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Beyond the End of the World

Myth Making with a Scientific Spin

 

Mark Adams enters a room like an escaped particle from a high-energy physics experiment. He whizzes in suddenly and asks if you want coffee. Then he’s gone, hunting down a pot brewing somewhere outside. Just as precipitously, he returns and lights up the first in a chain of cigarettes that, together with the caffeine, power a high-octane conversation that requires hardly a question to sustain it.

Adams is an associate professor and graduate chair in the Department of the History and Sociology of Science, which he helped found in 1971. He is an authority on Soviet science and has particular expertise in the history of biology, science and politics, and the history of science fiction. In addition to other courses, he teaches Science and Literature, a class that explores the emergence of science fiction and how it has spawned a mythology for modern technological civilization that reflects our sense of ourselves and our place in the universe.

Holding forth on sci-fi topics, he tempers a computer geek’s gee-whiz enthusiasm for the "big questions" the genre raises with a scholar’s analysis and exhaustive footnoting of sources behind them. What is the "plan" of the universe? What is our place in nature? How did we get here, and what is the destiny of the human species? "Those are the big questions," he exalts, his arms waving in big, encompassing gestures as if to keep from being submerged by them. "And those are the questions that the new science fiction writers felt Darwinism [and the new biology] were in a position to answer."

Early in this century, says Adams, a number of authors produced works that comprise a science-based "credo" concerning the evolutionary future of the human race. They had a keen understanding of experimental biology as it was emerging, and they extrapolated the implications of biological manipulation—what we now call bioengineering—to forge a compelling and grand and terrible conception of the future. "They believed we didn’t have to rely on natural selection," says Adams, holding the smoke from a long drag on his cigarette to create a pregnant pause, "but were empowered in a way humanity never was before to control our own evolution." He calls their writings "visionary biology."

One of these visionaries was J.B.S. Haldane, a hard-to-classify polymath who was at once biochemist, physiologist, statistician, science popularizer, essayist, and much more. Unafraid to perform painful experiments on himself, Haldane helped bring together Darwin’s theory of natural selection with Mendel’s theory of genetics. In "The Last Judgment," a literary work that is part essay and part short story, he laid out a vision of the end of the world and the future of humanity beyond the earth’s destruction.

Besides revealing the mechanism by which species evolve, Darwin’s theory of natural selection also implies that all species will become extinct. To elude this fate, Haldane tried to imagine how humans might escape the planet’s end. Steeped in a worldview of material nature governed by laws, he shaped a history of the future that was constrained by possibilities latent in scientific theory. "I have been compelled to place the catastrophe within a period of the future accessible to my imagination," he explained, "for I can imagine what the human race will be like in 40 million years, since 40 million years ago our ancestors were certainly mammals. . . . But I cannot throw my imagination forward for ten times that period. Four hundred million years ago our ancestors were fish of a very primitive type. I cannot imagine a corresponding change in our descendants."

Haldane recognized that human history, which encompasses the future of the race as well as its past, is set within a far wider context than the brief 10,000 years of recorded history studied by conventional historians. He set history within the story of the origin of the universe, the condensation of the solar system, the emergence of life, and the evolution of the human species. It’s the story that science has elaborated, Adams points out, and you can’t understand the past—or the future—without understanding that narrative. Haldane knew he couldn’t imagine the human species 400 million years into the future because these descendants would no longer be "human" as we understand the term, just as our fish-like ancestors were profoundly remote from us 400 million years in the past. "How would the street grid of Philadelphia have been understood by a flatworm?" asks Adams. "That’s the kind of evolutionary time he’s talking about."

In "The Last Judgment" Haldane recounts how the human race will cast off the helplessness nature imposes upon all species and seize control of it’s destiny, using the tools of science, to escape a doomed planet. "A few hundred thousand of the human race . . . determined that though men died, man should live for ever." In his telling, it takes our descendants 284 failed attempts and almost 10 million years before they establish a foothold on Venus, from which they witness the earth’s destruction when the moon collides with it.

The new home planet is prepared for colonization by a process called "terraforming": bioengineered organisms are let loose to destroy indigenous life forms, rendering Venus more suitable for human habitation. To survive the still inhospitable Venusian environment, a "deliberate evolution" is also undertaken to engineer a race with a much higher body temperature and a physiology that requires only one-tenth the oxygen. On Venus, the new humanity evolves into a "super-organism" whose individual members are each telepathically "under the influence of the voice of the community." A stark message from this artificially evolved race notes, "So rapid was our evolution that the crew of the last projectile to reach Venus were incapable of fertile unions with our inhabitants, and they were therefore used for experimental purposes."

