Kort Explores conundrums of the human condition

Howard Hughes may have had it right all along - he was just once again ahead of his time.

In the past it was necessary for people and goods to be physically present in order to transact business. Moving people and goods has always been an expensive proposition in terms of hard costs and lost productivity during transport.

Modern technology is making it increasingly possible to project a virtual presence that is nearly as effective as the real thing. The potential cost savings of projecting a virtual presence instead of sending expensive and valuable personnel is already creating a lot of interest in the technology. But a more powerful factor may soon encourage the general adoption of technology as a substitute for person to person physical contact in many aspects of modern life.

Never before in human history has mankind been able to maintain the population density with which we currently burden the Earth. In all other species, population concentrations become a prime target for one or more of nature's population reduction/dispersal mechanisms.

If the predator/prey equation is unable to control the balance, population density grows beyond the optimum level, and the environment starts to degrade. When local populations have to compete for scarce resources, they weaken and succumb to diseases. High population densities facilitate the rapid spread of infectious diseases, contributing to a rapid reduction of the population. Of course this is nothing new. Some scientists suggest that the increased mobility of previously isolated dinosaur populations made possible by the appearance of land bridges between continents set loose epidemics that contributed to the steep decline of the dinosaurs prior to their final extinction.

Mankind has used medical and sanitation technology to push his population density far beyond the natural limit, while at the same time raising human mobility to unprecedented levels. And at the same time we are creating ideal breading grounds and distribution systems for new infection diseases around the world, medical science is running out of tricks to keep the house of cards from collapsing.

The free flow of goods and people is one of the hallmarks of modern technological civilization. Just a few generations ago, most humans never ventured farther than a few dozen miles from where they were born. The physical limitations of time and distance have been significantly overcome. Commercial airlines now make it almost as easy for an individual to travel to another continent as to a nearby city. And travelers carry a lot more than their luggage with them.

Europeans brought small pox to the new world which did far more to decimate the native populations than a handful of greedy conquistadors. The conquistadors then took syphilis back to Europe, which in return ravaged the European population.

Europeans also suffered mass deaths from contagions brought by invaders. Along with his hordes of Mongols, Genghis Khan brought bubonic plague and rat fleas. In one of the first recorded instances of biological warfare, the Mongols catapulted infected corpses into the cities they besieged, greatly assisting the spread of the plague.

In October 1347, a refugee ship fleeing the Mongol siege of Kaffa docked briefly at the port of Messina in Italy. The townsmen quickly forced the plague ship back to sea, but in just the few hours it was tied up at the dock, enough rats escaped ashore to set loose the Black Death in Europe. The resulting plague killed half the European population before it burned itself out.

In the past, plague carriers were greatly limited in the number of people they could infect by the difficulties of travel. Just reaching the next town might be all the infected individual could manage before succumbing to the disease. With modern high speed travel, plague carriers could share their misery with every major population center on Earth in just a few days - before they even started showing signs of infection themselves.

Even though the risk of contagious disease has long been known, ever larger diverse populations are currently being concentrated into close contact in prisons, military facilities and operations, high density public functions like sporting events, concerts, theme parks, conventions, etc. While it might be argued that most have appeared relatively benign in the short term, many concentrations of humanity like the rapidly expanding refugee camps and slums of the third world, and the inner city wastelands of the first and second world, are regressing to a primitive state lacking even the most basic forms of sanitation.

Consider how many new bacteria and viruses from around the world will be brought to the Atlanta Olympics, shared among the millions of attendees and local residents, and redistributed back out to the far corners of the globe when everyone goes home. Will any of them turn out to be the next great plague when introduced into a new environment? We've gotten away with the gamble repeatedly in the past and will probably get away with it again this time. But how many times can you roll the dice before they come up snake-eyes?

During the last 50 years, we've been living in medical science's golden years. During the living memory of the current human residents of Planet Earth, medical science appeared to overcome the ancient scourges one after the other. Based on our exceedingly brittle illusion of short term triumph over a relatively small number of viruses and bacteria, we've come to expect that medicine will eventually eliminate all human disease.

