Tertiarymatt

We all started out as a fertilized egg: a solitary cell about as wide as a shaft of hair. That primordial sphere produced the ten trillion cells that make up each of our bodies. We are not merely sacs of identical cells, of course. A couple hundred types of cells arise as we develop. We’re encased in skin, inside of which bone cells form a skeleton; inside the skull are neurons woven into a brain.

What made this alchemy possible? The answer, in part, is viruses.

Viruses are constantly swarming into our bodies. Sometimes they make us sick; sometimes our immune systems vanquish them; and sometimes they become a part of ourselves. A type of virus called a retrovirus makes copies of itself by inserting its genes into the DNA of a cell. The cell then uses those instructions to make the parts for new viruses. HIV makes a living this way, as do a number of viruses that can trigger cancer.

On rare occasion, a retrovirus may infect an egg. Now something odd may happen. If the egg becomes fertilized and gives rise to a whole adult individual, all the cells in its body will carry that virus. And if that individual has offspring, the virus gets carried down to the next generation.

At first, these so-called endogenous retroviruses lead a double life. They can still break free of their host and infect new ones. Koalas are suffering from one such epidemic. But over thousands of years, the viruses become imprisoned. Their DNA mutates, robbing them of the ability to infect new hosts. Instead, they can only make copies of their genes that are then inserted back into their host cell. Copy after copy build up the genome. To limit the disruption these viruses can cause, mammals produce proteins that can keep most of them locked down. Eventually, most endogenous retroviruses mutate so much they are reduced to genetic baggage, unable to do anything at all. Yet they still bear all the hallmarks of viruses, and are thus recognizable to scientists who sequence genomes. It turns out that the human genome contains about 100,000 fragments of endogenous retroviruses, making up about eight percent of all our DNA.

Evolution is an endlessly creative process, and it can turn what seems utterly useless into something valuable. All the viral debris scattered in our genomes turns out to be just so much raw material for new adaptations. From time to time, our ancestors harnessed virus DNA and used it for our own purposes. In a new paper in the journal Nature, a scientist named Samuel Pfaff and a group of fellow scientists report that one of those purposes to help transform eggs into adults.

In their study, Pfaff and his colleagues at the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences examined fertilized mouse eggs. As an egg starts to divide, it produces new cells that are capable of becoming any part of the embryo–or even the membrane that surrounds the embryo or the placenta that pipes in nutrients from the animal’s mother. In fact, at this early stage, you can pluck a single cell from the clump and use it to grow an entire organism. These earliest cells are called totipoent.

After a few days, the clump becomes a hollowed out ball. The cells that make the ball up are still quite versatile. Depending on the signals a cell gets at this point, it can become any cell type in the body. But once the embryo reaches this stage, its cells have lost the ability to give rise to an entirely new organism on their own, because they can’t produce all the extra tissue required to keep an embryo alive. Now the cells are called pluripotent. The descendants of pluripotent cells gradually lose their versatility and get locked into being certain types of cells. Some become hematopoetic cells, which can turn into lots of different kinds of blood cells but can no longer become, say, skin cells.

Pfaff and his colleagues examined mouse embryos just after they had divided into two cells, in the prime of their totipotency. They catalogued the genes that were active at that time–genes which give the cells their vastly plastic potential. They found over 100 genes that were active at the two-cell stage, and which then shut down later on, by the time the embryo had become a hollow ball.

One way cells can switch genes on and off is producing proteins that latch onto nearby stretches of DNA called promoters. The match between the protein and the promoter has to be precise; otherwise, genes will be flipping on at all the wrong times, and failing to make proteins when they’re needed. Pfaff and his colleagues found that all the two-cell genes had identical promoters–which would explain how they all managed so become active at the same time.

What was really remarkable about their discover was the origin of those promoters. They came from viruses.

During the earliest stage of the embryo’s development, these virus-controlled genes are active. Then the cells clamp down on them, just as they would clamp down on viruses. Once those genes are silenced, the totipotent cells become pluripotent.

Pfaff and his colleagues also discovered something suprising when they looked at the pluripotent ball of cells. From time to time, the pluripotent cells let the virus-controlled genes switch on again, and then shut them back down. All of the cells, it turns out, cycle in and out of what the scientists call a “magic state,” in which they become temporarily totipotent again. (The pink cells in this photo are temporarily in that magic state.)

Cells in the magic state can give rise to any part of the embryo, as well as the placenta and other tissue outside the embryo. Once the virus-controlled genes get shut down again, they lose that power. This discovery demonstrated that these virus-controlled genes really are crucial for making cells totipotent.

Pfaff and his colleagues propose that the domestication of these virus promoters was a key step in the evolution of mammals with placentas. The idea that viruses made us who were are today may sound bizarre, except that Pfaff is hardly the first person to find evidence for it. Last year, for example, I wrote about how placental mammals stole a virus protein to build the placenta.

A discovery this strange inevitably raises questions that its discoverers cannot answer. What are the virus-controlled genes doing in those first two cells? Nobody knows. How did the domestication of this viral DNA help give rise to placental mammals 100 million years ago? Who knows? Why are viruses so intimately involved in so many parts of pregnancy? Awesome question. A very, very good question. Um, do we have any other questions?

We don’t have to wait to get all the answers to those questions before scientists can start to investigate one very practical application of these viruses. In recent years, scientists have been reprogramming cells taken either from adults or embryos, trying to goose them back into an early state. By inducing cells to become stem cells, the researchers hope to develop new treatments for Parkinson’s disease and other disorders where defective cells need to be replaced. Pfaff suggests that we should switch on these virus-controlled genes to help push cells back to a magic state.

If Pfaff’s hunch turns out to be right, it would be a delicious triumph for us over viruses. What started out as an epidemic 100 million years ago could become our newest tool in regenerative medicine.

(For more on these inner passengers, see my book A Planet of Viruses.)

[Image: Courtesy Salk Institute.]

Photo: Kyle Cassidy

I took Annihilation from my wife. I discovered she was reading it while we were on vacation last spring, and, it wasn’t so much the book that caught my attention as much as the effect it had on her. She was stealing moments to read it, drifting out of conversations; excited; distracted. Though she reads a lot, I seldom see her this carried away by a novel. I asked her to describe the book—she tells me it is unusual. All the characters are women. They are referred to by profession, rather than by name (“the biologist;” “the anthropologist,” etc.) They are part of an expedition. They collectively find themselves in a place; a zone called Area X. What is this environment like? It’s a habitation for something or other; the site of an unspecified encounter. Pristine. Yet also infected. It’s wide open, like a nature preserve, but strangely claustrophobic. The landscape seems sentient, and it communicates variously, using its own untranslatable semiotics: olfactory; haptic; extra-sensory and perhaps multidimensional. There are animals (of a sort). There are trees, plants (some of which, we later find out, are un-killable.) There is a lighthouse. There is another tower, which is also a tunnel. Upon its inner walls, a crypto-biblical psalm is being written in organic matter. There are piles of moldering journals, diaries. The governing principles of this world (ours?) are neither scientific nor occult. Or perhaps, rather, they are both. I found it fascinating that my wife would find a book which didn’t cleave to obvious narrative patterns, genres, tropes, so compulsively readable. She is an avid reader of nonfiction, and a species of positivist.

Me, I love fiction, the stranger the better, and I’m specifically drawn to books that have no elevator pitch; which are sui generis (these are rare.) So I stole the book. (Before she had finished it.) She went out one afternoon and I picked up Annihilation and began reading it and refused to give it back. She was angry with me for this, and rightly so. I went on to request advance copies of the subsequent books (Authority; Acceptance) from the publishing house. I read them quickly. I had almost finished all three books by the time she finished book one (she bought her own copy). This was last spring. She’s probably still mad at me.

Then, this summer, in what was surely karmic retribution, someone stole all three books from me. (It wasn’t my wife). Someone went into my office at Knopf on the 12th floor of the Random House building, and took the entire Southern Reach Trilogy. I guessed that the thief had purchased the first book in a store like everyone else, but lacked the requisite patience to wait for books two and three. Clearly I wasn’t the only obsessive. The books are infectious; addictive. The books exert their own brand of spooky action at a distance. The books have a way of festering inside you. The books resist definition, yet the questions they raise demand resolution. As a result of this theft, I had to wait until the final book was commercially available, like everyone else, in order to finish the series. Having to wait really sucked. Now, thankfully, the entire trilogy is out. No one needs to steal books anymore.

