We Will Forget
Our future without science won’t be so bad.
[Letter #025]
Good morning, son.
The gifts are rolling in from the baby registry, and we’re supposed to have a baby shower on Thursday to receive more still. There’s something inherently “human” (or maybe even inherently “living”) about being happy for and celebrating a new life. Times being hard these days, I don’t guess everyone equally feels such happiness, but it seems to be the default setting during “normal” times. Before the party on Thursday, we’re supposed to get another sonogram at the doctor’s appointment, so it’s possible that we’ll come away with another of your earliest portraits. Isn’t this modern-age wizardry amazing?
That’s actually what’s on my mind this week — wizardry. I’ve spent a great deal of my younger life absorbed in fantasy stories, whether those be in books, video games, movies, or whatever else. The aesthetic of swords and armor, sorcery and magic, felt to me at once novel and exciting as well as comfortable and a bit nostalgic for some time and place that never happened. Apparently, this is a feeling that many an internet stranger has experienced, and so the neologism “anemoia” was coined to label it.
There are, as you may well know by now, almost no stories told by humans that have no significance whatsoever. If we’re telling a story, it’s because we’ve been influenced in life in some manner that would direct us to tell such a story. They nearly always mean something, and in the case of fantasy magical elements, these are usually metaphors for science and technology. I mean, even the origin of the wizard stereotype comes from old academics who used to dress in robes with pointy hats and impress villagers with their knowledge of natural sciences. It’s always been an amusing thought to me that a traveling wizard might visit towns across Asia and Europe, demonstrating the fiery spectacles that he learned from Chinese black powder enthusiasts. I don’t know if this specific thing ever occurred, but it’s fun to me nonetheless.
Something that has stuck out to me recently regarding fantasy wizards though has been when these stories always seem to take place with regard to magical developments. Fictional practitioners of the arcane arts almost never make new discoveries or invent new spells. It seems inevitable that the time in which the story is set is always after the hey-day of magical research, development, and invention. This is the case in The Wheel of Time, The Lord of the Rings, A Song of Ice and Fire, The Witcher, Dungeons & Dragons, and even Star Wars (I figure if you can describe a sci-fi story as “space wizards dueling with laser torches,” then it probably also counts as fantasy). I’m sure that plenty a nerd out there could give me a list of exceptions, but it seems to me that the most common behavior for a sorcerer, notwithstanding the flashy antics of questing and heroism, is that of poring over dusty tomes in the eye-straining dimness of an ancient tower. You never see wizards experimenting with spells and writing down their results, as that’s usually warned against as dangerous. No, even the grandpappy of them all, Gandalf the Gray/White, got his answers from rotting scrolls and creaking books in a forgotten library.
Whether the authors of such fantastic tales realize it or not, and judging this is well beyond my capacity, I think that they’re actually making predictions about the future rather than giving us wistful glimpses of some hocus-pocus history. I’ve made the prediction many times, and I’m by no means the original or only person to do such a thing, that our future is going to look a great deal like our past, simply due to our limited ability to acquire and use fossil fuels as we do today. Our modern era is replete with abundant and cheap fuels that are orders of magnitude more powerful than any animal muscle that our ancestors had access to. Once these are no longer cheap and/or abundant, the powers that they provide are going to once again become essentially impossible to employ with any whisper of efficiency. Thus, the future of human existence will resemble more and more how our ancestors lived, whether that ends up looking like peasant-style dirt farming or the older (and far less labor-intensive) hunter/gatherer lifestyles of our right-thinking distant ancestors.
That doesn’t mean that the knowledge that we’ve amassed in the past few centuries is going to instantly vanish, although certainly some of it will. There will surely remain a handful of individuals who will preserve the books and writings to the best of their abilities well into the future, probably within old, sturdy buildings. Come to think of it, they might want to use elevated buildings to help make sure that any flooding from climate change doesn’t damage the inventory. Actually, it might be wise to have the building made with stone, so that it will be mostly impervious to wildfire as well. I guess old wizard towers aren’t the worst idea after all. Such bastions would serve a similar purpose as did the old European monasteries after the collapse of the classic world.
That’s an interesting comparison to me. The monasteries collected information from the classic world in large part because they wanted to preserve the prophecies and myths pertaining to Christianity. They had to calculate when Easter was supposed to be, for example. It’s an intriguing thought to imagine what data they didn’t think was important enough to preserve from the “pagan” Greeks or Romans. In the same way, our future “wizard towers” will have to be maintained by academics who will pick and choose which works to preserve based on their own values and priorities.
