by Dylan Evans
I changed into my swimming trunks and wandered down to the sea. It was warm and friendly, and after paddling out a little I turned over and let myself float with my eyes closed. I felt the warm sun on my face and the gentle motion of the waves as my body rose and fell with the swell. It was paradise.
Later, as the sun began to go down, I spotted a small group of people making a barbecue higher up on the beach. They were about five young Mexican men, all in shorts and nothing else on, their muscular bodies glowing with golden tans. I walked over to say hi, but when the young man tending to the smoking fish looked up he did a double take.
‘Were you in Mérida recently?’
I nodded, puzzled by his reaction. I certainly didn’t remember meeting him there.
Then he turned to his friends and said, in Spanish: ‘That’s the guy who paid a fortune for the clothes in Mérida!’
A peel of laughter rippled round the group. The young man looked back at me, smiling broadly, without the slightest suspicion that I had understood his remark.
So, word had somehow travelled all the way from Mérida to the coast about this gullible gringo. Had I really overpaid that much for those clothes, to become the subject of such far-flung gossip? I was frankly spooked by the idea. But only for a short while. Before too long, I had drifted back into a whimsical and carefree mood that remained with me for the rest of my time in Mexico.
Relaxing on that warm beach, the idea of post-apocalyptic living didn’t seem all that bad. True, the collapse itself would be dreadful, but for those who survived, the simpler way of life they would be forced to adopt might well have certain advantages over the technological one that had preceded it. It might be positively utopian.
To call something utopian is, of course, not entirely positive. The connotation of a perfect society is offset by that of a hopelessly impractical ideal. And it was probably the latter meaning that Thomas More had in mind when he coined the term Utopia in his 1516 book of the same title. For he derived the word from the Greek oὐ (not) and τóπoς (place), meaning literally nowhere. The implication is that while we might dream of a perfect society, we will never find it in this world.
And yet, despite this clear warning, there have been no end of idealists who have taken More’s book as an exhortation to turn his fantasy into a reality. The very first of these was a Spanish churchman by the name of Vasco de Quiroga, and the place he chose to build his Utopia was, as it happens, in Mexico. A mere two decades after the publication of More’s book, Quiroga used it as the blueprint for a commune he established on the outskirts of Mexico City.
Here, in the vicinity of Lake Pátzcuaro, the Indians would be taught not just the Christian religion, but also a variety of arts and crafts, and the fundamentals of self-government. Like many utopian communities ever since, the settlements created by Quiroga also had elements of primitive socialism: each person worked six hours a day and contributed on an equal basis to the common welfare. It was strangely appropriate, then, that the idea for the Utopia Experiment should have occurred to me in Mexico. And yet, there was also something surreal about those sun-soaked days in Tulum. Everything seemed so magical, so dreamy. I would later wonder what was in that drink the woman gave me in Mérida. Was it some kind of hallucinogenic substance, or some magic potion perhaps, that made me so willing to part with my money, to give up everything I had even, and live a life without possessions? Was I under some kind of spell when I first came up with the idea for the Utopia Experiment?
Back in England, the weather was dark and gloomy, and I began to put my vague plan into action. The first task was to find a suitable location. What sort of place would the survivors of a global catastrophe find refuge in? If the collapse was due in part to climate change, the places favoured by the old climate might become inhospitable. According to some forecasts, the south of England would become increasingly dry and infertile, but rainfall would still be plentiful in the Scottish Highlands, and rising temperatures there would mean that it would be more conducive to agriculture. Perhaps a few far-sighted people from the big cities would head north before the shit hit the fan, and prepare for the coming collapse by growing their own food and weaning themselves off the technology that would soon disappear. Just as a few Maya survived the collapse of their civilization by retreating into the jungle, so a few refugees from London and Edinburgh might eke out a living in the Scottish Highlands.
As it happened, I had an old friend from the Highlands who might be able to help. I had met Romay at Southampton University in 1987. While we were students she had often talked about going back to the Highlands, and in the year 2000 she did just that, buying and renovating the old farmhouse where she had spent her childhood. Her brother had inherited the farmland around it, on which he now raised some of the best beef cattle in Scotland.
Nervously, I picked up the phone and dialled Romay’s number.
‘Do you think your brother would let me use a couple of acres of land for an experiment?’ I asked.
Romay hesitated. Her brother, Alastair, was a no-nonsense, sensible kind of a man, and not the most likely candidate to allow strangers to live on his land to conduct an experiment in post-apocalyptic living. But her enthusiasm for my idea got the better of her.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I think you could probably persuade him. And I know the perfect place.’
A few weeks later I travelled to Scotland for a week to get a better idea of the territory. I had been here many times before, but never really paid much attention to the topography of the land that lay between Romay’s farmhouse and Alastair’s farm, which lay on the northern shores of the Black Isle, north of Inverness. A stream cut through the fields and formed a small valley, densely overgrown with trees and bracken. Here, with the surrounding farmland out of sight, you suddenly felt very far from civilization. This was the site Romay suggested.
