Original subtitles

Surviving progress.

In defining progress,

I think it is very important to make a distinction

between good progress and bad progress.

I mean, things progress in a sense that they change.

Both in nature and in human society there appears to be a clear trend towards increasing complexity.

As change proceeds, we tend to delude ourselves that these changes always result in improvements.

....from the human point of view.

SURVIVING PROGRESS

We are now reaching a point in which technological progress and the increase in our economies and our numbers

threaten the very existence of humanity.

WHAT IS PROGRESS?

What is progress.....

I think..... mhm. That's too hard question....

When I think of the word 'progress'...

Progress will not come easy, it won't come quick, but today we have an opportunity to move forward.

It seems we are stuck in this trap for the last 200 years, since the industrial revolution

where we think progress is more of the same, like:

We should make our machines better and get more machines

but we've been doing it for 200 years, so doing more of that is not progress.

We're like stuck in this like a record......

Things are start out to seem like improvement or progress.

These things our seductive, there seems like there is no downside to these

but when they reach a certain scale they turn out to be dead ends, more traps.

PROGRESS TRAPS

I came up with a term 'progress trap' to define human behaviors that

sort of seem to be good things, seem to provide benefits in a short term

but which ultimately lead to disaster, because they are unsustainable.

One example would be going right back to the old stone age

the time of when our ancestors were hunting mammoths.

They reached a point, where their weaponry and hunting techniques got so good

that they destroyed hunting as a way of life through the most of the world.

The people who discovered how to kill two mammoths instead of one

had made real progress, but the people who discovered that they can

eat very well by driving a whole herd over a cliff and kill 200 at once

had fallen into a progress trap

they'd made too much progress.

Our physical bodies and physical brains as far as we can tell

have changed very little in past 50 000 years.

We've only been living in civilization for the last 5000 years

...at the most which is less then 0.2% of our evolutionary history.

So the other 99.8 we were hunters and gatherers

and that is the kind of way of life that made us.

We are essentially the same people as those stone age hunters.

What makes our way of life different from theirs is that culture has taken off at exponential rate

and has really become detached from pace of natural evolution.

So we are running 21st century software, our knowledge,

on hardware that hasn't been upgraded for 50 000 years

and this lies at the core of many of our problems.

All of this is because our human nature is back in hunting-gathering era of the old stone age

whereas our knowledge and technology, in other words, our ability to do both good and harm to ourselves and to the world in general

has grown out of whole proportion.

One thing to remember, of course, about human mind is that it's not

that fundamentally different from, say, a brain of a chimpanzee.

Most of the human brain, the basic structure of the brain

is much older than human species

some of it goes back to bacteria

some of it goes back to worm, some of it originated in first mammals

some of it within the first primates, some of it in first human beings.

Very little however changed in the last 50 000 years.

And so most of what we do, we do with hardware components

that are much older than any of the problems that we face.

When I first began to study chimps

I thought that the task was to just map out more and more similarities

to find the areas of cognition that hadn't been studied yet

and simply show that chimps were just like us.

WHY

You can imagine teaching a small child to stand up a block up right

and you can teach a chimp to do the same thing

'oh I set up a block here, set up a block here, I can see everything, it�s very, very clear'

'and I get a piece of fruit for doing it'

But what happens when you introduce a small subtlety into the situation

when you trick them and make the block off center just that the block keeps falling over.

Well, the chimp will come in, set up the good block

set up the block that we've tricked them with

but then it falls over.

Well the chimp can see that it's not the way it's supposed to be

so they try again, and they try again

and they move it to one place, and they move it to another place

and they keep trying to get it to stand up

because they know what is supposed to happen.

But they have no understanding or no inclination to ask why.

What unobservable part of the situation is causing that block to keep falling over.

The young child will enter set up the good block

try to set up the block that we've tricked them with

but when it falls over, well first they'll try again

then maybe try again, but very quickly they'll turn it over, feel the bottom of it, shake it,

try to concern what unobservable property of that block is causing it to fall over.

That's the fundamental, core difference, I believe, between humans and chimps

that humans ask why, we're constantly probing for unobservable phenomenon to explain the observable.

It's what's driven us to discover gravity,

it's what's driven us to probe into the mysteries of quasars,

and it's the same thing that drives us to probe into mysteries of each other

in our every day life�s.

