Reason Magazine - Staff

Theological Science Fiction

gbenford@uci.edu (Gregory Benford) — Fri, 23 May 2003 00:00:00 EDT

As The Matrix Reloaded sets new box office records, it gets few notices in the religious press. Yet it is a spiritual story of a quest for the true world hidden behind what we think of as the real one—and, of course, it's science fiction.

This collusion of theology and science fiction is not new. The Matrix movies (with Matrix Revolutions to conclude in November) are elaborated views of a world dominated by artificial intelligences, which keep most of us in pods, feeding us an illusory world—this one you're sitting in—through spinal taps. Our lives are piped into our brains, complete sensory experiential Muzak.

Rebels living underground in Zion (yes) are led by a mysterious guerrilla figure (Morpheus, given to stentorian pronouncements in a butterscotch voice). Their mission and message is to free your mind (remember the '60s!) and, by the way, achieve an apocalyptic end to the artificial intelligences' enslavement of humanity.

Morpheus plays John the Baptist to Neo's Jesus. This is no messiah who redeems by suffering. Rather, as ancient Jewish texts expected, Neo is a fighting liberator. Neo has a literal calling. "You may have spent the last few years looking for me," Morpheus tells him, "but I have spent my entire life looking for you. Early in the film, when Neo is still selling pirated software, one of his customers declares, "Hallelujah! You're my savior, man. My own personal Jesus Christ!"

To overcome the laminated malignancy of the Agents, Neo must learn to use his spiritual powers and focus his mind. His training is a cyber-techno take on meditation, the traditional path to enlightenment. Visiting the Oracle, he asks if he is the One, and she says coyly, "Your next life, maybe," setting the stage.

His learned skills let him deliver dazzling martial arts blows to the Agents, but he, well, lacks something: enlightenment. We get the drift when, in a bold sally, Neo swoops down to save a nearly comatose Morpheus, saying "Morpheus! Get up!" echoing Jesus' "Lazarus, come out!"

Neo then enters the center of Matrix power, like Jesus cleansing the Temple, fights and is shot dead. His girl friend Trinity (yes) holds the lifeless Neo, as Mary Magdalene did Jesus, and Neo comes back to life. He has saved himself, reaching deep inside—transcendent knowledge, self-enlightenment.

After this self-resurrection, Neo has an unmistakable radiance. His aura dominates the film's frames. He manifests what St. John termed the after-resurrection "spiritual body" of Jesus. Stopping bullets with a raised hand, entering an Agent's body and exploding it, flying into the sky like Superman—all simple, now that he has been enlightened to his true nature.

The Matrix itself is not some external evil, but rather an outcome of our own error, our karmic payoff of past actions. Not merely illusion, it is an allusion to a founding myth of our culture.

Both Matrix films carry forward this spiritual, eschatological story, of the Neo new One who will return and win the last grand battle, bringing peace. A rebel named Cypher plays Judas, they ride in a battleship called Nebuchadnezzar ("we're on a mission from God") in defense of the transcendent last stronghold of humanity, Zion.

This blend of high tech and time-defying science fictional special effects seems to be a good example of our culture calling forth what the postmodernists term "floating signifiers"—ideas like exile from reality, and restoration of a radical newness, adrift on the Zeitgeist and ready to be used. Science fiction grounds this in the future and thus in hope; teenagers (the Matrix core audience) will not sit still for a big-budget Biblical epic.

Virtual reality you can't tell from life, downloaded worlds, malign machines—these are customary landscapes of the young, who are probably destined to live among them. The Matrix is one way for this audience to think about a future they see more clearly than we elders do—an essential reason that science fiction has been a young, brassy culture since the 1930s.

Indeed, computers have shown us the 2D poverty of digital deserts, the postmodernist "desert of the real" (a term quoted in the films). A techno-take on radical philosophical doubt is very hip these days. It works especially if we can see the grunge look of Zion versus the all-black Matrix look of cool dusters and plenty of leather.

In science fiction, basic doubts featured prominently in the worlds of Philip K. Dick. I knew Phil for 25 years, and he was always getting on to me, a scientist. He was a great fan of quantum uncertainty, epistemology in science, the lot. Whether in science fiction or academic philosophy, we lately seem bemused by the notion that our reality may be a swindle. Computers in their flat-screen worlds help along a sensation of irreality, a liking not merely for the plausibly weird, but for the weirdly plausible. Already several Dick tales of fake realities have made it into major movies: Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report.

Which way would you vote, given a choice of a secure life in a pod illusion, or a tricky, dangerous reality? Plugged or unplugged? For worker-drones living in corporate lattices satirized in the hugely popular business comic strip Dilbert, the choice is obvious.

The persistent science fictional posture of confronting categories of Godhood, and of revelation, is typical of the culture that made modern science fiction. The genre is, more than anything else, about change. Religions change, too, the writers remind us. We incorporate into our mind's eye of God our current knowledge. This is inevitable, and fundamentally positive.

Today science fiction has many currents. Popular writers like Orson Scott Card depict future societies much like Mormon ones, but suffused in a utopian glow. Other writers excoriate fundamentalist faiths, and satirize Theocracy. The genre is a useful antidote to certainty. It promotes a more experimental, and historically sophisticated, view of the whole range of theological thought. It especially is unafraid of spiritual insights and methods like Zen Buddhism, and often contrasts nature-centered Asian faiths with the more axiomatic and rigid Western ones.

The point of speculative ideas and science fictional treatments is not to foster propaganda (though many do so, usually obviously and unsuccessfully), but to make us think. As a literature of change driven by technology, science fiction presents religion to a part of the reading public that probably seldom goes to church.

Movies are another matter; The Matrix Reloaded sometimes seems like the New Testament on steroids. It also suffers from the bind of superhero epics—if Neo is unstoppable, how can there be real constraint, and so suspense?

Beyond the cool violence, vinyl cat suits and dazzling bullet-time effects, the Matrix world points both toward our future and to basic theological mythologies, to spiritual meta-narratives that can appear backlit by modern science.

In this sense science fiction is an ambassador between the two most widely separated tribes of modern thought, the scientific and the religious. Negotiations should prove profitable, but only if they are imaginative.

Leaping the Abyss

gbenford@uci.edu (Gregory Benford) — Mon, 01 Apr 2002 00:00:00 EST

Stephen Hawking on black holes, unified field theory, and Marilyn Monroe.

Stephen Hawking seemed slightly worse, as always. It is a miracle that he has clung to life for over 20 years with Lou Gehrig's disease. Each time I see him I feel that this will be the last, that he cannot hold on to such a thin thread for much longer.

Hawking turned 60 in January. Over the course of his brilliant career, he has worked out many of the basics of black hole physics, including, most strikingly, his prediction that black holes aren't entirely black. Instead, if they have masses equivalent to a mountain's, they radiate particles of all kinds. Smaller holes would disappear in a fizz of radiation -- a signature that astronomers have searched for but so far not found.

The enormous success of Hawking's 1988 book, A Brief History of Time, has made him a curious kind of cultural icon. He wonders how many of the starlets and rock stars who mentioned the book on talk shows actually read it.

With his latest book, The Universe in a Nutshell (Bantam), he aims to remedy the situation with a plethora of friendly illustrations to help readers decipher such complex topics as superstring theory and the nature of time. The trick is translating equations into sentences, no mean feat. The pictures help enormously, though purists deplore them as oversimplified. I feel that any device is justified to span such an abyss of incomprehension.

When I entered Stephen's office at the University of Cambridge, his staff was wary of me, plainly suspecting I was a "civilian" harboring a crank theory of the universe. But I'd called beforehand, and then his secretary recognized me from years past. (I am an astrophysicist and have known Stephen since the 1970s.) When I entered the familiar office his shrunken form lolled in his motorized chair as he stared out, rendered goggle-eyed by his thick glasses -- but a strong spirit animated all he said.

Hawking lost his vocal cords years ago, to an emergency tracheotomy. His gnarled, feeble hands could not hold a pen. For a while after the operation he was completely cut off from the world, an unsettling parallel to those mathematical observers who plunge into black holes, their signals to the outside red-shifted and slowed by gravity's grip to dim, whispering oblivion.

A Silicon Valley firm came to the rescue. Engineers devised tailored, user friendly software and a special keyboard for Hawking. Now his frail hand moved across it with crablike speed. The software is deft, and he could build sentences quickly. I watched him flit through the menu of often-used words on his liquid crystal display, which hung before him in his wheelchair. The invention has been such a success that the Silicon Valley folk now supply units to similarly afflicted people worldwide.

"Please excuse my American accent," the speaker mounted behind the wheelchair said with a California inflection. He coded this entire remark with two keystrokes.

Although I had been here before, I was again struck that a man who had suffered such an agonizing physical decline had on his walls several large posters of a person very nearly his opposite: Marilyn Monroe. I mentioned her, and Stephen responded instantly, tapping one-handed on his keyboard, so that soon his transduced voice replied, "Yes, she's wonderful. Cosmological. I wanted to put a picture of her in my latest book, as a celestial object." I remarked that to me the book was like a French Impressionist painting of a cow, meant to give a glancing essence, not the real, smelly animal. Few would care to savor the details. Stephen took off from this to discuss some ideas currently booting around the physics community about the origin of the universe, the moment just after the Big Bang.

Stephen's great politeness paradoxically made me ill at ease; I was acutely aware of the many demands on his time, and, after all, I had just stopped by to talk shop.

"For years my early work with Roger Penrose seemed to be a disaster for science," Stephen said. "It showed that the universe must have begun with a singularity, if Einstein's general theory of relativity is correct. That appeared to indicate that science could not predict how the universe would begin. The laws would break down at the point of singularity, of infinite density." Mathematics cannot handle physical quantities like density that literally go to infinity. Indeed, the history of 20th century physics was in large measure about how to avoid the infinities that crop up in particle theory and cosmology. The idea of point particles is convenient but leads to profound, puzzling troubles.

I recalled that I had spoken to Stephen about mathematical methods of getting around this problem one evening at a party in King's College. There were analogies to methods in elementary quantum mechanics, methods he was trying to carry over into this surrealistic terrain.

"It now appears that the way the universe began can indeed be determined, using imaginary time," Stephen said. We discussed this a bit. Stephen had been using a mathematical device in which time is replaced, as a notational convenience, by something called imaginary time. This changes the nature of the equations, so he could use some ideas from the tiny quantum world. In the new equations, a kind of tunneling occurs in which the universe, before the Big Bang, has many different ways to pass through the singularity. With imaginary time, one can calculate the chances for a given tunneling path into our early universe after the beginning of time as we know it.

