In an earlier review I gave this book 3 stars because, although I enjoyed reading it, there were parts that drove me crazy. However, in edition 4 the author has made an effort to address many of my prior complaints, so I now give his book 5 stars.
The author still includes arguments that I consider wacky and/or specious (that might at first sound, on the surface, like they are logical, but actually completely “miss the mark”). However, these arguments are still fun to encounter and hopefully it will cause others (as it did for me) to ponder why they disagree (or agree) with them.
First, I will mention what I liked; then I will address some of the arguments I found unconvincing.
PARTS I LIKED:
A) Wiki-wiki-wikipedia (Chapter 4) — Berleant explains how wikipedia could be much more useful if it could, in the near future, generate articles (on the fly) that consist of appropriate intersections of pre-existing wiki articles. For example, if one wants to know about the use of computers in developing, say, different perfumes, one currently has to search wikipedia for perfume topics; then search for computer topics, in the hope of finding an intersection. With a wiki-wikipedia, portions of articles would be accessed and combined automatically, based on both topic and context (e.g. perfumes in the context of computers). This future capability would enable anyone to find articles about topic A within the context of some topic B. Extending this idea would involve intersections of, say, topics A+B+C (thus the term wiki-wiki-wikipedia).
It’s interesting that, since I made the above comments (in my review of edition 3), the dangers of: auto-generated web “fake” (political, conspiracy, climate-denial etc.) articles and articles that are biased toward a user’s belief-preferences profile — have become a major cause for concern. The unfortunatel result is that users could remain inside what is now being called “filter bubbles”. Could this faux-meme creation/trolling behavior undermine the development of the automatic creation of wiki-wiki articles?
B) Highly Centralized to Highly Decentralized (Chapter 6) — Berleant points out where society is currently centralized; along with the disasters that could happen as a consequence. He predicts that future societies (in addition to decentralized use of solar panels) will make use of “agribots” to create decentralized food supplies.
I think it’s hard to predict which types of centralized vs decentralized resources are vulnerable (to what or when). Consider an attack by EMP (Electro-Magnetic Pulse, from a high-altitude atomic bomb, perhaps lobbed above the US by N. Korea). Centralized resources are more easily hardened against EMP than decentralized resources. All laptops and autos (i.e. decentralized) would have their electronics “fried” while any centralized energy plant (or centralized large cloud-storage facility) could be hardened to withstand EMP. So in this case, centralized would be superior to decentralized.
C) Meat from genetically engineered microbes (Chapter 9) — There are those who argue that humanity will be eating insects in large quantities in the future. I disagree and side with Berleant. I think that future meat products will come from both (a) combining essential components of meats (e.g. heme) extracted from plant sources and (b) growing meat within vats of genetically modified bacteria. These technologies will eliminate the need for large cattle farms containing methane-burping cows (a potent green-house gas).
D) Difficulties with prediction (Chapter 14) — It’s very savvy of the author, who is making predictions (sometimes way into the future), to discuss reasons why accurate predictions are often impossible. Berleant presents what he calls 7 “wet blankets” (barriers to accurate prediction). Some of these “wet blankets” stem from Quantum theory and Chaos theory. The first “wet blanket” he calls the “observer effect” which is the fact that the act of observing a system will perturb it.
I suggest that Berleant add another “wet blanket”: second-order chaos. Yuval Harari, in his book Sapiens (2014), distinguishes second-order chaos from first-order chaos (first-order chaos is the “butterfly effect”). Second-order chaos occurs in systems that have human agents. Second-order chaos is exponentially more unpredictable because humans change their behavior as they become aware of the predictions made (about such systems) by other agents. Harari describes a case in which an emperor asks scientists to build a sophisticated model to make political predictions WRT his empire’s future. Using the predictions the scientists have generated, the emperor changes the way he treats his subjects and thus avoids the revolution that the model had predicted. The emperor then refuses to pay the scientists, because their prediction never came about (but that was due to the changes the emperor made, as a result of his awareness of those predictions). Stock markets are example of second-order systems because models concerning the market’s future behaviors will cause agents to change their own behaviors (thus undermining those predictions).
I found wet blanket #6 (i.e., that predictions are useless because the future might not matter) and wet blanket #7 (the “so what?” horizon effect) to be very similar. In both cases, as we look farther into the future, we have less personal vested interest in the outcome.
E) Warm, Poison Planet (Chapter 15) — Over 15 years ago I first read about the ocean chemocline (a gradient change in the deep layers of the oceans). Below the chemocline the ocean is anoxic (lacking oxygen) and only anaerobic bacteria live. Above the ocean chemocline layer exist aerobic life forms, which produce the majority of oxygen in our atmosphere (more than produced by trees on land). The anaerobic bacteria produce hydrogen sulfide (H2S), which is highly toxic to aerobic forms of life (i.e. toxic to all fish in the seas and to all animals on land). If the chemocline were ever to rise up to the surface and “burp” large quantities of hydrogen sulfide, such an event would kill all fish in the oceans (as it rose upward) and then kill all land animals (as it “burped” into the atmosphere).
