by Adrian Berry
It was always more fun to believe in evil creatures from space than benevolent ones. Like the pretentious Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), the latter tend to induce soppy silliness - although ’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and 20/0 (1984) were brilliant exceptions to this rule. The Rocket Man (1954), the story of an alien visitor who gives a magic ray to a little orphan boy and tells him to use it only for good, made me want to throw up. And I couldn’t stop laughing at the naively sincere Red Planet Mars (1952) in which people learn by interplanetary radio that Christian beings live on Mars. Everyone becomes determined to live more virtuously as a result. has a lot to answer for.
Malevolent aliens scared audiences out of this world in Invasion of The Body Snatchers (1956) in which peoples’ bodies are imperceptibly taken over. (The 1978 remake of this film was third rate.) The same paranoid atmosphere, where you do not know whether you are talking to a fellow-human or a monster in human guise, was recreated in the 3-D shocker It Came from Outer Space (1953); and I fear that the ultimate in horror may have been reached in Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986), both scientifically plausible because they were solidly based on insect biology. As their ads put it, ‘In space no one can hear you scream.’
Mad computers, a possible outcome of ‘artificial intelligence’, the science of teaching machines to think, have been almost as frightening as evil aliens. The classic in this genre was The Forbin Project (1969), in which a giant ‘thinking machine’ (in those days all computers were gigantic) is built to take over the management of America’s missile defences. Locking out its creator , it demands global disarmament and strikes with nuclear bombs when it doesn’t get it - an identical idea, incidentally, to the sub-plots of Terminator II and its earlier and rather better lower-budget version The Terminator (1984).
’s Who’s Who entry contains no mention of Demon Seed (1977), in which she is forcibly impregnated by a lustful computer-controlled robot. Perhaps she thought it less tastelessly agreeable than I did. The pronouncements of the murky and disgusting computer in Dune (1984) were both disagreeably tasteless and unintelligible. Perhaps the only mad computer in SF cinema whose murderous conduct was truly fascinating to scientists and lay viewers alike was HAL in 2001, its name an alphabetical code for ‘IBM’.
Why not take the average cliché-ridden western plot and change its horses into spaceships and its towns into planets? had this idea and the result was Star Wars (1977), a sort of cleaned-up version of Dune. It could have been the model for a new genre of light-hearted space operas that charmed by not taking themselves too seriously.*
*Star Wars did not appear to take anything seriously, even the difference between distance and time. ‘I can make the journey in twelve parsecs,’ says (), commander of the starship Millennium Falcon. This is rather like saying meaninglessly on Earth: ‘I can be in town in six miles.’
But this, alas, did not happen. Its sequels, The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and The Return of the Jedi (1983), lacked the light touch (as has the Star Trek series) and were merely pretentious.
Where, then, is the attraction of Terminator IP Not in its rather commonplace main plot - whether a killer robot from the future can succeed in liquidating a small boy who is destined to play a heroic role in a coming war - but rather in its background plot about time travel into the past.
Many discerning people spotted the fatal scientific flaw in the film of ’s The Time Machine (1960), an error that Wells himself never understood. You cannot travel backwards in time because you could then change the past, an impossible paradox. But one can, without breaking physical laws, get round this difficulty by travelling backwards into ‘another reality’.
There is thus one reality in which the boy is killed and another in which he is not. The heroes are therefore free to choose their own future. They must ensure that they live in the latter reality - by saving the boy and killing the evil robot. It is the same scientific ingenuity of plotting that explained the popularity of Back to the Future (1985) and its two sequels.
Abolishing Hunger
Will our descendants be able to feed themselves? The pessimism that has long surrounded the question is giving away to new hope as the Green Revolution proceeds. The latest encouraging news is from Brazil which is rapidly becoming a farming superpower.
The ‘cerrado’, a 1.2 million-square-kilometre plain south of the , was long ignored by farmers who regarded it as a pestilent wasteland of scrub, worthless, crooked trees and acidic soil. Then, soon after 1960, when the new capital Brasilia was founded to exploit the resources of the Brazilian heartland, scientists discovered a species of wasp and a viral disease that would control two of the cerrado’s ancient pests, its caterpillars and beetles.
of the Associated Press, who gave a fascinating account of what is happening in the cerrado, described it as a ‘verdant carpet of soya beans stretching to the horizon, and on which wheat, tangerines, cucumber, avocados, and strawberries flourish’.
The output of the cerrado is enabling Brazil to produce a record harvest for a third straight year, enjoying a farming boom that even the most gloomy experts acknowledge will boost the country far above its present position as the world’s fifth largest food exporter.
Brazil’s farm production has grown by 47 per cent since 1980, faster than all its other industries and more than four times its rate of economic growth. Even though the amount of land being farmed has not changed in this period, and government subsidies to farmers have been halved, Brazil last year harvested a record 75.2 million tons of grains and oil seeds. Grain production on the cerrado, where farmers still only till a fifth of the arable land, has quadrupled in the past quarter century to 20 million tons a year. Today it produces 45 per cent of Brazil’s coffee, a third of its soya beans, rice and corn, and a tenth of its wheat and beans.
