And to this day you can meet Italians in Southern Italy or Sicilians who will speak rather bitterly of the time when the Piedmontese descended upon Italy and forcibly drew it together into a single country. The same thing is true of Germany. The final unification of Germany came after the Franco-Prussian war and was essentially an act of force. One sees the same thing in the building up of a unified France through the use of force and cunning by Richelieu in the seventeenth century. If there is a unification by conquest in the future I would say that, should the West win, we should see a kind of very superior, up-to-date Roman Empire as it was at the time of the Antonines; if the East should win, we would see a very much more unpleasant kind of empire, in which Western people would find themselves living on the wrong side of the tracks and thoroughly discriminated against.
Can we expect the coming together of the nations into a single world government, which is obviously infinitely desirable? And can we expect it to happen by democratic means? Can one expect a course of action which is manifestly good for everybody in the long run, but which in the short run causes discomfort or even suffering to a good many people, to be taken by a democratic society in time of peace? It seems to me rather dubious that this should be the case because there are enormous vested interests involved—and not merely the vested interests of the rulers, although rulers of a sovereign state do not wish to become merely officials in a province.
Similarly, the owners of factories do not want to subordinate the interests which flourish under a tariff system or to subordinate themselves to the interests of a much larger unit outside the present borders of the country, where there will be more efficient factories which will throw their own out of business. There are the vested interests of many workers, who might be displaced from their work or thrown out of employment altogether and forced to migrate to other parts of the country. There are also the vested interests of intellectuals, who don’t wish to change their ideas, and indeed the vested interests of everybody—no one wants to alter the conditioning which he has had in childhood.
In general, one can say that it is only when human beings are threatened by somebody else that they are ready to unite and to accept short-range privations for long-range goods; they are ready to unite under the threat of war and catastrophe. Undoubtedly, the best thing for world government under law would be an invasion from Mars. Unfortunately, this is rather unlikely to take place. But is it possible to persuade ourselves that after all human beings are their own Martians, that with over-population and over-organization and over-technicalization, we are committing immense aggressions against ourselves? Can we unite against ourselves for our own higher interest? It might be possible, by suitable education and propaganda, to put this view across, that what we regard as a piping time of peace is not, in fact, a piping time of peace, but that there is a real threat overhanging us all the time against which it is enormously in our interest to unite. This is rather remote speculation, but it is possible that some such argument might finally persuade people to take the step of getting together and forming a government in which all should live together under law.
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
