The Danger of Cosmic Genius
In the range of his
genius, Freeman Dyson is heir to Einstein—a visionary who has reshaped thinking
in fields from math to astrophysics to medicine, and who has conceived
nuclear-propelled spaceships designed to transport human colonists to distant
planets. And yet on the matter of global warming he is, as an outspoken
skeptic, dead wrong: wrong on the facts, wrong on the science. How could
someone as smart as Dyson be so dumb about the environment? The answer lies in
his almost religious faith in the power of man and science to bring nature to
heel.
By
Kenneth Brower -- The Atlantic Magazine, December, 2010
One starry night 35 years ago, I drove
the physicist Freeman Dyson through the British Columbia rain forest toward a
reunion with his estranged son, George. The son, then 22, was a long-haired,
sun-darkened, barefoot dropout with an uncanny resemblance to Thoreau. He had
emigrated to Canada during the Vietnam War, and he lived 95 feet up a Douglas
fir outside Vancouver. His passion was the aboriginal North American skin boat.
In a workshop near his tree house, he had resurrected the baidarka, the
kayak of the Aleutian Islands—a watertight second skin, lightweight and nimble,
in which the Aleut hunter originally, and young George himself eventually,
became a kind of sea centaur, half man and half canoe. The father, Freeman, was
then and continues to be a professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced
Study in Princeton, New Jersey, employed there, as Einstein was before him, to
think about whatever he finds interesting.
Freeman Dyson is one
of those force-of-nature intellects whose brilliance can be fully grasped by
only a tiny subset of humanity, that handful of thinkers capable of following
his equations. His principal contribution has been to the theory of quantum
electrodynamics, but he has done stellar work, too, in pure mathematics,
particle physics, statistical mechanics, and matter in the solid state. He
writes with a grace and clarity that is rare, even freakish, in a scientist,
and his books, including Disturbing the Universe, Weapons and Hope,
Infinite in All Directions, and The Sun, the Genome, and the
Internet, have made a mark. Dyson has won the Lorentz Medal (the
Netherlands) and the Max Planck Medal (Germany) for his work in theoretical
physics. In 1996, he was awarded the Lewis Thomas Prize, which honors the
scientist as poet. In 2000, he scored the Templeton Prize for exceptional
contribution to the affirmation of life’s spiritual dimension—worth more, in a
monetary way, than the Nobel.
The period of his
career that Dyson remembers most happily, the endeavor during which he believes
he learned the most, began the year after Sputnik. In 1958, he took a leave of
absence from the Institute for Advanced Study and moved to La Jolla,
California, where he joined Project Orion, a group of 40 scientists and engineers
working to build a spacecraft powered by nuclear bombs. The Orion men believed
that rocketry was hopeless as a means of settling the universe. Only nuclear
power had sufficient bang to propel the requisite payloads into space. The team
called the concept “nuclear-pulse propulsion.” From a hole at the center of a
massive “pusher plate” at the bottom of the craft, atom bombs would be dropped
at intervals and detonated. The shock wave and debris from each blast would
strike the pusher plate, driving the ship heavenward on a succession of
blinding fireballs. Shock absorbers the size of grain silos would cushion the
cabin and crew, smoothing out the cataclysmic bumpiness of the ride.
To the layperson,
this seems exactly the sort of contraption that Wile E. Coyote, in his efforts
to overtake Road Runner, habitually straps on before self-immolation. But the
layperson is wrong, apparently. Specialists in the effects of nuclear
explosions saw no reason Orion would not work. The Advanced Research Projects
Agency, the precursor to NASA,
underwrote the project, then NASA
took it on, and nuclear-pulse propulsion briefly held its own against the
chemical rockets of Wernher von Braun. Dyson and his colleagues did not want to
delegate; they intended to go bombing into space themselves. Their schedule had
them landing on Mars by 1965 and Saturn by 1970.
The Volkswagen camper
in which I was driving Freeman through the forest was a ’69, assembled the same
year the Orion ship was supposed to thunder silently through space toward its
1970 rendezvous with Saturn. Like all VW minibuses of that vintage, mine was
underpowered and prone to overheating. It was primitive transportation—internal
combustion, just 57 horsepower—yet it got us down the road. Now and again, I
checked the speedometer. We were averaging about 50 miles per hour, well under
the 22 million mph that Freeman had hoped to coax from an interstellar
spacecraft, but safe under the conditions. To the tinny pocketa pocketa of
the four cylinders, I steered beneath the narrow swath of stars bounded by the
crowns of conifers on either side.
The détente between
the Dysons, father and son, was something I had helped mediate. This drive
through the forest to unite them had the look of family counseling, but in fact
it was fieldwork. I was gathering notes for my book The Starship and the
Canoe, an account of the two men, their two vessels, and their two
diverging views of the future.
