Dissecting Irrational Fear: To Boldly Go Where No One Has Gone Before

I read the other day (more like 10 weeks ago when I got the idea for this blog) that 3-Dimensional printers may be coming to our homes in the next 5 years for the affordable price of 1 to 5 thousand dollars. At first I thought, “wow, pretty cool. I can make my own Barbies”, but shortly thereafter (and before you make the assumption that such silly thoughts are all that go on in my brain (you will have more proof later)), two forces that have long waged war within my mind began to battle again: technology versus nature. I love science fiction but once it starts to become science fact (which history shows is generally inevitable), technophobia overcomes my excitement. My general over-reactive fear is that the world will become like Coruscant, the Star Wars planet that is almost entirely covered with buildings. When this happens, I take a step back and analyze my fear.

First, I realized that 3D printers are strangely suggestive of one of K. Eric Drexler’s machines from his book “Engines of Creation”, which describes a machine that uses nanotechnology to create from the atom up any object one desires including a slab of beef. If this was written in the context of a science fiction, I would be highly entertained. Drexler however, describes it with the hope and conviction that some day it will become a reality. My entertainment is replaced with a morbid fascination of what the world would be like with this kind of machine and the abuses that would come along with it (I shudder to think, but we won’t go there because we are dissecting a more irrational fear at the moment. So for now, I tell myself that this machine is unlikely to be invented in my lifetime.)

Though Drexler's machine would definitely work in a world that has no natural habitat like Coruscant, it is still a long way off from our present “engine of creation” which chiefly involves the making of more plastic objects. This, if you boil it down, represents my main cause for concern here which stems from an article I read a while back: The Feminization of American Culture. What does feminization and plastic have to do with each other? According to Leonard Sax, in a nutshell, plastic contains synthetic estrogens, and in highly industrialized areas there is a direct correlation between the amount of the synthetic estrogen leakage into the water and the androgyny of aquatic males. But more importantly, studies show that men in industrialized areas also have a lower sperm count than those in rural areas. (Read the article, it is quite an interesting theory.) That’s right you nay-sayers, technology could very well be the extinction of man. I shouldn’t fear a world like Coruscant but rather one that is described in “Children of Men”.

But just as I’m about to throw technology to the wind for a life in the country where I pump water, am married to a fertile man, and hang up my laundry in the nude, I realize I would be shunning a key factor that has advanced man’s knowledge of his natural surroundings. The same technology that gives us artificially flavored food, which puts synthetic estrogen in my water, and that causes black dust to settle on my roses, is the same technology that has allowed me to feed my burning desire to know the intricacies and secrets of the universe. For instance, the advancement of technology has allowed the Hadron Collider to be invented which will hopefully give us some clues as to what dark matter really is. A question I’m sure, that is plaguing everyone’s minds. Okay, so I don’t have a burning desire just for knowledge’s sake (I’m trying to write a science fiction story at the moment) but I do find physics fascinating and I read up on it when I have the chance and when I need to do research.

Suffice it to say, this dichotomy will probably never resolve itself logically within my brain. So, rather than fearing a future that is like “Children of Men” or Coruscant, I retreat into a fantasy world like (and this is where I reveal my ultimate geekiness and where perhaps my sanity breaks down) Star Trek: TNG. Why Star Trek? Because that is where the holodeck exists, of course. Obviously, I’m not really expecting nor hoping that the world will end up like Star Trek (I would really worry about me, if you aren’t already), but in order to imagine any kind of paradise in this lifetime, my mind won’t rationally allow one to exist unless I first imagine programming it into my personal holodeck, that way both technology and nature (though “nature” will never really be real in a holodeck (but what’s really real, really? Everything is made of the same stuff and who knows what subatomic “particles” are truly made of anyway?)) can coexist without as many toxic byproducts. And, if you think about it, it is an appropriate evolution. As nature has helped us create technology, technology then recreates nature. (Right, of course, makes perfect sense.)