Converging Technologies and Human Destiny∗

∗The views expressed in this essay do not necessarily represent the views of the National Science Foundation.

Abstract

The rapid fertility decline in most advanced industrial nations, coupled with secularization and the disintegration of the family, is a sign that Western Civilization is beginning to collapse, even while radical religious movements pose challenges to Western dominance. Under such dire circumstances, it is pointless to be cautious about developing new Converging Technologies. Historical events are undermining the entire basis of ethical decision-making, so it is necessary to seek a new basis for ethics in the intellectual unification of science and the power to do good inherent in the related technological convergence. This article considers the uneasy relations between science and religion, in the context of fertility decline, and the prospects for developing a new and self-sustaining civilization based in a broad convergence of science and technology, coalescing around a core of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive technologies. It concludes with the suggestion that the new civilization should become interstellar.

Keywords:

• nanotechnology
• biotechnology
• information technology
• cognitive science
• converging technologies
• ethics
• religion

I. INTRODUCTION

Nanotechnology and the wider ensemble of technologies that are converging at the nanoscale promise to give humanity unprecedented power to change itself and the world around it (Roco & Bainbridge, 2001; 2002a; 2006a,b,c; Roco & Montemagno, 2004). Some philosophers and social critics argue, therefore, that we should follow a precautionary ethical principle: we should not take any significant technological step without first demonstrating that it is safe (cf. Bainbridge, 2002b; 2004a; ETC Group, 2003; Hughes, 2004). This essay will argue exactly the opposite. Civilization is already in such grave danger that we must not only take significant technological risks, we must seek an entirely fresh foundation for our culture and institutions. I write as a social scientist who has the perhaps unique perspective of having studied both religion and advanced technology over the past thirty years (e.g. Bainbridge 1976; 1978; 1986; 1991; 1997b; 2002a), and who now sees these two great forces confronting each other in the arena of history.

There are two possible positive futures for humanity:

1. A radical retrenchment that leads to a world fragmented among competing religious fundamentalisms — Christendom in the Americas, Islam expanding from its present territory further into Africa and Europe, and a swarm of unimaginable new cults conquering Asia. Faith would bring scientific progress to a halt and enslave technology in service of the ruling elites (cf. Bainbridge, 2003b).

2. A transcendence of the traditional human condition — made possible by the unification of all sciences and technologies, establishing a dynamic new creed to replace religion.

This would open new worlds for humanity, not only in outer space, but also in the transformation of our own nature.

II. THE IMPENDING DEMOGRAPHIC CATASTROPHE

For several decades, intellectuals have assumed that unchecked population growth threatens the well-being of humanity (Ehrlich, 1968), but more recently an awareness has emerged that fertility decline in advanced nations is more troubling (Wattenberg, 1987), and widespread use of birth control may doom our species to extinction. There is much discussion about the dangers of nuclear energy, bioterror or bioerror, and imagined future misapplications of nanotechnology (Rees, 2003), yet birth control pills and contraceptive devices may be the humble technologies that destroy our civilization.

In his 1922 classic, Social Change, sociologist William F. Ogburn argued that major inventions create novel conditions of life, but society is slow to adjust, causing what he called cultural lag. Ogburn noted that in pre-industrial times the death rate was high, so the birth rate also had to be high or the society would die out. Then, innovations in public heath, nutrition and medicine increased the life span and reduced the annual death rate. But, because of cultural lag, people still gave birth to many children. Thus, cultural lag creates a population explosion, until the society can adjust to the new technological conditions and achieve population stability again with low rates of both births and deaths.

Four decades later, demographers like Kingsley Davis (1963) developed Ogburn's theory into an excessively optimistic doctrine called demographic transition. Eventually, they believed, the population would stabilize again with low rates of fertility and mortality. This reflected the functionalist thinking in sociology of the time, based in the rosy assumption that somehow the institutions of society work together for its survival. Only later did demographers realize that Ogburn's plausible analysis of the beginning of the historical transition from high fertility and mortality was not matched by any theory of what happens later.

