by Morris, Ian;
In 1914, when Europe’s great powers faced off over the ruins of the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans, Serbia’s Black Hand terrorist gang needed only a pistol to set off World War I. In 2008, a United States commission concluded that “it is more likely than not that a weapon of mass destruction will be used in a terrorist attack somewhere in the world by the end of 2013.” With the great powers now facing off over the ruins of Europe’s empires in the arc of instability, the havoc al-Qaeda or Hezbollah might wreak with such weapons does not bear thinking about.
The entanglements in the arc are far scarier than those in the Balkans a century ago because they could so easily go nuclear. Israel has built up a large arsenal since about 1970; in 1998 India and Pakistan both tested atomic bombs; and since 2005 the European Union and United States have accused Iran of seeking the same goal. Most observers expect Iran to be nuclear-capable sometime in the 2010s, which may drive up to half a dozen Muslim states* to seek nuclear deterrents. Israel anticipates a nuclear-armed Iran by 2011, but might not wait for matters to reach that point. Israeli warplanes have already destroyed nuclear reactors in Iraq and Syria, and new attacks may follow if Iran’s program proceeds.
No American administration could remain neutral in a nuclear confrontation in the arc of instability between its closest friend and bitterest enemy. Nor, perhaps, could Russia or China. Both have opposed Iranian nuclear ambitions but they did let Iran apply to join their Shanghai Cooperation Organization,* a loose body working largely to counter American interests in central Asia.
An all-out East-West war would, of course, be catastrophic. For China it would be suicidal: the United States outnumbers it twenty to one in nuclear warheads and perhaps a hundred to one in warheads that can be relied on to reach enemy territory. China tested an antimissile missile in January 2010, but lags far behind American capabilities. The United States has eleven aircraft carrier battle groups to China’s zero (although China began building its first carrier in 2009) and an insurmountable lead in military technology. The United States could not, and would not want to, conquer and occupy China, but almost any imaginable war would end with humiliating defeat for China, the fall of the Communist party, and perhaps the country’s breakup.
That said, winning a war might be almost as bad for the United States as losing it would be for China. Even a low-intensity conflict would have horrendous costs. If Chimerica splits abruptly and vindictively it will mean financial disaster for both partners. A nuclear exchange would be worse still, turning the west coast of North America and much of China into radioactive ruins, killing hundreds of millions, and throwing the world economy into a tailspin. Worst of all, a Sino-American war could easily drag in Russia, which still has the world’s biggest nuclear arsenal.†
Any way we look at it, all-out war is madness. Fortunately, a huge body of expert literature reassures us that in a globalized world such madness is impossible. “No physical force can set at nought the force of credit,” says one authority. According to another, the “international movement of capital is the biggest guarantor of world peace.” A third adds that fighting “must involve the expenditure of so vast a sum of money and such an interference with trade, that a war would be accompanied or followed by a complete collapse of … credit and industry”; it would mean “total exhaustion and impoverishment, industry and trade would be ruined, and the power of capital destroyed.”
This is comforting—except for the fact that these experts were not talking about the risk of Sino-American conflict in the 2010s. All were writing between 1910 and 1914, insisting the modern world’s complicated web of trade and finance ruled out any chance of a great-power war in Europe. We all know how that turned out.
Perhaps the world’s statesmen will yank us back from precipice after precipice. Maybe we can avoid a nuclear 1914 for another generation; maybe for fifty years. But is it realistic to think we can keep the bomb out of the hands of terrorists and rogue states forever? Or deter every leader, regardless of national interest, from ever deciding that nuclear war is the best option? Even if we limit proliferation to its current rate, by 2060 there will be close to twenty nuclear powers, several of them in the arc of instability.
Every year we avoid Armageddon the threats from the horsemen of the apocalypse keep building. Pressure on resources will mount, new diseases will evolve, nuclear weapons will proliferate, and—most insidious of all—global weirding will shift the calculus in unpredictable ways. It seems crazily optimistic to think we can juggle all these dangers indefinitely.
We appear to be approaching a new hard ceiling. When the Romans ran up against the original hard ceiling in the first century CE, they faced two possible outcomes: they might find a way through, in which case social development would leap upward, or they might not, in which case the horsemen would drag them down. Their failure began a six-century decline, cutting Western social development more than one-third. In the eleventh century, when Song China reached the same hard ceiling, it, too, failed to break through and Eastern development fell almost one-sixth between 1200 and 1400.
As we press against a new hard ceiling in the twenty-first century, we face the same options but in starker forms. When the Romans and Song failed to find solutions, they had the relative luxury of several centuries of slow decline, but we will not be so lucky. There are many possible paths that our future might follow, but however much they wind around, most seem to lead ultimately to the same place: Nightfall.
What a Singularity will mean for Western rule is open for debate, but what Nightfall will mean seems much clearer. Back in 1949, Einstein told a journalist, “I do not know how the Third World War will be fought, but I can tell you what they will use in the Fourth—rocks.” After Nightfall, no one will rule.