'Why does she keep doing that?'

'Why does he keep behaving like that, he must think this, he believe this, I don't understand...'

'Why, why, why, why...'

So the upside of the human capacity that asks why,

to continuously probe behind appearances

and to try to find out how the world really works

is we develop fabulous new medicines, fabulous new therapeutic techniques to take care of people,

we invent the whole cascade of modern technology.

But the downside is that

we invent the whole cascade of modern technology.

Arguably we are the most intellectual creature that ever walked on planet earth.

So how come then that so intellectual being

is destroying its only home, because we only have the one home.

Maybe one day people will be on Mars, but at the moment we've got planet earth.

We are destroying, we are polluting, we are damaging the future of our own species

which is very counterproductive from the evolutionary perspective.

This capacity that seems so wonderful to us,

ability to ask 'why'

the very ability that defines modern science

as a double-edge sword.

If humans go extinct on this planet

I think what's gonna be our epitaph on our gravestone is:

'Why?'

We have the ability to think into the future

but most of our mechanisms, most of our brain mechanisms

evolved before we had any ability to think forward to the future

and when it made some sense for decisions to be short-term.

A lot of our brain mechanisms, what I call ancestral mechanisms or reflexive mechanisms

are tuned to making snap decisions, right away, like fight or flight

you see a lion, either you're gonna fight or you gonna run

no time to think about long-term consequences

and that's good when we're stressed about something immediate that we can deal with, for example

but those very systems that work by reflex

are not so good at cooperating with these more modern systems, deliberative systems

that allow us to make long-term decisions, and say

is this good for me, is it good for my society, for my planet.

NOT ENOUGH PLANETS

Between the fall of the Roman empire

and Columbus sailing it took 13 centuries

to add 200 million people to the world�s population

now it takes only 3 years.

A simple thing like pasteurization, the warming of milk so that the bacteria are killed

and the control of smallpox.

Things like that have led to a great boom in human numbers.

Overpopulation, which no one really wants talk about

because it cuts that things like religious believes and the freedom of individual and autonomy of family and so on

is something that we will have to deal with.

We probably have to work towards a much smaller worldwide population then 6 or 7 billion.

We probably need to go down to a half of that or possibly even third of that

if everybody is going to live comfortably and decently.

The other side of this problem

and perhaps the more dangerous side is

the footprint of the individuals at the top of the social pyramids

who are consuming the most.

Somebody in the U.S. or Europe is consuming about 50 times more resources

then a person in a place like Bangladesh.

If China is going to reach the level of consumption

of the U.S. or Europe it's very unlikely that the world could support the addition of billion consumers at that level

I'd say in China, maybe 200, 300 million people are affluent

they could afford a lot, all that we can in the west

in India ca. 200 million, so you add up this affluent segments of population

in these developing countries

but still what you come up with is no more then one and half, maybe two billion people.

So there is still five billion people waiting to tap into these bonanzas

of plentiful food, cars, decent housing, right education for their children.

So the potential demand for resources is immense.

For thousands of years, you know,

China has the longest continuous civilization in the world.

And it is only in the recent period of time

when the European countries started to industrialize

that China started to lag behind and therefore, you know,

between the First Opium War in around 1840 all the way to 1978

China went through a roller coaster of great humiliation, wars, aggression of foreign nations

Japanese aggression against China, Civil War, collapse of Qing Dynasty, great cultural revolution, chaos in China

that's when Deng Xiaoping reemerged in 1978

he basically pointed out the only correct path.

We need to go out to the path of growth

and China needs to modernize and insutrialize.

NATURAL CAPITAL

Some people have written about, ehm,

natural capital, the capital that nature provides

which is the clean air and clean water

the uncut forest, the rich farmland and the minerals, the oil, the metals,

all these things are the capital the nature has provided

and until about 1980 human civilization was able to live on

what we might term interest of that capital

or surplus that nature was able to produce

the fruit that farmland can grow without actually degrading the farmland

or the number of fish you can put out of sea without causing the fish stocks to crash

but since 1980 we've been using more than the interest

so we are in effect somebody who thinks he's rich cause he is spending the money that has been left in his inheritance

not spending the interest but eating into the capital.

The last time I visited the New York Stock Exchange

was in 1980 and the mood sure was different than.