After another two decades, demographers (including Davis) had begun to worry that birth rates might drop significantly below replacement (Davis, Bernstam, & Ricardo-Campbell, 1986). A nation that declines in population will decline in world influence, and the low fertility of western European nations is an explicit reason the United States has begun to discount their international influence (CIA, 2001). A declining society's market for goods and services may also shrink, stifling economic development. A higher proportion of its population will be elderly and dependent. A lower proportion will be young and creative. Once science and technology make it possible for people to control their own reproduction, what can ensure that they produce a sufficient number of babies to keep the society alive? What prevents fertility from dropping all the way to zero? We lack clear answers to these questions.

In 2001, the United Nations reported that the world population had reached 6.1 billion and was growing at an annual rate of 1.2 percent. Projections for the year 2050 ranged from a low of 7.9 billion to a high of 10.9 billion, with a number around 9.3 billion seeming a reasonable middle estimate (United Nations, 2001). It is hard to specify exactly how many people the Earth can support at any particular level of economic development and environmental quality, the so-called carrying capacity of the planet, but these numbers seem affordable (Cohen, 1995).

The UN report notes that half the world's annual population growth occurs in just six nations: India (21 percent), China (12 percent), Pakistan (5 percent), Nigeria (4 percent), Bangladesh (4 percent), and Indonesia (3 percent). In its middle-range projection, the UN estimates that the population of less developed societies will grow from 4.9 billion to 8.2 billion, even with significant fertility reductions.

By the year 2000, populations had stabilized or even begun to shrink in several European nations. Russia is declining in population at a rate of 0.37 percent per year, whereas Ukraine is losing 0.60 percent annually (CIA, 2006). Partly, this shrinkage is caused by emigration, but a number of Eastern European nations have suffered increasing death rates as well as decreasing birth rates. Throughout Europe — and in Canada, Australia, and Japan as well — fertility is not sufficient to sustain the population over the long run. The UN (2001, p. 58) predicts that 19 nations of the world will each lose more than a million in population by the year 2050: Russia (loss of 41 million people), Ukraine (20 million), Japan (18), Italy (15), Germany (11), Spain (9), Poland (5), Romania (4), Bulgaria (3), Hungary (2), Georgia (2), Belarus (2), Czech Republic (2), Austria (2), Greece (2), Switzerland (2), Yugoslavia (2), Sweden (1), and Portugal (loss of 1 million people). The inclusion of Japan in this list suggests the problem is one of advanced civilization in general, not merely European culture, and thus development of nations like India would lead to a further population crash there as well.

III. FAMILY AND AGING

Associated with the fertility collapse is an unraveling of the social bonds that hold human communities together, notably family ties. Without a major realignment of society, we can expect the family to continue to disintegrate, contributing to increases in crime and poverty even in the richest societies (Bianchi, 1999; Goldscheider, 2000).

One might think that the increasing life span will offset declining fertility, not merely demographically, but also by giving people many more years in which they can contribute to family life. However, increased longevity does not automatically mean increased vitality or economic productivity. The growing proportion of the population who are elderly will put great demands on the healthcare industry, with fewer people paying to maintain the whole system (Fuchs, 1999). Also, we cannot count on the kind of medical technology we have today to increase longevity indefinitely.

The average white American male born in 1900 could expect to live 48 years, but in 2000 this life expectancy had increased to 74 years. For white females, the average life expectancy increased from 51 to 80. Projecting these figures forward at the same rate of increase suggests that life expectancy in 2100 might be 114 for males and 125 for females. However, using more realistic assumptions, the U.S. Census Bureau has projected that life expectancy for Americans born in the year 2100 might be only around 88 for males and 92 for females (Hollmann, Mulder, & Kallan, 2000). These Census Bureau estimates are based on the observation that most improvements in longevity came from reducing the risk of death for infants and young adults, and it will be increasingly difficult to gain additional years through extending the lifespan of the elderly.

Progress in health is by no means assured. During the nineteenth century, American health may actually have declined significantly for a number of decades, despite economic growth (Costa & Steckel, 1997). We tend to attribute the undeniable improvement in health over the twentieth century to medical progress, but health education and public sanitation may have been more important (Preston, 1996). The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (1999; 2000) argue that substantial improvements in health and longevity could be achieved simply by lifestyle changes, notably exercising more, reducing the fats in our diet, and avoiding smoking. The introduction of antibiotics made a difference, and modern cardiology saves the lives of many people who might otherwise die prematurely of heart attacks, but the progress against cancer has been agonizingly slow. On balance, economists find that the increasing investments in heath care are paying off, but not in all areas or with very great benefit (Cutler et al.,1998; Cutler & Richardson, 1999; Fuchs, 2000).