I think it would be reasonable to ask why people couldn’t just collectively preserve all of this knowledge. Is there any real reason why we can’t just continue to educate the public more or less as we do now? Then, everyone could do their part in maintaining the “wizard tower” or whatever library format we might use to keep our discoveries intact and within common knowledge. I think that the reason that this is unlikely to happen is the same reason that everyone didn’t just maintain parts of classical literature in Roman-style libraries after the empire dissolved — it’s not going to be important.
It’s not going to be important for people in the future for the same reasons that it wasn’t important for post-Roman Europeans. Much of this information doesn’t pertain to every-day survival. String theory and quantum mechanics have no obvious applications to hunting and skinning a deer for food and clothing. Maybe someday, a clever wizard can study these ideas and cast a quantum spell to mystically put the deer onto our plates for us, but I don’t see it happening. The information that will be useful is going to be stuff like how to construct a durable shelter that won’t leak rainwater, which types of plants are good for eating or good for medicine, and how to tie certain knots that will make for better tool assemblies. This knowledge will be passed down successfully to future generations because these skills will be used commonly by average people, and they’ll be used almost daily. There won’t be a need to record such info in books, although I’m sure that some studious wizards will do so anyway.
I believe if I were to sit at a bar and relay the above discussion to a fellow fermentation enthusiast, I would be met with sentiments of sadness and loss about the state of the future. My hypothetical fellow bar patron might tell me how depressing it is to imagine such a bleak life, how miserable our descendants must be without access to scientific knowledge and understanding, how pitiful their lives must be with only superstitions to explain their universe. He might possibly be able to imagine a future without fossil fuels, as that may look something like the dystopian movies and books cooked up by the entertainment industry today, but a future where the average person doesn’t understand how germs work, how deep the oceans are, or why the seasons change with Earth’s orbit and axial tilt? That would be just awful, wouldn’t it?
I don’t think so, and again, the reason I don’t think it will bother our descendants will be for the same reason it hasn’t bothered folks in similar situations in the past. I believe that our descendants will live far closer to how other animals have always lived in the wild, specifically in that they will be forced to live within the same constraints and natural limits as everything else, and the lack of this knowledge doesn’t bother other animals in the slightest.
If my imaginary pub-frequenting compatriot actually dug into the truth of his worries, he might find that he’s being influenced by some quasi-religious social pressures. If I were to ask him how germs actually worked, right there in the bar, could he tell me much about that, beyond that I should wash my hands to prevent sickness? Could he tell me how deep the ocean is without looking it up? Probably not, but he could certainly tell me that it’s very, very deep. He may or may not be able to explain seasons and axial tilt, but the practical effects, the fact that it’s hot in the summer and colder in the winter, would be easy to explain. My compatriot doesn’t actually care about the specific data points that science documents and discusses. He only cares that someone out there keeps up with all of that. He goes about his daily routines never concerning himself with the migration patterns of African swallows, the degrees of temperature fluctuation of a typical summer day in the Antarctic, or how salicylic acid converts in the body to act as an analgesic. These things just happen, and that’s good enough.
In short, he believes in science.
There seems to be a sort of comfort in the knowledge that someone out there, an educated person serving as a sort of “priest” of this faith, has all of the measurements and the readings all documented about any and every subject. This unspoken belief instills the confidence that these subjects are all under control. The scientists, these “priests,” have the matters in hand, and we need not concern ourselves with them. This is the same today as it would have been throughout any part of history with other gods.
Modern folks are thus, on the average, not practitioners of the scientific method. They’re believers of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). Like priests and gods of ages past, scientists and STEM provide answers we’re looking for to our satisfaction. Whether these answers are true and accurate descriptions of the universe isn’t really important. They are satisfying, and that’s what matters to folks.
Without culture’s constant hammering to demand our praise and gratitude to STEM for the possibilities and privileges in our lives however, people will be apt to simply drop the religion altogether. When the electricity shuts off, and it never comes back on, will folks continue to praise this god? When their phones become useless because the network connections shut off, will STEM save them from starvation or death? Sure, actual scientific practices might, but again, people aren’t all that interested in the practice of scientific research. They enjoy the application of scientific discoveries, miracles of the church, of the past few centuries, and that’s where they place their faith.