Government with its high taxes, excessive spending and over regulation

had thrown a wrench in the works of our free markets.

With tax reform and budget control our economy will be free to expand to its full potential

driving the bears back into permanent hibernation.

That's our economic programme for next four years, we're going to turn the ball loose.

The world is this big.

It's not this big and it can't be this big.

It's just this big, it's a finite sub.

Instead of thinking that nature is this huge bank that we can just....

this endless credit card that we can just keep drawing on.

We have to think about the finite nature of the planet

and how you keep it alive, so that we too may remain alive.

And less we conserve the planet there isn't going to be any "the economy".

The ice-age-hunter is still us, it's in us.

Those ancient hunters who thought that there would always be

another herd of mammoth other the next hill

shared the optimism of a stock trader, that there's always gonna be another big killing on the stock market

in a next week or two.

If you are watching the earth over the last 5 or 6 thousands of years

and you're speeding up your film

what you see is civilization breaking out like forest fires

in one pristine environment after another

and after a civilization has arisen as it burnt out natural resources in that area

than it dies down and another fire breaks out somewhere else.

And now of course we have one huge civilization around the world

which we have to confront the possibility that the entire experiment of civilization

is in itself a progress trap.

"When will the economy turn around?" "yeah."

"I'm not an economist, but I do believe we are growing and I can remember this press conference"

"saying about recession as if you were economists."

"I'm an optimist, I believe there is a lot of positive things for the economy."

Faith in progress has become a kind of religious faith

a sort of fundamentalism rather, like market fundamentalism

that have just recently crashed and burned.

The idea that you can let market leap

is a delusion just like the idea that you could

let technology leap and it will solve the problems created by itself

in a slightly earlier phase.

That has become a belief very similar to religious delusions

that caused some societies to crash and burn in the past.

A SHORT HISTORY OF DEBT

Written records go back about four thousand years

and from 2000 BC to the time of Jesus it was normal for all of the countries in the world

to periodically cancel the debts when they became too large to pay

so you have Sumer, Babylonian, Egypt, other regions

all proclaiming these debt cancellation and

the effect was to make a clean slate so that society would begin all over again.

This was easy to do in a society when most debts were owed to the state

it became much harder to do when enterprise and credit pasted out of the hand of state

into the private hands, into the hand of an oligarchy

and the last thing that they wanted was to have a king

that would actually cancel the debts and restore equality

Rome was the first country of the world not to cancel the debts.

It went to war in Sparta, in Greece to overthrow the governments and kings

that wanted to cancel the debts.

The wars of the first century BC ended up stripping these countries of everything they had.

it's stripped the public buildings,

it's stripped the economies off their reproductive capacity

it's stripped them of their works

it made a desert out of the land

and it said: "a debt is a debt".

The collapse seems to have been closely linked

to ecological devastation which led to also social and economic and military problems.

In the early stages of the Roman Republic you had

a fairly egalitarian land owning system

the peasants had access to public land

but as the Roman state became more powerful and the lords the generals

began to appropriate public land for their own private states

more and more peasants became landless

at the same time corrosion was serious problem, so bad that

some of the Roman ports stilled up with top soil that have been washed down from fields into the river.

Archeologists have been able to establish how badly degraded much of Italy was by the fall of Roman empire

and how it took a thousand years of much reduced population

during the middle ages for fertility in Italy to rebuild.

What was absolutely new in a Roman Empire was irreversible concentration of wealth at the top of economic pyramid

and that what's progress has met ever since.

Progress has ment: "you will never get back what we take from you".

That's what brought on the dark age and that's what threatens to bring dark age again

if society doesn't realise that if it lets the wealth to concentrate in the hands of financial class

this class is not going to be any more intelligent in long term

in disposing of the wealth then predecessors were in Rome, and other countries.

Well, the term oligarchy, sounds a little esoteric

it just means a small groups of people that got a lot of political power

based on their economic power.

We like to think that the U.S. is much more democratic, much more spread out, in terms of who has the power

and oligarchy is something usually associated with relatively poor countries

but that view has to be updated, because we've got an essential part of that problem

of that structure in the United States today.

People who have all this economical power were in financial sector, it was Wall Street.

