Deaf To The Countdown

Newspapers recently carried an artist's vivid imaging of a collision of Earth and Mars that is supposed to take place some three billion years from now. As I was pondering over the image of the two planets melting into each other, I was reminded of a conversation—a real, not an imaginary one—between an astronomy teacher and his student. The teacher had suggested that the sun and the earth were slowly, but ever so steadily, moving towards each other. He said our planet, a few billion years from now, will therefore burn into a plume of vapour. The student then asked, anxiety writ all over him, "How many billion years would that take?" The teacher said, "About six billion." "Oh!" breathed the student in relief, "that's alright then. I thought it was three billion." Ours has to be the age of denial.

Natural hazards like asteroid impacts and earthquakes also perform the role of the astronomy teacher. They alert us to the laws and procedures of Planet Earth. The unmistakable signs of climate change are also our teacher. They warn us of what lies ahead. But unlike the earth-sun approximation, the multiple shocks created by climate change are not going to wait for six billion years. They are not going to wait 600 years; not even six decades. If you have seen pictures taken even five years ago of Antarctica, of Gaumukh, or of Ghoramara islet in the Sunderbans, and you see those formations now, you will know what I mean. Global warming and the rising mean sea level are changing the face of the earth. West Bengal's riverbanks and estuaries, where land crumbles like a biscuit into a coffee cup, show this phenomenon dramatically.

And on the same Faculty of Reminders of Grim Prognoses are Dr Terror and Professor Error—bio-terror, bio-error, chemical terror, chemical error, nuclear terror, nuclear error. And then there are possible nano catastrophes. The twins of terror and error—biological, chemical and nuclear—belong not just to the realm of the possible but, let us be strong enough to admit, to that of the highly probable. These are all around us and can come face to face with us at any moment, including this one. Or the next. 'Devices' falling into non-state hands is a probability that should make us all more than concerned. Installations going wrong, or their safety systems going to sleep, too, are real fears. Human society in general is like the astronomy student, seeking refuge in the comfortable illusion that these risks, though real, are still far from us in time and in space. Ours has to be the age of denial.

Any one of the risks I have mentioned can disfigure life, even make it disappear. And to these risks is now added climate change, man-propelled, though working through the instrumentation of 'natural' phenomena. Lord Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal of England, who is really a philosopher-astrophysicist, has said with compelling and persuasive seriousness, in his gripping book The Final Century, that taking all risks—including the risks inherent in science experiments—into account, the chances of human life surviving this century are 50:50. Wired magazine carried a series of "long bets" in 2002 about future predictions in society, science and technology. Lord Rees staked one thousand dollars on the bet: "That by the year 2020 an instance of bio-error or bio-terror will have killed a million people." He says he fervently hopes to lose the bet, but honestly does not expect to.

"Twenty-twenty" is a mere 11 years away. The end of this century is just nine decades away. Will our grandchildren and our great grandchildren see it? We have no reason to feel assured. We have every reason to worry. And great need, an existential need, in fact, to act. And yet, far from worrying and very far from acting, we are in denial.

Scientists, like statesmen, have been agents of change. They have changed things by what they have understood and explained, but most significantly, they have changed things by what they have done. They have sometimes changed so much and so fast that they have had to run behind some of their own creations to say, "Stop! I did not mean to unleash you like that!"

At Los Alamos, in 1945, as he saw the explosion illumine, intensify, pummel, roll, liquefy and gasify the landscape before his eyes, Oppenheimer invoked the Bhagavad Gita, as we all know, in its description of "all-devouring death". The 1955 manifesto on the nuclear peril prepared by Bertrand Russell and signed, among others, by Einstein, in one of his "last acts", deserves to be known as much as Lincoln's Gettysburg address for its calm determination, or Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" for its sense of immediacy. The authors say in that profound document that they are "speaking...not as members of this or that nation, continent or creed, but as human beings, members of the species Man, whose continued existence is in doubt". Today doubt assails us not just about the nuclear peril but about a great many other perils as well, perils that have swollen to monstrous dimensions by man's actions over the last 100 years or so.

Many of you have, I am sure, read Guiseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's fascinating novel The Leopard, a universal and timeless story. In it, Tancredi says about the Sicilian Prince of Salina, "If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change." To "stay as they are", to "stay as we are" or, in simple words, to survive, even up to 2020, things will have to change. But—and this BUT is all in capital letters—things will have to change not in the way they have been changing; things will have to change very, very differently.

Scientists and statesmen have, as I said, been able to change. But now they face a choice—not between being 'changers' or 'no-changers', not between so-called 'progress' and so-called 'status quo', but a choice between the same kind of change and a new kind of change. They face what can only be called the task of changing change itself, the direction of change, the aim of change and, indeed, the nature of change. And, borrowing from the 1955 manifesto, they need to do this as "members of the species Man whose continued existence is in doubt". In this, scientists and statesmen will need also to do another extremely difficult thing—namely, carry society with them.