IV. SECULARIZATION AND CONVERGENCE

Religion may be the most powerful factor resisting fertility collapse and family disintegration (Bainbridge, 2001; 2002a; Keyfitz, 1986; Stark, 1996). Nations with high religious participation have higher fertility. Within advanced nations, people with traditional religious beliefs or fundamentalist affiliations tend to have more children. However, science and rational bureaucracies tend to erode faith in the supernatural.

On the op-ed page of the New York Times, Yale psychologist Paul Bloom wrote: “The great conflict between science and religion in the last century was over evolutionary biology. In this century, it will be over psychology, and the stakes are nothing less than our souls” (2004b, A27). Bloom is a cognitive scientist who studies early child development, and his widely publicized book, Descartes' Baby (2004a), argues that in fact humans do not possess souls, immortal or otherwise. We are dualists, like the French philosopher René Descartes, believing that we ourselves are somehow separate from our bodies, because the human brain is not directly conscious of its own mental processes and because the brain uses somewhat different modules to handle the social versus physical worlds. If the brain is a distributed neural network organized in complexly interconnected modules in which thoughts and memories are lodged in physical structures, then humans indeed lack the souls that Christianity seeks to save (Pinker, 1997; Quinlan, 2003; Schultz, 2003; Stein, 1998).

Bloom's reference to evolutionary biology is apt, because if cognitive science erodes religious faith, the combination of cognitive science with evolutionary biology and other cutting-edge scientific fields will do so even more rapidly. Entomologist and sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson (1998; cf. Dennett, 1995) has called the unification of the sciences consilience, and expressed skepticism that religion could find a way to participate in the coming intellectual consensus.

Considering all the sciences, cosmology surely poses an especially clear intellectual challenge to religion, because it seeks to explain how the universe could have come into being and provide a home for mankind without divine help. Cosmology, nonetheless, may not have the power to convince the public mind to abandon faith, because it is so poorly communicated beyond the very small subcultures of people interested in astronomy, and is so unpleasant in its implications. Over the years, the magazine Scientific American has published several articles, intelligible to the average educated reader, that communicated the fundamental challenge (Bousso & Polchinski, 2004; Gale, 1981; Linde, 1994), but the public remains unaware.

Stripped of details about string theory and cosmic inflation, the cosmological challenge is based on two ideas (Bainbridge, 1997a). First, the sum total of everything in the cosmos — positive protons, negative electrons, gravity, the energy of the expanding universe — may equal zero. The positive and the negative cancel out. If so, then it required no work at all to bring the universe into existence, and thus no creator. Second, if the cosmos is infinitely varied, over unimaginable distances and dimensions, then the fact that our portion of it is lawful and conducive for the evolution of intelligent life is merely a selection effect. The human mind exists not because some greater divine mind created it, but because in a vast and meaningless wasteland of existence, there was bound to be some small corner where intelligence could evolve unaided.

Clearly, many people would not find these ideas encouraging, and that is one reason why they have not become popular. At least as they have been presented to date, they have little to offer ordinary people. Decisively, these ideas are not at present essential for any technology. If quantum computing became common and cognitive science were to make use of it for technologies that helped humanity overcome some of the terrible problems that religion pretends to address, then the story might be different. Then cosmology would become part of Converging Technologies.

That is the radical significance of NBIC, the convergence of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and new technologies based on cognitive science. It not only brings together four previously separate domains of science and technology, but it also unites untraditional conceptions of reality with marvelously useful applications that cannot be ignored. Biotechnology, not merely genetic engineering, but all of it, is really evolution in action. Information technology is mind embodied in machines. Nanotechnology, in part because it concerns the domain just above that where quantum events take place, demonstrates that the world consists of mechanisms, not mysteries. And cognitive technologies drag human beings themselves under the atomic force microscope, in future decades offering many means by which humans will augment and alter themselves. Once we use the technology to transform ourselves, then the technology becomes more salient for our hopes and beliefs than any ancient myth could be.