Occasionally I stole
a sideways glance at Freeman, who rode shotgun, very erect in the seat, staring
in his unblinking way at the pavement ahead. It did not escape me that the
black macadam in my headlights covered a road on Vancouver Island, British
Columbia, Canada, Planet Earth. This was not extraterrestrial basalt on the
dark side of Saturn’s moon Iapetus, which Freeman had especially wanted to
visit, curious about why one side is black and the other white. This was not
some haul road on Mimas, the innermost of the major moons of Saturn, a cratered
satellite of water-ice just 115,000 miles from the planetary surface and
favored by Freeman both as a place to provision and for its spectacular view of
Saturn filling most of the sky. Back in 1958, Freeman had calculated the
velocity increments required to deposit the Orion ship on various inner moons
of Saturn and Jupiter, laying out the data in tables—but all for naught, in the
end. The Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963, with its prohibition of nuclear
explosions in the atmosphere and outer space, killed Project Orion. President
Kennedy’s signature effectively condemned Freeman to spend the rest of his life
on this planet.
The forest was dark,
the road twisty and narrow. It was two in the morning, and I had been driving
all night. To keep awake at the wheel, I interviewed the physicist, in a
desultory way. I was curious about his childhood in England. In 1943, as a
teenager, he had been a mathematician with the Royal Air Force, calculating the
ideal density for bomber formations raiding Germany; but his precociousness, I
knew, had manifested itself much earlier than that. By the age of 6, his great
interests had been mathematics and astronomy. He had been a little wizard, a
wunderkind.
“It is said that the
mental processes of a mathematical prodigy differ in no essential respect from
those of ordinary folks who can handle more modest problems,” George Dyson had
written—not Freeman’s tree-dwelling son, but Sir George Dyson, Freeman’s
father, a composer and the director of the Royal College of Music. “The
prodigy’s gift is the power of incessant concentration on more and more
complicated mental calculations, until his brain can instantly recall the end
products of the thousands of factors with which his mind has been busy.”
The prodigy in
question, Freeman Dyson, now middle-aged, stared ahead, his incessant
concentration on the road unbroken. He seemed mesmerized by the oncoming
pavement, or by some idea or formulation glimpsed in the immateriality beyond
the pavement. I asked him whether as a boy he had speculated much about his
gift. Had he asked himself why he had this special power? Why he was so bright?
Dyson is almost
infallibly a modest and self-effacing man, but tonight his eyes were blank with
fatigue, and his answer was uncharacteristic.
“That’s not how the
question phrases itself,” he said. “The question is: why is everyone else so
stupid?”
In
August 2009, Dyson appeared on
the Charlie Rose show. His inimitable voice—somehow both diffident and
firm, its original British accent overlaid by an American one—caught me in
transit of my living room, and I pulled up a chair. Dyson has aged well. He has
kept himself trim, not to say scrawny, and what he radiates in his 80s is a
kind of wizened boyishness. I smiled at the familiar mannerisms. Freeman and
his son, George, share an odd, cryptic style of chuckling in which the chin
drops, the eyes get merry, and the shoulders shake with laughter, but no sound
comes out.
Among intelligent
nonexperts who have weighed in on climate change, Freeman Dyson has become, now
that Michael Crichton is dead, perhaps our most prominent global-warming
skeptic. Charlie Rose began his interview with questions about the climate.
Dyson answered that he remained very skeptical about the dangers of global
warming. He did not believe the pronouncements of the experts. He did not claim
to be an expert himself, so he would not argue the details with anybody; he had
not given much time to the issue and did not pretend to know the real answers,
but what he knew for sure was that the global-warming experts did not know the
answers, either.
Dyson did not deny
that the world was getting warmer. What he doubted was the models of the
climatologists, and the grave consequences they predicted, and the supposition
that global warming is bad. “I went to Greenland myself, where the warming is most
extreme,” he said. “And it’s quite spectacular, of course, what you see in
Greenland. But what is also true is, the people there love it. The people there
hope it continues. It makes their lives a lot more pleasant.”
Dyson argued that
melting ice and the resulting sea-level rise is no cause for alarm. He said
that the release of increasing volumes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is
a very good thing, as it makes plants grow better. The important thing to
remember, he said, is that the planet is warming mainly in places that are
cold, and at night rather than during the day, so that the phenomenon is
essentially making the climate more even, rather than just making everything
hotter.
“Have we been kind to
the planet?” Rose asked at one point.
“Yes. I would say, on
the whole, yes.”
When Rose expressed
surprise at this answer, the physicist backtracked slightly.
“No, the fact is, of
course, we’ve done a lot of damage to the planet, but we also repair the
damage. I grew up in England, and England was far more filthy then than it is
now. We had the industrial revolution first, so England was much more polluted
than the United States ever has been, and England now is quite comparatively
clean. You can go to London and your collar doesn’t get black in one day.”
The
question that phrases itself now,
in the minds of many, is: how could someone as smart as Freeman Dyson be so
dumb?
