ASTR 1210 (O'Connell) Supplement

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SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, AND SOCIETY -- AN ESSAY

INTRODUCTION

We usually use the word "technology" to refer loosely to the raft of electronic devices and software services that seem to be everywhere in our lives today.

But "technology" has a much broader meaning. Anything that is useful to humans -- that has some practical application -- is an example of technology. That includes all electronics, of course, but it also includes almost every other material thing in our everyday lives, from T-shirts to refrigerators to skyscrapers; and it also refers to the enormous swath of practical knowledge and methodology that we make use of to survive -- as in agriculture and medicine.

Technology ranges from the highly sophisticated to the humble. PowerPoint slides are a familiar form of "teaching technology" --- but so is a piece of chalk. Important technologies in earlier times were very basic: the first human technologies to be developed were fire, stone cutting tools and weapons, and clothing from animal skins. Although other animals are capable of employing primitive tools, our human progenitors had surpassed them in sophistication as long as 3 million years ago. The fossil record shows that invention was slow at first, the important steps taking tens of thousands of years. That was because hunter-gatherer societies lived on the edge of survival and were reluctant to take chances on diverting the labor needed to develop innovative technologies.

Almost by definition, civilizations are based on technology. The earliest civilizations in Mesopotamia and Egypt (ca. 4000-3000 BC) depended on the extensive development of technologies for building homes and governmental/religious structures; for agriculture, water supplies, transportation, ceramics, weaponry, methods of storing and conveying information, and so on. Domestication of horses, cattle, dogs, and other animals was another key technology. Many of the simple things we take for granted today -- like cotton thread, or glass windows, or aspirin -- are technologies that would have been highly prized by ancient societies.

Although they may not have been determinative, the available technologies were of great importance in shaping the behavior and values of early human societies -- the place and character of manual labor, for instance.

Left: The Giza Pyramids of Egypt (ca. 2500 BC); Right: Maya Kukulcan Pyramid (Chichen Itza, Mexico; ca. 900 AD).

Useful innovations spread quickly among societies that were in close contact with one another, but independent parallel development tended to occur in isolated societies. The ceremonial pyramids of Egypt and the Maya (see above) --- developed 8000 miles and over 3000 years apart, completely independently of each other --- are examples. The rates of development differed, and the sequences were never exact: for instance, the wheel was not important in North or South America before European contact in 1492. And although civilizations rise and fall, their basic technologies tend to survive. They are taken over by successor societies and propagate continuously into the future. As the writer L. Sprague de Camp put it:

"If there is any one progressive, consistent movement in human history, it is neither political, nor religious, nor aesthetic. Until recent centuries it was not even scientific. It is the growth of technology, under the guidance of the engineers."

[By "engineers" here, de Camp does not mean people with formal training in engineering, such as we have today. Rather he means those who devoted themselves to working somewhere in the broad spectrum of developing important technologies, including farmers, shipbuilders, architects, metal workers, and so forth.]

Technology transcends culture and politics. The primary technologies employed by any society are an amalgamation of innovations from earlier times and cultures. We still use the arch -- invented by others but first used on a large scale by the Romans (after ca. 200 BC) -- as a basic element of architectural design. We still use Euclidean geometry (from ca. 300 BC) in uncountable daily applications.

But why did de Camp say "not even scientific" here? Don't we think of science as being essentially equivalent to technology and also as a continually "progressive movement"?

Yes, science and technology are often conflated. But they are not identical. There are fundamental distinctions that are important to understand, and those are the main subject of this course supplement.
As for interruptions in the "progressive" continuity of science: de Camp is alluding to what happened to the accomplishments of the ancient Greeks in philosophy, science, and mathematics. In the 700 years prior to 200 AD, the Greeks had made great strides (among their contemporaries) in understanding the physical and biological world. They laid the foundations of the mathematics used to this day and had even developed an analog computer. Their achievements in astronomy would not be superseded for over 1300 years. But after Greek culture was absorbed by the Roman and Byzantine Empires, this progress stalled and was even threatened with extinction because the trove of Greek manuscripts was scattered and almost destroyed. Enough were preserved, especially by Islamic scholars (650-1200 AD), who elaborated on them, that they eventually formed the intellectual basis of the scientific Renaissance --- but this was not until ca. 1500 AD.
Science had been not only nearly static but also almost forgotten for over a millennium, whereas technology had progressed, if slowly (e.g. the compass, Gothic cathedrals, windmills).