The nineteenth-century, pre-existentialist philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche (1892), offered an apt metaphor. Humanity is crossing an abyss on a tightrope. Behind us is the old world of religious faith that compensated wretched but fertile people for the misery in their lives. On the other side, if we can only reach it, is a new land where we no longer have to live by illusions, where wisdom and procreation are compatible, where truth and life are one. Nietzsche warned that as we make this perilous crossing, we must not look down.

V. CONVERGING TECHNOLOGIES AND THE FAMILY

To remake ourselves, and to restore the vitality needed to keep our civilization flourishing, we will need to experiment with alternative social structures — new kinds of family, work group, and community. This will require both the professional skill of scientists to devise worthy experiments and the courage of ordinary people to dedicate years of their lives to testing them. It is extremely unlikely that current forms of government would invest in radical social experiments of the right kinds, and that is one of the reasons I have suggested for a number of years that we need to explore how to replace those governments with something simultaneously more humane and more scientific (e.g., Bainbridge, 1985a).

For a century and a half, intellectuals and social scientists have been developing theories of utopianism, based on observation of actual experimental communities, and some of their findings may be of use to us now. Nathaniel Hawthorne (1852, p. 75) insightfully described the people who joined such movements: “They were mostly individuals who had gone through such an experience as to disgust them with ordinary pursuits, but who were not yet so old, nor had suffered so deeply, as to lose their faith in the better time to come.”

John Humphrey Noyes (1870) and Charles Nordhoff (1875) debated whether shared religious faith was necessary to the success of a utopian experiment, or whether some secular ideology might take its place. A century later, many social scientists explored a host of factors that enhance commitment to a new way of life (Bainbridge, 1984; Kanter, 1972; Zablocki, 1980). Much of the research concerned communal experiments, often religious communes incorporating radical alternatives to the conventional family (Bainbridge, 1978; 2002a; Carden, 1969; Foster, 1981). There is much wisdom in this large body of scholarly literature, and it needs to be harvested for application to very different future circumstances. However, this was old-style historical and sociological research. It made essentially no use of information technology, did not factor in new opportunities offered by reproductive biotechnologies, and did not base its analyses on principles of cognitive science. Thus, I suggest, we need a new kind of social science, convergent with NBIC, to test ideas about new ways to organize social life that could be more viable for the centuries to come.

One very, very small step in that direction was a textual analysis study I carried out online to explore the ideas that ordinary people had about the future, in the year 2100. I was invited to contribute items to the pioneering web-based questionnaire, Survey2000, organized by sociologist James Witte and sponsored by the National Geographic Society (Witte, Amoroso, & Howard, 2000). About 46,500 adults responded to Survey2000, at least 100 from each of 35 nations, but chiefly from the United States, Canada, Britain, and Australia. I included an open-ended question: “Imagine the future and try to predict how the world will change over the next century. Think about everyday life as well as major changes in society, culture, and technology.” About half of the respondents, or 20,000 people, gave thoughtful answers to my open-ended question about the future. I culled this vast corpus of text for distinct ideas, and have already published results concerning information technology and religion (Bainbridge, 2004b,c).

Many respondents predicted that a wide variety of alternative family structures will be accepted. Some felt that “common law” relationships will all but replace formal marriage. That is, couples will simply cohabit without any explicit arrangement or legal contract (Smock, 2000). By one careful estimate, there were about 1,100,000 such cohabiting couples in the United States in 1977, and over 4,850,000 in 1997 (Casper & Cohen, 2000). Living together has become a step toward marriage for many couples, but for an apparently increasing number of people cohabitation has become an alternative setting for childbearing (Raley, 2001).

Another idea suggested that a system of temporary conjugal contracts might replace permanent marriage. One common variant could be open marriage, permitting the parties to love many other people, while still keeping a good relationship with each other (cf. Bainbridge, 2002a).

Other respondents felt the family will be redefined until it will be common to see three or four adults of the same generation in a household, along with children they produced in different combinations. The ideal of a family unit will expand to include multiple overlapping marriages. By the year 2100, many men and women will live in multigenerational households in which all members work part-time and raise families. Groups of people will live together in communal households, raising their children collectively, and for much of the population, the traditional family unit will be replaced by group homes. One Survey2000 respondent was skeptical, however, saying that because of jealousy and competition for mates, multi-partner group marriages may be exceedingly rare (Kanazawa & Still, 1999).