"Sure, the equations can be interpreted that way," I argued, "but it's really a trick, isn't it?"

Stephen said, "Yes, but perhaps an insightful trick."

"We don't have a truly deep understanding of time," I replied, "so replacing real time with imaginary time doesn't mean much to us."

"Imaginary time is a new dimension, at right angles to ordinary, real time," Stephen explained. "Along this axis, if the universe satisfies the 'no boundary' condition, we can do our calculations. This condition says that the universe has no singularities or boundaries in the imaginary direction of time. With the 'no boundary' condition, there will be no beginning or end to imaginary time, just as there is no beginning or end to a path on the surface of the Earth."

"If the path goes all the way around the Earth," I said. "But of course, we don't know that in imaginary time there won't be a boundary."

"My intuition says there will be no blocking in that special coordinate, so our calculations make sense."

"Sense is just the problem, isn't it? Imaginary time is just a mathematical convenience." I shrugged in exasperation at the span between cool mathematical spaces and the immediacy of the raw world; this is a common tension in doing physics. "It's unrelated to how we feel time. The seconds sliding by. Birth and death."

"True. Our minds work in real time, which begins at the Big Bang and will end, if there is a Big Crunch -- which seems unlikely, now, from the latest data showing accelerating expansion. Consciousness would come to an end at a singularity."

"Not a great consolation," I said.

He grinned. "No, but I like the 'no boundary' condition. It seems to imply that the universe will be in a state of high order at one end of real time but will be disordered at the other end of time, so that disorder increases in one direction of time. We define this to be the direction of increasing time. When we record something in our memory, the disorder of the universe will increase. This explains why we remember events only in what we call the past, and not in the future."

"Remember what you predicted in 1980 about final theories like this?" I chided him.

"I suggested we might find a complete unified theory by the end of the century." Stephen made the transponder laugh dryly. "OK, I was wrong. At that time, the best candidate seemed to be N=8 supergravity. Now it appears that this theory may be an approximation to a more fundamental theory, of superstrings. I was a bit optimistic to hope that we would have solved the problem by the end of the century. But I still think there's a 50-50 chance that we will find a complete unified theory in the next 20 years."

"I've always suspected that the structure never ends as we look to smaller and smaller scales -- and neither will the theories," I offered.

"It is possible that there is no ultimate theory of physics at all. Instead, we will keep on discovering new layers of structure. But it seems that physics gets simpler, and more unified, the smaller the scale on which we look. There is an ultimate length scale, the Planck length, below which space-time may just not be defined. So I think there will be a limit to the number of layers of structure, and there will be some ultimate theory, which we will discover if we are smart enough."

"Does it seem likely that we are smart enough?" I asked.

Another grin. "You will have to get your faith elsewhere."

"I can't keep up with the torrent of work on superstrings." Mathematical physics is like music, which a young and zesty spirit can best seize and use, as did Mozart.

"I try," he said modestly.

We began discussing recent work on "baby universes" -- bubbles in space-time. To us large creatures, space-time is like the sea seen from an ocean liner, smooth and serene. Up close, though, on tiny scales, it's waves and bubbles. At extremely fine scales, pockets and bubbles of space-time can form at random, sputtering into being, then dissolving. Arcane details of particle physics suggest that sometimes -- rarely, but inevitably -- these bubbles could grow into a full-fledged universe.

This might have happened a lot at the instant just immediately after the Big Bang. Indeed, some properties of our universe may have been created by the space-time foam that roiled through those infinitesimally split seconds. Studying this possibility uses the "wormhole calculus," which samples the myriad possible frothing bubbles (and their connections, called wormholes).

Averaging over this foam in a mathematical sense, smoothing its properties a bit, Hawking and others have tried to find out whether a final, rather benign universe like ours was an inevitable outcome of that early turbulence. The jury isn't in on this point, and it may be out forever -- the calculations are tough, guided by intuition rather than facts. Deciding whether they meaningfully predict anything is a matter of taste. This recalls Oscar Wilde's aphorism that in matters of great import, style is always more important than substance.

If this picture of the first split second is remotely right, much depends on the energy content of the foam. The energy to blow up these bubbles would be countered by an opposite, negative energy, which comes from the gravitational attraction of all the matter in the bubble. If the outward pressure just balances the inward attraction (a pressure, really) of the mass, then you could get a universe much like ours: rather mild, with space-time not suffering any severe curvature -- what astronomers call "flat." This seems to be so on such relatively tiny scales as our solar system, and flatness prevails even on the size range of our galaxy. Indeed, flatness holds on immense scales, as far as we can yet see.

It turns out that such bubbles could even form right now. An entirely separate space-time could pop into existence in your living room, say. It would start unimaginably small, then balloon to the size of a cantaloupe -- but not before your very eyes, because, for quite fundamental reasons, you couldn't see it.

"They don't form in space, of course," Stephen said. "It doesn't mean anything to ask where in space these things occur." They don't take up room in our universe but rather are their own universes, expanding into spaces that did not exist before.

"They're cut off from us after we make them," I said. "No relics, no fossil?"

"I do not think there could be."

"Like an ungrateful child who doesn't write home." When talking about immensities, I sometimes grasp for something human.

"It would not form in our space, but rather as another space-time."

We discussed for a while some speculations about this that I had put into two novels, Cosm and Timescape. I had used Cambridge and the British scientific style in Timescape, published in 1980, before these ideas became current. I had arrived at them in part from some wide-ranging talks I had enjoyed with Stephen -- all suitably disguised in the books, of course. Such enclosed space-times I had termed "onion universes," since in principle they could have further locked-away space-times inside them, and so on. It is an odd sensation when a guess turns out to have some substance -- as much as anything as gossamer as these ideas can be said to be substantial.

"So they form and go," I mused. "Vanish. Between us and these other universes lies absolute nothingness, in the exact sense -- no space or time, no matter, no energy."

"There can be no way to reach them," his flat voice said. "The gulf between us and them is unbridgeable. It is beyond physics because it is truly nothing, not physical at all."

The mechanical laugh resounded. Stephen likes the tug of the philosophical, and he seemed amused by the notion that universes are simply one of those things that happen from time to time.

His nurse appeared for a bit of physical cleanup, and I left him. Inert confinement to a wheelchair exacts a demeaning toll on one's dignity, but he showed no reaction to the daily round of being cared for by another in the most intimate way. Perhaps for him, it even helps the mind to slip free of the world's rub.

I sat in the common room outside his office, having tea and talking to some of his post-doctoral students. They were working on similarly wild ideas and were quick, witty, and keenly observant as they sipped their strong, dark Ceylonese tea. A sharp crew, perhaps a bit jealous of Stephen's time. They were no doubt wondering who this guy was, nobody they had ever heard of, a Californian with an accent tainted by Southern nuances, somebody who worked in astrophysics and plasma physics -- which, in our age of remorseless specialization, is a province quite remote from theirs. I didn't explain; after all, I really had no formal reason to be there, except that Stephen and I were friends.

Stephen's secretary quietly came out and asked if I would join Stephen for dinner at Caius College. I had intended to eat in my favorite Indian restaurant, where the chicken vindaloo is a purging experience, and then simply rove the walks of Cambridge alone, because I love the atmosphere -- but I instantly assented. Dinner at college high table is one of the legendary experiences of England. I could remember keenly each one I had attended; the repartee is sharper than the cutlery.

We made our way through the cool, atmospheric turns of the colleges, the worn wood and gray stones reflecting the piping of voices and squeaks of rusty bicycles. In misty twilight, student shouts echoing, Stephen's wheelchair jouncing over cobbled streets. He insisted on steering it himself, though his nurse hovered rather nervously. It had never occurred to me just how much of a strain on everyone there can be in round-the-clock care. A few people drifted along behind us, just watching him. "Take no notice," his mechanical voice said. "Many of them come here just to stare at me."

We wound among the ancient stone and manicured gardens, into Caius College. Students entering the dining hall made an eager rumpus. Stephen took the elevator, and I ascended the creaking stairs. The faculty entered after the students, me following with the nurse.

The high table is literally so. They carefully placed Stephen with his back to the long, broad tables of undergraduates. I soon realized that this is because watching him eat, with virtually no lip control, is not appetizing. He follows a set diet that requires no chewing. His nurse must chop up his food and spoon-feed him.

The dinner was noisy, with the year's new undergraduates staring at the famous Hawking's back. Stephen carried on a matter-of-fact, steady flow of conversation through his keyboard.

He had concerns about the physicists' Holy Grail, a unified theory of everything. Even if we could thrash our way through a thicket of mathematics to glimpse its outlines, it might not be specific enough -- that is, we would still have a range of choices. Physics could end up dithering over arcane points, undecided, perhaps far from our particular primate experience. Here is where aesthetics might enter.

"If such a theory is not unique," he said, "one would have to appeal to some outside principle, which one might call God."

I frowned. "Not as the Creator, but as a referee?"

"He would decide which theory was more than just a set of equations, but described a universe that actually exists."

"This one."

"Or maybe all possible theories describe universes that exist!" he said with glee. "It is unclear what it means to say that something exists. In questions like, 'Does there exist a man with two left feet in Cambridge?,' one can answer this by examining every man in Cambridge. But there is no way that one can decide if a universe exists, if one is not inside it."

"The space-time Catch-22."

"So it is not easy to see what meaning can be given to the question, 'Why does the universe exist?' But it is a question that one can't help asking."

As usual, the ability to pose a question simply and clearly in no way implied a similar answer -- or that an answer even existed.

After the dining hall, high table moved to the senior common room upstairs. We relaxed along a long, polished table in comfortable padded chairs, enjoying the traditional crisp walnuts and ancient aromatic port, Cuban cigars, and arch conversation, occasionally skewered by a witty interjection from Stephen.

Someone mentioned American physicist Stephen Weinberg's statement, in The First Three Minutes, that the more we comprehend the universe, the more meaningless it seems. Stephen doesn't agree, and neither do I, but he has a better reason. "I think it is not meaningful in the first place to say that the universe is pointless, or that it is designed for some purpose."

I asked, "No meaning, then, to the pursuit of meaning?"

"To do that would require one to stand outside the universe, which is not possible."

Again the image of the gulf between the observer and the object of study. "Still," I persisted, "there is amazing structure we can see from inside."

"The overwhelming impression is of order. The more we discover about the universe, the more we find that it is governed by rational laws. If one liked, one could say that this order was the work of God. Einstein thought so."

One of the college fellows asked, "Rational faith?"

Stephen tapped quickly. "We shouldn't be surprised that conditions in the universe are suitable for life, but this is not evidence that the universe was designed to allow for life. We could call order by the name of God, but it would be an impersonal God. There's not much personal about the laws of physics."