The technologies employed by civilizations before 1500 AD may have been sophisticated in many ways, but they were not grounded on a systematic, scientific understanding of nature. Today, 500 years after the beginning of the "scientific revolution," things are different. It is fair to say that we now live in a scientific civilization. This doesn't simply mean that many people are scientists or that most people have some education in science.

Instead, it means that, whether we know it or not, we depend on science for our wealth and well-being; that almost all of our critical technologies are based on science; and that without science, we would be living in a very different and very impoverished world. We are benefitting today from the intellectual capital produced by hundreds of thousands of scientists and engineers.

In this course supplement, we consider the effects of science and technology on society and how our scientific understanding of the operating principles of nature has affected human lives.

Relationship Between Science and Technology

Although science and technology are often intertwined they have different goals and value systems, and we need to clarify the distinctions between them:

Science is the attempt to build a systematic understanding of natural phenomena based on a rigorous empirical standard of truth. Science provides a conceptual framework for dealing with the world. This kind of research is often called "fundamental," "unapplied," "basic," or "pure." Important examples of scientific accomplishment are Newton's theory of gravity, Maxwell's discovery of electromagnetic waves, Leeuwenhoek's discovery of microorganisms, or NASA's planetary exploration missions.
Technology is the application of our basic knowledge to solve practical problems (e.g. shelter, food, transport, energy, medicine, tools, weapons, communication). Technology may use our basic scientific understanding but doesn't necessarily in itself contribute to it. Engineering is applied science/technology. Examples: structural and civil engineering, aeronautics, pharmacology, or the Internet.
Technology always has a societal motivation, whether for ultimate good or ill, but the main motivation for "basic" science is simply curiosity and the desire to understand.
Job descriptions:
Scientist: "Be curious"
Technologist: "Be useful"

Today there is a strongly symbiotic relationship between science and technology because new technology provides new tools that enable better scientific understanding and vice versa. Scientists often employ the most advanced technologies available in their work. The Large Hadron Collider and the LIGO gravitational wave detection observatory are examples of cutting-edge technology put to use in basic scientific research. In some areas, the distinctions are blurry. For instance, the push to develop "high temperature superconductors" is driven by their potential for applications in lossless electrical power transmission, but the process of exploring the nature of new, often exotic, materials also provides new scientific insights.

Until the scientific era, new technologies were developed through trial and error, building on intuition drawn from everyday personal and societal experience. Beginning in the 17th century, science was a new analytical and contextual mode of thinking about the natural world. The main hallmarks of science were the rejection of supernatural explanations, a demand for repeated verification by empirical tests, and insistence on accepting new interpretations only if they were consistent with all the known facts.

Starting with the discoveries of Copernicus. Kepler, Galileo, and Newton. in the period 1540-1680 concerning the motions of the planets in the solar system, astronomy played a major role in laying the foundations of modern scientific thinking.

The influence of science on technology began slowly in the 17th and 18th centuries. But the pace accelerated as science demonstrated its value as a means to solve many problems that at first seemed intractable: e.g. questions like "what causes bubonic plague?" or "what are the stars?" By the mid-1800's, it was clear that science offered a demonstrably reliable and powerful understanding of the natural world.

Technologists began to realize great advantages by adopting not only the results of science (e.g. Newton's Laws of Motion, thermodynamics, electromagnetism, chemistry, biology, geology, hydrodynamics, the structure of matter) but also its methods (critical thinking, skepticism, rational analysis, empirical testing, calculus, statistics, double-blind medical trials, etc.).

Today, our scientific understanding of many aspects of the natural world is truly profound -- as it should be after hundreds of years of concentrated effort. It encompasses almost everything we encounter in everyday life. Consequently, science now usually precedes technology. Trial and error are certainly still central to technology development, but the essential foundations for experimentation come from science. Most of the important technologies of the last 200 years have been based on earlier scientific research.

The Critical Conceptual Path: All technology is utterly dependent on a huge store of knowledge and invention that extends far back in human history. For each important technology, we can construct a "critical conceptual path" of the main steps leading to its realization. Almost all modern technologies depend on a long list of discoveries in curiosity-driven basic science. Most will go all the way back to the 17th century scientists.

