World War II stimulated several technological breakthroughs of such magnitude and significance that they warrant classification as the second industrial revolution.
The first industrial revolution created new energy sources such as stem power, electricity, and the gasoline engine. During World War II an explosion on the desert floor of New Mexico marked the harnessing of the power of the atom. This power was used first for military purposes with the dropping of atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Today it is used for numerous other purposes, such as nuclear power ships, biomedical research, medical diagnosis and therapy, and nuclear power plants.
Whereas the first industrial revolution created labor-saving machines, the second is creating labor-replacing machines. The roots of these new machines go back to Britain's World war II antiaricraft batteries, which were filled with computers: a combination of electric memory and programs that told the machine how to process the stored data. Thanks to microconductors, or silicon ships, computers now are much smaller and faster. They have become the backbone of modern economies, being used in power stations, business offices, supermarket checkout stands, textile mills, telephone switching systems, and factory production lines. They are the "brains" in robots, which are used today for welding and painting and moving materials and which will be used tomorrow for chores in homes.
When the Germans bombarded London with their V-2 rockets, they
were using arms that led to the space age a few years later. On
October 4, 1957, the Russians shot Sputnik I into orbit around
the earth. For the first time human being had burst the bonds
of gravity and were free to explore outer space. No one can foresee
precisely what the repercussions will be. Outer space offers many
advantages for manufacturers because of the absence of gravity
and the limitless supply of vacuum and of super-high and super-low
temperatures.
Hence projects are now under way for automated pharmaceutical
space factories producing vaccines and pure tissue cultures for
enzymes, automated space factories creating near perfect crystals
for use in electronic circuits, and giant solar collectors bearing
energy from the sun to earth stations via microwaves. More futuristic
are the speculations of scientists such as American physicist
Gerald K. O'Neill and Soviet astrophysicist Iosif S. Shklovsky,
who foresee the construction in outer space of huge platforms
or islands where eventually more humans might live than on earth.
Scientists discovered in 1953 the structure of DNA (deoxyribonucleic
acid), the chemical that carries the genetic code of all living
thins. Since learning how to read the messages of genes through
DNA, scientists have also learned how to write their own genetic
messages by cutting apart and splicing the genes, by making animal
and human genes grow in bacteria, and even by manufacturing totally
new and artificial genes in the test tube. Thus scientists now
can read genetic codes, modify them, and create new ones.
Humans have been tempering with genes since they began domesticating
plants and animals about ten thousand years ago. but now the tampering
is direct and instantaneous. instead of choosing among plants
and animals through many generations, scientists now choose among
individual genes and manipulate them. such genetic engineering
opens up possibilities for a new agricultural revolution. In the
field of medicine, genetic engineering already has created insulin
and growth hormone as well as several new vaccines, including
one against the highly infectious hoof-and-mouth disease of cattle.
This is a revolution in two parts: accumulating information and distributing information. The rate at which knowledge is being accumulated today is unprecedented and explosive. The amount of scientific information alone, which is being published around the world every twenty-four hours, would fill seven complete twenty-four volume sets of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Equally unprecedented and explosive is the rate at which information can be stored and retrieved by computers, and also distributed throughout the world at the speed of light, especially via satellites. Any person, in any country, can receive this information through a newspaper, magazine, radio, television set, or computer.
The first industrial revolution was accompanied by an agricultural
revolution characterized by enclosures, improved seeds, scientific
stock breeding, and new agricultural machinery. The second industrial
revolution also has been accompanied by an agricultural revolution
("Green Revolution") stimulated by the steep rise in
the demand and prices for farm products during World War II. New
hybrid varieties of major cereals greatly increased crop yields
wen used in conjunction with irrigation, fertilizers, and pesticides.
Because of genetic engineering the first "green revolution"
is being followed in the 1980s by a second, in which scientists
are mixing and matching genetic materials from different organisms.
Just as this technique has yielded useful substances such as human
insulin and interferon, so it is being applied to agriculture
to produce plants that can grow in salty or dry soils; that will
make their own nitrogen fertilizers; that are less susceptible
to diseases caused by viruses, bacteria, fungi, and worms; and
that will yield larger and more nutritious crops. This is one
reason why food output in the Third World since World War II has
increased more than has the population growth.
The first industrial revolution had a profound impact on the European
continent, where it originated, and also on the ret of the globe.
So it is now with the second industrial revolution. But since
this revolution is infinitely more powerful and dynamic, its impact
everywhere is correspondingly more disruptive and encompassing.
The second industrial revolution not only is affecting all
types of societies but also is leaving a deep imprint on the planet
earth itself. This is an ecological impact, since the planet is
the oikos, or home of the human species. Ecological repercussions
from human activities are not peculiar to our age, as we noted
previously.