That humanity has
been kind to the planet is not a possible interpretation, not even for a
moment—certainly not for anyone who has been paying the slightest attention at
any point in the 4,700 years of human history since Gilgamesh logged the cedar
forest of the Fertile Crescent. That we repair our damage to the planet is a
laughable assertion. It is true that the air is better now in London, and in
Los Angeles too. Collars do blacken more slowly in both those places.
Some rivers in the developed world are somewhat cleaner, as well: the Cuyahoga
has not burned in many years. But it is also true that the Atlantic is afloat
with tar balls, and that detached sections of fishnet and broken filaments of
longline drift, ghost-fishing, in all our seas. Many of the large cities of
Africa, South America, and Asia are megalopolises of desperate poverty ringed
by garbage. Vast tracts of tropical rain forest, the planet’s most important
carbon sink, disappear annually, burned or logged or mined. Illegal logging is
also ravaging the slow-growing boreal forests of Siberia. The ozone hole over
Antarctica continues to open every southern spring, exposing all life beneath
to unfiltered ultraviolet rays. African wildlife is in precipitous decline.
Desertification continues in the Sahel, turning that semi-arid zone into just
more Sahara. Frogs are vanishing everywhere. We are in the middle of a mass
die-off, the “sixth extinction,” this one caused not by volcanoes or collisions
with asteroids and comets, as before, but by mankind—with species disappearing,
according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, at 1,000 to
10,000 times the rate prevalent over the 65 million years since the previous
great extinction. That one was caused by an asteroid strike—the cataclysm that
ended the Cretaceous Period, killing off the dinosaurs and nearly everything
else alive. It is wonderful that Dyson, in his trips home to London, finds less
soot on his collar, but this is perhaps not the best measure of planetary
health.
Many of Dyson’s facts
on global warming are wrong, as the scientists who have done actual research on
the subject point out, but more disconcerting is the selective way he gathers
his information and the peculiar conceptual framework into which he inserts it.
It is true that
plants grow better with increases in carbon dioxide. (Photosynthesis is the
conversion of carbon dioxide and sunlight into organic compounds, so the more
CO2 and sunlight, the better, up to a point.) If a plant’s survival depended
only on its metabolism—if all it had to do was photosynthesize—then increased CO2
in the atmosphere might indeed be a good thing. But plants happen to grow in
these little universes we call ecosystems, where they are sustained by complex
webs of interdependency with fungi, microbes, animals, and other plants. Much
of this mutually dependent life is adapted to narrow temperature and rainfall
regimes, and these biomes are collapsing everywhere.
Plants do grow better
with increased CO2, but not when deprived of water. Water is a vanishing
commodity in the American West, where I live, and where, like the Australians
and Sudanese and many others, we are enduring a succession of increasingly
prolonged and severe droughts. Drought is a paleontological fact in the
American West, but the latest desiccations have a new signature, and my region’s
climatologists, hydrologists, foresters, and water managers are nearly
unanimous in their conviction that what we are seeing now is climate change,
the anthropogenic kind, a consequence of too much CO2 and other greenhouse
gases. Drought-induced stress increases plants’ susceptibility to disease, and
tree diseases are epidemic now in my home landscape and elsewhere. Plants grow
better with increased CO2, but not when they are dead snags.
The planet, Dyson
assured Rose, is warming mainly in places that are cold; it is not getting
hotter so much as the climate is evening out. This is a peculiar analysis. The
fact is that the planet is getting hotter, by small but enormously
consequential increments. That the warming is most pronounced in cold places is
true, but this is no consolation to the creatures that live there. I recently
returned from reporting on diminishing sea ice and the decline of penguin
populations and krill stocks on the Antarctic Peninsula, the western side of
which, over the past half century, has been warming at five times the world’s
average rate. I feel obligated to put in a word for the elephant seals, fur
seals, crabeater seals, leopard seals, whales, penguins, albatrosses, petrels,
and other members of that cold-adapted, krill-dependent fauna. Dyson’s
implication that an evening out of global temperatures might somehow be
a neutral or beneficial phenomenon is astounding. Temperature differentials at
different latitudes and altitudes are a prime driver of planetary weather.
Weather patterns, needless to say, are full of consequence not just for
penguins and seals, but for all life everywhere.
How could someone as
brilliant as Freeman Dyson take the positions he does on global warming and
other environmental issues?
I have a number of theories.
Contrariness
A contrarian nature,
by clearing the field of received wisdom, speeds original thought. Physicists,
astronomers, scholars of every stripe, have always been charmed by the
counterintuitive—and why not, as it so often turns out to be right? Dyson’s
present devotion to a set of contrary, counterintuitive, even counter-obvious
ideas on climate change is hardly a novel stance for him, only a little more
stubborn than usual. It is clear to me that he has been stung by the criticism
of his musings on global warming, and is digging in his heels.