After reading Annihilation, I crowed about the book on Twitter and was surprised when Jeff replied directly to me. We corresponded for a bit online, and then, this August, when our books (my What We See When We Read, and his Acceptance) were released at about the same time, and we were both on the road flogging our wares, he wrote me to suggest a conversation about our work: about book jackets, the uncanny effect in literature, about world building, design—both graphic design and narrative design. My book’s subject is the reading imagination—so you can understand why I would jump at the opportunity to interrogate an author who is, sure, a talented world-builder, but more importantly an author who is so very good at insinuation; whose project seemed to include adumbrating that which is, by its very nature, incomprehensible. There is so much in Jeff’s books that is manufactured in the reader’s mind through a wonderful mechanics of mystification; through what isn’t said. And this, I suppose is where I’d like to start…

PM: One of things that interested me most in your new trilogy was the way in which you describe the indescribable (Which is a recurrent and essential challenge, it seems to me, of speculative fiction—how does one give a sense of something that is truly alien; that lives beyond the ken of our understanding?) You do a lot of hinting at things (creatures, events) and suggesting the outlines of things, while still managing to invest your books with a palpable sense of reality. Did you intentionally blur, or remove elements from your descriptions? (Is this the only way to describe an encounter with something the mind isn’t built to encompass?)

JV: Thinking of the novels from a compositional standpoint—“composition” as an art term, or even perhaps mise-en-scene from film—it’s the opposite of blurring. For example, the backdrop has to be clear, crisp, well-defined so that whatever moves across it can be in part defined by what it is moving across—and so the reader has an anchor. In this case “backdrop” for purposes of creating the uncanny effect refers to the people in a scene too, so you’re looking at building some scenes that have strong traditional characterization but that at certain points the characters are also subsumed. You invest a lot of effort in getting right the mundane details of place and character. Without those coordinates being precise, the rest of the map doesn’t work. The weird elements will seem out of focus or confusing. This also has to do with use of silence and stillness—you don’t create unnecessary movement in the background or “chatter” that fails to contribute to the destabilizing unease. A lot of writers don’t recognize this—their characters are so full of movement and facial tics and motions, most of it stock, that it’s literally creating self-defeating incidental movement in the reader’s mind.

If you think of it in terms of colors or patterns then, especially in Authority, you’re dealing with wide strips of backdrop that are all one color or at least not creating a distracting filigree. Against that setting, the uncanny can lurch out across the landscape and contaminate the brain in the right way.

The alien elements also must impart some element of coy continuity error, to impinge on the environment so that most readers perceive it in an almost subliminal way. A description that isn’t blurred, but is “off” even as it’s conveyed in precise detail. But it’s just…not quite right. You have a sense of processes going on beneath the skin, behind the walls. Dialogue can even accentuate this idea—in Authority, for example, in the hallways of the Southern Reach stray fragments of speech from Annihilation linger, a kind of displaced residue that the main character can’t identify but the reader can.

The level of specificity depends on the characters, too, though. The biologist will notice things about the natural world that the viewpoint character of Authority would never notice. This is one advantage of fiction over painting: art is subjective in the sense of what to emphasize and what to deemphasize on the canvas, and the “style” is created by the type of paint and the application of the paint through brush strokes. But the subjectivity of fiction is in large part the subjectivity of the character you’re writing about.

…My question for you, which relates to your own question: I very much like how you draw out in What We See When We Read this idea of creation of character by the constraints around them. Which helps to create an outline of the character. It’s more or less how I thought of Control in Authority. Taking this even farther, I think that writers like Karen Joy Fowler do something even weirder where sometimes the absence of text or the cutting of text creates a ghost or resonance that allows the reader to fill in the space. Is there an equivalent effect in art/design? Perhaps it’s something you’ve played around with in your own work. An absence that denotes presence.

PM: “An absence that denotes presence” could be the definition of a good book cover. Good book covers are hard to make, I think, specifically because a designer is asked to deploy the facts of a narrative without showing anything explicit about the setting or characters. It’s a tricky balancing act. Everything is done by implication, proxy, metaphor or analogy.

So what is left off of a jacket is crucial. (I’ve often said that most of my day in the office is spent either suggesting things or hiding things.) I’m not an anti-intentionalist or anything, but I do believe that the reader deserves, to some extent, the right to co-create a fictional world alongside the author. So when you make the author’s world explicit on a cover, you’ve taken something from the reader.

JV: Why do you think so many publishers then do seem to require making the world explicit on the cover? It’s definitely something I’ve pushed back against in the past for my own books and would’ve been a much less effective entry point for the reader on the Southern Reach trilogy.

PM: Publishers love these “explicit” covers so much, which is unfortunate. I think this phenomenon comes down to a bunch of faulty premises, the first of which is the mistaken idea that the reading experience is cinematic, and primarily visual (which I don’t believe.) Then there’s the prejudice that a book is nothing more than the sum of the facts of its narrative. (Obviously wrong.) Then there are many people who wonder how a book jacket that didn’t just regurgitate main plot points is even possible; like “what else is there to show on a jacket?” So in a way, it comes down to a lack of imagination. I come up against this all the time.

The problem always seems worse to me when it comes to books like yours, in which the uncanny is an intrinsic part of the narrative. There are a lot of trite covers for speculative fiction, in general, and I always wonder why books that lie outside of, say, the self-proclaimed “literary mainstream” get such awful, clichéd covers. Maybe it has something to do with this wrongheaded need of ours to pigeonhole a book’s genre.

We end up shoehorning books into these conventional jackets in order to trumpet category: like blood on crime covers and pink on chick lit. It’s a shame. And designers hate to be asked to do this. Though this would be a great time to mention that you’ve been very fortunate in your jackets. I love both the paperback covers for the trilogy …

as well as the new omnibus…

not to mention your amazing foreign market covers you’ve received…

But the fact that you’ve had good covers only underlines more for me the poverty of good covers for Horror, Fantasy, New Weird, Sci Fi, etc. It beggars belief—these are precisely the books that beg for imaginative, original visual treatments. And that isn’t to say that great covers don’t exist for these types of fiction, but you just get the sense that designers who work in these particular mines aren’t really being encouraged to venture into uncharted territory. I suppose I chalk it up to the publisher’s fear of alienating what they imagine is a core audience used to a certain kind of cover. Which is just a vast underestimation of the diversity and intelligence of this very core audience.

JV: Absence versus presence—the type of presence, the type of absence. The reason behind either.

PM: Yes—and to return to your point about creating the “uncanny” effect, it is also crucial when making visual images that whatever effect you decide to highlight—an image, a color, or a piece of text—be given an appropriate backdrop which maintains, as you put it, a certain “stillness.” And I love this idea of a clear, still, stable backdrop giving definition to that which “moves across” it. In Remembrance of Things Past, (it sounds massively pretentious to bring up this example, but it’s the one that came to mind) Proust describes how, as a boy, he watched a magic lantern cast images in his room:

If the lantern was moved I could make out Golo’s horse continuing to advance over the window curtains, swelling out with their folds, descending into their fissures. The body of Golo himself, in its essence as supernatural as that of his steed’s, accommodated every material obstacle–every hindersome object that he encountered by taking it as his skeleton and absorbing it into himself: even the doorknob he immediately adapted to and floated, invincibly over with his red robe or his pale face as noble and as melancholy as ever, but revealing no disturbance and this transvertebration.

The efficacy of Proust’s description of this event, the projected character of “Golo” gliding across the wall, depends upon exactly the process you describe. There are the curtains, and their folds and fissures, the doorknob. These details of the wall being simple, and fixed in advance gives the wall definition and therefore a sense of continuity, which in turn allows the reader to then “see” the image moving across it. (Elaine Scarry discusses this effect in depth in her excellent book on the reading imagination.)

Weirdly Proust’s description of Golo almost reminds me of a floating or swooping creature in Area X; the ribbon-like entity which “stitches” across the sky for instance. When I read the passage in your book that describes that stitching thing, I felt like I could see the “deepening blue” sky so clearly, and that made me see this entity, which I imagine a bit like a sea serpent in a medieval map, where only half the coils are observable above the waves and the rest implied.

