by Joel Garreau
He’s written three drafts, but events keep overtaking him. At first, he says, his book was aimed at overcoming people’s denial. So for over a year his research assistant rounded up all the reasons to think there were really bad people in the world with really lethal ideas. On September 10, 2001, Joy was unpacking the resultant library of extraordinary proof in the place he had rented in Manhattan only blocks from the World Trade Center. “I was alphabetizing all my books on the plague and books on loose nukes and chem and bio and anthrax. I didn’t have any of the anarchist cookbooks. But I think if, on the morning of the 12th, someone had come to my hotel room, I’d have probably been in jail.”
Bam—as quickly as you can fly airplanes into towers, the need for the warnings of that book disintegrated. Within hours, it seemed to him, “basically a thousand people—that seems like a large number, but I bet it would be provable”—started reporting on his subject matter, blasting it out from every medium.
So Joy abandoned that plan for the book and started reorganizing it around the next important thing to which he needed to alert people: the mortal threat from the development of self-replicating man-made anything. Things that can make more of themselves might not be eradicable. In the original Wired piece, Joy had called attention to the specter of self-replicating robots and nanotechnology. His research, however, persuaded him that biotech was the much more imminent threat. Indeed, during this period, one of the reports that most agitated intelligence agencies in Washington was the hint that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was working on a designer pathogen of genetically combined pox virus and snake venom. A 1986 study in the Journal of Microbiology had reported that fowlpox spread faster and killed more chickens in the presence of venom extract. Investigators heard that Iraq sought to splice together pox and cobra venom. Such an artificial life form—created by inserting genetic sequences from one organism into another—is called a chimera, after the fire-breathing monster of Greek mythology commingling lion, serpent and goat. The investigators pursuing this weapon after the second Gulf War discovered that Iraq’s technical capabilities to produce any such thing had been crippled by bombings, embargoes and UN inspections. But Joy’s alarm is underlined by the fact that such a weapon in the hands of someone like Saddam Hussein was a serious worry.
Joy looks at the way in which jet travel allows a newly discovered virus such as avian flu—which can kill humans—to move from Southeast Asia to New York in hours. He looks at the way the industrialization of our food supply can distribute mad cow disease or resistance to antibiotics. He looks at how development pressure on wild areas seems to be connected to the spread of West Nile virus, Lyme disease and AIDS. He sees these suddenly emergent diseases as repeated wake-up calls from Mother Nature to human nature. Then he thinks about what an evil person could create intentionally. Imagine somebody opening a jar of chimera on Capitol Hill. Suppose it had the quick contagion and awful bloody flesh-melting aspects of Ebola, plus the long-lasting debilitating horrors of AIDS. Imagine someone unleashing flesh-eating self-replicating nanobots. After all, he says, it’s astonishing what genetic engineers are doing by accident. Particularly terrifying is the Australian mouse pox incident.
Australia is one of those unusual isolated ecosystems where, when new species are introduced, they can run amok because they have no natural enemies. Mice are one of those species. Population explosions of mice—mice everywhere—just overrun Australia from time to time. Interest in figuring out how to control the buggers is keen. Toward this end, two Canberra researchers, Ron Jackson and Ian Ramshaw, in late 2000 were trying to create a new mouse contraceptive. Instead, they created a monster. They added one gene to a mousepox virus, and this new virus turned out to be 100 percent fatal. It killed every last mouse in the experiment in nine days. No survivors. This came as a complete surprise. Until then, researchers believed that changes in the genetic makeup of viruses invariably made them less lethal, not more. But even when this engineered virus was tested on mice that supposedly had been immunized, it killed half of them. “It’s surprising how very, very bad the virus is,” Ann Hill, a vaccine researcher from Oregon Health Sciences University in Portland, told New Scientist. Later work in the United States created a version that wipes out 100 percent of the mice even if they have been given antiviral drugs as well as the vaccine that would normally protect them. Cowpox virus also has been genetically altered in a similar way.
Mousepox does not affect humans. It is, however, a close relative of smallpox, which lethally does. Such a manipulation in the genetic makeup of smallpox, therefore, were it ever to be released into the population, might stand a decent chance of wiping out the human race. Nonetheless, after consulting with the Australian Department of Defence, the Australian researchers submitted their work for publication in the Journal of Virology. “We wanted to warn the general population that this potentially dangerous technology is available,” said Jackson. “We wanted to make it clear to the scientific community that they should be careful, that it is not too difficult to create severe organisms.”
