Well, it finally happened. For the first time since becoming
host of Dreamland in 1999, I have had a fight with a guest
on the air. As you know, I cultivate a very special approach
to my guests. In order to draw them out and make them feel
at home, I?m unreservedly enthusiastic about their ideas. I
keep my own beliefs to myself.
The result is that I?m sometimes attacked by listeners who
think that my efforts to encourage my guests are an
endorsement of their assertions. But I figure that?s a small
price to pay for being virtually the only large interview
program out there where guests are actively drawn out so
that listeners get to hear their real beliefs?often, things
that they literally never say elsewhere.
This time, it didn?t work quite that way. The guest was
Daniel Pinchbeck. I won?t go into what I think of his ideas.
Actually, I think that they?re well worth entertaining. Some
of his hopes for the future of mankind are touching and very
appealing.
So what was the fight about? Just this: he accused me of
being in league with dark alien forces that do not have the
best interests of the human species at heart. He said that I
was spreading a dark view of the human future and that, by
doing so, I was helping them make it come true.
I understand that the secrecy of the visitors is the reason
that what I regard as superstitions have grown up around
them, and also that
I am in the awkward position of knowing them too well to
have any such confusion. I know what they are: complex,
passionate and intricately intelligent people who sacrifice
a great deal to come here, and are trying with all their
might and main to help us through a difficult phase in the
life of our species without destroying our independence by
revealing too much of their breathtaking knowledge and
technology to us.
I have been face to face with the anguish this causes them.
Among them, I have seen a sadness unlike anything we know
among ourselves, that is born of too great an understanding
of the way the universe really works, and the grand and
tragic position of intelligent life, to know.
Among them I have seen the mad and the vicious, as well as
the brilliant and sacred. There are criminals among them,
too, profiteers, thieves, you name it. Often, they are
vulnerable and afraid, and this makes them mean. I?ve been a
victim of their rough treatment, and a beneficiary of their
gentleness.
When, as an adult, I first met them, I reacted like a wild
animal?and they reacted like what they were, small,
vulnerable creatures who had taken a wild animal into their
home.
Imagine if you drugged a panther and brought it into your
living room, then woke it up to see how it would react.
Well, if it was just any panther, you might not do that. But
what if it was a panther that, when it was a cub, you had
cuddled and tamed? You might expect it to recognize you.
This panther did not recognize one damn thing. To them, we?d
only been apart a short time. To me, they were demons who
had come out of nowhere and they scared me so terribly that
this particular gentleman became a roaring, raging monster.
But they were not, and are not, evil. Oh, some of them are
unpleasant as hell. There is terrific xenophobia there?or
what we see as xenophobia. But would you embrace a panther?
No, you wouldn?t, but to the panther that?s going to look
like you don?t care for it a whole lot.
I have addressed the reasons for the secrecy in these pages
a number of times. There are three main ones: first, the
visitors would destroy our free will if they exposed us to
their knowledge and technology; second, we?in the form of
our governments?have reacted to them by doing what we can to
hide their presence, and they have respected that; third,
the physics of contact are very, very difficult, and unless
it is handled by two species who understand its inherent
dangers and can cope with them, there is danger that the
less-informed species will, essentially, have its access to
reality deranged so badly that it will go mad.
They are here because we are at a period of transition in
the life of our species, and they are hoping to assist us
without destroying us in the process, and that is going to
be a very near thing.
Pinchbeck accuses me of bringing on a dark future by
predicting it. That?s magical thinking, and just as impotent
as its opposite?that you can create a positive future by
believing in it.
I say in the program that I believe that mankind is going to
experience a dieback, and this makes Pinchbeck furious
because he fears that just by saying something like that, it
will become true. I don?t want to put words in another man?s
mouth, but I had the impression that he sees me as a sort of
viral particle of negativism, and that my perspective is
designed to bring on the destructions of which I
warn?presumably, so that my evil alien masters can inherit
the ruined planet, I suppose.
What is so silly about this is the idea that they would want
our planet, our bodies, our souls, our genes or anything we
have. Are you ready to run off to the Congo to get their
cassava? I don?t think so. But you might be moved to go
there to help relieve their suffering, even if they have
nothing to give you in return. We don?t even have much of
one of the fuels they actually do use and mine in nature,
which is Helium 3. The moon has a lot of it, but they?re not
up there taking it, at least not in great quantity, because
they know we will need it soon, and that the process of
getting it will help advance our species scientifically,
culturally and technologically.