Some respondents predicted that in 2100, there will be a greater acceptance of the concept that the person you marry and possibly have children with, may not be the person you remain with the rest of your life. Biological families may be largely replaced by extended non-biological friend-families. Many single women will choose to have children, and in this scenario that is a perfectly healthy alternative. People will choose the unmarried life without a sense of guilt of being inadequate when compared to their married friends. At the extreme, marriage will be a thing of the past, and the traditional family will cease to exist.

Many marriages of the future, respondents conjectured, will be between partners of the same sex (Frank & McEneaney, 1999). It could be quite common for homosexual couples to adopt children, but there are also a number of ways through which homosexual males or females can produce their own biologically related children. Infertile women, or those repelled by pregnancy, may find a surrogate mother willing to bear their children for a price.

New technological procedures may increase still further the options for alternative family structures. For example, one respondent thought that by 2100, infants will be grown in artificial wombs, eliminating the need for women to play a special role in reproduction. At the same time, infertile women will be able to conceive children by a variety of methods. Another respondent even thought men will discover how to carry babies, and some will opt to become mothers of their own children.

Survey2000 respondents hoped that technologies to assist reproduction will largely overcome the necessity of parents to have their children during the early adult years. People of any age will be able to reproduce, and the consequences of this innovation for family structure could be very significant. For example, author Robert A. Heinlein (1966) imagined a future form he called the line family, that would benefit from life-long fecundity and could have exceptional social and economic stability. Such a family might consist of four men and four women of a wide range of ages, perhaps from 15 through 100. When the oldest one dies, the family would recruit a young person of the same gender to complete the set, thereby achieving a kind of familial immortality. Members would share everything with each other, including sexual relations as they individually preferred, but decisions about bringing a child into the world or marrying another spouse would be made by the family as a whole.

The point of asking ordinary people to predict the future of the family is not because I imagine they have some prognosticatory powers that social scientists lack, but because their inputs suggest radical alternatives that at least some members of the general public will be ready to experiment with.

Imagining a world in which all of these things are true, and yet the fertility rate is high enough to sustain the population, one comes to several conclusions. First, as some of the respondents mentioned themselves, new biotechnologies — and we know that really means nano-biotech — will be needed to allow anyone who wishes to reproduce with any selected partner to indeed have children. Barriers of age, health conditions, and gender will need to be overcome.

Second, there must be some way to sustain social bonds through the fluidity of brief and even overlapping sexual relationships and marriages. Information and communication technology will be essential here. I am thinking not merely of virtual-reality versions of instant messaging that would allow loved ones at a distance to communicate with a significant degree of intimacy. Probably much more important will be the use of these technologies to divorce jobs and recreation from geographic locations. Ideally, all the past and current lovers and spouses, all the parents and parent surrogates, all the siblings and sibling substitutes, and all the children will choose to live in a shared geographic area, where they can develop their distinctive lifestyle on a cohesive social network that is both electronic and face-to-face. One of the main reasons people move is to get a new job, and they also move in search of a more culturally stimulating environment. With advanced electronic information and communications technologies, all that can be brought to Normal, Illinois, or any other pleasant small city you can mention.

Third, the overwhelming majority of people must deeply desire to cooperate with each other, in order to make sure that an ample number of children will be raised to be healthy, happy, productive adults. Cognitive science and technologies will be essential here. The human mind evolved to sustain life and reproductive success in an environment that is vastly different from the one we inhabit today. Our “instincts” have become anachronistic. To some extent, we must re-engineer ourselves. But we also need to understand ourselves so that we can better adapt our environment not only to our personal needs, but also to the enduring needs of the human species.

Finally, there must be an economic and social basis for supporting and educating the children. Capitalism is very good at producing the wealth, but not at distributing it to needy babies. NBIC is the chief means by which any economic system of the future can produce maximum wealth at minimum disruption to the environment and to people's lives. We also need a new economic system, not some pseudoscientific fraud like Marxism that aimed to replace capitalism merely to put power in the hands of the communist politicians themselves, but a scientifically mature version of capitalism that has learned how to incorporate the greater good into rational investment calculations. This, also, requires NBIC, but through a wider convergence that reaches beyond cognitive science to encompass economics and sociology.