Individuals like Galileo, Einstein or Pasteur can make important breakthroughs, but progress in science inevitably depends on the contributions of many people. For instance, a 2015 study of the development of a new drug to fight metastatic melanoma concluded that its critical conceptual path extended back over 100 years and involved 7000 scientists working at 5700 different institutions. Most of this path involved basic research disconnected from immediate commercial or clinical applications.
The recent development of vaccines for the COVID-19 virus is a perfect example of how basic research underpins essential technology. With older technology, it normally took years to perfect viral vaccines. However, the discovery of the structure and function of the "messenger RNA" molecule in 1961 began a long chain of research in cell biology that ultimately led to the very rapid development, in only a few months' time, of COVID-19 vaccines that use mRNA to induce human immune system resistance to the virus.
Conversion Time: The time scale for conversion of basic scientific discoveries into practical technologies varies enormously. Consider some examples from research in physics:
X-Rays (1895): X-Rays were accidentally discovered by Roentgen in the course of basic research on the physics of electromagnetic waves using cathode ray tubes like the one shown at the right. One of his earliest X-ray images, of his wife's hand, is also shown. Conversion time to medical applications: 1 year. This is a good example of a technological problem that couldn't be solved by trying to solve it. A direct engineering approach to devising a non-invasive mechanism to examine internal human anatomy would have failed miserably.
Human Space Flight (1961): The basic scientific understanding needed to build rockets and navigate through space had been established since the 19th century, so the investment of large amounts of government money (in both the US and USSR) was able to solve the other formidable technical problems necessary to enable space flight within 5 years of a political decision to go forward. Conversion time: 280 years (from Newtonian orbit theory, the essential conceptual foundation of space flight).
CD/DVD Players (1982): Here, the critical conceptual path includes Einstein's work on induced transitions of electrons in atoms (1916), which was the essential idea in creating the lasers that are used to convert digital disk recordings into electronic signals. (Similar lasers are the basis of data transmission by fiber-optic cables, now the main technology used to drive the Internet.) Conversion time: 66 years.

The length and complexity of the critical conceptual path behind the "latest innovations" is the reason that politicians and opinion-makers who insist on the "relevance" of scientific research, especially by expecting near-term applications, are misguided --- and may even inhibit progress.

The "Big Four" Benefits of Technology to Modern Society

If you asked historians of technology to list the inventions or technological developments most important to today's society, you would get a range of opinion on the "top-ten." But any sensible list would include the following four categories:

Information Technology: None of the refined, modern versions of human technology would exist without the ability to record vast amounts of information and transmit it accurately from person to person and generation to generation. The development of written languages (ca. 3000 BC, in Mesopotamia) was, of course, crucial. Through medieval times it was possible to convey knowledge on a modest scale by laborious manual writing and copying and some scattered experiments with printed material. However, only the advent of mass-produced printed books based on Gutenberg's design of printing presses using movable type (ca. 1440) opened the doors to the information revolution.
Within 150 years, 200 million volumes had been printed. Books ushered in the modern age. Science depended on them. Universities flourished because the ability to deal with large amounts of specialized information in books became essential to society. Beginning in the mid 19th century, information transfer proliferated thanks to the automated rotary press and inventions like the telephone and the linotype machine. In the last quarter century, the Internet and other electronic technologies have greatly accelerated the spread and creation of information, but their societal impact has not yet matched the monumental watershed established by the printed book.

Agricultural Genetics: "Genetic engineering," the creation of artificial life forms, is nothing new. It has been going on for thousands of years. You will be shocked when you click on this picture of the most familiar artificial life form. Essentially all the food we eat is derived from deliberate human manipulation of plant and animal gene pools. Until the mid 20th century, the techniques employed were cross-fertilization, selective breeding, population culling, and other "natural" methods. As our understanding of genetics matured (ca. 1900-1950), these techniques became science-based. Eventually, we learned how to directly manipulate cellular material (ca. 1970+). Molecular biology now offers an ultimate genetic control technology.
Another key invention for agriculture was the Haber-Bosch process (1909) for producing synthetic chemical fertilizers --- a main contributor to the "green revolution" of the last 75 years, without which famine would be widespread.

