on behalf of the Frederick s Pardee Center for the study of the longer-range future welcome to tonight's lecture lecture by the party visiting professor for two thousand five and six Freeman Dyson like the center itself this distinguished lecture series was established by the imagination and generosity of Frederick s Pardee Freeman Dyson was born in England and received his BA degree from the University of Cambridge he has spent practically his entire professional life as a professor at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies from which he only recently retired a winner of the prestigious National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction professor Dyson has written more than a half-dozen books and numerous periodical pieces he has received honorary degrees from nearly 2,000 universities that he's a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the Royal Society in Britain he's won numerous awards among them the Enrico Fermi award and the five at a Kappa Ward the Robert Oppenheimer Oppenheim Memorial Prize the Max Planck medal of the German Physical Society the Hughes medal of the Royal Society the Lawrence medal of the Royal Netherlands Academy of the Hyneman prize of the American Institute of Physics and almost a dozen more he has been a consultant to government departments and agencies and has served as a chairman of the Federation of American scientists of the towering intellectual figures of our time professor dyson by the range and variety of his interests and accomplishments stands out as a renaissance scientist he has contributed to learner journals but also has written for the general reader in the pages of The New Yorker and of Scientific American and similar periodicals he has studied the ethical problems of war in peace has studied natural theology has studied the origins of life has studied how to narrow the gap between the rich and the poor he has won the Templeton Prize for progress in religion he has been honored by Rock Rockville University for embodying the scientist as poet he has helped to design a spaceship his fields of study have included quantum electrodynamics nuclear reactors solid state physics ferromagnetism astrophysics and biology professor dyson will speak to us tonight for close to an hour and then we'll answer questions and here he is well thank you for that generous introduction I'm grateful to Boston University and to mr. Frederick party in particular for inviting me here to talk about the longer-range future mr. Pardee has defined what he means by the longer-range future it's the future from 35 to 200 years ahead so I'm quite safe I won't be around when when when my predictions are turn out to be wrong I'll try to stay within those limits but I should stay I should say at the start that as a scientist I don't have much faith in predictions science is organized unpredictability what scientists do is to arrange things in an experiment to be as unpredictable as possible and then do the experiment to see what will happen you might say that if something is predictable then it's not science so when I'm making predictions I'm not speaking as a scientist this evening I'll be speaking as a storyteller and my predictions will be science fiction rather than science the predictions of science fiction writers are notoriously inaccurate their purpose is to imagine what might happen rather than to describe what will happen my purpose is to tell some stories the challenge the prevailing dogmas of the day the prevailing dogmas maybe right but they still need to be challenged I'm proud to be a heretic the stories that I shall tell are heresies numbered from 1 to 6 the world always needs heretics to challenge the prevailing orthodoxy we are lucky that we can be heretics today without being burned at the stake but unfortunately I'm an old heretic old heretics don't catch much ice when you hear an old heretic talking you can always say too bad he's lost his marbles and pass on what the world needs is young heretics so I'm hoping one or two of you people in the audience might fill that role a few months ago I was at Cornell University celebrating the life of Tommie gold a famous astronomer who died at a ripe old age he was famous as a heretic promoting unpopular ideas the usually turned out to be right long ago I was a guinea pig in Tommy's experiments on human hearing he had a heretical idea that the human ear discriminates pitch by means of a set of tuned resonators with active electromechanical feedback the experts in order to refuse e ology ignored his work because he didn't have a degree in Physiology many years later the experts discovered the two kinds of hair cells in the inner ear that actually do the feedback as Tommy had predicted it took the experts 40 years to admit that he was right of course I knew he was right because I had seen him do the experiments later in his life he promoted another heretical idea that the oil and natural gas in the ground come up from deep in the mantle of the earth and have nothing to do with biology again the experts are sure he is wrong and he didn't live long enough to change their minds but just a few months ago some chemists at the clinic Institution in Washington did a beautiful experiment in a diamond anvil cell they mixed together tiny quantities of three things that we know exist in the mantle of the earth and observed them at the pressure and temperature appropriate to the mantle about 200 kilometers down the three things were calcium carbonate which is sedimentary rock an oxide which is a component of igneous rock and water those three things are certainly present when a slab of subducted ocean floor descends from a deep ocean trench into the mantle the experiment shows that they react quickly to produce lots of methane which is natural gas so big quantities of natural gas certainly exist in the mantle the chemist sent an email to Tommy go to tell him their result and got back a message that he had died three days earlier now that he's dead we need more heretics to take his place so now I must get ahead with my own heresies