Do you think it will ever be possible to carry plans like that forward? asked la Reine des Neiges.
I dont know, Mortimer said. Ever is a long time but thats a two-edged sword so far as the argument goes. The present generation of emortals has become very conservative. Weve learned patience so well that weve lost all sense of urgency. I dont believe that the Earthbound are as entrenched in their views as the young are wont to claim, and I dont believe that theyre becoming even less flexible as time goes by, but theyre certainly prepared to string the arguments out, hoping that a consensus will some day be reached. The Outer System people may think theyre different, but theyre not. Nobody is prepared to take matters into their own hands any more, to get things done in spite of oppositionand thats a good thing in some ways, though not as good in others. Were right to be proud of our tolerance for opposing views, even though its gradually rendering us impotent.
People like Emily will always want to make things, to build things and to change things no matter how old they become, but as the population of the solar system grows and it will continue to grow for a long while yet, no matter how many microworlders choose to emigrate the resistance to any and all particular projects is bound to increase. Were already past the point of effective inertia; its difficult to imagine how progress can be restarted, let alone reaccelerated.
What if some external threat to humankind were to be discovered? la Reine asked.
I was confused for a moment, but then I figured out that Mortimer must have been so efficiently regressed that he had lost all memory of the Afterlife. The original version of this conversation must have taken place before the existence of the Afterlife was discovered.
That ideas been around since the twentieth century, Mortimer the historian was quick to point out. The legendary Garrett Hardin was a firm believer in the notion that no common polity could be maintained without an external threat to motivate individuals to sacrifice their self-interests to a common cause. He used to call it the Russell Theorem. The piratical clique that built its mythology on another of his notions discounted that one, though. They didnt think an external threat was necessary or desirable.
If the long-overdue alien invaders ever did make their appearance, I suppose it would wake us up and lend a little urgency to our interminable debatesbut thered be a terrible cost to pay. In the twentieth century it was a popular belief that warfare had been a major stimulus to technological progress, and that without continual pressure to invent new and better weaponry our mortal ancestors scientific knowledge and technical capacity couldnt have increased as rapidly as they did. Its a crude argument, in my opinion. It implies that scientific and technological progress is a cumulative process measurable in purely quantitative terms: something that moves faster or slower, but moves all of a piece. Thats not true. Technological repertoires vary in all sorts of ways, and even fundamental scientific theories are flexible in terms of the models that are used to represent them and the language used to describe them.
There were twentieth-century historians who argued that the age of steel and steam had been provoked by the need to develop and mass-produce better cannon, and that their entire civilization was founded on the irrepressible urges motivating their ancestors to blast all hell out of one another. They had an arguable case but so had their opponents, who argued that the real motivating force behind the development of steel and modern civilization in Western Europe had been the demand for church bells that could measure out the hours of the day, allying and alloying the modern notion of time with the notion of devotion to duty. Then again, theres a case to be argued that the most vital boost to technological progress came after the Crash, motivated by the necessity of rebuilding everything that had been lost and to build it better. Within that view, its not the impulse to destroy that carries us forward so much as the impulse to recover from misfortune of any kind.
I dont think any of those views is uniquely right, but I do think that the distinctions between them are important. Its important that we continue to invent and make new things, but it also
matters a great deal what we invent them for . Thats always been a more complicated story than some historians have tried to make it seem.
An external threat would certainly motivate us to action perhaps to make a fortress of the solar system, and to equip that fortress with weapons of fabulous destructive power but Id rather find a motive force that would steer us in a more constructive direction. In the end, you see, all fortresses fall, and weapons of mass destruction do their work. All progress is a matter of risk.
Youd rather have church bells instead, or a natural disaster with a productive aftermath?