The single greatest impetus toward peace isn’t religion, philosophy, nor human empathy and compassion, but science.
Warfare is almost always, at least in part, conflict engendered by burgeoning populations vying for finite resources; some of history’s most well-known examples include great barbarian invasions, Viking breakouts from Scandinavia, the movement of entire peoples in Central Asia to more fertile pastures, endemic rivalry and bloodshed among tribes in the Americas.
The shorthand for humanity’s age-old penchant for organized brutalities on a collective scale can be understood not so much as the bellicose nature of Homo sapiens, even now not that far removed from his ferocious primate ancestry, but as the only and logical path taken by people with their backs up against the wall.
Science, it’s true, has admittedly brought explosive lethality to the efficiency of conducting war, such that the millennia-long status quo of remarkably few deaths occurring among combatants on ancient hand-to-hand battlefields has been transformed to the ghastly reality of entire sections of large cities being vaporized in a matter of seconds in modern wars.
But there’s a false conclusion to be drawn that owing to firearms, explosives, chemical agents, nuclear weapons and whatever comes next, invention therefore is the great engine of death and destruction; nothing could be further from the actual facts.
It's only through science that the core, age-old seed of ceaseless human hostilities — limited resources for a planetary population perpetually increasing — can be uprooted and forever quashed.
Two of every five of us, for example, wouldn’t be here today but for one lowly yet remarkable tuber: the potato.
It was intrepid explorers armed with scientific instruments and celestial navigation who made the world at large aware of this colossal contributor to humanity’s larder, and tractors, steamships and trucks that grew and distributed this immensely important stopgap against starvation.
By 1900, when world population surpassed 1.5 billion, there seemed every reason to credit the Malthusian pessimism that said the world must soon face endless war, widespread privation, an age of eternal conflict.
All told, in nature, without scientific intervention, there are only sufficient fixed-nitrates, the basic building blocks of food (created by lightning strikes, and certain few species of micro-organisms) to support a global population of some 3.5 billion.
However science at that very juncture, in 1909, did what seemed magical, a watershed moment like none other: the chemist, Fritz Haber, pulled the necessary extra food out of thin air, literally. The Haber process converts nitrogen in the air into the granddaddy of all fixed nitrates, ammonia.
Man-made ammonia, the base for fertilizer, and then food, has satiated the human race’s hunger ever since.
Fully half the fixed nitrates in the very chromosomes of every man, woman and child on Earth was artificially cooked up in ammonia factories.
A similar miracle took place in India and Pakistan in the mid-1960s when Nobel Prize winner Norman Borlaug introduced his strain of dwarf wheat into those countries, with crop outputs exploding.
This 1970 Nobel Prize winner is credited now with having "saved a billion lives."
But human beings require more than just food to live a content and fulfilling life; we need our own spaces, our own domiciles, our own destinies and liberties, and then too some degree of wealth, leisure, luxuries and entertainment.
Science stands now at the very brink of bringing all that and more to fruition.
Humankind is taking its first tentative steps off the home planet that has sustained us since time immemorial and what awaits is an unfathomable bounty.
The asteroid belt alone holds enough iron for the girders to construct a ten story skyscraper enclosing the entire Earth, along with stupendous quantities of gold, platinum, nickel, titanium, palladium, iridium, magnesium and so much more.
Just our nearby celestial neighbors, Mars and the Moon, encompass enough virgin acreage to claim, terraform and develop, sufficient to keep millions or billions of future human stakeholders busy for the next thousand years.
And the energy bonanza off-planet—with blistering solar energy shining non-stop, lakes and seas of methane and other fuels on the moons of the giant gas planets — is equally mind-boggling.
Homo sapiens could soon be entering the species’ adulthood, being far too busy, too rich, too engaged, and too thrilled to consider something which rightly may be considered not worth the time, trouble or effort, something having become unreasonable and patently unnecessary: killing each other in old-fashioned wars.
And, no matter what the environmental catastrophists, division peddling politicos, and doomsaying soapbox philosophers continue to repeat ad nauseam, humanity’s future is bright.
Normal people need a reason to fight, and with science snatching that excuse away, what’s left in the vacuum could be something that has eluded humankind since having shambled out of caves: blessed peace.
David Nabhan is a science writer, the author of "Earthquake Prediction: Dawn of the New Seismology" (2017) and three previous books on earthquakes. Nabhan is also a science fiction writer ("The Pilots of Borealis," 2015) and the author of many newspaper and magazine Op-Eds. Nabhan has been featured on television and talk radio globally. His website is www.earthquakepredictors.com. Read David Nabhan's Reports — More Here.
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