All this—especially publishing the details of how to duplicate this evil—drives Bill Joy wild. He believes we simply have no idea what a modern plague, specifically one engineered to evade defenses, might be like. Have we learned nothing from the outbreak of SARS, which kills 10 or 20 percent of all infected humans and can be spread by sneezing? He has taken to quoting to anyone who will listen the first-century B.C. Roman poet and Epicurean philosopher Lucretius. This is his description of the plague of Athens:
At first, they’d bear about
A skull on fire with heat, and eyeballs twain
Red with suffusion of blank glare. Their throats,
Black on the inside, sweated oozy blood;
And the walled pathway of the voice of man
Was clogged with ulcers; and the very tongue,
The mind’s interpreter, would trickle gore,
Weakened by torments, tardy, rough to touch. . .
From the mouth the breath
Would roll a noisome stink, as stink to heaven
Rotting cadavers flung unburied out. . .
Night and day,
Recurrent spasms of vomiting would rack
Alway their thews and members, breaking down
With sheer exhaustion men already spent. . .
The inward parts of men,
In truth, would blaze unto the very bones;
A flame, like flame in furnaces, would blaze
Within the stomach.
This is precisely what Joy says he is worried about. This is The Hell Scenario.
THERE ARE REASONS for both hope and desperation regarding the unprecedented terrors of The Hell Scenario. The good news is that end-of-the-world predictions have been around for a very long time, and none of them has borne fruit yet. The gloom concerning The Hell Scenario is that it is distinct. It is based on the unprecedented geometric increase of The Curve. Another cause for melancholy is that many suggested ways of avoiding it are unconvincing.
The seeds of Bill Joy’s alarm land on the most throughly fertilized ground of our imagination. Of all the scenarios we can conjure, oddly enough the ones we find easiest to embrace are the visions of disaster. No matter how good our lives may be today and no matter how much better off we may be than our ancestors, the easiest sell in the world is doom. Perhaps it is because we feel latent guilt about our achievements, which we are sure will result in punishment. Perhaps it just makes for a more exciting story. Whatever the case, there is no dearth of examples matching that of Paul R. Ehrlich. In 1968, he published The Population Bomb. He predicted “certain” world mass starvation by 1975 unless the world’s population growth was halted. “The battle to feed all of humanity is over,” Ehrlich’s first sentence read. “In the 1970s the world will undergo famines.” He predicted that “hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs.”
At best, he predicted, America and Europe would have to undergo �
��mild” food rationing within the decade, even as starvation and riots swept across Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Arab countries. At worst, the turmoil in a foodless Third World could set off a series of international crises, leading to thermonuclear war. His misjudgment sold over 3 million copies.
Armageddon has a long and distinguished history. Theories of progress are mirrored by theories of collapse, Arthur Herman notes in The Idea of Decline in Western History. If success scenarios are usually tied to a wonder at the way humanity is stealing fire from the gods, calamity scenarios are tied to a conviction that we will pay mortally for our sin.
The Bible gets at it quickly. Eat of the tree of knowledge, and here’s the price:
Accursed be the soil because of you. With suffering shall you get your food from it every day of your life. It shall yield you brambles and thistles, and you shall eat wild plants. With sweat on your brow shall you eat your bread, until you return to the soil, as you were taken from it. For dust you are and to dust you shall return.
In Greek myth, Pandora, the first woman, displays curiosity and opens a box sealed by Zeus. She accidentally releases every kind of evil, including sickness. Only hope remains inside. The Hindus, too, have a saga where a golden age is replaced by misery, as do the Confucians, the Zoroastrians, the Aztecs, the Laplanders, numerous North American tribes and the earliest peoples of Iceland and Ireland.
To whom can I speak today?
The iniquity that strikes the land
Has no end.
To whom can I speak today?
There are no righteous men,
The earth is surrendered to criminals.
That was written circa 2000 B.C., in Egypt’s Middle Kingdom.
In Greek myth, Cassandra, the daughter of Priam and Hecuba, was given the gift of prophecy by Apollo, who lusted for her. When she spurned his advances, Apollo retaliated by decreeing that no one would believe her forebodings, no matter how accurate. Today, the word Cassandra conjures up a nag with nothing to offer but premonitions of ruin. That’s because divining how we might avoid doom is the far more formidable challenge.
What’s interesting is how quickly and thoroughly our visions of doom became intertwined with our uneasiness about technology. To “make a name for ourselves,” as it is recounted in Genesis, we decided to build a tower to heaven. Yahweh took one look at it and surmised, accurately, “This is but the start of their undertakings! There will be nothing too hard for them to do.” The tower ended up being called “Babel, therefore, because there Yahweh confused the language of the whole earth. It was from there that Yahweh scattered them over the whole face of the earth.” Despite such dramatic intervention, Babel may have slowed us down, but obviously it has not stopped us yet.
