Carl Sagan at MIT - Management in the Year 2000: Sloan School Symposium 1987

[Music] [Music] so for me it's very very exciting to have Carol with us today to help us kind of puzzle out this whole question of where the world seems to be going Carol thank you I I will be talking not so much about whether there's intelligent life elsewhere but whether there's intelligent life here I want to talk mainly about the development of Science and Technology and its consequences I will make some economic statements which if I'm extremely lucky will be as as competent as Lester's Astrophysical statements we are a tool using species it's our our only hedge against disaster our ancestors when they came down from the trees ten million years ago or something like that we're not faster than the competition not stronger than the competition not better camouflage not better diggers or swimmers or flyers or runners all we had going for us was being smarter having hands with which we could build things and that has was and has been the secret of our success we were technological from the beginning so two million years ago our ancestors had a vast stone and wood technology we knew how to chip and flake carve and that's how we managed to make a living in a very good living it was that hunter-gatherer way of life spread to all six continents existed for a million years and the bulk of the evidence is that most of those economies had surpluses and that the amount of time that people work in hunter-gatherer societies even the paltry remnants that are around today is less than the fraction of time that people work in modern industrial economies so immediately there is a real question about how much progress has been made in the last million years the the critical step in human history before the present time is the domestication of plants and animals the Agricultural Revolution of roughly and the years ago where it was figured out instead of simply harvesting vegetables and nuts all by themselves you could use generally in river valleys natural irrigation plant crops and therefore it is in a small area than was otherwise available that meant that the previous way of life ruff fault grieve his way the hunter-gatherers was a nomadic style of existence and if you're enough and you follow the game wander you carry your possessions on your back along with your children and that means you possessions societies virgin personal property no sense of owners the game is is shot is distributed to lots of people among the mmm can't say exactly but you gotta do that and simultaneously Republic of Botswana the praise belongs not the person who shot it but the person who made the arrow a very different kind of lifestyle which it's very interesting badminton spend much time on it but what I'd like to stress is that human beings have spent something like 99% of the history in an extremely different kind of social situation extremely different kinds of economic situation but a very familiar kind of technological situation to what we have today and to the extent that we have emotional predispositions that are hereditary a lot of them must be geared to those hunter-gatherer at times and find very little expression in modern industrial economies now after the settled agricultural revolution it was clear that you had to organize large numbers of people over large areas along the Nile or the Yangtze this required a political organization that had never been seen before it involved hierarchical political structures which don't exist in any untogether society on the planet it involved enforcement police armies which are extremely rare among hunter-gatherers it involved slavery unknown others we are living in the last ten thousand years in an extremely anomalous circumstance for the history of the human species now the technology has been monotonically developing always for short-term advantage it's extremely rare that a technological development is forsworn because a hundred years from now we can see that there will be some serious negative consequences even though ten years from now we can see that there will be some significant advantage we never think on those on those timescales 100 years from now we'll be dead someone else is watching let them look out for that well this passion for the short term over the long term coupled with extraordinary technological prowess as I maintain produced a an extremely dangerous and critical circumstance at the present time the technology now permits us to affect the entire planet and so apart from the evident economic interdependence of the planet which Lester so brilliantly discussed just a moaning on there is an enormous technological interdependence and I'd like to give a few examples the innocent act of burning fossil fuels coal peat wood natural gas petroleum products has consequences it seems the most natural thing in the world the global economy is geared mainly on the fossil fuels but every time you burn a lump of coal let's say you combine the carbon in it with the oxygen in the air that's what the energy comes from and you produce carbon dioxide co2 now let's let's just spend a moment on carbon dioxide the air in this room has point O 3 percent carbon dioxide in it it's a minor constituent it's odorless it's colorless it's not poisonous and it's transparent right here we are seeing each other it must be transparent it's transparent in the visible part of the spectrum the ordinary kind of light that our eyes are sensitive to but in the infrared part of the spectrum the light beyond the red it is not fully transparent and at a wavelength like 15 microns