I wish that the visitors would expose us to more of the
history of intelligent species in this universe. For there
is such a history, with names and dates, and stories of the
ruin and triumph of worlds. Diebacks are so common that they
are not remarkable. They?re footnotes, and in ten thousand
years, the one we?re about to go through will be a footnote
in the history of mankind, too. A much larger issue is
species death consequent to the deterioration of DNA.
Intelligent species tend to outlast the amount of time that
nature expected them to survive, and to get old in ways that
we won?t need to worry about for at least another million
years?but which will, in those distant times, occupy our
attention far more than do present upheavals.
The history of intelligent life in the universe is not a
history of magic. It is not about god-beings and mysterious
galactic superminds playing in the lives of their wretched
planetary underlings. Our gods are in our minds.
Rather, it is a history of what it is like to live in a
place that is by the nature of its structure, damn dangerous.
Many intelligent species have become extinct simply because
their planet has taken a hit at the wrong moment, or their
star has burped a little too forcefully. Just at random.
They?ve gone down, no doubt, calling on their gods and
cursing their gods, and begging forgiveness for sins that
never mattered at all.
One of the great problems that our present visitors face is
that they have attained something close to absolute
knowledge, and so they know, in advance, where most of these
accidents are going to happen. They also know that they can
prevent some of them. They live with a terrific ethical
quandary: should they? If a species is ugly and probably
going to kill itself off anyway, should they just let some
cosmic accident happen, or should they quietly intervene, in
the deep of space, and redirect that asteroid, or quiet the
turmoil in a star?
What is fate? What is its meaning? To such people, who are
at the extreme limit of knowledge, these are the questions
that keep them from going stark, raving mad. And they don?t
work for all of them, believe you me.
Too much knowledge has cursed our visitors with a lack of
spontaneity. It is why, when I asked one of them, an old man
whom I?d met a few times, what his vision of the universe
was, he answered me by projecting a picture of a closed
coffin into my mind.
They do not fight much, but there is one thing that I know
every man-jack of them will fight for to his last drop of
blood, and that is the spontaneity that our limited
knowledge grants us. They traded this away by seeking too
many answers, and they are suffering the consequences. They
don?t want that to happen to us, and they also do want to be
close to us, to enter our lives in whatever ways they can,
so that they can taste of the surprise that life brings us.
Maybe it?s selfish of them, and it certainly isn?t pretty,
but there it is. Right now, they are in an increasingly
desperate quandary: their efforts to get us to help
ourselves are failing. So, do they ?come out? or not? If
they do, can the contact be executed in such a way that we
don?t see the full reality of the situation? But if they
don?t fully reveal themselves, the denial that is so deeply
engrained in us will continue to function, and we still will
not acknowledge them, heed their warnings, or, above all,
pick up on the immensely subtle science, which, if we are
willing to wrestle with our own minds to understand it, can
help us to survive in our earth, and to enter worlds beyond.
Pinchbeck is right about me in one respect. I do think that
there?s going to be a dieback of the human species, and I do
not think that anything can be done to avoid it. Certainly,
it can be ameliorated and even, to an extent, controlled,
but it is going to happen.
The reason that I?m sure of this could not be more simple.
In nature, there is a formation called a bell curve. When
the ascending shoulder of a bell curve develops, the
descending shoulder follows. Nothing goes up for ever.
Entropy always sets in. It must. That?s the way that physics
works. I said it on the show?at least, I think I did?and
it?s worth repeating here. Nature is numbers. It?s math,
pure and simple.
The human species is just reaching the apogee of a bell
curve of consumption and population expansion that began in
about 1750. The planet?s resources are going to run out,
because we are, of necessity, consuming them too fast.
Clever technology will enable some of us to climb down the
far side of the bell curve, undoubtedly. But for most human
beings, it will look like and be a sheer cliff.
Species expansion and contraction happens all the time on
this planet. Ideal conditions come along for a given species
and it overexpands. Then conditions change and it contracts
again. It just happens. The mathematics of nature.
Another thing that happens around here a lot is catastrophe.
Volcanoes explode, global warming causes massive methane
emissions and short term extreme heating. Then it all snaps
back into another ice age. It?s been like this for about
three million years, and will continue to be like this as
long as the land masses of the planet are configured as they
are. When they change, as they will, so also will the climate.