THE GREAT RACE
Talking to the Ghost of Christmas Past leads to an alarming conclusion: the twenty-first century is going to be a race. In one lane is some sort of Singularity; in the other, Nightfall. One will win and one will lose. There will be no silver medal. Either we will soon (perhaps before 2050) begin a transformation even more profound than the industrial revolution, which may make most of our current problems irrelevant, or we will stagger into a collapse like no other. It is hard to see how any intermediate outcome—a compromise, say, in which everyone gets a bit richer, China gradually overtakes the West, and things otherwise go on much as before—can work.
This means that the next forty years will be the most important in history.
What the world needs to do to prevent Nightfall is not really a mystery. The top priority is to avoid all-out nuclear war, and the way to do that is for the great powers to reduce their nuclear arsenals. Paradoxically, pursuing total disarmament may be a riskier course, because nuclear weapons cannot be uninvented. Great powers can always build new bombs in a hurry, and the really bad guys—terrorists and rulers of rogue states—will in any case ignore all agreements. Proliferation will increase the risk that wars will go nuclear across the next thirty to forty years, but the stablest situation will be one where the great powers have enough weapons to deter aggression but not enough to kill us all.
The older nuclear powers—the United States, Russia, Britain, France, China—have been moving in this direction since the 1980s. During the Cold War the mathematician, pacifist, and meteorologist (until he abandoned weather research after realizing how much it helped the air force) Lewis Fry Richardson made a widely cited calculation that there was a 15–20 percent likelihood of a nuclear war before 2000. By 2008, however, the energy scientist Vaclav Smil could offer a positively sunny estimate that the chance of even a World War II–scale conflict (killing 50 million people) before 2050 was well under 1 percent, and in January 2010 the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the minute hand of its celebrated “Doomsday Clock”—indicating how close we stand to Nightfall—back from five minutes to six minutes before midnight.
The second priority is to slow down global weirding. Here things are going less well. In 1997 the worl
d’s great and good gathered at Kyoto to work out a solution, and agreed that by 2012 greenhouse gas emissions must be cut to 5.2 percent below their 1990 levels. The proposed cuts, however, fell mostly on rich Western nations, and the United States—the world’s biggest polluter in the 1990s—refused to ratify the protocol. To many critics this seemed (as an Indian official put it) like “guys with gross obesity telling guys just emerging from emaciation to go on a major diet,” but American policy makers responded that emissions could not be controlled unless India and China (which in 2006 displaced the United States as the world’s biggest polluter) made cuts too.
By 2008 the United States and China were both more interested in change, but the political will needed for comprehensive agreements seems to be lacking. The authors of the Stern Review estimate that the kind of low-carbon technologies, forest preservation, and energy efficiencies that could avert disaster by holding carbon levels to 450 ppm by 2050 will cost about a trillion dollars. Compared to the price of doing nothing that is trivial, but with their finances in tatters after the 2007–2009 economic crisis, many governments backed away from expensive plans to reduce emissions, and the Copenhagen summit of December 2009 produced no binding agreement.
Despite their obvious differences, nuclear war and global weirding actually both present much the same problem. For five thousand years, states and empires have been the most effective organizations on earth, but as social development has transformed the meaning of geography, these organizations have become less effective. Thomas Friedman has summed it up neatly. “The first era of globalization [roughly 1870–1914] shrank the world from a size ‘large’ to a size ‘medium,’” he observed in 1999, but “this era of globalization [since 1989] is shrinking the world from a size ‘medium’ to a size ‘small.’” Six years later the shrinking had gone so far that Friedman identified a whole new phase, “Globalization 3.0.” This, he suggested, “is shrinking the world from a size small to a size tiny and flattening the playing field at the same time.”
In this tiny, flattened world, there is no place left to hide. Nuclear weapons and climate change (not to mention terrorism, disease, migration, finance, and food and water supply) are global problems that require global solutions. States and empires, which have sovereignty only within their own frontiers, cannot address them effectively.
Einstein pointed out the obvious solution less than a month after atomic bombs destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. “The only salvation for civilization and the human race,” he told The New York Times, “lies in the creation of world government.” Publicly mocked as a naïve scientist interfering in matters he did not understand, Einstein put his point more bluntly: “If the idea of world government is not realistic, then there is only one realistic view of our future: wholesale destruction of man by man.”
Looking back across the last fifteen thousand years, Einstein does seem to have judged the direction of history correctly. From Stone Age villages through early states such as Uruk and the Shang, early empires such as Assyria and Qin, and oceanic empires such as the British, there has been a clear trend toward bigger and bigger political units. The logical outcome seems to be the rise of an American global empire in the early twenty-first century—or, as the economic balance tilts against the West, a Chinese global empire in the mid or late twenty-first century.
The problem with this logic, though, is that these larger political units have almost always been created through war, precisely the outcome Einstein’s world government is supposed to prevent. If the only way to avoid nuclear war is a world government, and if the only way to create a world government is through a Sino-American nuclear war, the outlook is grim.