it's opaque if our eyes were good at 15 microns we could not see our finger in front of our face which is why our eyes are not good at 15 microns because that would be perfectly useless now what determines the temperature of the earth visible light comes from the Sun hits the surface of the earth some of its reflected back to space the rest of it it's absorbed by the ground that goes into heating the earth and what we have is a kind of equilibrium the earth radiates to space just the same amount as what it absorbs from space and that equilibrium determines the temperature of the earth but that is only part of the story the other part has to do with the greenhouse effect so-called because of a an imagined analogy to a florist's greenhouse but the basic idea is that transparent atmosphere lets the sunlight in but when the surface tries to radiate away into space in the infrared that radiation is impeded by the partially opaque atmosphere in the infrared carbon dioxide is one of the causes water vapor is another ozone chlorofluorocarbons is a number of molecules that are greenhouse gases and hold the heat in now the lifetime of carbon dioxide molecules in the atmosphere is measured in thousands of years so every carbon dioxide molecule we put in the atmosphere will stay there for the foreseeable future and increases the greenhouse effect and therefore increases the temperature of the earth globally the worldwide temperature the curve of carbon dioxide is a function of time is a kind of increasing sawtooth like that the the up down is a seasonal cycle of vegetation on the planet and the amount of carbon dioxide is monotonically increasing and has been doing that for many decades in fact possibly since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution it is now entirely clear that the earth's temperature is increasing as well globally at estimated rates of industrial and domestic use of fossil fuels you can make some predictions and there's of course some uncertainty but a typical prediction is that at the projected rates of fossil fuel use by the middle to late 21st century that is roughly a century from now the global temperature will have increased sufficiently to make massive climatic change on the planet a typical prognostication is the conversion of the Ukraine and the American Midwest into something a little different from scrub deserts that will have significant economic consequences but on a timescale that nobody worries about because it's not our watch it's our children and grandchildren let them worry about it on the longer term there's an even larger catastrophe in store and that is the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet falling into the Antarctic Ocean raising a sea level by tens of meters all over the planet and that means inundating every coastal city on earth and that's maybe that's a much less certain prediction the timescale it's a little like what Lester was saying about economic forecasting that it's going to happen is reasonably clear and when it's going to happen it's less clear for something like 150 years from now not maybe before then we will have figured out alternative energy sources but because the time scale is so long for scavenging carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere what we do is fundamentally irreversible now so this raises an important question what are our responsibilities to two three and four generations from now bearing in mind that it is extremely unlikely that there will be a technical fix to this problem notice the carbon dioxide does not respect national boundaries has never heard of national sovereignty and therefore the burning of coal in the United States affects the climate in the Soviet Union and vice-versa suppose that we were smart and started limiting the use of fossil fuels made massive investments in alternative energy sources solar power and ultimately fusion power thermonuclear reactions what would the consequences be well suppose the United States and the Soviet Union in 30 years not out of the question had economically viable fusion reactors and replaced their entire fossil fuel economies despite enormous resistance from fossil fuel corporations and with that within everything be fine everything would not be fine the third largest coal producer on the planet is China China is in the throes of massive industrialization can we imagine the United States and the Soviet Union going to China and saying look we know we made some some mistakes in our industrialization using fossil fuels but please learn from our mistake don't you use coal as well otherwise our farmers in the Ukraine and the Midwest are going to be in trouble what's in it for China I think the United States and the Soviet Union would have to provide the alternative power technology at a rate which was competitive with Chinese use of coal which will be very cheap in order to make much of a dent in Chinese thinking possibly China will be much more altruistic and planet oriented in the United States in the Soviet Union but I wonder if we can bet on that well this is a kind of prototype of a generic set of problems that worldwide technology now brings before us a set of problems which involve unanticipated negative consequences of apparently benign technology consequences very severe consequences that are global in nature and therefore that cannot be solved even by one or two of the most powerful industrial nations by themselves requires the entire industrial world to to deal with let me give another example we talked about the visible part of the spectrum and the infrared long word of red while