Novel solutions to the planet’s problems

As writers go, I suppose I’m known as an optimist. So it seems only natural that this novel projects a future where there’s been just a little more wisdom than folly ... Maybe a bit more hope than despair. In fact it’s about the most encouraging tomorrow I can imagine right now.

Brin, in his afterword, also offers a challenge to our generation:

… pick up a truly daunting burden, to tend and keep a planetary oasis, in all its delicacy and diversity, for future millennia and beyond.

If we should accept, we are obliged not only to take on such a “burden”, but also to pass this heavy baton on to our children, the next generation.

Finally Brin invites his readers to become across-the-board activists. Nevertheless, if you want to be interested in planetary issues without being too active, he suggests you join some worthy cause, pay your membership subscription, make donations and thus enable others to save the planet for you: “Pick a problem,” he writes, “and there’s probably some organization already in tune with your agenda that will add your small contribution to others’ and leverage it into serious effort … How can anyone complain that they can’t influence the future of the world when it’s so easy to get involved?”

Where can you find out more about any particular planetary concern and the appropriate group you might support? A good place to start looking will be, of course, on the Internet.

Meanwhile the Internet may have been but a hyper-twinkle in the eyes of its creators when Gregory Benford wrote his science fiction thriller Timescape. While I never really had a particularly burning desire to share it in any deep and meaningful way with my children, I still found this novel not only extremely thought-provoking but also truly unforgettable - the concepts and the plot anyway, if not all the details. And like Earth it is still available. Benford, who is also an astrophysicist, professor of physics, and no less a prolific novelist sets this time-centric story both in the near future and in the recent past - with more than a touch of autobiography.

In his acknowledgements Benford states that his aim was to “illuminate some outstanding philosophical difficulties in physics”. Benford believes that this book will have served its purpose if readers conclude that time represents a “fundamental riddle in modern physics”.

He begins with apt quotations from two well-known scientist-philosophers: The first is from Sir Isaac Newton:

Absolute, true, and mathematical time, of itself and from its own nature, flows equably without relation to anything external.

The second is, surprisingly, from Advance Australia Award winner and Order of Australia recipient Paul Davies:

How is it possible to account for the difference between past and future when an examination of the laws of physics reveals only the symmetry of time? … present-day physics makes no provision whatever for a flowing time, or for a moving present moment.