In addition to more-or-less random changes in the planet
itself, we are also the victims of external forces.
Supernovas occasionally sheet the planet in gamma rays.
Comets and bolides crash into it. Close encounters with
celestial objects sometimes play havoc with it.
What?s more, from minute to minute, we have essentially no
idea whether or not these things might or might not happen
again. Literally, another second could bring about the end
of the world.
So we look to our gods. In that, at least, we are not alone.
Intelligent life in this universe is on a quest?in fact, it
may, itself, BE the quest, but that?s another story?and this
quest is to find some meaning somewhere out there past that
coffin my alien friend sees as his vision of the world.
And now we get to the heart of the matter, something that
even the visitors do not fully realize, as extensive as
their knowledge is. It is that we?highly intelligent
ourselves, and possessed of marvelously sensitive physical
instruments?are at the leading edge of the ages-long journey
toward God. We are real experts in this, and their greatest
fear is that, if they were to reveal their own failure to
us, they would disrupt our search.
Recently, the nature of the human search?its stark truth?was
exposed in a most remarkable way. The private journals of
Mother Teresa of Calcutta were made public, and it was
revealed that she struggled all of her life with the sense
that there was a darkness there, where God should be.
The instant I saw that, I knew that her life had been
entirely authentic, that she was a real saint. For it is the
work of a saint to see that darkness and go about the
business of faith anyway. In all of her years, she doubted.
No doubt she longed for another, lighter, more pleasant
life. But even though she had only a sense of this
darkness?she was sustained by no illusions, no false gods,
no loving Jesus of the imagination?she still acted as if God
was there, and suffering mattered, and compassion made a
difference.
She did so while, in the inevitable mathematics of reality,
there is an asteroid or a comet or a supernova out there
that will one day strike the earth again, and shudder her to
her core, and make us, by pure random chance, a memory.
Unless we come to species death in some other way.
In another of these journals, I reported my mother?s
perspective on the randomness and tragedy of being. She used
to say, simply, ?trust grace.? Mother Teresa faced the dark
and kept on anyway. That?s trusting grace in its rawest,
hardest form.
And it?s also why I argued so vehemently with Daniel
Pinchbeck. To pretend that we will pull off some sort of a
miracle that will somehow cause two and two to add up to
something other than four is to trust nothing. Of course the
human intellect will ameliorate the coming disaster. This is
why our intellect evolved. We started the last ice age naked
and living in the forest. We ended it clothed and living in
the plains?where the forest used to be. In other words, we
used our intelligence to save ourselves.
We will do that again, and some of us will indeed be saved.
But not all. The dieback is, by the math of it, inevitable.
And with it will come a true dark night of the soul, as all
of our gods abandon us. In our suffering, also, we will
begin to blame each other. In fact, that?s already
happening. The environmentalists blame the oil companies.
The oil companies blame the tree huggers, and everybody, it
seems, blame the madly polluting Chinese, even the Chinese
themselves.
You know what, though? Nobody is to blame. At least, not us.
Nature is to blame. The reason is that, because we were so
vulnerable for so long, we lost our seasonal fertility and
at the same time acquired extremely prominent genitals that
are rich with nerve endings. Add to that our fine memories,
and we have been turned into rutting machines.
This happened because we were so few and so far between for
so long. When we did live in that old forest, our population
was sparse, indeed. So nature compensated by making us more
sexy. Then came the ice age and we were well-served by that
eager sexuality. It helped us to survive that catastrophe, too.
Afterward, though, the planet entered into one of its
periodic and brief interglacials. Not brief enough, however,
to prevent our fertility and sexuality from working against
us in exactly the same way it does when algae bloom under
ideal conditions. Remove the conditions, and there?s going
to be a dieback.
That?s where we are. But there is a difference between us
and algae, which is this marvelous brain of ours. So we have
a bit of a percentage in our favor. We?re going to figure
out some ways to help ourselves crash land instead of crash.
In a hundred years, there are not going to be as many of us
here as there are now, and saying that does not mean that,
by some sort of black magic, I will be responsible for it
happening.
There is no reason to fear extinction. Species death is a
long way away. But dieback, no. We?re on our way down that
side of the bell curve?at least, in this man?s opinion.
Listen to Dreamland. Enjoy the fight. I hope it makes you
think, and I am sure that Daniel Pinchbeck agrees with me,
at least on that point.