Wall Street became really powerful, they use that power to buy influence in Washington

get more deregulation, so to get more of the play field shaped in a way they wanted

which is no government intervention, no restrictions on what they wanna do.

That'd enable them to make a lot more money

which bought them more political power and this went on for considerable period of time

until of course there was an enormous crash.

But basically you come to us today on your bicycles after buying girl-scout cookies and helping out Mother Teresa

telling us: "we are sorry", "we didn't mean it", "we won't do it again", "trust us".

Well, I have some people at my constituancy that actually robbed some of your banks

and they say the same thing! They're sorry, they didn't mean it, they won't do it again, just let'em out.

Do you understand that this is a little difficult for most of my constituants to take that you learned your lesson.

The bankers can't stop themselves.

It's in their DNA, in DNA of their organizations to take massive risks, to pay themselves ridiculous salaries

and to collapse. And the more that reasonable, responsible people at the center and the left and the right

see this, the closer we'll get to constrain the power of these, out of control, factual oligarchs.

It's not a mystery, it's not a surprise, we know we have crisis every 5 or 10 years.

My daughter called me from school one day and said:

"Dad what's a finansial crisis", I tried to be funny, I said:

"It's something that happens every 5 or 7 years", than she said:

"Why everybody is so suprised?", so we aren't, we shouldn't be suprised

I read scroll on the wall somewhere, that

everytime history repeats itself the price goes up.

If you look at the increasing complexity of civilization

what you can see is that towards the end of classic Maya period

it is the enormous amount of effort put to build palaces and temples

that were controlled entirely by nobility and from which, what I imagine, the peasantry was excluded

just as ordinary folks are excluded from gated communities in many countries today

and one imagines also that therefor the people at the bottom

were becoming more and more disenchanted with the rulers

as they felt that the social contract, that had once existed,

that the rulers were the mediators between the gods and themselves

and would help them get good weather, good crops and all that

as they saw that begining to break down and their rulers in effect loosing touch

with the people who they claim to represent

it's the pattern I think we can see a lot in the modern world now.

Every society in history for the last 4 thousand years

has found that debts grow more rapidly that people can pay

the problem is a small oligarchy of 10% of the population on the top

to whom all of these debts are owed to.

You want to annule the debts to the top 10%, thats what they're not going to do.

The oligarchy is running things.

They would rather annule the bottom 90% right to live then to annule the money thats due to them

they would rather strip the planet and shrink the population and be paid

rather then give up their claims.

That's the political fight of the XXI century.

DEBT PUSHERS

Our job on Wall St. was to balance the payments of economies for Chase Manhattan Bank in the 1960's.

My first job there was to calculate how much debt could third world countries pay

and the answer was, well, how much do they earn,

and whatever they earn, that's what they could afford to pay in interest

our objective was to take the entire earnings of a third world country

and say, ideally, that would be all paid as interest to us.

Look, don't give me a hard look story, I hear them every day

and quite frankly they bore me.

The facts are simple: İn 1973 this bank gave you a loan and you still haven't paid it back.

Admittedly you paid back the inital sum, but not the interest

which to date amounts to nine times the amount origianaly borrowed.

Nine times

so you better get your act together, times are tough,

and we all having to clamp down

and don't look at me like that, this is a bank, not a charity.

The number 1 costs for foreign lending through some of the multilateral associations.

IMF or World Bank is the death tomb on the continent.

We can look at the support of the dictators that took place thirty years ago

from 1960 till 1997, of a brutal dictator.

He was given humengous loans.

Everyone knew he wasn't using that for the population

he was propped up as one of the biggest leader in the whole african continent.

While your country is young, only 10 years of age

that it is had a period of progress in that period,

which has been an example for nations throughout the world.

You have moved forward economicaly, you have estabilished unity in your country

and you have a vitality, which impresses every visitor when he comes to Congo.

What is interesitng is all the money and plunder from all iternational debt

is found in western banks, so as he was removed from power

the money never returned to the Congies.

The population didn't have access to medical services

didn't have access to adequate education, living wage and

calculating up to date, now Congo has 14 bln dollar debt

structure and the weight where the people do not benefit and human cost is so high.

In Congo we have 6 million deaths since 1996.

Rich countries lend, so called, "developping countries" a big wack of "money".

Debt is incurred on behalf of people who have nothing to do with it and don't know anything about it.