He
Doesn’t Really Mean It
Dyson is prone to
conducting thought experiments, and will often slip into one without warning.
It is not always apparent when he is inhabiting some Dalí-esque experimental
landscape between his ears and when he has touched down on Earth. Even his old
colleagues from Project Orion, men working with him on an exceedingly far-out
concept, were sometimes unsure.
“Freeman’s last
lecture, toward the end of his stay, was a marvelous thing,” an Orion engineer
named Brian Dunne told me. “He decided to take Orion to the ultimate. It was
funnier than hell. First I didn’t believe it. Then I did. Then I didn’t. It was
just so outlandish, beyond anything we had ever envisioned before.”
What Dyson proposed
was a 240-million-ton ark with a pusher plate 90 miles in diameter and powered
by hydrogen bombs. It was a modest vessel, really, the smallest possible
practical version of a class of 6,000-miles-per-second starships he had dreamed
up, dreadnoughts capable of crossing our solar system in a month. His starship
would be slow off the starting blocks, with a zero-to-6,000-mps time of 30
years, but then it would really get rolling. Dyson addressed small details,
like questions of plumbing. Nuclear-pulse propulsion, even in the small, pokey,
atom-bomb-powered version of the Orion ship designed to tool around this solar
system, required that each nuclear bomb be packaged in propellant—some material
that, when vaporized into a plasma stream by the explosion, would strike the
pusher plate and provide the necessary kick. For his starship, Dyson proposed
recycling the feces of the astronauts as propellant. Riding a thermonuclear
shit storm, his ark would carry several thousand colonists to Alpha Centauri on
a 150-year voyage.
“Was he serious?” I
asked Dunne.
“No,” said the
engineer. He laughed merrily at the memory. Then suddenly he stopped. His face
went thoughtful. “Well, you never know,” he said. “You can’t tell with Freeman.
You have to be cautious.”
“Was he serious?” I
asked Ted Taylor several days later. Taylor, an expert in the miniaturization
of nuclear bombs, was the head of Project Orion and Dyson’s closest friend on
the team.
“I don’t think so,”
Taylor said, after several moments of hesitation. “In his characteristic way,
he wanted to push something to the limit. H-bombs, per unit of energy, are a
lot cheaper than A-bombs. They’re also a lot hotter, a lot more energetic.”
Dyson himself, when I
put the same question to him, was dismissive. “The starship was like an
existence theorem in math,” he said. “It was to prove if you could do it. I
never really believed in it.”
Educated
Fool
Einstein could not
make change, according to the lore; the bus drivers of Princeton had to pick
out his nickels and quarters for him. We dimmer bulbs love to seize on tales
like this. We are comforted by the notion of the educated fool. It seems only
right that some leveling principle should deprive the geniuses among us of
common sense, street smarts, mother wit. It is tempting to try explaining Dyson
in this way.
Having myself grown
up in Berkeley, where Nobel laureates are a dime a dozen, I certainly know the
syndrome: the mismatched socks, the spectacles repaired with duct tape, the
forgotten anniversaries and missed appointments, the valise left absentmindedly
on the park bench. Yet hometown experience did not prepare me completely for
Dyson. In my interviews with the physicist, he would sometimes depart the
conversation mid-sentence, his face vacant for a minute or two while he
followed some intricate thought or polished an equation, and then he would
return to complete the sentence as if he had never been away. I have observed
similar departures in other deep thinkers, but never for nearly so long.
“He’d just
disappear,” George Dyson remembers. George was just 5 when his father moved the
family west to La Jolla for the Orion work, but he was a watchful child, and it
was his impression that the varied challenges of designing the spacecraft only
intensified his father’s preternatural powers of concentration. Freeman’s body
occupied the chair in his study, but in every other sense, he was gone.
Many years after
Orion, in La Jolla, with the physicist as my guide, I tried to drive us to a
restaurant that Dyson knew from his spaceship days. We overshot it by a mile
going east, because Dyson got lost in some long chain of cogitation, and then
we overshot it going west, and then overshot it going east again. Each time,
Dyson would apologize, but remorse did not save him from falling again, just a
few yards down the road, into some black pothole of cerebration. Our course to
the restaurant, which we finally reached, half-starved, was the sort of
oscillation you might chart by affixing a pencil to the tip of a pendulum as it
loses momentum. (I chose not to interview Dyson afresh for this essay, not from
any impatience with his mental walkabouts, but because what I wanted to address
here were his public statements on climate change, the environment, and
technology.)
If this seems to
support a nutty-professor explanation for Dyson, then the testimony of his
colleagues tends to argue the other way. Among his former co-workers, Dyson is
famous for a kind of elevated common sense.
