The Future of Human Civilization: Space Exploration and Settlement, Study notes of History

Download The Future of Human Civilization: Space Exploration and Settlement and more Study notes History in PDF only on Docsity! THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY James Burke Jules Bergman Isaac Asimov NASA SP-482 THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY James Burke Jules Bergman Isaac Asimov Prepared by Langley Research Center Scientific and Technical Information Branch 1985 National Aeronautics and Space Administration Washington, DC Contents Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . iii The Legacy of Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 James Burke Accomplishments of Science by the Year 2000 . . . . . . 33 Jules Bergman Our Future in the Cosmos-Computers . . . . . . . . . 59 Isaac As imov Our Future in the Cosmos-Space . . . . . . . . . . . 79 Isaac As imov V The Legacy of Science James Burke James Burke For more than a decade, James Burke has been one of the British Broadcasting Corporation’s outstanding television writers, hosts, and producers. Born in Northern Ireland and educated at Oxford University, Burke spent 5 years in Italy teaching at the Universities of Bologna and Urbino and directing the English Schools in Bologna and Rome. He made his television debut in 1965 as a reporter for Granada Television’s Rome Bureau. Burke’s impressive following in the British Isles dates back to 1966, when he joined the BBC’s weekly science show, Tomorrow’s World. As the chief BBC correspondent for all Apollo space flights, Burke won critical acclaim for his interpretation of the US space program to an audience of over 12 million people. During this time he developed and presented a variety of documentaries, and in 1972 he became the host of his own weekly prime-time science series, The Burke Special. The programs earned for Burke a Royal Television Society Silver Medal in 1972 and a Gold Medal in 1973. In 1975-1976, Burke co-authored and co-hosted The Inventing of America, an NBC/BBC joint production for the US Bicentennial. Burke’s 10-part television series Connections, which aired in 1979, attracted one of the largest followings ever for a Public Broadcasting Station documentary series, and the companion book was a bestseller in both the UK and the US. The series, which took a year of research and another year to film at more than 100 loca- tions in 22 countries, surveyed the history of technology and social change by tracing the evolution of eight major modern inventions: The atom bomb, telecommunications, computers, production lines, jet aircraft, plastics, rocketry, and television. In 1980 Burke wrote and presented Burke: The Real Thing, a BBC six-part series on reality and human perception. He is a regular contributor to such major magazines as Vogue, The Atlantic Monthly, Harpers, N e w York Magazine, and N e w Scientist. The Legacy of Science Let me look at the envelope from a very basic point of view, that of the neurophysiology of raw perception itself. Forgive me if it’s a bit oversimple. Take me-on the back of your retina I’m upside down, focused at the center but fuzzy at the edges, two-dimensional, a barrage of photons releasing rhodopsin and triggering neural impulses along the visual nerve. At the same time, the pressure wave I’m setting up right now with all this talk is causing little hairs inside the cochlea, in your inner ear, to shake around and send neural impulses into your brain. At no level am I aurally or visually more than a complicated version of the same neural impulse you’d get if you scratched yourself. So what is it that makes all that mush me? After all, you’ve never met me before, and yet here I am, identified by you with absolute certainty as a human being, male, standing more or less upright, talking, and doing all the other things you’ve already recognized. What accomplishes that recognition job for you is your cognitive model. This is the construct, both experiential and genetic in origin, that you use to check up on all the separate bits of me and everything else you experience, mentally and physically, for identification purposes. You are using a recognition system made up of dedicated cells, each one firing in reaction to the one highly specific bit of detail it’s built to react to. Interestingly, it may be that the genetic component in that model is greater than was once thought. Some work going on here and in the UK shows that on the back of the human embryo, very early on in its development, is the neural plate, which contains the nerves that will eventually expand to form the spinal cord and the brain-the nervous system, in fact. Apparently, embryonic development involves millions of those little baby neurons growing and traveling (thanks to some kind of genetic zip coding) to an exact position in three-dimensional space in the final brain, in order for you to function at all when you’re born and to lay down the