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On Growth (1974)

On Growth

(1974)–Willem Oltmans–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

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60. Freeman Dyson

Professor Dyson teaches physics at the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton, New Jersey.
He was born in Crowthorne, England, in 1923. During the war years he served at operations research headquarters of the Royal Air Force (1943-45). He studied mathematics at Cambridge. In 1947 he came to Cornell University on a Commonwealth fellowship. In 1957 he became an American citizen.
He has worked on the TRIGA reactor and the Orion spaceship at General Atomic in San Diego, California (1956-59). He has also been a consultant for various weapon laboratories in the United States, for the Space Agency and the Disarmament Agency.

Do you feel like Arthur C. Clarke1 has written - ‘we are not the

only castaways upon the tiny raft of the Solar System as it drifts forever along the Gulf streams of the Galaxy.’2

 

I don't know. I am very much interested to find out.

 

How does Clarke know?

 

It's a question of faith. Many of my colleagues have this religious belief that we are not alone in the universe. I hope they are right. The universe will be a much more interesting place if they are right.

 

Toynbee3 felt that this odyssey into space was a waste.

 

In the long run it is certainly no waste. The way we have gone so far is not the right way to go. We have come to a dead end in the Apollo program. That is no surprise to anybody who has been involved with it. It has been done in a very extravagant and in many ways unintelligent way. Still it has been done. That is the main thing. I would rather have gone to the moon this way than not have gone at all. What we shall need if we are to do anything sensible in space is to travel cheaply in space. Ships like the Apollo remind me strongly of the great airships of my youth, the R 101 in England and the Hindenburg in Germany, these marvelous, beautiful, fragile ships with their absurdly small payloads. They are just like the Apollo ships. What we need is the equivalent of the Boeing 747. I think we shall have it, but it will take a while.

 

Do you feel the Soviets approach space exploration more intelligently?4

 

I wouldn't say so. It's very difficult to judge because they don't publish their costs. I would say theirs has been done slightly more stupidly than ours, but this is a matter of judgment. They also have had wrong objectives.

 

In what way the wrong objectives?

 

They have been more interested in the rocket than in the payload. As far as we know, the people who run the Soviet space program are even less in touch with scientific objectives than the people who run ours;

but I speak from great ignorance, since very few of us have ever had the chance to talk to these people.

 

With the lessening of dangers, the improvement of relations, do you believe there is a fair chance for closer and more open communication with your Soviet counterparts in space?

 

We already have quite good communication with my counterparts, that is, the people who snipe at the program from the outside. I think there is also reasonably good communication between the people on the inside, but we have not succeeded in establishing very good communication between the people on the inside and the people on the outside in either country. However, these are small issues as compared with the future of mankind.

 

The US just succeeded to put into completion the first map of Mars, through seven thousand television pictures, thirty-five million miles away. What's the importance of this achievement?

 

This is impossible to say. One did not know what was the importance of discovering America when it was first discovered.

 

Is it a step ahead?

 

It's an enormous step. It's the first time we've had a clear view of any planet other than our own. What it will lead to I am not capable of saying, nor is anybody else. The next step is to send two orbiting ships in 1975 or '76 to have a much closer look. It will take a very long time to see what are the sensible things to try to do. At the moment we are just at the very beginning of exploring the planet Mars.

 

You have expressed in the New York Times the view that it is important to gather more intelligence on the galaxies, on the universe.5 Is that possible? Is it being done with the use of computers?

 

The way to approach this is to have a look and to see what is there. Most of the apparatus is not very sophisticated. We have to look with ordinary optical telescopes of the kind we already have. We do need more telescopes of all kinds. At the moment there is an acute shortage

of ordinary old-fashioned telescopes. There are many more astronomers with good ideas than there are telescopes. We are beginning to have a look from space which shows us a lot of new things. The most important thing that's come out of this space program, as far as science is concerned, is the discovery of x-ray sources in the sky. This is a completely new kind of astronomy. The beauty of this is that it is comparatively cheap. The most important science that has been done in this space program has been done for less than one percent of the cost of the program. All the space astronomy has been done with unmanned satellites. X-ray astronomy in particular has mostly been done with quite small rockets. Such observations don't need billions of dollars. In fact, they're done much better without billions of dollars.