Stitching through the sky, in a terrifying way—rippling, diving, rising again, and there came a terrible whispering that pierced not his ears but all of him, as if small particles of something physical had shot through him. He cursed, frozen there, watching, afraid. “The wavery lines that are there and not there.”

The winking in and out of existence is so good—such an effective and novel visual effect. This is one of the truly otherworldly moments in the book.

JV: And yet something like the ribbon thing is conjured up through triangulating real-world details. So: the floating bag in the movie American Beauty “mapped” for the subset of its kinship to the movement of eels underwater, and then that tempered or transformed by memories of strange skies while hiking—which is all then “cooked” and set out as the kind-of answer to the weird equation set out in the video from the first expedition in Authority:

The last fragment of video remained in its own category: “Unassigned.” Everyone was dead by then, except for an injured Lowry, already halfway back to the border.
Yet for a good twenty seconds the camera flew above the glimmering marsh reeds, the deep blue lakes, the ragged white cusp of the sea, toward the lighthouse.
Dipped and rose, fell again and soared again.
With what seemed like a horrifying enthusiasm. An all-consuming joy.

Even though the weird elements in the Southern Reach may be apprehended as ethereal, if you interrogate the actual descriptions, there’s the residue of something tactile. And I do mean residue. Early drafts of that scene had the ribbon things as too eel-like and thus too specific—much like you mentioned that a book cover can be too specific and not leave room for the reader—so I stripped out that description…but the ghost of it remained in elements of the movement. The ghost of a water creature moving through the sky = Uncanny.

All of this would just be a kind of Halloween House trick, a kind of cheap thrill, if it wasn’t wedded to an attempt at conveying the truth that the world is stranger than we recognize, that we understand less of it than our brains trick us into believing. So, if you do it right, the unease that resonates is in part the radiation from the suspicion that we’re not as in control as we think and micro and macro events continue to occur invisible all around us. Quite natural events, of course, but still beyond our ken.

PM: I suppose that if you describe anything real or otherwise, in enough detail, or with the proper detail, with sufficient clarity, that it begins to seem uncanny. Like a housefly under an electron microscope, or a word which you say so many times it begins to sound foreign. This idea of the real (natural) world being “stranger than we recognize” recurs often in these books of yours. One of the most haunting descriptions in the trilogy, for my money, is that of the starfish the biologist encounters in book one. When I read this section I felt a real sense of horror; that description is so visceral. I also had the sense that this episode might be autobiographical. Have you ever had an uncanny episode with a starfish? Further to this point: was the research daunting for these books? Did you undergo a deep immersion in biology; zoology; mycology?

JV: I grew up in Fiji and my earliest memories are of the coastlines of islands and of walking on the beach and encountering fish and whelks and crabs and other animals in that way, and making observations in my diary about them. Two of my three most intense memories are of staring a speared parrotfish in the eye and of watching a Spanish Dancer that had washed up in the tide. There was a kind of frozen stillness to the parrotfish contrasting with the brilliance of its coloration and the bloody hole where the spear had gone in and the grit of sand encroaching on the design of its body. I didn’t like seeing it dead. This seemed so much the opposite of the intent of its design, in a way more intense and direct than I’d experienced before.

The Spanish dancer meant something different. It looked like a living burgundy skirt tumbling there in the rush-retreat of the surf. It fascinated me: What kind of creature is this? Even in a place with a remarkable diversity of sea life I’d never seen anything like it. This was the first time I thought about how strange and alien life on Earth really is, which led later to thinking about what we take for granted.

The third memory involves the starfish. Fiji is composed of volcanic islands with reefs almost right offshore. One night, my parents took my sister and me out walking on a reef. I believe there was some research purpose for my parents. I remember it was windy and dark, with different variations and intensities of shadow in the sea and the sky; stars everywhere above. It was exhilarating but also disorienting. Several times I lost the thread and couldn’t locate the shore. In the midst of this, kind of excited and frightened at the same time, we came upon a Crown of Thorns starfish, which is known as a “destroyer of worlds” because it feasts on coral—so voraciously that people sometimes kill them. This, then, is one reason why I thought of “Annihilation” as the title of the first novel.

I don’t know if the Crown of Thorns was bioluminescent or that my mom was shining a flashlight down into the saltwater grotto. But in memory the starfish is huge and glowing red and among the most beautiful and terrible things I have ever seen. Something so anomalous against the darkness even though a natural part of the landscape—just not to me. I’m trying to be precise here to capture it correctly, even though no matter how many times I describe it, something about it keeps slipping through my fingers, so to speak. There’s also the hyper-reality of creating your own personal mythology, where encounters or images have a different significance and so are transformed in your head until the memory itself isn’t real on some level. And all of that, including confusion and awe, is channeled into the scene where the biologist encounters the starfish.

But memory also becomes structural. I always thought of the structure of Acceptance as being like a starfish: it has limbs that feed into the center, and the center is the biologist’s account. Now, this structure is a construct, like the starfish memory is now a kind of construct, because no novel can really look like a starfish in form unless you somehow had the option of reading each “arm” in any order you wanted and read the center last…but somehow thinking of it that way was of use to me. So now I wonder about how you bring autobiography into design and also if you sometimes create mental constructs that help you to envision something?

PM: Hmmn. I mean, yes, I do bring autobiography into my work, but only to the extent to which I bring my personal experience to bear when reading the books I am making covers for. Not that it’s a particularly revelatory or original thought, but my reading imagination—not just mine, but everyone’s—is not only stimulated and influenced by memory, but in some sense actually constructed of memory. In other words, the building blocks of the imagination are memory fragments. When I imagine, I retrofit and combine these pieces of my past in order to envision the narrative I am reading. For example, the “biologist” in your trilogy was, for me, my high school biology teacher. Not her exactly—I may have swapped out some of her features to make her mesh better with your biologist—but my teacher was the manikin upon which I hung your character’s physical descriptions. Her other features I borrowed from other people I’ve known. Your character John Rodriguez, or “Control,” was, in my mind, a soccer coach of mine who had a similar name. And he shared some facial characteristics with Alexander Knox, the actor who played Control on the BBC’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. (pics of Lee Evans and Alexander Knox)

Whitby was “played” in my imagination by the English actor Lee Evans (I have no explanation for this choice. Why him? I’m sure there is a reason. I’ve said it before, but, like dreams, the reading imagination can be psychoanalyzed.) No part of this process of mental casting happened consciously. I was unaware that I was doing this while reading. I am only aware of it after the fact. Whereas what you are describing is a mindful act: a craftsmanlike mining of personal history; a conscious use of this material to make something new. So it’s pretty different. In any case, all of that is to say that when it comes time to make a book jacket, I’m usually referring visually to something I’ve already personalized.

I’ve also never had the experience of using my autobiographical experience to structure a work of design. And I’m not sure how this would function with design, which depends so much on the author’s program and content. So your comment about the branching structure of your books is fascinating to me. And it makes perfect sense—this idea of “arms” extending from a central narrative. I’m sure you’ve answered this question elsewhere, but now that we are on to the idea of narrative structure, I’ve been curious since reading the trilogy; were they conceived originally as three books? I keep imagining the thing as being originally one large text, that was split in parts later to suit a publication plan (An ingenious publication plan by the way). But I realize I have no real reason to think this…

JV: The Southern Reach trilogy is a collapsed quartet: Authority and Acceptance devoured all the story planned for book four. (A blessing anyway, because I couldn’t think of a good “A”-word title for a fourth novel.) These particular novels I thought of in terms of their character arcs, so to me they are three separate books in that each contains the complete arc of a particular character. This gets more complicated in Acceptance, because that novel is so filled with ghosts—there’s a reason the last section of Authority is called “Afterlife”. For example, in essence Control becomes Ghost Control in Acceptance and Ghost Bird is still a kind of ghost and so are the former director and the lighthouse keeper inasmuch as they exist in the past. Even the biologist is a kind of ghost as in “P.S. I’m a ghost. Love, the Biologist.” This is all within the larger phantasmagoria that’s the over-arching storyline so in the sense of that storyline—if that’s how you define a book with an overt, metastasized mystery in it—I suppose the three books do form one uber-book. But a compelling case can be made for their autonomy on other levels—including that each one has such a different structure, while it’s equally true that there’s a lot of cross-stitching that binds all three together. To diagram that you’d almost have something that looks like a physics diagram of how particles work. Gene Wolfe’s The Fifth Head of Cerberus was definitely an influence in that regard; in his case, three very different novellas allow the reader to piece together what’s going on. Each novella stands alone but also forms part of a greater whole. (Another interesting structure is Nabokov’s Pnin, where a seeming story suite locks into place as a novel only with the final lines.)