As I arrived the last rays of sunshine were glinting off the snow-covered peaks in the distance. Romay greeted me with her usual enthusiasm. She was in her late forties, with tousled brown hair flecked with grey, and dark brown eyes that twinkled mischievously when she smiled. But she also had a toughness born of years of fending for herself and bringing up two children on her own. Now, back in the land of her birth, she seemed in her element striding through the muddy fields in her green Wellington boots, as she took me round the site of the future Utopia.
There was a small waterfall we might use to generate electricity. Slopes either side of the stream might be good to terrace for fruit trees and berry bushes. At one point the valley widened to form a flat area either side of the water that might provide a suitable site to set up our camp.
Above the valley lay a large potato shed with stone walls and a roof of rusty corrugated iron. There were a few holes in the roof that would need patching to make it waterproof, and we would need to put some doors in the gaping holes where the wind now blew, but apart from that the shed was in pretty good shape. This, Romay suggested, could be a communal eating and cooking area.
Near the potato shed was an acre of scrubland where we could grow our crops and keep a few pigs and chickens. The land was stony and would need a lot of preparation before we could plant anything. But the soil was rich and dark, and although it was north-facing, the slope was gentle enough to catch a good deal of the intermittent sunshine.
But I had no idea about farming. The only thing I had ever grown was a cannabis plant, and that was more out of curiosity than for any practical purposes. I was the least green-fingered person you could imagine. The idea of me tilling the land, and planting seedlings, and harvesting the crops, would have seemed ludicrous to my friends and family. But at that time I had heroic visions of becoming a horny-handed son of toil, labouring away like some diligent yeoman in a Thomas Hardy novel. I was blissfully unaware of how ill-suited I was to that way of life.
3. ROBOTS
When I got back from my trip to Scotland, I set up a page on my website headed An experiment in Utopia. I announced that
I was setting up a novel kind of community based on three main ideas:
1. It will be a LEARNING COMMUNITY – each member must have a distinctive skill or area of knowledge that they can teach to the others.
2. It will be a WORKING COMMUNITY – no money is required from the members, but all must contribute by working.
3. It will be strictly TIME-LIMITED. This is not an attempt to found an ongoing community. The experiment will last 18 months. Members may stay for up to three months, but may also come for as little as two weeks.
In a word, think of a cross between Plato’s Academy and The Beach.
The reference to Plato may sound grandiose, but his Academy was really just an olive grove outside the city walls of ancient Athens where his friends and followers would gather to study and discuss philosophy. It was this high-minded but informal atmosphere that I wanted to recreate.
The Beach tells of another Utopia. The protagonist of Alex Garland’s blockbuster novel is a young backpacker who discovers a hidden beach in Thailand, where a small community of young people from all over the world live together amidst idyllic surroundings. At first everything goes well, and our hero thinks he has found paradise. But, eventually, everything ends in disaster.
For some reason the ominous implications of citing The Beach as inspiration for my experiment escaped my mind at the time. Nor did I put much thought into how I would select the volunteers. I simply asked them to send me a two-hundred-word email telling me who they were, and what they could offer the community.
I made no attempt to promote the webpage or tell anyone the announcement was there. The only way you could find it was by following a link from my home page. I was curious to see if the first people who followed that link would share it, and whether it might take on a momentum of its own.
Sure enough, within a few days, the first volunteers were beginning to contact me. It started off as a trickle, but before long I had received several hundred applications to join the experimental community. And, despite my friends’ predictions, they weren’t all hippies in their twenties. With ages ranging from eighteen to sixty-seven, and a roughly equal mix of men and women, they came from a wide range of backgrounds. They included an ex-Royal Marine turned shoemaker, a computer programmer passionate about vegetables, a retired schoolteacher who had spent time with the Inuit, a journalist from India, a graffiti artist from Belfast, and a Cambridge graduate who offered to be the community musician.
There was nothing about the end of the world in the original outline I posted online; it wasn’t until a few months later that I wrote the fictional scenario Dr Satoshi read. I can’t remember why I chose not to reveal that aspect of the experiment at this stage. Maybe I was still sufficiently sane to realize how crazy it sounded. Maybe I didn’t want to give away too much.
Nevertheless, several of the first people to apply made it clear they were already thinking along similar lines. One of those was Agric.
A self-employed computer technician in his early fifties, he lived in Slough and grew his own vegetables – but he was planning to sell his house and become a nomad.
In his first email to me, after explaining why he would like to volunteer, Agric concluded with a ‘heads up’ about the dire consequences of peak oil.
Peak oil is the moment when global oil production starts to decline. Working for Shell in the 1950s, a geologist called Marion King Hubbert suggested that oil production would follow a bell-shaped curve. At first the rate of production is very low, but then it begins to increase rapidly until it reaches a peak, stabilizes, and then declines equally rapidly.