Walnuts eaten, port drunk, cigars smoked, it was time to go. When we left, Stephen guided his wheelchair through the shadowy reaches of the college, indulging my curiosity about a time-honored undergraduate sport: climbing Cambridge.

At night, young men sometimes scramble among the upper reaches of the steepled old buildings, scaling the most difficult points. They risk their necks for the glory of it. Quite out of bounds, of course. Part of the thrill is eluding the proctors who scan the rooftops late at night, listening for the scrape of heels. There is even a booklet about roof climbing, describing its triumphs and centuries-long history.

Stephen took me to a passageway I had been through many times, a shortcut to the Cam River between high, peaked buildings of undergraduate rooms. He said that it was one of the tough events, jumping across that and then scaling a steep, often slick roof beyond.

The passage looked to be about three meters across. I couldn't imagine leaping that gap from the slate-dark roofs. And at night, too. "All that distance?" I asked. My voice echoed in the fog.

"Yes," he said.

"Anybody ever miss?"

"Yes."

"Injured?"

"Yes."

"Killed?"

His eyes twinkled and he gave us a broad smile. "Yes." These Cambridge sorts have the real stuff, all right.

In the cool night Stephen recalled some of his favorite science fiction stories. He rarely read any fiction other than science fiction past the age of 12, he said. "It's really the only fiction that is realistic about our true position in the universe as a whole."

And how much stranger the universe was turning out than even those writers had imagined. Even when they discussed the next billion years, they could not guess the odd theories that would spring up within the next generation of physicists. Now there are speculations that our universe might have 11 dimensions, all told, all but three of space and one of time rolled up to tiny sizes. Will this change cosmology? So far, nobody knows. But the ideas are fun in and of themselves.

A week after my evening at Cambridge, I got from Stephen's secretary a transcript of all his remarks. I have used it here to reproduce his style of conversation. Printed out on his wheelchair computer, his sole link with us, the lines seem to come from a great distance. Across an abyss.

Portraying the flinty faces of science -- daunting complexity twinned with numbing wonder -- demands both craft and art. Some of us paint with fiction. Stephen paints with his impressionistic views of vast, cool mathematical landscapes. To knit together our fraying times, to span the cultural abyss, demands all these approaches -- and more, if we can but invent them.

Stephen has faced daunting physical constrictions with a renewed attack on the large issues, on great sweeps of space and time. Daily he struggles without much fuss against the narrowing that is perhaps the worst element of infirmity. I recalled him rapt with Marilyn, still deeply engaged with life, holding firmly against tides of entropy.

I had learned a good deal from those few days, I realized, and most of it was not at all about cosmology.

The Stars My Consternation

gbenford@uci.edu (Gregory Benford) — Sat, 01 Aug 1998 00:00:00 EDT

The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of, by Thomas Disch, New York: The Free Press, 329 pages, $25.00

This sadly sardonic survey of science fiction worries its subject from many angles: historical, literary, sociological. Science fiction (s.f.) is perhaps the defining genre of the 20th century, although its conquering armies are still camped outside the citadels of literary Rome.

Throughout this century, conventional literature persistently avoided thinking about conceptually altered tomorrows and retreated into a realist posture of fiction of ever-smaller compass. Henry James and H.G. Wells had a classic debate on the matter during World War I, but in the end the novel of character, by foregrounding personal relations, claimed the high ground of orthodox fiction. James won his argument, surrendering the future to s.f., the genre that would increasingly set the terms of social debate. Though Aldous Huxley, Nevil Shute, Italo Calvino, George Orwell, and Vladimir Nabokov did impressive work, they were little emulated.

Thomas Disch underlies his wryly witty observations with poet Delmore Schwartz's resonant title from 1938, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities. This "pregnant truth"--that s.f. has obligations to think coherently about our prospects, not just play melodramatic games with futuristic props--is Disch's clarion call to the genre that once fascinated him but that has plainly appealed to him less since the mid-1980s. He was a prominent novelist and short story author of the 1960s and '70s; his best novels, Camp Concentration and 334, displayed a cool, distanced mannerist style tending toward a razor wit (often seen in this book as well), revealing social nuances of possible futures. His rising repute as a "new formalist" poet carries forward this agenda.

Critic John Clute described Disch as "perhaps the most respected, least trusted, most envied and least read of all modern first-rank sf writers," and there is justice in the claim. Disch was a major figure in the 1960s New Wave movement, which introduced many modernist and surrealist techniques into s.f. As a critic, he takes on such revered figures as Robert Heinlein and Ursula Le Guin with insightful malice, particularly wounding Le Guin for her political correctitude. He is no less forgiving of the wild ideas that have sprouted like weeds in s.f.'s rich loam.

Genres are best understood as constrained conversations, and s.f. is the leader and innovator in this. Constraint is essential, defining the rules and assumptions open to an author. If hard s.f. occupies the center of science fiction, that is probably because hardness gives the firmest boundary.

Like immense time-binding discussions, genres allow ideas to be developed and traded, and for variations to be spun down through decades. Players ring changes on each other--a steppin'-out jazz band that inventively agrees on its central tune, not a solo concert in a plush auditorium. Contrast this with "serious" fiction --more accurately described, I believe, as merely self-consciously solemn--which proceeds from canonical classics that supposedly stand outside of time, deserving awe, looming great and intact by themselves.

Disch seems to sense this central draw of s.f., which thins as popularity grows. Alas, this book treats few works under 15 years old; Disch has been separated from the field for so long, his expedition never reaches the core. He has missed several rounds of the conversation. Genre pleasures are many, but the quality of shared values within an ongoing discussion may be the most powerful, enlisting lifelong devotion in its fans. In contrast to the Grand Canon view, genre-reading satisfactions are a striking facet of modern democratic ("pop") culture. Paradoxically, visual media success has so diluted this aspect as to make it invisible to the masses who flock to big special-effects movies.

S.f. takes up Big Ideas and Big Wonders but does not always treat them with care; it is historically gullible. Its unfulfilled promise vexes Disch, and he rummages among the cranks, fakes, and crazies that often camped near the Legions of the Future. He treats us to tours of mesmerism from the time of Poe, to UFOs and their exploiters (Whitley Strieber, a flagrant example), to the huge religion--Scientology--invented in an s.f. magazine. These unseemly neighbors of the genre betray America's high dreams and ready gullibility. Skepticism is quite in order, particularly in the New Age.

The persistence of cranks and fools in the ranks of s.f. is sobering. We'll scarcely be invited to the high literary tea, Disch worries, if we have so many companions with such muddy boots.

This concern blends with Disch's class analysis of literature. "The difference between highbrow and low--between Eliot and Poe, between mainstream and scifi--is not one that can be mapped by the conventional criteria of criticism." He supports this by showing that Poe is more a formalist than Eliot, and less given to overt lecturing and preachiness (two oft-cited s.f. mannerisms). Instead, "The essential difference is not one of aesthetics or of some subtler metaphysical nature, but of the two writers' antithetical social and economic positions." Poe was a popular, market-driven writer, a "magazinist," while Eliot was supported by a high culture with subtle, indirect patronage.

S.f., in my view, has been the voice of a rising class that sprang from the burgeoning American masses, hopeful, middle-class, technological types. Their very earnestness carried their arguments and visions into the souls of the one country most responsible for our collective visions of the future; s.f.--at least since the great era of Wells ended--is notably an American creation.

Predictably, its grandiose dreams lead to its worst faults. S.f.'s greatest vice is lecturing. In the face of such large ideas, many authors became the "School Teacher Absolute, a fate that would befall so many later s.f. writers--Heinlein, Asimov, Bradbury, Le Guin, Delany--that it must be considered an occupational hazard." It can carry a writer away. Disch sees the later work of Philip K. Dick, particularly the important Valis, as "madness recollected in a state of borderline lucidity." The lecture becomes a sermon.

Such faults go with the territory, but they do not dominate it. The true strength of the genre lies in its power to convince by imagining. Writes Disch, "A theory can be controverted; a myth persuades at gut level."

We s.f. creators are often great makers of myth, some lifted from written s.f. and tarted up for visual media consumption. Star Trek is notorious for looting the more thoughtful work of writers for their striking effects, leaving behind most of the thought and subtlety. Of the show's huge global audience, Disch observes that "few audiences like to be challenged," for after all, a challenge "is traditionally the prelude to a duel, not to a half-hour of light entertainment. Any artist's first order of business is not to challenge but to entice."

He views this most persistent of TV shows from a fashion angle: actors in pajamas. Their starship looks much like an office from the inside, with crew in look-alike uniforms: "[T]he same parables of success-through-team-effort that can be found on such later workplace-centered sitcoms as The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Designing Women."

Trek was thus the prophet of the politically correct multicultural future just ahead of us, with workplace equality conspicuously displayed. Disch wrings much humor from this insight, yet surely the crucial nature of both Star Trek and Star Wars lies in their invocation of family. The strangeness of outer-space futures had before been so daunting for audiences that typically it is the backdrop of neo-Freudian horror (the Alien series, etc.). Yet even here the chilly landscape of the scientific world- view is reduced to the conventional: vampires in space; dripping goo; aliens capable only of hostile rage.

Star Trek's insight lay in the promise of going to the stars together, with well-defined stereotypes who could supply the emotional frame for the potentially jarring truths of these distant places. That is why the cultures they encountered proved so boring: "Blandness and repetition can be comforting, and comfort is a major desideratum in bedtime stories." Alas, the genre set out to do more than rock us to sleep.

The market now mirrors Disch's withering analysis. Despite his assertion that "three or four slots on the best-seller lists are occupied by SF titles," in fact their occupants are fantasy tomes, media tie-ins, and Michael Crichton clones, not actual s.f. at all. Only one true s.f. novel I can recall from the 1990s made the lists for long, Arthur C. Clarke's 3001: The Final Odyssey, a media-driven sequel to a sequel to a sequel.

Indeed, Disch believes that once space travel, s.f.'s grand metaphor, proved to mean long voyages to inhospitable places, the genre reverted to fantasy-like motifs. There is truth in this, both in the rise of genre fantasy in books (now plagued with a numbing sameness and endless trilogies) and in the ascendance of Joseph Campbell (savant of the mythic archetype theory of storytelling, as used by George Lucas in Star Wars) over John W. Campbell (tough-minded editor of Astounding magazine, the font of s.f.'s Golden Age, yet also the crucible of Scientology and crank ideas like the infamous Dean Drive).

