19.1 Material and Social Crises

When considering the crises, it may be useful to consider them as more or less dependent on social factors. Even if climate change were solely due to changes in solar activity, mitigating it would be a social matter rather than relying on individual action.

Although demography is only one of the generally recognized crises, at root all of them depend on world population. Beyond vague appeals to “promoting humanity”, the only concrete advantage of a large population is for sending people on interplanetary and even interstellar missions to found new colonies of humankind in the rest of the universe. Since our present technological capabilities are still far from being able to realize such missions, it seems prudent to restrain population growth until we have such capabilities, lest in the meantime we destroy ourselves through overcrowding. Of course, a large population implies genetic diversity and concomitant robustness, but we seem to be very far above the size needed to sustain such diversity. On the contrary, our present social organization seems to favor the continuation of deleterious traits through the phenomenon of pseudoadaptation [3], which is itself a consequence of having reached a certain level of civilization and technological mastery.

The crises, in roughly descending order of severity, and the potential contributions of nanotechnology to alleviate them, are:

Climate change, especially global warming [4]. If the cause is anthropogenic release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, then any technology that tends to diminish it will be beneficial, and nanotechnology in the long term should have that capability (see Section 18.1). If the cause is not anthropogenic and due to (for example) variations in the solar constant, then we need to enhance our general technological capabilities to give us the power to combat the threat.

Demography. This comprises both population growth, considered to be excessive, and becoming too large for Earth to support, and aging of the population. The latter is partly a social matter. It is customary for elderly people to retire from active work, but their income as rentiers (i.e., old-age pensioners) is ensured by those still actively working, so if the ratio of the latter to the former decreases, the pension system collapses (except in countries such as Switzerland where each worker invests in his or her future pension, rather than paying the pensions of those who are already retired). There is also a matter of healthcare: elderly people tend to require more resources. Advances in medical care, to which nanotechnology is making a direct contribution (Chapter 6), should diminish the healthcare problem, reversing the present expansion of morbidity that has accompanied the increase of life-expectancy. Therefore, elderly people should be able to continue to work longer, diminishing the threat to the pension system. At the same time, advances in technology should further diminish the prevalence of unpleasant jobs from which one is glad to retire. In any case, unproductive work (e.g., involving an advisory or decision-making rôle without an impact on production—town planning is a good example, along with membership of the now numerous councils or committees with comparable functions) could be preferentially assigned to elderly people.

If, in principle at least, the problem of aging populations can thus be solved, the same cannot be said for population growth. It is probably best to consider it as a medical problem (as it is already in many countries), in which case the technology of Chapter 6 may be applicable.

A danger faced by efforts to reduce population is that advances in technology actually increase the carrying capacity of Earth, in a great variety of ways, ranging from increased yields in agriculture to the ability to construct very tall buildings. This capability to some extent alleviates the detriments caused by overcrowding and diminishes the need to reduce the population.

Environmental degradation. This is mostly a gradual change, but by being slow it is pernicious, and suddenly we have a seemingly irreparable dust bowl in the Mid-West or an Aral Sea disaster. The latter was a fairly direct result of the massive diversion of the two main feeder rivers, the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya, into irrigation, mainly of cotton fields, although unpredictable nonlinearities appeared near the end. Whether the immediate restoration of full flow would regenerate the sea is a moot point, and anyway has not been seriously considered because of the immense social dislocation that would result from the collapse of the cotton agro-industry. In Soviet times serious consideration was given to the possible solution of diverting some of the great, northward-flowing Siberian rivers into the Aral Sea, but the idea was ultimately abandoned due to fears of adverse ecological and climatic consequences. Some of the world's great deserts such as the Sahara and the Gobi are also currently expanding, but this may be a cyclic phenomenon linked to long-term climate changes. In fact, the mechanisms of desertification are not well understood, and efforts to investigate it piecemeal. Presumably the United Nations Organization declared 2007 as the Year of Desertification in an effort to improve matters, but it was singularly ineffectual in inspiring a coördinated global effort to tackle the problem. Nanotechnology may be able to contribute in such ways as increasing the ability of plants to tolerate saline and arid conditions, hence allowing deserts to be recolonized.

