John H. Gibbons, "The 21st Century: Science, Technology and Society” Compton Lecture (1/3) 10/22/1998

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VEST: Because our lecturer today prides himself in his trove of interesting jokes and stories, I decided I'd better start off with a joke, Jack. And it's one that does have relevance to deduction and the scientific method. And it has to do with Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson being out on a camping trip.

They were lying there in their sleeping bags in the middle of the night on their backs, looking up at the heavens and crystal clear night and millions and millions of stars across the sky. And Holmes turned and said, I say, Watson, what do you make of all this? What do you think about when you see all these stars? What do you deduce from it?

Watson thought a bit and said, well, my friend, I think it's a message to us. It's there to remind us of the vastness of the universe and the miracle of its creation and to clearly send the signal to us that all those billions of stars out there, as far as we know, we're the only planet with intelligent people and what a special place we hold. He said, what do you make of it Holmes? Holmes said, well, Watson, I deduced that someone has stolen our tent.

So with that, as the 15th President of MIT, it's my pleasure to welcome you to the first of three Karl Taylor Compton Lectures that will be given during 1998-99. This lecture series was established in 1957 to honor the Institute's ninth president. Dr. Compton held that post from 1930 to 1948. Went on to serve as chairman of the MIT Corporation from 1948 until his death in 1954.

In his quarter century of service to MIT, K.T. Compton led a crucial expansion and modernization of our Institution. In the words of one of his contemporaries, he was instrumental in transforming MIT "from a good, but more or less provincial Institute to an international Institution." At the same time, he provided extraordinary leadership in bringing science and technology to the service of our nation during the Great Depression, during World War II, and in the critical early years of the Cold War. He served in a variety of senior governmental positions, including Chairmanship of the Depression Era Science Advisory Board, Chief of the Wartime Radar Programs of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, and the first head of the Research and Development Board that was created by President Truman to oversee scientific preparedness in the years after World War II.

These lectures were created as a fitting memorial to Karl Taylor Compton's ability to bring the innovations, the values, and the wisdom of science, technology, and academic inquiry into the arenas of public policy and popular discourse. The purpose of the series is to give the MIT community an opportunity to hear from, meet with key leaders who are helping to shape and inform global events. Sponsored each time by a different academic department, the Compton lecturers have brought a distinguished array of global leaders to our campus. Past Compton Lectures have included statesmen like Hubert Humphrey, former Japanese Prime Minister Nakasone, and they have included Nobel Laureates such as Niels Bour and Linus Pauling. Indeed, last year's lecture was both a statesman and a Nobel Laureate, Doctor Oscar Arias Sanchez of Costa Rica.

This year's Compton Lectures are sponsored by the Political Science Department in conjunction with the Office of the Provost. They have brought us a speaker who is well qualified to carry on in the tradition of his distinguished predecessors. Indeed it would be difficult to find someone who better epitomizes K.T. Compton's own devotion to the development of science and technology, as instruments of national service in the public interest.

Jack Gibbons is an internationally recognized scientific leader whose early career specialty was nuclear physics. After earning his doctorate at Duke, he spent 15 years as a researcher at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Beginning in 1970, his professional focus began to shift. He undertook pioneering work of the use of technology in conserving energy, as well as in minimizing adverse environmental impacts from energy production and consumption. At the start of the nation's first major energy crisis in 1973, Jack was therefore well-positioned to become the first director of the Federal Office of Energy Conservation. After two years in that post, he returned to Tennessee as head of the University of Tennessee's Energy Environment and Resources Center.

In '79, he was called back to Washington to direct the Office of Technology Assessment, the OTA, an independent professional agency that provided Congress with nonpartisan expert analysis on a wide variety of issues involving science, technology, and public policy. After two 6-year terms as head of OTA, Jack was selected by President Clinton to be the assistant to the President for Science and Technology and director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, job he performed with great distinction until he decided to step down early this calendar year. In his role as the president's Science Advisor, as in so much of his career, Jack Gibbons has been a forceful and effective advocate for the importance of understanding and using science and technology, programs and policies designed to address larger public issues.

