Dangerous Ideas
There's a fascinating Web site maintained by the Edge Foundation, and every January 1 it asks a crew of scientists and other bright people a difficult question. (This has been happening annually since 1998.) This year, the Edge questuion ran as follows:
The history of science is replete with discoveries that were considered socially, morally, or emotionally dangerous in their time; the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions are the most obvious. What is your dangerous idea? An idea you think about (not necessarily one you originated) that is dangerous not because it is assumed to be false, but because it might be true?
This year, 117 people answered the question, and if you have a few hours to read 72,000 words (and can stand staring at your screen that intently for that long) it's well worth reading, at least in part to get a sense for what smart people consider "dangerous."
Most of the essays are pretty cosmic-and some of the contributors are a little unlikely. A graying and distinguished-looking Michael Nesmith (yeah, the Monkee) suggests that "Existence is Non-Time, Non-Sequential, and Non-Objective." Uhhhh, ok. Now, how about one more spin at "The Last Train to Clarksville?" An awful lot of people are wrestling with spiritual questions, either trying to reconcile science and religion or trying to talk us into giving up religion entirely. Some are pushing the same old change-human-nature crap that gave us Communism and the 100+ million deaths it caused. Yeah, that's dangerous, but that's what at least one individual thinks we ought to attempt. Some of the ideas presented are seen as dangerous to liberal common knowledge (e.g., that lefty obsession that human beings are blank slates, and that intelligence and talent are evenly distributed) but are seen by ordinary people as just the way the world works.
Few are describing ideas down in the realm of physical gadgetry, though that's where my personal view of what's really dangerous resides. Some ideas are scary to me (like the notion of an afterlife without God) but hardly dangerous, in the sense that they can mess things up down here on Earth. For dangerous, consider an upload-only P2P file sharing node planted by a virus. It's dangerous because it provides something no other P2P system can provide: Plausible deniability. People would deliberately infect their own PCs with it, and it would be the Napster era all over again. If you're in the record or movie industry, that is your worst nightmare. Nothing else comes even close.
However, for real danger to collective humanity, I think it's hard to top bioengineered stealth sterilizer pathogens, especially those keyed to only infect individuals with certain genetic markers. A germ that blocked the fallopian tubes painlessly while causing the organism no pain and no other damage could quickly reduce humanity's numbers by 95%, wipe out whole racial and ethnic groups, and cause general pandemonium once people fully understood what was up.
Still, some of the cosmic dangers are real and intriguing, like the common theme that we are running up against the limits of human reason to understand the universe. Some thinkers, like nihilist/debunker Susan Blackmore, go further and simply state that all of existence is pointless, so why struggle? A few are optimistically iconoclastic, like the guy who states that global warming might make the world better as likely as worse. (Much depends on whose coast is getting flooded, heh.) Some of the essays are in garbled academic talk, but most are refreshingly well-written. Bookmark it and read a few every day.