This retreat from an observable fact--that the real moon is indeed a harsh mistress--signals, to Disch, the end of s.f.'s best days. He scorns the Heinlein-Pournelle wing of hard s.f. ("Space is like Texas, only larger"), not distinguishing between libertarian and conservative elements. Disch's own politics are not easily unfolded from his novels, but he does dislike militarism and seems to view with pleasure a benevolent state run by people much like himself.

Still, the rigor of s.f.'s ongoing internal discussions appeals to him, and he nods approvingly at the "Killer Bs"--Greg Bear, David Brin, myself. He confesses a fondness for that seminal work of strict physical exploration, Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity (1954). Conceptual adventures without a political agenda, as with Arthur Clarke, refresh him.

Certainly, "hardness" in the sense of scrupulous concern for the facts and methods of science remains for Disch and many others the core of the field and its always hopeful promise. Hardness has been appropriated by some for politically hard-nosed analysis, often with a libertarian bias, sometimes even with a conservative one--this last a seeming contradiction, given that this is a "literature of change."

Hal Clement's world-building took us to far exotica, to meet the strange face to face. Indeed, aliens are the most pointed s.f. motif. "If God can't be coerced into breaking his silence, at least he can send emissaries," is Disch's neat compression of science's failure to reveal the holy, and s.f.'s literary attempt to find it metaphorically in the alien. Aliens are only passingly interesting to see; what one wants to do is talk to them, sense the strangeness of another mind.

Yet this is not the focus of the movies and TV, which have turned s.f.'s aliens into horror shows or neat parables. "Screenwriters do not have the luxury that novelists enjoy of taking the time to explain things, to pose riddles and work them out, to think," writes Disch. "Such bemusements can be the glory of s.f. (as of the deductive mystery, another genre poorly served by film)," but we see it seldom in the torrent of special effects pouring from our screens.

In the late 1990s we have entered an era when special effects can show us just about anything, sometimes at surprisingly little cost. This could liberate s.f. from the standard by which it is increasingly judged: the visual. The trick is to combine ever-bigger spectacles with real thinking, historically a tough job.

I believe this to be the great challenge to the genre: to use its insights and methods to reach the huge potential audience with more than simple bangs. The western made such a transition in the 1950s, producing its finest works (High Noon, The Searchers, Shane) before running out of conceptual gas.

Written s.f. may have lesser prospects. Media tie-in work fills a (thankfully) separate section of the s.f. division in the larger bookstores. In the rising tide of media spinoff novels and "sharecropping" of imaginative territories pioneered by early greats, Disch sees the genre's probable fate: "more of the same and more of the sameness."

Need this be so? I find the quantity of well-written s.f. has never been higher, counter-balancing the media tie-in clones. This goes little noticed in the windy passageways of the literary castles, for the division of that Wells-James debate persists.

The media-tied series books typically sell less well with time, unlike creative series (mystery writer Sue Grafton's, historical novelist Patrick O'Brien's), whose readership tends to increase. This opposite gradient suggests conceptual exhaustion, the market not refertilizing. Thus are genres depleted and cast aside, as was the western.

Perhaps this comes in part because there are few feedback loops carrying information-dense dialogue. The media tie-ins have their Star Trek conventions, but they are isolated from the larger s.f. genre discussion. Further, there is a curious mismatch between the reviewing media and the reading public. One would expect an efficient market to shape book reviewing to the great strengths of contemporary America: many genres, from the hard-boiled detective to cutting-edge s.f. and techno-thrillers, on to wispy, traditional fantasy. Yet s.f. particularly is seldom noticed outside its own few magazines, except when Hollywood steals its innovations, often without credit.

In the end, Disch seems saddened because the energy of the New Wave, just breaking when he entered the field in the 1960s, hissed away into the sands of time. But the legacy of his generation is deeper, upping the stakes in the genre's perpetual battle between conventional literature's subtle, stylish stamina versus s.f.'s blunt, intellectual energies. True, Disch's fellow New Wave marchers--Joanna Russ, Samuel Delany, Harlan Ellison, J.G. Ballard--have largely dug in and fallen silent, but the advance of hard s.f. after them used weaponry they had devised. From Clement's beginning, hard s.f. has fashioned a whole armament of methods; mainstream mavens like Tom Clancy, and savvy insiders like Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, have used some of them to carve out rich provinces of their own.

On some issues Disch closes ranks with virtually all other s.f. writers. He deplores the recent razoring of literature by critics--the tribes of structuralists, postmodernists, deconstructionists. To many s.f. writers, "postmodern" is simply a signature of exhaustion. Its typical apparatus--self-reference, heavy dollops of obligatory irony, self-conscious use of older genre devices, pastiche and parody--betrays lack of invention, of the crucial coin of s.f.: imagination. (Philip K. Dick's identity anxieties resonate with postmodernists, though, so there is some overlap.)

Some deconstructionists have attacked science itself as mere rhetoric, not an ordering of nature, seeking to reduce it to the status of the ultimately arbitrary humanities. Most s.f. types find this attack on empiricism a worn old song with new lyrics, quite retro.

At the core of s.f. lies the experience of science. This makes the genre finally hostile to such fashions in criticism, for it values its empirical ground. Deconstructionism's stress on contradictory or self-contained internal differences in texts, rather than their link to reality, often merely leads to a literature of empty word games.

S.f. novels give us worlds which are not to be taken as metaphors, but as real. We are asked to participate in wrenchingly strange events, not merely watch them for clues to what they're really talking about. S.f. pursues a "realism of the future" and so does not take its surrealism neat, unlike much avant-garde work which is easily confused with it. The social-realist followers of James have yet to fathom this. The Mars and stars and digital deserts of our best novels are, finally, to be taken as real, as if to say: Life isn't like that, it is this.

The best journeys can go to fresh places, not merely return us to ourselves. Despite Disch's sad eulogy for the genre's past, which he considers its high point, I suspect there are great trips yet to be taken. But they will require courage.

Climate Controls

gbenford@uci.edu (Gregory Benford) — Sat, 01 Nov 1997 00:00:00 EST

Although we are getting better and better at it, forecasting the weather is still remarkably tricky. Far easier to predict the political climate, especially when it comes to the issue of global warming. To wit: In December, negotiators from around the world will meet in Kyoto to work out an international treaty to deal with what most (though not all) scientists believe is a 0.5-degree-centigrade increase in temperatures over the past century, and the promise of more to come.

All major participants, including the U.S. representatives, will argue that the only way to address global warming is to reduce significantly levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that are plausibly (though not definitively) linked to the rise in temperatures. Although a group of small island nations will suggest a 20 percent reduction in greenhouse gases, members of the European Union will most likely carry the day with a plan to cut emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide by at least 15 percent over the next decade.

The Clinton administration may object to those specific targets, but it will enthusiastically support the consensus that the only way to counter global warming is by reducing emissions. Indeed, the president announced in August that "we owe it to our children" to sign a treaty reducing consumption of greenhouse gases, a position echoed by Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, who has called dissenters "un-American," and chief economic adviser Janet Yellen, who has called cost-benefit analyses of cutting greenhouse gases "futile."

Such thinking is perfectly in keeping with the universal environmentalist position, which is best understood as a starkly Puritan ethic: "Abstain, sinner!" "The only way to slow climate change is to use less fuel," asserts Bill McKibben in The End of Nature, a book that roundly condemns such luxuries as privately owned washing machines and oranges shipped to cold climates. And if a 15 percent reduction in greenhouse gases seems extreme, consider that many ecologists champion far more costly conservation measures as the only solution. Ross Gelbspan's The Heat Is On even urges a government takeover of the energy sector and a massive propaganda campaign. In the wake of the Kyoto conference, expect to see calls for a Greenhouse Czar as global warming is brought to broad, persistent public notice.

Such hand wringing is as unimaginative as it is unequivocal. Instead of draconian cutbacks in greenhouse-gas emissions, there may very well be fairly simple ways--even easy ones--to fix our dilemma. But the discussion of global warming never makes this clear; it seems designed to preclude any hint that we might remedy the situation except through great sacrifice, discomfort, and cost. Indeed, it seemingly assumes a direct relationship between the level of sacrifice, discomfort, and cost demanded by any proposed solution and its scientific efficacy. Solutions based on suppressing fuel use will cost us dearly, in terms of both dollars spent and standard of living. Economists differ over the price tag, with a rough analysis yielding an estimate of about $250 billion a year to reduce carbon dioxide emissions alone by 15 percent worldwide. (This number is easily debatable within a factor of two.) To this price we must add the cost of reducing other greenhouse gases, a cost felt not merely in our pocketbooks but also in the goods, services, and innovations whose production would be halted or forgone.

But for a number of reasons that I will discuss below, now is precisely the time to take seriously the concept of "geoengineering," of consciously altering atmospheric chemistry and conditions, of mitigating the effects of greenhouse gases rather than simply calling for their reduction or outright prohibition. While such a notion may seem outlandish at first blush, it merely acknowledges explicitly what everyone already understands: that human activity has an impact on the planet.

Forty years ago, the noted atmospheric scientist Roger Revelle declared that "human beings are now carrying out a large scale geophysical experiment" by pumping billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the air. The question before us should not simply be how best to stop the experiment--and, by extension, the prosperity and progress allowed by cheap, abundant energy.

Rather, the question should be how best to design that experiment, so that we maximize benefits and minimize costs. As the citizens of the advanced nations become convinced that global warming is an immediate threat worthy of response, they will legitimately ask for solutions that demand the least sacrifice.

Politics and Parasols

A little-noticed 1992 National Academy of Sciences panel report spoke directly to this issue. The report clarified the science behind global warming and then ventured far from the ruling environmental orthodoxy: Could we accept that greenhouse gases will rise and find ways to compensate for them? Instead of cutting gases, could we intervene to mitigate or offset the warming they may cause?

Climate modification is time-honored, though not clearly a winner. Cloud seeding in the United States during the 1940s and '50s met some success but ended in a blizzard of lawsuits from those who claimed their local rainfall had been diverted by neighboring areas. (Though such assertions had little scientific proof, courts felt otherwise.) During the Cold War, both sides studied a menu of climatic dirty tricks, including schemes to kill the opponent's crops.

These programs foundered on a fundamental fact: Before modifying a climate, one must first grasp it. At the level of understanding available in the 1960s, only spectacular interventions would have left discernible signatures. Climate variability was so little fathomed that weather prediction was pointless beyond roughly a week.