The Orion engineer
Brian Dunne, a nuts-and-bolts sort of guy, was doubtful at first about Dyson’s
pragmatism. “I had had dealings with lots of very eminent theorists,” he told
me. “I’d found huge gaps in their knowledge of things, particularly
experimental problems—how to put something together that works. When I realized
Freeman really is a fine engineer, I was astounded. He knows electrical
engineering, mechanical engineering, structural. That’s unnerving, in a
theoretical physicist with the eminence that he enjoys. His contributions to
quantum electrodynamics are classics. They are beautiful pieces of work—poetry
in physics, if you will. To see the same man do an analysis of the pusher-plate
motion, and the shock-absorber motion, putting in the damping coefficients, and
the strengths and stresses, and getting it all right—that’s unnerving.”
Dyson eludes
stereotype. The nutty-professor hypothesis, as applied to him, remains a work
in progress.
Old
Age
Some critics have
suggested that at his advanced age, Dyson is “out of his beautiful mind,” as
one put it. On most subjects, Dyson’s recent writings and lectures give no hint
that he is slipping. He puts his words and thoughts together as lucidly as
ever. When a mind starts out with all the excess computing power that Dyson’s did,
it generally has enough millions of spare neurons to carry the owner into his
90s and across the finish line in style. I would venture that if Dyson’s mind
is lost, or just wandering far afield in its idiosyncratic way, then that
detour happened long ago, and age has nothing to do with it.
“First I have to
clear away a few popular misconceptions about space as a habitat,” he said,
lecturing in London in 1972, when he was only 48. “It is generally considered
that planets are important. Except for Earth, they are not. Mars is waterless,
and the others are, for various reasons, basically inhospitable to man. It is
generally considered that beyond the sun’s family of planets there is absolute
emptiness extending for light-years until you come to another star. In fact, it
is likely that the space around the solar system is populated by huge numbers
of comets, small worlds a few miles in diameter, rich in water and the other
chemicals essential to life.”
The comets contain
everything we need except warmth and air, he promised, and he predicted that
biological engineering would make up for these two shortcomings: bio-engineers
would design trees that function in airless space and thus make the comets
habitable. Then he turned to potential habitations much closer at hand:
“There’s very good
news from the asteroids. It appears that a large fraction of them, including
the big ones, are actually very rich in H2O. Nobody imagined that. They thought
they were just big rocks … It’s easier to get to an asteroid than to Mars,
because the gravity is lower and landing is easier. Certainly the asteroids are
much more practical, right now. If we start space colonies in, say, the next 20
years, I would put my money on the asteroids.”
The real-estate
mantra “Location, location, location” applies to the asteroids, as it does
everywhere else. The near-Earth asteroids seem particularly prime. And Dyson
has had his eye on them for a very long time.
Eros, the first
near-Earth asteroid discovered and the second-largest of them all, is promising
terrain. Eros is a Mars-crosser. It is named for the god of love. Shaped
something like a sweet potato, or a cashew, it is 21 miles long by eight wide
by eight deep—somewhat bigger, astronomers think, than the asteroid that dug
the Chicxulub crater out of the Yucatán Peninsula and wiped out the dinosaurs.
The Erotic climate is not perfect. Temperatures rise to 212 degrees Fahrenheit
in daytime and drop to minus 238 degrees at night. Gravity there is unsettled,
fluctuating wildly depending on where you stand. But Eros does have redeeming
features. More gold, silver, aluminum, zinc, and other precious metals lie near
its surface, in theory, than exist in all the Earth’s crust. Eros was the first
asteroid on which a spacecraft ever landed. In 2001, after orbiting Eros for a
year, the robotic probe Shoemaker set down on the rubble of the Erotic
surface. The probe sits there still. For future colonists, it may prove
useful—a historical monument, perhaps, or just scrap.
Dyson has been
thinking about Eros for most of his life, and in his imagination, he
anticipated the Shoemaker’s landing by nearly 70 years. Among the
relics of his childhood is a blue exercise book, its cover reading, in fountain
pen, Sir Phillip Roberts’s Erolunar
Collision. Written by F. J. Dyson, aged 8–9, 1932–1933. The story opens:
Chap. I. The Great Discovery
Sir Phillip Roberts, director of the British South-African Astronomical
Society, was sitting in his study, calculating facts about Eros, the minor
planet which revolves at between 100,000,000 and 180,000,000 miles from the
sun, and which sometimes approaches within 13,000,000 miles of the Earth; He
had just discovered that Eros was going to come exceptionally near to the Earth
in 10 years and 291 days, and might, by some luck, be caught within the Earth’s
attraction. He quickly went off and told one of the members of the society,
Major Forbes, who was rather a friend of his, the good news.
There is very little
action in “Sir Phillip Roberts’s Erolunar Collision,” but a great deal of
calculating. (“This set everybody calculating exactly where the Moon would be
at that time, and, wonder of wonders!, the Moon was found to be due at the
exact spot where Eros would be in 10 years, 285 days’ time; or, to put it more
shortly, Eros would collide with the Moon.”) Sir Phillip Roberts and his
astronomer colleagues, having determined that Eros will hit the moon, set about
designing a craft that will take them there in time to observe the crash.