my first heresy says the United States has less than a century left of its turn as top nation since the modern nation-state was invented around the Year 1500 a succession of countries have taken turns at being top nation first Spain then France Britain America each term lasts about 150 years ours began in 1920 so it should end about 2070 the reason why each top nations turn comes to an end is that the top nation becomes overextended militarily economically and politically greater and greater efforts are required to maintain the number one position finally the overextension becomes so extreme that the structure collapses already we see in the American posture today some clear symptoms of overextension who will be the next top nation china is the obvious candidate after that it might be India or Brazil you should be asking yourself not how to live in an America dominated world but how to prepare for a world that's not America dominated that may be the most important question to the next generation of Americans to solve how does a people that thinks of itself as number one yield gracefully to become number two because as an Englishman I had some experience with doing that I'm telling you misfortunes are on the way your precious PhD or whatever degree you went through long years of hard work to acquire may be worth less than you think your specialized training may become obsolete you may find yourself overqualified for the available jobs you may be declared redundant the country and the culture to which you belong may move far away from the mainstream but those misfortunes are also opportunities it's always open to you to join the heretics and find another way to make a living with or without a PhD there are big and important problems for you to solve my second heresy will take longer to explain and discuss it says that all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated here I'm opposing the holy Brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the climate models of course they say I have no degree in meteorology and I'm therefore not qualified to speak but I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do but the models solve the equations of fluid dynamics and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans they do a very poor job of describing the clouds the dust the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests they do not begin to describe the real world that we live in the real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we don't yet understand it's much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models than it is to put on winter clothes and go out and measure what's really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds that's why the climate model experts end up believing their own models there's no doubt that parts of the world are getting warmer but the warming is not I'm not saying the warming does not cause problems obviously it does obviously we should be trying to understand it better what I'm saying is that the problems are grossly exaggerated they take away money and attention from other problems that are more urgent and more important such as poverty and infectious diseases and public education and public health and the preservation of living creatures on land and in the oceans not to mention easy problems such as the timely construction of adequate dikes around the city of New Orleans so section 2 land management and climate I should read the subheadings it's so you consider see where we're going the first section was called the need for heretics second section Land Management and climate I will talk about the gloaming global warming problem because it's interesting even though it's important is exaggerated to understand the movement of carbon through the atmosphere and biosphere in detail we need to measure a lot of numbers I don't want to confuse you with a lot of numbers so I will ask you to remember just one number the number that I asked you to remember is one hundredth of an inch per year let's to say one inch per century so now I'll explain what that number means consider the half of the land area of the earth that's not desert or ice cap or city or Road or parking lot this is the heart of the land that's covered with soil and supports vegetation of one kind or another every year it absorbs and converts into biomass a certain fraction of the carbon dioxide that we emit into the atmosphere we don't know how big a fraction it absorbs since we have not measured the increase or decrease of the biomass the number that I ask you to remember is the increase in thickness averaged over one half of the land area of the planet of the biomass that would result is all the carbon that we are emitting burning fossil fuels were absorbed the average increase in thickness is one hundredth of an inch per year the point of this calculation is the very favorable rate of exchange between carbon in the atmosphere and carbon in the soil to stop the Cloudant in the atmosphere from increasing we only need to grow the biomass in the soil by a hundredth of an inch per year good topsoil contains about 10% biomass so a hundredth of an inch of biomass growth means about a tenth of an inch of topsoil changes in farming practices such as no-till farming avoiding the use of the plow cause biomass to grow at least as fast as this if we plant crops without plying the plowing the soil more of the biomass goes into roots which stay in the soil and less returns to the atmosphere if we use genetic engineering to put more biomass into roots we can probably achieve much more rapid growth of topsoil I conclude from this calculation that the problem of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a problem of land management not a problem of meteorology no computer model of atmosphere and ocean can hope to predict the way we shall manage our land here is another heretical thought instead of calculating worldwide averages of biomass growth we might prefer to look at the problem locally consider a possible future with China continuing to develop an industrial economy based