But, without answers from the priests or the divine directly, a religion loses its purpose.
Similarly, common folks in the countryside during the Early Middle Ages were technically Christians. They didn’t understand much of it, but they were confident that those monks in their walled monasteries had it all figured out. All of the mysteries of the cosmos could be explained by those learned men in their silly robes and funny haircuts, should anyone actually care enough to visit them for the education.
For most folks, it just wasn’t necessary. Unless the Church was imposing itself on your community constantly, say with a Cathedral, it was easy enough to just not think about it. Common people made up folklore, superstitions, and conventional wisdom to describe earthly phenomena, and they passed these ideas to their children. What actually mattered to them was what materially affected them on a daily basis.
Would it be surprising then to find people losing interest in STEM just as easily in the future? If the church of STEM can’t keep producing miracles, I don’t see it keeping the public’s attention.
Hell, there haven’t really been very many earth-shattering scientific discoveries in the past half-century or so anyway. The radio wave, television, washing machines, chemotherapy, vaccines, and supersonic flight were all discovered or invented back in the mid-20th century or earlier. Since then, we’ve just improved efficiency, reduced size, and considered new applications for old tech.
John Michael Greer, in his Dark Age America, describes this as being the diminishing returns of technological innovation. As an example, he notes that the discovery of penicillin required nothing more than a microscope and a single researcher during his off hours and on his own budget. This discovery was infinitely useful to humanity, saving countless lives and opening entire fields of study. Conversely, today we have spent billions upon billions to construct the Large Hadron Collider complex, which made the discovery of the Higgs boson particle in 2012. To this day, neither I nor any average person on the street could tell you what the hell a “Higgs boson particle” is or what relevance it has to our lives. They might as well have discovered a portal to a dimension of unicorns and leprechauns. Actually, such a discovery would be infinitely more explainable and useful to a regular human.
Why are students constantly told by our governments and the corporations of Silicon Valley to go to school for STEM? Well, the corporations have obvious motives — the more people studying STEM, the more potential applicants for STEM jobs, the cheaper they can pay for a STEM-trained worker. But, movies and TV shows also say the same thing. They want to show us just how amazing and capable Tony Stark is with his hyper-technical suits of armor, laser weaponry, and super-advanced AI companion. This, they tell us, is what we all deserve, and it’s what we’ll all have if we keep investing into technology.
If the progress of scientific discovery and innovation is declining markedly though, why obfuscate that? Oh, the usual reasons.
Most of these large institutions make a great deal of money on the “Narrative of Perpetual Progress,” not just in entertainment, but also medical, military, education, retail, and just about everything else. By setting us up with the expectation that we are, every day, making bigger and better scientific breakthroughs, then they’re able to steadily charge more and more for the next model in the line-up of products, or request ever more in grants from governments, or to demand large subscriptions from consumers. So long as we’ve been blinded by science, or at least so long as we’ve been sufficiently bewildered by the bullshit of techno-propaganda, then we won’t have the time or interest to look behind the curtain and see the truth of it. That safeguards the cash cow’s gravy train. In short, it keeps the faith.
Setting aside my cynicism, if we go back to the JMG idea above about diminishing returns, it starts to look like maybe we’re actually pushing up against the limits of what’s truly achievable. Maybe discovery and innovation are declining because that’s all we’re capable of. If that’s true, and if it’s obvious to someone like me, then it’s clearly going to be obvious to the poor bastards whose job it is to come up with the “next big thing.” A cause for alarm in the ranks of the clergy.
Maybe it is true though. Maybe we’ve just figured out everything that clever apes can figure out on their own. That is, everything short of those discoveries requiring gargantuan amounts of energy and resources. Seems likely that it was the vast energy inputs that were what made our recent discoveries possible anyway. I’m sure it’s not a coincidence that our fossil fuel abundance and use over the past few centuries corresponds with our rapid scientific advancements and technological applications. That would mean that new discoveries would require an exponentially larger energy investment, but we’ll soon have no more to invest.
Fossil fuels have provided all the necessary surplus energy needed to run so many things, including science, while remaining able to feed so many of us. With these indispensable energy sources turning net energy negative, and still no viable, scalable and cheap replacement found, the future of science becomes questionable.
