On the other side of sci-fi’s blurred divide, Big Science has proven as invasive and exhausted.
In a cosmological blink, Big Science has spent the last few centuries extinguishing global cultures and extracting natural resources, deploying tyrannies and privileging wars and warriors. From Doctor Frankenstein and Doctor Mabuse to Dr. Strangelove and The Fog of War‘s mad scientist, Robert McNamara, and onward into oblivion armed with more, Big Science has rarely met an annihilation it didn’t love to death.
Compromised by coal, oil, gas, nuclear and other unsustainable energies better left buried beneath our once-cool planet, the scientific industry subsidized the sixth mass extinction, rendering the astronomical singularity of life on Earth an object zombie lesson. It is not just sci-fi, but also science which coherently, painfully reminds us that it is we who are the walking dead, trained by exterminative programming bleeding from our screens and dooming our children.
Many of the essential, self-aware documentaries of another archivist, Adam Curtis — such as The Living Dead, The Century of the Self, All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace… — have dizzyingly captured these technocratic catastrophes, in recombined historical footage revising reality as you experience(d) it. Others less ambitious but as necessary, including the aptly named Surviving Progress, argue that scientific overreach is an extinction event in search of a trigger.
“Nature is infinitely prolific, fecund and, above all, wasteful,” metafictionalist Grant Morrison told me. “S/he appears to enjoy making multiple doomed copies.”]
For all its triumphalism, exponential technological development has, so far, epically failed to transform an obsolete energy industry before it melted Earth’s polar ice caps and reanimated our globally warmed Anthropocene, which is shaping up, so far, to rival the Permian Triassic extinction event, a catastrophe that killed 96 percent of life on Earth. Scientists call it The Great Dying.
It’s not as if renewable solutions haven’t been within grasp for decades before the 20th century ended, to say nothing of the wasted 21st. “I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy,” Thomas Edison famously hoped — in 1931. “What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.”
“This is not a clash of civilizations or a war of good vs. evil, or any of that mindless nonsense,” intrepid journalist and Beyond The Green Zone author Dahr Jamail explained after Anerica’s bipartisan war on Iraq petrochemical;y turbocharged our exponential climate crisis.
“This is about controlling dwindling resources,” Jamail added. “The world runs on oil, and whoever controls the price and access of that resource will largely dominate the world. That is the U.S. agenda: Global domination by one country. It’s lunacy.”
It is a lunacy that Big Science has willingly lent its expertise to, engineering a scale of destruction unseen on Earth in millions of years. Between the post-World War II boom of 1960, and the Bush and Obama administration’s over-leveraged 2000s, the amount of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere rocketed from 320 parts per million to over 400 parts per million (and counting). It is a planetary acceleration proving impossible to survive, for almost all life on Earth.
Crunching the mundane data, even the solar and wind booms of Obama’s two terms of presidential administration are no triumphant matter, and there is little point in unraveling the global destabilization of the 2016 U.S. election. After decades of fossil fuel emissions and oppressions — including from ExxonMobil, whose scientists predicted environmental catastrophe as far back as the 1970s — our upward wave of solar installation has managed to penetrate, as of this writing, barely a percent or two of global electricity generation. Wind power, while cheaper and more widespread, is similarly underrepresented and under-subsidized.
Whether renewable energy’s evolution will arrive in time to save us from what Chasing Ice director Jeff Orlowski told me was an enslavement to fossil fuels still remains what fossil fool Donald Rumsfeld would tragicomically call an “unknown unknown.”
“Fossil fuels were put into the ground for a reason, because that’s where they’re safe,” explained Orlowski, who I also interviewed for Chasing Coral, Dhasing Ice’s cli-fi twin. “But the lifestyle that we have been accustomed to, which is literally just taking this energy stored in the ground and moving it into the atmosphere, has these consequences.”
“And we don’t even need it,” he added. “We know that wind and solar are sustainable, and can supply our demands. So it really comes down to this antiquated way of obtaining energy, and the people who are invested in that, because they’re going to lose a lot of money. The fossil fuel industry runs in the trillions, and if I ran one of its companies I would want to protect those assets. And I’d be motivated to not want to recognize or acknowledge climate change, because there’s a financial inventive in maintaining the status quo.”
