Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

As a former assembly language programmer I was skeptical of the doomsday scenarios, and fortuitously I was in New Zealand, the first country to welcome the new millennium, at the fateful moment. Sure enough, at 12:00 A.M. on January 1, nothing happened (as I quickly reassured family members back home on a fully functioning telephone). The Y2K reprogrammers, like the elephant-repellent salesman, took credit for averting disaster, but many countries and small businesses had taken their chances without any Y2K preparation, and they had no problems either. Though some software needed updating (one program on my laptop displayed “January 1, 19100”), it turned out that very few programs, particularly those embedded in machines, had both contained the bug and performed furious arithmetic on the current year. The threat turned out to be barely more serious than the lettering on the sidewalk prophet’s sandwich board. The Great Y2K Panic does not mean that all warnings of potential catastrophes are false alarms, but it reminds us that we are vulnerable to techno-apocalyptic delusions.

How should we think about catastrophic threats? Let’s begin with the greatest existential question of all, the fate of our species. As with the more parochial question of our fate as individuals, we assuredly have to come to terms with our mortality. Biologists joke that to a first approximation all species are extinct, since that was the fate of at least 99 percent of the species that ever lived. A typical mammalian species lasts around a million years, and it’s hard to insist that Homo sapiens will be an exception. Even if we had remained technologically humble hunter-gatherers, we would still be living in a geological shooting gallery.¹³ A burst of gamma rays from a supernova or collapsed star could irradiate half the planet, brown the atmosphere, and destroy the ozone layer, allowing ultraviolet light to irradiate the other half.¹⁴ Or the Earth’s magnetic field could flip, exposing the planet to an interlude of lethal solar and cosmic radiation. An asteroid could slam into the Earth, flattening thousands of square miles and kicking up debris that would black out the sun and drench us with corrosive rain. Supervolcanoes or massive lava flows could choke us with ash, CO2, and sulfuric acid. A black hole could wander into the solar system and pull the Earth out of its orbit or suck it into oblivion. Even if the species manages to survive for a billion more years, the Earth and solar system will not: the sun will start to use up its hydrogen, become denser and hotter, and boil away our oceans on its way to becoming a red giant.

Technology, then, is not the reason that our species must someday face the Grim Reaper. Indeed, technology is our best hope for cheating death, at least for a while. As long as we are entertaining hypothetical disasters far in the future, we must also ponder hypothetical advances that would allow us to survive them, such as growing food under lights powered with nuclear fusion, or synthesizing it in industrial plants like biofuel.¹⁵ Even technologies of the not-so-distant future could save our skin. It’s technically feasible to track the trajectories of asteroids and other “extinction-class near-Earth objects,” spot the ones that are on a collision course with the Earth, and nudge them off course before they send us the way of the dinosaurs.¹⁶ NASA has also figured out a way to pump water at high pressure into a supervolcano and extract the heat for geothermal energy, cooling the magma enough that it would never blow its top.¹⁷ Our ancestors were powerless to stop these lethal menaces, so in that sense technology has not made this a uniquely dangerous era in the history of our species but a uniquely safe one.

For this reason, the techno-apocalyptic claim that ours is the first civilization that can destroy itself is misconceived. As Ozymandias reminds the traveler in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem, most of the civilizations that have ever existed have been destroyed. Conventional history blames the destruction on external events like plagues, conquests, earthquakes, or weather. But David Deutsch points out that those civilizations could have thwarted the fatal blows had they had better agricultural, medical, or military technology: