Broca's Brain - Carl Sagan [22]
Similarly, the new Department of Energy can be effective only if it can maintain a distance from vested commercial interests, if it is free to pursue new options even if such options imply loss of profits for selected industries. The same is clearly true in pharmaceutical research, in the pursuit of alternatives to the internal-combustion engine, and in many other technological frontiers. I do not think that the development of new technologies should be placed in the control of old technologies; the temptation to suppress the competition is too great. If we Americans live in a free-enterprise society, let us see substantial independent enterprise in all of the technologies upon which our future may depend. If organizations devoted to technological innovation and its boundaries of acceptability are not challenging (and perhaps even offending) at least some powerful groups, they are not accomplishing their purpose.
There are many practical technological developments that are not being pursued for lack of government support. For example, as agonizing a disease as cancer is, I do not think it can be said that our civilization is threatened by it. Were cancer to be cured completely, the average life expectancy would be extended by only a few years, until some other disease—which does not now have its chance at cancer victims—takes over. But a very plausible case can be made that our civilization is fundamentally threatened by the lack of adequate fertility control. Exponential increases of population will dominate any arithmetic increases, even those brought about by heroic technological initiatives, in the availability of food and resources, as Malthus long ago realized. While some industrial nations have approached zero population growth, this is not the case for the world as a whole.
Minor climatic fluctuations can destroy entire populations with marginal economies. In many societies where the technology is meager and reaching adulthood an uncertain prospect, having many children is the only possible hedge against a desperate and uncertain future. Such a society, in the grip of a consuming famine, for example, has little to lose. At a time when nuclear weapons are proliferating unconscionably, when an atomic device is almost a home handicraft industry, widespread famine and steep gradients in affluence pose serious dangers to both the developed and the underdeveloped worlds. The solution to such problems certainly requires better education, at least a degree of technological self-sufficiency, and, especially, fair distribution of the world’s resources. But it also cries out for entirely adequate contraception—long-term, safe birth-control pills, available for men as well as for women, perhaps to be taken once a month or over even longer intervals. Such a development would be very useful not just abroad but also here at home, where considerable concern is being expressed about the side effects of the conventional estrogen oral contraceptives. Why is there no major effort for such a development?
Many other technological initiatives are being proposed and ought to be examined very seriously. They range from the very cheap to the extremely expensive. At one end is soft technology—for example, the development of closed ecological systems involving algae, shrimp and fish which could be maintained in rural ponds and provide a highly nutritious and extremely low-cost dietary supplement. At the other is the proposal of Gerard O’Neill of Princeton University to construct large orbital cities that would, using lunar and asteroidal materials, be self-propagating—one city being able to construct another from extraterrestrial resources. Such cities in Earth orbit might be used in converting sunlight into microwave energy and beaming power down to Earth. The idea of independent cities in space—each