largely on the burning of coal and the United States deciding to absorb the resulting carbon dioxide by increasing the biomass in our topsoil the quantity of biomass that can be accumulated in living plants and trees is limited but there's no limit to the quantity that can be stored in top soil to grow topsoil on a massive scale may or may not be practical depending on the economics of farming and irrigation it is at least a possibility to be seriously considered that china could become rich by burning coal well the United States could become environmentally virtuous by accumulating topsoil with transport of carbon from the mine in China to the soil in America provided free of charge by the atmosphere and the inventory of Clavin in the atmosphere remaining constant we should take such possibilities into account when we listen to predictions about climate change on fossil fuels if biotechnology takes over the future takes over the planet in the next 50 years as computer technology has taken it over in the last 50 years the rules of the climate game will be radically changed when I listen to the public debates about climate change I am impressed by the enormous gaps in our knowledge the sparseness of our observations and the superficiality of our theories many of the basic processes of planetary ecology are poorly understood they must be better understood before we can reach an accurate diagnosis of the present condition of the planet when we're trying to take care of a planet just as when we are taking care of a human patient diseases must be diagnosed before they can be cured we need to observe and measure what is going on in the biosphere before we can hope to cure it everyone agrees that the increasing abundance of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has two important consequences first a change in the physics of radiation transport in the atmosphere and second a change in the biology of plants on the ground and in the ocean opinions differ on the relative importance of the physical and biological effects and on whether the effects either separately or together are beneficial or harmful the physical effects are seen in changes of rainfall cloudiness wind strength and temperature which are customarily lumped together in the misleading phrase global warming in human in humid air the effect of carbon dioxide on radiation transport is unimportant because the transport of radiation is already blocked by the much larger greenhouse effect of water vapor the effect of carbon dioxide is important where the air is dry and air is usually dry only when it's cold hot desert air may feel dry but it often contains a lot of water vapor the warming effect of carbon dioxide is strongest where the air is cold and dry mainly in the Arctic rather than in the tropics mainly in winter rather than in summer mainly at night rather than in daytime the warming is real but it is mostly making cold places warmer rather rather than making hot places hotter to represent this local warming by a global average is grossly misleading the fundamental reason why carbon dioxide abundance in the atmosphere is critically important to biology is that there is so little of it a field of corn growing in full sunlight in the middle of the day uses up all the carbon dioxide within a metre of the ground in about five minutes if the air were not constantly stirred by convection currents and winds the corn would stop growing about 1/10 of all the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is converted into biomass every summer and given back to the atmosphere every fall that is why the effects of fossil fuel burning cannot be separated from the effects of plant growth and decay there are five reservoirs of Claven that are biologically accessible on a short timescale not counting the carbonate rocks and the deep ocean which are only accessible on a timescale of thousands of years the five accessible reservoirs are the atmosphere the land plants the topsoil in which land plants grow the surface layer of the ocean in which ocean plants grow and our reserves of fossil fuels the atmosphere is the smallest reservoir and the fossil fuels are the largest but all five of them are of comparable size they all interact strongly with one another and two understand any of them it's necessary to understand all of them as an example of the way different reservoirs of carbon dioxide may interact with each other consider the atmosphere in the topsoil greenhouse experiments show that many plants growing in an atmosphere enriched with carbon dioxide react by increasing their route to shoot ratio this means that the plants put more of their growth into roots and less into stems and leaves a change in that direction is to be expected because the plants have to maintain a balance between the leaves collecting carbon from the air and the roots collecting minerals from the soil the enriched atmosphere tilts the balance so that the plants need less leaf area and more root area now consider what happens to the roots and shoots when the growing season is over when the leaves fall and the plants die the new ground biomass decays and is eaten by fungi or microbes some of it returns to the atmosphere and some of it is converted into topsoil and the average more of the above-ground growth will return to the atmosphere and more of the below ground growth will become topsoil so the plant with increased root to shoot ratio will cause an increased net transfer of carbon from the atmosphere into topsoil if the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide from fossil fuel-burning has caused an increase in the average route to shoot ratio of plants over large areas the possible effect on the topsoil will not be small at present we have no way to measure or even to guess the size of this effect the aggregate biomass of the topsoil of the planet is not a measurable quantity but the fact that the topsoil is unmeasurable does not mean it's unimportant at present we don't know whether the topsoil of the United States is increasing or decreasing over the rest of the world because of