GUEST EDITORIAL

experiments in utopias

by Carl Sagan

Editor's note: The lead article this month, and the cover illustration, are dedicated to the topic of interstellar flight. G. Harry Stine shows how the first programs of interstellar exploration and colonization can be planned, and Rick Sternbach shows us what a starship might look like, based on the best existing scientific information.

This Guest Editorial is actually an excerpt from Carl Sagan's newest book, "The Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective."* (* Copyright © 1973 by Carl Sagan and Jerome Agel. To be published in November by Doubleday & Co., Inc. )

Most of Analog's readers already recognize Dr. Sagan's name. He is one of the world's leading astronomers, and has devoted much of his career to establishing the scientific bases for searching for life on other worlds. Much of his work has involved studies of Mars, and his researches have taken him into the widely diverse disciplines of biochemistry, geology, meteorology, and even terraforming.

In assessing the likelihood of advanced technical civilizations elsewhere in the Galaxy, the most important fact is the one about which we know least—the lifetime of such a civilization. If civilizations destroy themselves rapidly after reaching the technological phase, at any given moment (like now) there may be very few of them for us to contact. If, on the other hand, a small fraction of civilizations learn to live with weapons of mass destruction and avoid both natural and self-generated catastrophes, the number of civilizations for us to communicate with at any given moment may be very large.

This assessment is one reason we are concerned about the lifetime of such civilizations. There is a more pressing reason, of course. For personal reasons, we hope that the lifetime of our own civilization will be long.

There is probably no epoch in the history of mankind that has undergone so much and so many varieties of change as the present time. Two hundred years ago, information could be sent from one city to another no faster than by horse. Today, the information can be sent via telephone, telegraph, radio, or television at the velocity of light. In two hundred years the speed of communication has increased by a factor of thirty million. We believe there will be no corresponding future advance, since messages cannot, we believe, be sent faster than the velocity of light.

Two hundred years ago it took as long to go from Liverpool to London as it now does from the Earth to the Moon. Similar changes have occurred in the energy resources available to our civilization, in the amount of information that is stored and processed, in methods of food production and distribution, in the synthesis of new materials, in the concentration of population from the countryside to the cities, in the vast increase in population, in improved medical practice, and in enormous social upheaval.

Our instincts and emotions are those of our hunter-gatherer ancestors of a million years ago. But our society is astonishingly different from that of a million years ago. In times of slow change, the insights and skills learned by one generation are useful, tried, and adaptive, and are gladly received when passed down to the next generation. But in times like today, when the society changes significantly in less than a human lifetime, the parental insights no longer have unquestioned validity for the young. The so-called generation gap is a consequence of the rate of social and technological change.

Even within a human lifetime, the change is so great that many people are alienated from their own society. Margaret Mead has described older people today as involuntary immigrants from the past to the present.

Old economic assumptions, old methods of determining political leaders, old methods of distributing resources, old methods of communicating information from the government to the people—and vice versa—all of these may once have been valid or useful or at least somewhat adaptive, but today may no longer have survival value at all. Old oppressive and chauvinistic attitudes among the races, between the sexes, and between economic groups are being justifiably challenged. The fabric of society throughout the world is ripping apart.

At the same time, there are vested interests opposed to change. These include individuals in power who have much to gain in the short run by maintaining the old ways, even if their children have much to lose in the long run. They are individuals who are unable in middle years to change the attitudes inculcated in their youth.

The situation is a very difficult one. The rate of change cannot continue indefinitely; as the example of the rate of communication indicates, limits must be reached. We cannot communicate faster than the velocity of light. We cannot have a population larger than Earth's resources and economic distribution facilities can maintain. Whatever the solutions to be achieved, hundreds of years from now the Earth is unlikely still to be experiencing great social stress and change. We will have reached some solution to our present problems. The question is, which solution?

In science a situation as complicated as this is difficult to treat theoretically. We do not understand all the factors that influence our society and, therefore, cannot make reliable predictions on what changes are desirable. There are too many complex interactions. Ecology has been called the subversive science because every time a serious effort to preserve a feature of the environment is made, it runs into enormous numbers of social or economic vested interests. The same is true every time we attempt to make a major change in anything that is wrong; the change runs through society as a whole. It is difficult to isolate small fragments of the society and change them without having profound influences on the rest of society.

When theory is not adequate in science, the only realistic approach is experimental, Experiment is the touchstone of science on which the theories are framed. It is the court of last resort. What is clearly needed are experimental societies!