going the other way short word of violet there's another part of the spectrum that the Sun puts out that every object puts out but that our eyes are not sensitive to called the ultraviolet ultraviolet light is very dangerous because the molecules that make us up especially the nucleic acids and the proteins fall to pieces or undergo chemical reactions when it's supposed to ultraviolet light we ordinarily don't have to worry about that because we have an ozone layer ozone is three atoms of oxygen chemically bond that a kind Providence has put up 25 kilometers to 40 kilometers in the sky and it absorbs almost all of that ultraviolet radiation it's very little ozone however up there were brought down to this room the thickness of the ozone layer would be a quarter of a millimeter thick it's small and therefore it's vulnerable now in refrigerants and decreasing Li in aerosol propellants and as a degradation product of of some plastic styrofoam and the like is a molecule set of molecules called chlorofluorocarbons CCF's the brand name of the most widely known is a dupont brand named freon these molecules have been chosen precisely because of their how chemically inert they are no harm if you breathe them they don't interact with anything around here it's it sounds like the ideal kind of by-product for for some industrial applications but precisely because they're so inert they stay around for a long time they get out into the open air the atmosphere circulates them and eventually they wind up high in the atmosphere where they bump into ozone molecules and ozone is sufficiently reactive to combine with the CCF's and fall to pieces well what is happening is that the ozone is declining there is a unpredicted and extremely worrisome hold of large dimensions in the Antarctic ozone asphere there are other holes in the ozone which are appearing now in Spitsbergen and elsewhere and it seems very clear that the production of chlorofluorocarbons is in the process of compromising the global ozone layer and the time scale for these molecules to be scavenged out of the atmosphere in part by interaction with ozone is something like a century so if we stopped right now all ozone all CCF production a hundred years from now the consequences would be apparent now what would happen if there was a significant decrease in the in Arizona sphere a superficial consequence which is what one mainly hears about but it's by no means the most worrisome is an increase of skin cancer in people with lights kittens people with dark skin are better protected is one of the few cases where there's a kind of technological justice the the people who do the technology carelessly are the ones who are preferentially destroyed by it and dark-skinned people who didn't do it are not bothered by it in most cases it goes the other way that that the people who had nothing to do with the technology of the ones who most suffer from the negative consequences but much more important than skin cancer is the fact that there's a vast range of microorganisms that are exquisitely sensitive to increase ultraviolet light for example the phytoplankton at the surface of the oceans which are the primary source of molecular oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere there is a vast ecological pyramid you know these guys harvest sunlight and then these guys eat those guys and these guys eat those guys and way up to the top that's us and we eat them who eat them depend with them to eat these guys who are sensitive to ultraviolet light now this web of interactions is extremely poorly studied extremely poorly understood but I don't think it's it's being alarmist to say that there's something to worry about here and to try to deal with this this issue large number of industrialized nations United States and Canada Western Europe the Soviet Union Japan have been meeting and have agreed in principle on emission controls of chlorofluorocarbons there are special cases Soviet Union and Japan want some exclusions for periods of time so it's not to harm their domestic industry some US corporations have been very responsible on this issue even if it involves some loss of profit but this is another example of an accidental byproduct of high-technology that has global venue that involves all industrialized nations that has possibly extremely serious consequences and there are others acid rain for example radioactivity from nuclear reactor accidents one very worrisome aspect though is if you look how these dangers were uncovered they're uncovered absolutely accidentally in the byproduct of some other kinds of scientific investigation and very late which suggests that there is probably a significant category of other serious global consequences of technology that we haven't been smart enough to figure out yet other discoveries along these lines won't be made in the future we could even describe some economic diseases like AIDS as in this category because they clearly are significantly assisted by advances in transportation technology so that the world is to a significant extent sexually intercommunicating all and the exponentiation of a number of AIDS cases worldwide is now something very serious because Exponential's beat everything and this may very well have powerful consequences in the distribution of power worldwide for example Soviet Union in China have disproportionately extremely small incidents of AIDS because they are not as sexually into communicating with the rest of the world as of many other countries it is possible that one consequence of the AIDS epidemic is to leave the Soviet Union and China in a