seem plausible only if one forgets that there can be only one type of person: universal explainers and constructors. The idea that there could be beings that are to us as we are to animals is a belief in the supernatural.
Moreover, there is only one way of making progress: conjecture and criticism. And the only moral values that permit sustained progress are the objective values that the Enlightenment has begun to discover. No doubt the extraterrestrials’ morality is different from ours; but that will not be because it resembles that of the conquistadors. Nor would we be in serious danger of culture shock from contact with an advanced civilization: it will know how to educate its own children (or AIs), so it will know how to educate us – and, in particular, to teach us how to use its computers.
A further misconception is Hawking’s analogy between our civilization and pre-Enlightenment civilizations: as I shall explain in Chapter 15, there is a qualitative difference between those two types of civilization. Culture shock need not be dangerous to a post-Enlightenment one.
As we look back on the failed civilizations of the past, we can see that they were so poor, their technology was so feeble, and their explanations of the world so fragmentary and full of misconceptions that their caution about innovation and progress was as perverse as expecting a blindfold to be useful when navigating dangerous waters. Pessimists believe that the present state of our own civilization is an exception to that pattern. But what does the precautionary principle say about that claim? Can we be sure that our present knowledge, too, is not riddled with dangerous gaps and misconceptions? That our present wealth is not pathetically inadequate to deal with unforeseen problems? Since we cannot be sure, would not the precautionary principle require us to confine ourselves to the policy that would always have been salutary in the past – namely innovation and, in emergencies, even blind optimism about the benefits of new knowledge?
Also, in the case of our civilization, the precautionary principle rules itself out. Since our civilization has not been following it, a transition to it would entail reining in the rapid technological progress that is under way. And such a change has never been successful before. So a blind pessimist would have to oppose it on principle.
This may seem like logic-chopping, but it is not. The reason for these paradoxes and parallels between blind optimism and blind pessimism is that those two approaches are very similar at the level of explanation. Both are prophetic: both purport to know unknowable things about the future of knowledge. And since at any instant our best knowledge contains both truth and misconception, prophetic pessimism about any one aspect of it is always the same as prophetic optimism about another. For instance, Rees’s worst fears depend on the unprecedentedly rapid creation of unprecedentedly powerful technology, such as civilization-destroying bio-weapons.
If Rees is right that the twenty-first century is uniquely dangerous, and if civilization nevertheless survives it, it will have had an appallingly narrow escape. Our Final Century mentions only one other example of a narrow escape, namely the Cold War – so that will make two narrow escapes in a row. Yet, by that standard, civilization must already have had a similarly narrow escape during the Second World War. For instance, Nazi Germany came close to developing nuclear weapons; the Japanese Empire did successfully weaponize bubonic plague – and had tested the weapon with devastating effect in China and had plans to use it against the United States. Many feared that even a conventionally won victory by the Axis powers could bring down civilization. Churchill warned of ‘a new dark age, made more sinister and perhaps more protracted by the lights of perverted science’ – though, as an optimist, he worked to prevent that. In contrast, the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig and his wife committed suicide in 1942, in the safety of neutral Brazil, because they considered civilization to be already doomed.
So that would make it three narrow escapes in a row. But was there not a still earlier one? In 1798, Malthus had argued, in his influential essay On Population, that the nineteenth century would inevitably see a permanent end to human progress. He had calculated that the exponentially growing population at the time, which was a consequence of various technological and economic improvements, was reaching the limit of the planet’s capacity to produce food. And this was no accidental misfortune. He believed