Some would say we need a new religion, one that is not at odds with the truth as science is discovering it or with the future as technology is creating it. The dominant religions of today were created between 1500 and 3500 years ago, when illiterate shepherds watched their flocks by night, and petty kings ruled in the foul-smelling mud brick cities. So they imagined that God is a king and people are sheep. Maybe we need a religion oriented toward the present and the future, not the past. Maybe we even need a religion that is true.

VI. THE FUTURE OF CIVILIZATION

In the 1930s, sociologist Piritim A. Sorokin propounded a cyclical theory of the rise and fall of civilizations that may well apply to ours if we do not prevent it. For Sorokin, the most influential elements of culture are those that concern the inner experience of people, their images, ideas, volitions, feelings and emotions. The essence of a culture is defined by the view people have of the nature of reality, the goals they value and the means they emphasize in reaching these goals. In his theory, each great civilization emerges out of a period of chaos with a coherent set of spiritual beliefs that give it strength. Often it is born in the development of a new religious tradition. At this point, it is what Sorokin called an ideational culture. This means it considers reality to be essentially spiritual rather than material, and it seeks to achieve spiritual goals. Depending upon the historical circumstances, members of an ideational culture tend to be either ascetic or active. In this context, an ascetic person suppresses his or her carnal desires and detaches from the illusory world of the senses. An active person tries to reform society to match the ideology of the culture.

A successful ideational culture grows and develops. With success, however, comes complaisance. The society slowly loses its faith in spirituality, doubt sets in, and the culture becomes sensate, a perspective on existence that is the opposite of ideational. A sensate culture believes that reality is whatever the sense organs perceive, and it does not believe in any supernatural world. Its aims are physical or sensual, and it seeks to achieve them through exploiting or changing the external world. Religion is ideational; science is sensate. Depending upon circumstances, most people in a sensate society will exhibit one of three personality orientations. Active individuals use technology and empire-building to take charge of the material world. Passive individuals indulge themselves in pleasures of the flesh. And cynical individuals exploit the prevailing conditions for their own profit without any ideal to provide fundamental values.

Our own scientific, secular society is in the late stages of the sensate form of society, which evolved out of the ideational Christendom that emerged from the Dark Ages, Sorokin believed. The entire cycle of which he wrote can take many centuries to complete, but he believed that western society was approaching a crisis point. Ultimately, a sensate civilization is likely to crash, ushering in a new period of intense cultural chaos out of which a new ideational civilization may be born. Sorokin wrote,

Neither the decay of the Western society and culture, nor their death, is predicted by my thesis. What it does assert … is simply that one of the most important phases of their life history, the Sensate, is now ending and that we are turning toward its opposite through a period of transition. Such a period is always disquieting, grim, cruel, bloody, and painful. (Sorokin, 1937, vol. III, pp. 537)

Looking back on the seventy years since he wrote, there is good reason to agree.

Among scholars of religion, frankly there is debate about whether secularization is really the dominant trend (Bruce, 1992). Secularization certainly does occur within the most liberal religious denominations, as highly educated clergy adopt the intellectual values of secular academics. In so doing, they tend to lose touch with the spiritual needs of the laity in their own churches, and membership declines (Finke & Stark, 1992; Stark & Finke, 2000; Stark et al.,1971). At the same time, their theologians lament that theology can no longer compete intellectually with science (Pailin, 2000; Peacocke, 2000). As highly secularized denominations lose membership, more fervent sects grow. In time, the sects themselves become more worldly and stall in their growth, but at this point schisms generate new sects. Thus, secularization and revival tend to balance off as individual denominations weaken, but religion in general remains strong. This is a cycle of secularization and revival in which the wheel of faith turns but does not move either forward or back (Stark & Bainbridge, 1985; 1987).

At certain historical periods, such as the early Roman Empire and possibly the present day, however, a revolution in faith takes place (O'Donnell, 1977). An increased rate of secularization, accelerated by contact with alien cultures and by secular intellectual developments, so weakens the prevailing religious tradition that many religious innovations occur. A few of these establish fresh religious traditions. Innovative groups tend to begin quite small, through rapid recruitment of new members around one or two spiritual leaders. Schismatic movements tend to adhere to existing traditions, so their capacity to innovate is limited.