disproportionately better-off situation and then the industrialized West and Japan might have that might be the single most significant determinant of the balance of power among nations on the planet and not economics not nuclear war not anything else and who would have figured that well I want to say a few words about about the nuclear arms race it is in a way in this category as well and one way to look at it is the following in 1945 just after when Lester began with Bretton Woods the United States was the most powerful nation on the planet not just economically but militarily it was invulnerable surrounded east and west by impassable oceans north and south by weak and friendly neighbors the United States had absolutely nothing to worry about in a military sense at least in terms of direct aggression by other nations the United States then developed nuclear weapons and their delivery systems has been the leading nation on the planet and ever increasing the sophistication of these weapons and the delivery systems at enormous cost I'll say something about cost in a moment and driving I think there's no doubt that it's American technology that has driven the nuclear arms race much more than Soviet technological advances their Soviets are always in the situation of huffing and puffing to follow up and try to match or counter American advances and the net result is that today the United States is exquisitely vulnerable to utter annihilation because of the very technology that the United States pioneered in the development nuclear weapons we are alive United States today because Soviet leaders did not 20 minutes ago decide to annihilate US and Soviet citizens are alive today because 20 minutes ago American leaders did not decide to annihilate them everybody united states is is vulnerable in extremely short time skills a fuse 20 minutes long because of this technology designed to protect ourselves there is a kind of irony now the nuclear arms race is so invested with national propaganda on both sides that of course both sides have a list as long as your arm of the abuses by the other and all the reasons why it's essential to have nuclear weapons to protect ourselves but the net result is that nobody is protected and everybody is vulnerable there are some 60,000 nuclear weapons in the world the planet has been booby-trapped by the United States and the Soviet Union of those 60,000 weapons almost 25,000 our so-called strategic weapons that is connected to delivery systems that carry them from the homeland of one superpower to the homeland the other superpower and the remaining 35 30 to 35 thousand nuclear weapons are so-called tactical nuclear weapons some of which are are given demeaning names like munitions but most of which are more powerful than the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki how many cities are there on the planet Earth there's about 2300 cities if you define a city as having more than a hundred thousand people that means that the United States and the Soviet Union if they wished to cooperate on this matter by devoting to nuclear weapons to every city on the planet could destroy every city on the planet and have twenty thousand strategic weapons left over as a challenge to the target ears to figure out what to use those weapons for I think it's very clear that no matter what the function of nuclear weapons are there are far too many of them in a so-called central exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union estimates of the prompt fatalities that is in a few days to a few weeks range from many hundreds of millions to a high estimate by the World Health Organization of about two billion people killed outright and that's mainly from blast fire prompt radiation and short-term radioactive fallout there are a set of longer-term adverse consequences of nuclear war and let me just list a few of them there's long term radioactivity which spreads most of it hemispheric wide northern hemisphere that there's a northern mid latitude target zone where where the greatest vulnerability is but the radioactivity spreads north and south of that and some of it we now know spreads into the southern hemisphere there is a new and very incompletely understood consequence from the burning of modern cities the production of toxic smaug's you know how in the burning of a modern skyscraper people are said to be overcome by smoke smoke inhalation that's what it's called that's not what happens at all what happens is that in the burning of modern synthetics and plastics a witch's brew of poison gases is generated carbon monoxide dioxins furans and you breathe them and it's like gas warfare and you you are poisoned now in the burning of a modern city those gases all heavy so they stay near the ground spread out from the city into the surrounding countryside and some estimates of how much of that would occur are are very serious this is not something that the defense establishments have discovered and it's not something that they're interested in calculating it's all been done by civilian scientists and then there are a set of extremely serious climatic consequences which go into the rubric of nuclear winter which is essentially a blocking of sunlight for periods between weeks and perhaps years lowering of temperatures 10 to 20 degrees centigrade change in the in the average temperature of the planet are what the range of modern calculations for a nuclear war that involves about a third of the strategic Arsenal's the average temperature this difference between now and the last ice age is 10 degrees centigrade so we're talking about very serious