The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [189]
“If the long-overdue alien invaders ever did make their appearance, I suppose it would wake us up and lend a little urgency to our interminable debates…but there’d be a terrible cost to pay. In the twentieth century it was a popular belief that warfare had been a major stimulus to technological progress, and that without continual pressure to invent new and better weaponry our mortal ancestors’ scientific knowledge and technical capacity couldn’t have increased as rapidly as they did. It’s a crude argument, in my opinion. It implies that scientific and technological progress is a cumulative process measurable in purely quantitative terms: something that moves faster or slower, but moves all of a piece. That’s not true. Technological repertoires vary in all sorts of ways, and even fundamental scientific theories are flexible in terms of the models that are used to represent them and the language used to describe them.
“There were twentieth-century historians who argued that the age of steel and steam had been provoked by the need to develop and mass-produce better cannon, and that their entire civilization was founded on the irrepressible urges motivating their ancestors to blast all hell out of one another. They had an arguable case — but so had their opponents, who argued that the real motivating force behind the development of steel and modern civilization in Western Europe had been the demand for church bells that could measure out the hours of the day, allying and alloying the modern notion of time with the notion of devotion to duty. Then again, there’s a case to be argued that the most vital boost to technological progress came after the Crash, motivated by the necessity of rebuilding everything that had been lost and to build it better. Within that view, it’s not the impulse to destroy that carries us forward so much as the impulse to recover from misfortune of any kind.
“I don’t think any of those views is uniquely right, but I do think that the distinctions between them are important. It’s important that we continue to invent and make new things, but it also matters a great deal what we invent them for. That’s always been a more complicated story than some historians have tried to make it seem.
“An external threat would certainly motivate us to action — perhaps to make a fortress of the solar system, and to equip that fortress with weapons of fabulous destructive power — but I’d rather find a motive force that would steer us in a more constructive direction. In the end, you see, all fortresses fall, and weapons of mass destruction do their work. All progress is a matter of risk.”
“You’d rather have church bells instead, or a natural disaster with a productive aftermath?”
“I wouldn’t want church bells in any narrow sense. The church bells of Western Europe were instruments of oppression, after their own life-denying fashion. I’d rather find something that was backed by achievable aspirations, by a blueprint for salvation based in a kind of hope that’s better by far than any stupid fake inspired by blind faith. I wouldn’t want another large-scale natural disaster either — that’s too high a price to pay for the aftermath effect. I don’t believe that progress has to go in fits and starts, always needing to be set back in order to generate the acceleration to carry it further forward. I believe that it can be motivated by gentler ideological pressures, in the right environment. If only we weren’t so easily satisfied within ourselves we wouldn’t need to be interrupted by petty disasters.
“I’d rather have the kind of progress that’s orientated toward a real goal: one with sufficient drawing power to make us hurry towards it. The Type 2 crusade has never acquired that kind of magnetism, and deservedly so. Neither has Omega Point mysticism, nor the Cyborganizers’ quest for the perfect alchemical marriage of flesh and silicon. Perhaps all such hypothetical goals fall prey to the essential unpredictability of the future. To the extent that the spectrum of future possibilities depends on discoveries we haven’t yet made,