Another major challenge is environmental pollution. Certain remediation technologies based on nanoparticles (cf. Section 9.5) may help to alleviate local problems; conversely, nano-objects inadvertently released into the environment may contribute to further degradation. In the long term, nanotechnology will certainly help to alleviate pollution via significantly increasing the overall efficiency of production—waste in manufacturing should be essentially eliminated. Nevertheless, artifacts will presumably still be used and discarded. Nanotechnology, however, offers the ultimate recycling technology—by decomposing every discarded artifact into atoms, which are then sorted to be reused as feedstock.

Depletion of material resources. Nanotechnology should have a generic beneficial effect, because if the same function can be achieved using a less material, obviously fewer resources will be used.

Furthermore, very light yet strong materials (probably based on carbon nanotubes or graphene) are likely to be of inestimable value for space travel—including the space elevator, which would enormously facilitate departures from the planet. Continuing increases in processing power will enhance the feasibility of unmanned space missions (enabling on-board manufacturing and recycling)—for example, to neighboring asteroids and planets in order to mine precious metals that may no longer be obtainable on Earth.

Energy penury. Not only is the population growing, but also per capita energy use. Fossil fuels are deprecated because of their contribution to atmospheric carbon dioxide, and besides will soon be exhausted at current rates of usage [5].

Financial chaos. The new economic order associated with nanotechnology—productive nanosystems (Chapter 18)—based on production on demand may solve this problem automatically, since the rôle of credit will diminish. Given that the realization of productive nanosystems is not anticipated before at least another decade, and quite possibly two, have elapsed, it must not be hoped for that nanotechnology will come to the rescue of the present troubles, but perhaps it will prevent a fresh occurrence of bubbles.

Terrorism. This is above all a social problem [6], which might disappear if nanotechnology ushers in a new ethical era (see Chapter 20).

The food crisis. In June 2008 the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO, part of the United Nations) held a 3-day summit conference in Rome in order to explore ways of overcoming problems caused by steeply rising food prices around the world, which have caused especially grave problems in poor countries. Although part of the problem lies in the commercial sphere, and may be dealt with by considering the effects of export restrictions and price controls, a sustainable solution clearly lies in the technological realm. In the short term, charitable deliveries of seeds and fertilizers may alleviate the problem; in the medium term such measures are likely to make things worse. Therefore, a thorough appraisal of the state of agronomy is needed. In fact, a number of recent reports have pointed to the research deficit in the field accumulated during the last few decades [7]. Yet in its call for increasing public support (in the developing countries) for agronomy research, the FAO is essentially still thinking of traditional approaches. In view of the generally revolutionary nature of nanotechnology, it must be expected that here too it can make a decisive contribution, by the intense nanoscale scrutiny of the processes of comestible biomass production in its entirety, followed by inspired intervention at that scale. An example is biological nitrogen fixation. A wealth of detail is already known about the process: at the molecular level (the nitrogenase enzymes responsible for actually fixing the nitrogen); at the microbiological level (the symbiotic rhizobia); and at the ecological level (soil and inoculation). Intervention, e.g. with functionalized nanoparticles, especially to improve nitrogen fixation in difficult (e.g., dry or saline) conditions, seems to be feasible. The actual need is for laboratory and field research to establish the possibilities and limitations of such an approach.

“Man ist, was man isst”, as Martin Luther famously remarked in one of his Tischgespräche. Given the centrality of food for human existence, it can hardly be discussed in isolation as a purely physiological matter. Indeed, there is even evidence that the intake of folic acid by a pregnant mother can influence methylation of the baby's proteins [8]. Furthermore, it is perhaps too much to expect that we always eat “sensible” foods, or carefully examine the list of ingredients on a packet (which anyway is usually woefully inadequate, particularly regarding the actual quantities of the substances mentioned), or acquire a personal biosensor for verifying on the spot the absence of hormone-active substances in vegetables. It may be nowadays trite to repeat John Donne's dictum “No man is an island”, but if anything it is even more true today, in a world wide web-connected age, than it was at the end of the Middle Ages. We are all affected by the foods around us, whether we partake of them or not.

The dominant social aspect of nutrition is malnutrition coupled with obesity. It is estimated that current world production of food is adequate for the current world population, but much of that food is in the wrong place at the wrong time. Technologies, such as cold storage and nanoparticle-containing gas-resistant wrappers, should therefore contribute to alleviating unevenness of supply. The technologies come at a price, however—for example many modern farming practices, including intensive agriculture of all kinds and fish farming, tend to yield produce that is less wholesome than their nonintensive counterparts (especially regarding their micronutrient content).

