Over the holiday I’ve had time to catch up on much of my reading. The Economist published a great series of articles on the damage mankind has inflicted on our seas.

I also managed to find more time than usual to exercise. Having recently put a DVD player in front of our treadmill, I’ve now gotten the opportunity to watch some old, favorite, movies. Among them, this week, was The Maxtrix.

I bring this all up because there is a quote from the movie that got me thinking about the articles. Agent Smith (from the film) alludes to human beings being ‘a cancer’.

Simply put, cancer happens when renegade cells attack healthy cells and make unhealthy cells out of them. Over time the number of unhealthy cells overwhelms the healthy cells and the organism dies. The cancer, of course, dies with it.

If the Earth is viewed as an organism, human beings have thus far had a similar effect. We began harmlessly enough thousands of years ago and have been steadily growing ever since. As we’ve grown, we’ve begun to damage the environments where we cluster. Over time, this damage has formed a breeding ground for creating more people (in the simplest terms our death rate has been dropping and out birth survival rate increasing), which in turn causes more damage to the environment because we spread out and create more clusters.

As a strain, we’ve become more resistant to epidemic illness, we’ve got no natural predators, and we have create numerous systems (including economics) which help perpetuate our accelerated growth.

As far as I am aware, we are the only species like this. Other species over populate, but then they are naturally brought back in check. Nature has been having a harder time doing this with humans. Similarly, other animals consume resources, but they do not seem to inflict the long term damage to their host environment that humans do.

The similarities between the impact of man on the Earth and cancer on an organism stops at one point in my mind. That is consciousness. Cancer is unaware of the damage it does (I’m assuming, anyhow). It simply does what it does to survive and propogate. We, however, are becoming aware of the harm we cause with our actions.

This may be the key to reversing the cycle we’re stuck in. Being self-aware, we might be able to stop our selves from devouring our environment to the degree that we kill our host and die out ourselves.

Wired recently had an article on cancer. The thrust was that the approach taken by this one group is to focus spending its research dollars on ways to detect cancer earlier. This idea is based on the fact that found in early stages, most cancer patients have very high survival rates. Traditionally science spends research money on finding treatments for people who already have cancer. The article went on to say that overall, the reduction in cancer-related deaths is largely due to early detection and that late stage treatment advances have been slower to come and less successful.

The grim logical extension left out of the article was that the hundreds of thousands of people with cancer already are in some sense less important, in the bigger picture, than the millions who might yet be diagnosed earlier on (and thereby, more likely to survive).

“The benefit of the many outweighs the benefit of the few” to quote the cooly logical Mr. Spock from Star Trek.

That’s a tough pill to swallow Neo (red or blue) which is likely why it’s left to inference in the Wired piece.

Taking the Wired article and using it as a lens to look at the idea of mankind as a cancer on the Earth, logically leads to thinking about early detection of the ‘cancerous environmental effects’ of our decisions. That is, shouldn’t we look at new technologies and ideas and their impacts before they’re introduced to the world? In a world focused on ‘speed to market’ and selling what’s new, have we been that good at thinking ahead as to the damaging effects these new products might cause?Even as recent as a few years ago, we missed the mark, converting corn crops to ethanol rather than food and creating several problems in the process.

We may not have had the self-awareness to consider our environmental impact back in the 1800′s or even 1900′s. But we certainly do now. Unlike cancers at the cellular level, we do know we’re killing our host. Whether we’re in stage I, II, III or IV as a cancer is up for debate, but if we shift some of our resources to early detection, perhaps we can prevent ourselves from doing injurious things.

(Interestingly, the Economist articles made multiple mentions of impacts already set in motion that simply could not be stopped for decades even if we threw the proverbial ‘off’ switch right now.)

Of course, taking the cancer metaphor further, we might also have some difficult and ugly decisions about how to ‘treat’ our current condition. This very topic is much of the driving ‘evil’ of Agent Smith and the Matrix. It makes for a great science fiction movie.

That said, it’s very easy to dismiss movies like the Matrix as ‘really cool science fiction’. Often times though, science fiction has a back story that is pretty important. Thinkers like Michael Crichton, Philip K. Dick and others have been casting a spotlight on emerging challenges related to our innovations for a long time. Their parables aren’t about warpdrives and spaceship battle scenarios so much as cerebral inquiries into the nature of our human drive to innovate and the frequent recklessness surrounding it.

They’re also about unintended consequences, which is a frequent product of action without foresight.

Many science fiction authors have been the first to look ahead and the first focused on early detection of problems. It might benefit us to pay less attention to the special effects and look more closely at the storyline. We might want to elevate some science fiction from purely the entertainment section of the weekly paper to the editorial lest it one day become tragic front page news.