Several of us from here at MIT, myself included, greatly enjoyed the pleasure of working directly with Jack through our joint service on the President's Committee of Advisors in Science and Technology. Through that close professional association, we have come to appreciate that Jack is exactly the kind of scientist that President Compton found so valuable and virtuous. He's a leader not only in his own field, but in the complex and demanding business of bringing science and technology into the mainstream of public discourse and policy making. Jack's most recent book is entitled This Gifted Age: Science and Technology at the Millennium.

His lecture for today's entitled The 21st Century: Will Science and Technology Contribute to Society or Scuttle it? His second lecture which will be delivered here at the same time on Monday, November 30, bears an equally provocative title Governance of Science and Technology: Theory, Myths and Reality. I think I know how he will answer the question in the title of this day's lecture, I have no idea what he will say in November. But please join me in welcoming an outstanding colleague and good friend, Jack Gibbons.

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JACK GIBBONS: I think I have my mic on. Is that right? Good. President Vest, how indeed nice it is to be with you and to come to MIT in this capacity. I'm greatly honored by the invitation. And I look forward to the weeks and months ahead, and working with individuals, and departments, and programs, as well as these several Compton lectures. I want to especially thank Chuck Vest for taking the time to introduce me, he doesn't have very much to do, of course, as you understand.

Chuck, when he came to MIT, was also very, very generous in his time with a lot of issues we had to deal with in Washington. And I don't know whether his wife has forgiven me yet, but I remember on one occasion in which he was helping try to figure out what in the world to do with the space station back in 1993. And I think his last night on that project, he worked not only through the night but saw the dawn and sun come up the next morning while he was still trying to finish that work up for the president. I think that's first time that had happened to him since graduate school. But I want to, in case you don't know, I want to congratulate Chuck in public for the fact that he's now a grandfather. You don't look it Chuck, but we're very proud and happy for you, and for Becky.

It's no accident my coming to MIT, I yearned to come to the place that I saw as a symbol of the front edge of higher education and research in public service in terms of science and technology in our nation's future. There's no question in my mind what MIT carries the leading flag in that regard. And I'm, therefore, feel a little bit like carrying coals to Newcastle to talk with you about these issues. But nonetheless, bear with me and you can attack me when I finish my lecture.

I do, in this first lecture, want to say that I'm drawing on not only my past work at OTA and the Office of Science and Technology Policy, but also to a degree in my prior experiences in research and in technology development. The course now, I'm out of government and I have changed my pace. My office is now on the farm in northern Virginia, a comfortable hour away from downtown Washington.

And in setting up shop at home, I had to get a computer set and a lot of other things going on. So I got some advice call a Farmer's Guide to Computers. And there's several definitions I thought I would share with you. To log on means making the wood stove hotter. Monitor means keeping an eye on the wood stove. Download means getting the firewood off the pickup truck. Floppy disk means what you get from piling too much firewood up. And windows means what to shut when it's 30 degrees outside. And finally, mainframe is what holds up the barn roof.

So if you have to remember to get your term straight, even though the words may be identical, the meanings are different in one setting versus another. But thank you so much for inviting me to be with you during this 1998-99 winter season. The title I conjured up for the talk is a teaser, you know it. It's not either/or, it's always both.

Robert Lewis Stevenson said that nature never gives anything to anyone, everything is sold at a price. It is only in the ideals of abstraction that choice comes without consequence. Alvin Weinberg talked about nuclear energy in terms of the faustian bargain. If you want to take the powerful opportunities of nuclear energy, you also have to make the bargain of stewardship. And because technology is the human use or application of knowledge, and because humanity always displays the passion for both good and evil, there's no question but what powerful technology will add either to the benefit of humankind or to its detriment, depending on how humans use it.

And in thinking about this question of the 21st century and the role of technology, I had a few images flash across my mind. First of all, national defense these days is certainly governed by the fact that we have the science and technology edge that we have obtained since World War II. It is an enormous asset for us in terms of providing an assured national security at a much lower investment of people and money than otherwise would be required by virtue of having front of the edge technology. The food we eat, the drink we drink, the shelter over our heads, the interior lights, and the illumination, and the heating and cooling, all of these things are direct results of technology that would have been the envy of [INAUDIBLE].