This is why I find the diagram on page 316 of your book describing Kafka’s vision of New York City very compelling. Those arrows going off in different directions, which if you were to do a thorough mapping of certain fictions would become an even more gnarled mass of arrows finding almost infinite wormholes of connections and pointings in even more directions. And I love how, almost like that diagram about Kafka and New York, you’re continually trying out different structures in What We See When We Read, which is in a way an attempt to imagine the different ways that people read in addition to the effects writers create. Not just the receipt of vision through dream, poetics, the narcotic, but those stereo-like balance indicators you’ve got: Dream, Hallucination, Veridical Perception, Reading Imagination.

As a reader, do you have limits as to how extreme those four elements can get in one direction or another? What’s too strange even for you? And what will make you throw a book against the wall, figuratively or literally?

PM: Nothing is too strange for me—the stranger the better. Really. There are so many bland books in the world. And so much dull writing. So strange is good. And I believe a generous, committed reader will follow a writer pretty much anywhere. For instance, I loved the conversations between your books—the speech fragments from Annihilation you mentioned earlier, which appear in Authority. I wasn’t exactly sure, as I was reading, why these splinters of dialogue were echoing around the Southern Reach, but their inclusion didn’t in any way rupture the paranormal logic you had already established. Why do you ask? Do you ever worry about pushing that “weird” boundary too far in your writing? It is very impressive how much narrative energy and drive these books of yours have, given how awesomely strange they are. Which I mean as the highest possible complement. But I see how you could become engaged on this topic of “how weird is too weird…”

JV: It’s something you’re hardwired to think about early on because you can get tagged as “difficult” or “inaccessible.” I don’t like it when reviewers say this about a writer because they’re basically pre-judging the tastes of readers who might find something perfectly normal if given a more sympathetic entry-point. The truly weird thing to me is how we sometimes seem to want to distance ourselves from the more idiosyncratic and unique imaginations out there. If everyone’s creating squares and someone makes a circle, you shouldn’t tell people “this one’s not a square” but instead “look—here’s this interesting circle!”

At the same time, though, as a younger writer, I never really thought about the space left for the reader in a text and because my own personal tolerance for strangeness in the fiction I read is very high I do find I have to monitor this a bit. Finding a balance between the peculiar and the familiar in the narrative in such a way that it’s good for the narrative rather than an issue of pandering to some flawed idea of audience—that is difficult.

A novel shines a kind of light, even if it’s the light of a collapsed star, drawing you in. You get to decide the kind of light and its oscillation, whether it’s a warm light or a cold light. How distant the source of the light. Refractions in a prism or a prison. Range light. Fixed light. Occulting light. But the reader shines a light into the novel as well.

Area X is available on Amazon

photo by Kyle Cassidy

Bostrom: Well suppose you have a moral view that counts future people as being worth as much as present people. You might say that fundamentally it doesn't matter whether someone exists at the current time or at some future time, just as many people think that from a fundamental moral point of view, it doesn't matter where somebody is spatially---somebody isn't automatically worth less because you move them to the moon or to Africa or something. A human life is a human life. If you have that moral point of view that future generations matter in proportion to their population numbers, then you get this very stark implication that existential risk mitigation has a much higher utility than pretty much anything else that you could do. There are so many people that could come into existence in the future if humanity survives this critical period of time---we might live for billions of years, our descendants might colonize billions of solar systems, and there could be billions and billions times more people than exist currently. Therefore, even a very small reduction in the probability of realizing this enormous good will tend to outweigh even immense benefits like eliminating poverty or curing malaria, which would be tremendous under ordinary standards.

In the short term you don't seem especially worried about existential risks that originate in nature like asteroid strikes, supervolcanoes and so forth. Instead you have argued that the majority of future existential risks to humanity are anthropogenic, meaning that they arise from human activity.  Nuclear war springs to mind as an obvious example of this kind of risk, but that's been with us for some time now. What are some of the more futuristic or counterintuitive ways that we might bring about our own extinction?

Bostrom: I think the biggest existential risks relate to certain future technological capabilities that we might develop, perhaps later this century. For example, machine intelligence or advanced molecular nanotechnology could lead to the development of certain kinds of weapons systems. You could also have risks associated with certain advancements in synthetic biology.

Of course there are also existential risks that are not extinction risks. The concept of an existential risk certainly includes extinction, but it also includes risks that could permanently destroy our potential for desirable human development. One could imagine certain scenarios where there might be a permanent global totalitarian dystopia. Once again that's related to the possibility of the development of technologies that could make it a lot easier for oppressive regimes to weed out dissidents or to perform surveillance on their populations, so that you could have a permanently stable tyranny, rather than the ones we have seen throughout history, which have eventually been overthrown.

And why shouldn't we be as worried about natural existential risks in the short term?

Bostrom: One way of making that argument is to say that we've survived for over 100 thousand years, so it seems prima facie unlikely that any natural existential risks would do us in here in the short term, in the next hundred years for instance. Whereas, by contrast we are going to introduce entirely new risk factors in this century through our technological innovations and we don't have any track record of surviving those.

Now another way of arriving at this is to look at these particular risks from nature and to notice that the probability of them occurring is small. For instance we can estimate asteroid risks by looking at the distribution of craters that we find on Earth or on the moon in order to give us an idea of how frequent impacts of certain magnitudes are, and they seem to indicate that the risk there is quite small. We can also study asteroids through telescopes and see if any are on a collision course with Earth, and so far we haven't found any large asteroids on a collision course with Earth and we have looked at the majority of the big ones already.

You have argued that we underrate existential risks because of a particular kind of bias called observation selection effect. Can you explain a bit more about that? 

Bostrom: The idea of an observation selection effect is maybe best explained by first considering the simpler concept of a selection effect. Let's say you're trying to estimate how large the largest fish in a given pond is, and you use a net to catch a hundred fish and the biggest fish you find is three inches long. You might be tempted to infer that the biggest fish in this pond is not much bigger than three inches, because you've caught a hundred of them and none of them are bigger than three inches. But if it turns out that your net could only catch fish up to a certain length, then the measuring instrument that you used would introduce a selection effect: it would only select from a subset of the domain you were trying to sample. Now that's a kind of standard fact of statistics, and there are methods for trying to correct for it and you obviously have to take that into account when considering the fish distribution in your pond. An observation selection effect is a selection effect introduced not by limitations in our measurement instrument, but rather by the fact that all observations require the existence of an observer. This becomes important, for instance, in evolutionary biology. For instance, we know that intelligent life evolved on Earth. Naively, one might think that this piece of evidence suggests that life is likely to evolve on most Earth-like planets. But that would be to overlook an observation selection effect.  For no matter how small the proportion of all Earth-like planets that evolve intelligent life, we will find ourselves on a planet that did. Our data point-that intelligent life arose on our planet-is predicted equally well by the hypothesis that intelligent life is very improbable even on Earth-like planets as by the hypothesis that intelligent life is highly probable on Earth-like planets. When it comes to human extinction and existential risk, there are certain controversial ways that observation selection effects might be relevant. 

Bostrom: Well, one principle for how to reason when there are these observation selection effects is called the self-sampling assumption, which says roughly that you should think of yourself as if you were a randomly selected observer of some larger reference class of observers. This assumption has a particular application to thinking about the future through the doomsday argument, which attempts to show that we have systematically underestimated the probability that the human species will perish relatively soon. The basic idea involves comparing two different hypotheses about how long the human species will last in terms of how many total people have existed and will come to exist. You could for instance have two hypothesis: to pick an easy example imagine that one hypothesis is that a total of 200 billion humans will have ever existed at the end of time, and the other hypothesis is that 200 trillion humans will have ever existed.

