Peace on Earth, Peace off Earth, Peace with Earth

Relevance for the Earth

Ongoing developments in the Middle East and in Ukraine have placed the nuclear superpowers on a collision course. Political tension at the present moment is as great as it was in 1914 prior to the onset of World War I.  As was the case then, it would only take a minor incident to set off dramatically increased level of international aggression with unpredictable consequences.

The Doomsday Clock is an internationally recognized design that conveys how close we are to destroying our civilization with dangerous technologies of our own making. First and foremost among these are nuclear weapons, but the dangers include climate-changing technologies, emerging bio-technologies, and cyber-technology that could inflict irrevocable harm, whether by intention, miscalculation, or by accident, to human civilization and to all life sharing our planet.

On January 22, 2015 the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists updated their Doomsday Clock to 3 minutes to midnight. "The clock ticks now at just three minutes to midnight because international leaders are failing to perform their most important duty—ensuring and preserving the health and vitality of human civilization." (1)

The last time the Doomsday Clock minute hand moved was in January 2012, when the Clock’s minute hand was pushed ahead one minute from six to five minutes before midnight.  Since its creation in 1947, the Doomsday Clock has been adjusted only 18 times, ranging from two minutes before midnight in 1953 to 17 minutes before midnight in 1991.  The last time the Doomsday Clock was at three minutes to midnight was 1983, when “US-Soviet relations were at their iciest,” according to the Bulletin.

Thus, it could be argued that the most critical issue facing humanity - the one that will most likely determine its ultimate success or failure as a species - is its propensity to wage war on a global scale.  Since the beginning of human history “war” has been the method most often chosen to resolve conflicts of interests among nation-states or communities through the use of violence.  Mostly, such conflicts and the resulting wars were about gaining control over populations and resources accompanied by the lust for power over others. The concept of “right” expressed through “might” is still widely practiced by societies of the 21st century. With the invention of nuclear weapons, the missile delivery systems and the willingness for governments to use such technologies for solving terrestrial problems or exerting their power, humanity has lived on the brink of annihilation for more than a half a century.  In recent years, both the United States and Russia have embarked on massive programs to modernize their nuclear triads—thereby undermining existing nuclear weapons treaties.

In his book The Overview Effect, Frank White’s reflections on war and space exploration emphasize this insight: 
“War and space exploration are alternative uses of the assertive, exploratory energies that are so characteristic of human beings. They may also be mutually exclusive because if one occurs on a massive scale, the other probably will not.” (2) 

Whatever the justifications for war – the victor in most such conflicts is usually the one with the superior technological advantage and space technology is deeply embedded in today’s military arsenals.

Carl Sagan wrote in his book Cosmos: 
“The choice is stark and ironic. The same rocket boosters used to launch probes to the planets are poised to send nuclear war­heads to the nations. The radioactive power sources on Viking and Voyager derive from the same technology that makes nu­clear weapons. The radio and radar techniques employed to track and guide ballistic missiles and defend against attack are also used to monitor and command the spacecraft on the planets and to listen for signals from civilizations near other stars. If we use these technologies to destroy ourselves, we surely will venture no more to the planets and the stars. But the converse is also true. If we continue to the planets and the stars, our chauvinisms will be shaken further. We will gain a cosmic perspective. We will recognize that our explorations can be carried out only on behalf of all the people of the planet Earth. We will invest our energies in an enterprise devoted not to death but to life: the expansion of our understanding of the Earth and its inhabitants and the search for life elsewhere. Space exploration—unmanned and manned— uses many of the same technological and organizational skills and demands the same commitment to valor and daring as does the enterprise of war. Should a time of real disarmament arrive before nuclear war, such exploration would enable the military-industrial establishments of the major powers to engage at long last in an untainted enterprise. Interests vested in preparations for war can relatively easily be reinvested in the exploration of the Cosmos.” (3) 

In a recent interview the noted physicist Stephen Hawking had this to say about the future of humanity:
"The human failing I would most like to correct is aggression. It may have had survival advantage in caveman days, to get more food, territory or partner with whom to reproduce, but now it threatens to destroy us all …. a  major nuclear war would likely end civilization, and could wipe out the human race…” 
Hawking called for greater empathy, and added that “…human space exploration is necessary as "life insurance" for humanity.” (4) 