large-scale deforestation and erosion the topsoil reservoirs probably decreasing we don't know whether intelligent man and management could increase the growth of topsoil by four billion tons of carbon per year the amount needed to stop the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere all that we can say for sure is that this is a theoretical possibility and we ought to be seriously exploring it so that's the end of the second heresy the third one is actually sort of connected with it so third section the wet Sahara my third heresy is about the mystery of the wet Sahara this is a mystery that has always fascinated me since I read or real Oates book the search for the Tassili frescoes which was published in 1958 so that's 45 47 years ago that book has marvelous reproductions of rock paintings in the Sahara in the Sahara Desert at places that are now dry and unpopulated showing people with herds of animals the paintings are abundant and have amazing artistic quality comparable with the more famous cave paintings in France and Spain the Sahara paintings are more recent than the cave paintings they come in a variety of styles and were probably painted over a period of several thousand years the latest of them show Egyptian influences and must be contemporaneous with early Egyptian tomb paintings the best of the Hurd paintings dates from roughly 6,000 years ago they are strong evidence that the Sahara at that time was wet there must have been enough rain to support herds of cows and giraffes which must have grazed on grass and trees there were also some hippopotamuses and elephants the Sahara then must have been like the Serengeti today at the same time roughly six thousand years ago that were deciduous forests in northern northern Europe we can see the pollen from those forests at the bottom of lakes you're quite accurately dated deciduous forests where the trees are now conifers proving that the climate in the far north was milder then than it is today there were also trees standing in mountain valleys in Switzerland which are now filled with famous glaciers the glaciers that are now shrinking in Switzerland were much smaller six thousand years ago than they are today six thousand years ago seems to have been the warmest and wettest period of the interglacial era it began 12,000 years ago when the last ice age ended so I'd like to ask two questions first if the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is allowed to continue shall we arrive at a climate similar to the climate of 6,000 years ago when the Sahara was wet second if we could choose between the climate of today with a dry Sahara and the climate of 6,000 years ago with a wet Sahara should we prefer the climate of today so my third heresy answers yes to the first question and no to the second it says the warm climate of 6,000 years ago with the wet Sahara is on the whole to be preferred and that increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere may help to bring it back I'm not saying this heresy is true I'm only saying it won't do us any harm to think about it the biosphere is the most complicated of all the things that humans have to deal with the science of planetary ecology is still young and undeveloped it's not surprising that honest and well-informed experts disagree about facts but beyond the disagreements about facts there's another disagreement a deeper disagreement about values the disagreement about values may be described in an oversimplified way as a disagreement between natural ists and humanists natural ists believe that nature knows best for them the highest value is to respect the natural order of things any gross human disruption of the natural environment is evil excessive excessive burning of fossil fuels is evil changing nature's desert either the Sahara Desert or the ocean desert into a managed ecosystem where giraffes or tuna fish may flourish is likewise evil nature knows best and anything we do to improve upon nature will only bring trouble that naturalist ethic is I believe the driving force behind the Kyoto Protocol the humanist ethic begins with the belief that humans are an essential part of nature through human minds the biosphere has acquired the capacity to steer its own evolution and we are now in charge humans have the right and the duty to reconstruct nature so that humans and biosphere can both survive and prosper for humanists the highest value is harmonious coexistence between humans and nature the greatest evils are poverty under development unemployment disease and hunger all the conditions that deprive people of opportunities and limit their freedoms the humanist ethic accepts an increase of club and dioxide in the atmosphere as a small price to pay if worldwide industrial development can alleviate the miseries of the poorer half of humanity the humanist ethic accepts our responsibility to guide the evolution of the planet the sharpest conflict between naturalist and humanist ethics arises in the regulation of genetic engineering the natural aesthetic condemns genetically modified food crops and all other genetic engineering projects that might upset the natural ecology the humanist ethic looks forward to a time not far distant when genetically engineered food crops and energy crops will bring wealth to poor people in tropical countries and incidentally give us tools to control the growth of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere here I must conclude by confessing my own bias since I was brought I was born and brought up in England I spent my formative years in a country with great beauty and a rich ecology which is almost entirely man-made the natural ecology of England was uninterrupted and rather boring forest humans replaced the forest with an artificial landscape of grassland and moorland fields and farms with a much richer variety of plant and animal species quite recently only about a thousand years ago we introduced rabbits and non-native species which had a profound effect on the ecology rabbits opened glades in the forest where flowering plants now flourish there is no