There is good biological precedent for this idea. In the evolution of life there are innumerable cases when an organism was clearly dominant, highly specialized, perfectly acclimatized to its environment. But the environment changed and the organism died. It is for this reason that nature employs mutations. The vast majority of mutations are deleterious or lethal. The mutated species are less adaptive than the normal types. But one in a thousand or one in ten thousand mutants has a slight advantage over its parents. The mutations breed true, and the mutant organism is now slightly better adapted.

Social mutations, it seems to me, are what we need. Perhaps because of a hoary science-fiction tradition that mutants are ugly and hateful, it might be better to use another term. But social mutation—a variation on a social system which breeds true, which, if it works, is the path to the future—seems to be precisely the right phrase. It would be useful to examine why some of us find the phrase objectionable.

We should be encouraging social, economic, and political experimentation on a massive scale in all countries. Instead, the opposite seems to be occurring. In countries such as the United States or the

Soviet Union the official policy is to discourage significant experimentation, because it is, of course, unpopular with the majority. The practical consequence is vigorous popular disapproval of significant variation. Young urban idealists immersed in a drug culture, with dress styles considered bizarre by conventional standards, and with no prior knowledge of agriculture, are unlikely to succeed in establishing utopian agricultural communities in the American Southwest—even without local harassment. Yet such experimental communities throughout the world have been subjected to hostility and violence by their more conventional neighbors. In some cases the vigilantes are enraged because they themselves have only within the previous generation been accepted into the conventional system.

We should not be surprised, then, if experimental communities fail. Only a small fraction of mutations succeed. But the advantage social mutations have over biological mutations is that individuals learn; the participants in unsuccessful communal experiments are able to assess the reasons for failure and can participate in later experiments that attempt to avoid the causes of initial failure.

There should be not only popular approval for such experiments, but also official governmental support for them. Volunteers for such experiments in utopia—facing long odds for the benefit of society as a whole—will, I hope, be thought of as men and women of exemplary courage. They are the cutting edge of the future. One day there will arise an experimental community that works much more efficiently than the polyglot, rubbery, hand-patched society we are living in. A viable alternative will then be before us.

I do not believe that anyone alive today is wise enough to know what such a future society will be like. There may be many different alternatives, each potentially more successful than the pitifully small variety that face us today.

A related problem is that the non-Western, nontechnological societies, viewing the power and great material wealth of the West, are making great strides to emulate us—in the course of which many ancient traditions, world-views, and ways of life are- being abandoned. For all we know, some of the alternatives being abandoned contain elements of precisely the alternatives we are seeking. There must be some way to preserve the adaptive elements of our societies—painfully worked out through thousands of years of sociological evolution—while at the same time coming to grips with modern technology. The principal immediate problem is to spread the technological achievements while maintaining cultural diversity.

An opinion sometimes encountered is that the problem is technology itself. I maintain that it is the misuse of technology by the elected or self-appointed leaders of societies, and not technology itself, that is at fault. Were we to return to more primitive agricultural endeavors, as some have urged, and abandon modern agricultural technology, we would be condemning hundreds of millions of people to death. There is no escape from technology on our planet. The problem is to use it wisely.

For quite similar reasons, technology must be a major factor in planetary societies older than ours. I think it likely that societies that are immensely wiser and more benign than ours are, nevertheless, more highly technological than we.

We are at an epochal, transitional moment in the history of life on Earth. There is no other time as risky, but no other time as promising for the future of life on our planet.

Editor's Afterword: While Dr. Sagan did not specifically mention setting up experimental societies on worlds other than Earth, it seems clear that one of the major motivating forces behind interstellar colonization could be exactly that.

After all, the European settlement of America was largely driven by desires to create societies unhampered by existing political, economic or religious constraints. The settlement of the Polynesian islands of the Pacific was apparently similarly motivated, at least in part.

The first star-seeking colonists may well be political, social or religious exiles searching for a New Earth on which they can build their own culture.

It would be simpler to build these mutated societies here on our home-world, but as Sagan points out, Earth is already too crowded for that hope to be viable. The other planets of our Solar System are so different from Earth, so inhospitable, that mere physical survival on them will be the overriding problem for generations to come.

There may be other Earthlike planets circling other stars. Even if there are not, the kinds of giant spacecraft envisioned by Stine and Sternbach could themselves become miniature universes (an old but worthwhile science-fiction concept) in which these new societies can grow and perhaps flourish.

One major problem remains. Even if new societies can be worked out in starships or on other planets, how can these new social ideas be communicated back to Earth, when the links from star to star take years, decades, centuries—even at light-speed? Will Earth be left behind, culturally, by the star-dwellers?