(“‘Well,’ said Sir Phillip, ‘we are here to converse about our projectile
inside which we are to ascend to our only satellite; what size do you
prepose?’”)
My point here is not
that this fictional projectile eerily foreshadows Dyson’s work on the Orion
spaceship—though foreshadow it certainly does. My point is that the physicist
was not in his 80s and fading when he lost his beautiful mind in the asteroids.
He was just 8 years old.
Collision
of Faiths
In the June 12, 2008,
New York Review of Books, in an essay called “The Question of Global
Warming,” Dyson reviews books on that subject by William Nordhaus and Ernesto
Zedillo. He writes,
All the books that I have seen about
the science and economics of global warming, including the two books under
review, miss the main point. The main point is religious rather than
scientific. There is a worldwide secular religion which we may call
environmentalism, holding that we are stewards of the earth.
After halfheartedly
endorsing this idea of stewardship, Dyson goes on to lament that “the worldwide
community of environmentalists—most of whom are not scientists”—have “adopted
as an article of faith the belief that global warming is the greatest threat to
the ecology of our planet.” This is a tragic mistake, he says, for it distracts
from the much more serious problems that confront us.
Environmentalism does
indeed make a very satisfactory kind of religion. It is the faith in which I
myself was brought up. In my family, we had no other. My father, David Brower,
the first executive director of the Sierra Club and the founder of Friends of
the Earth, could confer no higher praise than “He has the religion.” By this,
my father meant that the person in question understood, felt the cause
and the imperative of environmentalism in his or her bones. The tenets go
something like this: this living planet is the greatest of miracles. We Homo
sapiens, for all the exceptionalism of our species, are part of a
terrestrial web of life and are utterly dependent upon it. Nature runs the
biosphere much better than we do, as we demonstrate with our ham-handedness
each time we try. The arc of human history is unsustainable. We cannot go on
destroying natural systems and expect to survive.
Freeman Dyson does
not have the religion. He has another religion.
“The main point is
religious rather than scientific,” he writes, yet never acknowledges that this
proposition cuts both ways, never seems to recognize the extent to which his
own arguments proceed from faith. Environmentalism worships the wisdom of
Nature. Dysonism worships the indomitable ingenuity of Man. Dyson often
suggests that science is on his side, but lately little of his popular
exposition on planetary matters has anything to do with science. His futurism
is solidly in the tradition of Jules Verne, as it has been since he was 8 and
wrote “Sir Phillip Roberts’s Erolunar Collision.” On the question of global
warming, the world’s climatologists and scientific institutions are almost
unanimously arrayed against him. On his predictions for the future of
ecosystems, ecologists beg to differ. Dysonian proclamations like “Now, after
three billion years, the Darwinian interlude is over” are not science. (His
argument here, which is that cultural evolution has replaced the Darwinian
kind, is at best premature and at worst the craziest kind of hubris.)
The two faiths
collided in the Dyson family.
The schism between
Freeman and his son, George, began not with any debate about asteroids versus
redwoods, but over marijuana. In his early teens, George left his father’s
house in Princeton to spend his summers in Northern California, visiting his
mother, the mathematician Verena Huber-Dyson. He and his mother hiked the
Sierra Nevada on Sierra Club trips; in those mountains, and later in Colorado,
he came to know my sister, Barbara, a teenage cook for the club. He also hiked
the Haight of the late ’60s, when rebellion and cannabis smoke were thickest in
that neighborhood, and he made contacts among the flower children. Back home in
New Jersey, he became the target of an investigation, suspected by narcotics
officers of being the main weed dealer at his high school. His room was raided
and some seeds were found. He was handcuffed during class and taken to jail.
Freeman chose not to bail him out. In his week behind bars, George read the dictionary
up to the letter M before his sister Esther helped spring him. He was
shaken by the experience, and his relationship with his father was broken.
At 16, George went
west for good. He matriculated at the University of California, living
surreptitiously in the Berkeley marina on a small sailboat. From time to time,
he visited my family’s home in the Berkeley hills. He fell under the influence
of my father. (And vice versa. My father, struck by George’s ambition “to find
freedom, without taking it from someone else,” used the line often in his
speeches.)
George did not find
freedom at the University of California. After a short period of spotty
attendance, he lit out for Canada. In Vancouver, he and his half-sister
Katarina, who had preceded him north, became intimates of the founding fathers
of Greenpeace. George had gone over to the other side, joining the secular
religion of environmentalism, but his faith was noninstitutional, personal,
quixotic. He began designing and building a succession of kayaks that would
culminate in his equivalent, or his antidote, to his father’s starship: a giant
baidarka, the Mount Fairweather, 48 feet long, the biggest kayak
in history, with six manholes for paddlers and an outrigger platform on which a
seventh crewman sculled with a sweep oar. In this behemoth, as in his smaller
kayaks, George paddled resolutely in the opposite direction from his father,
back toward the Stone Age.