Control of Infectious Disease: The control of the microorganisms (bacteria, viruses, fungi, parasites) that cause infectious disease is one of the most important contributions of science & technology. In fact, many of us would not be alive today without it (because a direct ancestor would have died too early). But as recently as 350 years ago, communicable disease was thought to be produced by evil spirits, unwholesome vapors, "miasmas," or other mysterious agents. No one imagined that it was caused by invisible lifeforms until Leeuwenhoek in 1676 used the newly-invented microscope to discover microscopic organisms.
Widespread production in the 1940's and later of agents -- "antibiotics" -- that could attack specific types of harmful bacteria was one of the most important advances in medical history. As we are all aware today, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, "public health" consists mainly of systematic methods for controlling microorganisms.

Electricity: Electricity is the primary tool of modern civilization, yet few people appreciate this or have any idea of how electricity was discovered or converted to useful technologies. We explore those topics in the next section.

Electricity: A Case Study

The most obvious manifestation of electricity today is in sophisticated electronics: smart phones, DVD players, HD TV, personal computers, video games, and so forth. But these are luxuries, and it should be easy to imagine being able to live comfortably without them---in fact, people did so only 30 years ago. We don't really need fancy consumer electronics, but we do need electricity. Our reliance on electricity is profound, and its use is so deeply embedded in the fabric of civilization that we mostly take it for granted. At least until there's a power failure.

Electricity supplies almost all of the power we depend on. The ultimate source of that power may be fossil fuels, radioactivity, wind, water, or solar radiation, but it is converted to a much more usable form using electric generators. Electricity is now essential for manufacturing, agriculture, communications, transportation, medicine, household appliances, and almost every other aspect of modern life.
It's easy to overlook the ubiquity of electricity by thinking only in terms of obviously "electrical" devices:
One crucial example: all the internal combustion engines used in cars, trucks, locomotives, and planes require electrical ignition systems. Our transportation systems are entirely dependent on electricity.
Two others: refrigeration and water distribution and purification systems. Imagine the challenges in providing food and medication to the world's population today in the absence of electrically powered refrigerators. Anyone who appreciates hot showers taken indoors is an unknowing admirer of electric pumps.

Aside from the power itself, electricity is also the basis of nearly all of the critical control systems we use.
The most powerful control systems in use today are, of course, computers and microprocessors. These outperform human brains in raw processing speed by factors of many millions and have advanced to the point of duplicating or superseding human performance in games like chess or in operating an automobile. They are used on a scale that would have been inconceivable to people only 75 years ago. Nonetheless, that generation also depended on electricity for control systems: think of the telephone operator plug-boards of the "one ringy-dingy" era.

If our knowledge of electricity could be somehow magically subtracted from the contents of a typical classroom, virtually everything would disappear --- except a bunch of naked people.

More seriously, if knowledge of electricity were magically subtracted from our society, our economy would collapse overnight, taking our Gross Domestic Product back to the level of about 1900. Half the population would probably die off within 12 months, mostly from starvation and disease.
The 2012-14 NBC-TV series "Revolution" showed an action-oriented version of what a fictional post-electricity world might be like (though one where everybody still manages to have good hair).
An all-too-real threat to our electrical infrastructure is posed by magnetic activity on the Sun, particularly "coronal mass ejections." In July 2012 the Earth only narrowly missed a CME from a solar superstorm that could have devastated our electrical grid.

Development of Electric Technology

Electricity is the everyday manifestation of electromagnetic force between electrons and atomic nuclei, the second kind of inter-particle force (after gravity) that physicists were able to quantify. Here is a very brief history of our understanding of EM force, divided between "basic" and "applied" developments:

• ca. 1750-1830: Coulomb, Orsted, Ampere, (Benjamin) Franklin, and other physicists explore the basic properties of electric and magnetic phenomena. Orsted and Ampere show that an electric current moving in a wire could produce a magnetic field surrounding it. Basic.

• 1800: Volta invents the first electrochemical battery. Later, more practical designs allow electromagnetic energy to be stored and transported. Both basic and applied.

• Faraday (1831) (experimental physicist) discovers electromagnetic induction. Basic.
  Faraday found that a changing magnetic field could induce an electric current. Together with the fact that an electric current could induce a magnetic field, this demonstrates the symmetry of electromagnetic phenomena.
  Because the interaction of magnetic fields can produce a mechanical force between objects, this is also the key to the development of electric generators and motors, which use magnetic fields to convert mechanical force to electrical force, and vice-versa. These are two of the essential technologies of the electric age.

