I borrowed the title from The Tempest. Shakespeare won’t mind, and who better to express complex truths succinctly? Yogi Berra, maybe. OK, so he didn’t write plays; he made them. But the Yankee curmudgeon who hit rather than writ was nonetheless an astute observer of that virulent condition afflicting humans called life. “It’s deja vu all over
again,” Berra was heard to say. Undoubtedly more than once.

I’ve been reading a little history and a little prophecy recently (medieval and Renaissance history courtesy of William Manchester and predictions for the coming millennium from the fertile mind of physicist Freeman Dyson) and was persuaded that Manchester and Berra were on to something. If the past is a preface, the present is a rerun.

However humble in origin, the blooms of invention that crown our technological age were planted in centuries past. From a historical perspective, progress is a series of connecting dots. Tools and contexts change, but the underlying motivations that drive progress do not; thus, motivation becomes the connective tissue of history. Intentions unrestricted by time and place lend events separated by centuries and continents a remarkable similarity.

Reading Manchester’s book, A World Lit Only by Fire, I started to look at history through this connective weave and found some unanticipated threads linking the past to the present. Take the Internet. If one of the primary features of the Internet is its capacity to link peoples around the world, then Magellan—the first to circumnavigate the
globe—metaphorically laid the original cable. He forged the first chain of global connections while redefining a world of previously indefinite size and shape, much as the Internet is redefining our own relationship to the world. Magellan also opened trade routes and made contact with heretofore unknown peoples and lands—a process continued today by the expanding World Wide Web.

Spain’s impetus for funding Magellan’s exploration was its desire to seek new territory, acquire resources, establish trade routes, and, by force or faith, convert the native peoples it encountered. Again, this is not entirely dissimilar to the forces propelling the growth of the Internet.

Global trade and communication are, after all, the essence of the World Wide Web. Like wealth-seeking Spanish monarchs, those who use the Internet commercially seek to acquire either some resource (buyers) or market share (sellers), and for today’s sovereign- equivalents (multinational corporations), expanding market share is the 20th century’s version of claiming new territory. As for converting natives through faith or force, one

result of global economic linkage is, arguably, the unyielding pressure applied to every recalcitrant nation and indigenous tribe to embrace the blessings of the free
market—through economic coercion, if necessary.

The major expeditions of Magellan’s day were highly leveraged business ventures—not unlike Amazon.com, which has yet to make a dollar but is financed on the hopes of a future bonanza. Magellan’s fleet of five ships was essentially a state-subsidized floating corporation, and, like many of today’s enterprises, its success hinged on the quality and availability of data. That data was compiled at great risk and meticulously stored in logs called rutters, which served as nautical databases. Data was collected in such volume and detail that it is reminiscent of data warehousing practices. Manchester notes that “everything went in [the rutters], everything...tides, reefs, channels, magnetic compass bearings between ports and headlands, the strength and direction of winds, the number of days a master kept his vessel on each tack, where he found fresh water...even the changing color of the sea.” It was the mapping of the unknown and the law that governs the usefulness of data (GIGO) applied with a vengeance: Garbage In, Get Lost and Die. So, like any valuable and confidential corporate database, rutters were aggressively protected and were never permitted to be published.

Publishing was, of course, very new to medieval Europe. Gutenberg’s bible had just rolled off the press in 1457, and his creation of moveable type (primitive word processing) would have profound benefits for Western civilization. Nonetheless, like any new technology that threatens to empower the masses, it was roundly criticized by some among the power elite. “The invention of printing,” Manchester documents, “was denounced by, among others, politicians and ecclesiastics who feared it as an instrument which could spread subversive ideas.” How right they were. In their fear, however, these critics were not so different from their intellectual descendants who today call for censorship of the Internet, citing its moral subversiveness.

If Gutenberg was the first publisher, Martin Luther, the spiritual insurgent who challenged 1,000 years of unquestioned dominance by the Catholic Church, was the first desktop publisher. In our time, desktop publishing was similarly perceived as a revolution, giving each person the power to see his ideas in print regardless of how far removed from mainstream thought. Luther’s 95 theses, nailed to the castle church door in Wittenberg, were, indeed, seditious and had no hope of being published by conventional means. It required, in a sense, the creation of personal publishing. What made Luther’s posting evolutionary, however, was not the fact that he published it himself but that it was written in the language of the common man—in this case, German. Prior to Luther’s lament, the language of the printed word was almost exclusively Latin, which could be read by only a handful of educated people. By the simple act of making the printed word—and therefore ideas—accessible, Luther ignited the smoldering Renaissance. The printed word had burst the confines of monastic libraries and, for the first time, made its way to the desktop, or at least, the refectory table.