Disease these days is not exactly on the retreat, but we're certainly gaining in terms of the ultimate goal of, as one physician described to me once, having people turn into alkaline batteries. You know, an alkaline battery runs, and runs, and runs until it just suddenly dies instead of petering out like a carbon based battery. And he said that's our objective for humanity, we should turn people into alkaline batteries. And I think we're doing a pretty good job of it, given the extension of useful, active, healthy lives that come about by virtue of technology and medicine.

Job increase has been enormous, because of the opportunities provided by advancing technology for people to use them themselves in very productive ways. Transportation is beyond belief of my father even, much less my grandfather. Communication and access to knowledge is beyond the belief of people who thought about this only 20 years ago, before internet had its exposion and the opportunities now in this latter day succession to the invention of the printing press to have access to knowledge from whence commerce power and influence. Environmental wastes is another area where we have made extraordinary gains. Let me give you an example.

This first slide I took from a magazine some years back. I think it was advertising sewer treatment. But can you imagine our cities today without the capability that technology provides for gathering, and assimilating, and treating wastes that otherwise would make urban living simply impossible. The convenience and amenities provided by technology are essentially too numerous to mention. And I think Oliver Wendell Holmes captured the positive spirit of science and technology when he wrote the following. Holmes wrote, "true science knows no bounds. It penetrates into every domain without fear and it serves all men without prejudice or favor. Its work is to substitute facts for appearances, demonstrations for impressions, and beneficial realities for those many things that ignorance and greed proclaim to be impossible. For suffering humanity," says Holmes, "it is hope and promise."

Now, I could spend all day talking about the goods, but as Ken Boulding always said, you should also talk about the bad, because that's the other side of the coin. And in my thinking about today's talk and where we are now, I thought about just several things that I think we should admit to. First of all, that technology has led to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in a form and scale never before witnessed on the face of the Earth, both nuclear and biochemical weapons. Their use not only by nation states but also by small terrorist groups now makes the world a very different place and security a very different thing from what it was a scant several decades ago.

Population growth has been extraordinary, driven by the fact that health has brought death control downward and birthrates remain high. And the consequence of the difference between those two functions led to a very rapid increase in world population.

For example, when DDT, after post-World War II, was introduced into Sri Lanka, death rates fell by a factor of two very suddenly. And the population of Sri Lanka doubled in 17 years. This is a benefit of death control but the disbeneift of having a sudden imbalance between two things that only slowly change.

And it's not just numbers. It's an issue of quality of life that goes with population. And this is another ad from a, in this case, newspaper. Who wants to go to Jamaica in the summer when you have the beach right here? Well, these are people. And I think the ocean starts about here. But you can see the problem illustrated by this, namely that we have, in terms of quiet, empty spaces for those uniquely human functions of population in many ways is already outstripping our resources.

See how this works. I'm going to run back over to the podium. Along with a population explosion and the press on people comes also a loss of privacy. That is a child of some our modern technology, derived through information technology's expansion and such things as DNA typing, which now give us different and additional reasons to have to apply governance to the use of these technologies in order to assure traditional freedoms of choice and of privacy. This is going to be a matter of continuing and increasing concern. If we want the benefits of advances in information technology and molecular biology, we also must, along with that, join with public policies that help assure our traditional freedoms that can be infringed by the misuse of that kind of a technology.

Our environmental losses have been large. We have lost some species at an increasing rate. The Chesapeake Bay oyster yield is now 1% of what it was 100 years ago. Zebra mussels now cost us nearly $7 billion a year in management costs in the US alone. We are doing things with our atmosphere on a global scale that I will return to in a few minutes. In other words, we have some bads that come along with the goods.

And we have rising conflicts between technology and its use on the one hand and traditional ethical and religious and cultural values. This is perhaps personified by the great writer and anthropologist Loren Eiseley, who made this exclamation in his book, a book called The Firmament of Time. Eiseley, I think, personified the frustration that a lot of people have about technology, and it's kind of tough to read. But I think it's important for those of us in technology to understand this feeling.