  
• Edison (technologist) and others (1840--1900) develop practical electrical generators, motors, distribution grids, and appliances. Applied.
  Many people think Edison "invented" electricity. He didn't. He invented a large number of electrical appliances---including the electric light, tickertape machines, the motion picture camera & projector, etc. But these all depended on a pre-existing supply of electricity and the knowledge of how to use it---all contributed by basic research in physics.

• After 1850 most large-scale electrical generators relied on steam engines to help convert mechanical energy into electrical energy. (Various types of wood- or coal-burning steam engines had been developed in Great Britain in the period 1760-1800 and were so effective at increasing economic productivity in commercial mining and textile manufacturing that they became the basis of the Industrial Revolution.) Today, steam turbine engines are most commonly used in large electric generators. Applied.

• Readily available electrical power stimulates the invention of the telegraph (1830's) and telephone (1870's), fundamentally changing human communications (and, needless to say, behavior). Applied.

• Maxwell (physicist): in 1865, Maxwell deduces equations giving a complete description of the known properties of electrical and magnetic (EM) phenomena. From these, he predicts the existence of electromagnetic waves that can travel through space at the speed of light. This demonstrated that light is an electromagnetic phenomenon, one of the most important discoveries in the history of science. Basic.
  The fact that these EM waves can have arbitrary wavelengths implies the existence of a broad electromagnetic spectrum, which includes the "long-wavelength" regions we now use for radio and television. No one had suspected the existence of this vast spectrum, which is mostly invisible to our eyes.

  
• Hertz (physicist, technologist): accomplishes the first generation and detection of artificial radio waves (1887, see sketch above). After he demonstrated the existence of radio waves, Hertz admitted that he could not see any practical applications for them. Eight years later, as described above, Roentgen discovers the ("short-wavelength") X-ray region of the EM spectrum, the practical applications of which, by contrast, were immediately apparent. Both basic and applied.

• Tesla, Marconi and many others develop methods for routine transmission and reception of radio waves, even over intercontinental distances. Just as important is the invention of the vacuum tube (1907), which allows modulation of EM waves so that an intelligible signal could be impressed on them. These developments make possible commercial radio (1920) and television (1936). All of our "wireless" technology today is similarly based on radio waves. Applied.
  With broadcast radio and TV, cell phones, WiFi, and dozens of other types of wireless technologies, the average US home today is saturated with manmade EM waves.

• The development of quantum mechanics (basic) after 1925 leads to the miniaturization of electrical circuits using solid-state materials like silicon and the invention (applied) of the transistor (1947) and integrated circuits (1959), which are the central components of all the electronics in use today. These technologies are probably responsible for at least 50% of our Gross Domestic Product today.
  So one of the largest contributors to our economic well being was developing an understanding of how electrons move in chunks of silicon. Who could have predicted that? What "venture capital" firm would have been willing to invest in that in 1920?

A Brave New World

The cumulative influence of science-based technologies, including medicine and the myriad applications of electricity and electromagnetic waves, has been profound. Living conditions for most human beings have been radically transformed for the better since 1500 AD.

By every measure -- lifespan, health, quality of life, liberty, equality, wealth, security, opportunity, and so on -- the present circumstances for the great majority of people are an unprecedented improvement over the past. They are an improvement even over the lifestyles of the most privileged individuals in earlier history --- there aren't many sensible people who would trade indoor plumbing for rubies and emeralds.

These six charts show the dramatic improvement over the last 200 years in important indicators like poverty, child mortality, and literacy.
The long-term historical decline in violence among human societies is illustrated in this slide presentation.

It's worth taking a moment to contemplate how different life was 500 years ago. You may not know who your ancestors were in the year 1500, but you do know two things about them: their lives were mostly not very good and not very long. The miseries of the 16th century were graphically depicted in this extraordinary 1542 painting by Pieter Bruegel. His visualization was, thankfully, exaggerated for effect. But look at the charts linked above as you ask yourself what your own life might have been like if you had been born in, say, 1900 -- a date only an instant ago in the context of all human history.

As a practical example, think about this: When you get some kind of injury or malady and you go to a doctor, you automatically assume you will be effectively treated and usually cured. That's a new assumption. It wasn't true throughout all of human history until about 100 years ago. In fact, one historian of medicine noted that before about 1850, "most people were fortunate in being unable to afford treatment" --- because medical care then was often counterproductive, brutal, and dangerous.