wilderness in England and yet there is plenty of room for wild flowers and birds and butterflies as well as a high density of humans but that's why I'm a humanist so heresy number four the diet the domestication of biotechnology my fourth heresy is about the domestication of biotechnology 50 years ago in Princeton I watched the mathematician John von Neumann designing and building the first electronic computer that operated with instructions coded encoded into the machine from Neyman did not invent the electronic computer the computer called ENIAC had been running at the University of Pennsylvania five years earlier what fun Lyman invented was software the coded instructions that gave the computer agility and flexibility it was the combination of electronic hardware with punch card software that allowed a single machine to predict the weather to simulate the evolution of populations of living creatures and to test the feasibility of hydrogen bombs from Neyman understood that his invention would the world he understood that the descendants of his machine would dominate the operations of science and business and government but he imagined computers always remaining large and expensive he imagined them as centralized facilities serving large research laboratories or large industries he failed to foresee computers growing small enough and cheap enough to be used by housewives for doing income tax returns or by kids for doing homework he failed utterly to foresee the final domestication of computers as toys for three-year-olds he failed totally to foresee the emergence of computer games as a dominant feature of 20th 21st century life because of computer games our grandchildren and our growing up with an indelible addiction to computers for better or for worse in sickness or in health till death do us part humans and computers are now joined together more durably than husbands and wives so what's this story of from Norman's computer and the evolution of computer games got to do with biotechnology simply this that there's a close analogy between from Newman's view of computers as large centralized facilities and the public perception of genetic engineering today as an activity of large pharmaceutical and agribusiness corporations such as Monsanto the public distrusts Monsanto because Monsanto likes to put genes for poisonous pesticides into food crops just as we distrusted fun Lyman because fun Diamond liked to use his computer for designing hydrogen bombs it's likely that genetic engineering will remain unpopular and controversial so long as it remains a centralized activity in the hands of large corporations I see a bright future for the biotechnical industry when it follows the path of the computer industry the path that fun Lyman failed to foresee becoming small and domesticated rather than big and centralized the first step in this direction was already taken recently when genetically modified tropical fish with new and brilliant colors appeared in pet stores the technology to become domesticated the next step is to become user friendly I recently spent a happy day at the Philadelphia Flower Show the biggest Flower Show in the world where flower breeders from all over the world show off the results of their efforts I've also visited the reptile show in San Diego an equally impressive show displaying the work of another set of breeders Philadelphia excels in orchids and roses San Diego excels in lizards and snakes the main problem for a grandparent visiting the reptile show with a grandchild is to get the grandchild out of the building without actually buying a snake every orchid or rose or lizard or snake is the work of a dedicated and skilled breeder there are thousands of people amateurs and professionals who devote their lives to this business now imagine what will happen when the tools of genetic engineering become accessible to those people there'll be a do-it-yourself kit for gardeners who will use genetic engineering to breed new varieties of roses and orchids also kits for lovers of pigeons and parrots and lizards and snakes to breed new varieties of pets breeders of dogs and cats will have their kits to genetic engineering once it gets into the hands of housewives and children will give us an explosion of diversity of new living creatures rather than the monoculture crops that the big corporations prefer new lineages will proliferate to replace those that monoculture farming and industrial development have destroyed designing genomes will be a personal thing a new art form as creative as painting or sculpture few of the new creations will be masterpieces but all will bring joy to their creator and variety to our foreigner and flora the final step in the domestication of biotechnology will be biotech games designed like computer games for children down to kindergarten age but played with real eggs and seeds rather than with images on a screen playing such games kids will acquire an intimate feeling for the organisms that they are growing the winner could be the kid whose seed grows the prickly actus or the kid whose egg hatches the cutest dinosaur these games will be messy and possibly dangerous rules and regulations will be needed to make sure our kids don't endanger themselves and others if domestication of biotechnology is really the wave of the future five important questions need to be answered first can it be stopped second ought it to be stopped third if stopping it is either impossible or undesirable what are the appropriate limits that our society must impose on it fourth how should the limits be decided fifth how should the limits be enforced nationally and internationally in considering each of those questions it would be helpful to keep in mind the analogy between computer technology and biotechnology the majority of people using domesticated biotechnology to cause trouble will probably be small fry like the young computer hackers who spread computer viruses around on the Internet on the other hand there's a big difference between a computer virus and the real virus like influenza or HIV if we allow kids to