These seem to be the immediate military and political possibilities in front of us. Now we have briefly to consider the technical and industrial prospects. Here the problem is one of resources. For those who wish to know more about this, I would advise them to read Harrison Brown’s Challenge of Man’s Future and Brown, Weir, and Bonner’s book, The Next Hundred Years, where all the figures are given. When one considers that the amount of planetary capital consumed by the United States since the end of the First World War is greater than the entire amount of metals, fuels, and minerals consumed by the entire human race before that, one realizes what a fantastic drain upon resources is now going on. In order to carry on our present civilization, we require 1000 pounds of steel per head per annum, 23 pounds of copper, 26 pounds of lead, 3.5 tons of stone, gravel, and sand, 500 pounds of cement, 400 pounds of clay, 200 pounds of salt, 100 pounds of phosphate rock—in all, about 20 tons; and then, added to this, each member of the population requires the equivalent of 8 tons of coal to provide energy for him per year.
One sees that the amount of resources which is being used in the modern technical civilization is incredibly great. One of the consequences, as I hinted before, is that the easily accessible rich ores have to a large extent been exhausted. Fifty years ago a good copper ore contained 5 per cent of copper; today, ores are being worked with hardly more than 0.5 per cent of copper. And this is certainly going to continue. We are going to have to work poorer and poorer ores until finally we are exploiting granite and sea water to get the metals and minerals that we require. Theoretically this can perfectly well be done, and even in practice one can see how it could be done, but it will undoubtedly require far more work to get our raw materials than we put into it now, and it will entail an immense mechanization far beyond anything that we envisage today.
How long will our planetary resources last? The estimates vary greatly, from a few hundred years to a few thousand, but it is quite clear that sooner or later the richer ores will be exhausted.
Here Dr Harrison Brown has posed a question: What likelihood is there of man’s being able to make the transition from an industrial life based upon rich ores to an industrial life based upon the poorest ores, a transition that will require an incredible amount of ingenuity and skill? Dr Brown, like Bertrand Russell, offers three alternatives. One is that we will succeed in making the transition, but that we shall then have a world-wide industrial civilization completely controlled by a totalitarian authority. The second possibility is that the transition will be made and that we shall then have a world-wide free industrial society devoted to the full development of human beings; but this alternative, while obviously the most desirable, is extremely difficult both to achieve and to maintain. The third possibility, which Dr Brown thinks the most probable of the three, is that within the next thousand years or so, provided we escape war, we shall find ourselves gradually reverting to the agrarian state.
Let us consider now some of the more immediate possibilities and prospects in front of us. We begin with biochemistry, where such great authorities as Albert Szent-Györgyi are convinced that means will be found for controlling population, thus stabilizing world conditions and making some kind of reasonable development possible. He leaves out of account that the problem is not merely biochemical but sociological, psychological, philosophical, and religious, though on the biochemical level at least, I think we can look forward to such developments. In regard to food production, there seems to be no doubt that this can be enormously increased by the development of new varieties of plants through directed mutation, by the creation and domestication of various types of bacteria and fungi for producing different kinds of edible substances, and by new methods of finding water. Stephen Riess is working on methods of finding what has been called ‘juvenile water’, thus making possible the irrigation of vast areas which at present are completely barren. It seems fairly clear that if we can stabilize the population, it should be possible to feed it at an adequate level—although, inasmuch as the meat diet is extremely wasteful, probably with a vegetarian diet.
There will also certainly be advances in chemistry. I expect one of the most important will spring from basic research in photosynthesis, in the field of what may be called radiation chemistry. It will certainly be found that an enormous number of chemical processes can take place in controlled radiation—not merely in sunlight, but in the harder radiations possible now that we have large atomic piles. Quite unprecedented kinds of chemical synthesis will become possible.
Incidentally, all this will happen entirely as a result of basic research, not ad hoc research. We still tend to be obsessed with doing research to solve a particular problem, but the basic discoveries come only as a result of basic research. I read the other day a very amusing remark by Dr Szent-Györgyi about the nature of basic research. He said,
When I first came to this country ten years ago, I had the greatest difficulty to find means for my basic research. People asked me, what are you doing, what is it good for? I had to say, it is no good at all. Then they asked, then exactly what are you going to do? I had to answer, I don’t know, that is why it is research. So the next question was, how do you expect us to waste money on you when you don’t know what you do or why you do it? This question I could not answer.
Such questions are not asked as often any more. All the same, there is plenty of room for improvement.
From the biological and chemical worlds, let us pass to the human world. In the field of psychopharmacology we shall probably see extraordinary developments as the result of research in basic metabolism, with the creation of a better environment for the central nervous system and the consequent elimination of a great many mental disorders and psychophysical diseases. We may also see the kind of scientific application which the eminent geneticist Professor Hermann Muller speaks about—the application of eugenic methods to the improvement of the human stock. Muller speculates about what he calls ‘foster parenthood’ and the possibility of the creation of a new kind of morality, by which people would think it more important to bear children who were the best possible in the field of nature rather than children who exactly reproduce their parents’ idiosyncrasies and weaknesses.
This would be possible through foster parenthood of children conceived by the union of reproductive cells derived from stocks representing the parents’ highest ideal. Sooner or later eugenics will be practised, although it is certainly going to take a tremendous revolution in our present ethical ideas on the subject. It may be added that the first nation that does practise such eugenic methods as Professor Muller advocates will in a few decades be enormously superior to all its rivals—which seems to me yet another reason why we should, as quickly as possible, by hook or by crook, achieve the ‘one world’ ideal; in the context of nationalism eugenics could become an instrument of extraordinary power and extraordinary danger.
Then we come to purely psychological processes. Psychology is, quite obviously, still in its infancy, and we can foresee remarkable developments. It may become possible within two or three generations to understand the processes of creative thinking, to find out how these processes can be systematized, how they can be taught, how human beings can be educated so as to live to the height of their potential instead of using only a small part of their capacity. Such purely psychological advances, added to those in the field of psychopharmacology, will probably greatly improve the performance of human beings. If these are conjoined with eugenic procedures, we can foresee with considerable confidence a remarkable improvement in the human creature. What Emerson said long ago, that all men plume themselves on the improvement of society but no man improves, will cease to be true. It may even be possible now to get men to improve and thus to improve society. Though no one knows whether this will be accomplished or not, we are perfectly justified in saying that it can be accomplished now.
Let us very briefly talk about mechanical advances. Probably the most important of these will be connected with the great electronic computing machines, which will enable us to perform feats of thinking and problem-solving of which we were never capable before, and which will, therefore, open up to rational action areas in which it was quite impossible in the past. It may be possible even