It is speculated by some scientists (studying super-massive extinctions), that such an event could have caused the Permian-Triassic extinction. In this event 96% of all marine species (and 70% of all vertebrate land species) went extinct, along with extinctions of many species of insects. A component of this theory is that increased carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the atmosphere heated up the oceans, which then could not hold as much oxygen. Increased CO2 also caused stagnation in ocean currents, leading to a rise in the chemocline. It is speculated that volcanic eruptions spewed out carbon dioxide to raise CO2 levels during past massive extinction events and when the levels went above 1000 ppm such massive extinction events occurred.
Recent human activity has been rapidly raising CO2 levels, now reaching 400 ppm. If the rate of increase continues, CO2 could rise — in just 2 centuries — to bring about an H2S-belching massive extinction event. Berleant does a good job in explaining how such an event might come about. (For those climate deniers, current rises in CO2 are not due to volcanic eruptions. Scientists know this because the radiocarbon isotopes associated with man-made CO2 and volcanic CO2 are different and so they can prove that the CO2 rise is being caused by human activity. Anthropogenic CO2 emissions exceed volcanic emissions by over 100 times.)
F) Science vs pseudo-science (Chapter 19) — It’s useful for readers who are not scientists to know how to tell the difference. In addition to Kuhnian paradigm shifts and Popper’s falsifiability criteria, I would suggest adding a new advance in scientific methodology: Judea Pearl (winner of Turing Award, equivalent to a Nobel prize in computer science) has shown under what circumstances causation can be extracted from correlations. Pearl has achieved this impressive feat through developing a formal language (and algorithms) for reasoning about counterfactuals. (See his 2018 publication: The Book of Why).
G) Melankovitch cycles (in Chapter 21) — These are astronomical cycles involve the Earth’s movements in space, which go a long way toward explaining recurring ice ages over the past hundreds of millions of years. I came upon these cycles maybe 10 years ago and was really fascinated by them. Berleant’s book is the only book I have encountered (outside of geology texts) that includes a discussion of these cycles. In addition, he does a very good job of explaining (and visualizing) them.
H) New Plant Paradigms (Chapter 22) — I enjoyed the discussion of how some plants reproduce via seeds while others reproduce via spores and how plants could be genetically engineered in the future to produce by both methods, along with the benefits/dangers that might come about. I also enjoyed the discussion of how plants could be genetically engineered to extract and concentrate various precious metals.
ARGUMENTS THAT ARE WACKY, WEAK AND/OR SPECIOUS:
(a) Omphalos hypothesis (in Chapter 17) — For some (unknown) reason, Berleant is enamored with this hypothesis (first named “omphalos” in 1857) and he claims that it is the perfect hypothesis to eliminate conflict between religious fundamentalists and evolutionary scientists.
Omphalos is greek for “navel” (belly button). Based on biblical analysis, religious fundamentals believe that God created the Universe (along with Adam and Eve) about 6000 years ago. On the other hand, scientists have very strong evidence that the known universe if around 13.8 billion years old and that humans (and all life on Earth) evolved from earlier life forms, e.g. humans (such as Adam and Eve) evolved from early primates that were common ancestors to both humans and modern great apes.
The omphalos hypothesis is that, when God (de novo) created Adam and Eve, he would have given them navels (along with all other human characteristics, such as tiny facial hairs on their foreheads, which all humans have). Thus, if scientists were to find Adam and Eve’s remains, they would (incorrectly) conclude that Adam and Eve must have had parents, when in fact they did not, since God created them as the FIRST man and woman. For Berleant, the mystery is not the omphalos hypothesis itself, but why it is either ignored or, if known, not accepted by both groups.
Why does this hypothesis eliminate fundamentalism vs. evolution conflict? According to Berleant, if it were accepted by both groups, then the fundamentalists could keep on claiming that the Earth is only 6000 years old and the scientists could go along with this (absurdity) by stating that, although God created the universe just 6,000 years ago, He created it to APPEAR AS THOUGH it is really 13.8 billion years old. Berleant does not seem to understand why both groups might reject this hypothesis and so I will supply reasons here.
From the fundamentalists’ point of view: If fundamentalists were to accept that God made the universe to APPEAR to conform to Evolution and the Big Bang, then they might as well accept both theories, thus undermining Biblical analysis. Therefore, fundamentalists are not going to embrace this hypothesis. Fundamentalists hate any science that disagrees with their biblical interpretations and they don’t understand how science works and progresses.
From the scientists’ point of view: For God to make the universe APPEAR as though it is billions of years old, He would have had to have performed all the calculations involved in passing the universe though all of its prior periods of time. Consider the placement of tiny hairs on human foreheads. If you mutate just one gene you would get humans with thick coarse hair in that area (e.g. consider the hairy “wolf boys” of Loreto, Mexico). If we presume that (along with creating Adam and Eve with navels) God created Adam and Eve with tiny hairs on their foreheads, then to geneticists, it would appear that human body hair placement evolved from genetic variations, over time, in common ancestors (thus adding support to evolution). Thus, for God to create Adam and Eve with human-like hairs, positioned appropriately, with varying levels of length and coarseness, over their entire bodies, God would have had to calculate the evolution of the genes involved in hair growth and placement.