Medical science continues to make great strides in dealing with physical defects in human systems like clogged arteries and nerve damage, but it is increasingly unable to cope with the rate of mutation in bacteria, viruses and especially retroviruses. While popular history lauds medicine for conquering plague, many of our past triumphs were actually due more to basic sanitation than to medical science. It has come as an unpleasant revelation that having been convinced to abandon old fashioned nonmedical responses to dangerous disease, new viral killers modern medicine is powerless to stop continue to appear at the same time some of the old supposedly defeated scourges are re-emerging in new drug resistant strains. Modern hospitals have themselves become a major source of drug resistant infections. By some estimates, half of all bone deep operations result in a serious hospital transmitted infection.

Fortunately, transmission of the only strain of the Ebola virus that attacks humans is so far limited to physical contact with infected secretions. If the human active Ebola virus mutates into airborne transmission, it could threaten the survival of our species.

AIDS is thought to be a monkey virus that crossed the species barrier in Africa and rapidly spread around the world. In the fall of 1989 an airborne strain of Ebola appeared in a monkey isolation facility in Reston Virginia - just 15 miles from Washington DC. The airborne Reston Ebola virus reappeared in 1996 at a Texas isolation facility killing monkeys shipped from the Philippines. Fortunately, the only airborne strain of Ebola discovered so far doesn't as yet attack humans.

And Africa is not unique as a breeding ground for killer viruses. The Hanta virus, which is nearly as deadly as Ebola, erupted in the American Southwest several years ago. Originally spread by deer mice in rural Nevada, the Hanta virus has now expanded into 23 states and reached into major cities nationwide.

The logical solution requires we lower our population density, limit the distance goods are shipped to a minimum, and minimize travel by both humans and the diseases they carry. There is almost no possibility that mankind will adopt the logical solution willingly.

Given the unwillingness of humans to lower their population density, the increasing difficulty of finding effective new drugs, the liberal prohibition on self defense by the uninfected, and mankind's long experience with pestilence, it seems almost guaranteed that we will again see the outbreak of widespread medically untreatable epidemics.

The potential for contracting one of the increasing number of incurable life threatening sexually transmitted diseases has already affected the sexual attitudes of at least the more rational segments of the population. It's hard to justify "free sex" when it could cost your life. Major changes in the basic social structures and behavior patterns of the inhabitants of our overcrowded megacities may someday also be necessary to protect against non-sexually transmitted infectious diseases.

At various times and places in recorded history, just meeting someone face to face carried a significant likelihood of transmitting the latest plague and costing the lives of both participants. Attending the funeral of one victim could doom all the mourners to a similar fate a few days later. Traditionally, the only way to effectively limit the spread of infectious disease has always been to limit contact between individuals.

While the need to socialize is probably too strong to suppress entirely, most people will likely become more selective when each additional person they contact increases the odds of contracting a deadly disease. Public gatherings will become dangerous places. One participant carrying an infectious airborne Ebola-like virus could doom everyone else who attended. Attending a "Woodstock" 100 years from now might be the last thing you ever did. Using mass transit could become a subsidized one way trip to the cemetery. The antics of our generation may well become the hard to believe legends of future generations.

However, all is not doom and gloom. Modern technology is on the brink of providing a digital prophylactic to contagious disease - virtual reality. A digital connection can't transmit a human active virus. In a way, just talking on the telephone is a form of projecting a virtual presence. Crude video telephones are already in use on the Internet, and holographic projections are taken for granted on science fiction TV shows.

Health care workers who by definition deal with the sick will likely be the first major population sector to limit their exposure to contagious diseases by projecting a virtual presence. We're already seeing the technology used to compensate for unavoidable distance between specialist and patient - and occasionally to allow intentional distance.

While current virtual presence technology is still relatively crude, it's getting better all the time. When linked to effective sensory feedback systems, projecting a virtual presence may someday become as satisfying an experience as "real life".

Given sufficient financial incentives, a functional virtual presence/reality system for the general public could probably be available by the turn of the century. And yes, the sex industry is the likely source of major funding and initial consumer demand. The sex industry supported the initial development of many useful technologies such as the printing press, movies, VCR's and Polaroid cameras. Hopefully the prudes won't interfere before the libertines pay most of the bills this time as well. With luck and a minimum of interference the technology may well be available for more proper applications by the time it's needed.

On the other hand, I worked out a project proposal several years ago involving artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and sensory feedback systems with 5 stages of development. The logical extrapolation to the fifth stage would have resulted in capabilities that when offered to laboratory rats consistently caused the rats to literally kill themselves with pleasure. I decided not to proceed with the project on the grounds that such a device had at least a small potential of causing the extinction of the human species all by itself. There are risks to every solution.