Isaac Asimov: Science, Technology and Space

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We don't have to decide which course of action will destroy us all or save us all, because the questions that await us aren't that simple. Instead, we have to decide which course of action has the best chance of allowing us to progress from this year to next year—and from this century to the next—with a maximum of safety. Nowhere is there a black and white dichotomy. Nowhere are the choices simple and clear.

Indeed, we're not likely to survive without some damage, no matter what direction we take.

PLOWBOY: In your opinion, what are mankind's prospects for the near future?

ASIMOV: To tell the truth, I don't think the odds are very good that we can solve our immediate problems. I think the chances that civilization will survive more than another 30 years—that it will still be flourishing in 2010—are less than 50 percent.

PLOWBOY: What sort of disaster do you foresee?

ASIMOV: I imagine that as population continues to increase—and as the available resources decrease—there will be less energy and food, so we'll all enter a stage of scrounging. The average person's only concerns will be where he or she can get the next meal, the next cigarette, the next means of transportation. In such a universal scramble, the Earth will be just plain desolated, because everyone will be striving merely to survive . . . regardless of the cost to the environment. Put it this way: If I have to choose between saving myself and saving a tree, I'm going to choose me.

Terrorism will also become a way of life in a world marked by severe shortages. Finally, some government will be bound to decide that the only way to get what its people need is to destroy another nation and take its goods . . . by pushing the nuclear button.

And this absolute chaos is going to develop—even if nobody wants nuclear war and even if every body sincerely wants peace and social justice—if the number of mouths to feed continues to grow. Nothing will be able to stand up against the pressure of the whole of humankind simply trying to stay alive!

PLOWBOY: How can we cope with this massive problem?

ASIMOV: I think we'll need some sort of world government. Yet we're not even beginning to move toward such unity today. On the contrary, as I look around the world, it seems to me that even our individual nations are becoming less powerful than before.

PLOWBOY: How can that be? The atomic bomb gives many such countries enough power to devastate the world.

ASIMOV: Yes, nations with nuclear bombs can destroy the world . . . but they can't win any wars. We didn't use such explosives in Vietnam, and the Soviet Union isn't using them in Afghanistan, because the bombs are simply too powerful.

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