Why the West Rules—for Now

by Morris, Ian;

  To insist that this will add up to Kurzweil’s Singularity by 2045 would be rash. It might be rasher still, however, to deny that we are approaching a massive discontinuity. Everywhere we look, scientists are assaulting the boundaries of biology. Craig Venter’s much-publicized ambition to synthesize life had earned him the nickname “Dr. Frankencell,” but in 2010 his team succeeded in manufacturing the genome of a simple bacterium entirely from chemicals and transplanting it into the walls of cells to create JCVI-syn1.0, the earth’s first synthetic self-reproducing organism. Genetics even has its own version of Moore’s Law, Carlson’s Curve:* between 1995 and 2009 the cost of DNA synthesis fell from a dollar per base pair to less than 0.1 cent. By 2020, some geneticists think, building entirely new organisms will be commonplace. Hard as it is to get our minds around the idea, the trends of the last couple of centuries are leading toward a change in what it means to be human, making possible the vast cities, astonishing energy levels, apocalyptic weapons, and science-fiction kinds of information technology implied by social development scores of five thousand points.

  This book has been full of upheavals in which social development jumped upward, rendering irrelevant many of the problems that had dominated the lives of earlier generations. The evolution of Homo sapiens swept away all previous ape-men; the invention of agriculture made many of the burning issues of hunter-gatherer life unimportant; and the rise of cities and states did the same to the concerns of prehistoric villagers. The closing of the steppe highway and the opening of the oceans ended realities that had constrained Old World development for two thousand years, and the industrial revolution of course made mockery of all that had gone before.

  These revolutions have been accelerating, building on one another to drive social development up further and faster each time. If development does leap up by four thousand points in the twenty-first century, as Figure 12.1 predicts, this ongoing revolution will be the biggest and fastest of all. Its core, many futurists agree, lies in linked transformations of genetics, robotics, nanotechnology, and computing, and its consequences will overturn much of what we have known.

  But while Figure 12.1 clearly shows the Eastern development score gaining on the West’s, you may have noticed that every example I cited in this section—DARPA, IBM, the Six Million Dollar Man—was American. Eastern scientists have made plenty of contributions to the new technologies (robotics, for instance, is as advanced in Japan and South Korea as anywhere), but so far the revolution has been overwhelmingly Western. This might mean that the pundits who point to America’s decline and a coming Chinese age will be proved wrong after all: if the United States dominates the new technologies as thoroughly as Britain dominated industrial ones two centuries ago, the genetic/nanotechnology/robotics revolution might shift wealth and power westward even more dramatically than the industrial revolution did.

  On the other hand, the underlying shift of wealth from West to East might mean that the current American dominance is just a lag from the twentieth century, and that by the 2020s the big advances will be happening in Eastern labs. China is already using lavish funding to lure its best scientists back from America; perhaps Lenovo, not IBM, will provide the mainframes that host a global consciousness in the 2040s, and Figure 12.1 will be more or less right after all.

  Or then again, perhaps the Singularity will render ten-thousand-year-old categories such as “East” and “West” completely irrelevant. Instead of transforming geography, it might abolish it. The merging of mortals and machines will mean new ways of capturing and using energy, new ways of living together, new ways of fighting, and new ways of communicating. It will mean new ways of working, thinking, loving, and laughing; new ways of being born, growing old, and dying. It may even mean the end of all these things and the creation of a world beyond anything our unimproved, merely biological brains can imagine.

  Any or all these things may come to pass.

  Unless, of course, something prevents them.

  THE WORST-CASE SCENARIO

  Late in 2006, my wife and I were invited to a conference at Stanford University called “A World at Risk.” This star-studded event, featuring some of the world’s leading policy makers, took place on a bright winter’s day. The sun shone warmly from a clear blue sky as we made our way to the venue. The stock market, house prices, employment, and consumer confidence were at or near all-time highs. It was morning in America.