Then they are expected to pay the price by scraping off their livelihood turning it into money.

Giving it to somebody else...

Howcome the money given to common benefit of the people

use some of the funds to make sure that there are strongest against secesion in the country

protecting against human rights violation, so many other issues that we face

but these funds are not used for that because whatever is given

they tell you specifically what project you have to use it for

and mainly is usually mining projects to get access to resources.

DIGGING HOLES

You can relate to the destruction of the rainforest in Brasil directly to the Wall St. and London financial sector

the story begins in 1982 whe countries couldn't pay their debts any more

and the result is that Latin American coutries generally stopped paying because they said

we're already paying all of the balance of payments surplus we have to the banks

we don't have any money to import, to sustain living standards

we don't have money to import, to build new factories to pay the debt

so the IMF at that point said:

Don't go bankrupt! You have an option, you can begin to sell off the public domain

you have plenty of assets to sell to pay us

you can sell off your water rights, your forests, your subsoil mineral resources, you can sell us your oil rights

and so Brazil, Argentina and other countries began to sell off their resources to private investors

and private investors bought these resources on credit.

MARINA SILVA. - FORMER MINISTER OF THE ENVIRONMENT, BRAZIL

RAQUEL TITSON-QUEIROZ. - ENVIRONMENTAL POLICE OFFICER IBAMA

ENITO BEATA - SAWMILL OWNER

They're cutting down the rainforest, they're emptying out the economy

they're turning it to a hole in the ground to repay the bankers, that's the financial buisness plan

that's how it ends up because the bankers goal is take their money

and begin digging holes in another country and empyting out that country

that's the global financial system.

The economists say: İf you clearcut the forest, take the money, and put it in the bank

you can make 6 or 7%.

If you clearcut the forest, put it into Malysia or smth you can make 30 or 40%.

So who cares whever you keep the forest, cut it down, put the money somewhere else

when those forests are gone, put it in fish, the fish are gone, put it in computers.

Money doesn't stand for anything and money now grows faster then the real world.

Conventional economics is a form of brain damage.

DAVID SUZUKI - GENETICIST/ACTIVIST

Economics is so fundamentally disconnected from the real world

it is destructive.

If you take an introductory course in economics

the professor in the first lecture will show a slide of the economy

and it looks very impressive, you know, raw material, extraction processes, manufacture, wholesale, retails,

with arrows going back and forward

and they try to impress you because they think that they know damn well.

Economics is not a science but they're trying to fool us into thinking that it is a real science. It's not.

Economics is a set of values that they then try to use mathematical equations and all that stuff

and pretend that it's a science.

But if you ask the economist in that equation where do you put the ozone layer

where do you put the deep underground aquafiers of fossil water

where do you put topsoil or biodiversity, their answer is:

Oh, those are externalities.

Well, then you might as well be on Mars.

That economy is not based in anything like a real world.

It's life that filters water in hydrologic cycle

it's microrganisms in the soil that create the soil that we can grow our food in

nature performs all kinds of services

insects fertilize all of the flowering plants

these services are vital to the health of the planet

economist call these externalities. That's nuts!

Unlimited ecoomic progress in the world of finite natural resources doesn't make sense.

It's a pattern that is bound to colapse and we keep seeing it collapsing

but then build it up because there are these strong vested interests

we must have buisness as usual

and you know, you got, the arms manufacturers, the petroleum industry, pharmaceutical industry

and all of this feeding into helping to create corrupt governemnents

who are putting the future of their own people at risk.

You can imagine lilies growing in a pond.

Lilies grow very rapidly, they double every day

they're going to cover the whole surface and there won't be any way for the fish getting oxygen

and all the life is going to die in the pond

that's how rapidly things can grow.

One day you are half full of lilies and the next day you're dead.

You could say that today we're at the point in which the lily pond is half full

the life is being snuffed out of national economies and the debt goes on doubling

how long can it do it. It has one day to go.

All the civilizations of the past and, I think our own, only seem to be doing well

when they're expaning, when the population is growing, when the industrial output is growing

and when the cities are spreading out.

Eventualy you reach the point at which the population has overrun everything.

The cities have expanded over the farmland

the people at the bottom begin to starve and the people at the top loose their legitimacy

and so you get hunger, you get revolution.