However, religious innovators do not emerge out of nowhere. In order to have the skills and practical experience to run a religious group, they tend to have served an implicit apprenticeship in an earlier successful group. Thus religious movements, whether schismatic or innovative, tend to cluster in family lineages, sharing some cultural features in common.

This means it is possible to analyze religions from an evolutionary standpoint, employing cultural genetics (Bainbridge, 1985b). Although many adherents to traditional faiths abhor the reductionist theory of evolution, it may turn out that religion itself can best be understood in evolutionary terms. That is, the great proliferation of small religious movements that exist by the tens of thousands in the world today can be seen as a constant mutation of religious cultures. Most of those movements die out swiftly and only a very few grow and endure. This is a process of natural selection in which only those religions that are by chance well adapted to prevailing social conditions will thrive. As long as religion continues to mutate and new religions continue to appear in great numbers and variety, religion in general will be able to adapt to changing social conditions and survive. Consideration of previous eras in history when something like science existed — Hellenistic Greece and the peak of Arab civilization for example — suggests that science is not so hardy (Ben-David, 1971).

In one of the classic essays of twentieth-century sociology, Talcott Parsons (1964) argued that religion was one of the evolutionary universals of humanity. Parsons noted that all societies possess four features of supreme importance: religion, communication with language, social organization through kinship, and technology. He concluded that these four are essential for human society, and that all lasting cultural developments must be based upon them. Some individuals may safely be irreligious or skeptical, but if everybody abandons religion, then the society will fall as surely as if everybody abandoned technology. I have just finished a sociological study on this issue, The Secular Abyss (Bainbridge, in press), and the findings seem to indicate that the benefits of religion in most areas of modern life are actually quite weak, and even strong religion's ability to sustain fertility in a modern society is uncertain.

The question is whether there might be an alternative, so that we do not have to sit passively and watch as revivalist sects and radical cults compete with each other to set the terms of the next ideational era, with the overhanging danger that the next Renaissance might need to wait until after the next Dark Age. Converging Technologies may be that tightrope, of which Nietzsche wrote, that can carry us to the other side.

VII. A VIEW OF THE HUMAN HORIZON

The editor of this special issue suggested I complete this essay with a glimpse of what may be “on the horizon” for Converging Technologies. My current research area is the conjunction of information and cognitive technologies, and in recent years I have managed government programs that award research grants in the areas of artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, and science and engineering informatics. So, my view of the horizon is most clear in that quadrant. What I see is quite remarkable: the very real possibility that human and machine intelligence will converge over the coming century. That development, in partnership with other NBIC convergences, could unlock the heavens to human habitation.

Among the many disappointments of the twentieth century, I reckon the arthritic condition of space exploration among the most distressing. On December 7, 1972, in the dark of night, I marveled as the Florida sky turned orange, reflecting the flames from the first stage of the Apollo 17 launch vehicle, the beginning of the last trip to the Moon. The great hopes that some of us held for the space shuttle (Bainbridge, 1976) dimmed not only with the Challenger and Columbia accidents, but also in the gradual awareness that launching the vehicle would never be as cheap as needed to support substantial space development. Over the same period, we have seen very little if any increased public enthusiasm for the space program, and very little progress in rocket propulsion technologies. At the risk of oversimplification, we can identify three “bottlenecks” restricting future space development:

1. the cost of launching to Earth orbit;

2. the lack of supportive biospheres elsewhere in the solar system, and

3. the vast distance and thus flight time to the stars.

Unfortunately, chemical reactions are just barely powerful enough to launch vehicles into Earth orbit, and any chemical-based space transport system must make use of two or more rocket stages to lift reasonable payloads. Nuclear rocket engines were tested in the 1960s, but they are environmentally unacceptable. The chemical system used by the space shuttle orbiter, based on liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen, is environmentally benign because the output is simply water. New nanotechnology materials, such as composites based on carbon nanotubes, could improve a future launcher's mass ratio, which is the payload expressed as a fraction of the total launch weight of the fueled vehicle (Venneri, 2001). Carbon nanotubes are currently very expensive to make, but they have the virtues of great strength and great lightness.