But in progress little noticed by the public, systematic weather prediction has advanced more than tenfold in its assured time range. By watching the sun, atmosphere, ocean, land, and clouds using satellites, advanced aircraft, ships, and a tight grid of land-based observations, we have diminished the uncertainties about long-range weather. We are still just talking about the weather, but the talk is of higher quality. Earlier this year, for instance, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency predicted a coming wet winter six months in advance, based on temperature measurements of tropical waters, presaging a new El Niño ocean current. Whether that prediction is right or wrong--the coming months will decide--we are entering a new era in forecasting. With the latest systems, backed by heavy computer modeling, we will shrink uncertainties, identify subtle feedback loops, sniff out regional pollution patterns, discern the spread of deserts and the withering of forests.

Sensitive global measures of disturbance will shed further light on polar and glacial contractions, ozone levels, volcanic dust, levels of the oceans. There is even a technique available for cheaply gauging global reflectivity by measuring "earthshine"--the faint glow of our reflected light, seen on the dark portion of a crescent moon. Using a small telescope and makeshift gear, astronomers easily showed that we reflect 30 percent of incoming sunlight back into space--a number that our satellite system got earlier, at a price tag of hundreds of millions of dollars. Such innovation will lessen the costs and confusions of global understanding, a help we will need dearly if and when the greenhouse predicament worsens.

Geoengineering

Some geoengineering systems appear possible to deploy now, and at reasonable cost. They could be turned on and off quickly if we got unintended effects. It would be relatively easy to run small-scale experiments to answer questions about how our current atmosphere behaves when one alters the kind of dust, or aerosols, in it. Nuanced knowledge is crucial; the biosphere is a highly nonlinear system, one that has experienced climatic lurches before (glaciation, droughts) and can go into unstable modes, too.

Indeed, some critics argue that this simple fact precludes our tinkering with the "only Earth we have." Earth's climate might be chaotically unstable, so that a state with only slightly different beginning conditions would evolve to end up markedly different: An engineered early frost this year might mean an ice age the next. But we also know that Earth suffers natural injections of dust and aerosols from volcanoes, driving weather changes. Experiments that affect the planet within this range of natural variability could be allowed with little to no risk.

The simplest way to remove carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, is to grow plants--preferably trees, since they tie up more of the gas in cellulose, meaning it will not return to the air within a season or two. Plants build themselves out of air and water, taking only a tiny fraction of their mass from the soil. Forests, which cover about a third of the land, have shrunk by a third in the last 10,000 years (though they have grown over the last half-century in the United States, mostly due to market forces).

Like the ocean, land plants hold about three times as much carbon as the atmosphere. While oceans take many centuries to exchange this mass with the air, flora take only a few years. As tropical societies clear the rain forest, the temperate nations have actually been growing more trees, slightly offsetting this effect. In the United States, we have lost about a quarter of our forest cover since Columbus, and replanting occurs mostly in the South, where pine trees are a big cash crop for the paper industry. But globally we destroy a forested acre every second. Just staying even with this loss demands a considerable planting program.

Trees soak up carbon fastest when young. Planting fast-growing species will give a big early effect, but what happens when they mature? Eventually they either die and rot on the ground, returning nutrients to the soil, or we burn them. If this burning replaces oil or coal burning, fine and good. Even felling all the trees still leaves some carbon stored longer as roots and lumber. Buildings can hold lumber out of this cycle for a century or so.

About half the U.S. carbon dioxide emissions could be captured if we grew tree crops on economically marginal croplands and pasture. More forests could enhance biodiversity, wildlife, and water quality (forests are natural filters); make for better recreation; and give us more natural wood products. Even better, one can do the cheapest part first, with land nobody uses now. This would cost about $5 billion a year, and a feel-good campaign would sell easily, with merchants able to proclaim their eco-virtue ("Buy a car, plant a grove of trees").

This would work reasonably well in the short run. But trees take water, and one must be careful not to exhaust the soil, so this is a solution with a clear horizon of about 40 years. Soaking up the world's present carbon dioxide increase solely through trees would take up an Australia-sized land area--that is, a continent. Most such land is in private hands, so the job cannot be done by government fiat. Still, a regional effort could make a perceptible dent in overall carbon dioxide levels.

The Geritol Solution

The oceans comprise the other great sink of greenhouse gases; some researchers estimate that they absorb 40 percent of fossil- fuel emissions. In coastal waters rich in runoff, plankton can swarm densely, a million in a drop of water. They color the sea brown and green where deltas form from big rivers, or cities dump their sewage. Tiny yet hugely important, plankton govern how well the sea harvests the sun's bounty, and so are the foundation of the ocean's food chain. Far offshore, the sea returns to its plankton-starved blue.

The oceans are huge drivers in the environmental equations, because within them the plankton process vast stores of gases. Though cause and effect are not quite clear, we do know that in ice ages, carbon dioxide levels dropped 30 percent.

Could we do this today? Driving carbon dioxide down should lower temperatures, certainly. But how?

The answer may lie not in the tropics but in the polar oceans, where huge reserves of key ingredients for plant growth--nitrates and phosphates--drift unused. The problem is not weak sunlight or bitter cold, but lack of iron. Electrons move readily in its presence, playing a leading role in trapping sunlight.

A radical fix would be to seed these oceans with dissolved iron dust. This may have been the trigger that caused the big carbon dioxide drop in the ice ages: The continents dried, so more dust blew into the oceans, carrying iron and stimulating plankton to absorb carbon dioxide. Mother Nature can be subtle.

Such an idea crosses the momentous boundary between quasi-natural mitigation such as tree planting and self-evidently artificial means. Here is the nub of it, the conceptual chasm. With a boast that may cost his cause dearly, the inventor of the idea, John Martin of the Moss Landing Marine Laboratories in California, said, "Give me half a tanker full of iron, and I'll give you another ice age."

The captured carbon gets tied up in a "standing crop" of plankton. These tiny creatures dwell within a few meters of the surface. To truly bury the gas, they must somehow carry it into the vast bulk of the whole ocean. Some biologists believe that from the plankton the carbon dioxide should slowly dissolve into the lower waters, though we are uncertain of this. Perhaps the carbon dioxide eventually is deposited on the seabed. This last process no one has checked. Somehow, though, a good deal
of carbon does end up in the deep ocean sinks.

First proposed by Martin in 1988, the "Geritol solution" of adding iron to the ocean had a rocky history. Many derided it automatically as foolish, arrogant, and politically risky. But in 1996 the idea finally got tested by the U.S. government, and it performed well. Near the Galapagos Islands lies a fairly biologically barren area. Over 28 square miles of blue sea, scientists poured 990 pounds of iron during a week of testing. Immediately the waters bloomed with tiny phytoplankton, which finally covered 200 square miles, suddenly green. Plankton production peaked nine days after the experiment started. One thousand pounds of iron dust stimulated over 2,000 times its own weight in plant growth, far greater than the performance of any fertilizer on land. The plankton soaked up carbon dioxide, reducing its concentration in nearby sea water by 15 percent. It quickly made up this deficiency by drawing carbon dioxide from the air.

Projections show that since this process would affect only about 16 percent of the ocean area, a full-bore campaign to dump megatons of iron into the polar oceans probably would suck somewhere between 6 percent and 21 percent of the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, with most recent estimates settling around 10 percent. Such scary, big-time tinkering is the extreme; the method would have to be tested at far lower levels. Still, this mitigation could dent the greenhouse problem, though not solve it entirely.

Even such partial solutions attract firm opponents. Geoengineering carries the strong scent of hubris. What is best described as eco-virtue reared its head immediately after the 1988 proposal, even before any experiments took place. Following the Puritan model that any deviation from abstinence is itself a further indulgence, many scientists and ecologists saw in Martin's plan an incentive for polluters. "A lot of us have an automatic horror at the thought," commented atmospheric authority Ralph Cicerone of the University of California at Irvine.

Other specialists retaliated. Russell Seitz of Harvard said the Galapagos experimenters were afraid to seem politically incorrect. "If this approach proves to be environmentally benign," Seitz said, "it would appear to be highly economic relative to a Luddite program of declaring war against fire globally."

Large uncertainties remain: How would the iron affect the deeper ecosystems, of which we know little? Will the carbon truly end up on the seabed? Can the polar oceans carry the absorbed carbon away fast enough to not block the process? Would the added plankton stimulate fish and whale numbers in the great Antarctic Ocean? Or would some side effect damage the entire food pyramid? Even if the idea worked, who should run such a program? Additionally, there is some evidence that little of the newly fixed carbon in the Galapagos experiment actually sank.
It seems to have come back into chemical equilibrium with the air. Controversy surrounds this essential point; clearly, here is where more research could tell us much.

This much seems certain (and should allay many fears): If we decide to stop the Geritol solution because of unforeseen side effects, control is easy. The standing crop will die off within a week, providing a quick correction.

Costs, too, are easy to figure. There is nothing very high-tech about dumping iron. Martin estimated that the job would take about half a million tons per year. Depending on what sort of iron proves best at prodding plankton, and implementation methods, the iron costs range between $10 million and $1 billion a year. Throwing in 15 ships steaming across the polar oceans all year long, dumping iron dust in lanes, brings the total to around $10 billion. This would soak up about a third of our global fossil-fuel-generated carbon dioxide emissions each year.

Reflecting on Reflectivity

Not all mitigation efforts need take place on land or sea. In fact, the most intuitive approach may be simply to reflect more sunlight back into space, before it can be emitted in heat radiation and then absorbed by carbon dioxide. People understand the basic concept readily enough: Black T-shirts are warmer in summer than white ones. We already know that simply painting buildings white makes them cooler. We could compensate for the effect of all greenhouse gas emissions since the Industrial Revolution by reflecting less than 1 percent more of the sunlight.

A mere 0.5 percent change in Earth's net reflectivity, or albedo, would solve the greenhouse problem completely. The big problem is the oceans, which comprise about 70 percent of our surface area and absorb more light because they are darker than land.

When it comes to increasing albedo, it would be wise to begin the discussion by introducing positive measures that can be easily understood and are close at hand. Reflecting sunlight is not a deep technical idea, after all. Simply adding sand or glass to ordinary asphalt ("glassphalt") doubles its albedo. This is one mitigation measure everyone could see--a clean, passive way to Do Something.

A 1997 UCLA study showed that Los Angeles is 5 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the surrounding areas, mostly due to dark roofs and asphalt. Cars and power plants contribute, but only a bit; at high noon, the sun delivers to each square mile the power equivalent of a billion-watt electrical plant.

This urban "heat island" effect is common. But white roofs, concrete-colored pavements, and about $10 billion in new shade trees could cool the city below the countryside, cutting air conditioning costs by 18 percent. Cooler roads lessen tire erosion, too. About 1 percent of the United States is covered by human constructions, mostly paving, suggesting that we may already control enough of the land to get at the job.