‘In the 1940s, this was only a dream,’ said , the agronomist of Texas A M University, and the father of the Green Revolution, whose revolutionary studies in crop production won him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970. He believes Brazil still has vast areas of unused land which it can profitably cultivate.
Nowhere can these advances be seen more vividly than in the Brazilian production of soya beans, that universal crop that originated in China, and which has done more perhaps than any other substance to alleviate world hunger, providing vegetable proteins for tens of millions of people and ingredients for hundreds of chemical products and medicines.
In 1970, Brazilian farmers produced 9,900 tons of soya beans on about 36,000 square kilometres in the central-western states of Goias, Mato Grosso, Mato Grosso do Sul and Minas Gerais. By 1985, in those states, they needed just 30,000 square kilometres to grow six million tons of soya beans.
All this tremendous output seems a far cry from the 1960s, when a bestselling book was published with the title Famine 1975! Environmental pessimists simply looked at population growth statistics, ignored any possibility of scientific improvement in crop yields (although the work of and others was well known at the time), and threw up their hands in despair.
The example of Brazil and of other countries where food production is unexpectedly booming shows us how far we have progressed since the centuries before Columbus, when meals, consisting largely of meat (that often led to scurvy), were unspeakably monotonous and insipid. Potatoes, tomatoes and maize were unknown. So also were lemons, sugar, tea and coffee. Pepper was so expensive that rich men were called ‘pepper-sacks’.
Today, the biggest difficulty in feeding the hungry is not in producing food but in getting it to where it can be sold. ‘Most of the highways in Brazil are lousy,’ said Jonas Neves, an agronomist at the Cerrado Research Centre. ‘When a trucker uses a bad road he charges more. By the time our soya beans reach port, they’ve tripled in price.’
If transport can be made as efficient as food production, the world need never go hungry.
Backward Britain
Many American members of Congress have been voting with enthusiasm to fund the permanent
ly orbiting space station Alpha. Even those who do not understand its purposes like the idea because it is ‘to do with the future’. The House of Commons, if given the same choice, would probably prefer to spend the money on false teeth.
The reason for this is simple: the British people have a tendency to be ‘technophobic’. They have a deep suspicion, amounting to a hatred, of new technological ideas.
The seeds of British technophobia were probably sown in about 7000 bc, when the English Channel was formed as a result of the retreat of the glaciers at the end of the last Ice Age. Being an island people made them hostile to foreign ideas.
The pattern seldom changes. There is a brilliant British proposal or invention (they have always had talented inventors), and the idea is scorned at home but then exploited by foreigners. The first sign of this fatal policy was seen in the thirteenth century, when the Oxford friar Roger Bacon conceived of vast futuristic plans that included motor cars, aircraft and, of more immediate practical use, the cannon and the compass. He won no immediate fame for these schemes and ended up by being thrown into prison for insulting the clergy. His compass was put to use by the seamen of Henry the Navigator of Portugal, and his cannon was used a century later, in the battle of Crecy in 1346 on the English side. But the English failed to develop these ‘wondrous new-made bombards’, thereby losing the Hundred Years War against the French, who had by contrast developed a formidable artillery.
They failed again when it came to , who, while seeking funds for his expedition, sent his brother to London in 1488 to request funds from for what became his American expedition. He was turned down by the unimaginative monarch, and the first empire in the New World was won by Spain.
Britain might have beaten America in creating the computer industry, now one of the world’s largest sources of wealth, but for . sought funding from his government to finish building the world’s first cumbersome, but workable, computer. But in vain, wrote that he could see only one purpose for such a machine: ‘to calculate the vast sums of public money that have already been squandered on it.’
In 1989, this decision was shown to have been catastrophic, reversing the conventional verdict of the history books which said that the materials needed to build his machine did not then exist. Experimenters at the London Science Museum proved that the materials needed to build his machine did exist in his time by building the machine with them. It could have been completed, and it might have changed the world.
Some of Britain’s monarchs and prime ministers have been highly interested in science. was fond of peering through one of the first microscopes, delighting to see flies appear as large as sparrows. Lord Salisbury kept a laboratory at his country house at Hatfield that contained many samples of seaweed. His was the first private house in Britain to use electricity, and he introduced a primitive telephone with which he maddened his guests by reciting nursery rhymes through concealed loudspeakers.
To , science was the most powerful force in history. ‘Its once feeble vanguards,’ he wrote in 1932, ‘often trampled down, often perishing in isolation, have now become a vast organized army marching forward on all fronts towards objectives that none may measure or define. It is an army that cares nothing for all the laws that men have made, nothing for their most time-honoured customs, nothing for their most dearly cherished beliefs, nothing for their deepest instincts.’
Except for during the war, when Britain introduced radar, penicillin, the jet engine and electronic code-breaking, little of this enthusiasm has been transformed into action. Postwar governments, including the present one, seem to have developed a hatred of science.
set a precedent in the Sixties by cancelling the successful Blue Streak rocket. ranted vaguely about the ‘white heat of the technological revolution’, but pushed this revolution so feebly that he succeeded only in provoking an unprecedented brain-drain. The British have thus seen endless cancellations of promising projects that would have been profitable, but which were deemed useless because no profit would immediately appear from them.