Once a space vehicle has achieved Earth orbit, it can use efficient but low-thrust ion engines for interplanetary flight, carrying some high-thrust chemical fuel for landing at its destination. The problem is that no destination in the solar system has many of the natural resources that humans need for life. The source of the life-giving oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere is life itself, and the oxygen elsewhere in the solar system is locked into the rocks or ice. On Earth, much of our economy relies directly or indirectly upon natural products of life, including fossil fuels, wood for construction, plant and animal food, and many clothing materials. Through biotechnology it may be possible to engineer new life forms that could survive on Mars or under the surfaces of icy moons like Europa and Ganymede, and gradually transform the environment to make it more hospitable for humans. The first stage in terraforming an inhospitable planet or moon — making it more Earth-like — might involve nanotechnology-enabled robots creating a crude machine economy upon which a biological ecology could be erected.

The Voyager 1 space probe was launched in 1977 and is now nearly nine billion miles from Earth, but this enormous distance is only about 1/4,000 of the distance to the nearest star other than the sun. Interstellar probes will undoubtedly travel faster, but speed is very costly so interstellar flights are likely to take hundreds or thousands of years. The classic science-fiction solution to this problem, aside from complete fantasy notions such as Star Trek's “warp drive,” is to send an entire community in which many generations could be born, reproduce, and die. This adds the challenge of designing a society that would endure unchanged and avoid falling into a Dark Age (Heinlein, 1941). A more efficient solution would be to send humans in the form of frozen DNA samples and recorded personalities, to be reassembled at the destination.

This is where the convergence of cognitive and information technologies becomes crucial. In a series of scientific articles, I have shown that it is already possible to archive a low-fidelity image of a human personality — by means of psychological tests, attitude questionnaires, and behavioral observations — and I have suggested practical means by which it could continue to act within the world (Bainbridge, 2002c; 2003a; 2006). In a collection of essays published by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, I argued:

A combination of foreseeable advances in several fields of science and technology will permit vast improvements in our ability to capture and reanimate a human personality. In time, cognitive neuroscience, perhaps drawing upon molecule-size sensor developments in nanotechnology, will be able to chart the structure and function of a living human brain. “Gene on a chip” bioelectronic devices will permit cost-effective sequencing and analysis of those aspects of a person's genetic code that influence his or her personality. Information science, especially in the very active area of digital libraries, will develop the necessary techniques for efficient storage and access of petabyte records of the individual. Finally, advances in genetic engineering, information systems, and robotics will allow archived human beings to live again, even in transformed bodies suitable for life on other planets and moons of the solar system. (Bainbridge, 2002d, pp. 58–59)

Already in the first Converging Technologies report, computer engineering pioneer Warren Robinett (2003) suggested that human personalities could travel through space at the speed of light in the form of information transmitted by radio or laser, an idea I had explored in a 1993 essay on religion, science, and secularization. Other writers have proposed that deep-space exploration would be carried out entirely by intelligent machines, and that humans will soon be succeeded by machines as the dominant intelligent species on this planet (Dick, 2003; Kurzweil, 1999; MacGowan & Ordway, 1966; Moravec, 1998). I suggest that machines will not replace humans, nor will humans become machines. These notions are too crude to capture what will really happen. Rather, humans will realize that they are by nature dynamic patterns of information, which can exist in many different material contexts, some of which are suitable for travel to the stars.

When confronted with such ideas, but without the advantage of decades of technological change during which to become accustomed to them, many people will resist. I suggest a compromise. We can agree that the planet Earth should remain a refuge for traditional humanity, living in a variety of low-tech societies in what technophiles would call a perpetual Dark Age. Those who wish to transform themselves into a very different kind of intelligent entity will need to leave the Earth, fulfilling what Alfred Bester (1956) ironically called arrival of the fittest. The original Star Trek motto — to boldly go where no man has gone before — has been criticized for splitting an infinitive and employing sexist language, and I now criticize it for implying that space travelers will be humans in the antique sense of the term. Another motto from the science-fiction subculture is better, leaving open the nature of spacefarers and playing nicely off an old religious motto: The meek will inherit the Earth, but the bold will go elsewhere.

Notes

∗The views expressed in this essay do not necessarily represent the views of the National Science Foundation.