Fairly Symmetrical

Randall Parker is considering what will happen when a single terrorist will be able to kill enormous numbers of people. His conclusion states that:

If we are going to be faced with growing threats from terrorism due to technological advances that make it easier to launch terrorist attacks of enormous lethality is there anything we can do about it? As I see it there are only about two major counters that can be used to sustain a defense in the long run:

• A massive worldwide surveillance society. Sensors would be deployed throughout the world to watch for dangerous actions by individuals.
• Reengineer human minds to make humans less dangerous.

One of his commenters says, "Another 'counter' is to build a less fragile civilization." Perhaps it's because I've been reading Frank Herbert lately again, but I'm reminded of the concept of the "Golden Path" in the Dune books (the original ones, not the horrid ones infected by Kevin J. Anderson).

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I'm not convinced that you can or should reengineer humans to remove all aggressive tendencies, and there are obvious problems with a worldwide surveillance system.

I'm strongly reminded of the "Golden Path" in Frank Herbert's Dune books. (I swear, they get more visionary every time I read them. :) The only way to guarantee the survival of civilization, indeed of the human race at all, is to spread it out so much that nothing could ever threaten all of it.

In fact, I think this will happen automatically as societies evolve -- though whether it will happen faster than the danger evolves or slower is clearly still a question. I read a post somewhere just the other day about how advances in telecommunications could lead to much lower population densities in developed countries. We've already seen this in the growth of suburbia; how much more extreme can it be when the limit of distance becomes not how far you are willing to commute every day, but how far the Internet reaches? Obviously there is still a physical limit -- the population density must remain high enough that "in-person" services like food, grooming, and social activities can still be supported, and there is a limited amount of actual area on Earth -- but it would certainly lessen the importance of cities.

This is one of the reasons I think the space program is so important. At this point it's a race to see whether the kooks will manage to kill us all, or we'll manage to colonize space and start utilizing its resources—one of which is its sheer size.