In what Luther would consider ironic proof of Alphonse Karr’s dictum that the more things change, the more they remain the same, the sale of indulgences (the practice of paying for exemption from punishment after death, to which Luther objected vehemently) continues over 400 years later with only slight refinement. Sister Mary Rinaldi, director of development for the Selesian Sisters in New Jersey, recently revealed that more than 2,500 benefactors paid $100 and up for nuns to pray for them daily.

Money, of course, whether obtained through the support of the faithful or by exploration and conquest, must eventually be counted. It is not surprising, therefore, that the technology of computing was, almost from the start, placed in the service of accounting. Today, business computers are, first and foremost, sophisticated counting devices, managing volume and complexity beyond the average person’s math skills.

The average medieval official, according to Manchester, had no math skills at all. This shortcoming presented a unique problem for the keeper of the royal treasury, known as the exchequer. His remedy (which was also the source of his title) was a checkered cloth

the Arabs used to do rudimentary math. It was an early precursor to the calculator, but the reason for its use spans the centuries. Are imported medieval counting aids so different from the proliferation of foreign calculators used by those who are uncomfortable doing mental math?

Despite Manchester’s rich account, comparatively little is known about medieval life. The anonymity of the common people “approached the absolute,” states Manchester, “and so did their mute acceptance of it.” The cathedral in Canterbury took an astonishing 23 generations to complete; Chartres was 18 generations in the making. “Yet,” says Manchester, “we know nothing of the architects and builders.” It is a modesty not shared in a time when everyone is scrambling for his or her 15 minutes of fame. Yet anonymity has found a resurgence on the Internet. Anonymous chat rooms, the nameless perusal of distant data, the pursuit of private fixations, and even remote romance and clandestine attack can all be launched by unnamed parties from unknown locations.

At the end of the first millennium, while Leif Ericsson sailed toward the American continent, the faithful in Europe gathered to await the Armageddon. One thousand years later, some are still waiting. To assuage their anxiety, an enterprising Japanese inventor decided to apply market principles to pending global demise by offering modern mystics the Armageddon bra, an undergarment that warns the wearer of incoming missile or meteor attack. Alas, sales are reportedly slow, since it regrettably works best when worn on the outside.

In A World Lit Only by Fire, Manchester wrote about the immovable object that was medieval life and the irresistible forces of the Renaissance that would shatter it, much as the computer—the single most powerful and widely applicable tool of human invention—and its spawn, the Internet, promise to reshape our own era.

Though it is instructive to occasionally glance backward, since it is there the path was forged that led us to this moment, our hopes and concerns point eternally ahead. C.F. Kettering’s reasoning was inescapable: “We should all be concerned about the future because we will have to spend the rest of our lives there.”

While life is best understood backward, it must, as Kierkegaard said, immortalizing the obvious, be lived forward. So, as we enter the new millennium with all of its promise and forecasts of doom, I offer the forward-thinking predictions of physicist Freeman Dyson, a towering intellect whose genius is tempered by gentle optimism and compassion. Dyson believes that three technologies will dominate the new millennium: the Sun, the Genome, and the Internet, which he persuasively wrote about in a book bearing that title.

The sun, the earth’s abiding energy source, will in the next century finally become our primary energy font, Dyson foresees. The reasons he cites are based on both economics and social equity. “Solar energy is distributed equitably over the earth,” he notes, and it is abundant where it is most needed: “in the countryside rather than in cities [and] in the tropical countries where most of the population lives rather than in temperate latitudes.” As solar capture and storage improves, many grindingly poor, resource-meager nations will harvest energy resources plentiful enough to transform the lives of their citizens. “Each square mile in the tropics,” Dyson notes, “receives about a thousand megawatts averaged over day and night.” Such a bounty could support a dense population equipped with a full range of modern electric conveniences.

Dyson anticipates the development and distribution of small, single-family solar units that will bring power to the remotest villages and eliminate the need for a costly infrastructure of powerlines, transformers, and central generators. But electrical power is only a small part of the promise of solar energy. The places where solar energy intersects with genetic engineering will be transformative.

Traditionally, solar energy is stored in either photoelectric panels, which produce electricity, or energy crops, which produce fuel. With advances in genomic manipulation, Dyson envisions an energy crop that would not need to be harvested at all. Imagine a permanent forest of diverse trees genetically engineered to “convert sunlight to liquid fuel and deliver the fuel directly through their roots to a network of underground pipelines.”