In fact, though, neither of these propositions is entirely true. Since 1945, nonstate organizations have taken on more and more functions. These organizations range from charities and private multinational corporations that operate beneath the umbrella of states to federations such as the European Union, United Nations, and World Trade Organization that impinge on state sovereignty. States certainly remain the guarantors of security (the United Nations has done little better than the League of Nations at stopping wars) and finance (in 2008–2009 it took government bailouts to save capitalism), and will not fade away anytime soon; but the most effective way to hold back Nightfall for another forty years may be by enmeshing states more deeply with nonstate organizations, getting governments to surrender some of their sovereignty in return for solutions that they might be unable to reach independently.
That will be a messy business, and as so often in the past, new challenges will call for new thought. But even if we manage in the next half-century to create institutions that can find global solutions for global problems, this will still only be a necessary rather than a sufficient condition for the Singularity to win the race.
We might compare our situation with what happened in the first, eleventh, and seventeenth centuries, when social development pressed against the hard ceiling at forty-three points on the index. I suggested in Chapter 11 that the only way the Romans or the Song could have broken through in the first and eleventh centuries was by doing what Europe and China did in the seventeenth century: that is, by restructuring geography by closing the steppe highway and creating an oceanic highway. Only then would they have bought themselves security from migrations, raised the kinds of questions that called for a scientific revolution, and begun creating the kinds of incentives that would set off an industrial revolution. Neither the Romans nor the Song, of course, were able to do this, and within a few generations migration, disease, famine, and state failure combined with climate change to set off Eurasia-wide collapses.
When Europeans and Chinese did restructure geography in the seventeenth century, they pushed the hard ceiling upward, though as we saw in Chapter 9 they did not shatter it. By 1750 problems were mounting once again, but by that time British entrepreneurs had used the time that geographical restructuring had bought to begin a revolution in energy capture.
In the twenty-first century we need to follow a similar path. First we must restructure political geography to make room for the kinds of global institutions that might slow down war and global weirding; then we must use the time that buys to carry out a new revolution in energy capture, shattering the fossil-fuel ceiling. Carrying on burning oil and coal like we did in the twentieth century will bring on Nightfall even before the hydrocarbons run out.
Some environmentalists recommend a different approach, urging us to return to simpler lifestyles that reduce energy use enough to halt global weirding, but it is hard to see how this will work. World population will probably grow by another 3 billion before it peaks at 9 billion around 2050, and hundreds of millions of these people are likely to rise out of extreme poverty, using more energy as they do so. David Douglas, the chief sustainability officer at Sun Microsystems, points out that if each of these new people owns just one 60-watt incandescent lightbulb, and if each of them uses it just four hours per day, the world will still need to bring another sixty or so 500-megawatt power plants on line. The International Energy Agency expects world oil demand to rise from 86 million barrels per day in 2007 to 116 million in 2030; and even then, they estimate, 1.4 billion people will still be without electricity.
The double whammy of the world’s poor multiplying and getting richer as they do so makes it most unlikely that energy capture will fall over the next fifty years. If we use less energy for fertilizers or for fuel to move food around, hundreds of millions of the poor will starve, which will probably bring on Nightfall faster than anything. But if people do not starve, they will demand more and more energy. In China alone, fourteen thousand new cars hit the roads every day; 400 million people (more than the entire population of the United States) will probably flee low-energy farms for high-energy cities between 2000 and 2030; and the number of travelers vacationing overseas, burning jet fuel and staying in hotels, will probably increase from 34 million in 2006 to 115 million in 2020.
We a
re not going to reduce energy capture unless catastrophe forces us to—which means that the only way to avoid running out of resources, poisoning the planet, or both, will be by tapping into renewable, clean power.
Atomic energy will probably be a big part of this. Fears about radiation have shackled nuclear programs since the 1970s, but may fall away as the new age gets new thought. Or perhaps solar power will be more important: only one-half of one-billionth of the energy that the sun emits comes to Earth, and roughly one-third of that is reflected back again. Even so, enough solar energy reaches us every hour to power all current human needs for a year—if we could harness it effectively. Alternatively, nanotechnology and genetics may deliver radically new sources of energy. Much of this of course sounds like science fiction, and it will certainly take enormous technological leaps to usher in such an age of abundant clean energy. But if we do not make such leaps—and soon—Nightfall will win the race.
For the Singularity to win, we need to keep the dogs of war on a leash, manage global weirding, and see through a revolution in energy capture. Everything has to go right. For Nightfall to win only one thing needs go wrong. The odds look bad.
THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME
Some scientists think they already know who will win the race, because the answer is written in the stars. One day around 1950 (no one remembers exactly when) the physicist Enrico Fermi and three of his colleagues met for lunch at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. After laughing about a New Yorker cartoon showing a flying saucer, they moved on to extraterrestrials in general before turning to more conventional scientific topics. Suddenly Fermi burst out: “But where are they?”