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25th July 2010
Dear Granddaughter:
I don’t know your name, because at the time
I’m writing this, you have not been named.
In a week's time or so you may have a name, but your parents haven’t
given you one yet. In fact you have only
just been born.
My mother your great-grandmother, was born
in 1909. That may seem like a very long
time ago. But as your life moves on, it
will come to seem not so long ago. Only
a hundred years! By the time you are my
age, around 2080, you should be able to think back and realise that you have
known people who have had direct connections back to the start of the 20th
century, and you will have grandchildren – most likely, who can look forward to
their own children living well into the 22nd century. Time is neat and inexorable. Make the most of
what little you have!
The idea here is to record for you a little
of what life is like early in the 21st century, at the time of your
birth. Maybe you will reflect on the
changes you have witnessed, and think of the changes you will see in the course
of the rest of your life.
Whether you and I will ever meet and talk
remains to be seen; whether we will talk, as in Alice in Wonderland, about sealing wax and things, who knows. I’d like to think that reflecting on the
state of the world and our experience of it is something you will do. Who knows?
Maybe it is only something us old farts do, and therefore something you
will only do long after your children have flown the coop.
Love they say is what makes the world go
round. I disagree: I think it is sex.
We build so many taboos around the subject
that it never ceases to amaze me. From a
biological point of view, our only “purpose” is to reproduce; there is no
other, despite what those of a religious bent would have us think. (This bent comes from our fear of sex.) Given that as a purpose, then no wonder we
are constantly desirous. It is what has
made the species so successful.
Everything else, or nearly everything else, stems from the sex
drive. Our need to attract a mate, drives
us to explore, to paint ourselves, to dress ourselves, to sing for others, to
entertain, and yes to work. Through work
we attain status and money that enables us, again, to attract a mate, or mates.
Of course, the goals of a woman differ from
that of a man. A man would like to
father as many children as he can; a woman is limited because of the time it
takes per conception. Thus the ageless
battle of the sexes.
And so we call it love. Because without it, there would be no
commitment to the care of our young. The
bond of love that ensures that our offspring, who need 15 to 20 years of care
before they are ready to reproduce, will receive that care.
I have no idea how many siblings you now
have (at the time you read this) or will have.
I know that your parents will have dedicated a fair chunk of their lives
to your nurture. Will have shown you
care and love and concern.
And then you’ll leave for your search for a
mate or mates. If it goes according to
my experience, no matter what you will have been taught, you will still have to
discover for yourself how to control your urges, how to manage your affairs,
and how to fall deeply in love at the right time.
I wish I could be around at the time to
help you, but it is very unlikely – I will be (or would have been!) 88 by the
time you are 20: you won't appreciate my advice then! All I can do is wish you the best of
luck. Enjoy the sex, and strive for a
long deep love.
I am writing to you on my Apple MacBook
Pro, a fine piece of electronic engineering, that I am particularly proud
of. Whether when you read this, there
will still be Macintosh computers or not, I may never know.
When my father would have written to me,
though he didn’t, he would have had to write with pen and paper. He might have typed, but I don’t think he
ever learnt.
Maybe you’ll never even type! It could be that any “written” word, will be
created via voice recognition. Such
tools are available today, but suffer from limited application. There are cars and phones that respond to
voice commands, but not much else. There
are applications (Kurtzweil for instance) that will transcribe spoken text into
a Word document. But considerable
intelligence is still required to get the spelling and grammar right. Context is everything and that cannot be
presumed.
Maybe this will all have changed, but I
doubt it. Considerable advances have
been made in artificial intelligence; the power of computers has increased
dramatically over the last 40 years.
Enough to make full and correct sense of the spoken word? No, I think there will still be the need for
“transcription” of words to text, there will still be the need for translators
of text between languages.
I use software
translators on occasion today, I did just yesterday. But once translated – which certainly saves
time, there is still a significant amount of work required to correct both
grammar and sense. Even if I had my own
personal robot translator – which perhaps you will have, it would still fail in
many contexts. For example, the word for
a tax return in English is a “return,” but in French it is “déclaration,” not
“retour” which would be the obvious translation. Context is everything.
I started on an IBM computer, the
1401. This is the machine that made IBM
the computing powerhouse it was back in the 60s and 70s. It enabled IBM to design and build the 360,
the machines I then grew up with through my 20s and 30s. But the 1401 began with 1.4Kb of memory. On this machine we did stock control for the
Queen’s navy in England! Punch cards by
the thousand that were fed in through a machine that read the holes in the
cards, and then under program control, punched other cards out, or printed from
them.
1400 bytes of memory. Today the computer I’m using on my desktop
has 2 Gb of memory, 2 thousand million, 2 billion bytes of memory! For you this may be peanuts. Perhaps the machine you are using, or will
shortly, will have several terabytes of memory.
Or perhaps not. There is a trend today to use what is called
“cloud computing.” In this computing
model the power of the computer is no longer on the desk of the user, but
somewhere else in the world, in the cloud of the internet. So maybe the device you use will only have a
small amount of memory, the rest all being who knows where.
But I somehow find this hard to
believe. There is something very
personal and private about one own’s data being with one. If we allow our data and processing to be
held somewhere else, we are delegating authority and responsibility for our own
selves to others. That takes an enormous
amount of trust that I am not prepared to give.
