The mother of all inventions

In my third year as an un­der­grad­u­ate at Mc­Mas­ter Uni­ver­sity, Dr. Michael Egan (au­thor of Barry Com­moner and the Sci­ence of Sur­vival) strode into our small, grey “His­tory of the Fu­ture” class­room. He turned to face us, leaned against the desk, and with an air of au­thor­ity and in­sight that be­trayed his youth asked, “Is ne­ces­sity the mother of in­ven­tion, or is in­ven­tion the mother of ne­ces­sity?” That has al­ways stuck with me.

Back in 1985 the BBC aired a se­ries hosted by his­to­rian James Burke called The Day the Uni­verse Changed. Al­beit quite dated and leav­ing gap­ing holes in his­tory, it at­tempted to ex­am­ine the role of sci­en­tific and tech­no­log­i­cal in­no­va­tion in shap­ing the fu­ture. More specif­i­cally, it fo­cused on how our per­cep­tions of the uni­verse can be al­tered en­tirely by one swing of the sci­en­tific and tech­no­log­i­cal dis­cov­ery pen­du­lum. In line with this, Dr. Egan helped us look back on our imag­ined fu­ture through­out his­tory-and how wrong we've al­ways been. We are hope­lessly bad at pre­dict­ing the scope and speed of tech­no­log­i­cal and sci­en­tific growth. We are worse at pre­dict­ing how this af­fects us, and even worse, still, at how it af­fects our world.

We've built so­ci­eties around our need for a car, when we didn't re­ally need them in the first place-we just wanted things to be slightly eas­ier. That's re­ally all sci­ence and tech­nol­ogy is: de­vel­op­ing some­thing to make our lives eas­ier. Life then be­comes more dif­fi­cult if you take that thing away; so we don't. We cre­ate a need by cre­at­ing a thing! Yet we ig­nore con­se­quence, and in doing so cre­ate in­sa­tiable hungers for things that harm us (fos­sil fuels).

Our an­swer, as usual, is to in­vent some­thing to solve the prob­lem; in this case, we need to.

Fast-for­ward to 2016 and hope­fully the pen­du­lum has swung far enough for peo­ple to no­tice. Re­cently, Tesla an­nounced its newest model of the elec­tric car, the Model 3. Why is this spe­cial? This car is made, specif­i­cally, to be an af­ford­able, re­al­is­tic op­tion to sti­fle the need for fuel-burn­ing cars. There's some­thing you don't hear in cap­i­tal­ist so­ci­eties often (ever?): doing good while sell­ing some­thing. This al­most sounds too good to be true!

Sadly, it is-sort of.

Re­al­is­ti­cally, the bat­ter­ies need to get good enough to go over 500km on a sin­gle charge (they cur­rently go up to about 340), but what's more im­por­tant is the in­fra­struc­ture. When you drive up to Car­cas­sonne, or down to Tar­rag­ona, the last thing you want to worry about is how you're going to get back. How­ever, this may be one of those mo­ments in our his­tory where some­one like Burke will look back and say that Tesla jump-started the need for a sus­tain­able in­fra­struc­ture built around the elec­tric car. This may be a step to­wards an imag­ined fu­ture that we might ac­tu­ally get right-at least, I hope so.

Last month we cel­e­brated Earth Day. We do so every year al­most as if every day weren't. I'd like to think that the in­cen­tives on offer will en­tice peo­ple to go elec­tric, be­cause, at this point, this in­ven­tion is a ne­ces­sity. Lately, the en­vi­ron­men­tal fu­ture of our planet looks pretty bleak, and that should be wor­ry­ing for us given that it's be­cause of us. With the way tech­nol­ogy has de­vel­oped, it re­ally shouldn't be a prob­lem. And yet it is, be­cause at­ti­tudes have not evolved along­side tech­nol­ogy.

In 2010, the Span­ish gov­ern­ment's de­ci­sion to retroac­tively cut sub­si­dies to solar power put solar en­ergy plant op­er­a­tors in jeop­ardy of bank­ruptcy (after they had al­ready in­vested in build­ing the solar farms). This se­verely un­der­mined its global role in the re­new­able en­er­gies sec­tor. Then, just last year, it went a step fur­ther and ap­proved a “sun tax”, which must be paid even if that solar en­ergy is not fed into the grid, and used solely for self-con­sump­tion. Just to con­firm: Yes, this IS ab­surd.

If our abil­ity to pre­dict the fu­ture hasn't im­proved, our abil­ity to shape it un­doubt­edly has. Ne­ces­sity and in­ven­tion are one and the same pen­du­lum of sci­ence and tech­nol­ogy, in that those in­ter­ac­tions shape our fu­ture. Sci­ence is based on a need to ques­tion and dis­cover; this spurs tech­no­log­i­cal growth the same way in­ven­tion fuels ne­ces­sity, and vice-versa.

Over the next decade(s) the way we con­tinue to imag­ine our fu­ture will be rad­i­cally changed through the de­vel­op­ment of a more sus­tain­able world. I just hope we're right, for once.