From the warnings of Karl Marx to the death of neoliberal incrementalism, to the technical manuals of Tesla and Darpa, who (or what) is master and who (or what) is slave becomes a process in desperate need of deprogramming. Persisting materially and maddeningly, the master-slave binarism has led directly to deeper capital and cultural imbalances, whether in America’s electoral college or Thomas Pynchon’s V and The Crying of Lot 49. Owning more of Earth and its species than ever before, privileged humans of varying percentiles cling to the capitalist fantasy of ceaseless growth like life rafts from the Titanic — another turn of the century epic whose lead, Leonardo DiCaprio, portals deeper into cli-fi in The Revenant and his documentary, Before the Flood. Cli-fi also notes that those two films were bankrolled by Rupert Murdoch, and that DiCaprio was one of the first environmental heavyweights to meet with a transitioning Trump administration stacked with climate deniers.
We can have some more / Nature is a whore. — Nirvana, “In Bloom”
Many of these forces have stalled decelerative innovations in degrowth, reforestation and other capture strategies aiming to sink runaway emissions, which have been dumbly sacrificed as Big Science slaves beneath fallacious master narratives of energy, finance, medicine and the military, engines of hyperconsumption running on empty.
Consider STEM, a strategic (perhaps intentionally ironic) marketing of science, technology, engineering and medicine as an organic machine. Such propaganda avoids data disclosing that the top employers of America’s best and brightest mathematicians are often Wall Street and/or the National Security Agency. Similarly, agriculture multinationals pondering corporate inversions, such as Monsanto, Bayer, and Dupont, snatch up Earth’s top chemists and other scientists like alien abductions.
Cli-fi influentials like Hayao Miyazaki have constructed decorated careers illustrating STEM’s apocalyptic fallout, most notably in Princess Mononoke, Howl’s Moving Castle, and The Wind Rises. A resolute no-nukes activist, as well as a pessimistic doom prophet who spends his days off cleaning his local river, Miyazaki built his legend charting the contours of science and nature, master and slave, Earth and machine.
“My father’s generation lived through and after the war, and basically had nothing,” Goro Miyazaki, son of Hayao, as well as director of animated adaptations of cli-fi pioneers Ursula Le Guin (Tales of Earthsea) and Astrid Lindgren (Ronja: The Robber’s Daughter), once told me.
“They forged their paths with their own hands, and created their whole world themselves,” Miyazaki added. “Therefore, they consistently try to be proactive. On the other hand, by the time my generation came of age, everything was already available to us. I think this made us somewhat passive.”
There is also much great documentary cli-fi stored in the bowels of Big Science, including Into Eternity, a haunting dive deep into Earth’s womb, where humanity is hoping to store — for thousands of years, without irony — its post-nuclear waste. Nuclear Cinema alone deserves its own book-length analysis, deconstructed through cli-fi’s cultural prism.
How long until our overheating climate and its cli-fi claims the radioactive Runit Dome, known to the quickly sinking Marshall Islands as The Tomb, which is now being swallowed by sea rise? Will it arrive as an inevitable blockbuster, or a disturbing documentary? Indeed, how much longer can Big Science, to say nothing of us, literally afford to ignore STEM’s irradiated offspring, and other technocratic tombs? Like thermodynamics itself, global warming’s entropic unraveling will eventually come to for The Tomb’s 111,000 cubic tons of nuclear machinery, as surely as it will come for all of us.
In the stark reality of such harm, what scientists, physicians and other Frankensteins can rebuild science and sci-fi’s integrity?
Given the historical record, it seems no error that Earth is on life support during the same period in which the third highest cause of death on Earth are medical errors. They are committed by medical, pharmaceutical, and related industries, marketed as healthcare, which more realistically, if you will, prescribe variations on opiates, antibiotics, and other chemical nightmares evading regulations and spawning epidemics, found in foundational sci-fi like George Lucas’ THX-1138, and Aldous Huxley’s source text, Brave New World.
It is no accident that Huxley was a pioneer in psychedelics, now mainstreaming into accepted medicine for a post-tramautic populace wracked by stress disorders at the global scale. Cli-fi notes that Huxley descended from Darwin’s Bulldog, Thomas Henry Huxley, whose evangelism of doomed social darwinism, in turn, added legitimacy to the British Empire’s ruthless total war of colonialism and industrialization — which, in turn, spawned Well’s War of the Worlds, as well as sci-fi itself.
What would the Huxleys, as well as Darwin, hypothesize today? Confronted with a sixth mass extinction of unimaginable magnitude, as humanity — the survivors, the fittest — nullify the Endangered Species Act?
When comprehensively assembling this evidence and more, we find climate science and cli-fi already supplanting Big Science and sci-fi, rather than serving as fashionable subordinates. Sci-fi, such as it is, may barely survive our still-new century before suicide, bereft of the jetpack it always wanted while it was busy dreaming up drones and other death from above.
But cli-fi flowers where sci-fi fails.