 

You are talking now about what you call infrared astronomy?

 

No. Infrared is done from the ground, mostly.

 

And that flourishes?

 

Yes, it flourishes. But there's still an acute shortage of telescopes.

 

Don't the Soviets now have the largest telescope in the world?

 

It's not quite running yet. It is true it will be running in a short time.

 

It will be an important step forward.

 

It's not clear. The Russians are skeptical about it. It seems it has not been put in the right place. It's not being very well handled as far as we can tell. However, we shall see. It will be a good instrument, I am sure.

 

You spoke recently of a possible entirely new development, which you called ‘the greening of the galaxy.’ Are new discoveries in the universe probable which will place the limits of the planet in a different perspective?

 

One thing you can say for sure about the future, it will not be the way anybody expects. Of course that includes me. I don't pretend to

predict what's going to happen. The kind of predictions made by the Club of Rome - or rather by Forrester and Meadows - look to me even less convincing than most of the others. What I have learned in looking at the world over the last thirty or forty years is the fact that qualitative changes always outweigh quantitative ones. Whenever the world seems to be going in a particular direction as a result of quantitative changes, then some new qualitative factor comes up which changes the whole nature of the problem. This has happened time and time again.

 

Hydrogen fusion -

 

Hydrogen fusion may or may not have this effect. I think it is not a sufficiently great qualitative change. It's only a small variation. Many of the big changes are rather intangible. It was only a few years ago that people started seriously talking about zero population growth. We already are closing down an elementary school in Princeton because there are not enough kids. That took only five years or so. It goes ridiculously fast. I think this will happen time and time again within the next hundred years. Whatever people will be worrying about in a hundred years' time, I am willing to predict will not be the problems that Forrester and Meadows are so excited about. Of course, I could be wrong. We all can be wrong. But the main thing to me is to be always prepared for the unexpected twist.

 

But coming to the possibility of growing trees on comets and feeding on biological byproducts -

 

We don't expect any great surprise from physics, which is my own part of science. We could be wrong there too, but I think it is likely that physics will not be the main frontier of scientific advance in the next hundred years. Biology will be the main frontier. There will be enormous changes in what we think about ourselves, what we think about our environment, as a result of learning how biological processes work in such a way that we have a real mastery of them. This hasn't yet happened. I think it's very likely to happen within the next fifty years. We will then have the same kind of mastery over the basic processes of biology that we have achieved in physics and chemistry. That will be a very great change in the whole place of man in the universe and in the scheme of things. I don't say the next thing as a prediction but I

raise this as a question. It could happen that in a hundred years from now the main question which concerns us will be, shall we be one species or shall we be a thousand species?

 

What do you mean by that?

 

Shall mankind remain one species or shall we diversify to such an extent that we become a thousand separate species.

 

Spread over the galaxies -

 

Not necessarily. Maybe here on earth. It is not necessary to go into space to face this problem. We have it already here.

 

In order to have these thousand different species live on one earth, we need a form of rule of behavior acceptable to all. You talk about biology being the future, but where does behaviorism and psychology come in?

 

Of course, that's probably ninety percent of the problem. I absolutely agree with you. Only I don't think that we shall make people behave the way we want them to. I think the question will be, How do people wish to behave?

 

In absolute freedom?

 

I hope there will never be a world in which we decide how people shall behave. That is not what I would want to do. I think the question is, Are our social institutions flexible enough to cope with the kind of diversity which is coming? This is to me the big problem. I think we have some hope. There's every sign that social institutions in many ways are getting more flexible than they used to be. This I find a very healthy development. All kinds of behavior are now allowable which thirty or forty years ago were not. This I welcome. I think that we're going to see much more of it.

 

And doomsday?

 

I am thoroughly against prophets of doom. They've never done us any good.

But would you consider it feasible that civilization instead of being bound to the limits of the planet, would propagate from comet to comet, from star to star, into new living space, new space to feed us, new space to live?