basic matrix of interrelating neurons which will be the neurophysiological infrastructure of your personality and of the way you think. I labor the point to show that the cognitive model isn’t merely some psychologist’s fantasy. I t has a physical existence as a recognition system acting in an individual way t o determine what 5 The Impact of Science on Society reality is or is not for the organism. Anything that doesn’t get recognized in the most basic sense by the model is, naturally enough, rejected as meaningless. Of ‘course, meaning is defined by your neurophysiological construct, not anybody else’s. Perception is directed and controlled by this cognitive model, both at the individual level and at the level of whole societies. Both kinds of models are very idiosyncratic. The Italian model has a sign like a wave, meaning, “Come here.” Greek girls cause problems for non-Greek boys by saying “No” with a nod, not a shake, of their head. In New Zealand you can do one kind of V-sign but never the other. Americans look posh when they look neat; Europeans look posh when they look as if they’ve just come through a hedge backwards. A very fine linguistic example of model difference lies in the way the Irish and the English express themselves. Where the British will say that a situation is desperate but not hopeless, the Irish will say the situation is hopeless but not desperate. The cognitive model, then, is what sets the rules, defines the structures, bestows meaning, sets up the ethics, values, beliefs, knowledge-everything that permits the user to function as a sentient organism, because it provides a perceived reality. It tells you which way is up, if you like. The model, then, determines what the universe is. As Wittgenstein said, “You see what you want to see.” Let me give you a good example of that axiom from history. Back in the twelfth century, when we were looking up at a Sun going round the Earth because Aristotle and the Church said that’s the way it was, we were also looking up at what we thought was a perfect and unchanging universe, since if it had been created on day one of creation by the Deity, it had to be perfect. If it were perfect, there would be no change up there to see, so we didn’t look up much. At the same time, however, the Chinese were busy getting a crick in the neck from doing just that-observing what was going on up there and logging everything that moved. They became expert astronomers centuries before we did, not because they were clever and we were dummies but because there was nothing in their model, as there was in ours, to stop them from seeing changes up there. We saw no change up in the sky because we thought there was none to see. Comets and supernovae were thought of as warnings from God! 6 The Legacy of Science The cognitive model-or to give it a better name, the paradigm- controls all decisions. If you believe the cosmos is made up of omelette, you build instruments specifically designed to find traces of intergalactic yolk. In that paradigm you reject phenomena like pulsars and black holes as paranormal garbage. In an omelette cosmos, the beginning of the universe becomes a chicken and egg problem, doesn’t it? Now, this definition of terms (like omelette universe) happens all the time. The reason that we today refer to electricity in terms of current is because in the eighteenth century people like Ben Franklin thought it was a fluid and tied all their experiments to that so-called fact. At the same time, in the eighteenth century, they thought all disease was caused by bad smells. Malaria is mal aria-bad air. We laugh at that, but for them, as for everybody at any time, the contemporary view of things is always the horse’s mouth. Every paradigm, at every time, in every place, is internally valid. By definition it has to be, for the organism or the group to function. Everybody has to have some version of reality-“the way things are for them,” their definition of which way is up. This is perfectly valid at the time. All you can logically say about a guy who thinks he’s a poached egg is that he’s in the minority. But then, if every paradigm is valid-set in philosophical concrete-what ’s the point in going through all that confusion when change happens? Metaphysically speaking, no one paradigm is innately any better than any other. A universe that began at 9 a.m. on October 10, 4004 B.C. (which was official back in the seventeenth century) is intrinsically no less valuable for those who live by a belief in it than is our present uncertain universe, per- haps built like a yo-yo, forever destroying and remaking itself in never-ending big bangs. Each of the cosmological theories has, at different times, found totally ironclad evidence to support it. So, given that every paradigm in every place at every time has had epistemological reasons for being the only right one thus far, why does the boat get rocked time and again, why are waves made, why does change happen, when everything