Eiseley says, it is with the coming of man that a vast hole seems to open up in nature, a vast black whirlpool spinning faster and faster consuming flesh, stones, soil, minerals, sucking down the lightning, wrenching power from the atom until the ancient sounds of nature are drowned in a cacophony of something that is no longer nature, something instead which is loose and knocking at the world's heart, something demonic and no longer planned. Escaped it may be, spewed out of nature, contending in a final giant's game against its master. Those are tough words from Eiseley. But I think they very poignantly point out the frustration that many people have about the way things are moving under the influence of advancing technology.

Most recently, Pope Paul, just this month on the 20th anniversary of [INAUDIBLE] encyclical warns about science and technology progress as putting humanity at risk. And I think that while that's true, that's but one side of the coin. And I'm afraid that it's up to us to make sure people understand that with every powerful idea, including technology, one has the power both for good and evil.

So what lessons do I draw from this litany? First of all, the power of free and open society, of open markets, and seed ground for innovation such as we find in our country provides for efficiency. There is a concomitant need, though, to manage externalities and to assure level playing fields. But there is an enormous power never before witnessed in terms of creativity and its influence on the way people live and their options and opportunities that derive from technology.

The second observation or lesson is that the power that science and technology have to provide brand new options to do things, to achieve goals, to provide for our wants and needs, both the goods and the bads, but you can't have one without the other. The third observation is this extraordinarily pervasive and growing dependence that humanity has on science and technology for its livelihood and its future. Fourth, the stresses imposed on societies and social institutions by the high and even accelerating rates of change driven, of course, by science and technology change. And the results of this can be seen in so many ways, the rise of neoconservatism, of creationism. A lot of other, as it were, retreats, I think, are outward examples of the concern people have about this almost intolerable rate of change that they seem to see being imposed upon their traditional thoughts and values.

And finally, in terms of observations from this litany of the recent past, in general, I think the dynamics of exponential expansionism are catching up with us. The exponential has for a long time been the surrogate for progress. As long as we can grow, things can get better. Growth measured by way of the extent to which we consume raw materials.

I reserve the word growth. I'd rather call it expansionism because growth can mean different things to different people. But this 20th century paradigm of growth through expansionism, of the exponential being our salvation, I think, is now anachronistic.

Robert Heilbroner, who is a, I guess, combined sociologist and economist, Chuck, if I remember right, wrote recently that the coming generation, he said, will be the last generation to seize control over technology before technology irreversibly seizes control over it. A generation is not much time, he says, but it is some time. And that's pretty serious business to say that somehow technology as an external force somehow from society has that kind of capacity and power. And I think it confuses technology on the one hand from ourselves on the other. And I think we need to concentrate and understand, though, the feeling that arises in people who would make statements like that.

Well, what about the 21st century? That's what I came here to talk about. But you can't look ahead without looking back a little bit. I would make several observations about the 21st century. First of all, I don't think there's any end in sight for discovery or the development of new options. Every day tells us that we're still, if anything, on an accelerating pace of discovery.

Lewis Thomas said before he died that he thought history would show that the greatest discovery of the 20th century was the discovery of the extent of human ignorance. And I think that may well carry over to the 21st century. But it certainly is an apt statement about the extent to which knowledge is constantly an unfolding phenomenon. And that will happen right straight on into the next century.

The second thing I would say is that our economic market basket is growing and will continue to grow but that the contents of the market basket are and will be shifting depending on how we go about providing goods and services for the people's wants. There is no apparent limit, as far as I can tell, to greed or avarice that seems to be in our genes somehow. But there is indeed some hope and some evidence that we're beginning to think more carefully about what we mean by growth and progress.

For example, one statement that is very appealing to me is that there is a big difference between being rich and being wealthy. Being rich, on the one hand, is making lots of money. Being wealthy is having lots of time. And I think that notion of trade off between money and other desiderata is something that we may well want to pay more attention to in the coming century. And maybe technology will help us get there.

Third statement about the 21st century is that our global problems are indeed looming up on us. And I think it will be a century in which we will have to become constantly and ever more carefully thinking in global terms and linking our local actions to global actions and our actions now to events and actions in the future. Population is growing. We hope that the 21st century will exhibit a leveling off or at least a tendency in that direction of global population.