 

Spacing mankind out into a larger living space, I don't say from star to star, that's in the remote future, but within the solar system; the question is, Do we wish to do it? - rather than, Can we do it? If we wish to do it, we certainly can. It remains to be seen whether we shall wish to. It would seem to me likely that we will need a larger living space to solve the problem of diversity, which is, as I see it, the main social problem of mankind. It may help us to solve a great number of these problems if we can open up new frontiers in the solar system away from the earth. I hope that this will be done in an informal way, in the same sort of way that the expansion of Europeans over the planet took place. Not that some supergovernment decides to launch a tremendous project to colonize the solar system. I hope that it will rather be small groups of people who make up their minds that they would like to be on their own and who will organize the necessary resources and go ahead and do it. That is why it's so important that it should be cheap, so that a couple of hundred people can acquire the necessary resources. I think that this will happen, but I have to admit that a lot of inventions still have to be made before it will become feasible.

One of the very important developments which I look forward to is the self-reproducing machine. This idea was first studied from a theoretical point of view by the mathematician von Neumann.6 The self-reproducing machine is our own copy of the processes of life. When we have understood in sufficient depth the way in which living things reproduce themselves, the way in which the processes of heredity, of differentiation of an organism, occur in nature, then it will be open to us to use these processes for our own purposes in building machines, i.e., to make machines which are sophisticated enough to reproduce themselves. Already we see in principle how to do it. Von Neumann designed such a machine on paper. It had only half a million distinct parts. A real one, of course, will have a lot more than that. It has to be a complicated beast. But when such machines are practical, it will make the process of colonizing new worlds tremendously easier. You send one rocket to the moon with a rather sophisticated machine on board. This machine will be programmed to reproduce itself using nothing but rock and sunlight. It can manufacture its own parts. It can

be programmed to construct whatever one would want to construct to make the moon ready for human habitation. This is the sort of way in which it seems to me the economics of space could be transformed, not by slight improvements in propulsion systems, but by radical change in the qualitative nature of the problem.

When you have self-reproducing machines, the problems of economics have a very different flavor. The accumulation of capital would become much more rapid. The costs of doing things would become different in such a radical sense that it no longer is possible to predict at all what you can do and what you cannot do. There's no reason as far as I can see why self-reproducing machines shouldn't also be important here on earth. There is lots that one can think of doing here. There are greater limitations on the earth. We have human beings around who're likely to get in the way when self-reproducing machines are let loose. Self-reproducing machines on the earth will obviously cause all kinds of ecological problems which we will have to handle with great care. These machines will also make the transition from poor to rich a great deal easier. Perhaps, looking at it in capitalistic terms, you can imagine an industrial development kit which is marketed by one of your big companies like IBM, which a poor country can buy for a modest down payment. One machine is shipped from the IBM factory to the country in question, and this machine then reproduces itself, differentiates, organizes an industrial plant, a complete modern communications network, and all the rest of what it takes to modernize a country.

 

But what would these developments do to the ever-increasing populations? More machines, less work, more unemployment. Self-reproducing machines will cause, in India or Brazil, disaster.

 

I didn't say that I had a solution for the social problems of mankind. I merely say that such technological developments are quite likely to happen. They're going to change radically the nature of our problems, but problems will still be there. They may be worse, but they will certainly be different. I think it's very likely that one of the consequences of this will be a greater alienation of the mass of mankind from economic problems, a greater alienation of people who run the machines from the people outside, who are only bystanders. We will be moving more and more in the direction of what is called by the pundits a postindustrial society, a society in which the majority of people are no longer concerned

with earning a living in old-fashioned style. After economic problems are solved other problems always arise to take their place.

 

They might leave for the moon -

 

I don't say that they should leave for the moon. I say those who wish may leave for the moon. Those who wish to stay here will have to find ways to occupy their time, ways of living which they consider satisfactory. I think this may not be such a big problem for Indians as it will be for us, because in some ways the Indians are closer to the postindustrial society than we are. It may be we shall have to learn to live like the Indians rather than the Indians learning to live like us. It may be. It is hard to predict. What is perfectly clear is that the problems which will arise for mankind will have large aspects which will be common to the rich and the poor countries. In certain respects the self-reproducing machine will be a great leveler. It will mean that anything a rich country can do, a poor country can also do. It will mean that the problems which the rich countries have will also be problems for the poor countries.


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