Energy is the economy. No (surplus) energy, no economy, no frivolous activities either. Science has shown us the way how to use the massive bout of surplus energy from fossil fuels the most effectively, and how to pillage and plunder the planet more efficiently. Lacking the free energy needed to power the technology it gave us, science too will become useless. Its discoveries will be forgotten in the centuries ahead, as there will be simply no means to utilize them — people will be able to grow potatoes just fine without understanding black holes and gravitational waves. Yes, it would be useful to know how to make fertilizer or pesticides, but lacking natural gas and oil (the prime source of chemicals needed to make these agricultural inputs), this knowledge too will be forgotten.
– B, The Honest Sorcerer, The End of Science as a Useful Tool, Medium.com
I would actually argue that without oil and natural gas, the knowledge of how to make fertilizers and pesticides is not at all useful. I agree, however, that it will be forgotten.
So, if we don’t have the energy to invest in research and new discoveries to bring us to the prosperity promised by the Star Trek future, and our near future won’t even have the energy available to keep the present state of technological advancement possible, then it suggests that our faith in STEM and Progress is destined to fizzle out. Maybe that’s why it’s better to hide this and proclaim that scientific excellence is marching forward every day, and we’re steadily driving toward a space-faring destiny. Proliferating such narratives would certainly be in the interests of the ruling classes, at least until such a time as it is no longer possible to maintain the illusion of prosperity.
I suppose the only question that I would have left is: “Is this all such a bad thing?” I mean, humans did just fine — terrifically, in fact — for hundreds of thousands of years without knowing a damn thing about mitochondria, quasars, or hypertext transfer protocols. Those things don’t really have much to do with loving, caring, sharing, laughing, singing, dancing, or gossiping. That is, not much to do with what makes a human act like a human. It’s really cool to know about quasars, but they have virtually nothing to do with sitting around a campfire with friends and family. When considered from the deathbed perspective, is this information really needed for a good life for most people? If it was forgotten entirely, or maybe just generalized into a myth, would that really be so bad? Moreover, how much more of the data that we think we care about so much today would actually fall into this category of “who cares”?
I suppose those questions aren’t really intended for me and folks in my day. Most of us probably still care a lot, as we’re still inundated with the self-importance of the modern techno-industrial culture. However, the folks in the future for whom electricity won’t really matter, for whom metal manipulation will be difficult or impossible, for whom plastics will be nothing more than a toxic substance to be avoided — will they care about how to change the oil in a 2004 Chevrolet Malibu? No, as there won’t be oil to run such a machine anymore. Will they care about the possibilities of gene manipulations with CRISPR technology? No, as anything smaller than what the naked eye can see will likely be regarded as spirits anyway. Actually, pretty much everything related to modern techno-industrial culture will go away and won’t be coming back, so there’s really little reason to preserve the knowledge of any of it, apart from as a history of magic and wonder — an Age of Legends, wherein everyone had access to pools of vast energy, from which many miraculous sculptures animated and performed work for people, humans could whisper to friends around the world, and the land could be forced to yield enough food to feed billions.
Beyond the tales of myth and legend, will any of it matter to our descendants?
I’ll wager that it will matter a great deal only to a small collection of interested persons, educated in the enigmatic oddities of the ages past. These wizards will collect and catalog the arcane paraphernalia pertaining to ancient sciences and long-abandoned chemical undertakings. They will gather artifacts and make guesses about their functions, arguing amongst each other why anyone would ever lie flat in a cooking booth when the sunlight toasts skin efficiently already. They will demonstrate high school laboratory reactions to awe and amaze villagers in exchange for a place to sleep and some food. Maybe they can even wear robes with stars and a pointy hat. Would that really be so bad? I don’t think so.
I hope that you’re doing very well when you read this, son. I understand that the world we’re bringing you into isn’t going to be anything like our distant ancestors’ world nor like what our potential descendants will experience. You and I will live through a transition time, and I fear that what we’ll have to get through will suck mightily, but I’ll always help you as long as I can. I hope that you’re safe. I love you very much.
Your father,
Papa Bear
[Author’s note: This is a series of letters that I intend to print to paper and deliver to my son, probably around the year 2040. You are more than welcome to read along. The links in the article are only for you, the reader, and will include citations, jokes, asides, and links to books or other items. If you happen to purchase anything through such a link, I’ll get a small commission. Every little bit helps, right?]