Now, one scary thing about the moment we're in is that

for the first time there is kind of only one system

so if the whole thing goes down, you won't have what you've had in previous eras of epic collapse

which is that even if one civilization goes down and it may take a while to recover

there are other robust civilizations that can be guardians of progress.

ROBERT WRIGHT. - AUTHOR OF NONZERO: THE LOGIC OF HUMAN DESTINY

In that sense some of the things that have been reassuring in the past

about progress don't necesserily apply to the current situation

'cause once you get to the global level you've only got one experiment working.

That's just the inevitable combination of its growth ever since the stone age

and there were waystations like the Roman empire

and now here we are and more and more people, we're in the same boat

and they face problems and either they will solve them together or suffer together

possibly on a catastrophic scale.

ESCAPING THE TRAP

We are entering an increasingly dangerous period of our history

our genetic code still caries the selfish and agressive intincts that were survival advantage in the past

but I'm an optimist.

STEPHEN HAWKING - THEORETICAL PHYSICIST

If we are the only inteligent beings in the galaxy we should make sure we survive and continue.

If we can avoid diseaster for the next two centuries our species should be safe.

We have made remarkable progress in the last hundred years.

Our only chance of going through survival is not to remain on planet earth

but to spread out into space

I was at the conference a few years back with George Lukas

and he came up and said

there is only two hopes for humanity.

Either we find another planet to colonize after we've destroyed this one

or perhaps your technology, meaning what we are doing with genetic code, might allow us to transform ourselves

or other aspects of the planet where we can continue to live here.

J. CRAIG VENTER. - BIOLOGIST / CEO SYNTHETIC GENOMICS

We're here to celebrate the complition of the first survey of the entire human genome

without a doubt this is the most important, most wondrous map ever produced by human kind.

We are announcing today that the first time our species can read the chemical letters of its genetic code.

For the last several years my team has been sailing around the world

looking for all the species in the ocean, the microspecies, on filters

and we isolate all the DNA, all at once from all of them

I have a novel way of looking at these genes

I've use them as the design components of the future.

It's mind-bugging concept, even though we're doing it everyday,

that we can simply start with four bottles of chemicals, write the genetic code

and change the genetic code of species, basically developing new species

and we can try and find ways to make fuels that other people haven't even imagined

we can do this with novel source of food

we're limited only by our imagination and whatever biological reality is

when we consider trying to replace oil, we use bilions of gallons of oil a year

it's a, I can't even, i think I have pretty good imagination, envision what a billion gallons of oil is

making a billion gallons of oil from invisible microbs is a certain leap of faith

in fact that's how we proceed in science.

Instead of writing software for computers, we can now write software for life.

By changing and taking over evolution, changing the timecourse of evolution

and going into deliberate design of species for our own survival

at least gives us some points of optimism that we have a chance to control our destiny.

We're here today to announce the first synthetic cell.

This is the first self-replicating species that we've had on the planet whose parent is a computer.

GODS R US?

One of the challanges that faces the human species is

we're more and more in a position of acting like gods

it has been true for a while because we have the ability to change the climate for example

this is gonna be even more true with genetic technologies

we're gonna be able to manipulate other species ad eventualy ourselves.

We're gonna be in a position of controling our own faith in a way that

no creature has ever, you know, in billion years on the planet had an opportunity to do.

I once wrote a poem in which a mad bishop said

"a man became god, became greater than god, and the godhood of man"

I do not see anyone living in this materialistic society as being anything like god

I don't know what god is,

but in my wildest dreams I would never conceive of god or a god as being like

a modern human being in a materialistic society.

We're anything but godlike, I think

the challenges are so overwhelming to all of us

that we're all trying to use whatever new tools we can to try and change the future.

Synthetic biology is a progress trap par exellence.

JIM THOMAS. - ACTIVIST/AUTHOR OF THE NEW BIOMASSTERS

Biologist have pointed out that whese engineering aproach is all very well

and that engineers can try to treat life as it was some kind of computer engineering substrate

but ultimately the microbes are gonna end up loughing at them

the life doesn't work like that.

I think the problems that we're seeing now whever we are talking about hunger,

massive inequity, when we're talking about climate change or the loss of biodiversity

have been driven over the last 200 years by a system of overproduction of stuff

and overconsuption of stuff

and that's being inflated and inflated and inflated to a point where there really is not in any way reasonable

the companies and those of the governements who supported that approach

are now saying that they will provide new technologies to continue that consumption of stuff

that level of production. It's just not realistic.

