in that it carries the genetic instructions from DNA out into the other parts of the cell, and not DNA itself? Because RNA, while it acts like DNA in being able to encode genetic information, also has been found to act like proteins, including the ability to serve as an enzyme, the class of molecule that brokers many of the central chemical reactions in the cell.
Owing to the work of Leslie Orgel, Francis Crick, and Carl Woese, the RNA-first theory gained support. Their origin of life scenario was this: in the beginning there was RNA.
Dyson did not like this explanation and in typical fashion set off to explain things in a different way. RNA, he argued, is too sophisticated to have started things off. In modern cells a human chromosome can contain millions of molecular units (nucleotides). Replication of such a complex object in the early Wild West phase of life could easily have involved many wrong turns. These errors, Dyson maintained, would have crippled the effectiveness of the cell and its offspring down through many generations. The errors would likely multiply at each iteration. Reproduction had to be more tolerant of errors.
Minimal Life
The earliest cells had to be simpler to survive. Homeostasis, the process of enduring from moment to moment in some stable condition, was paramount. Hanging on to life, scratching out an existence, was to be the theme of Dyson’s explanations for how life came into being and how it persisted. An earlier idea, by the Russian biologist Alexander Oparin, who believed that primitive cells developed first, followed by enzymes, followed by genes, was just what Dyson wanted.2
What does it mean for a thing to be “alive”? Minimum requirements would seem to include an enclosing surface (a membrane), some functioning innards, and an ability to reproduce. (Some entities like viruses challenge even this simple specification.) Reproduction of the proto-cells didn’t have to be exact. Offspring would emerge when the cell got fat and had been jostled by some event in its surroundings, such as a quickening change in temperature or turbulence, causing the cell to break in two. The daughter cells might have been different from the parent, but so what? It’s not as though a true lineage was important. Species didn’t yet exist.
Life as a Com
puter
Dyson began to write up his ideas. He reached for a handy metaphor by invoking John von Neumann, his late colleague at the Institute for Advanced Study. Comparing a biological cell to a computer, Dyson suggested that the nucleic acids that encode information are like software, while the proteins that process that information are the cell’s hardware. The proteins, in complex organisms, serve as the primary participants in sustaining metabolism, in keeping the nervous system humming, in keeping the immune system alert, in maintaining the endocrine system of hormones, and in deploying a host of fundamental housekeeping functions.
Dyson argued that at a bare minimum we can imagine a computer running in some hardwired way. We can imagine hardware without software but cannot imagine software having a meaning without any underlying hardware on which to operate. So it was with early rudimentary cells. The processing of chemicals was essential; the execution of exact genetic instructions was not. The accurate transcription of instructions, as if from a downloaded piece of software, was too great a luxury. Dyson set out to create a model backed up by mathematics that could account for his saga of early life.
Life Begins Twice
Act I in Dyson’s theater of life presents the lawless, pioneering phase. No fancy replication, just homeostasis, hanging on to life. Maintaining a distinction between yourself and all the other chemicals in your neighborhood was the bare fact of life. Early proto-cells had to eat those chemicals to stay alive. Metabolism—using fuel to build cells—was the game. Reproduction was crude. Many errors, many failed experiments, many nonsustainable trial configurations resulted. Death was an important process. The failures far outnumbered the successes.
Act II was about the rise of the replicators. Rudimentary RNA might have survived on its own, with its own membrane or as a parasite within cells. Thus with the help of the metabolizers and with enough time, early RNA could master the art of exact or near-exact replication. This constituted the second origin of life. Possibly the proto-RNA could return the favor by taking an active, even genetic, role in the lives of the metabolizing cell. RNA, Dyson argued, was a sort of benign disease within cells.
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