Agric was not alone in thinking peak oil was imminent. I soon found out that it was a common belief among doomers – people who believe that a global catastrophe will happen within the next few years. Doomers attribute the catastrophe to a variety of possible causes, from global warming to financial crises, but the end of cheap oil is a pretty popular choice. And when one considers how central oil is to our modern technological civilization, it is easy to see why.
At the other end of the optimism scale from the doomers are the boomers, or cornucopians, who believe that continued technological progress will solve all our problems and lead to an ever-increasing standard of living.
For a long time I had counted myself firmly among the cornucopians. I was confident that humanity was headed for the kind of techno-utopia envisaged by science fiction writers like Arthur C. Clarke, who famously wrote that ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’. And I desperately wanted to be part of that future, to make it happen.
Enthused by the promises of artificial intelligence, I had managed to land a job at one of the best-equipped robotics labs in the world – the Bristol Robotics Laboratory (then known as the Intelligent Autonomous Systems Lab). Like most of the other researchers I met there, I started off with grand ambitions to build robots that would be able to run around, hold intelligent conversations, and free people from dull, dirty and dangerous jobs. Of course, I knew that there would be big challenges in designing such advanced technology, but I hadn’t realized that the biggest one of all would be energy. Energy is the dirty secret of robotics.
Artificial intelligence still has a long way to go before it rivals human intelligence, but it has already achieved some impressive feats: beating world champions at chess, and more mundane but actually more demanding tasks, such as driving cars and recognizing faces. But all the most advanced intelligence won’t get you very far if you run out of energy, and most robots run out of energy very quickly. That’s because they rely on batteries, and batteries, despite all the progress with the lithium-ion devices that power our mobile phones, are still terribly inefficient. At least, they are when compared with the biological mechanisms that power living creatures like ants and humans. Think of how small an ant is – and how long it can walk around, carrying several times its own body-weight. In order to get a robotic ant to do that, you would have to give it a battery much bigger than itself. But then it would need a lot more energy to carry that battery around, so you would have to give it an even bigger battery, and so on.
After a few months in Bristol it struck me that, in this sense (and in many others), robots were rather like human societies. Their intelligence outstripped their energy – they could perform all sorts of amazing intellectual endeavours, but they kept running up against an energy deficit, and needed to find ever more resources to fill it. Many societies collapsed in the past because their energy requirements began to outstrip their energy resources.
The Maya are a case in point, but other examples are not hard to find. Easter Island is a small and very remote patch of land in the Pacific Ocean. When a small group of Polynesian settlers arrived there eight hundred years ago, it was covered in trees – perhaps as many as sixteen million of them, some towering a hundred feet tall. The settlers proceeded to burn down the woods to free up farmland, and began to multiply. Eventually the population grew to perhaps fifteen thousand, and they ran out of trees. Without trees, the islanders couldn’t build any more canoes to go fishing, and soil erosion ate away at their farmland.
By the time Captain James Cook visited in 1774, there were only a few hundred islanders left, living hand to mouth. All that remained of the once proud civilization their ancestors had created were the tall stone statues for which Easter Island is famous today. And many of them had been torn down by rival clans, who had turned on each other as their society collapsed.
I began to think the global village was in the same situation as the Maya and the inhabitants of Easter Island. For years, our civilization had been powering itself with fossil fuels – especially oil – and we kept needing more and more. But sooner or later we would run out. And that, as Agric would later remind me constantly, would mark the beginning of the end.
But in another sense, human societies were very unlike the robots in my lab. A lot of our research there focused on something known as ‘swarm intelligence’. This involved taking a l
ot of very simple robots and programming them to work as a team. The idea was that, even though each robot was quite stupid on its own, a kind of collective intelligence – a hive mind – would emerge when they worked together to achieve a common goal. Human societies, it struck me, were just the opposite. Individually, people are very intelligent creatures. But in society a kind of collective stupidity seems to emerge spontaneously. The Scottish journalist Charles Mackay famously called it ‘the madness of crowds’ in an 1841 book that chronicled such follies as economic bubbles, the Crusades and witch-hunts. ‘Men,’ he wrote, ‘go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.’
The global village was going mad too, it seemed to me. Despite all the protestations of sensible individuals about the dangers of climate change, the world as a whole seemed incapable of doing anything about it. But surely there was a way to form a sane community, one not overtaken by groupthink and delusion? My Utopia Experiment would be an attempt to create just such a society, in miniature.
Many doomers actually look forward to the collapse of modern civilization. They know that billions of people will die, but they think the world is due for a correction, just like an economic bubble that is bound to burst. In the aftermath, however, the survivors will have the chance to rebuild a more humane kind of society, untroubled by the many ills of industrialization.
In this world view, the coming collapse becomes a kind of secular apocalypse, a naturalistic equivalent to the Tribulation of Christian theology, in which many people will perish in disasters, famine and war. Just as the Tribulation is a punishment meted out by God in response to our sins, so the collapse of modern civilization is the vengeance of Mother Earth for polluting the environment and a punishment for overconsumption. And just as the Tribulation will be followed by a thousand years of peace and prosperity, the collapse will be followed by a return to a blissful pre-industrial way of life.