For an infinite being, simulating the entire past development of the universe (from the Big Bang) could be done in an instant, but the fact is that this labor WOULD have to have been done, in order to create the appearance of a 13.8 billion-year past. Since the labor was done anyway, why pick an arbitrary point, i.e. 6,000 years ago, to have the universe created by God? Why not pick one minute ago? We could claim that God created the universe just one minute ago, but gave us our memories so that we have the illusion that we have already lived for many years.
The reason the 6,000 year time period has been chosen (by fundamentalist nut-jobs) is due to their absurd insistence that the Bible is some sort of infallible document from God (as opposed to a set of weak histories and stories that were intended to convey moral principles).
Berleant attempts to rebut the objection — that God would be tricking both scientists and fundamentalists — with this highly specious statement: “It [ omphalos ] would really be a trick only if it were not possible to figure out!” It drove me crazy that the author insisted on arguing FOR this wacky hypothesis and yet, I did enjoy reading his attempts at taking it seriously.
(b) Chances that we exist in a simulated universe (Chapter 17) — Berleant argues that it is highly likely that we are in a simulated universe because, for each (habitable) universe there will exist many simulated universes that might be created within that “base” universe (by computers scientists existing in that base universe, with our own universe being a “spun-off” simulation on one of their computers.)
I am unconvinced by this argument because each simulated universe will have to be an enormously DEGRADED version of each base universe. Consider what it would take to simulate our universe (on some hypothetical computer in the base/parent universe). That computer would need a memory that could hold every smallest fragment of our universe’s space-time (at the tiniest levels known which, given current quantum theory, is Planck space and Planck time). The simulation would also have to simulate the application of physical laws (across all of space), at the level of Planck time, starting at the Big Bang (at the very least) and executing to simulate over 13.8 Billion years.
The construction of such a computer is completely impossible within our own universe. Therefore, the base universe would have to be vastly more enormous (and probably vastly more complex, in terms of its physical laws) than our own universe. That is, each universe simulated within another universe much be enormously DEGRADED with respect to the base (parent) universe.
To accept the conclusion of that we-are-simulated-because-there-are-many-more-simulations requires us to imagine an inverted tree of universes — each being a base (parent) universe to DEGRADED simulated universes immediately below it. Each set of universes simulated within a degraded universe will be enormously MORE degraded. So a universe simulated within another universe that is simulated within yet another universe would be mind-bogglingly DEGRADED with respect to the grandparent universe. Given the vast and ancient nature of our universe, I think it’s highly unlike that we are a simulation (unless most parent universes are vastly more vast and ancient than our own, with their parents being vaster, etc.). There is absolutely no evidence for this state of affairs.
(c) Guesstimating when the universe might end (Chapter 28) — Berleant spends a lot of time discussing how one might guesstimate the chance of a largely unknown event occurring, based on how long it’s been without that event having yet occurred. I found this analysis very unconvincing because it does not rely on any sampling (of multiple prior occurrences of the event in question). Normally, when we calculate the probability of an event, we do the following: (1) assume that the future will be like the past and (2) we examine multiple prior occurrences of the event in question to determine the likelihood of its occurrence in the future.
With the universe ending, normally cosmologists look at the expansion rate (cosmological constant). Currently, it appears that the expansion is accelerating (which, by the way, is completely counterintuitive and requires the postulation of some kind of “dark energy” anti-gravitational cosmological force) and so it appears that the universe will end in a “Big Rip”. Berleant’s analysis (e.g. taking 1/60 vs 59/60 of some lifespan remaining) has little to do with any cosmological evidence.
(d) A bone to pick about Chapter 23 (humans changing 10M Years INTO THE FUTURE) — Ironically, Berleant has little to say about the biological nature of humans in the distant future. Instead, he spends that entire chapter talking about how our hominid ancestors were different from modern humans when going back INTO THE PAST 100,000 years and then back INTO THE PAST 1M and then 10M years.
I recommend that, in a subsequent edition, he discuss changes to humans going INTO THE FUTURE (since his book is supposed to be about the future). All he says here is that humans would have bigger brains and wide hips so that those big-headed babies can be born. He doesn’t consider in this chapter that humans, with genetic-modification technology already rapidly progressing, might cause more changes to their bodies and brains in the next 100 to 1000 years than all changes wrought by evolution over the last 10M years. In such a scenario, what changes might humans make to their own biological makeup in the next 100,000 to 1M to 10M years?
Final Comment: Throughout the book, Berleant’s writing style is light and breezy, with a nice sense of humor. As a result, it is one of the the most pleasant books you will ever read about possible futures (whether near, far or exceedingly distant).
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