Such a breakthrough is closer than we might think. The sequencing of genes from bacteria to humans is in full swing. Major crop plants are already being genetically altered to make them resistant to pests and frost. Within a few decades, Dyson predicts, “We shall have achieved a deep understanding of the genome, an understanding that will allow us to breed trees that will turn sunlight into fuel”—and much more. Trees, Dyson says, can also be genetically programmed to produce such seemingly improbable items as silicon chips and silicon film for photovoltaic collectors. The cost of manufacturing could be reduced to the cost of sunlight. Designer bacteria will recycle the most hazardous waste, and “it might even be possible to build roads and buildings biologically, breeding little polyps to lay down durable structures on land in the same way as their cousins build coral reefs in the ocean.” Creating riches from common materials: the ancient fable of Rumpelstiltskin made fact through biological manipulation.

“The basic patterns of genetic control,” Dyson notes, “are the same in yeast and fruit flies and mice and humans, so that we can learn from experiments with yeast and fruit flies and mice how human babies grow.” And once we have that knowledge, we can, of course, change how humans grow and what they grow into. Want to create a whole team of Michael Jordans or a warrior race or a Mozart on demand? Want to breed for looks or skill or intellect? Want to grow spare body parts in case yours fail? Pandora’s box has been opened, and wishing will not close it. Dyson bluntly states that “the game of evolution...will in the future be played by humans and machines working together.” A daunting prospect since human brilliance and human folly so often share the same axis.

Just months after Dyson published these predictions, Dr. J. Craig Venter, chairman of the Institute for Genomic Research in Rockville, Maryland, announced that he had devised a blueprint for creating a synthetic bacteria that can move, eat, grow, and reproduce using artificial DNA. One newspaper report glowed: “The mystery of creation, which took nature hundreds of millions of years, may now be accomplished by Man within five
years.”

Others are gathering existing DNA samples in an attempt to bring back extinct animals like the dodo and the carrier pigeon. One Japanese industrialist is reportedly obsessed with reincarnating the woolly mammoth. (His neighbors are less enthusiastic.) The implications are staggering: the creation of life under human control; a complete rewrite of Genesis; from synthetic viruses that will replace the surgeon’s knife and eliminate the need for chemotherapeutic poisons to biological warfare agents immune to everything.

The computer will be the dominant tool in the creation of new life, and, Dyson predicts, we will be unable to escape or fully control the ubiquitous systems that govern almost every aspect of modern life.

As revolutionary as genomic manipulation promises to be, however, Dyson believes that the most important technology of the new millennium will be the Internet. “This will not be the Internet of today,” says Dyson, “accessible only to computer-literate people in rich countries. It will be a truly global Internet, using a network of satellites in space for communication with places that fiber optics cannot reach and connected to local networks in every village. The new Internet will end the cultural isolation of poor countries and poor people.”

The architecture for a genuinely global Internet is already under development. The proposed Teledesic system will consist of 288 low-orbit satellites that will enable any two points on the globe to communicate. The larger challenge, says Dyson, is “the problem of the last mile”: how, precisely, to connect remote individuals to the nearest Internet terminal. An inexpensive and flexible solution was developed by Paul Baran, coincidentally the original inventor of the Internet. The system is called Ricochet and consists of small wireless receivers and transmitters able to switch frequencies constantly to prevent interference from like devices. Each user, however, would require a modem to communicate by radio with the local network. This, in turn, requires electricity, which, in Dyson’s mind, would come from the disbursement of the solar technology described above.

Solar energy, genetic engineering, and the Internet, working together, will, Dyson believes, spread wealth and opportunity to rural villages everywhere, freeing people from economic migration to megacities, which are increasingly unable to sustain them. He sees a socially just world where “every Mexican village becomes as wealthy as Princeton.” Dyson readily admits this is only a dream, but even though he is well past the age when most despair of changing the world, he still contends, “It does no harm to hope. We have a responsibility for making the networks serve the interests of social justice and human freedom. We need to apply a strong ethical push to add force to the technological pull.”

Dyson’s hope is the hope shared by humankind across the ages: that in the race between consciousness and disaster, consciousness may ultimately triumph.

History, as always, will record both with imperial disinterest. In the end, the new millennium will be what we make it. For the optimist, it is littered with possibilities; for the pessimist, it is heaped with peril. As for the past, with all its instructive potential, it will remain a dormant teacher unless we apply yesterday’s wisdom to tomorrow’s challenges.

“Tomorrow,” another legendary American observed, “is the most important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight, very clean. It’s perfect when it arrives, and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we’ve learned something from yesterday.” The speaker was John Wayne.

So listen up, pilgrim.

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