The solution to eating the wrong foods—such as those that leave one undernourished, or overweight, or both—is surely more knowledge. This is the perennial problem of a society based on high technology—it can only be truly successful if all members are sufficiently knowledgeable to properly partake in its development. Hence we also need to inquire how nanotechnology can contribute to the education of the population [9].

Health challenges. Overcrowding may contribute to mental disease and the spread of infectious diseases, and environmental degradation creates obvious health risks. Nanomedicine may increase the ability to combat specific illnesses, but the beneficial effects might be outweighed by the growing prevalence of “lifestyle diseases” such as diabesity—the combination of obesity and diabetes. It is hard to see how nanotechnology will influence the latter. IT seems to promote a sedentary lifestyle, with deleterious health consequences, and nanotechnology is increasingly an enabler of high-performance IT, hence part of the cause of the problem. Diminishing food quality also counts as health challenge; here too, nanotechnology may actually contribute to the problem by enabling more palatable, but not healthy, processed foods and the longer preservation of food without retaining all its nutritionally valuable attributes.

Lifestyle predicaments. It is doubtful whether all the challenges can be met simultaneously, therefore priorities will have to be set. One notices that demography (especially population growth) is, in fact, the most fundamental challenge, in the sense that solving this one will automatically solve the others. It seems appalling that countries whose populations are falling (many European countries, Russia and Japan) are being encouraged to promote immigration—to stave off collapse of their social security systems! The prolongation of healthy human life is one of the more reliably extrapolatable trends, and a clear corollary is that world population should stabilize at a lower level than otherwise. In blunt ecological terms, “be fruitful and multiply” is an appropriate injunction in a relatively empty world in which r-selection (see Section 3.1) operates, but in our present crowded, technologically advanced era K-selection is appropriate, typified by a sparser, but longer-living, population.

19.2 Is Science Itself in Crisis?

The idea of scientific endeavor being harnessed to explicitly solve grave global problems is an attractive one. Bacon's stress on one of the purposes of scientific investigation being for the “relief of man's estate” would encourage that idea, and most scientists would probably agree that a basic humanitarian aim of science is to help promote human welfare. However, as Maxwell has pointed out, science seeks this by pursuing the purely intellectual aim of acquiring knowledge in a way (called standard empiricism (SE) by Maxwell) that is sharply dissociated from all consideration of human welfare and suffering [10]. Under the aegis of SE any desire to solve global challenges is likely to be little more than a velleity. Maxwell advocates replacing SE by aim-oriented empiricism (AOE) as a better philosophy of science. Not only is it more rigorous, but value (to humanity and civilization) becomes an intrinsic part of its pursuit. Even in a highly abstract discipline the adoption of AOE will be a step forward, because of its greater rigor, although the fruits (research output) are not likely to look very different. In areas other than the “hard” sciences, the difference is likely to be dramatic. The social sciences, including sociology and economics, have become largely useless to humanity. On the contrary, astonishingly and sadly, the attitudes prevailing among many academic sociologists and economists tend to drag humanity down whenever they are taken up by politicians or other activists. Social science should be replaced by something called social inquiry, social methodology or social philosophy, concerned to help humanity tackle its immense problems of living in more rational ways than at present, and seeking to build into social life progress-achieving methods arrived at by generalizing AOE, the progress-achieving methods of the natural sciences.

The natural sciences themselves need to acquire a tradition of criticism that has long been a part of literary and artistic work. Because, unlike those other areas of endeavor, the natural sciences contain their own internal validation—the predictions of a theory can always be tested via empirical observation—they have not felt the same need to develop a tradition of criticism that in the literary world is as esteemed as the creation of original works. In consequence, much science tends to move in sterile or even counterproductive directions [11]. One often hears reference to the “rapid progress” in many fields, especially the biological sciences. To be sure, advances in techniques and instrumentation have yielded impressive results, but if the direction is wrong, the rapid progress does not mean very much. These weaknesses will become more obvious when the challenges to which science as presently practised might be able to respond, but does not or cannot, become more important.