play around with roses and snakes we still have to stop them from playing around with viruses so that's the end of heresy number four next of darwinian interlude my fifth heresy was to suggested by a meeting I attended recently in the city of Portland Oregon the meeting was called oz Kahn short for open source convention it was a meeting organized by group of people who call themselves the geek culture a lot of them are people who dropped out of college and started software companies there were about a thousand geeks at the meeting mostly young and adventurous and interested in other things besides getting rich their companies are based on software programs that are out in the open like UNIX and Linux free for anyone to copy and improve they share an intense dislike for companies like Microsoft which keep their source code secret they despise people who won't share I talk to the open source crowd about biological sharing in addition to sharing genome databases biological communities can also share genes the physical sharing of genes between diverse members of a community gives another meaning to the phrase open source when genes are shared freely a biological community reaps the same advantages from sharing genes as the open source community reaps from sharing software so my fifth heresy says the open source movement may be recapitulating in a few decades the history of life on Earth over billions of years Cabo's is the world's greatest expert in the field of microbial taxonomy he explored the ancestry of microbes by tracing the similarities and differences between their genomes he discovered the large-scale structure of the Tree of Life with all living creatures descended from three primordial branches he recently published the provocative and illuminating article with the title a new biology for a new century in the June 2004 issue of microbiology and molecular biology reviews his main theme is the obsolescence of reductionist biology as it has been practiced for the last hundred years and the need for a new synthetic biology based on communities and ecosystems rather than on genes and molecules aside from his main theme he raises another profoundly important question when did Darwinian evolution begin by Darwinian evolution he means evolution as Darwin understood it based on the competition for survival of non interbreeding species he presents evidence that Darwinian evolution did not go back to the beginning of life the comparison of genomes of ancient lineages of living creatures shows evidence of massive transfers of genetic information from one lineage to another in early times the process that he calls horizontal gene transfer the sharing of genes between unrelated species was prevalent it becomes more prevalent the further back you go in time whatever car was Wright's even in a speculative vein needs to be taken seriously in his article he is postulating a golden age of pre-darwinian life when horizontal gene transfer was Universal and separate species did not exist life was then a community of cells of various kinds sharing their genetic information so that clever chemical tricks and catalytic processes invented by one creature could be inherited by all of them evolution was a communal affair the whole community is advancing in metabolic and reproductive efficiency as the genes of the most efficient cells were shared evolution could be rapid as new chemical devices could be evolved simultaneously by cells of different kinds working in parallel and then reassembled in a single cell by horizontal gene transfer but then one evil day a cell resembling a primitive bacterium happened to find itself one jump ahead of its neighbors in efficiency that cell anticipating Bill Gates by three billion years separated itself from the community and refused to share its offspring became the first species reserving its intellectual property for its own private use with its superior efficiency it continued to prosper and to evolve separately while the rest of the community continued its communal life some millions of years later another cell separated itself from the community and became another species and so it went on until nothing was left of the community and all life was divided into species the Darwinian interlude had begun now after 3 billion years the Darwinian interlude is over it was an interlude between two periods of horizontal gene transfer the epoch of Darwinian evolution based on competition between species ended about 10,000 years ago when a single species Homo sapiens began to dominate and reorganize the biosphere since that time cultural evolution has replaced biological evolution as the main driving force of change cultural evolution is not Darwinian cultural cultures spread by horizontal transfer of ideas more than by genetic inheritance cultural evolution is running a thousand times faster than Darwinian evolution taking us into a new era of cultural interdependence which we call globalization and now in the last 30 years Homo sapiens has revived the ancient pre-darwinian practice of horizontal gene transfer moving genes easily from microbes to plants and animals blurring the boundaries between species we are moving rapidly into the post Darwinian era when species will no longer exist open-source principles will govern the exchange of genes and the evolution of life will again become you know that's my fifth heresy so finally chapter 6 role or poverty my sixth and last heresy is about rural poverty rural poverty is one of the great evils of the modern world the lack of jobs and economic opportunities in villages drives millions of people or billions of people to migrate from villages into overcrowded cities the continuing migration causes immense social and environmental problems in the major cities of poor countries the effects of poverty are most visible in the cities but the causes of poverty like mostly in the villages the what the world needs is a technology that directly attacks the problem of rural poverty by creating wealth and jobs in the villages a technology that creates industries and careers in villages