We know our atmosphere is becoming markedly changed by human activities. And I'll return to that in a few minutes. And we know that our biosphere is being significantly impacted globally by human activities in terms of diversity and depletion of species and the loss of habitats. As a consequence of some of these as well as other things, social stresses are indeed amplified. And as I said before, religious fundamentalism, economic frustration emerges from these kinds of stresses and can result in violent conflict.

And in terms of global problems, deadly conflict and terrorism is certainly not new in the world. But it is more intense and more deadly with the modern technology. There is indeed no hiding place now anywhere over the globe from this kind of frustration exhibiting itself in terrorism. So just as economics are now globally tied and integrated, so too is environment and security.

Now the thing that strikes me is that many of the biggest challenges presented to us, population, climate change, biodiversity, have large hysteresis in them. And they present conflicts of time constants involved. In other words, they seem to develop fairly slowly as measured in terms of political response and the attention gotten by the public. And at the same time, many of them are nearly irreversible or even completely irreversible in the future. So there's not a symmetric oncoming and outgoing. There is a hysteresis in the process.

And that presents some real problems. Adlai Stevenson once observed that American people never seem to see the handwriting on the wall until their back is up against it. And I think it's probably a truism. It's not just American people. It's generally people have that feeling. The closer to them personally or in their backyard, the more attention it gets.

And global biodiversity change, global climate change are not things that, at least superficially, present a lot of handwriting on the wall until our back is up against it. And Mario Merlino knows all about-- hi, Mario-- knows all about that. And the question is, how can you take such an enormously important thing, the planetary commons and transform it from a Never Never Land way down the road, therefore, I'll forget about it to an issue that is perceived and interpreted as something of immediate concern to us, immediate long-term rational self-interest concern?

Most of these issues lie outside the traditional marketplace. They are indeed the so-called global commons. And the problem is that we are now treading on the global commons to the point that it's not a free good anymore as we used to think. I remember when I was a kid. Chuck, I'm older than you are. But I remember when I was a kid, people would say, what do you mean? It's a free country, ain't it? And free country meant, in those days, it's a linear country. If you get into trouble, you just need to move a little bit farther away from your neighbor. It had no sense of that kind of interconnectedness or non-linearity that now is reality for all of us.

Well, what's the point? The point is, I think, that was sufficient lead time, and I would proffer this, with sufficient lead time, many, if not most of these issues that I've spoken about can be addressed using ingenuity with science and technology. But we need the political will to do so. We need to catalyze a political or public will to take action on issues before our back is up against the wall.

There are some successful lessons. I think you all know about stratospheric ozone as a good recent example of a successful lesson in this regard in which between Mario and some other people, they finally understood what was happening in the atmosphere and were concerned about certain manmade chemicals affecting the thickness of the stratospheric ozone layer, which in turn protects life on the Earth from ultraviolet rays from the sun. And people began to worry about what other kind of chemicals could be used for refrigerants and the likes that didn't have this unhappy property.

And so they began working along and the chemists came up with some wonderful technology substitutes for these unhappy, these molecules that are triggering the destruction of stratospheric ozone. Industry understood that this was a market opportunity and that they could substitute one for another. In fact, there were some substitutes for the chlorofluorocarbons that were cheaper and more effective than the chlorofluorocarbons.

And just as we were trying to form a public policy to collectively have all the world's nations work on getting this stratospheric ozone protection up, along came the observations of these enormous holes in the ozone in the Antarctic. And the explanation related back to human activities. And to me, it's still a wonder because I've been to the South Pole to look up into the heavens whether it be in Boston or in McMurdo Sound and see this enormous atmosphere up there and know that it is being materially affected, specifically by human activities, for the first time since humanity came about. But it's a good example of where we did as a world of nations find a technical alternative, institute some price changes, which pushed the market in the right direction, and put in place a process whereby within about 50 years, 30 to 50 years, we will find the ozone depletion dropping off and moving back toward greater protection. But mind you, it'll take about a half a century before we really see significant improvements in that erosion, a long time constant.