  Over breakfast we heard from former secretaries of state and defense about the nuclear, biological, and terrorist threats facing us. Before lunch we learned about the shocking scale of environmental degradation and the high risk that international security would collapse, and as we ate we were told that global epidemics were virtually inevitable. And then things went downhill. We reeled from session to session in gathering gloom, overwhelmed by expert report after expert report on the rising tide of catastrophe. The conference had been a tour de force, but by the time the after-dinner speaker announced that we were losing the war on terror, the audience could barely even respond.

  This day of despair made me think (to put it mildly). In the first century CE and again a thousand years later, social development ran into a hard ceiling and the forces of disruption that development itself had created set off Old World–wide collapses. Are we now discovering a new hard ceiling, somewhere around one thousand points on the index? Are the hoofbeats of the horsemen of the apocalypse overtaking our baby steps toward the Singularity even as you read these words?

  The five familiar figures—climate change, famine, state failure, migration, and disease—all seem to be back. The first of these, global warming, is perhaps the ultimate example of the paradox of development, because the same fossil fuels that drove the leap in social development since 1800 have also filled the air with carbon, trapping heat. Our plastic toys and refrigerators have turned the world into a greenhouse. Temperatures have risen 1°F since 1850, with most of the increase coming in the last thirty years; and the mercury in the thermometer just keeps rising.

  In the past, higher temperatures often meant better agricultural yields and rising development (as in the Roman and Medieval Warm Periods), but this time may be different. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggested in 2007 that “Altered frequencies and intensities of extreme weather, together with sea level rise, are expected to have mostly adverse effects on natural and human systems … warming could lead to some impacts that are abrupt or irreversible.” And that may be putting it mildly; the small print in their report is even more alarming.

  The air bubbles in the ice caps show that carbon dioxide levels have fluctuated across the last 650,000 years, from just 180 molecules of carbon dioxide per million molecules of air in the ice ages to 290 parts per million (ppm) in warm interglacials. Carbon dioxide never reached 300 ppm—until 1958. By May 2010 it was clocked at 393 ppm, and the IPCC estimates that if present trends continue unchecked, carbon dioxide levels will reach 550 ppm by 2050—higher than they have been for 24 million years—and average temperatures will jump another 5°F. And if energy capture keeps rising as Figure 12.1 implies, the world could get much hotter, much faster.

  Even if we stopped pumping out greenhouse gases tomorrow, there is already so much carbon in the air that warming will carry on. We have changed the atmosphere’s chemistry. Whatever we do now, the North Pole will melt. Conservative estimates, such as the IPCC’s, suggest that the ice will be gone by 2100; the most radical think polar summers will be ice-free by 2013. Most scientists come down around 2040.

  As the poles melt, the sea level will rise. The waters are already a good five inches higher than they were in 1900, and the IPCC expects them to rise a further two feet by 2100. The direst predictions for the polar meltdown add another fifty feet to the sea level, drowning millions of square miles of the planet’s best farmland and richest cities. The world is shrinking in more ways than we realized.

  But despite all the icy meltwater, the seas will keep getting
warmer as they absorb heat from the atmosphere, and because the oceans now cool off less in winter than they used to, hurricane and cyclone seasons will get longer and fiercer. Wet places will be wetter, with more violent storms and floods; dry places drier, with more wildfires and dust storms.

  Many of us have already had some kind of wake-up call that made global warming personal. Mine came in 2008. Well before California’s fire season normally gets going, the air thickened with ash as the forests burned around our house. The sky turned an unearthly orange and the rotors of firefighting helicopters drowned out our voices. We cleared a broad firebreak around our home against future blazes and in the end had only one really close call before the rains came. Or perhaps I should say before the rains finally came: the active fire season in the western United States is now seventy-eight days longer than it was in the 1970s. The typical fire burns five times as long as it did thirty years ago. And firefighters predict worse to come.