From such homegrown solutions, we could make the leap to space. The most environmentally benign proposal for increasing the planet's albedo is very high-tech (and expensive): a massive orbiting white screen, about 2,000 kilometers on a side. Even if such parasols were broken into small pieces, putting them up would cost about $120 billion, a bit steep. We would also have to pay a lot to take them down if they caused some undesirable side effects. (One is certain: a night sky permanently light-polluted, irritating astronomers and moonstruck lovers.)

Using more-innocuous dust to reflect sunlight does not work; it drifts away, driven off by the sun's light pressure. But the upper atmosphere is still a good place to intervene, because much sunlight gets absorbed in the atmosphere on its way to us. Also, measures far above our heads trouble us less.

Other sorts of reflectors at high altitudes are promising. Spreading dust in the stratosphere appears workable because at those heights tiny particles stay aloft for several years. This is why volcanoes spewing dust affect weather strongly. The tiny motes that redden our sundowns reflect more sunlight than they trap infrared.

Even better than dust are microscopic droplets of sulfuric acid, which reflects light more effectively. Sulfate aerosols can also raise the number of droplets that make clouds condense, further increasing overall reflectivity. This could then be a local cooling, easier to monitor than carbon dioxide's global warming. We could perform such small, controllable experiments now. The amount of droplets or dust needed is a hundredth of the amount already blown into the atmosphere by natural processes, so we would not be venturing big dislocations. And we would get some spectacular sunsets in the bargain.

As usual, there are human-centered concerns. The Environmental Protection Agency hammers away at particulate levels, blaming them for lung disorders. Luckily, high-
altitude dust would come down mostly in raindrops, not making us cough. The cheapest way of delivering dust to the stratosphere is to shoot it up, not fly it. Big naval guns fired straight up can put a one-ton shell 20 kilometers high, where it would explode and spread the dust. This costs only a hundredth as much as the space-parasol idea. But booming naval guns that rattle windows for miles around are likely to provoke more than a few Not in My Backyard reactions.

Fortunately, there is a ready alternative to dust in any form: jet fuel. Changing the fuel mixture in a jet engine to burn rich can leave a ribbon of fog behind for up to three months, though as it spreads it becomes invisible to the eye. These motes would also come down mostly in rain, not troubling the brow of the EPA. Fuel costs about 15 percent of airlines' cash operating expenses, and running rich increases costs by only a few percent. For about $10 million, this method would offset the 1990 U.S. greenhouse emissions. Adding this to the cost of an airline ticket would boost prices perhaps 1 percent. An added asset is that quietly running rich on airline fuel will attract little notice, doesn't even change sunsets, and is hard to muster a media-saturated demonstration against.

But there are, as always, side effects. Dust or sulfuric acid would heat the stratosphere, too, with unknown impact. Some scientists suspect the ozone layer could be affected. If a widespread experiment showed this, we could turn off the effect within roughly a year as the dust settled down and got rained out. (Smaller experiments should show this first, of course.)

These ideas envision doing what natural clouds do already as the major players in the total albedo picture. A 4 percent increase in stratocumulus over the oceans would offset global carbon dioxide emission. Land reflects sunlight much better than the wine-dark seas, so putting clouds far out from land, and preferably in the tropics, gets the greatest leverage.

Clouds condense around microscopic nuclei, often the kind of sulfuric acid droplets the geoengineers want to spread in the stratosphere. The oceans make such droplets as sea algae decays, and the natural production rate sets the limit on how many clouds form over the seas. Clouds cover about 31 percent of our globe already, so a 4 percent increase is not going to noticeably ruin anybody's day.

Tinkering with such a mammoth natural process is daunting, but in fact about 400 medium-sized coal-fired power plants give off enough sulfur in a year to do the job for the whole Earth. (This in itself suggests just how much we are already perturbing the planet.) There are problems with using coal: Arguing that more air pollution is good for Mother Earth sounds intuitively wrong. Coal plants sit on land, and the clouds would be most effective over the oceans. A savvy international strategy leaps to mind: Subsidize electricity-dependent industry on isolated Pacific islands, and ship them the messiest, sulfur-rich coal. The plants' plumes would stretch far downwind, and the manufactured goods could revitalize the tropical ocean states, paying them for being global good neighbors. The wealthy states would then get their mitigation carried out far from home and far from vexatious neighborhood committees, using labor purchased at low rates. And nobody has to take the plants; prices will mediate the demand.

A more boring approach, worked out by the National Academy of Sciences panel, envisions a fleet of coal-burning ships which heap sulfur directly into their furnaces. (Maybe some collaboration would work here. Freighters burning sulfur could also spread iron dust, combining the approaches, with some economies.) The ships spew great ribbons of sulfur vapor far out at sea, where nobody can complain, and cloud corridors form obediently behind. It would be best to use these sulfur clouds to augment the edges of existing overcast regions, swelling them and increasing the lifetime of natural clouds. The continuously burning sulfur freighters would follow weather patterns, guided by weather satellite data.

At first these could operate as regional experiments, to work out a good model of how the ocean's cloud system responds. This low-tech method would cost about $2 billion per year, including amortizing the ships.

The biggest political risk here lies with shifts in the weather. The entire campaign would increase the sulfur droplet content in our air by about 25 percent. Probably this would cause no significant trouble, with most of the sulfur raining out into the oceans, which have enormous buffering capacity. Keeping the freighters a week's sailing distance from land would probably save us from scare headlines about sudden acid rains on farmers' heads, since about 30 percent of the sulfur should rain out each day.

Albedo Chic

The NAS panel found that "one of the surprises of this analysis is the relatively low cost" of implementing some significant geoengineering. It might take only a few billion dollars to mitigate the U.S. emission of carbon dioxide. Compared with stopping people in China from burning coal, this is nothing.

We should not take the 1992 panel report, thick with footnotes and layers of qualifiers, to be a road map to a blissful future. The NAS estimates are simple, linear, and made with poorly known parameters. They also ignore many secondary effects. For example, forests promote clouds above them, since the water vapor they exhale condenses quickly. Those lovely cumulus puffs reflect sunlight. So growing trees to sop up carbon dioxide also increases albedo, a positive feedback bonus. But is that the end of the chain? No, because water vapor itself is a greenhouse gas. Thick clouds absorb infrared as well. If forests respire a lot, they can partially trap their own heat. Understanding this, and calculating it in detail, will take a generation of research.

But perhaps the greatest unknown is social: How will the politically aware public react--those who vote, anyway? If geoengineers are painted early and often as Dr. Strangeloves of the air, they will fail. Properly portrayed as allies of science--and true environmentalism--they could become heroes. Not letting the radical greens set the terms of discussion will matter crucially.

A major factor here will be whether mitigation looks like yet another top-down contrivance, another set of orders from the elite. Draconian policing of fuel burning will certainly look that way, a frowning Aunt Bessie elbowing into daily details, calculating your costs of commuting to work and setting your thermostat level. In contrast, mitigation does not have to push a new camel's nose into our tents. Technical solutions can play out far from people's lives, on the sea or high in the air.

Better, widespread acceptance of mitigation strategies could lead to an albedo chic--ostentatious flaunting of white roofs, the Mediterranean look, silvered cars, the return of the ice-cream suit in fashion circles. White could be appropriate after Labor Day again.

More seriously, every little bit would indeed help. This is crucial: Mitigation wears the white hat. It asks simple, clear measures of everyone, before going to larger-scale interventions. Grassroots involvement should be integral from the very beginning. Local efforts should go apace with those at the nation-state level, especially since mitigation intertwines deeply with diplomacy. Here appearances are even more critical, given the levels of animosity between the big burners (especially the United States) and the tropical world.

Plausible solutions should stay within the NAS panel's sober guidelines. Learning more is the crucial first step, of course. This is not just the usual academic call for more funded research; nobody wants to try global experiments on a wing and a prayer.

Beyond more studies and reports, we must soon begin thinking of controlled experiments. Climate scientists so far have studied passively, much like astronomers. They have a bias toward this mode, especially since the discernible changes we have made in our climate generally have been pernicious. Such mental sets ebb slowly. The reek of hubris also restrains many. But a time for many limited experiments like the iron-dumping one will come. This will be the second great step as we ponder whether to become geoengineers. Constraints must be severe to ensure clear results.

Most important, perturbations in climate must be local and reversible--and not merely to quiet environmentalist fears. Only controlled experiments, well designed and well analyzed, will be convincing to all sides in this debate. Indeed, the green plume near the Galapagos Islands showed this. Its larger features were best studied by satellite, which picked up the green splotch strongly against the dark blue sea. But the crucial issue of whether the carbon stayed tied up in ocean waters was poorly addressed. Satellites were of no help. Slightly better funding and more scientists in dispersed, small craft could have told us a lot more.

Careful climate modeling must closely parallel every experiment. Few doubt that our climate stands in a class by itself in terms of complexity. Though much is made of how wondrous our minds are, perhaps the most complex entity known is our biosphere, in which we are mere mayflies. Absent a remotely useful theory of complexity in systems, we must proceed cautiously.

While computer studies are notorious for revealing mostly what was sought, confirming the prejudices of their programmers, methods are improving quickly. They can explore the many side avenues of small-scale geoengineering experiments. Invoking computer models as crucial watchdogs in every experiment will calm fears, at least among those who read beyond the headlines.

Who pays, in the end? Political pressure may well compel nations to comply with some target goals. A crucial factor will be what ratio to use in assessing a nation's (or region's) rectitude: net fossil-fuel consumption divided by what? Population? This favors the poor and populous nations. Economic value created with the fuels? The United States would fare reasonably well. Some weighted mean between the two?

To avoid descending into pure power politics and making policy sausage in public, a World Warming Authority could copy our fledgling pollution-voucher methods, bringing some market forces into play. But instead of simply trading the right to burn more--a negative unit--one could use a positive Mitigation Unit as well. Industries amassing them by, say, paying for rich-burning jet fuel could then burn more oil themselves. A market-driven dynamic equilibrium could then minimize costs for a given anti-warming target.

Such approaches might drive the emergence of suites of methods, which regions could choose among to their best advantage. Deserts reflect light well (though their roads are usually dark), so added cloud cover is less effective there overall; the whitewashing of cities could be measured by their average decrease in the heat-island effect; lands with high rainfall may favor forestation. Any such policy calculus should hover over the
intricacies of markets, which will move faster and with more ingenuity than any committee. Rigid mandates will inevitably fail.