After five years of
estrangement, both father and son relented. In my Volkswagen camper, aboard a
ferry pulling into Vancouver Island, Freeman scanned the shore for his son.
“The big moment,” he said. George’s 14-year-old sister, Emily, who had been
asleep in the back, searched too. I spotted George first, walking down to the
slip in a knit cap and fisherman’s oilskins. “You see him? Where is he?”
Freeman asked. I pointed, and Freeman stared. “Yes, there’s the man.” He leaned
out the window and waved. We pulled up beside George, one of the last cars off
the ferry. Beaming broadly, father and son shook hands.
We spent the next few
days camping in the forests of Swanson and Hanson islands and paddling the
straits and channels thereabouts. Freeman was impressed by George’s woodcraft
and boatmanship; he admired the man his son had become. Fascinated by George’s
friends, he informed these backwoodsmen that they had just the sort of skills
and temperament required of space colonists, and in a playful way he tried to
recruit them.
For 35 years, now,
Freeman and George Dyson have been reconciled personally; and ideologically
too, the gap between them has narrowed.
George has long since
come down from his tree house. Even while he lived up there, the flying
squirrels were stealing his insulation to line their own nests, and today,
three decades after he abandoned his pied-à-l’air, the squirrels have
stripped the place bare. There is no returning. George now lives in Bellingham,
Washington. In 1989, he bought a derelict bar on the waterfront, Dick’s Tavern,
and converted it to a kayak-building shop. He drifted into writing. His first
book, Baidarka, is a history of the Aleut kayak and an account of his
resurrection of that vessel. His second book, Darwin Among the Machines,
is a history of the luminaries of the information revolution, and as such
signals a turn back toward the world of his father. His third, Project Orion,
is a history of his father’s spacecraft. His next, Turing’s Cathedral,
he conceives as “a creation myth for the digital universe.”
This July in Dick’s
Tavern, George was hard at work finishing Turing’s Cathedral, trying to
meet an August deadline for delivery of the manuscript. Mounted on the tavern
wall, running the length of the bar, was the skeletal frame for one of his
Aleut-style kayaks, 25 feet long, with three manholes for paddlers. Beneath
this unfinished vessel, the pages of Turing’s Cathedral were laid out in
neat stacks along the bar surface, about two chapters per bar stool. The
inspiration for the book seems to have come in 1961, when George was 8 and he
and a small band of comrades—the sons of field theorists at the Institute for
Advanced Study—stumbled upon an old barn on the institute’s campus. Stored
inside, along with old farm equipment, were the relics of the antediluvian
electronic computer on which John von Neumann conducted his pioneering
experiments in artificial intelligence. In Darwin Among the Machines, in
a chapter called “Rats in a Cathedral,” George describes how he and his
buddies, with wrenches and screwdrivers, lobotomized von Neumann’s machinery.
“We blindly dissected the fossilized traces of electromechanical logic out of
which the age of digital computers first took form.”
Freeman, for his
part, seems to have settled more deeply into his own secular religion, becoming
a prominent evangelist of the faith. He is in such a scientific minority on
climate change that his views are easy to dismiss. In the worldview underlying
those opinions, however—in the articles of his secular faith—he makes a kind of
good vicar for a much more widely accepted set of beliefs, the set that
presently drives our civilization. The tenets go something like this: things
are not really so bad on this planet. Man is capable of remaking the biosphere
in a coherent and satisfactory way. Technology will save us.
In “Our Biotech
Future,” a 2007 essay in The New York Review of Books, Dyson writes,
Domesticated biotechnology, once it
gets into the hands of housewives and children, will give us an explosion of
diversity of new living creatures … New lineages will proliferate to replace
those that monoculture farming and deforestation have destroyed. Designing
genomes will be a personal thing, a new art form as creative as painting or
sculpture. Few of the new creations will be masterpieces, but a great many will
bring joy to their creators and variety to our fauna and flora.
He goes on to predict
that computer-style biotech games will be played by children down to
kindergarten age, games in which real seeds and eggs are manipulated, the
winner being the kid who grows the prickliest cactus or the cutest dinosaur.
“These games will be messy and possibly dangerous. Rules and regulations will
be needed to make sure that our kids do not endanger themselves and others.”
One always searches
Dyson’s prognostications for hints of irony. Surely this vision of powerful
biotechnology in the hands of housewives and kindergartners—godlike power
exercised by human amateurs as amusement—is a Swiftian suggestion, Dyson’s try
at “A Modest Proposal.” But nowhere in this essay will you find a single sly
wink. Dyson is serious.