  All this comes under the heading of what the journalist Thomas L. Friedman has called “the really scary stuff we already know.” Much worse is what he calls “the even scarier stuff we don’t know.” The problem, Friedman explains, is that what we face is not global warming but “global weirding.” Climate change is nonlinear: everything is connected to everything else, feeding back in ways too bewilderingly complex to model. There will be tipping points when the environment shifts abruptly and irreversibly, but we don’t know where they are or what will happen when we reach them.

  The scariest of the stuff we don’t know is how humans will react. Like all the episodes of climate change in the past, this one will not directly cause collapse. In 2006 the Stern Review, a British study, estimated that if we continue business as usual until 2100, climate change will drive global economic output down 20 percent from current levels—a dismal prospect, but not the end of the world as we know it; and even if the direst predictions come true, with temperatures rising 10°F, humanity will muddle through. The real concern is not the weather itself but that long before 2100 people’s reactions to climate change will unleash more horsemen of the apocalypse.

  The most obvious is famine. The green revolution was perhaps the twentieth century’s greatest achievement, increasing food production even faster than population could grow. By 2000 it seemed that if we could just contain the viciousness and stupidity of dictators and warlords, starvation might yet be banished. But one decade on, that seems less likely. Once again the paradox of development is at work. As wealth rises, farmers feed more and more cheap grain to animals so we can eat expensive meat, or turn more and more acres over to biofuels so we can drive cars without burning oil. The result: the prices of staple foods doubled or tripled between 2006 and 2008 and hungry crowds rioted around Africa and Asia. The combination of the biggest cereal harvest in history (2.3 billion tons) and the financial crisis pushed prices down in 2009, but with the world’s population set to reach 9 billion by 2050, the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization expects that price volatility and food shortages will only increase.

  Geography will continue to be unfair in the twenty-first century. Global warming will raise crop yields in cold, rich countries such as Russia and Canada, but will have the opposite effect in what the U.S. National Intelligence Council calls an “arc of instability” stretching from Africa through Asia (Figure 12.2). Most of the poorest people in the world live in this arc, and declining harvests could potentially unleash the last three horsemen of the apocalypse.

  The National Intelligence Council estimates that between 2008 and 2025 the number of people facing food or water shortages will leap from 600 million to 1.4 billion, most of them in the arc; and not to be outdone in apocalyptic predictions, the Stern Review concluded that by 2050 hunger and drought will set 200 million “climate migrants” moving—five times as many as the world’s entire refugee population in 2008.

  Plenty of people in the Western core already see migration as a threat, even though since the closing of the steppe highway three centuries ago migration has more often been a motor of development than a danger to it.* In 2006 a Gallup poll reported that Americans thought immigration was the country’s second-worst problem (after the war in Iraq). To many Americans, the danger of Mexicans smuggling drugs and taking jobs seems to outweigh all benefits; to many Europeans, fears of Islamist terrorism loom just as large. In both regions, nativist lobbies argue that the new settlers are uniquely difficult to assimilate.

  Figure 12.2. The big thirst: the National Intelligence Council’s “arc of instability” (stretching from Africa through Asia), plotted against regions likely to face water shortages by 2025. The darkest-shaded areas will face “physical scarcity,” defined as having more than 75 percent of their water allocated to agriculture, industry, and/or domestic use. Medium-dark areas will be “approaching physical scarcity,” with 60 percent of their water taken up by these purposes, and the lightest areas will face “economic scarcity,” with more than 25 percent of their water committed. Rich countries such as the United States, Australia, and China can pipe water from wet areas to dry; poor ones cannot.

  Global warming threatens to make even the most lurid fears of anti-immigrant activists come true by the 2020s. Tens of millions of the world’s hungriest, angriest, and most desperate people may be fleeing the Muslim world for Europe, and Latin America for the United States. The population movements could dwarf anything in history, reviving the kind of problems that the steppe highway used to present.