Are the world's statesmen and scientists prepared to do this? Do they realise that they need to do it? Is society ready for it? Is it ready to unlearn what a short- sighted generation of ideologues has for decades taught it? I believe several among statesmen and scientists are so prepared. Likewise, so are large sections of society. Action to reduce "BNC" arsenals by major powers has, we must acknowledge, done well; no small achievement in our cynical times. Climate change too is on serious government agendas the world over. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's setting up a special team on climate change and the initiatives being monitored by Dr R.K. Pachauri and the dynamic new minister for environment, Jairam Ramesh, show that India is serious about mitigating climate change. But the comprehensive change in change, let us be honest, by bulk consumers of energy and fuel is not proportionate-by-half to the need for it.

Scientists have to be technologists, just as artists have to be craftsmen, and just as statesmen have to be politicians. But then scientists can be philosophers as well, since they deal with the Substances of Life, just as artists can be visionaries since they deal with the Essences of Being. I described Martin Rees as a philosopher-astrophysicist. He shows the way. More specifically, as men and women who have mastered the cognitive process and the empirical method, scientists have it in them to be empirical philosophers. And in that role they have it in them to make ours not the final century, but an altogether new one.

The most abiding changes in history have come from changes brought about from within the agents of change. Our first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, is rightly regarded as the architect of modern India. But let us recall what his distinguished biographer Sarvepalli Gopal has written about him: "Nehru...who, at the end of 1956, surveying the large Bhakra-Nangal dam had whispered to himself, 'These are the new temples of India where I worship', confessed nearly two years later that he doubted very much if the government would have initiated such a project if it came before them at this time...."

It is time, I believe, for new 1955 manifestos covering all our perils beyond the nuclear one. The time has come for the world of science to move from the creation of destruction and the destruction of creation—which we have all witnessed unrelentingly since 1945—to the fostering of our planet in all its manifold diversity. The hour has come, but the minutes are fleeting!

Former president A.P.J. Abdul Kalam held up, quite rightly, the year 2020 as a development milestone, a milestone for progress, for growth. But what if the road to that golden milestone is strewn with landmines laid by Dr Terror and Prof Error? The need now is for the alchemising touch of inner change, the touch of redemption, within the impulses of our design for earth's future.

This can only be brought about by the power of our 21st century's observational mind. We need as a generation to move beyond outdated thought. Forms of faster growth will be a fatal exercise. Not faster but different forms of growth, new paradigms of progress, and fresh definitions of development are what we need. The opposite of acceleration is not deceleration, but the attaining of an optimal pace through what the Buddha called Right Understanding. The faculty to distinguish between right and wrong is ingrained in all of us. It is connected to a sense of responsibility. Individual scientists who wield and use power know this better than others. As Richard Preston (quoted by Lord Rees in The Final Century) has said: "The main thing that stands between the human species and the creation of a supervirus (that can be used in bio-warfare) is a sense of responsibility among the individual scientists."

What is needed by Planet Earth is not a rollback, nor a "return to simplicity". The opposite of complexity is not simplicity, but clarity. Ours is the century of three negative 'globalisations'—global meltdown, global terror and global warming. All three are boomerangs hurling back to hit the very world that swung and set them in motion. When statesmen and scientists work for the globe as a whole rather than for slices of it, they become agents of the change that we need from within politics and within science. If they do not, the world will have 'business as usual'. Until, of course, the lights go out, literally and metaphorically. And the generators have no diesel left in them and the alternatives shrivel up. But if they do, a new dynamism can return to the earth.

We, in India, take just pride in our exciting space venture, Chandrayaana. That huge undertaking is important for us. But in the scheme of life, while there is such a thing as the important, there is also such a thing as the urgent. When, from our mountains to our oceans, our terais to our beaches, we see human interventions scooping the soul out of our heritage, when plastic garbage grows like an indestructible fungus over every inch of public space, when cement structures grow like pustules over public and private space, when our Himalayan forests struggle, when our glaciers shrink, when our rivers grow low or thick with silt and pollutants, our aquifers begin to dry and die, and the air we breathe is laden with toxic gases, we need, alongside Chandrayaana, with equal magnificence and equal success, a Prithviyaana, which includes a Himayaana, a Vanayaana, a Jalayaana and a Vaayuyaana as well.

More importantly, we need to modify the Mahayaana of mindless growth propelled by bulk consumers of energy and fuel into a Hinayaana of ecological intelligence and human responsibility.