In his book Collapse – How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Jared Diamond examines a number of ancient societies that have collapsed including, among others, Easter Island - an isolated island in the South Pacific which once had an abundant amount of natural resources, dozens of species of trees which created and protected an ecosystem fertile enough to support a thriving culture of over 30,000 inhabitants and one that produced enormous stone statutes. This society was not murdered or wiped-out by invasion, it was not decimated by a pest or by another natural catastrophe. Their collapse appears to have been caused primarily by deforestation attributed to political and social causes such as competition among the chiefs to erect larger statues which required a large number of trees to move the statues from the building site to the erection place. Larger statues gave them a higher rank and over time the Eastern Islanders cut down each and all of their trees one-by-one. This did not happen overnight.  Any Eastern Islander who tried to warn about the dangers of progressive deforestation would have been overridden by vested interests of the stone carvers, the bureaucrats, and the chiefs, whose jobs depended on continued deforestation. In the end, they committed suicide. They no longer had the one resource – trees – necessary for building fishing boats and for their only means of escape. (5)

When Diamond gives this lecture his students ask the obvious question: “How on Earth could such a society make the disastrous decision to cut down all of the trees on which it depended?” Diamond points out that the destruction of the trees was made by rational people who must have been aware of the importance of trees to their survival. 

The fact that Easter Island was also quite isolated in the South Pacific made the possibility of emigration to another locality very difficult. Easter Island is located 2000 km from the coast of Chile and 1400 km from the nearest inhabited island to the west. Thus, Easter Island is as alone in the Pacific Ocean much as our planet Earth is alone in space. If we compare the geographical situation of Easter Island to the cosmological situation of planet Earth then an insight emerges that may have relevance to the survival of our own civilization.

 

Today, our modern societies have developed quite a complex infrastructure to deal with changes in the global system in order to regulate the economy, manage resources, respond to threats to national security, etc. Yet there is also the inherent problem that group dynamics which characterize our decision making processes are not always effective and often fail because of competing interest groups and competing priorities.

The systemic failures of the world community to manage major problems are numerous;  how our governments responded to Hurricane Katrina both before and after the storm, the Gulf oil spill, Fukushima, the financial crises and the rising tensions in the Middle East and now in the Ukraine are clear examples of how such modern systems can and do fail. Like the natives of Easter Island when they cut down the last tree, we must therefore ask ourselves the following: “Why do our governments continue to invest vast resources into the technologies of destruction rather in the technologies that promote survival, peace and prosperity?”

It is a moral and philosophical dilemma. Either, we, as a species, are more afraid of each other than we are of the real threats to our existence or is it embedded in our character to live in a state of denial and to project our aggressions onto others. The obvious solution would be simply to ban any war of aggression in any form and for whatever purpose.

As Robert A. Heinlein succinctly stated in 1970:
"It may take endless wars and unbearable population pressure to force-feed a technology to the point where it can cope with space. In the universe, space travel may be the normal birth pangs of an otherwise dying race. A test. Some races pass, some fail."  (6)

As our technological civilization continues to develop on an isolated planet with finite room and finite resources our species is indeed rapidly approaching that moment of ultimate decision – humanity’s Cosmic Choice.(7) If one believes that economic and technological development are necessary preconditions for peace, then one has to arrive at the conclusion that significant resources are necessary (a.) to fuel development, and (b.) to reduce tension.

1. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists : http://thebulletin.org/clock/2015
2. Frank White, The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution, 1987, pp.126,   Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston
3. Carl Sagan, Cosmos, 1980,pp. 339-342 , Random House, New York
4. Stephen Hawking: Human Aggression Could 'Destroy Us All'
   http://www.livescience.com/49906-hawking-human-aggression-warning.html
5. Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, 2005, Viking Penguin, USA
6. Robert A. Heinlein, I Will Fear No Evil, 1970, Putnam
7. Arthur Woods, The Space Option: Our Cosmic Choice, April 2014