temperature changes the most significant adverse consequences of nuclear winter is is in agriculture the destruction of crops for example Canadian wheat and barley production is brought to zero by a three degree centigrade temperature decline and it is estimated that from this source alone starvation for several billion people as is likely there are also a range of synergism z' that is cases where the some of the advert where the net adverse consequence is more than the sum of the individual adverse consequences and let me give just one example of how that would work the prompt effects of the nuclear war destroy doctors and hospitals who are preferentially in the target zones and and in the cities the destruction of civil and sanitary facilities promotes the development of disease birds are preferentially killed by lowering temperatures and the radiation they are a significant source of control of insects which are disease vectors so the birds aren't there the disease carriers proliferate medical facilities are unavailable and radiation levels that aren't enough to kill you are enough to significantly lower your immunity to disease and one of the consequences of the sub-lethal radiation in a nuclear war even in places far from target zones is something like a global case of AIDS that is I mean you don't have to do anything special to get it except be complacent about the nuclear arms race but what happens is your ability to resist disease is compromised at precisely the time when diseases are rampaging that's an example of synergism well it can be argued that these consequences are so severe that we of course would not would not permit this to happen and that great safeguards are taken to prevent accidental nuclear war inadvertent nuclear war but I think we only have to go back two years to two spectacular technological catastrophes of the two superpowers to see how bankrupt this argument is I'm talking about Challenger and Chernobyl here we have high technologies in which enormous amounts of national prestige have been invested by the United States in the Soviet Union and which nevertheless spectacularly fail there are many ironies here one of which is a year before Chernobyl an interview with the Soviet deputy minister of heavy industry or something was published in the Soviet english-language magazine Soviet life in which this guy by bad luck picked on Chernobyl as an example of the safety of Soviet fission reactors and estimated she said had been carefully done that the average time to catastrophic failure for the Chernobyl nuclear plant would be a hundred thousand years that's how long you'd have to wait before there was a serious accident that Chernobyl and he was pointing to this as an example of the safety of Soviet nuclear power facilities one year later kaboom and likewise for the for the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster in which seven astronauts lost their lives both NASA and contractor spokespersons had said less than a year before the Charlie Challenger disaster that the average time to spectacular failure would be 10,000 years now these aren't just any old technologies these are technologies which are important for the public images in the United States and the Soviet Union where there isn't anything like the secrecy involved that there isn't a nuclear arms race and therefore the opportunity for vigorous criticism is much larger than in compartmentalised secret environment such as involves nuclear weapons for these and similar reasons the claim that yes we have an extremely dangerous technology but don't worry we have absolutely impassable safeguards should be greeted with some significant skepticism in my view and then beyond that there is the evident fact evident in the century of Hitler and Stalin that madmen can achieve the highest the highest offices in modern industrial nations and in fact I think it is apparent even from recent history of many nations that the the psychological screening for highest officials is not what it might be and therefore it must be only a matter of time it's very clear for example that in 1944 and 45 if Hitler had nuclear weapons and the lies had nuclear weapons and Hitler was it was guaranteed to Hitler that if Hitler used nuclear weapons that Germany would be destroyed that nevertheless Hitler would have used nuclear weapons in fact Hitler was as angry at the German people for not doing some superhuman effort to to deflect the Allied invasion as he wasn't the Alliance he wanted the German people to be punished and that kind of psychology in a national leader with nuclear weapons is something I believe to be worried about so the nuclear arms race is something supremely foolish that we have done always for patriotic reasons always thinking the short term and ignoring the long term is a a kind of machine that goes by itself each side's escalation prompts the other side to escalate and is capable certainly of obliterating the United States in the Soviet Union and Western Europe Eastern Europe China Japan Canada that's of course not the whole planet but for those of us who live in those countries and even for a few others that that would be a significant loss nuclear war would very likely destroy the global civilization and conceivably although this is much less certain could end the few million year old experiment human experiment on the planet Earth stakes are never higher here is an example of a technology that that in dangers everybody on the planet and yes there are some stirrings we will if all goes well next month have a three percent reduction in those sixty thousand nuclear