Inferno Decoded

by Michael Haag

  So far, we have only looked at the supply side of the food equation. What about demand? The Food and Agricultural Organization of the UN (FAO) estimates that the total supply of food will need to increase by seventy per cent by 2050. Food production in developing countries will need to double, and an additional billion tonnes of cereals and 200 million tonnes of meat will be required every year.

  These sound like big numbers, the kind that place an enormous strain on agricultural systems. This extra demand is one of the major props in the Malthusian argument, but it’s important to place it in context. Demand for food is expected to grow at a slower rate than in the 1960s and 1970s, as the rate of population growth is slowing.

  When we remember that global food production tripled between 1950 and 2000, an increase of seventy per cent in forty years does not sound impossible. Moreover, at a biophysical and nutritional level, it is a mistake to regard this extra demand as something fixed, which the food system must deliver at all costs.

  An estimated thirty per cent of all food grown worldwide is lost or wasted. In poor countries, that largely occurs during post-harvest storage, or en route to the consumer; in richer ones, much ends up in the rubbish bin. Halving the amount of food waste – a perfectly achievable target – would both reduce the pressure on food supplies and save money.

  We can also change how we use crops. If the one-third of cereal production that currently goes to feed animals was consumed directly by humans, it would satisfy the calorie needs of 3.5 billion people. People would not have to give up meat and dairy entirely, just to limit their consumption to animals raised on pasture or recycled food wastes.

  The Malthusian doomsday scenario does not stand up to scrutiny. All the science indicates that, so long as we use resources wisely, we have not reached the biophysical carrying capacity of the Earth. Practically every research organisation that has examined this question – from the FAO, to IIASA, to the Office of the Chief Scientist of the UK Government, to university departments all over the world – has concluded that it will be possible to feed the world’s population in 2050.

  We grow enough food today to feed 9.3 billion people. That’s what makes it so shocking that the global food system is failing to nourish the seven billion that currently exist, 870 million of whom go hungry because they lack the purchasing power to lay claim to the food they need. Our pattern of food use is a function of political choices and economic disparities, and the ability to change it lies within human hands.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Transhumanists — The Eternal Optimists

  I believe Transhumanism is mankind’s only hope for long-term survival

  Bertrand Zobrist, Inferno, chapter 66

  For many readers, Dan Brown’s Inferno will provide their first introduction to the concept of Transhumanism. As ever, Brown’s fiction is rooted to some extent in truth – so yes, Transhumanists do exist. But who are they, and what do they believe? And, judging from his words and his actions, is the villainous Bertrand Zobrist a typical Transhumanist?

  Rather than a single fixed ideology, Transhumanism is a broad philosophical movement that’s essentially characterised by an optimistic view of how ongoing scientific developments will affect the future of humanity.

  Transhumanists believe that thanks to continuing advances in technology, we will be able to improve not only our physical wellbeing and our lives in society, but also our actual human bodies. What’s more, permanent changes will take place at the genetic level, and thus become inheritable from generation to generation. As a result, humans will become a truly different species – posthumans.

  ARE WE NEARLY THERE YET?

  In a paradoxical sense, our capacity to transcend our physical limitations has always been part of what makes us human. From the moment we first used tools, or wrapped ourselves in animal skins to survive in harsher climates, we began to redefine ourselves as a species. Enough time has passed since the establishment of the earliest human societies that evolution has been able to respond by changing our bodies. Thus, for example, what was once a rare mutation – the continued ability in adulthood to digest milk – proved enough of an advantage after the domestication of cows, goats and sheep in the ancient near East and Europe that it became the local genetic norm.

  Printing out the entire human genome for the first time required more than a hundred volumes, each of which held a thousand pages.

  Despite the changes that have already occurred, for Transhumanists it’s a matter of definition that we’re not yet posthuman. That we will become so, however, is so inevitable that there’s little point wasting time in ethical debate as to whether it should happen. Instead, they believe, we should simply embrace the possibilities and focus on what precise form the future will take.

  So how will we know when we have become posthuman? Ageing and death, above all else, are the essential Transhumanist preoccupations. There’s an irony in that, of course, because while most Transhumanists consider themselves to be adamantly secular, rejecting the ‘supernatural’ and placing their beliefs very much in the tradition of humanism, they share that concern with death and immortality with every religion that’s ever existed.

  The Transhumanist dream is that human life spans will become much longer – and that means longer periods of robust health, not merely additional years of decrepitude – until we ultimately attain immortality. For Transhumanists, that is so clearly a desirable goal that there is no reason to retain a sentimental attachment to our existing human bodies or way of life. Ultimately, in fact, we may have to leave those bodies altogether; even once they become as genetically perfect as we can possibly imagine, they may remain too vulnerable to violent accident for it to be safe for us to stay in them. Here too, in the notion that our physical bodies are peripheral to our existence as human beings, there are clearly echoes of religious belief.

  Some Transhumanists see scientific advances as being incremental, continuing indefinitely into the future without necessarily accelerating. Others foresee posthuman status as arriving in a sudden, blinding moment – the Singularity. The term was originally invented to refer to the hypothetical instant when artificial intelligence first transcends human thought, enabling machines to pass not only beyond human understanding, but beyond human control, and thus ending humanity’s role as the dominant species. The leading proponent of that idea is Ray Kurzweil, currently director of engineering at Google, whose book The Singularity Is Near was recommended by Dan Brown as further reading for Inferno fans. In the Transhumanist Singularity, however, it’s the new, emergent breed of posthumans that will supplant the existing species.

  And when Transhumanists say ‘we’ will become immortal, they really do mean us – not abstract future generations, but you and I, and others alive today. Or at least, they say they do, though sceptics – and, perhaps, readers of Inferno – can’t help wondering whether they can be trusted. Perhaps the ‘we’ applies only to the scientists themselves, or to the elite in the affluent West; certainly it’s hard to picture a moment when all humans suddenly become posthuman.

  This is why Dan Brown’s Bertrand Zobrist regards himself as making such a sacrifice. Although, assuming that he’s the Transhumanist he claims to be, his goal is to extend human life spans to the point of immortality, he himself is suffering (permanent) death in order to make that possible. He calls himself ‘the gateway to the Posthuman age’, but he will not become posthuman himself. Hence his hubristic self-comparison to Martin Luther King, Jr, who in what’s known as the ‘I have been to the mountaintop’ speech, spoke the night before he died of the desirability of longevity, while acknowledging that ‘I may not get there with you’.

  Leaving aside whether Zobrist’s actions make all that much sense in terms of the plot of Inferno itself, and, for the moment, whether the views of this fictional character do in fact reflect those of actual Transhumanists, it’s worth stressing that there is no intrinsic link between Transhumanism and Malthusian theories. Overpopulation is not
an issue that’s particularly addressed in Transhumanist writings, and Transhumanism does not in any sense present itself as a solution to rising population numbers, or indeed to any other current human problems.

  WHO ARE THE TRANSHUMANISTS, AND WHERE DID THEY COME FROM?

  Generally speaking, the Transhumanist movement is made up of responsible individuals—ethically accountable scientists, futurists, visionaries.

  Elizabeth Sinskey, Inferno chapter 73

  For as long as human beings have existed, we have directed at least part of our energy and attention towards what are now the two prime facets of Transhumanism – firstly using technological advances to ameliorate our living conditions in general, and our health in particular, and secondly searching for ways to overcome death and achieve eternal life.

  The Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, for example, dating from approximately 1900 BC, is the story of Gilgamesh’s perilous quest for immortality. Similarly, the ancient Egyptians furnished their tombs with food and other practical necessities in hope of ensuring an afterlife. It was also in Egypt, before the time of Christ, that alchemists started to explore the mutability of the material world in the hope of affecting not only inert substances – transmuting base metals into gold, for example – but also human nature.

  This cuneiform tablet contains part of the Epic of Gilgamesh.

  The idea that humans are entitled – indeed authorised by God – to change and develop in any way they choose was beautifully expressed by the Renaissance philosopher Pico della Mirandola. In a text much cited by modern Transhumanists, the 1486 Oration on the Dignity of Man, he wrote that:

  Neither a fixed abode nor a form that is thine alone nor any function peculiar to thyself have we given thee, Adam … We have made thee neither of heaven nor Earth, neither mortal nor immortal, so that … thou mayest fashion thyself in whatever shape thou shalt prefer.

  As described in Chapter Five of this book, Renaissance Florence saw an upsurge in humanist thought, influenced in particular by the Greek philosopher Gemistus Plethon. Similarly, the French Revolution inspired philosophers such as Nicolas de Condorcet and William Godwin to speculate about the future in what now read as proto-Transhumanist terms – and prompted Malthus to put pen to paper in response (see Chapter Seven).

  Not until the twentieth century, however, did ‘Transhumanism’ first appear in print. In 1957, Julian Huxley – who was the brother of Brave New World author Aldous Huxley, and had long styled himself a humanist – argued in New Bottles for New Wine that ‘The human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself – not just sporadically, an individual here in one way, an individual there in another way – but in its entirety, as humanity. We need a name for this new belief. Perhaps Transhumanism will serve.’

  Pico della Mirandola

  Fereidoun Esfandiary, the ‘handsome Iranian man’ featured in chapter 73 of Inferno, taught a course on ‘New Concepts of the Human’ at the New School in New York in the 1960s. He published UpWingers: A Futurist Manifesto in 1973, followed by a book called Are You A Transhuman? in 1989. The latter contained a questionnaire with the same title, which can be found in assorted versions online. As Dan Brown describes, Esfandiary changed his name to FM-2030, consisting of his initials and the year in which he hoped to celebrate his hundredth birthday, but he died, and was vitrified to await future reanimation, in 2000.

  These days, as no one has exclusive rights to the term ‘Transhumanist’, there’s no one, agreed definition as to what it exactly it means. Broadly speaking, common elements to the various outlines and manifestos that have been put forward include an enthusiastic and optimistic embrace of the potential for scientific advances to improve the individual and collective human condition; a belief that such changes are too inevitable to be thwarted by political or religious decrees; and at least some recognition that there are important ethical issues to address.

