that this task might be easier said than done, partly because it can be difficult to distinguish prediction and desire, partly because of all the complex interactions that make the world what it is, and partly because “all evidence” points “to ever increasing acceleration of change.”99 Nevertheless, it is reasonable to start by looking at what the trends are. Bernal projects the future in three areas: “the world,” or our power in relationship to the material world; “the flesh,” or our power over life, particularly our own bodies; and “the devil,” our power over our own psyches. He concludes his volume by attempting to see what might come of developments in these three areas taken together.
In each realm Bernal expects remarkable things. His chapter “The World” focuses primarily on “the conquest of space.”100 He anticipates some developments that we have only recently achieved, like the use of huge sails to propel ships using solar wind,101 but his most extended discussion is of what it would take to create ten-mile-diameter spherical habitations with tens of thousands of inhabitants.102 With the necessary propulsion systems added, these communities in space would eventually allow for the long voyages that interstellar travel would require—voyages that will be necessary as our sun begins to fail.103
The chapter “The Flesh” starts from the bald assertion that “modern mechanical and modern chemical discoveries have rendered both the skeletal and metabolic functions of the body to a large extent useless.”104 Bernal expects the increasing substitution of mechanical for biological systems in the human body, with all the augmentation of physical and sensory abilities that implies—for example, “we badly need a small sense organ for detecting wireless frequencies.”105 People have always wanted longer lives and more opportunities “to learn and understand.”106 But achieving such goals is now in sight:
Sooner or later some eminent physiologist will have his neck broken in a super-civilized accident or find his body cells worn beyond capacity for repair. He will then be forced to decide whether to abandon his body or his life. After all it is brain that counts, and to have a brain suffused by fresh and correctly prescribed blood is to be alive—to think. The experiment is not impossible; it has already been done on a dog and that is three-quarters of the way towards achieving it with a human subject.107
Bernal expects that once some men were thus transformed, they would be most able at transforming others.108 Humans will have a “larval” stage of six to twelve decades in our current bodies, then we will pass into “chrysalis, a complicated and rather unpleasant process of transforming the already existing organs and grafting on all the new sensory and motor mechanisms.”109 Of course, unlike a butterfly, the end result of the human transformation will be capable of constant upgrade and modification—and indeed there will be no one form into which people will change themselves in any case, as the mechanical body will be readily customizable.110
“Normal man is an evolutionary dead end; mechanical man, apparently a break in organic evolution, is actually more in the true tradition of a further evolution.”111 Bernal envisions each of these mechanical men as looking something like a crustacean, with the brain protected in a rigid framework and a system of appendages and antennae attached for sensing and manipulating the world.112 He freely acknowledges that, to us, these beings would appear “strange, monstrous and inhuman.”113 But he claims that such monsters are “only the logical outcome of the type of humanity that exists at present.”114
In any case, beings so designed would quickly become progressively more different from us. Their brains would be readily linked together electronically to become a kind of group mind. Thus, while the original individual organic brain itself would still have a limited lifespan (perhaps three hundred to a thousand years, Bernal estimates), sharing its feelings, knowledge, and experience with other brains would be a way of “cheating death.”115 Bernal ends the chapter with the speculation that these inhuman beings would invent whole new materials and forms of life out of which to constitute themselves, so that even organic brain cells could be replaced with more diffuse materials with more complex interconnections, thus ensuring itself “a practical eternity of existence.”116 They might transcend physical embodiment altogether, becoming completely etherealized, atoms in space communicating by radiation, ultimately perhaps resolving entirely into light. “That may be an end or a beginning, but from here it is out of sight.”117
These first chapters lay out what would become an agenda for decades of science fiction and a fair amount of actual research and development. The next chapter, “The Devil,” is one that Bernal himself expressed dissatisfaction with nearly four decades after the book was published; he admitted that it was too much written under the influence of Freud.118 But the issue it discusses remains one that is debated, even if not precisely on Bernal’s terms. The main question is whether continued progress in science will be able to overcome the problem posed by the new (that is, Freudian) insight that “the intellectual life” is not “the vocation of the rational mind, but . . . a compensation . . . a perversion of more primitive, unsatisfied desires.”119 That is, science requires an ongoing supply of “perverted individuals capable of more than average performance.”120 Should our psychology and our power over nature combine to make the satisfaction of our desires the norm, we could settle into a “Melanesian” life of “eating, drinking, friendliness, love-making, dancing and singing, and the golden age may settle permanently on the world” without any desire for further progress at all.121 (Note the similarity here with Haldane’s flower breeders.) On the other hand, it could also be that we might be able to live lives that are both “more fully human and fully intellectual” if “a full adult sexuality would be balanced with objective activity.”122
The question of whether all this progress will eliminate the desire for further progress has another side as well, given the “distaste” that Bernal acknowledges he feels, and others are likely to feel, about what the future holds “especially in relation to the bodily changes.”123 It may even be that people will not have a chance to get used to such changes gradually, given the accelerating rate of change. Bernal does not pretend to predict whether repugnance, combined with satisfaction, will ultimately triumph over the increasing power that will be in the hands of those who advance the cause of science and mechanization. But one result might be the “splitting of the human race” into two branches: a stagnant because “fully balanced humanity” and another branch “groping unsteadily beyond it.”124 Seeing how that outcome might arise is the point of the book’s concluding chapters.
Bernal’s basic thought here is that the mechanical men he envisions would be very well suited for colonizing and exploiting space, as their life-support requirements would be far less than what human beings require and their capacities would be wider.125 He imagines these transhumans as “connected together by a complex of ethereal intercommunication” and spread out across space and time.126 But he is brought up short by the recognition that the human mind had hitherto “evolved always in the company of the human body.”127 The radical change he anticipates to “the delicate balance between physiological and psychological factors” will create “dangerous turning points and pitfalls.”128 What will happen to the sexual drive, for example? Perhaps it will require yet more thoroughgoing sublimation into research or, even more likely, into “aesthetic creation.”129 As these new beings come ever more completely to understand the world around them, and ever more capable of manipulating it, their primary purpose is likely to become determining “the desirable form of the humanly-controlled universe which is nothing more nor less than art.”130
After much consideration about how the possibility of “permanent plenty” might transform society, Bernal settles on the thought that the future is likely to hold de facto or even de jure rule by a scientific elite that could be the first stable aristocracy.131 This elite would have the means to assure that the masses engage in “harmless occupations”