19.3 Nanotechnology-Specific Challenges

In this section addresses the possibility of new, survival-threatening crises emerging from the growth of nanotechnology. Any revolution brings its own attendant new challenges (typically referred to as “birth pangs” and the like). There is already widespread implicit recognition of them. An example is presented by the report on nanoparticle risks commissioned by the British government [12]. This addresses the need to assess human exposure to engineered nanomaterials, evaluate their toxicity, and develop models to predict their long-term impacts. Similar investigations should be undertaken to establish effects on the overall ecosystem, including plant and microbial life. Given the extensive data that already exists, at least concerning human health impacts [13], care should be taken to avoid the waste and futility of endless studies aimed at the same goal, and all deficient in some regard. Meanwhile, more attention should be paid to how to act efficaciously upon the findings.

Productive nanosystems (PNs, Section 18.1) raise the risk of “grey goo” (the uncontrolled subversion of all terrestrial matter to assembling assemblers). Given that PNs are not expected before at least 10–20 years from now, should we already be concerned at this eventuality? Probably not, since it is still associated with so many imponderables.

There is strong military interest in nanotechnology [14], raising the specter that it will “met en oeuvre des moyens de mort et de destruction incomparablement plus efficaces que par le passé” [15]. Albert Schweitzer points out that history shows that victory by no means always belongs to the superior civilization; as often as not it is a more barbaric power that conquers. This problem is not specially associated with nanotechnology, but there is at least the hope that a pre-singularity surge of human solidarity may neutralize it (see also Section 19.5 and Chapter 20).

The above may sound rather negative, but there are also opportunities for nanotechnology to usher in a simpler, more austere lifestyle. The functionally dense artifacts associated with nanotechnology should encourage clutter-free living—something like the traditional Chinese worship of simplicity, if that was not eradicated by the Cultural Revolution (1966–76). With its emphasis on viewing and understanding things at the irreducible level of the atom, nanotechnology may even encourage a greater general interest in such understanding as a pastime, along with interpreting all experience and perceiving our place in the universe, in place of more conventional “leisure” activities.

19.4 Globalization

Perhaps the greatest socio-economic-technical danger faced by humanity is that of globalization. Advances in transport and communication technology have made it seem inevitable, and it appears as the apotheosis of Adam Smith's economic system (based on the division of labor) that has been so successful in augmenting the wealth of mankind. Yet globalization carries within it the seeds of great danger: that of diminishing and fatally weakening the diversity that is so essential a part of our capability of responding to security threats [16], threats here being interpreted in its most general sense, as threats to our survival. The disappointing uniformity of products emanating from the far-flung reaches of the British Empire was already apparent to foreign (European) visitors to the British Empire (Wembley) Exhibition of 1924 (Figure 19.1). Evidently productive nanosystems are in principle antiglobalizing, since locally adapted products can be made precisely where they are needed. Only if subpopulations are too indolent to master the technology and produce their own designs will they lapse into a position of weakness and dependence.

19.5 An Integrated Approach

The message of this chapter is that there is little point in developing revolutionary nanotechnology without parallel developments in the organization of society. But the irrepressible curiosity and creativity of the scientist will inevitably drive the technology forwards—despite all the obstacles placed in the way by unsympathetic bureaucracy!—science is fundamentally a progressive activity, ever aiming at a distant goal without striving to be instantaneously comprehensive. But no similar tendency exists regarding society. The ebb and flow of social tendencies is ever-evolving and open-ended. At one level, the official vision of technology (as exemplified by policy declarations of government research councils, for example) is aimed at ever stricter scrutiny and surveillance, with the bulk of the population seen as a restless, unreliable mass in which criminal disturbances may break out at any instant. At another level, the spectral impalpability of so-called high finance is allowed to become ever more impenetrable and autonomous, which might be acceptable were it not for the real effects (in terms of, for example, ruined livelihoods and drastically adjusted currency exchange rates) that are now manifest.

One solid correlation that should give us undying optimism is the link between the growth of knowledge and the improvement of ethical behavior (Chapter 20). The best hope for the future—given the impracticability of anything other than piecemeal social engineering—is to constantly promote the growth of knowledge and, given that our knowledge about the universe is still very, very incomplete, keep in mind Donald Mackay's dictum, “When data is short, keep mind open and mouth shut.”