Technology alone is certainly not responsible for all the improvements of the last 500 years, but it is central to most of the changes in our material surroundings, and these are transpiring at an ever-increasing pace.

• Up to the late 18th century, implementation of new technologies rarely occurred in a period shorter than a human life.

• Today, technological change is much faster and therefore more obvious. See this chart showing the rate of acceptance of several new technologies. The best recent example: smart phones, introduced only 17 years ago, have already dramatically changed the daily lives of billions of people.

• It is hard to visualize how rapidly modern technology has emerged --- in only about 200 years out of the 200,000 year history of our species.
  Picture even the most far-sighted thinkers of the 18th century -- Thomas Jefferson or Voltaire, say -- trying to figure out how a television set works. It is utterly foreign to the familiar technologies of their era. Its operation would appear to be "magic."

Examples like these demonstrate how important existing technologies are in shaping our behavior, our intuition, and our imagination -- in fact, our entire outlook on the world around us.

Technological Excesses and Boomerangs

Technology is never an unalloyed good. Given its rapid emergence, it is not surprising that modern technology has produced numerous unforeseen side effects and difficulties. All technology carries risk. Unsurprisingly, powerful technologies are capable of both great benefits and great harm. The obvious historical example of a two-edged technology is fire. Novel technologies will frequently rechannel human behavior, with consequences that are hard to predict and can be deleterious. Technologies convey important advantages to groups or societies that possess them, and they can be used to oppress or exploit other groups.

As appreciative as we ought to be of the technologies that are the foundation of our material lives today, and as impressive as are new medical therapies or innovations in entertainment, there is a strong thread of discontent with technology that runs through our society. Some of this stems simply from frustration when technologies -- usually complex ones -- fail to work well or don't live up to inflated expectations.

But in the last 50 years, dangers attributed to science and technology have often been given more prominence than their benefits. People these days are often more suspicious than appreciative of science and technology.

The perceived threats include environmental pollution, habitat destruction, environmental disease, global warming, nuclear weapons, nuclear poisoning, artificial intelligence, human cloning, and genetic engineering, among others. Such problems have often been vividly portrayed in literature and other media going back to "Frankenstein" written by Mary Shelley in 1816, such that the notion of unthinking scientists unleashing disasters on the world has become a staple of popular culture in the burgeoning genre of dystopian fiction. Some examples:

The threats are consequences not of basic science but instead of the societal choices that are involved in developing any new technology -- which is always based on some perceived need or demand in society. The threats are also mostly inadvertent --- i.e. unforeseen by those who implemented the new technologies or grossly amplified by widespread adoption.

"Boomerangs," paradoxes, and ironies abound in the history of modern technology. Here are some telling ones:

• A classic case of "irrational exuberance" over a new and initially highly beneficial technology was the thoughtless wholesale application of the insecticide DDT. Early use of DDT during World War II accomplished a miraculous suppression of the mosquitos that transmit malaria, one of the greatest historical killers of human beings. But its use was taken in the later 1940's and 50's to truly absurd levels and led to serious unanticipated environmental damage. That, in turn, was the genesis of the book that founded the environmental protection movement, Silent Spring (1962) by Rachel Carson, and ultimately heavy government regulation of powerful pesticides.

• A related rapidly emerging threat: the flourishing of organisms (bacteria, agricultural pests) that are resistant to the chemicals normally used to control them because of overuse of the control agent. By eliminating their natural enemies, overapplied agents allow resistant strains to proliferate. An all-too-common example: people demand antibiotics to try to control a viral infection -- but antibiotics work only against bacteria, not viruses. Hospitals are more dangerous places today than they were 30 years ago because of the overuse of antibiotics. Industrial agriculture also contributes to the problem by the unnecessary introduction of antibiotics to animal feed and by massive applications of pesticides and herbicides.

• Nuclear weapons were, of course, always intended to be destructive, and they were used as intended by the US to attack Japan in 1945 and bring World War II to an end. But the long-term dangers of radioactive fallout -- the most serious wide-area consequence of using nuclear weapons -- were not fully understood until well after their first use. Uncontrolled fallout effects greatly increase the destructiveness of these weapons. In the wake of the US attacks and subsequent controversies over weapons, fallout, and nuclear power plants, many people came to wish that these technologies had never been invented; some argued that our knowledge of nuclear physics is a bad thing.
  But nuclear physics also created nuclear medicine -- for example, using radioisotopes as biochemical tracers -- without which modern pharmacology, radiation therapy, and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) wouldn't exist. Biomedical applications of nuclear physics save millions of lives each year. Vastly more people have benefitted from nuclear technology than have been harmed by it (so far).