ExxonMobil and Synthetic Genomics have built a new facility

to identify the most productive species of algea.

How'd you imaigne amazing little criters make crit oil which we could turn into biofuels.

They also absorb CO2. We are hoping to suplemet fuels that we use in our vehicles

to some day help meet the words energy demands.

What is harder mapping the entire genome set that makes up a human being

or making algea produce energy?

Making algea produce energy is not hard but doing it on a scale required to have a major economic

and environmental impact is going to be a huge challenge

but have got partner in ExxonMobil to try and get it to a scale that it needs to be

of billions gallons a year.

A lot of engineering is reqired for facilities the size of San Francisco

I think that they are serious and we're serious.

What we're seeing alongside the development of synthetic biology is a massive corporate grab on plant life.

Literaly speaking that means a grab on land and a grab on seas as well.

Where people have been moved out of land to make way for the growing of plant life

that can be transformed into plastics, chemicals, fuels and so forth

and what drives synthetic biology is not an attempt to save the planet or help humanity

but an attempt to increase the bottom line for certain very large corporations.

If we're gonna feed the upcoming nine billion people

we can't afford to use our prime crop land for trying to produce billions of gallons of fuel that we use.

What we're doing is writing the genetic code, changing this species

allows us to use desert land mhm.. we just need sunlight and CO2

for using this new engineered algea for example.

Synthetic biology in a way, you know, it's frightening but I'm very sympathetic to this on many ways

that it will be nice to get a more water efficient plants

but still it would still need water

Greg Venter cannot create a plant which needs no water and no nitrogen

or it totaly fixes on nitrogen by sucking it from the air

which is....., it cannot go that far.

This does not fundamentally change the game.

What fundamentally changes the game and what people don't want to hear

and I'm telling this all the time and people say: "don't talk to us like that because it's just a no-starter"

but for me this is the only starter: We have to use less.

LIMITS

The poor people need more. There is no noubt, there is no discussion there.

If you are average villiger somewhere in Rajastan or Panjab or Nigeria u need more. Period.

There's a basic human decency that commends you to say: These people need more

more clean water, more basic food, more education for their children

the discussion goes like before it begins

but as far as us is concerned we certainly could and should use much, much, much less.

People have been conditioned that things have to always go better

and immediately if you say: "limit something", people think this is not getting better

but it would be.

It is even a no-starter when you say: You should eat less, you should eat less meat, right?

Even that is a no-starter. You should use less electricity, right?

You should build smaller cars. I saw the vice-president of GM talking about new GM

and one of the journalists asks him: "but your cars are still so heavy", and he says: "yes, we are working on it"

what is there to work on it?!? There are so many things that we could do.

Not to surrender our stand of living, not to live in gutter, right?

But we don't need one-and-a-half ton car to go from red light to red light.

People are not willing to go back on these things. Most of them simply aren't

because they've totally hijacked by this material culture.

Let's not underestimate the persuasion, the power of this material culture.

It's immense, it's just immense.

When I've seen so many people being genuinly unhappy

that they cannot afford a 50 000 sq foot, sorry, 50 000 dollar bathroom remodelling

I mean, there is something wrong with that values set, right?

'Cause bathroom is a place where you just spend, like, 10 minutes to take shower, brush your teeth

so it doesn't have to be very... but, you know, how much money people are.... because I can't... yhm...

because we are thinking about redoing our bathroom, right, so.. in my mind... it's very interesting

for me it's a char because it has to be done, but for many people it's a life-affirming thing, you know.

People are renting storage spaces, right? that they will never access, right?

to store the junk which they cannot store in their 5000 sq. foot homes

so do we need that? It's amazing! eh.... it's, it's, it's.....

This is very difficult to put the geany in the bottle, so everything is defined in this material thinking

I could make a lot more coherent but it's difficult because if you make it more coherent you make it prescriptive

and prescriptions never work, really. Because I don't have the solution

I can't say "we should follow this and then it will click and we will live happily everafter"

so I'm making it deliberatly uncoherent. I could be very doctrinate, I could be, but you see,

I lived for 26 years in communist society I'm inoculated against any doctriner grand solution,

you know, "this is the path, this is the must, this is the paradigm which we have to follow"

I'm just totally set agains it, so I'm making deliberatly, kind of, you know,

messy, uncoordinated, because that's how life is. We don't know what path will emerge.