weapons on the planet it's at least a step in the right direction but at the same time the United States and the Soviet Union will be building more nuclear weapons than those taken away in the INF treaty both nations built something like two or three net new nuclear weapons every day and this is going to take some doing to undo the nuclear arms race in my view what is needed is to bring it down at least to a kind of minimum deterrence in which each side retains an invulnerable capability to annihilate the other but not enough to destroy the global civilization that seems to me minimal prudence I think there's a significant chance I don't know what it is it's certainly not as high as 50% of doing that but it's certainly not going to be easy now I want to say something about about cost of the nuclear arms race and indeed of of armaments in general the world spends every year one trillion dollars on augments the United States and the Soviet Union vie with each other for the privilege of selling of the most arms to other usually developing nations and this money I think an extraterrestrial observer might believe is not being used in the most efficient way for human betterment we could ask another question how much money is the United States spent on the Cold War since 1945 now I'm not for a moment arguing that there aren't real reasons to have significant improve National Defense but I think a case can be made that you could do that with significantly less money than has actually been spent how much money has been spent by the time the Reagan administration leaves office in January 1989 or conceivably earlier the total amount in 1987 dollars will have been spent on the on the Cold War is ten trillion dollars by the United States what could you buy for 10 jillion dollars the answer is you could buy everything everything in the United States except the land nuclear purchase for 10 trillion dollars highways skyscrapers ships boats airplanes cars school rooms baby diapers everything so it seems to me that does raise the question of has this been the most effective use of our money and likewise has it been the most effective use of the comparable Soviet expenditures in addition to the question of the amount of money spent on this there's the question of the deflection of scientific and engineering talent away from the civilian economy more than half the scientists and technologists on the planet today are employed by the various military establishments what would happen if a significant fraction of them were pried loose to develop other kinds of technology that might be a little more beneficial as Lester mentioned the United States has gone within the last few years from being the largest creditor to the largest debtor nation on the planet the national debt is not only larger than that of any previous administration it is larger than the sum of all previous administrations back to George Washington since 1980 the annual increase in the budget deficit is almost exactly the annual increase in military expenditures I am very far from understanding anything about economics but it occurs to me that these two facts may be connected I also wonder if the boom in the German and Japanese economies might have something to do with the fact that there are military budgets as a fraction of gross national product I've been extremely low because of the United States supplying a significant amount of their defense and concern by other nations that in Japanese in German rearmament in the light of world war 2 may be undesirable there is a sense in which and this may be too strong I'll say it anyway in which the United States is showing signs of being a kind of developing nation it is 17th in the world in infant mortality a quarter of the population is functionally illiterate high school students all over the United States cannot locate the United States on an unmarked world map have no idea where their own country is I saw one one excursion of this sort where where a student asked to identify where the Soviet Union was pointed to Nicaragua this may be a consequence of the success of the president's propaganda but it is geographically incompetent patent applications are steeply done there are evident homeless people in every major city 20 million people in the United States are hungry every day that skip one or more meal because they can't afford it there are half as many graduate degrees in science and technology every year in the United States than in Japan which has half the American population public transportation and urban infrastructure in general are disgrace by say European standards there are lacks environmental standards in some respects United States is one of the most backward nations on the planet in dealing with its technological waste and the kind of decisions which are in effect made are that we need the job so desperately that we will sacrifice of the health of someone astuteness citizens united states is 14th in the world in percent of the population with safe water now all of these things are connected with money you could solve these problems in the United States if there were more money available to do it why is that money not available it seems to me it is very clear that one of the chief reasons it's not available both of the direct cents and in the indirect sense of what those scientists and technologists could do if they weren't working for the military is the military budget and any attempt to emerge from the global economic crisis which Lester has outlined seems to me and I claim those significant expertise here to have to deal with the question of