• An important unintended technological threat, one which played a central role in recent presidential elections but which was unrecognized by most voters, is the widening displacement of human labor by computers and smart machines. Although these reduce drudgery and improve efficiency, they have also produced major changes in employment demographics, suppressed wages, and increased social stress. Those difficulties will only multiply over the next decades.

• A major but often-overlooked danger to a highly technological society like ours is its vulnerability to potential disruptions. A pivotal feature of modern society is how complex, interdependent, and highly specialized it is. It takes tens of thousands of people working in coordination to produce and deliver even a single item. No one person could build a radio, or a lawn mower, or even a box of Cheerios from scratch. There is a highly integrated system involving scores of specialities across a dozen different industries behind the production and distribution of any of those things.
  Without being conscious of it, we live in a huge web of specialization and expertise. Such a system is inevitably fragile and can be easily disrupted by incompetence or by natural, political, malevolent, or cultural interference. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed some of the fragilities of modern societies, and the increasing impacts of global warming are exposing others.

• There may be no more timely example of a technological boomerang than the clearly emerging negative social and political consequences of social media Internet sites which allow unfettered human impulse, deceit, and cruelty to blossom. The vast anonymous user base is a font of the most irresponsible behavior imaginable. On the other hand, it's a terrific psychological experiment in cataloging the depths of human stupidity and depravity.
  Up to about 2005, the personal computer/Internet revolution was overwhelmingly seen as beneficial. There was a general belief that universal access to the vast amounts of digital information available on the Internet and to world-wide interpersonal communications could only make the world better. It was the combination of the Internet with smartphones and with ultimately pernicious social media software after that time that contributed to the tumultuous political and social state we find ourselves in today. I'm not aware that anyone in 2005 predicted the path that the revolution would take.
  The digital environment today bears some unpleasant similarities to the fictional Krell Machine, which wiped out its creators overnight in the 1956 movie "Forbidden Planet."

In the early 21st century we are entering an era of technological transformation, similar to that produced by physics and chemistry in the 20th century, based on molecular biology, hyper-scale information processing, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and bio-electronics. Few, if any, scientists, government officials, or corporate leaders are perceptive enough to accurately forecast what this will bring only 25 years from now. As always, both benefits and risks have the potential to be enormous.

Mitigation

How should we respond to adverse technological "feedback"? A first impulse might be to argue that the associated technologies are so threatening that we ought to suppress them --- but this ignores the abundance of benefits they bestowed in the first place. The problem, a difficult one, is to achieve a healthy balance that preserves most of the advantages while mitigating the serious disadvantages of important technologies.

Societies have been wrestling with this for the last 200 years. A fundamental obstacle to intelligent planning is the inevitable time lag between introduction of the new technology and the appearance of its major drawbacks --- especially if it has been widely adopted in the meantime. Another is that amelioration often demands a change in human behavior, not just the technology. The need to reduce our "carbon footprint" to mitigate global warming is a contemporary example.
It's important to appreciate that many of the negative effects of technology are only identifiable because of modern technology itself. Without our sensitive instruments and diagnostic tools, we would be poorly informed about the impact of environmental pollution on water or air quality, the ozone layer, global warming, induced diseases, and so forth. And achieving amelioration of the negative effects will also depend on science and technology themselves. A retreat from modern science or technology would produce vast suffering.

Technology could, in fact, solve many of the environmental problems we face --- assuming it is carefully designed and properly applied. Failures to adequately address such problems are rarely caused by serious technological barriers.

As an example, consider the fact that modern technology has made it possible to take one of the most toxic materials known (botulinum toxin, 1000 times more deadly gram-for-gram than plutonium), and turn it into the cosmetic Botox that thousands of people happily have pumped into their faces every day.

Instead, continuing threats from technology are usually the product of greed, incompetence, indifference, absence of foresight, or lack of political will. That certainly applies to the central environmental threat facing us and that we take up next.