As long as we are living on this sea of afluents and opportunities and material riches.

It's just very difficult to make this individual, voluntary resolutes that are saying "enough", "back"

I was walking around pointing my finger at everybody, you know,

you people, you know, blaming the culture for its consumption

finaly one day I came home and air-conditioners were on even though there was no one at home

and I was like: Wait, I've been going around blaming everybody else but the fact of the matter is

that my lifestyle requires a huge amount of resources too, so how can I blame other people

and I realized that before I go around and try to change other people maybe I should look at myself and change myself

keep my side of the street clean.

So I came up with this idea that I would live as environmentaly as possible for a year and see how that affected us.

COLIN BEAVAN. - ENGINEER / AUTHOR & DIRECTOR OF NO IMPACT PROJECT

So we did this No Impact experiment, we did it.

We live in New York, in the middle of the New York City

which made it unussual because most people can think of environmental living as some kind of back to tha land thing

but of course, back to the land, is not the right idea when it comes to saving our habitat

if all of us in New York were to go back to the land we would very much destroy the land.

We're not biologicaly consumptive this is not got to do with human nature.

Human nature is to do what everybody else does, that's human nature

that we want... and it's wonderful, it's like: I want to be with you, I want to be the same as you,

I want to love you and I want you to love me, thats not bad.

So that's... that's also part of the problem. I want to be the same as you and you consume

so I'm not going to be the first not to consume.

But it also tells us that if we can move from non-consumption to consumption,

we can also go from consumtion back to non-consumption.

We need to begin by saying: We're at the end of the failed experiment

and it is time to say good bye to it.

An economic experiment, it's a technological experiment that's been going on for couple of hundred years

and it's not worked, it's brought us to this point of crisis.

Then we can start sainly and inteligently say how can we live within the real limits that our planet gives us

and create a safe operating space for humanity.

Admitedly we've used are brains in ways that are detrimental to the environment and the society

but brains are begining to get together around the planet to find solutions to some

of the harm that we've inflicted.

You know, we humans are a problem solving species. We always do pretty well with our back's to the wall.

THA PLANETARY BRAIN

It's easy now to see kind of a giant social brain or planetary brain

'cause it's in a physical form of the internet, it looks so much like a nervous system, you almost can't miss the analogy.

You might say that there always have been a lot of little social brains around the planet getting bigger, starting to form little interconnections among themselves.

Now more than ever you could tell that there is a unified social brain.

Even if the overall arc of history is toward an expended moral horizon, more and more people acknowledging the humanity

more and more different kinds of people, there is always the risk of backsliding and it can be catastrophic.

From a point of view of strict self-interest it is imperative that we make further moral progress

that we get more and more people to acknowledge the humanity of one another

or it will be bad for pretty much all of them.

If we don't develop which you might call a moral perspective of god

than we'll screw up the engineering part of playing god because the actual engineering solutions depend on

seeing things from the point of view of other people, insuring that their lives don't get too bad

because if they do it will come back to harm us

so, you know, half of being god is just have been handed to us and the question is

whether we'll master the other half of being god, the moral half.

The bad news is the enlightment is sometimes hard to come by

because of human nature in some cases, because you know,

we've got these kinds of animal minds, desgined for very different environment

facing novel problems, so enlightment part is going to require some real education and reflection

and self-discipline and may not come natural

I think what we’re up against here is human nature,

we have to reform ourselves, remake ourselves in a way that cuts against the grain of our, our inner animal nature,

and transcend that Ice Age hunter, that all of us are, if you, if you strip off the thin layer of civilization.

We always have been the initiators of this experiment, we’ve unleashed it but we’ve never really controlled it.

But now it’s more likely that we’re going to come to grief because of environmental problems.

If we do, then that is really nature saying the experiment of civilization is a failed evolutionary experiment,

that making apes smarter is a, is a dead end. So, it’s up to us to prove nature wrong, in a sense,

to show that we can take control of our own destinies and behave in a wise way that will ensure the continuation of the experiment of civilization

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