Still, going from the local to the global is fraught with uncertainty--and sure to inspire much anxiety. We will always be ambivalent stewards of the Earth. And greenhouse gas emissions certainly will not be our last problem, either. We are doing many things to our environment, with our numbers expected to reach 10 billion by 2050. What new threats will emerge? Catastrophes may come at a quickening pace, springing from the many synergistic effects that we must trace through the geophysical labyrinth.

As we begin correcting for our inadvertent insults to Mother Earth, we should realize that it's forever. Once we become caretakers, we cannot stop. The large tasks confronting humanity, especially the uplifting of the majority to some semblance of prosperity, must be carried forward in the shadow of our stewardship.

And yet, even among the able nations, those who have the foresight to grasp solutions, an odd reluctance pervades the policy classes. As the atmospheric physicist Ralph Cicerone has noted, "Many who envision environmental problems foresee doom and have little faith in technology, and therefore propose strong limits on industrialization, while most optimists refuse to believe that there is an environmental problem at all."

Having sinned against Mother Nature inadvertently, many are keenly reluctant to intervene knowingly. Sherwood Rowland, a chemist at the University of California at Irvine who predicted, with Mario Molina, the depletion of the ozone layer, declared, "I am unalterably opposed to global mitigation." This added considerable weight to the abstention cause. At root, such people see mankind as the problem; only by behaving humbly, living lightly upon our Earth, can we atone. Here most scientists and theologians agree, at least for now.

The next century will see a protracted battle between the prophets who would intervene and the moralists who see all grand-scale human measures as tainted. Even now, many argue that even to speak of geoengineering encourages the unwashed to more excess, since the masses will think that once again science has a remedy at hand.

Some, though, will say quietly, persistently, Well, maybe science does....