Let's say that initially you think that each of these hypotheses is equally likely, you then have to take into account the self-sampling assumption and your own birth rank, your position in the sequence of people who have lived and who will ever live. We estimate currently that there have, to date, been 100 billion humans. Taking that into account, you then get a probability shift in favor of the smaller hypothesis, the hypothesis that only 200 billion humans will ever have existed. That's because you have to reason that if you are a random sample of all the people who will ever have existed, the chance that you will come up with a birth rank of 100 billion is much larger if there are only 200 billion in total than if there are 200 trillion in total. If there are going to be 200 billion total human beings, then as the 100 billionth of those human beings, I am somewhere in the middle, which is not so surprising. But if there are going to be 200 trillion people eventually, then you might think that it's sort of surprising that you're among the earliest 0.05% of the people who will ever exist. So you can see how reasoning with an observation selection effect can have these surprising and counterintuitive results. Now I want to emphasize that I'm not at all sure this kind of argument is valid; there are some deep methodological questions about this argument that haven't been resolved, questions that I have written a lot about. See I had understood observation selection effects in this context to work somewhat differently. I had thought that it had more to do with trying to observe the kinds of events that might cause extinction level events, things that by their nature would not be the sort of things that you could have observed before, because you'd cease to exist after the initial observation. Is there a line of thinking to that effect? Bostrom: Well, there's another line of thinking that's very similar to what you're describing that speaks to how much weight we should give to our track record of survival. Human beings have been around for roughly a hundred thousand years on this planet, so how much should that count in determining whether we're going to be around another hundred thousand years? Now there are a number of different factors that come into that discussion, the most important of which is whether there are going to be new kinds of risks that haven't existed to this point in human history---in particular risks of our own making, new technologies that we might develop this century, those that might give us the means to create new kinds of weapons or new kinds of accidents. The fact that we've been around for a hundred thousand years wouldn't give us much confidence with respect to those risks. But, to the extent that one were focusing on risks from nature, from asteroid attacks or risks from say vacuum decay in space itself, or something like that, one might ask what we can infer from this long track record of survival. And one might think that any species anywhere will think of themselves as having survived up to the current time because of this observation selection effect. You don't observe yourself after you've gone extinct, and so that complicates the analysis for certain kinds of risks. A few years ago I wrote a paper together with a physicist at MIT named Max Tegmark, where we looked at particular risks like vacuum decay, which is this hypothetical phenomena where space decays into a lower energy state, which would then cause this bubble propagating at the speed of light that would destroy all structures in its path, and would cause a catastrophe that no observer could ever see because it would come at you at the speed of light, without warning. We were noting that it's somewhat problematic to apply our observations to develop a probability for something like that, given this observation selection effect. But we found an indirect way of looking at evidence having to do with the formation date of our planet, and comparing it to the formation date of other earthlike planets and then using that as a kind of indirect way of putting a bound on that kind of risk. So that's another way in which observation selection effects become important when you're trying to estimate the odds of humanity having a long future.

Nick Bostrom is the director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford.

One possible strategic response to human-created risks is the slowing or halting of our technological evolution, but you have been a critic of that view, arguing that the permanent failure to develop advanced technology would itself constitute an existential risk. Why is that? Bostrom: Well, again I think the definition of an existential risk goes beyond just extinction, in that it also includes the permanent destruction of our potential for desirable future development. Our permanent failure to develop the sort of technologies that would fundamentally improve the quality of human life would count as an existential catastrophe. I think there are vastly better ways of being than we humans can currently reach and experience. We have fundamental biological limitations, which limit the kinds of values that we can instantiate in our life---our lifespans are limited, our cognitive abilities are limited, our emotional constitution is such that even under very good conditions we might not be completely happy. And even at the more mundane level, the world today contains a lot of avoidable misery and suffering and poverty and disease, and I think the world could be a lot better, both in the transhuman way, but also in this more economic way. The failure to ever realize those much better modes of being would count as an existential risk if it were permanent. Another reason I haven't emphasized or advocated the retardation of technological progress as a means of mitigating existential risk is that it's a very hard lever to pull. There are so many strong forces pushing for scientific and technological progress in so many different domains---there are economic pressures, there is curiosity, there are all kinds of institutions and individuals that are invested in technology, so shutting it down is a very hard thing to do. What technology, or potential technology, worries you the most? Bostrom: Well, I can mention a few. In the nearer term I think various developments in biotechnology and synthetic biology are quite disconcerting. We are gaining the ability to create designer pathogens and there are these blueprints of various disease organisms that are in the public domain---you can download the gene sequence for smallpox or the 1918 flu virus from the Internet. So far the ordinary person will only have a digital representation of it on their computer screen, but we're also developing better and better DNA synthesis machines, which are machines that can take one of these digital blueprints as an input, and then print out the actual RNA string or DNA string. Soon they will become powerful enough that they can actually print out these kinds of viruses. So already there you have a kind of predictable risk, and then once you can start modifying these organisms in certain kinds of ways, there is a whole additional frontier of danger that you can foresee. In the longer run, I think artificial intelligence---once it gains human and then superhuman capabilities---will present us with a major risk area. There are also different kinds of population control that worry me, things like surveillance and psychological manipulation pharmaceuticals. In one of your papers on this topic you note that experts have estimated our total existential risk for this century to be somewhere around 10-20%. I know I can't be alone in thinking that is high. What's driving that? Bostrom: I think what's driving it is the sense that humans are developing these very potent capabilities---we are doing unprecedented things, and there is a risk that something could go wrong. Even with nuclear weapons, if you rewind the tape you notice that it turned out that in order to make a nuclear weapon you had to have these very rare raw materials like highly enriched uranium or plutonium, which are very difficult to get. But suppose it had turned out that there was some technological technique that allowed you to make a nuclear weapon by baking sand in a microwave oven or something like that. If it had turned out that way then where would we be now? Presumably once that discovery had been made civilization would have been doomed. Each time we make one of these new discoveries we are putting our hand into a big urn of balls and pulling up a new ball---so far we've pulled up white balls and grey balls, but maybe next time we will pull out a black ball, a discovery that spells disaster. At the moment we have no good way of putting the ball back into the urn if we don't like it. Once a discovery has been published there is no way of un-publishing it. Even with nuclear weapons there were close calls. According to some people we came quite close to all out nuclear war and that was only in the first few decades of having discovered the new technology, and again it's a technology that only a few large states had, and that requires a lot of resources to control---individuals can't really have a nuclear arsenal.

The influenza virus, as viewed through an electron microscope.

Can you explain the simulation argument, and how it presents a very particular existential risk? Bostrom: The simulation argument addresses whether we are in fact living in a simulation as opposed to some basement level physical reality. It tries to show that at least one of three propositions is true, but it doesn't tell us which one. Those three are: 1) Almost all civilizations like ours go extinct before reaching technological maturity.

2) Almost all technologically mature civilizations lose interest in creating ancestor simulations: computer simulations detailed enough that the simulated minds within them would be conscious. 

3) We're almost certainly living in a computer simulation. 