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The "evolved humans" then begin planning to colonize Jupiter by engineering a dwarf species with short legs, thick bones, and more solid internal organs that could withstand the potent gravitational forces of the giant planet. The new species of humans—freed from their terrestrial fate—resolve to persist beyond the 80 million years of expected life for the galaxy. Having escaped extinction, they are free to choose a future not circumscribed by nature; they are looking out beyond the solar system, outside the confines of the galaxy, and across trackless space toward a future with no horizons.

"Man’s little world will end," Haldane concluded. "The human mind can already envisage that end. If humanity can enlarge the scope of its will as it has enlarged the reach of its intellect, it will escape that end. If not, the judgment will have gone out against it, and man and all his works will perish eternally."

Remarks Adams, "Haldane was aware of the deeper implications of science, and he saw the new biology as a way of controlling the human future and, indeed, of saving mankind." He has been cited as one of the "founding masters" of modern science fiction on the basis of this work alone. "The ideas in his 1927 essay began to infuse the newly emergent genre of ‘science fiction’ even before that genre had been given its name."

If Haldane was shy about imagining descendants who would evolve far beyond what could be easily recognized as human, Olaf Stapleton, another recognized master, was not. In 1930 he published Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future. Adams calls it "one of the meatiest books of this century."

The tale is told by a "human" of the far future, one of the "Last Men," who is able to speak to the people of the 1930s, who are the "First Men." He recounts the rise and fall of civilizations over a two billion-year period, from our time to his. Stapleton predicted increased industrialization, the development of atomic power and scientists’ efforts to control it, an Americanized planet, and a coming war with China for the near term.

In the history of the far future, 18 distinct human species evolve and succeed each other, some deliberately engineered, some not. The Promethean urge to seize control of natural forces leads the human species "to set about remaking human nature." There is a musical species, a flying species, a rabbit form, a tusked creature, and a big-brain telepathic species all punctuated by several near extinctions of the lineage. Stapleton’s historical tapestry casts the thing we call "human" as wildly protean—a cross-species shape shifter whose identity can’t be fixed.

In the essay "Possible Worlds," Haldane wrote that "the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose." Stapleton embraced that strangeness; he not only imagined the evolution of exotic "human" species, he laid out whole civilizations with philosophies and social, political, and economic structures appropriate to those forms. In the end, though, the two billion-year lineage is finally overtaken by a cosmic catastrophe, and Stapleton ends on a tragic note that was foreign to Haldane: "Great are the stars, and man is of no account to them. . . . He had it in him to go further than this short flight, now ending."

In the preface to Last and First Men, Stapleton wrote, "We must achieve neither mere history, nor mere fiction, but myth. A true myth is one which, within the universe of a certain culture (living or dead), expresses richly, and often perhaps tragically, the highest admiration possible within that culture."

Myth and religion, these authors believed, are vitally important, but a living religion must somehow reflect the highest capabilities, perceptions, and values of modern culture, which is deeply informed by science. "We live in a material, Darwinian world, governed by the laws of science," explains Adams, explicating the ideological underpinnings of these imagined futures, "and we must understand our existence and our future in an evolutionary, cosmic time scale." In the minds of these visionaries, "the old religious myths have zero to say about the scientific worldview. It is as though this universe doesn’t exist. In a sense, these writers were trying to create a new sense of spirituality, a new religious awareness that would give meaning to it all—a meaning that was consistent with what science had discovered about the world."

In November, NASA invited Adams to deliver the kick-off address for a conference on "The Societal Dimensions of Astrobiology." The event, held at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, included futurologist Alvin Toffler and sci-fi author Ben Bova as well as NASA researchers working on the terraforming of Mars. "It was interesting to note," remarks Adams, "how many of the real scientists working on this found their inspiration in one or another science fiction work."

Science has thrust into human hands options that were unavailable and inconceivable to our forebears, and the implications of the choices we make will sound through generations of our descendants. Science fiction writers have unearthed the not-yet-real futures that lie like seeds of possible worlds in our scientific civilization. It’s a Sartrean world we’ve been thrust into: we are condemned to choose, whether we want to or not. "Ultimately," proclaims Adams, summarizing Haldane’s vision, "the ‘last judgment’ is not something that a god or nature renders upon humanity, but rather something that, for the first time, humanity may well be able to decide for itself, if it is willing to pay the price."


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