Through the Middle Ages, barbarism was so close a companion that anything smacking of civilization seemed like a good idea. When the Enlightenment held out the prospect of self-government or liberty as preordained by God’s natural law, it seemed superb. It was hard to argue against rationality, the arts, science, literature and poetry, compared to fighting to the death over who gets to gnaw which bone. The idea of progress was inseparable from the idea of civilization. “Dependency, especially on political and religious authority, is the distinguishing mark of a barbarous and primitive society, while autonomy—liberty—is the mark of a modern and civilized one,” Herman writes. The perfection of human reason seemed to equal transcendence.
In 1627, Francis Bacon, one of the founders of modern science, published his fable The New Atlantis. In it, he anticipated aspects of The Hell Scenario. He describes a society much like ours, with the benefits and challenges of advanced science and technology, living with its burdens and its blessings. In it, the scientists meet to decide which of their inventions to make public and which to keep secret. This is to protect humankind from the dark side of their discoveries. But also they are trying to protect themselves from the backlash of society. They have no illusions that their beneficiaries would always be grateful.
In 1788, as the American republic arose, Edward Gibbon, in the most famous work of Enlightenment history, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, laid out a theory of societal self-destruction. All great empires reach a point of no return, he argued. “Virtue and truth produced strength, strength dominion, dominion riches, riches luxury, and luxury weakness and collapse—fatal sequence repeated so often,” as the historian John Anthony Froude phrased it.
The Industrial Age created the ancestors of today’s Hell Scenario. In 1794, the Rev. Robert Malthus made a curved projection from the rise of affluence and population that he observed, and concluded that there was no way civilization could continue to feed itself. The result would be starvation, destitution and ruin. He was spectacularly wrong, of course. His error, however, offers a lesson that echoes to this day: Just because the problems are increasing doesn’t mean solutions might not also be increasing to match them. (Malthus, by the way, may have been the first to note that change was occurring at “accelerated velocity” and that this was exhilarating and disorienting to those caught up in it.) In 1808, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe published the first part of his monumental work immortalizing one of the most durable legends of Western folklore. It is the story of Dr. Faustus, the German wizard and astrologer, who sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for knowledge and power.
The most breathtaking Romantic depiction of technology’s impact on human nature, however, came from Mary Shelley.
In 1816, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, while still a teenager, came to a sensational leap of imagination. She wrote a novel in which her protagonist famously recalls his precise moment of damnation: “It was on a dreary night of November that I behold the accomplishment of my toils. It was already one in the morning, the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs. . . . His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set.”
Her novel, the first and still most celebrated work of fiction examining the impact of Industrial Age technology on the human mind, probed the psyche of a scientist obsessed with creating life who then rejected his creation, even though it could think and feel. She called her story Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus and later described the arrival of her vision as almost miraculous. Speaking of her own dreams, she would later write:
When I placed my head on my pillow, I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think. . . . I saw—with shut eyes, but acute mental vision,—I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world. His success would terrify the artist; he would rush away from his odious handywork, horror-stricken. . . . He sleeps; but he is awakened; he opens his eyes; behold the horrid thing stands at this bedside, opening his curtains, and looking on him with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes. I opened my eyes in terror.
Shelley said that in Frankenstein she “endeavoured to preserve the truth of the elementary principles of human nature.” To this day, Shelley’s title is used as an incantation and an amulet. Whenever any powerful new technology disturbs our ideas of what it means to be human—interspecies organ transplants, genetic engineering, cloning—such research is rocked by that one-word hiss: Frankenstein.
A century later, Shelley’s fears had suffused society. By the first third of the 20th century, it was commonplace to question whether technolo
gical change really equaled progress. Writers warned us against any technological utopias promised by supposedly far-seeing elites. Indeed, they saw these as hell on earth. Utopias became dystopias.
In 1932, Aldous Huxley addressed our fears of a world driven by mass production and mindless pleasure in Brave New World. The date is 632 A.F. (After Ford). Ford is explicity portrayed as a god. Where once there was Christ and his Cross, in the Brave New World there is Ford and his Flivver. Psychological conditioning, genetic engineering and a perfect pleasure drug called soma are the cornerstones of the new society. Reproduction has been removed from the womb and placed on the assembly line. Workers tinker with the embryos to produce grades of human beings like so many Lincolns and Mercurys. They range from the super-intelligent Alpha Pluses down to the dwarfed semi-moronic Epsilons. Each class is conditioned to love its type of work and its place in society—Epsilons are supremely happy running elevators. Outside of their work, people spend their lives in constant pleasure—buying new things whether they need them or not, participating in elaborate sports and universal uninhibited sex. Love, marriage and parenthood are viewed as obscene. The World Controller explains that contentment is more important than freedom or truth.