The full argument requires sophisticated probabilistic reasoning, but the basic argument is fairly easy to grasp without resorting to mathematics. Suppose that the first proposition is false, which would mean that some significant portion of civilizations at our stage eventually reach technological maturity. Suppose that the second proposition is also false, which would mean that some significant fraction of those (technologically mature) civilizations retain an interest in using some non-negligible fraction of their resources for the purpose of creating these ancestor simulations. You can then show that it would be possible for a technologically mature civilization to create astronomical numbers of these simulations. So if this significant fraction of civilizations made it through to this stage where they decided to use their capabilities to create these ancestor simulations, then there would be many more simulations created than there are original histories, meaning that almost all observers with our types of experiences would be living in simulations. Going back to the observation selection effect, if almost all kinds of observers with our kinds of experiences are living in simulations, then we should think that we are living in a simulation, that we are one of the typical observers, rather than one of the rare, exceptional basic level reality observers. The connection to existential risk is twofold. First, the first of those three possibilities, that almost all civilizations like ours go extinct before reaching technological maturity obviously bears directly on how much existential risk we face. If proposition 1 is true then the obvious implication is that we will succumb to an existential catastrophe before reaching technological maturity. The other relationship with existential risk has to do with proposition 3: if we are living in a computer simulation then there are certain exotic ways in which we might experience an existential catastrophe which we wouldn't fear if we are living in basement level physical reality. The simulation could be shut off, for instance. Or there might be other kinds of interventions in our simulated reality. Now that does seem to assume that a technologically mature civilization would have an interest in creating these simulations in the first place. To say that these civilizations might "lose interest" implies some interest to begin with. Bostrom: Right now there are certainly a lot of people that, if they could, would be very happy to do this for all kinds of reasons---people might do it as a sort of scientific study, they might do it for entertainment, for art. Already you have people building these virtual worlds in computer games, and the more realistic they can make them the happier they are. You could have people pursuing virtual historical tourism, or people who want to do this just because it could be done. So I think it's safe to say that people today, had they the capabilities, would do it, but perhaps with a certain level of technological maturity people may lose interest in this for one reason or another. Your work reminds me a little bit of the film 'Children of Men,' which depicted a very particular existential risk: species-wide infertility. What are some of the more novel treatments you've seen of this subject in mainstream culture? Bostrom: Well, the Hollywood renditions of existential risk scenarios are usually quite bad. For instance, the artificial intelligence risk is usually represented by an invasion of a robot army that is fought off by some muscular human hero wielding a machine gun or something like that. If we are going to go extinct because of artificial intelligence, it's not going to be because there's this battle between humans and robots with laser eyes. A lot of the stories you see in fiction or in films are subject to the good story bias; there are constraints on what makes for a good story. Usually there has to be a protagonist and the thing you're battling has to be evil, and there are going to be ups and downs, and the humans prevail in the end. So there's a filter for the scenarios that you're going to see in media representations. Aldous Huxley's Brave New World is interesting in that it created a vivid depiction of a scenario in which humans have been biologically and socially engineered to fit into a dystopian social structure, and it shows how that could be very bad. But on the whole I think the general point I would make is that there isn't a lot of good literature on existential risk, and that one needs to think of these things not in terms of vivid scenarios, but rather in more abstract terms. Last week I interviewed Cary Fowler with the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. His project is a technology that might be interpreted as looking to limit existential risk. Are there other technological (as opposed to social or political) solutions that you see on the horizon? Bostrom: Well there are things that one can do, some that would apply to particular risks and others that would apply to a broader spectrum of risk. With particular risks, for instance, one could invest in technologies to hasten the time it takes to develop a new vaccine, which would also be very valuable to have for other reasons unrelated to existential risk. With regard to existential risk stemming from artificial intelligence, there is some work that we are doing now to try and think about different ways of solving the control problem. If one day you have the ability to create a machine intelligence that is greater than human intelligence, how would you control it, how would you make sure it was human-friendly and safe? There is work that can be done there. With asteroids there has been this Spaceguard project that maps out different asteroids and their trajectories, that project is certainly motivated by concerns about existential risks, and it costs only a couple of million dollars per year, with most of the funding coming from NASA. Then there are more general-purpose things you can do. You could imagine building some refuge, some bunker with a very large supply of food, where humans could survive for a decade or several decades if there were a large impact of some kind. It would be a lot cheaper and easier to do that on Earth than it would be to build a space colony, which some people have proposed. But to me the most important thing to do is more analysis, specifically analysis to identify the biggest existential risks and the types of interventions that would be most likely to mitigate those risks. 

A telescope used to track asteroids at the Spaceguard Centre in the United Kingdom.

I noticed that you define an existential risk as potentially bringing about the premature extinction of Earth-originating intelligent life. I wondered what you mean by premature? What would count as a mature extinction? 

Bostrom: Well, you might think that an extinction occurring at the time of the heat death of the universe would be in some sense mature. There might be fundamental physical limits to how long information processing can continue in this universe of ours, and if we reached that level there would be extinction, but it would be the best possible scenario that could have been achieved. I wouldn't count that as an existential catastrophe, rather it would be a kind of success scenario. So it's not necessary to survive infinitely long, which after all might be physically impossible, in order to have successfully avoided existential risk. In considering the long-term development of humanity, do you put much stock in specific schemes like the Kardashev Scale, which plots the advancement of a civilization according to its ability to harness energy, specifically the energy of its planet, its star, and then finally the galaxy? Might there be more to human flourishing than just increasing mastery of energy sources? 

Bostrom: Certainly there would be more to human flourishing. In fact I don't even think that particular scale is very useful. There is a discontinuity between the stage where we are now, where we are harnessing a lot of the energy resources of our home planet, and a stage where we can harness the energy of some increasing fraction of the universe like a galaxy. There is no particular reason to think that we might reach some intermediate stage where we would harness the energy of one star like our sun. By the time we can do that I suspect we'll be able to engage in large-scale space colonization, to spread into the galaxy and then beyond, so I don't think harnessing the single star is a relevant step on the ladder.

If I wanted some sort of scheme that laid out the stages of civilization, the period before machine super intelligence and the period after super machine intelligence would be a more relevant dichotomy. When you look at what's valuable or interesting in examining these stages, it's going to be what is done with these future resources and technologies, as opposed to their structure. It's possible that the long-term future of humanity, if things go well, would from the outside look very simple. You might have Earth at the center, and then you might have a growing sphere of technological infrastructure that expands in all directions at some significant fraction of the speed of light, occupying larger and larger volumes of the universe---first in our galaxy, and then beyond as far as is physically possible. And then all that ever happens is just this continued increase in the spherical volume of matter colonized by human descendants, a growing bubble of infrastructure. Everything would then depend on what was happening inside this infrastructure, what kinds of lives people were being led there, what kinds of experiences people were having. You couldn't infer that from the large-scale structure, so you'd have to sort of zoom in and see what kind of information processing occurred within this infrastructure. 

It's hard to know what that might look like, because our human experience might be just a small little crumb of what's possible. If you think of all the different modes of being, different kinds of feeling and experiencing, different ways of thinking and relating, it might be that human nature constrains us to a very narrow little corner of the space of possible modes of being. If we think of the space of possible modes of being as a large cathedral, then humanity in its current stage might be like a little cowering infant sitting in the corner of that cathedral having only the most limited sense of what is possible.

Huge flightless terror birds were South America's top predators for millions of years and at nearly three metres tall certainly lived up to their name. Their modern relatives, the seriemas, kill their prey by smashing it repeatedly against the ground, which may well have been the terror birds' technique too. The terror birds lived between 27 million and 15,000 years ago and spread into North America when the two continents joined. One of these birds boasts the record for the largest bird skull ever found, measuring 71cm long with a wicked, curved 45cm beak.

We live in a golden age of technological, medical, scientific and social progress. Look at our computers! Look at our phones! Twenty years ago, the internet was a creaky machine for geeks. Now we can’t imagine life without it. We are on the verge of medical breakthroughs that would have seemed like magic only half a century ago: cloned organs, stem-cell therapies to repair our very DNA. Even now, life expectancy in some rich countries is improving by five hours a day. A day! Surely immortality, or something very like it, is just around the corner.

The notion that our 21st-century world is one of accelerating advances is so dominant that it seems churlish to challenge it. Almost every week we read about ‘new hopes’ for cancer sufferers, developments in the lab that might lead to new cures, talk of a new era of space tourism and super-jets that can fly round the world in a few hours. Yet a moment’s thought tells us that this vision of unparalleled innovation can’t be right, that many of these breathless reports of progress are in fact mere hype, speculation – even fantasy.

Yet there once was an age when speculation matched reality. It spluttered to a halt more than 40 years ago. Most of what has happened since has been merely incremental improvements upon what came before. That true age of innovation – I’ll call it the Golden Quarter – ran from approximately 1945 to 1971. Just about everything that defines the modern world either came about, or had its seeds sown, during this time. The Pill. Electronics. Computers and the birth of the internet. Nuclear power. Television. Antibiotics. Space travel. Civil rights.

