On July 11, 1965, one Lionel Goettrieder invented a machine that could generate unlimited, clean energy from the rotation of the Earth. And lo and behold: by 2016 the world has actually turned into a utopia that everyone had predicted half a century earlier. Complete with food pills, flying cars, teleportation, robot servants and space vacations.
In the science fiction novel All Our Wrong Todays (from 2017) by Elan Mastai, the protagonist undertakes an experimental time travel back to that July day in 1965, accidentally disrupts Goettrieder’s experiment, barely manages to return and ends up in a 2016 world in which the machine never existed. Ours.
How that story continues is not revealed here. But the message is clear. We ourselves have long been living in a dystopian version of the future, with pollution, dirty energy, climate damage and running out of resources. It could have been so much better.
Here’s a good way to sharpen the problems of today and the future. Could the fantasy of science fiction be better used to combat the causes of climate change?
crazy summary
The report Limits to Growth of the Club of Rome, an international group of entrepreneurs and scientists, was a lonely warning cry in 1972. But the existential crisis humanity is in now constantly forces scientists to look half a century or a century ahead. The global population growth is forcing this. The finiteness of natural resources. The Collapsing Biodiversity. The washing water. The practice of science fiction, scientific fantasy, has become a bitter necessity from a non-committal art genre.
As a result, the boundary between science fiction and science has become increasingly blurred. Both are now charting a path to a future where human society can survive and thrive unscathed.
The books and movies that have already been made can help with that. Because to be able to write a story that takes place in the future, you need a society that is still there in that future. But how did that fictional society survive everything? Many solutions have already been devised for this.
It is obvious that many scientists are fans of science fiction. This does not only apply to astronomers, physicists or engineers. It certainly applies to economists as well. Two famous: Bradford DeLong, professor at Berkeley. And Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman. It was reading the Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov, started in 1942 as a series of short stories that, in his own words, prompted Krugman to study economics. This choice of study is, in retrospect, not so surprising. Asomov’s protagonist Harry Seldon thinks he can predict human history centuries ahead with a mixture of mass psychology and mathematics – not even such a crazy summary of what macroeconomics really is.
Many scientists are fans of science fiction
What many future worlds in science fiction have in common – and why they presumably have survived – is a source of inexhaustible, clean, energy. On a large scale, this is a so-called Dyson sphere (named after the British physicist Freeman Dyson) around the sun, which captures all available energy, and which occurs, for example, in the masterpiece Accellerando by writer Charles Stross. It can also be different: in the novel Pandora’s Star by British author Peter Hamilton, two young entrepreneurs invent a projectable wormhole. That doesn’t just open up the universe to human discovery and colonization. A wormhole can also be placed in the center of a star, and energy is tapped from another wormhole in communication with it – a safe distance from the civilization for which the energy is intended. There are so many examples. But the simplest form of inexhaustible clean energy occurs in what is probably the best-known story series in this genre: series Star Trek† Here nuclear fusion, the extraction of energy from the fusing of atomic nuclei, is the basis of a civilization that is thriving in the 24th century.
An economics book has since been written about Star Trek: Trekonomics by the French historian Manu Saadia (with a foreword by Berkeley professor Bardford DeLong by the way). The core: if energy is unlimitedly available and does not pollute, many boundaries disappear. Replicatorsubiquitous machines, build whatever you want from elemental matter at lightning speed – like a steaming cup of Earl Gray for Captain Pickard, the captain of the spaceship Enterprise. The Star Trek economy therefore no longer has a scarcity, has said goodbye to money. Wealth means nothing anymore. And man’s motivation is no longer wealth or wealth, but personal improvement—and that of the rest of humanity.
That sounds utopian, and in a way it is. Saadia notes that energy production is apparently in the hands of the government. This way everyone can enjoy it and this indispensable foundation of society is not in the hands of a handful of private companies – think of Big Tech in our time.
lingering
If the survival of civilization does indeed partly depend on the invention and application of unlimited clean energy, then there is good and bad news. Advantageously, there is currently plenty of research into nuclear fusion and small breakthroughs have been reported, whereby slightly more energy was released from a fusion process for a short time than the massive energy that must first be put into it. There are also emerging small companies that are engaged in mergers. See also the podcast episode Hairless Monkeys of the NRC– science editorial of 1 June.
The bad news is that the efforts are still essentially small. You would think, given the urgency, that a Manhattan project would already have sprung up with large-scale mass research under great time pressure, such as the development of nuclear weapons at the end of World War II. Then suddenly it turned out that a lot could be done in a short time.
Moreover, unlimited clean energy must be regarded as a public good, a resource that is equally available to everyone. Private initiative in developing it is excellent, but a revolutionary energy supply intertwined with private patents contradicts it.
As a counterbalance to all the futuristic techno-optimism: in the meantime, we have long lingered in a version of the world in which climate measures were too late and too modest and the search for and introduction of alternative energy from wind and solar too unambitious. It could have been different. It’s high time to shift into a higher gear. Or, to stay in Star Trek style: to boldly go†