would give the villagers a practical alternative to migration it would give them a chance to survive and prosper without a Bruton themselves the shifting balance of wealth and population between villages and cities is one of the main themes of human history over the last 10,000 years the shift from villages to cities is strongly coupled with a shift from one kind of technology to another I find it convenient to call the two kinds of technology green and grey the adjective Green has been appropriated and abused by various political movements especially in Europe so I need to explain clearly what I have in mind when I speak of green and grey green technology is based on biology grey technology on physics and chemistry roughly speaking green technology is the technology that gave birth to village communities ten thousand years ago starting with the domestication of plants and animals the invention of Agriculture the breeding of goats and sheep and cows and pigs the manufacture of textiles and cheese and wine great technology is the technology that gave birth to and empires 5,000 years later starting with the forging of bronze and iron the invention of wheeled vehicles and paved roads the building of ships and war chariots the manufacture of swords and guns and bombs for the first five of the ten thousand years wealth and power belonged to villages with green technology and for the second five thousand years wealth and power belonged to cities with great technology beginning about 500 years ago great technology became increasingly dominant as we learn to build machines using power from winds and water and steam and electricity in the last hundred years wealth and power were even more heavily concentrated in cities as gray technology raced ahead as cities became richer rural poverty deepened this sketch of the last 10,000 years of human history puts the problem of rural poverty into a new perspective my sixth heresy says that green technology could give us a cure for rural poverty if rural poverty is a consequence of the unbalanced growth of gray technology it's possible that a shift in the balance back from gray to green might cause rural poverty to disappear that is my dream during the last 50 years we've seen explosive growth in the scientific understanding of the basic processes of life and in the last 20 years this new understanding has given rise to explosive growth of green technology the new green technology allows us to breed new varieties of animals and plants as our ancestors ancestors did 10,000 years ago but now a hundred times faster taking a decade instead of a millennium to create a new crop plant guided by a precise understanding of genes and genomes instead of by trial and error we can within a few years modified plants so as to give them improved yield improved new value or improved resistance to pests and diseases within a few more decades as the continued exploring of genomes gives us more complete knowledge of the architecture of living creatures we shall be able to design new varieties of microbes and plants according to our needs the way will then be open for green technology to do more cheaply and more cleanly many of the things that grey technology can do and also to do many things that grey technology has failed to do green technology could replace most of our existing chemical industries and a large part of our mining and manufacturing industries green technology could achieve a more complete recycling of waste products and worn-out machines with great benefit to the environment an economic system based on green technology could come much closer to the goal of sustainability using sunlight instead of fossil fuels as the primary source of energy new species of termite could be engineered to chew up derelict automobiles instead of houses and new species of tree with silicon leaves could convert carbon dioxide and sunlight into liquid fuels instead of cellulose before genetically modified termites and trees can be allowed to help solve our economic and environmental problems great arguments will rage over the possible damage they might do many of the people who call themselves green are passionately opposed to green technology but in the end if the technology is developed carefully and deployed with sensitivity to human feelings it's likely to be accepted by most of the people who will be affected by it just as the equally unnatural and unfamiliar green technologies of milking cows and plowing soils and fermenting grapes were accepted by our ancestors long ago I'm not saying political acceptance of green technology will be quick or easy I say only that green technology has enormous promise for preserving the balance of nature on this planet as well as for relieving human misery future generations of people raised from childhood with biotech toys and games will probably accept it more easily than we do nobody can predict how long it may take to try out the new technology in a thousand different ways and measure its costs and its benefits so what does this dream of a resurgent green technology have to do with the problem of rural poverty in the past green technology has always been rural based in farms and villages rather than in cities in the future it will pervade the cities as well as the countryside factories as well as forests it will not be entirely rural but it will still have a large rural component after all the cloning of Dolly occurred in a rural animal breeding station in Scotland not in an urban laboratory in Silicon Valley green technology will use land and sunlight as its primary sources of raw materials and energy land and sunlight cannot be concentrated in cities they are spread more or less evenly over the planet when industries and technologies are based on land and sunlight they will bring employment and wealth to rural populations it's fortunate that sunlight is most abundant in tropical countries where a large fraction of the world's people live and where rural poverty is most acute since sunlight is distributed more equitably than coal and oil green technology can be a great equalizer