There is more. Feminism. Teenagers. The Green Revolution in agriculture. Decolonisation. Popular music. Mass aviation. The birth of the gay rights movement. Cheap, reliable and safe automobiles. High-speed trains. We put a man on the Moon, sent a probe to Mars, beat smallpox and discovered the double-spiral key of life. The Golden Quarter was a unique period of less than a single human generation, a time when innovation appeared to be running on a mix of dragster fuel and dilithium crystals.

Today, progress is defined almost entirely by consumer-driven, often banal improvements in information technology. The US economist Tyler Cowen, in his essay The Great Stagnation (2011), argues that, in the US at least, a technological plateau has been reached. Sure, our phones are great, but that’s not the same as being able to fly across the Atlantic in eight hours or eliminating smallpox. As the US technologist Peter Thiel once put it: ‘We wanted flying cars, we got 140 characters.’

Economists describe this extraordinary period in terms of increases in wealth. After the Second World War came a quarter-century boom; GDP-per-head in the US and Europe rocketed. New industrial powerhouses arose from the ashes of Japan. Germany experienced its Wirtschaftswunder. Even the Communist world got richer. This growth has been attributed to massive postwar government stimulus plus a happy nexus of low fuel prices, population growth and high Cold War military spending.

But alongside this was that extraordinary burst of human ingenuity and societal change. This is commented upon less often, perhaps because it is so obvious, or maybe it is seen as a simple consequence of the economics. We saw the biggest advances in science and technology: if you were a biologist, physicist or materials scientist, there was no better time to be working. But we also saw a shift in social attitudes every bit as profound. In even the most enlightened societies before 1945, attitudes to race, sexuality and women’s rights were what we would now consider antediluvian. By 1971, those old prejudices were on the back foot. Simply put, the world had changed.

But surely progress today is real? Well, take a look around. Look up and the airliners you see are basically updated versions of the ones flying in the 1960s – slightly quieter Tristars with better avionics. In 1971, a regular airliner took eight hours to fly from London to New York; it still does. And in 1971, there was one airliner that could do the trip in three hours. Now, Concorde is dead. Our cars are faster, safer and use less fuel than they did in 1971, but there has been no paradigm shift.

And yes, we are living longer, but this has disappointingly little to do with any recent breakthroughs. Since 1970, the US Federal Government has spent more than $100 billion in what President Richard Nixon dubbed the ‘War on Cancer’. Far more has been spent globally, with most wealthy nations boasting well-funded cancer‑research bodies. Despite these billions of investment, this war has been a spectacular failure. In the US, the death rates for all kinds of cancer dropped by only 5 per cent in the period 1950-2005, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. Even if you strip out confounding variables such as age (more people are living long enough to get cancer) and better diagnosis, the blunt fact is that, with most kinds of cancer, your chances in 2014 are not much better than they were in 1974. In many cases, your treatment will be pretty much the same.

After the dizzying breakthroughs of the 20th century, physics seems to have ground to a halt

For the past 20 years, as a science writer, I have covered such extraordinary medical advances as gene therapy, cloned replacement organs, stem-cell therapy, life-extension technologies, the promised spin-offs from genomics and tailored medicine. None of these new treatments is yet routinely available. The paralyzed still cannot walk, the blind still cannot see. The human genome was decoded (one post-Golden Quarter triumph) nearly 15 years ago and we’re still waiting to see the benefits that, at the time, were confidently asserted to be ‘a decade away’. We still have no real idea how to treat chronic addiction or dementia. The recent history of psychiatric medicine is, according to one eminent British psychiatrist I spoke to, ‘the history of ever-better placebos’. And most recent advances in longevity have come about by the simple expedient of getting people to give up smoking, eat better, and take drugs to control blood pressure.

There has been no new Green Revolution. We still drive steel cars powered by burning petroleum spirit or, worse, diesel. There has been no new materials revolution since the Golden Quarter’s advances in plastics, semi-conductors, new alloys and composite materials. After the dizzying breakthroughs of the early- to mid-20th century, physics seems (Higgs boson aside) to have ground to a halt. String Theory is apparently our best hope of reconciling Albert Einstein with the Quantum world, but as yet, no one has any idea if it is even testable. And nobody has been to the Moon for 42 years.

Why has progress stopped? Why, for that matter, did it start when it did, in the dying embers of the Second World War?

One explanation is that the Golden Age was the simple result of economic growth and technological spinoffs from the Second World War. It is certainly true that the war sped the development of several weaponisable technologies and medical advances. The Apollo space programme probably could not have happened when it did without the aerospace engineer Wernher Von Braun and the V-2 ballistic missile. But penicillin, the jet engine and even the nuclear bomb were on the drawing board before the first shots were fired. They would have happened anyway.

Conflict spurs innovation, and the Cold War played its part – we would never have got to the Moon without it. But someone has to pay for everything. The economic boom came to an end in the 1970s with the collapse of the 1944 Bretton Woods trading agreements and the oil shocks. So did the great age of innovation. Case closed, you might say.

And yet, something doesn’t quite fit. The 1970s recession was temporary: we came out of it soon enough. What’s more, in terms of Gross World Product, the world is between two and three times richer now than it was then. There is more than enough money for a new Apollo, a new Concorde and a new Green Revolution. So if rapid economic growth drove innovation in the 1950s and ’60s, why has it not done so since?

In The Great Stagnation, Cowen argues that progress ground to a halt because the ‘low-hanging fruit’ had been plucked off. These fruits include the cultivation of unused land, mass education, and the capitalisation by technologists of the scientific breakthroughs made in the 19th century. It is possible that the advances we saw in the period 1945-1970 were similarly quick wins, and that further progress is much harder. Going from the prop-airliners of the 1930s to the jets of the 1960s was, perhaps, just easier than going from today’s aircraft to something much better.

But history suggests that this explanation is fanciful. During periods of technological and scientific expansion, it has often seemed that a plateau has been reached, only for a new discovery to shatter old paradigms completely. The most famous example was when, in 1900, Lord Kelvin declared physics to be more or less over, just a few years before Einstein proved him comprehensively wrong. As late as the turn of the 20th century, it was still unclear how powered, heavier-than-air aircraft would develop, with several competing theories left floundering in the wake of the Wright brothers’ triumph (which no one saw coming).

Lack of money, then, is not the reason that innovation has stalled. What we do with our money might be, however. Capitalism was once the great engine of progress. It was capitalism in the 18th and 19th centuries that built roads and railways, steam engines and telegraphs (another golden era). Capital drove the industrial revolution.

Now, wealth is concentrated in the hands of a tiny elite. A report by Credit Suisse this October found that the richest 1 per cent of humans own half the world’s assets. That has consequences. Firstly, there is a lot more for the hyper-rich to spend their money on today than there was in the golden age of philanthropy in the 19th century. The superyachts, fast cars, private jets and other gewgaws of Planet Rich simply did not exist when people such as Andrew Carnegie walked the earth and, though they are no doubt nice to have, these fripperies don’t much advance the frontiers of knowledge. Furthermore, as the French economist Thomas Piketty pointed out in Capital (2014), money now begets money more than at any time in recent history. When wealth accumulates so spectacularly by doing nothing, there is less impetus to invest in genuine innovation.

the new ideal is to render your own products obsolete as fast as possible

During the Golden Quarter, inequality in the world’s economic powerhouses was, remarkably, declining. In the UK, that trend levelled off a few years later, to reach a historic low point in 1977. Is it possible that there could be some relationship between equality and innovation? Here’s a sketch of how that might work.

As success comes to be defined by the amount of money one can generate in the very short term, progress is in turn defined not by making things better, but by rendering them obsolete as rapidly as possible so that the next iteration of phones, cars or operating systems can be sold to a willing market.

In particular, when share prices are almost entirely dependent on growth (as opposed to market share or profit), built-in obsolescence becomes an important driver of ‘innovation’. Half a century ago, makers of telephones, TVs and cars prospered by building products that their buyers knew (or at least believed) would last for many years. No one sells a smartphone on that basis today; the new ideal is to render your own products obsolete as fast as possible. Thus the purpose of the iPhone 6 is not to be better than the iPhone 5, but to make aspirational people buy a new iPhone (and feel better for doing so). In a very unequal society, aspiration becomes a powerful force. This is new, and the paradoxical result is that true innovation, as opposed to its marketing proxy, is stymied. In the 1960s, venture capital was willing to take risks, particularly in the emerging electronic technologies. Now it is more conservative, funding start-ups that offer incremental improvements on what has gone before.