The Biggest Threat

The root of almost all of our environmental problems is not any one technology. Instead it is the inevitable product of all of them, and it is something that almost everyone agrees is a good thing: modern technology keeps people alive. Life expectancy at birth has roughly doubled since 1850. Without a corresponding downward adjustment in birth rates, the increase in the human life span creates an imbalance between birth and death rates.

The response to this imbalance is exponential population growth, where the increase in the population in any year is proportional to the population itself. The population will grow geometrically, not linearly, without limit, as long as the net birth rate does not go to zero. Of course, at some point exhaustion of resources will drastically increase the death rate, and the population will stabilize or decrease. That will stop the exponentiation, but we obviously would prefer not to rely on that solution.

Population growth is the ultimate source of almost all of the environmental threats we now face, including global warming.

Exponential growth is insidious. A tiny 2% excess of births over deaths in a given year implies a doubling time for the population of only 35 years. This is close to the actual growth for the human population between 1960 and 1999. At that rate, starting from 6 billion people in the year 2000, the total population would be 42 billion -- 7 times larger -- by the year 2100.

The chart above shows the growth of the human population over time and identifies the introduction of important technologies, most of which encouraged population expansion. Note that the vertical axis is in logarithmic units, which exaggerates changes at small values while reducing them at large values; click here for a version plotted in linear units.
The spike at the right hand side illustrates the exponential era we are now experiencing. This graph should scare you. For a little more context, consider that the spike shown there constitutes only 0.00001% of the history of planet Earth. And yet the humans born in that spike have already begun to transform its physical character.

We may not yet have reached the "carrying capacity" of the Earth, but we are getting closer. We are probably already well in excess of the population that is compatible with easy resource sustainability.

Fortunately, as of 2019 the net birth rate had dropped to 1%, and the doubling time increased to 70 years. Taking into account this important reduction, the population in the year 2100 is projected to be "only" 11 billion -- so the situation is less dire than it might have been. Nonetheless, demand from the growing human population has already crossed critical local resource thresholds in many areas, as attested by famines and other privations scattered around the world.

One of the most striking is the collapse of the Atlantic cod fishery, previously thought to be inexhaustible. Another is the surge of African refugees into southern Europe, precipitated by a decrease in arable land and mean birth rates that are as high as 7 children per woman. And human contamination of the Earth's atmosphere is already affecting the climate.

There is no doubt that unchecked population growth is the biggest technology-driven hazard facing the human race today. Population control is not a technologically difficult problem; effective innovations like the birth control pill are readily available. But there are serious ethical, not to mention political, quandaries in attempting to control or reduce the human population. Regardless, it is obvious that these must be intelligently confronted soon. Needless to say, prospects here are not good. You would be hard pressed to find American politicians for whom population control is a serious issue, let alone a high priority. In fact, policies on all sides of the political spectrum, including those embedded in the current federal tax code, are to encourage population growth.

Summary

Humans are technological creatures. The earliest urban civilizations depended on a plethora of important technologies. Useful innovations spread through contacts among societies and became widely adopted and built upon. Modern science emerged from astronomy and physics in the 16th and 17th centuries and invoked a new mode of thinking about nature by placing a premium on validating ideas by empirical tests. Its success in making sense of the natural and human worlds transformed the ways in which new technologies were developed and greatly accelerated the rate of their introduction. We now live in a scientific civilization: the main technologies we rely upon today were made possible only by a long "critical conceptual path" of basic scientific research which itself was mostly not motivated by practical applications. Realizing the benefits of modern technology while simultaneously minimizing their inevitable negative side effects is a difficult balancing act with which all societies struggle, sometimes without great success. The biggest technological threat facing the world today is uncontrolled population growth, something that too few intellectual or government leaders are addressing seriously.

If there is one main lesson from the history of human technology it is that its trends and impact are difficult or impossible to predict. In terms of government policy, the best approach (apart from obvious crises) is good, broad support for basic scientific research and moderate (but alert and intelligent) regulation/stimulation of technology in the private sector.

And there is another fundamental obligation of a democratic society in the technological age: high quality public education. The danger of an uninformed electorate -- or, worse, government -- was nicely summarized by Carl Sagan in this 1995 quote:

"We've arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces."

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Guide 9

Guide Index

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Last modified December 2024 by rwo

Text copyright © 1998-2024 Robert W. O'Connell. All rights reserved. These notes are intended for the private, noncommercial use of students enrolled in Astronomy 1210 at the University of Virginia.