Broca's Brain by Carl Sagan Read Free Book Online Page B

But there has been no more vigorous or inventive pursuit of high technology than in the West. The resulting rate of change has been so rapid that many of us find it difficult to keep up. There are many people alive today who were born before the first airplane and have lived to see Viking land on Mars, and Pioneer 10, the first interstellar spacecraft, be ejected from the solar system, or who were raised in a sexual code of Victorian severity and now find themselves immersed in substantial sexual freedom, brought about by the widespread availability of effective contraceptives. The rate of change has been disorienting for many, and it is easy to understand the nostalgic appeal of a return to an earlier and simpler existence.
    But the standard of living and conditions of work for the great bulk of the population in, say, Victorian England, were degrading and demoralizing compared to industrial societies today, and the life-expectancy and infant-mortality statistics were appalling. Science and technology may be in part responsible for many of the problems that face us today—but largely because public understanding of them is desperately inadequate (technology is a tool, not a panacea), and because insufficient effort has been made to accommodate our society to the new technologies. Considering these facts, I find it remarkable that we have done as well as wehave. Luddite alternatives can solve nothing. More than one billion people alive today owe the margin between barely adequate nutrition and starvation to high agricultural technology. Probably an equal number have survived, or avoided disfiguring, crippling or killing diseases because of high medical technology. Were high technology to be abandoned, these people would also be abandoned. Science and technology may be the cause of some of our problems, but they are certainly an essential element in any foreseeable solution to those same problems—both nationally and planetwide.
    I do not think that science and technology have been pursued as effectively, with as much attention to their ultimate humane objectives and with as adequate a public understanding as, with a little greater effort, could have been accomplished. It has, for example, gradually dawned on us that human activities can have an adverse effect on not only the local but also the global environment. By accident a few research groups in atmospheric photochemistry discovered that halocarbon propellants from aerosol spray cans will reside for very long periods in the atmosphere, circulate to the stratosphere, partially destroy the ozone there, and let ultraviolet light from the sun leak down to the Earth’s surface. Increased skin cancer for whites was the most widely advertised consequence (blacks are neatly adapted to increased ultraviolet flux). But very little public attention has been given to the much more serious possibility that microorganisms, occupying the base of an elaborate food pyramid at the top of which is
Homo sapiens
, might also be destroyed by the increased ultraviolet light. Steps have finally, although reluctantly, been taken to ban halocarbons from spray cans (although no one seems to be worrying about the same molecules used in refrigerators) and as a result the immediate dangers are probably slight. What I find most worrisome about this incident is how accidental was the discovery that the problem existed at all. One group approached this problem because it had written the appropriate computer programs, but in quite a different context: they were concerned with the chemistryof the atmosphere of the planet Venus, which contains hydrochloric and hydrofluoric acids. The need for a broad and diverse set of research teams, working on a great variety of problems in pure science, is clearly required for our continued survival. But what other problems, even more severe, exist which we do not know about because no research group happens as yet to have stumbled on them? For each problem we have