But there is more to it than inequality and the failure of capital.

During the Golden Quarter, we saw a boom in public spending on research and innovation. The taxpayers of Europe, the US and elsewhere replaced the great 19th‑century venture capitalists. And so we find that nearly all the advances of this period came either from tax-funded universities or from popular movements. The first electronic computers came not from the labs of IBM but from the universities of Manchester and Pennsylvania. (Even the 19th-century analytical engine of Charles Babbage was directly funded by the British government.) The early internet came out of the University of California, not Bell or Xerox. Later on, the world wide web arose not from Apple or Microsoft but from CERN, a wholly public institution. In short, the great advances in medicine, materials, aviation and spaceflight were nearly all pump-primed by public investment. But since the 1970s, an assumption has been made that the private sector is the best place to innovate.

The story of the past four decades might seem to cast doubt on that belief. And yet we cannot pin the stagnation of ingenuity on a decline in public funding. Tax spending on research and development has, in general, increased in real and relative terms in most industrialised nations even since the end of the Golden Quarter. There must be another reason why this increased investment is not paying more dividends.

Could it be that the missing part of the jigsaw is our attitude towards risk? Nothing ventured, nothing gained, as the saying goes. Many of the achievements of the Golden Quarter just wouldn’t be attempted now. The assault on smallpox, spearheaded by a worldwide vaccination campaign, probably killed several thousand people, though it saved tens of millions more. In the 1960s, new medicines were rushed to market. Not all of them worked and a few (thalidomide) had disastrous consequences. But the overall result was a medical boom that brought huge benefits to millions. Today, this is impossible.

The time for a new drug candidate to gain approval in the US rose from less than eight years in the 1960s to nearly 13 years by the 1990s. Many promising new treatments now take 20 years or more to reach the market. In 2011, several medical charities and research institutes in the UK accused EU-driven clinical regulations of ‘stifling medical advances’. It would not be an exaggeration to say that people are dying in the cause of making medicine safer.

Risk-aversion has become a potent weapon in the war against progress on other fronts. In 1992, the Swiss genetic engineer Ingo Potrykus developed a variety of rice in which the grain, rather than the leaves, contain a large concentration of Vitamin A. Deficiency in this vitamin causes blindness and death among hundreds of thousands every year in the developing world. And yet, thanks to a well-funded fear-mongering campaign by anti-GM fundamentalists, the world has not seen the benefits of this invention.

Apollo couldn’t happen today, not because we don’t want to go to the Moon, but because the risk would be unacceptable

In the energy sector, civilian nuclear technology was hobbled by a series of mega-profile ‘disasters’, including Three Mile Island (which killed no one) and Chernobyl (which killed only dozens). These incidents caused a global hiatus into research that could, by now, have given us safe, cheap and low-carbon energy. The climate change crisis, which might kill millions, is one of the prices we are paying for 40 years of risk-aversion.

Apollo almost certainly couldn’t happen today. That’s not because people aren’t interested in going to the Moon any more, but because the risk – calculated at a couple-of-per-cent chance of astronauts dying – would be unacceptable. Boeing took a huge risk when it developed the 747, an extraordinary 1960s machine that went from drawing board to flight in under five years. Its modern equivalent, the Airbus A380 (only slightly larger and slightly slower), first flew in 2005 – 15 years after the project go-ahead. Scientists and technologists were generally celebrated 50 years ago, when people remembered what the world was like before penicillin, vaccination, modern dentistry, affordable cars and TV. Now, we are distrustful and suspicious – we have forgotten just how dreadful the world was pre-Golden Quarter.

we could be in a world where Alzheimer’s was treatable, clean nuclear power had ended the threat of climate change, and cancer was on the back foot

Risk played its part, too, in the massive postwar shift in social attitudes. People, often the young, were prepared to take huge, physical risks to right the wrongs of the pre-war world. The early civil rights and anti-war protestors faced tear gas or worse. In the 1960s, feminists faced social ridicule, media approbation and violent hostility. Now, mirroring the incremental changes seen in technology, social progress all too often finds itself down the blind alleyways of political correctness. Student bodies used to be hotbeds of dissent, even revolution; today’s hyper-conformist youth is more interested in the policing of language and stifling debate when it counters the prevailing wisdom. Forty years ago a burgeoning media allowed dissent to flower. Today’s very different social media seems, despite democratic appearances, to be enforcing a climate of timidity and encouraging groupthink.

Does any of this really matter? So what if the white heat of technological progress is cooling off a bit? The world is, in general, far safer, healthier, wealthier and nicer than it has ever been. The recent past was grim; the distant past disgusting. As Steven Pinker and others have argued, levels of violence in most human societies had been declining since well before the Golden Quarter and have continued to decline since.

We are living longer. Civil rights have become so entrenched that gay marriage is being legalised across the world and any old-style racist thinking is met with widespread revulsion. The world is better in 2014 than it was in 1971.

And yes, we have seen some impressive technological advances. The modern internet is a wonder, more impressive in many ways than Apollo. We might have lost Concorde but you can fly across the Atlantic for a couple of days’ wages – remarkable. Sci-fi visions of the future often had improbable spacecraft and flying cars but, even in Blade Runner’s Los Angeles of 2019, Rick Deckard had to use a payphone to call Rachael.

But it could have been so much better. If the pace of change had continued, we could be living in a world where Alzheimer’s was treatable, where clean nuclear power had ended the threat of climate change, where the brilliance of genetics was used to bring the benefits of cheap and healthy food to the bottom billion, and where cancer really was on the back foot. Forget colonies on the Moon; if the Golden Quarter had become the Golden Century, the battery in your magic smartphone might even last more than a day.

3 December 2014

This story originally appeared in Slate and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

A couple of months ago I posted an amazing time-lapse video called Stormscapes, showing storms and mesocylcones, created by photographer Nicolaus Wegner. It's really worth watching; seeing those swirling, dark clouds forming vortices over the Midwest is terrifying and mesmerizing.

Wegner contacted me recently; after a year of storm chasing he put together another video, Stormscapes2, and it's way, way better than the first one. In fact, I'd say it's seriously one of the most incredible weather videos I have ever seen.

Make this hi-def, full screen, and crank the volume up, because holy yikes.

Wow.

From the opening sequence to the last frame, that's magnificent. I was also really impressed by how Wegner let the music inspire the editing, and it really adds to the look and feel of the video.

The creepy oncoming storm sets the mood immediately, but then the double rainbow and crepuscular rays (shadows of clouds leaving long, dark shadows in the sky) converging on the horizon provide a brief interlude. Very brief.

Mesocyclones! Lightning! Exploding cumulonimbus clouds! Devil's Tower! And then, at the end, one of my favorite kinds of clouds: bulbs of mammatus clouds hanging down. Those are really peculiar, and it's not at all clear why they form. Their shape gives rise to their name, because they look like mammary glands. Seriously.

I've seen mammatus clouds just once, and it was unearthly. They're harbingers of severe weather, and Wegner mentioned he got that sequence the day a series of tornadoes hit the town of Wessington Springs, South Dakota. The town was devastated, but due to the work of the National Weather Service, not a single person was killed. They predicted the conditions were ripe for tornadoes, issued a warning, and people were able to get to safety in time.

That's amazing, but that's science. We've learned so much about the weather that we can predict with pretty good accuracy where and when tornadoes can form, and get people to safety.

As I watch Stormscapes2, I'm in awe of the beauty of weather, but I'm also uplifted. We understand a lot of these phenomena very well, and the things we don't understand, we learn. And when we learn, we make things better. We save people's lives.

Science saves lives. That's a pretty good thing to learn, too.

When CCI announced its bankruptcy, rather than rushing to the aid of students, the DOE stepped in to save Corinthian from collapse, appointing a monitor to help the company negotiate the sale of most of its 107 campuses to an unnamed buyer.

The sale is part of the federal government’s ongoing effort to bring market-based reforms to higher education at all levels. The DOE says it is protecting taxpayers from having to reimburse students who would be eligible for a debt discharge if their campus shut down. But why should students have to pay while the company that defrauded them gets a helping hand?

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