Three/Ideology and the "Technological Revolution"

This is a monumental challenge. It requires a revolution in technology and a revolution in thinking. We are going to have to rethink the way we live and work.
- Sir Terry Leahy, CEO, Tesco Supermarkets (U.K.) 29

The freight train is running full speed over the cliff right now, and the issue is too important to leave any stone unturned in our search for solutions to climate change.
- Kenneth Coale, Director, Moss Landing Marine Laboratories 30

He was the fellow who had discovered this Xi effect, wasn't he? Well, then, he could probably control it, too. Man had never met a problem that man was unable to solve.
- Philip Latham, "The Xi Effect"

Klaus Lackner is a doctor of physics at Columbia University who came up with an idea in 2003 to let us keep cranking out carbon dioxide while other scientists like himself find more solutions to the warming problem. Dr. Lackner's idea was a mechanical tree, 400 feet tall and made of metal, with a chemical-coated scrubbing board that would trap carbon much like flypaper catches flies.31 More recently he worked with Global Research Technologies, an up-and-coming "green tech" company, to demonstrate an "air extraction device" that looks a bit like a giant vacuum cleaner attachment. The latest invention is an "important tool" that shows "incredible promise in the fight against climate change," according to the director of the Earth Institute.32 Surely these ideas are examples of humankind's "capacity to invent solutions to the problems we have ourselves created," as Sir Richard Branson said in announcing that he'll award $25 million to anyone who finds a way to lower the yearly carbon dioxide pollution rate by a billion tons.33 Sir Richard's confidence in human ingenuity is admirable - and it sounds eerily like the final epigraph above. 

The mechanical tree (top), the "air extraction device"

In Philip Latham's 1950 story, "The Xi Effect," two astronomers make a disturbing discovery: the universe is shrinking. At first, convinced that their mathematical equations must be wrong, they treat the phenomenon with interest, but not concern. Then colors start to drop out of the visible spectrum. The reason for this is complex and hinges on theories of electromagnetic radiation waves, but Latham is more interested in the social and political response. The public is briefly alarmed by the changes in tints, with women especially annoyed because the lack of visible red makes all of their work to hair and makeup a waste of time. But the public adapts pretty quickly and even starts to joke about the change, convinced that scientists will find a way to put everything back to normal again. Scientists, meanwhile, are censored and not allowed to tell the public that the problem is only getting worse, and the universe is shrinking a lot faster than originally thought. A few speak out and are immediately fired for doing it and causing unnecessary worry. But eventually, world governments have to concede that the Xi effect is serious.

The story's climax has 100,000 people crammed into an arena to hear the world's foremost scientist deliver a talk about their world and its quickly-diminishing light - now reduced to a few hours' worth. "If scientists knew light was going to be extinguished, then why didn't they get busy and do something about it a long time ago?" one man asks. A woman follows by asking the scientist to predict what the future will be like, and he replies: "There can be no doubt as to the course of events up to a certain point. Beyond that point there is no knowledge, only speculation and conjecture." Then the light fades even more, the moon becomes distorted and grotesque, and the crowd panics as total darkness sets in. As the story ends, thousands of people sit whimpering and clinging to each other in the pitch black of the arena - "waiting hopefully for the light that had always returned."

Latham wasn't writing an allegory for global warming. He was an astronomer (real name Robert Richardson) and textbook author. As a science fiction writer, he specialized in "hard SF," a genre that centralizes the science and builds narratives around it. The science has to be accurate, or at least plausible if the circumstances being described were to actually happen. But with "The Xi Effect," a science fiction author seems to have nailed the social science even more than the astrophysical stuff. What stands out most in this mid-20th century tale is the public apathy, government denial, and blind, uncritical faith in technology to make everything better. We haven't just seen this before; we're living it right now.


====SOURCES====

29 Michael Specter, "Big Foot." The New Yorker, Feb. 25, 2008.

30 Melanie Haiken, "Dumping Iron." Mother Jones, March/April 2008.

31 Molly Bentley, "Synthetic Trees Could Purify Air." BBC News, Feb. 21, 2003.

32 "First Successful Demonstration of Carbon Dioxide Air Capture Technology Achieved." Physorg.com, April 25, 2007.

33 Kevin Sullivan, "$25 Million Offered in Climate Challenge." Washington Post, Feb. 10, 2007.