Today, the ecological impact of humans on their planet is greater
than ever because of the ongoing population explosion and technological
explosion. Global population growth today is at an alltime high.
it is estimated that total world population will increase by 50
percent between 1980 and 2000, and by 100 percent by 2050. Such
population increase inevitably deteriorates the physical environment
in many ways, one being increasing demand for firewood, which
leads to deforestation and ensuing damage to flood control, silting
of dams and disruption of household economies. Firewood is becoming
so scarce that in much of West Africa, families that traditionally
cooked two meals a day, now can cook only one a day, or one every
other day.
The technological explosion also is having a serious ecological
impact. Typical is the aftermath of modern energy production.
humans always have needed energy, and have tried to get as much
as possible because the more energy available, the more comfortable
the living standard. This did not cause serious problems so long
as humans used the energy of their own domesticated horses and
oxen, or the energy of the wind harnessed by sail boats and windmills.
The latest source of energy, however, is the nuclear reactor,
and when one of these reactors in Chernobyl (Soviet Ukraine) exploded
in 1986, the repercussions included the following: vegetables
grown in northern Italy were declared unfit for human consumption,
children in Poland were required to take iodine tablets, reindeer
in Northern Scandinavia were contaminated by radiation and no
longer available as the main food source for the local Lapp people,
and in the Soviet Ukraine itself, 100,000 people living in the
vicinity of the reactor were forced to abandon their homes permanently.
The combination of population pressures and technological pressures
has generated such stress on the planetary ecosystem that the
possibility of irreversible environmental deterioration is now
seriously discussed.
Acid rain, created by sulphur dioxide and oxides of nitrogen mixing with water vapor in the clouds, is seriously damaging forests, lakes, and arable lands in northern Europe, eastern Canada, and northeastern United States.
A greenhouse effect is created when fossil fuel produces carbon dioxide, which lets sunlight enter the atmosphere and heat the earth but inhibits the escape of heat radiation into outer space. The U.s. Environmental Agency has warned that average global temperatures could rise five degrees centigrade or nine degrees Fahrenheit by 2100, causing ocean levels to rise, producing drastic climatic changes, and disrupting the world economy.
Water pollution is caused by the dumping in oceans, lakes, and rivers of oil, toxic chemicals, radioactive wastes, and most recently, plastic waste. Birds, fish, whales, seals, and turtles are dying after becoming entangled with discarded plastic fish nets, trawls, seines, and snares or after eating broken pieces oft he discarded plastic.
Deforestation is widespread. One-third of the world's 3 million square miles of tropical forest may vanish between 1985 and 2000 because of commercial logging and peasants' search for arable land and firewood. Such razing could destroy 10 to 20 percent of all animal and plant species, as well as deplete the planetary supply of oxygen, 40 percent of which is produced by the tropical forests.
Soil erosion follows deforestation, so that half of the arable land in the United States is losing soil to erosion faster than it is being naturally regenerated. In addition to the agricultural loss, erosion in the United States causes damage estimated at $3 billion a year to water quality, navigation, and fish and wildlife. In other parts of the world, China's topsoil is carried by winds as far as Hawaii during each year's planting season, and north African soils are rained on the state of Florida.
Desertification is spreading throughout the globe, not because of drought (which is no more prevalent today than in the past) but because of human abuse of the land through overcultivation, overgrazing, deforestation, and faulty irrigation. A 1985 UN study warned that 35 percent of the earth's surface with 850 million inhabitants is "threatened' by desertification. The Sahara Desert is expanding 6 to 12 miles per year, and in the drought year of 1984 it grew by 125 miles.
Toxic wastes totaling at least 250 million tons are generated
each year in the United States (over 1 tone per person), but no
solid date are available about where it is produced and where
it is dumped. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services'
National Toxicology Program has identified over 58,000 "chemicals
in commerce" but has found that no toxicity data whatsoever
are available for the great majority of these chemicals.
In 1980 Americans bought 600 food commodities worth more than
$13 billion from 150 other countries. At least 10 percent of this
imported food was contaminated with pesticides which are hazardous
to human health, and therefore forbidden for use in the United
States. But they are freely exported to foreign countries where
they are used on food products that eventually are consumed by
the American public, as well as by the local population. The World
Health Organization estimates that 500,000 people a year are affected
by exposure to pesticides and that at least 5,000 die.
Symptomatic of the global scope of today's ecological problems
is the report of the commander of the first flight of space shuttle
Challenger in April 1983: "It was appalling to me to see
how dirty our atmosphere is getting. Unfortunately, this world
is rapidly becoming a gray planet. Our environment apparently
is fast going downhill. . . . What's the message? We are fouling
our own nest."