the massive military budgets of the United States and the Soviet Union and indeed in the developing world as well this has clearly been recognized by mr. Gorbachev who makes it clear that one of the reasons he's interested in both nuclear and conventional arms reduction treaty z' is to free up some of the military sector of the Soviet economy for civilian uses and to do that there are changes needed in in the openness in the society and the freedoms which are given to citizens very hard to to do significant pioneering science and technology in a society in which you are not permitted to make public criticism criticism is the lifeblood scientific method and so from economic necessity freedom is at least in limited to unknown at extent is driven and precisely the same thing is is true in China and the statements been explicitly made by Deng Xiaoping we I guess what I'm saying is the definition of national security involves more than how many weapons you have in fact in terms of nuclear weapons there is certainly a point in which the more nuclear weapons you have the less safe you are as I was trying to argue before there's a kind of counterintuitive aspect of modern technology in the military and in the civilian spheres and there is a necessity after 1945 of what Einstein called a new way of thinking which is very slowly permeating into the minds of leaders on the question of the definition of national defense I'd like to read to you a one sentence quote from Dwight Eisenhower the problem in defense spending is to figure how far you should go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without and any definition of national security it seems to me has to involve the well-being of the citizens economic well-being a positive sense of the future based not on path but on real expectations education especially in science and technology the scientific illiteracy of Americans in general is scandalous every day there are significant decisions made in Washington involving science and technology which have very long outreach into the future and 435 members of Congress there are perhaps two who in any sense have a scientific or technological background the office of the president's science advisor has been downgraded in recent years the president's scientific advisory committee was cancelled in the Nixon administration because it gave advice that was politically undesired the laws of physics did not correspond adequately enough to the ideological wishes of the leadership and no subsequent president has thought it advisable to resuscitate the president Science Advisory Committee for a nation which is in many significant respects dependent upon Science and Technology to arrange things that nobody knows anything about science and technology is clearly suicidal and some of the problems that I've been mentioning before are connected to this how is it we didn't foresee the consequences of many of these technologies it's because there's a very small science and technology base in in the United States there's a small science and technology base in the Soviet Union as well but they're doing a lot more in scientific technological education then we are how much science and technology do you see for example in the mass media every newspaper in America has a daily astrology column how many have even a weekly science column why is this how much science do you see on television when somebody wins the Nobel Prize do you ever get a coherent explanation of what he wanted for what was this discovery that was important enough doing a Nobel Prize well the the basic sense in television is that the American people are too stupid to understand and that it takes concentration and therefore in the quest for small differential advantage in a competition between the networks that it will be a means of losing ratings to spend time explaining what science is about short term advantage for the network long term disaster OMG well I have just one concluding remark and that is that I know I've been slightly negative in this presentation there is not the slightest doubt that science and technology but in particular the scientific way of thinking can be used in a very significant way to turn around many of these problems and to work for human betterment but it requires a break with the idea that everything we've done in the past is okay and any criticism of it is as impermissible that so many people for example of both political parties and in fact in the United States and the Soviet Union have invested their entire careers on the advisability of the nuclear arms race that that already means that there is a vast vested interest in turning things around and this is true in many of the other technological areas that I mentioned in order to justify a lifetime of some ambulance on the critical issues people are reluctant to even have those critical issues addressed so what I think is most urgently needed in all aspects of life the United States and the Soviet Union and elsewhere is a comprehensive baloney detection kit in which the average citizen can treat with appropriate skepticism remarks made by high government officials and those justifying the continuance of the way we've always done things whatever those things are I think good widespread critical thinking is an essential precondition for the higher standards of leadership that we desperately need and for the higher standards of education and awareness of problems we face which i think is required of every citizen thank you very much Clausen car [Applause]

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Published: Wed Dec 05 2018