Guest Post by Graeme Maxton
We cannot manage the
limits of nature because they are
limits.
Even so, there is a maximum speed that
we can run, even drug enhanced. There is a maximum speed
that cars can drive, before they begin to fly. We don't
understand where these limits lie, simply because we haven't
reached them yet. One day we will reach them though, and we
will understand then that they cannot be overcome.
When we talk about boundless oceans,
endless horizons and infinite possibilities this is merely
poetic. The oceans and the horizon are not limitless at all.
They are bound by the planet. While possibilities may be
many, they are never infinite. Even our universe has limits.
What is in our head has limits too. Our imagination is
limited by everything we currently understand. It is
impossible to conceive anything more.
When we reach natural limits, even the
best technology cannot overcome them. We only think that
they can be overcome because we have not encountered many of
them so far, and because the limits we have breached until
now were man-made or were not really limits at all.
Some of nature's limits are known. Light
cannot travel faster than 300,000km per second in space.
Nothing can be colder than -273°C. Ice cannot be heated
above 0°C under normal pressure. That is the limit of its
existence as ice.
If you think about it, everything is
defined by its limits - even items that are man-made. A
house is bound by walls and a roof, the limits of its physical presence. Bottles, fuel tanks and
the hulls of ships are designed to limit the influence of
whatever lies outside. The size of our society, from
prehistoric times until now, is limited by the rules we
impose.
These are not natural limits however,
but artificial ones.
The difference between man-made limits
and natural ones is that they are changeable. They can be
overcome. We can knock down walls and smash the bottles we
have made. We can change the laws.
Our technological advances support the
idea that we can master what is around us, that we can push
the limits of nature too. We can take energy from the wind,
modify the contents of cells and split atoms. But this
understanding of the world and our ability to manipulate it
has also made us foolish.
Foolish, because our discoveries are
really rather modest. When we take energy from the wind, we
simply capture what is already there. When we change the
contents of cells, we are only copying nature. And when we
split atoms, we are really just looking inside.
When it comes to the natural world,
there is so much that we do not understand. We do not know
the limits of consciousness, or even what it is. We have not
explored most of the oceans, the largest part of our planet.
We do not even know what substance or force makes up more
than 80% of the universe, and only discovered this recently.
We also keep changing our ideas. Our
theories about the origins of life and the birth of the
universe have changed completely in the last 150 years.
Despite this, we now think we have all the answers, or at
least most of the important ones.
That may be natural of course. We are
ambitious and already understand the limits of most of the
structures we use every day, because we made them. We know
when things are likely to go wrong.
In nature however, warning signals often
appear only when change is unavoidable. When a typhoon
forms, there is nothing that anyone can do to stop the
process, or change its path. We can only wait, and see what
damage it unleashes. Similarly, melting Arctic icecaps,
receding glaciers and rising sea levels are not warning
signals, signs that we need to change. They are the start of
a transformation that we will witness.
The changes we have unleashed already
are unstoppable, certainly within any time frame that we
really understand. The effects of our pumping large amounts
of carbon into the atmosphere have become visible within a
century, a flash of earthly time. It will take many hundreds
of years before the effects have passed.
Nature is easily the most complicated
system we know. We cannot survive without it. There is no
other place, so far as we know, where the acidity of the
oceans and the gases in the atmosphere are exactly
as creatures like us require. We know too, that an average
temperature rise of even a few degrees will change all this.
We have set a process in motion. Now we
must do everything we can to stop that process, and quickly.
Graeme Maxton is a Member of the Club of
Rome