helping to narrow the gap between rich and poor countries six years ago I published a book with the title the Sun the genome and the internet describing a vision of green technology enriching villages all over the world and halting the migration from villages to cities the three components of the vision are all essential the Sun to provide energy where it's needed the genome to provide plants which can convert sunlight into chemical fuels cheaply and efficiently the Internet to end the intellectual and economic isolation of rural immunity's with all three components in place every village in Africa could enjoy its fair share of the blessings of civilization people who prefer to live in cities would still be free to move from villages to cities but they would not be compelled to move by economic necessity so my time is now at an end and I won't attempt to summarize the lessons you might have learned from those six heresies the main lesson I'd like for you to take home is that the long range future is not predetermined the future is in your hands the rules of the world historical game changed from decade to decade in unpredictable ways all our fashionable worries and all our prevailing dogmas will probably be obsolete in less than 35 years my heresies will probably also be obsolete it's up to you to find new heresies to guide our way to a more hopeful future so I'd like to end by borrowing a conclusion from my friend the astronomer Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar who borrowed it from Shakespeare's epilogue to the second part of his Henry the fourth first my fear then my curtsy last my speech my fear is your displeasure my curtsy is my duty and my speech is to beg your pardon oh well thank you very much for being such a good audience and now let's have questions and you're supposed to speak through the mic so that everybody can hear the question so let's have one from down here or you have to say I guess you have to stand in line I'm surprised you spent less time than I expected on the internet literally when I have a question I can choose either to go online and find a tower or walk six feet to my to my books and look it up and it's a toss-up now and when that becomes general and as we watch the Chinese government wrestle with the Internet to keep their people off at while modding them on it in order to make economic sense it seems to me this is an extremely powerful distant future tool oh it's not only distant it's right here of course no I don't know how we used to live without Google now I recently paid a visit to with fine with 150 school children to the headquarters of Google in Menlo Park it's a fantastic place everybody ought to go there I mean that's the future apart from biology I mean that that that's doing wonderful things for the world and and it's as you say especially in China because they'll have their own Google very soon yeah on professor Tyson it's always a pleasure to listen to your talking person have two questions and your question when your main point is the unpredictability of the progress of science on a large scale that I entirely agree with you it's my view to however there seem seems to be many examples of successful predictions for example you you cover make successful predictions in 90 thirty's and sheldon glashow make predictions on charm court which later on turn out to be tape asylum as as an as an effort as the experimental effort so what perhaps overall most predictions are wrong and as a result they're just parrot in literature and never mentioned again but occasionally a few lucky ones would carry the day so instead of bashing on the your predictability ins as would you like to comment on the the merit of prediction in science that's for what the second one is regarding the reduction listening science if you ask theoretical physicist or steven weinberg then reductionist approach is critical to the success of modern science however if you ask evolutionary biologist Ernest mayor then a reductionist approach would never get ultimate answer in modern science so would you like to comment on the validity or invalidity of reductionist of reduction in Zandi modern science thank you yeah well I'll deal with those briefly I mean so clearly the fact is that rich Shelley was a genius and so he predicted things right and that occasionally happens but still at the time when he made the prediction it wasn't a sure thing I mean even for him and and so I mean clearly that that was what was great about it of course was that it wasn't a sure thing and it turned out to be right that's what we all hope for and as far as the balance but of course we need reductionist science as well as synthetic science and what Rose is saying is that the 21st century will have more synthetic science may be less reductionist science the balance may be shifts a bit we certainly still need both um if we are to deploy technology with sensitivity and creativity do we have to first come to terms with or handle the population growth right you didn't mention that seemingly pivotal issue in human history would you comment on that please oh yeah population growth of course is again something which is amazingly unpredictable it's a I mean I was I grew up to the time in England when everybody was worried the population was falling and then of course it went up quite rapidly and now in many countries in the world it's starting to fall drastically I was in Italy a couple of years ago and they were joking that if you come back here in a hundred years they'll be nobody around except Albanians it is amazing how as soon as women are empowered to take charge of their lives population Falls and amid one of the most remarkable one of the most remarkable numbers I happen to remember is that the average size of a family in Mexico went down from seven to two-and-a-half within 50 years and I mean it's a very drastic decline in birth rates which has happened not only in the rich countries but also in quite a number of the poor countries as well not in all poor countries unfortunately but still it does happen but it appears that
