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By Root 1470 0

ammonia and other refrigerants that, on leaking out, had caused illness and some deaths. Chemically inert, nontoxic (in ordinary concentrations), odorless, tasteless, nonallergenic, nonflammable, CFCs represent a brilliant technical solution to a well-defined practical problem. They found uses in many other industries besides refrigeration and air conditioning. But, as I described above, the chemists who developed CFCs overlooked one essential fact—that the molecules’ very inertness guarantees that they are circulated to stratospheric altitudes and there cracked open by sunlight, releasing chlorine atoms which then attack the protective ozone layer. Due to the work of a few scientists, the dangers may have been recognized and averted in time. We humans have now almost stopped producing CFCs. We won’t actually know if we’ve avoided real harm for about a century; that’s how long it takes for all the CFC damage to be completed. Like the ancient Camarinans, we make mistakes.* Not only do we often ignore the warnings of the oracles; characteristically we do not even consult them.

The notion of moving asteroids into Earth orbit has proved attractive to some space scientists and long-range planners. They foresee mining the minerals and precious metals of these worlds or providing resources for the construction of space infrastructure without having to fight the Earth’s gravity to get them up there. Articles have been published on how to accomplish this end and what the benefits will be. In modern discussions, the asteroid is inserted into orbit around the Earth by first making it pass through and be braked by the Earth’s atmosphere, a maneuver with very little margin for error. For the near future we can, I think, recognize this whole endeavor as unusually dangerous and foolhardy, especially for metal worldlets larger than tens of meters across. This is the one activity where errors in navigation or propulsion or mission design can have the most sweeping and catastrophic consequences.

The foregoing are examples of inadvertence. But there’s another kind of peril: We are sometimes told that this or that invention would of course not be misused. No sane person would be so reckless. This is the “only a madman” argument. Whenever I hear it (and it’s often trotted out in such debates), I remind myself that madmen really exist. Sometimes they achieve the highest levels of political power in modern industrial nations. This is the century of Hitler and Stalin, tyrants who posed the gravest dangers not just to the rest of the human family, but to their own people as well. In the winter and spring of 1945, Hitler ordered Germany to be destroyed—even “what the people need for elementary survival”—because the surviving Germans had “betrayed” him, and at any rate were “inferior” to those who had already died. If Hitler had had nuclear weapons, the threat of a counterstrike by Allied nuclear weapons, had there been any, is unlikely to have dissuaded him. It might have encouraged him.

Can we humans be trusted with civilization-threatening technologies? If the chance is almost one in a thousand that much of the human population will be killed by an impact in the next century, isn’t it more likely that asteroid deflection technology will get into the wrong hands in another century—some misanthropic sociopath like a Hitler or a Stalin eager to kill everybody, a megalomaniac lusting after “greatness” and “glory,” a victim of ethnic violence bent on revenge, someone in the grip of unusually severe testosterone poisoning, some religious fanatic hastening the Day of Judgment, or just technicians incompetent or insufficiently vigilant in handling the controls and safeguards? Such people exist. The risks seem far worse than the benefits, the cure worse than the disease. The cloud of near-Earth asteroids through which the Earth plows may constitute a modern Camarine marsh.

It’s easy to think that all of this must be very unlikely, mere anxious fantasy. Surely sober heads would prevail. Think of how many people would be involved in preparing and launching