Another is the Clean Air Act, which as you know was passed with great trepidation because there was concern about the cost of cleaning up the air. The estimates turned out to be about 10 times more costly than the actual facts of the matter. Now why did the facts of the matter end up being so much less costly in cleaning up the air? Two reasons.

One was innovative technology. And the second was to institute trading of clean air rights. So that those who could clean up the air least costly were able to sell their capabilities to those that were emitting pollutants but it was too expensive to clean them up. So by trading these emission rights, where they were able to go the minimum cost path for the improvement in air pollution, and we ended up with about 10% of the original cost estimate to do the job that was needed. We're going to need some more of that in the future. But it's another good example where collective action can work.

Well, what about the future then? C.P. Snow once said, incidentally, that a sense of the future, and that's what we're here today to talk about, a sense of the future is behind all good politics. Unless one can have it, one can leave nothing either wise or decent to the world. It's really incumbent on us just to have the commitment to think about the future, not to know where it's going, but have a sense of where it may be going depending on the actions we take between now and then.

As Al Gore has frequently said, the thing about doing for the future is to do it smart and not do it dumb. And we know ourselves that we've done some dumb things in the past. And we hope that we don't repeat those in the future and that we can pass on some of those lessons to the third world. Doing things smart means using elegant and thoughtful technology.

Some of those examples, I would like to mention to you. One is the term sometimes called green manufacturing, others, industrial ecology. It's a very simple thing in principle. Elegant in practice and making its way now especially in Europe but also in the United States and the other advanced industrial countries.

The old method is to simply take a linear flow of materials and products and waste streams. And the newer notion is to integrate all the way across from the initial design of a product to its ultimate disposition and use of the materials. And in doing so, make a materials choice at the design end that's going to make the tail end of the system work a lot better. In other words, put a bubble around the entire production process rather than segregate these off into different parts.

A good lesson early to me in Tennessee was coal strip mining. Where the mining people used to just strip off the dirt, dump it down the hill, mine the coal, and then either leave or come back maybe and push some of the dirt back. That was very expensive and not very effective because they separated the recovery or restoration process from the mining process as though they were two different things. Then they began to realize that if they would integrate these two processes together and make recovery part and parcel of the mining process, they could do a more effective job.

And that's what's caused now the ability with full integration of the ultimate recovery and use of the land an integral part of the mining process. And it has resolved a lot of problems in the coalfields. The same generally in manufacturing, I think, is a very important idea to be going in. And we're making some good strides.

The second is in the transportation sector as an example. We now have, even though petroleum's prices are lower than they've ever been, we are making good progress on being able to use fuels for transportation, for instance, in automobiles at perhaps three times the efficiency of present automobiles with the same degree of comfort and safety and attractiveness. And this has so many public benefits as well as private benefits that there is a consortium of government and industry working together over a 10 year period to push the technologies ahead to the point that this can be a practical reality, a substitution, therefore, of elegant technology for what we used to have in the past.

As a consequence of that kind of work, you can devise the following sort of future scenario, this is time versus millions of barrels per day of oil for the United States. And the green is domestic production. The red is net imports. And the yellow line at the very top of the envelope is future demand for-- domestic demand for petroleum in the transportation sector. And you see if you introduce over time improved technologies simply for more efficient use of energy and also for alternative and supplementary fuels, you see what can happen. You can move from our domestic oil production upward by additional fuels from Alaska plus some alternative fuels, for example, from biomass and other domestic sources. This cuts into the net imports from the bottom.

And then one can lay in different scenarios of introducing efficient automobiles and trucks into the fleets so that the energy demand drops even though the expansion of transportation continues. This means one can move from an envelope of domestic consumption like this and very large imports down to a point that we could have imports that would be at almost a level amount by the time we get to between 2010 and 2020, which may well be a very important time because that's the time in which the demand from the emerging nations, India, China, others, will be having a much greater call on global petroleum availability. And this will help ease the pressure on global availability of petroleum.