Selfness

gbenford@uci.edu (Gregory Benford) — Wed, 01 Jan 1997 00:00:00 EST

I am a clone.
Or rather, I am better than one. Or so any identical twin surely must see the matter.
The recent media feeding frenzy about a cloned sheep, Dolly, showed us journalism in its fullest modern form. Many of those writing about this genuine watershed moment in techno-culture followed current journalist practice: their foremost research instrument was the telephone. Of those who called me--an unlikely authority, since I am not a biologist--none realized that DNA does not solely determine the heritage a child gets from its parents.
My brother, Jim, and I shared a womb without a view for nine months. (Though not always restfully, our mother reports.) Genetically identical, we also enjoyed the same currents and chemicals of our mother. After a rather traumatic birth--both had our appendixes removed within days--we were brought up in the same house, with constant attentive parents, and even wore matching clothes until our late teens. (How much trauma this clothing ritual induced in our personalities I leave to others to decide; suffice to say that being seen as sugary-cute has left me with a decided prejudice against sweets in any form.)
True twins share womb chemistry and endure many fateful slings and arrows together. The fabled connection between twins is true, in my case. We are distantly dismissive of mere fraternal twins (different DNA) and regard all others as "singletons," those condemned by birth to endure the isolation of never truly sharing the intuitive grasp that we enjoy without paying a price.
Or nearly so. There is mild statistical evidence that identicals have slightly lower IQ. This might be plausibly so; the comfort of ready communication may well lead to a certain mental laziness.
Jim and I felt the opposite. Reared in rural southern Alabama, we enjoyed an idyllic Huck Finn boyhood. But education there was casual at best. Our mother and father were high school teachers, and challenged the pervasive easy-going ignorance. We attended a one- room schoolhouse, with each row of seats a separate grade. Against this my brother and I united, reading widely and enjoying the clash of cultures which paraded by. After we were 9 our father became a career Army officer, whisking us to Japan for three years, Germany for another three, and further isolating the twins from a continuity that might have sucked us into the conventional.
So we are an odd pair even among twins. Jim got his doctorate from the same institution as I, UC San Diego, in the same area (plasma physics) and now lives a few kilometers from where I once lived, in northern California. Such correlations appear often among twins. We grow up in a culture of sameness, so have a sense of self always shared.
Among singletons, interest in twins is enduring. Do we feel some mystical sense of connection? Of course; but whether it is mystical or not begs description. I am writing this at 35,000 feet over Greenland, on the way back to UC Irvine from Lapland. I know without thinking about it that my brother is probably body surfing on a beach near La Jolla, though I have not spoken to him for ten days. I remember his itinerary and without conscious deliberation feel where he is likely to be. This is processing at the unconscious level, and as an experiment, when I see him in two days I shall check with him and let you know the outcome. [Later: my estimate was right to within the hour.]
But this is scarcely mystical. Instead, I attribute the innumerable similar incidents in our lives to a lot of automatic thinking, based on intuitions cooked up through more than five decades. To singletons this can look uncanny.
Speaking as a twin, clones seem a lesser form. They grow up in a later era than their genetic duplicates, with different upbringings. Would knowing that they were genetic duplicates trouble them? Surely such people would not be inherently more mentally fragile; Siamese twins are far more like each other than ordinary twins, yet suffer no higher incidence of mental illness than is usual, suggesting that even extreme parallels in nature and nurturer are not damaging.
The furor over Dolly puzzled me by the emotional level of debate. Reasonable people like political commentator George Will asked, "What if the great given--a human being is a product of the union of a man and a woman--is no longer a given?" This issue properly comes from a broader issue in biotechnology, the entire field of artificial birth in all forms, for there are no precise boundaries in this new territory.
Certainly I see no reason why society should prevent grieving parents from having a baby cloned from the cells of a dead child, if they wish. Beyond such emotionally wrenching cases, where should we erect walls? Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins asserted that he could see purely intellectual issues intriguing enough to justify cloning himself: "I think it would be mind-boggingly fascinating to watch a younger edition of myself growing up in the twenty-first century instead of the 1940s."
Many no doubt find his position puzzling or even immoral or disgusting. Even so, why should Dawkins be prevented from having a cloned child? What is society's mandate?
The Dolly debate produced several claims that cloning violated the fundamental principle of individual dignity. Twins certainly belie that argument. Fears of interchangeable people armies, usually marching robotically onward, come from a simple-minded genetic determinism. And the grounds for a principle of uniqueness seem vague at best.
After all, why treat clones differently?--we twins and clones are all "monozygotes", as the biologists put it. In fact, clones necessarily separate in outside influences from their first moments in the womb, for the wombs are different. Another's DNA inserted into a host egg will acquire "maternal factors" from the proteins of that egg, affecting later development. The womb's complex chemical mix varies with each mother, so nine months of different "weather" will change the outcome in the fetus; the baby will not be a photocopy of its older original.
And clones will be full-fledged people with all rights attendant to that status. Nobody forces twins to serve as organ farms for their other twin; clones would have the same legal status.
The true first use of cloning will undoubtedly be in the "copying" of highly selected farm animals. These could first be excellent milk cows or racing horses. More futuristically, we shall see--and quite soon-- the cloning of "pharm" animals which yield biotech products of use to us, such as insulin-rich milk from cows, and a whole array of therapeutic hormones, enzymes and proteins.
Plants have already been extensively engineered. More than three-quarters of the cotton grown in Alabama last year was genetically tuned to kill predatory insects. Already scientists are experimenting with cotton plants that contain polyester fibers, too, surely a boon for fans of leisure suits.
Still, cloning should indeed furrow the brow of long- perspective thinkers. We believe sexual reproduction holds sway over much of the kingdom of life because it provides ever-new gene mixes, allowing a species to build fresh defenses against the ever-mutating pathogens that infest the natural world. The perpetual arms race between prey and predator favors sex as a defense. Seen this way, we are men and women because the primary predator on humans have always been microbes, not tigers.
So "pharm" animals cloned over and over will face the very real threat of infectious diseases which wipe out a herd overnight. But surely nobody will clone huge numbers of humans, so such plagues will be quite unlikely. The breeds of influenza that regularly attack us genetically diverse humans will do far more damage.
As I write this, a presidential panel seems about to recommend a uniform federal ban on human cloning experiments. I believe this will be a mistake, generally, and an ineffective move anyway. The technology is fairly simple; others will pick it up. In Latin American countries or on offshore islands, clinics will offer the service at a hefty charge. Underground, without legal oversight, we will indeed see some tragedies and even horrors.
Bioethics is a field with many practitioners but few obviously qualified savants. Often the bans which spring from such federal committees prove ill-advised, their only long-term effects negative. This was the case with the two-year moratorium on recombinant DNA, which simply slowed the field without deciding anything. So did similar bans on selling organs or blood, and I predict, so shall the recent Clinton prohibition on using human embryos in federally backed medical research. The ultimate price for these momentary interruptions -- and so far they have always been momentary -- is lives lost because the resultant technology arrives too late for some patients.
Bioethicists tend to see problems everywhere, and saying no gives them visible power. Letting technology evolve willy-nilly, responding to what people want -- maybe even people without advanced degrees! -- gives bioethicists no perks or prominence; unsurprising, then, that they seldom go that route. They aren't the patients clinging to life, or infertile, or stunted in some potentially fixable way.
They also tend to think collectively, omitting the inconvenient needs of real people. Bioethics professor George Annas of Boston University flatly demands, "I want to put the burden of proof on scientists to show us why society needs this before society permits them to go ahead and [do] it." Note that he does not require this rule in his own work, including testing the above sentence by its own standards. Instead, Virginia Postrel has noted of Annas and many others, "We will hear the natural equated with the good, and fatalism lauded as maturity. That is a sentiment about which both green romantics and pious conservatives agree."
Indeed. We would save ourselves much trouble if we could agree that the proper place for most bioethical thought lies in counseling those affected, not in dictating the spectrum of possibilities.
#
Cloning arouses anxieties stemming from a general uncertainty with the very concept of the self. Legally, even the mind-body unity seems shaky. In 1991 the California Supreme Court decided that a cancer patient did not have a right to share in the profits from UCLA's use of his diseased cells to produce new drugs. This meant that a patient does not even own his own body, and so his integral self is not simply bodily.
Consciousness seems to us to be slippery and yet intuitively obvious. We feel ourselves to be the same person all along our life- trajectory, unique and self-contained. Just as an ant colony or a baseball game has an integrity even as its insects or players change, we have an irreducible selfness.
Of course, such assertions are hard to prove. (Indeed, proving who you are is done by showing a partial copy of yourself-- fingerprints, or a drivers' license.) We all readily assent to knowing that we experience a continuous self.
Yet we fall asleep every day, a loss of conscious continuity. People who lapse into year-long comas can emerge again with the same personality. Still better, patients in brain operations who have their heads chilled down until they are legally brain dead, with no alpha and beta rhythms at all, are still themselves when they are warmed back up and revived. Their memories and mannerisms come through intact.
Over what spans of time and condition can we keep our sense of selfness unbroken?
The bedrock issue of preserving one's selfness then intersects the increasing interest in prolonging life--if necessary by either freezing oneself after death, or even "uploading" into computers.
Making yourself into a computer file and programs fits one present picture of our Self: the mind is software running on the hardware of the brain. The Self, then, is whatever program is running on your customized operating system, one developed by the rubs and rituals of your upbringing.
Of course, such an analogy is suspect, for our brains self- program themselves, laying down memories in chemical pathways that are not simply erased, and aren't under our conscious control.
But the uploader's central point is that one can copy a mind much as a tape copies a piece of music, without knowing how music is made. The brain, they say, is the same.
Minds are self-organizing, evolving systems, however, unlike fixed musical works; but the image is striking, still. Where does it lead us?
The first novel about uploading, Charles Platt's 1991 The Silicon Man, does not directly confront a basic problem of copying, Levinson's Paradox: To the degree that a copy approaches perfection, it defeats itself. In being an absolutely perfect copy --so that no one can tell it from the original--it transforms the original into a duplicate. This means the perfect copy is no longer a perfect copy, because it has obliterated, rather than preserved, the uniqueness of the original--and thus failed to copy a central aspect of the original.
A perfect, artificial human intelligence would inevitably have this effect on its natural original. Sf author Paul Levinson pointed out this feature, hinting that it portended even deeper problems, in the 1980s. While the paradox may seem a mere logical quibble, it underlines how little we know of how much fidelity to the original truly implies that the self has been preserved.
No mere technological improvement can remove this logical difficulty. Given enough memory maintenance, we could maintain numerical versions of ourselves, assuming that the recording process would not destroy our fleshy originals.
This raises great troubles, though. Termed variously Dittos, Duplicates or Copies, these digital entities lead a tenuous existence. Real, fleshy folk would decisively reject the Copy Fallacy: the belief that a digital Self was identical to the Original, and that an Original should feel that a Ditto itself somehow carried them forward into immortality. (As long as nobody pulls the plug, of course.)
Refuting this Copy Fallacy is straightforward. Imagine yourself promised that you will be resurrected digitally, immediately after your death. Assign a price tag you will pay for that, insurance of a sort. Then imagine the guy who sells you on this notion saying that, uh, well, maybe it would not be started right away, but sometime in future...we promise. As that date recedes, people's enthusiasm for paying for Self Copies dims -- demonstrating that it is the hope of continuity they unconsciously relish.
As an identical twin, I have never bought the Copy Fallacy in any form. Though my brother and I have diverged in personality and appearance, due to differing environments and histories, for the first twenty years of our lives few could tell us apart. He and I could, though, and that's the nub of the argument: the Self is defined internally, not externally.
In the end, Copies benefit themselves, not the dead; machine immortality is more like having your twin live on, not yourself.
Some thinkers about computer identities, in the years since publication of The Silicon Man, have begun to push an agenda of Copy rights -- the expansion of classical liberty into the digital wilderness. Dittos still will be people, the argument goes, with different skills and drawbacks, rather like the "differently abled."
The freedom to change your own clock speed, morph into anything, or even remake your own mind, goes along with the admitted liability of not being physically real. Unable to literally walk the streets, they will be like amputated souls.
Platt envisioned tele-presencing and some digital prosthetics that might reach in limited fashion into the concrete universe, but these would be re-creations; if a Ditto feared for its life, why lurk fully in the dangerous real world?
Also, "rights" for Dittos also get tied up with our own deep- seated fears -- of digital immortals who amass wealth and like fungus reach into every avenue of natural, real lives; parasites, nothing less. Platt plainly foresees issues looming over the horizon, as soon as the digital world amasses financial power. Tycoon Dittos!
Running a Ditto of your Self, then giving it autonomy, means it could get rich and also change itself. Your Ditto could shape its own motivations, goals, habits, edit away memories and tastes. It then stops mimicking your own evolution. Your Ditto could erase any liking for Impressionist Opera and overlay instead a passion for rap, enjoying rhythms that would have bored the true Self into a coma. The easy access of a Ditto to his entire underpinning -- unlike ourselves, with much of our personality lying in our subconscious and not consciously fixable -- implies constant change, personality tinkering, perhaps worse.
#
Is consciousness just a property of special algorithms, sliding sheets of information, digital packets jumping through conceptual hoops? How we envision our selfness depends on this huge question, now a hot topic.
Does a model simulating watching a sunset have to feel the same way its Original did? Why doubt simulated consciousness, when nobody asked the same question of programs that balance checkbooks? Such issues perplex many philosophers today, but I think feeling one's way through them in fiction is a rather more revealing path than abstract argument.
Consider that a Ditto is forcefully reminded that he is not the Original, but a mere fog of digits. All that gives him a sense of Self as continuity is the endless stepping forward of pattern. In people, the "real algorithm", computes itself by firing synapses, ringing nerves, getting the feel of continuity from the dance of cause and effect.
Dittos on the other hand are simply time-stepped forward, in processes that could just as easily run backward without the Ditto even noticing. Even time is fragile, a convention, in a digital universe.
Dittos surely would stand on shaky metaphysical ground here. Would we find that a Ditto fidgeted out of pure self-anxiety? His digital stress chem shoots up, metabolics lurch, heart-sims hammer, lungs flutter in intense uneasiness? Would typical Dittos talk incessantly, acutely uncomfortable, and make odd demands of their keepers?--that they be edited, truncated, improved, perhaps finally killed?
The dream of bodiless existence does not imply the end of the human condition, if we are still truly simulating humans.
Consider how well one would have to describe what our everyday life is like. Making a Ditto's body seem right to its critical intelligence demands sets of overlapping rules. After all, the Ditto remembers what a pleasure eating, say, used to be, back there in the gritty, real world.
As he (or she) chews, teeth have to thunk down on food, saliva squirt to greet the munched mass, enzymes started to work to extract the right nutrient ratios. The program can bypass the involved stomach and colon processes, simplifying into a satisfying concentration of blood sugars, giving him a carbohydrate lift, a pleasant electrolyte balance, hormones and stabilizers all calculated with patchwork templates for the appropriate emotional levels.
The body becomes a set of recipes for seeming like oneself. No underlying physics or biology at work, just a good-enough fake, put in by hand--the unseen hand of some Programmer God. So emerges an existential angst as profound as anything Camus felt, surely.
All other detail can be discarded, once the subroutines got right effect, simulating the tingling of nerve endings. All this is to ground a visceral sense of Self, seemingly rock-solid, though really just a patched-in slug of digits, orchestrated by a mosaic of ten thousand ad hoc rules, running together.
So much effort, just to approximate what we get for free every day!
But of course, digital selves need not age or die, as long as somebody pays the power bill and doesn't pull the plug on us. Ordinary fear of mortal death will become a fear of being cut off, your Self never run again. Each interruption in running the Self will come to a Ditto as a possible final end, for he cannot act in the world while not running.
Indeed, when booted up again, he might not be able to tell he had suffered a hesitation-death, or whether it was a mere second or a hundred years of real time. This is a kind of heavenly eternity, to some. To me it seems like a hell of existential anxiety. If to us twins, singletons have to go through life with rather rickety mental identities, think of a Ditto's lot!
But the possibilities! proclaim some of the uploading Digiterati.
With enough computing space and speed, one could be King Me the Magnanimous, endowing many proto-Michelangelos with creative time...or perhaps becoming Michelangelo oneself, with time. What if genius is just a matter or accumulating greater computing capacity?
Rebuilding yourself from the ground up then emerges as at least a hope. That which is buried in the digits might be harvested, changed. Learn to freezeframe your own emotional states, like painting a self portrait for study later. Perhaps that could help understand oneself, like a botanist putting himself on a slide and under a microscope. Could slices of the Self, multiplied, be the Self? With even emotions as programs?
Such ideas run through Platt's seminal book. They provoked later writers like Greg Egan, who in Permutation City sees a special SelfHood Suite menu, eerie in its temptations. With it one could present interior-configurations as separate subroutines, elements in the modeled brain. Here, grouped under headings--Qualms, Anxieties, Aversions, Likes, Habits, Unconscious Appeals--could rest items he could edit, improve, erase entirely. Not knowing what the Self is, which irreducible kernel of menu items define oneself, for oneself, suggests that Dittos will be tempted into rapt navel gazing.
Given the chance, which would you choose in pursuit of "immortality" -- uploading or cryonics? Forget about the probabilities of success -- each seems fraught with peril. (In an earlier column I estimated that the probability of being successfully frozen and later revived by future technology was at best one percent. A small chance, but infinitely larger than plain, flat zero...)
Uploading gives a pure Copy; cryonics yields your own brain, no doubt altered by much chemistry and microengineering necessary to pull your consciousness back out of the ice.
Which is truer? As far as I know, sf has yet to confront this question.
My intuitive choice is cryonics. At least in its perfect form, you recover the true you, the original synapses and holistic organization of the hopelessly complex brain. With uploading, you at best get a model of yourself, a rendering in 0s and 1s which reproduces for an outside audience--though not including you, the true best critic--your basic personality and memories.
Of course, having your brain frozen leaves out much: your physiology, your body instincts, will have to come from some body grown from your own cells (the reproductive ones, probably) to accompany the revival of your brain.
Here the cloning of humans is essential. Current cryonics organizations (I know of four) routinely preserve not just the head of their patients, but the reproductive organs and other body samples.
The idea is to send forward in time as much information as possible. While some patients elect to have their entire bodies frozen in liquid nitrogen, a far more expensive proposition, most take the head-only route.
They anticipate that a body can be cloned for them at some far future date when it will not only be technically possible, but even fairly inexpensive. Even more, they trust that no medical prohibitions will have halted cloning research. Further, cryonicists hope that cloning technology will have avoided the clear dangers.
But if a body is grown for a defrosted and repaired head, what becomes of the body's head? Was it deliberately stunted from "birth", so that it never developed as a conscious human? It seems unlikely that anyone could grow a body in some chemical vat, no matter how sophisticated, without using the many complex functions that the brain provides for that body.
So even to envision cryonics proceeding, one must require that future society has solved both scientific and moral questions about selfness and its implications. This is not an easy future to foresee, not at all.
But remember that the future is infinite, or at least very long indeed. Note how primitive medicine was a mere century ago. A few more centuries of steady growth could yield a social and philosophical landscape beyond our present comprehension.
Suppose cryonics could work. You would have grabbed back from time's maw the pure raw stuff of Self. Cybernetics gives a digital model, one always suspect because it has to choose how to configure the myriad data points of any brain-readout.
Choice begets the particular, and to have the whole Self, you must have the true, full general Self, in whatever deep labyrinths it lies.