  Largely, though not exclusively, Transhumanists are the actual scientists who are engaged in the relevant research. Many display a significant element of defiant self-justification, arguing that even if they don’t do the work themselves, and governments attempt to outlaw it, it will happen anyway. As Gregory Stock put it in Redesigning Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic Future (2002), ‘Policymakers sometimes think that they have a choice about whether germinal technologies will come into being. They do not.’

  Many Transhumanists, and especially those who cohered to form the Extropy Institute in California in the 1990s, are libertarians, in that they dispute the right of governments to interfere in their work, and insist that they are entitled as individuals to do whatever they choose to their own bodies.

  Others come from a more liberal perspective, explicitly acknowledging that their research does or will have social consequences, and that it should be available to all rather than some select or elite group. It’s their views that are most closely reflected within the international Humanity+ organisation, which was established in 2008 to supercede what for ten years previously had been the World Transhumanist Association.

  In Inferno, Elizabeth Sinskey makes it clear that she has no problem with Transhumanists per se. She expands upon the summation quoted on p.180, however, to say that ‘as in many movements, there exists a small but militant faction … [of] apocalyptic thinkers who believe the end is coming and that someone needs to take drastic action to save the future of the species.’ If such real-life Bertrand Zobrists do exist, they remain as yet invisible to the naked eye.

  WHAT DOES THE TRANSHUMANIST FUTURE HOLD?

  Bertrand had boundless hope for mankind. He … believed [that] in the span of several generations, our species would become a different animal entirely – genetically enhanced to be healthier, smarter, stronger, even more compassionate.

  Sienna Brooks, Inferno chapter 73

  The Transhumanist vision of the future is fundamentally Utopian. Not only will death cease to exist, but humans will become so downright wise that they’ll be able to solve any resultant social or material problems.

  The basic Transhumanist trajectory goes that human life spans will become longer and longer, with a guarantee of lasting good health. We’re already used to the idea that if, for example, a hip or knee joint becomes painfully unsuitable for use, we can replace it. Transhumanists believe that it will soon become possible not only to ‘regrow’ such faulty parts – and organs as well – but also to provide even better artificial and not necessarily organic substitutes. The very process that causes ageing in individual cells – and thus entire organisms – will also be halted. Already, according to nanoscientist Robert A Freitas Jr, ‘almost all … deaths are, in principle, medically preventable’. Effective immortality, Transhumanists believe, lies within our grasp.

  More crucially still, there’s no reason for us to remain within the existing parameters. If we take human beings simply to be the imperfect products of evolution, adapted to operate within specific conditions, many of our original specifications may no longer remain relevant. Thus for example Nick Bostrom, of the Future of Humanity Institute, argues that the humanoid ape that first stood upright on the African savannah had not only to be physically able to hunt for food, but also to carry out all its mental and bodily functions on the amount of food that was readily available. For modern human beings – affluent ones at any rate – acquiring food requires the expenditure of much less energy, and it would be straightforward for us to eat enough to fuel much greater mental activity. Similarly, perhaps the reason why we find it difficult to concentrate for extended periods is because we originally needed to be alert at all times to everything that was going on around us. Now, in the safety of our cities, humans may be free to develop our brain power to the point where we will become posthumans.

  What exactly that means – what life might actually look like – is hard to pin down. Transhumanists such as Bostrom rhapsodise about us developing entirely new emotions, and creating entirely new art forms. What those might be and in what sense they’d be ‘better’ th
an those we currently have, by definition we don’t know.

  HOW THE HELL DID THEY DO THAT?

  Langdon had no idea what germ-line manipulation was, but it had an ominous ring.

  Inferno, chapter 41

  As every Dan Brown fan knows, unsuspected avenues are always liable to open up in front of even the mildest-mannered symbologist and lead to places unknown. For the moment, though, Transhumanists talk in terms of there being three principal highways to the future: genetic engineering, nanotechnology and information technology.

  The first of those, genetic engineering, is perhaps the most familiar, and provides the central theme in Inferno. Consequent initially upon the discovery of DNA, and developed via the mapping of the human and other genomes, it is also the most controversial, being so closely tied in with notions of ‘playing God’. In the short term, the basic idea is that the more we know about the precise effects of having a specific genetic makeup, the more it will become possible to pre-empt potential problems as well as to cure actual diseases. We’ve already reached the point where it’s possible to buy a map of your own genes for around $100, and to thus take unprecedented control over your own health prospects. The most relevant technique in terms of individual treatment is ‘somatic cell gene modification’, in which new segments of DNA are inserted into, say, the blood or liver cells of a specific person, to treat some medical condition. From there, however, it’s a small step to Bertrand Zobrist’s speciality, germ-line manipulation – yes, it really does exist, albeit usually under slightly different names, such as ‘germline gene modification’ – in which DNA is added to sperm or unfertilised eggs and thus becomes part of the relevant person’s inheritable genetic make-up.