An example, therefore, of long-term capital stock turnover, where the property of the capital stock is to provide that good or service with less energy intensiveness. Along with that in the 21st century is the undoubted question of how we move toward the next cycle of primary energy availability in the globe. These are cycles historic up to here of the dominance of wood and then coal and then oil and now very shortly natural gas. And that pattern continues on to about the middle of the coming century, during which nuclear and other advanced forms of energy are going to undoubtedly have to begin to make their play in the market. And how that divides out between different energy sources, or I call it energy sorcery, depends a lot on where technology takes us in the interim. But it's going to be an interesting half century.

Incidentally, historical context, look what's been happening to the carbon intensiveness of energy. This is a global plot. It goes from about 0.85 down to about 0.55 between 1850 and the year 2000 as a result of that substitution of moving from coal to petroleum to natural gas. So the carbon intensiveness of our energy system has indeed been changing quite steadily. And that's to our credit. And we have more to go. But it's going to get tougher as we move on out into the 21st century.

In biotech, we have an enormous opportunity. As the president said, this may be the century for the life sciences where the 20th century was the century for the physical sciences. I can't separate them out that well myself. it's Harold Varmus said, medicine would be almost nowhere now if it weren't for crystallography and x-rays and all sorts of fancy physical techniques in order to do research and to carry out medical procedures but an age of science.

And biotechnology in terms of its impact on health, including its more effective means for birth control, especially for the developing countries, and biotech for food production will be enormous and important. And I think the challenge is full of opportunity for the coming century. In a sense, it'll be a molecular level succession to the green revolution in our food sector if we do it right and do it carefully.

In information technology and its impact on education and learning on worker productivity, on efficient use of resources, including energy and materials, enormous opportunities still lie ahead of us as we move more deeply into the age of information. And it's very difficult, as you know, to predict where things are going to go when things are changing still so very, very rapidly. But that just simply tells you the opportunity is there both upside and downside.

And finally, in weapons, I have to say that the opportunity now for the sequestration of nuclear weapons materials has never been greater. Things are happening pretty rapidly now. But we can ill afford to wait or slow down. The disposal of plutonium is a challenge but a lot of opportunities for doing things if we set our minds to it.

The use of technologies for effective national technical means of verification and monitoring are very important. As nations who don't necessarily trust each other must learn how to work with each other in terms of being comfortable about what the other country is doing. That all depends very deeply on technology development and the use of existing technology.

And there are some downsides. I'll give you four quick examples. One downside is proliferation of all sorts of weapons and methods for doing ill. It does go beyond nation states to individuals. And on top of this, I'm, frankly, personally very concerned about the talk of weaponization of space. That simply would open up in the name of somehow building a magic shield over our heads, which won't work, a way to spend a whole lot of money as we did in the '80s for naught. And we simply can't afford those kinds of spare resources. But mark my word, I think there's going to be a big fight in this coming decade in terms of understanding the cost of that impossible dream of building somehow a shield over continental America that will put in space the same thing we used to have for the oceans.

It's essentially an isolationist concept that I'm very much concerned about. Not about battlefield protection, ground-based protection against missiles but about continental wide area protection. Fast way to spend money. I almost lost my job at OTA when I fought the space-based weapons back in the early Reagan years. So I know what of I speak.

And I think another downside is the further loss of privacy, the further inroads to the notion of intellectual property. All of the other downside potentials of this extraordinarily powerful information technology that is going to be our salvation and yet, at the same time, something that will require careful thought on the governance of this extraordinary development. But the slowly changing things worry me even more. Let me speak just for a few minutes about two of them.

First of all, I want to speak a little bit about population. Now I think most of you know about some demographics and the so-called demographic charts of age distributions. This is of male and female to the right and left of zero line simply to show a nearly symmetric function.

And if you look at the United States, this is about what it looked like about five years ago. It hasn't changed that much. Namely, we have a bulge of population in the 20 to 40. That's most of you, isn't it? Here you are in the bulge. And that's partly due to the baby boom and the large number of children being born post-war World War II era and beyond. And then a move back toward a replacement rate fertility rate. And of course, as this bulge moves toward the later years, you run into a lot of problems of Social Security, of jobs, of working people versus retired people, a lot of very important sociological implications of a transient nature of moving from a expanding population to one that is dynamic or static.

