Fred Guterl - The Fate of the Species: Why the Human Race May Cause Its Own Extinction and How We Can Stop It

Copyright 2012 by Fred Guterl

Electronic edition published in May 2012

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information address Bloomsbury USA, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10010.
www.bloomsburyusa.com

Published by Bloomsbury USA, New York

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA HAS BEEN APPLIED FOR.

ISBN: 978-1-60819-624-1 (e-book)

First U.S. edition 2012

For Jude

A farmhand goes from pen to pen, dumping buckets of smelly gray slop into troughs. The pigs squeal with delight and tuck into their meal. Chickens, with free run of the farm, crowd in between the pink bodies to get their share of the grub. Clamshells and other detritus from the previous days feeding lie scattered on the ground. In the middle of this chaotic scene, a boy squats over a basin of water washing cabbagenot for the animals, but for farmhands, who are hungry for lunch.

This was just one of many vivid descriptions that my colleague Sarah Schafer reported on a trip to Chinas Guandong province back in the fall of 2002. She was on assignment for Newsweek International, collaborating on an article on the then-recent outbreak of SARS, the deadly cold virus that briefly caused a scare when it spread quickly beyond China. The farm she visited was typical of those that had been popping up all over the province at the time to meet the growing demand for meat from an expanding Chinese middle class. The farm was a living petri dish for new viruses, bringing together birds, pigs, and humans in close proximitya perfect breeding ground.

Over the next few years, the bigger story turned out not to be SARS, which trailed off quickly, but avian influenza, or bird flu. It had been making the rounds among birds in Southeast Asia for years. An outbreak in 1997 in Hong Kong and another in 2003 each called for the culling of thousands of birds and put virologists and health workers into a tizzy. Although the virus wasnt much of a threat to humans, scientists fretted over the possibility of a horrifying pandemic. Relatively few people caught the virus, but more than half of them died. What would happen if this bird flu virus made the jump to humans? What if it mutated in a way that allowed it to spread from one person to another, through tiny droplets of saliva in the air? One bad spin of the genetic roulette wheel and a deadly new human pathogen would spread across the globe in a matter of days. With a kill rate of 60 percent, such a pandemic would be devastating, to say the least.

Scientists were worried, all right, but the object of their worry was somewhat theoretical. Nobody knew for certain if such a supervirus was even possible. To cause that kind of damage to the human population, a flu virus has to combine two traits: lethality and transmissibility. The more optimistically minded scientists argued that one trait precluded the other, that if the bird flu acquired the ability to spread like wildfire, it would lose its ability to kill with terrifying efficiency. The virus would spread, cause some fever and sniffles, and take its place among the pantheon of ordinary flu viruses that come and go each season.

The optimists, we found out last fall, were wrong. Two groups of scientists working independently managed to create bird flu viruses in the lab that had that killer combination of lethality and transmissibility among humans. They did it for the best reasons, of courseto find vaccines and medicines to treat a pandemic should one occur, and more generally to understand how influenza viruses work. If were lucky, the scientists will get there before nature manages to come up with the virus herself, or before someone steals the genetic blueprints and turns this knowledge against us.

Influenza is a natural killer, but we have made it our own. We have created the conditions for new viruses to flourishamong pigs in factory farms and live animal markets and a connected world of international trade and traveland weve gone so far as to fabricate the virus ourselves. Flu is an excellent example of how we have, through our technologies and our dominant presence on the planet, begun to multiply the risks to our own survival.

The world lived for half a century with the specter of nuclear war and its potentially devastating consequencesradioactive clouds drifting thousands of miles and dust rising in mushroom clouds to the upper atmosphere, blocking sunlight and dispatching the human race in short order, just as the dinosaurs perished 65 million years ago after an asteroid impact. Then the Cold War ended. The Armageddon scenario has become less potent with each passing year. Nuclear weapons remain troublesome and dangerous. The missiles are still there, but the scenario seems remote.

Yet if anything the existential dangers have only multiplied since the end of the Cold War. Today the technologies we fear are not so much military as commercial. They come from biology and the information sciences, and they are behind our prodigious productivity. They are far more seductive than nuclear weapons, and more difficult to extricate ourselves from. The technologies we worry about today are the ones that form the basis of our global civilization and are essential to our survival.

The success of Homo sapiens has created new and terrifying risks that didnt exist a few decades ago. By our dominating presence on the planet, we are changing its geochemistry and its biology. We are upsetting climate systemsnot just global average climate, but also an intricate network of regional weather systemsin ways we dont fully understand. Ocean current cycles, monsoons, glaciers, and rain forests could each turn suddenly, or in tandem. This may already have been set in motion.

As humans grow in number, we have also come into closer contact with other species, opening ourselves to new reservoirs of disease, and weve given these microbes a vast interconnected world in which to circulate. The conditions are ripe for a plague of twenty-first-century proportions, the Black Death that wiped out a third of Europe writ large and immediate. To fight these pathogens, we are racing to uncover mysteries at the chemical heart of biology, as we should, but at the same time were opening new possibilities for mischief. We are beginning to create artificial life with technologies of molecular manipulation that will only become cheaper, faster, and more widespread, putting unprecedented power to destroy into the hands of individuals. Think of what a Unabomber-type lunatic could do now with a Ph.D. in microbiology and a few thousand dollars worth of lab equipment.

While the battle of the bugs rages, our own machines have become too complex for us to fully understand. A few decades ago the Internet was a novel technology shared among a small community of academics who knew and trusted one another. Its founders, taking such bonhomie for granted, built a house with no locks on the doors or windows, and computer scientists and engineers have been playing catch up with security ever since. Now, the Internet is the backbone of our global economy. Lives, not just livelihoods, depend on it. A new generation of software with the power to think and act much like people has thrown the future of this network in doubt, but our dependence on it only grows.

Scientists and engineers are generally upbeat people who love what they do and love to talk about it. But few of them, Ive found, want to publicly discuss the darker implications of their work. Even those who are vocal in advocating policies to avert climate change or prepare for a bio-weapons attack prefer to dwell on what can be done to prevent bad things from happening, rather than what those bad things might be. This is not universally true, of course. I once asked Stephen Pacala, a professor at Princeton, what the consequences might be if the permafrost of Canada and Alaska and Siberia were to melt and release the methane and carbon they now keep locked in the ground. His answer: All sorts of monsters would come out.