One of the things that is really amazing is
the gullibility of people. It is said
that there is one born every minute, and that no one failed by underestimating
the intelligence of the masses. The real
thing perhaps is the power of our imaginations.
We have been gifted, or rather we have
evolved to have quite remarkable powers of imagination. We need it, and we needed it, as
hunter-gatherers, to survive in the competitive natural world of “eat or be
eaten.” But we fool ourselves if we
imagine that there are things beyond those that we can experience directly
ourselves.
Imagination enables us to see significance
in patterns. We need to see significance
to distinguish the threat from the harmless, such as the patterns of a Tiger in
the grass to enable us to escape the danger.
But then we see a man in the moon where
there is clearly none. We see canals on
Mars where clearly there are none. And
we see the invisible hand of God in things we otherwise have no explanation
for.
Don’t fall into this trap! It is perfectly acceptable not to have an
explanation for something. You do not
have to invent a god to explain such things.
(Interesting that even as an atheist, I have
difficulty seeing the word god spelled with a lower case g. The only use of the upper case G is to show a
mark of respect for the idea, an idea that I reject.)
It seems to me very unlikely that religion
will fade. There are too many zealots in
the world to let that happen. It is one
of my greatest fears that of all human characteristics, the one most likely to
be taken to the stars is our religious faiths.
Religion has been a tremendous power for the good and for the growth of
our civilization. We would probably not
have our civilization were it not for the organizing power of religion and
religious ideas.
However, since they are all predicated on
the existence of a nonexistent entity, god, they are all based on nonsense,
based on childish ideas, that as St Paul said, “Now that I am grown up I will
give up childish things.” Only if that
had happened!
There is a particularly pernicious form of
religion called fundamental.
Fundamentalists appear to have no tolerance for those of other
beliefs. They are clearly so right that
not only must all the others be wrong, they are forever permanently damned.
Fundamentalists exist on all sides of the
spectrum. There are fundamental
Christians, fundamental Muslims, fundamental Jews. Many wars of the last thousand years can be
called religious wars: The crusades, the Holy wars, the war on terror. Others are wars of resource control – the
Second World War, the Great War as the Russians call it. I suspect we will continue to have religious
wars for the next thousand. Education
and tolerance do not always go hand in hand.
So god will be around for millennia to
come. And will continue to be a source
of both sainthood, martyrdom and bloodshed.
I don’t know how or when you will get
this. I will suggest to your parents
that the envelope that contains it be kept for perhaps your sixteenth
birthday. Or maybe earlier. You may show interest in the things your
granddad did or not, who knows. Perhaps
it will be consigned to some dusty box that only your grandchildren will find!
If you get the chance read some or all of
the following:
The
Omivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan
The
Ancestor’s Tale, Richard Dawkins
The
Black Swan, Nicolas Taleb
Your
Inner Fish, Neil Shubin
Anything by Elmore Leonard
I am going to end by welcoming you to a
world that has no room for you. No,
that’s too harsh. Your world has plenty
of room for you. Your parents – and your
grandparents will treat you as the jewel you are. No matter how you turn out, no matter what
befalls you, whether good or bad, you will be loved.
No, my concern is for the whole world we
live in. As John Donne said “No man is
an island,” and we share this planet with a burgeoning population. When I was at school in 1950, there were 3
billion people. Now as I write this,
there are over 6 billion inhabitants, and when you read this maybe in excess of
8 billion, and by the middle of this century perhaps as many as 11 or 12
billion.
There are many of us who believe that the
planet cannot take it. There is not enough
land nor resources to allow all of us to live a decent life. Some authors (eg David Suzuki) have suggested
that if we in North America continue to lead our lives the way we do, requiring
about 4.5 acres per person, and if all the world’s population were to consume
the same way, that we would need 4 earths to give everybody the same way of
living.
Some have gone as far as to suggest that
the carrying capacity of the planet is as low as 500 million people.
Clearly that is not possible. But equally clearly, no one today seems to get
it. All our political leaders, national
and international, continue to champion growth, growth, growth. As though that will solve all our problems,
and allow us to feed and clothe every day another 10,000 people. Even the Green Party, which alone stands for
a truly sustainable future doesn’t get it: “limits on population” is a dirty
phrase.
But growth will only result in the
consumption of more resources. And there
is a limit to the availability of those resources. If you run out of resources there is nothing
that can be done to replace them. Well,
mine the asteroids I suppose, or the moon.
And if you run out of resources, then growth will stop. And if growth stops, there will be intense
competition for the limited resources then available. And by intense, I mean armed and nasty
competition.
So the solution from my understanding has
to involve population control, a concept that few want to grapple with because
of the intense feelings it generates.
But without it, life into the 22nd century will be nasty for all of
us. The fighting in the Middle East, in
Afghanistan, in Iraq, will be as nothing compared to what you may see and hear
of. The human species along with
everything else on this jewel of a planet could be lost.
None of which reduces my delight in knowing
of your arrival, nor my wishes to you for a long and healthy and happy and
enjoyable life. Be positive, be a
friend, welcome new ideas, love and be loved.
I look forward to talking to you about the
things that excite you, and those that have excited me.
You have my love.
Your Granddad
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