Now if you look at Italy, it's almost a vertical line. It's almost distribution straight from old to very young. If you go and look at, say, our neighbor in Mexico, you find this kind of age distribution, enormous number of young people with very few of the very old people, which should make these folks feel better because they have all the young folks to help take care of them when they're old, right? But that can't go on forever because that produces a kind of a population growth that's simply not sustainable.

And China has gone from this now to try to move toward a stable population. And they have that problem of the bulge. And if you try to move that bulge too quickly by decreasing birth rates over time, then you find that you have too few young people entering the labor market and too many old people. So this thing can't change fast. It takes a century or two to make a major shift in the population profile of our countries. It's the kind of insidious slow moving thing that unless you think about it carefully and plan for it over the long term, you can get into a lot of trouble.

I'll show you an example because not doing anything is in itself a very bad idea. Here is southern Africa, south [INAUDIBLE] Africa. And these are not data. These are projections based on population in 1980 of about a half a billion people with three different scenarios, namely that the growth rate, the fertility rate moves from present relatively high numbers to replacement level, in this case, by the year 2030. Alternatively, to postpone it and have it hit replacement level and then stay there at about 2045. Versus waiting until about 2065 until it gets to the replacement level. And from that point outward, the same.

Now the resulting population from waiting 30 years versus 50 years versus 70 years is an ultimate population that changes from a little over 1 and 1/2 billion people to about 4 and 1/2 billion people. So waiting that extra time, essentially, more than triples the population of south [INAUDIBLE] Africa. And that's known as sort of the momentum of population and the time delays between fertility of stability, as it were, and ultimate population, the run of population.

And if we think that Africa is going to be better off with 4 and 1/2 billion people instead of about 1 billion people, then we're thinking wrongly. An abject lesson in the reality of the numbers, was it Bertrand Russell that said, man would rather commit suicide than learn arithmetic? And I think getting a feeling of the arithmetic on these things is going to be very important for us as we go into the 21st century because-- can you see that OK? This is population and development. I'm sorry it's so faded. I'm not very good at making color graphics yet. You see I'm no longer at the White House.

This is developed countries. And you see by about the year 2000, it's more or less a level number here. This is the so-called developing regions of the world. And you see what's happening since 1950. And the optimistic projection by the United Nations is that somehow almost as if by magic after the year 2000, we're going to suddenly change our mind and start leveling out population. I will believe it when it happens. I hope it does happen with I think the help of advanced family planning and health care delivery and economic growth for these people in the right sectors, we can see population begin to level out. Otherwise, you can see the enormous problem. And that will show up in a few minutes in another way.

So that's the first question. The second question is, and I only have a couple more, is water availability. When I visited China a year ago, I was taken down to near the mouth of the Yellow River. The Yellow River is one of the roughly five major river systems that were the cradles of civilizations in the past 10 millennia. The Yellow River for months of this year was dry at the mouth. It was all taken out for agriculture primarily but other uses as well as climate change that's occurring in northern China.

That is a microcosm of a general issue of water availability as populations grow and as needs grow driven in part by the demand of people for water and also for changing climate and the depletion of fossil resources such as our water under the Ogallala formation in the Midwest that was stored up during the Pleistocene period and is now being used up over a period of less than 100 years. Biodiversity loss is enormous. The species are suffering from invasions of foreign invasives. The habitats are being destroyed systematically, especially in the most productive of our biological regions, the tropical forests, the germ lines are being depleted.

And that you can reflect back on land cover changes where we see how quickly here since 1900 an erosion of the amount of forest lands and the rapid expansion of pasture lands and crop lands due to people's expansion of these uses. Carefully done, I think we can do OK. But if we aren't careful about what happens to diversity and resilience of our biological systems, we're going to be in trouble.

And if you look at the mammal species, both mammals and birds, over the period from about 1600 to now, you see that that chart is rising very, very rapidly. And it's a matter of concern because that's our biological warehouse of very interesting molecules and animals. As well as a lot of the joy of living, I think, is to live in a very diverse world. And we're in trouble there. How much more trouble, we don't know.

But the 21st century is going to be that time of, as it were, a moment of truth in that regard. There are things we can do technologically to assure that we maintain our existence in a biologically diverse world. But it won't happen without some careful thought.