  Disease, the fourth horseman of the apocalypse, may be one of these problems. Migrations across the steppes spread the plagues of the second and fourteenth centuries, and the greatest pandemic of the twentieth century, the H1N1 influenza of 1918, was spread by a flood of young men under arms between America and Europe. H1N1 killed more people in one year—perhaps 50 million—than the Black Death did in a century, and two or three times as many as AIDS has done in the last thirty years.

  Air travel has made disease much harder to contain. After incubating in Africa since at least 1959, AIDS exploded across four continents in the 1980s, and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) leaped to thirty-seven countries in 2003 within weeks of evolving in southern China. Geneticists sequenced the syndrome’s DNA in thirty-one days (as compared to fifteen years for HIV) and aggressive international action nipped it in the bud. By the time epidemiologists identified the so-called swine flu (known as “New H1N1” to distinguish it from the 1918 flu) in 2009, however, it had already spread too widely to be contained.

  If swine flu or one of the equally alarming strains of avian flu starts behaving like the H2N2 virus that killed 1–2 million people in 1957, the World Health Organization estimates that it will kill 2–7.4 million people; if it behaves like the 1918 flu, it will kill 200 million. The world is better prepared than it was in 1918, but deaths on even one-tenth of that scale could cause a short-term economic meltdown to make the 2007–2009 financial crisis look trivial. The World Bank guesses that a pandemic would knock 5 percent off global economic output, and some of the “Ten Things You Need to Know About Pandemic Influenza” listed on the World Health Organization’s website are even more alarming:

  • The world may be on the brink of another pandemic.

  • All countries will be affected.

  • Medical supplies will be inadequate.

  • Large numbers of deaths will occur.

  • Economic and social disruption will be great.

  As when the horsemen rode in the past, climate change, famine, migration, and disease will probably feed back on one another, unleashing the fifth horseman, state failure. The arc of instability is home to some of the world’s most rickety regimes, and as pressure mounts several may collapse as completely as Afghanistan or Somalia, increasing suffering and providing more havens for terrorists. And if instability drags in the cores, whose economies are thoroughly entangled with the arc’s resources, we may slide into the mother of all worst-case scenarios.

  As earl
y as 1943 an American mission to the Persian Gulf identified the central problem. “The oil in this region,” it reported, “is the greatest single prize in all history.” Rich nations in the Western core soon reoriented their grand strategies around Gulf oil. When western Europe’s power waned in the 1950s, the United States stepped in, covertly or overtly intervening to help friends, harm enemies, and preserve access in the arc. Although less dependent on Gulf oil, the Soviet Union meddled almost as vigorously to deny it to American interests, and when Russia retreated in the 1990s, China’s addiction to oil (which accounts for 40 percent of the rise in global demand since 2000) forced it, too, to join the great game.

  China’s hunger for resources (soybeans, iron, copper, cobalt, timber, and natural gas as well as oil) promises constant clashes with Western interests in the arc of instability in the 2010s. Chinese diplomats stress their country’s “peaceful rising” (some tone it down still further to “peaceful development”), but Western anxiety has increased steadily since the 1990s. In 2004, for instance, China’s search for iron set off what newspapers quickly dubbed the “great drain robbery,” with thieves the world over snatching manhole covers and shipping them to the East to be melted down. Chicago alone lost 150 in one month. Where would it end? Westerners asked. Today manhole covers, tomorrow the world. According to one poll in 2005, 54 percent of Americans agreed that China’s rise was “a threat to world peace”; in a 2007 poll Americans called China the second-greatest threat to global stability, trailing only Iran.

  China returns the compliment. When NATO planes bombed China’s embassy in Belgrade in 1999, killing three journalists, furious crowds stoned Western embassies in Beijing and firebombed a consulate in Chengdu. “PEOPLE AGONIZED BY CRIMINAL ACT,” the China Daily’s headline raged. In 2004 the Communist party still insisted on the reality of a “strategic conspiracy of hostile forces to Westernize and cause China to disintegrate.”