One of the worst episodes was in 1987, when the then Trade and Industry Minister, , was invited to join the European manned space programme. He reacted with fury, declaring that he did not wish to see a ‘frog’, i.e. a Frenchman, in space.
The result of his refusal to join was financially catastrophic. For under the rules of the European Space Agency, participating nations would be awarded contracts to build hardware. This would have included parts of the giant Ariane-5 rocket. thus deprived British Aerospace and its subcontracting firms of hundreds of millions of pounds.
Other well-known examples have been the failure to develop ’s swing-wing aircraft, the refusal to fund ’s Hotol rocket - although its design now appears to be obsolete - and the decision in the late Eighties to cut 25 per cent from the nuclear fusion experiments at Culham, experiment of which Ministers probably understood nothing.
The policy of Conservative governments since 1979, like so many of their predecessors, has been one of philistinism. , when he was president of the Royal Society, was told by a senior Treasury official that there is too much science in Britain, that Nobel Prizes are unimportant and that scientists must think more of the risks of their work than its benefits.
British science is in consequence dangerously underfunded. The country spends less of its GNP on publicly funded research than any other major European country. Private industry, taking its cue from the state, spends 30 per cent less than the Japanese. The policy looks safe enough on surface, but is rotten beneath. For the cancellation of a good project makes no difference to next year’s budget. Its effects are only felt decades later. But the ministers who make it will be long out of office, so why should they care?
The great futurist once told me that Britain’s most probable fate is to ‘decline slowly and genteelly for the rest of history’. The country performed well in past centuries when few technological innovations were needed. But now that success almost always depends on being willing to spend money on science, its future prospects appear dismal.
When writing my book The Next 500 Years (1995), which predicts that mankind will reach the stars, I came to the melancholy conclusion that these and other stupendous achievements will be made without the help of any British government.
Greed Threatens the Peace
They shall beat their swords into ploughshares,
and their spears into pruning hooks.
Isaiah 2:4
When the Soviet Union collapsed, an attempt was launched by the Bush administration to obtain the maximum amount of Soviet weapons-grade uranium, long employed in warheads, and sell it for use in American nuclear power stations, a project dubbed ‘megatons into megawatts’.
At stake was the nightmarish fear that it could fall into the hands of terrorists, as in Tom Clancy’s novel The Sum of All Fears, in which 80,000 people watching a football match are ‘executed’ by nuclear-armed Muslim fanatics.
In a 1992 deal with Russia, five tons of enriched uranium would be bought by the US over 20 years at a cost of £8 billion. It would be used solely for peaceful purposes. In the words of the agreement’s chief architect, , of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, this would prevent the uranium from going to the highest bidder. But under the administration, this project has been smothered by bureaucracy and greed. A detailed article in the Wall Street Journal Europe showed the kafkaesque difficulties of trying to understand what is happening to this dangerous material.
The White House decided that the sole agent authorized to buy the uranium from Russia should be the United States Enrichment Corporation (Usec), which appears to be both state-owned and private in that it enjoys the legal privileges of being both. It pays no taxes, and its planned ‘privatization’ will profit the government with a £1.1 billion budget reduction. The Journal reports: ‘White House officials have become so enamoured of making a maximum profit on this deal that they have lost sight of the prime goal.’
Eleven public utilities
that control nuclear energy have accused Usec of asking too high a price for its uranium, and have issued lawsuits against it. But the cases are unlikely to be heard because Usec’s lobbyists have inserted a waiver of liability from all pending lawsuits into congressional legislation now before the Senate.
Recently, in there was a most extraordinary farce. Usec hired a top legal firm to present its commercial arguments to the National Security Agency. This, says the Journal, was ‘one of a few examples of one federal agency hiring a lawyer to lobby another federal agency - all paid for by the US taxpayer’.
Not only are the utilities reluctant to buy the uranium because of its price. It is hard to see how Usec can ever prosper in view of an anti-dumping agreement reached in 1991 between the Commerce Department and the uranium mining industry that strictly limits the sale of foreign uranium.
The Journal comments that these events render ‘farcical’ the administration’s other nuclear posturings. It is campaigning for a permanent ban to nuclear weapons testing - which could have disastrous long-term consequences, especially for Britain, which is not being allowed to test its Trident missiles. It has also been conducting a noisy and futile campaign against Iran. The US attempted to mount an international trade embargo against Iran to stop its negotiations with Russia to set up nuclear power plants. The attempt fell flat, and Iran is now planning to build more such plants in addition to the one already being constructed, any one of which might be used for nuclear weapons manufacture.
These goings-on are considered all the more amazing in the light of Vice-President Gore’s policy over the space station. Not only will this orbiting laboratory create unprecedented advances in medical research. It will also, as Gore persuaded Congressmen, occupy the talents of Russian engineers who might otherwise have found a living making bombs and selling them to terrorists.