The Human Future Revisited [antikvár]

As a young man during World War II, I worked on the development of atomié bombs. There was a natural tendency for most of us who were engaged in such activity to brood about the ultimate consequences of this new weapon and to ask ourselves where humanity might be heading. In 1946 I wrote a book dealing with the dangers of nuclear war entitled Must Destruction Be Our Destiny? However, by the early 1950s I had come to appreciate that although nuclear war is indeed a terrible danger, other problems are in a very real sense even more dangerous. Such problems as rapid population growth, the growing affluence and complexity of industrial society, rapid technological change, and decreasing availability of resources can by themselves result in the collapse of our civilization, even in the absence of nuclear weapons. The massive deployment of ICBMs equipped with hydrogen warheads, coupled with the proliferation of nuclear capabilities in the world, serve only to make these basic problems more acute. In 1954 I wrote The Challenge of Maris Future, in which I attempted to look into the future from the point of view of somé of these other problems. Now, more than two decades later, I find the forecasts in that book to be both surprisingly and depressingly accurate. Although at the time of publication I was criticized by somé as being overly pessimistic in outlook, the forecasts where they err were more often than not based upon overly optimistic assumptions. For example, although it was clear that U.S. crude oil production would probably peak about 1970, this did not seem to be a matter for really serious concern, since the United States had a great deal of coal and nuclear power was well on its way toward being a reality. Thus the very disturbing energy crisis in which we have been enmeshed since 1974 was largely unanticipated. For similar reasons, it did not seem possible in 1954 that environmental problems on a truly global scale would reach serious proportions in the foreseeable future. Los Angeles had smog, but it was doing something about it. It seemed to me that environmental problems would be coped with once they were recognized. Now I realize that such optimism was completely unwarranted.