There Are Bubbles – and then There Are Bubbles

It was back in the 21st century that things started to get really bad – or, depending on how you look at it – started to get good! To be honest though, and like most changes, things had been brewing for quite a while before that. What makes a revolution? It starts with some very mundane and boring stuff! Perhaps a way of looking at it is through ‘infrastructure’. Infrastructure, for most of us, might be described as all the things we don’t see, or don’t think about, or take for granted (as long as they don't go wrong). The infrastructure issue gets difficult when it comes to technology. The thing about technology is that it seems so remote from the infrastructure that lies behind it. Hence, once we have a new gadget or whatever, then us ordinary folk see the gadget and not all of the infrastructure that must be there to make it work. Very often – and perhaps this was the crucial thing for the revolution I’ll be talking about – very often that infrastructure starts off as a public utility but ends up a private company. Governments of all stripes seemed to hanker after this marketisation of commodities – and the bigger the infrastructure the more the temptation to hive it off onto some private company and hope it will stay profitable! THAT, you may say, was the first seed of change – and as I say, already lurking in the background, some time before the 21st century. Something else that was proceeding at the same time was a fascination with a thing called ‘the singularity’. Not, especially, a ‘singular’ thing, as the name suggests, but rather the idea that eventually technology (and especially computer-learning and robotics) would one day be developing so fast that it would be beyond human ingenuity to understand it. We laugh at all this now of course, but, at the time, this was something of a scary proposition, at least for some. For others, it offered exciting prospects and opportunities. Two prospects seemed to suggest themselves especially. One prospect was based on the idea that consciousness is ‘substrate neutral’ – in other words, it could exist with any kind of underlying structure to support it. It could exist, for instance, in computers. So we might create consciousness by ever-more advanced computation – or, perhaps even more exciting – we could upload our minds to machines. The other exciting prospect was that we could find a cure for any kind of disease – including the ‘disease’ of old age. So one prospect was technical, we might say, and the other was biological. Together these were the second seed of the revolution. The contrast between the technical and the biological aspirations was sometimes described as ‘cyberpunk’ versus ‘solarpunk’. Cyberpunk had always a dystopian flavour to it – all those anxieties about computers taking over the world. Meanwhile solarpunk was forced to throw its efforts into understanding biology. And we all know, of course, that biology won out in the end – solarpunk. And Mars was the third seed of revolution – in particular, the terra-forming of Mars. That was the real game-changer. Because, of course, by that time we were also having to think about terra-forming the Earth. Terra-forming proper would of course mean a viable biosphere – and we are not quite there yet for Mars. And we have not quite got back to that with Earth. Instead, big enclosed bubbles of nature – that had been the first idea – an idea again that has its roots well into the past. At first the big bubble just tried to replicate the bio-diversity of nature. It was a struggle, but we got good at this. Just in time really, as actual nature was by that time getting severely stressed. And here is where our first seed – that issue of infrastructure – started to make its presence felt. Because, you see, big bubbles – big domes – and the biota they contain, could really be considered as big infrastructure – the biggest, in fact, that humanity had been obliged to design in order to meet its needs. As things grew worse in the outside world, the reliance on domes – the big infrastructure of the planet – grew evermore pronounced. And then the inevitable temptation of all governments – marketise the domes! Besides which, there was something a bit too communal about having to share a dome. Something a bit too claustrophobic – especially as ‘going out’ (and eventually this just meant going to another dome) became more and more difficult and expensive. Meanwhile, our second seed of revolution was coming into play. Knowledge of biology was racing ahead. As more domes were built there was the inevitable temptation to try out different combinations of species to achieve a viable ‘micro-biosphere’, and to tweak the biology to get the maximum food production, oxygen production and beauty. The dome became a designer product, and as they were marketised and privatised there were increasingly smaller bubbles, until today we have just our own bubble ‘houses’. So yes, there are bubbles, and then there are bubbles! The big communal domes of the 22nd century – such as the infamous Dome 39 - and the small private bubbles of today. Whether we could say necessity was the mother of invention, or that the market had invited innovation, it’s hard to say. But people seem happy with the result. All those concerns about people needing to wake up and to change before we could ‘save the planet’ turned out to be unfounded. But then again, I suppose we did change in the end, just not in the way that the campaigners of long ago seemed to think was needed. Individual domes of course were not the end of it. First, with all the evermore-diverse types of micro-biosphere created for the ever-growing number of domes, the problem of ‘mixing’ became an issue. Would the biota of one dome, for instance, simply take over a less resilient bubble? Or would they happily co-exist? Or would they blend in some way? As knowledge and experience has grown, these problems have become less pressing. But of course there are still the occasional problems, when whole swathes of bubbles have to be cleared of all the life they support, as things have gotten out of hand. The glazed tunnels and ‘public’ bubbles still face these worries today, as we all know. But on a brighter note there are the changes to us. No-one is born of a mother now, of course. We are ‘grown’. And grown with a whole lot of genetic modifications or sometimes clonings and all the rest of it. And (often overlooked) it is not just the human being that is grown. There are whole colonies of creatures that live in us and on us that need to be considered. We've got good at this – very good. Everyone can expect to wake up in the morning nowadays full of energy and health. We take it for granted, but should remember that history tells us it was not always so. People long ago – and I’m sure this is a surprise to folk today – would be horrified at the thought of spending their whole lives inside a bubble – even bubbles as luxurious and filled with such amazing trees and plants as our own. But then again, nowadays, we cannot help but shudder at the thought of what it must have been like to have ‘wild nature’ all around us, left to ‘evolve’ in its own unpredictable ways. We shudder too at the thought of humans out in the ‘rain’, ‘wind’ and ‘snow’ (these were terms used for what was collectively known as ‘weather’) and with only their clothes to offer them protection. Without bubbles and full control of biology, what are we? But, as I’m sure we’ve all been aware for at least a couple of decades now – after 450 years of increasing CO2 and increasing temperatures – Earth’s climate is stabilising. And I’m sure we’ve all noticed a few things starting to grow in that world outside our bubbles – a few creatures scuttling past. Current estimates indicate a timeframe of only 50 years before Earth will have a breathable atmosphere of its own once more, and a bio-sphere comprised of the remnants of its original (grass, cockroaches, lichen, bacteria, rats) plus all the ‘escapees’ from millions of massively diverse private bubbles. Ironically, the timescale is the same as the terra-forming projects of Mars and Venus – except on those planets the ‘outside world’ has been carefully planned. Will we, one day, the people of Mars, Venus and Earth, choose to step outside? Terra-forming was the dream of history, but now it seems a daunting prospect. But perhaps it’s time – perhaps it’s time that our bubbles could be whole worlds.