How is it possible to
misapprehend so profoundly so much about how the real world works? In the space
of these few sentences, Dyson has misjudged the desperation of housewives, the
dark anarchy in the hearts of kindergarten kids, the efficacy of rules and
regulations, and, most problematic of all, the deliberation with which
Darwinian evolution shapes the authentic organisms of Creation, assuring the
world of plants and animals that make sense in their respective biomes.
In this same essay,
Dyson writes,
We are moving rapidly into the
post-Darwinian era, when species other than our own will no longer exist, and
the rules of Open Source sharing will be extended from the exchange of software
to the exchange of genes.
When species other
than our own will no longer exist.
Has anyone else
proposed such a future? Does anyone else want to live in it? Has anyone
suggested how such a future (without pollinators, nitrogen-fixers, decomposers,
without microbes in the soil and bacteria in the gut) would be possible? For
the unifying impulse of the physicist, the idea might be satisfying—just one
species—but for the diversifying impulse of the biologist, there could be
nothing more chilling than this endorsement of mass biocide, Dyson’s cheerful
embrace of extinction for everything but us.
“Environmentalism has
replaced socialism as the leading secular religion,” Dyson complains in his
2008 New York Review of Books essay on global warming. This is far too
gloomy an assessment. The secular sect on the rise at the moment is Dyson’s
own. A 2009 Pew poll found that only 57 percent of Americans believe there is
solid evidence that the world is getting warmer, down 20 points from three
years before. In response to climate change, we have seen a proliferation of
proposals for geo-engineering solutions that are Dysonesque in scale and
improbability: a plan to sow the oceans with iron to trigger plankton blooms,
which would absorb carbon dioxide, die, and settle to the sea floor. A plan to
send a trillion mirrors into orbit to deflect incoming sunlight. A plan to
launch a fleet of robotic ships to whip up sea spray and whiten the clouds. A
plan to mimic the planet-cooling sulfur-dioxide miasmas of explosive volcanoes,
either by an artillery barrage of sulfur-dioxide aerosol rounds fired into the
stratosphere or by high-altitude blimps hauling up 18-mile hoses.
None of these
projects will happen, fortunately. They promise side effects, backfirings, and
unintended consequences on a scale unknown in history, and we lack the
financial and political wherewithal, and the international comity, to
accomplish them anyway. What is disquieting is not their likelihood, but what
they reveal about the persistence of belief in the technological fix. The
notion that science will save us is the chimera that allows the present
generation to consume all the resources it wants, as if no generations will
follow. It is the sedative that allows civilization to march so steadfastly
toward environmental catastrophe. It forestalls the real solution, which will
be in the hard, nontechnical work of changing human behavior.
What the secular
faith of Dysonism offers is, first, a hypertrophied version of the
technological fix, and second, the fantasy that, should the fix fail, we have
someplace else to go.
Freeman
Dyson is a national and
international treasure. His career demonstrates how a Nobel-caliber mind, in
avoiding the typical laureate’s dogged obsession with a single problem, can
fertilize many fields, in his case particle physics and astrophysics, biology
and exobiology, mathematics, metaphysics, the history of science, religion,
disarmament theory, literature, and even medicine, as Dyson was a co-inventor
of the TRIGA reactor, which
produces medical isotopes.
Dyson, clearly a busy
man, was extraordinarily generous with his time with me at an early stage of my
career. His allowing me to be present at an intimate family affair—his reunion
with George—provided the climax and denouement for my best and most successful
book. In the field, Dyson was an amusing and never-boring companion. Never have
I had a relationship of such asymmetrical understanding. Dyson always got the
drift of my ideas and sentences before I was three or four words into them, but
the converse was not true. When the physicist spoke of his own pet
subjects—quantum electrodynamics, say, or certain characteristics of the event
horizon in the vicinity of black holes—I had no idea what he was talking about.
Dyson is a discoverer of, and fluent in, the mathematics by which the
fundamental laws of the universe operate, and in that language I am illiterate.
Long ago I asked Ted
Taylor, the chief of Project Orion, what quality distinguished Dyson from the
other Orion men. “Freeman’s gift?” said Taylor. “It’s cosmic. He is able to see
more interconnections between more things than almost anybody. He sees the
interrelationships, whether it’s in some microscopic physical process or in a
big complicated machine like Orion. He has been, from the time he was in his
teens, capable of understanding essentially anything that he’s interested in.
He’s the most intelligent person I know.”
This is how Dyson
strikes me too. But the operative word for me is cosmic. The word terrestrial
would not apply. In taking the measure of the universe, Dyson fails only in his
appraisal of the small, spherical piece of the cosmos under his feet. Or so it
seems to me. For whatever reason, he is emotionally incapable of seeing the
true colors of the rampant ingenuity of our species and calculating where our
cleverness, as opposed to our wisdom, is taking us.
This article
available online at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/12/the-danger-of-cosmic-genius/8306/
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