It is remarkable to be living in the age when what sounds like far-fetched speculation can quickly become mind-bending reality. From cell phones that do everything but walk the dog to invisibility cloaks and other coming wonders, we live in a time of virtual magic. Now comes the strangest trick yet: manmade life.
I don't mean robots or artificial intelligence. I'm talking about actual living synthetic organisms. Famed geneticist Craig Venter has apparently created a genetic code for a never-before-seen bacteria and intends to insert this DNA into a host cell to create a brand new species. This is a long way from your mother's genetic engineering in which species X gets a trait or two from species Y. This is species Z -- the creation of life from scratch and a whole new game that's never been played before.
Watch enough horror movies, and you can be forgiven for thinking this experiment is likely to end poorly. Because it's one thing to invent a new widget, and quite another if the widget can have real babies. What might that life do? Create a new plague? Destroy an ecosystem? Maybe. But it could very well also eat toxic waste or produce clean fuels or do both at once. It could create new vaccines and medicines. When you get right down to it, it could destroy the world or save us all.
Geo-engineering is another rapidly approaching miracle of science that walks that fine line between blinding genius and unbridled insanity. This relatively new field seeks to modify or control the systems of the earth as a way to zero out the effects of global warming. Since we can't seem to get our act together enough to prevent a climate crisis, the thinking goes, let's see what we can do to compensate for the one that's already here. Hence the current slew of ideas to cool the planet on a global scale, including sending aloft giant space mirrors, seeding the atmosphere with reflective chemicals, or fertilizing the oceans to encourage carbon-eating phytoplankton.
None of these ideas, from Dr. Venter's new microbial beastie to bending large swaths of the globe to our will, is bad or wrong or evil in and of itself. It's how we approach the ideas that counts.
Human ingenuity got us into so many of today's eco-jams, we now need to focus it on getting us out of them. The horses have left the barn and closing the door is not an option. But coming up with ideas is the easy part. Human beings are remarkably good at that. What we're not so good at is summoning the discipline needed to exercise fanatical precaution when we consider unleashing new technological powers. What we lack is the foresight required to realize that sometimes the better thing to do is nothing at all. We seem to always have the courage to say yes but too often lack the wisdom to say no.
Of course, it should be our general cultural policy to avoid viewing technological advance an open license to run industrially wild. All glittering wonders of science aside, it's always best to prevent a problem than to have to repair it after the fact, and that should always be our preferred route to the right thing.
But we are where we are, and so now we need to reach into our bag of tricks and perhaps invent some new ones, too, like synthetic life forms that can eat their way to a cleaned-up world. And that's okay to consider as long as we do everything we can to make sure that as fascinating as these technologies might be in a gee-whiz sense, they won't cause more harm than good in the end.
As Stewart Brand wrote on the first page of the inaugural Whole Earth Catalog in 1969, "We are as gods and might as well get good at it." How good we get will depend on how careful we are. Let's hope Venter practices caution.