is fine as it is? Even if there are a few wrinkles in an otherwise fully adequate explanation of the universe, we try very hard to get around them. For instance, something that bothered people back in the eighth century B.C. was the way the planets appear to go backwards 7 I The Impact of Science on Society our administration and army chaps were dropping like flies out in the Far Eastern colonies because of malaria, and artificial quinine would have fixed things up right. Besides that, we were having to buy natural quinine from the Dutch in Java, and they charged an outrageous price for it. So that great motivator, money, was also at work. Well, after a bit Perkin came up with some interesting sludge, but one thing it wasn’t was artificial quinine, so he threw it down the sink, and discovered that he had invented the world’s first aniline dye. Made a million. Sometimes, though, you may be looking in the right direction, but you don’t see what’s happening. In 1778, just after you people had gone off on your own and left us with no more South Carolina pitch to put on the bottom of our ships to protect them from rot, the rather seedy ninth Earl of Dundonald in Scotland thought up a plan to recoup the family fortunes by getting tar out of the coal from a couple of mines on his land. This tar would replace the pitch and make Dundonald a rich man. Unfortunately, the British government had already shifted to copper-bottoming its ships, so Dundonald’s coal-heating kiln, where he made the tar, was useless, and so were the vapors he had been watching coming out of the kiln. In fact, he’d even been lighting them and generally playing around, shooting flames out of a tube. He happened to mention this to his friend James Watt, and three years later, Watt’s sidekick “invented” coal gas. Dundonald died in poverty. However, even when you get what you’re looking for and you know you’ve got it, things can go haywire. Take Benjamin Huntsman, clockmaker, looking for a better clock spring in 1740 because pendulum clocks were no good at sea and you needed a clock to work out longitude, and in an era of great maritime expansion east and west, longitude was kind of essential. Now Huntsman happened to live near a glass works, and he saw the glassmakers putting in chips of old broken bottles, doing high- temperature remelts, and coming out with really great glass. So he tried the trick with steel. It worked, and there was what he wanted, the world’s greatest spring. The point was, Huntsman’s steel would also cut anything you could think of, so what it did for the lathe, and machine tools in general, and micrometers, and precision engineering, and steam engine cylinders, and the whole Industrial Revolution was something nobody could ever have 10 The Legacy of Science dreamed of-least of all Huntsman, who sat there saying, “What happened?” Sometimes the catalyst for major change will simply come in, totally unexpectedly, from outside your paradigm. Take the case of the compass. It came in from China via the Arabs in the twelfth century. Nothing much happened until Sir Francis Drake came back from over here complaining about the way the needle did funny things when you got across to this side of the Atlantic. Queen Elizabeth’s doctor took time off (18 years) to look at why, and decided that the Earth was a gigantic magnet with poles. OK, so what? Well, to carry out his experiments, he built himself a lot of balls of various substances-lodestone, amber, sulfur, glass, and so on-to represent the Earth, so he could see what they did to his compass. As he busily rubbed these balls to make them attractive to his needle, he noted somewhat disinterestedly that sulfur was very attractive, and added a minor footnote to that effect. Around 1640 the mayor of Magdeburg in Germany, one Otto Guericke, read the aforesaid footnote and tried the trick again. While he was rubbing his sulfur ball one day to make it attractive, it cracked and gave off a spark, and-yes, you guessed it-electricity. From the compass. From China. Even if you’d spoken Chinese you wouldn’t have seen that one coming! One of the most common ways change is generated is through interaction between one factor and another, and usually in unex- pected concatenations. Take the skills a goldsmith has. He’s good at working soft metals and using molten alloys, and the hallmark of a good goldsmith is just that, his hallmark, the punch that puts his impress on his work. If you are capable of seeing that punched image in reverse, you can see how to cast a shape in the pattern made by the punch. And the pattern could be a letter, in metal, which is why printing was invented by a goldsmith-that’s what Gutenberg was. This interaction that can lead to change is often caused by imbalance, a kind of domino effect. The well-known modern one is that of the superplants. They give great yield-better than the old, less productive types. But they replace variety with a monoculture, and, if disease hits that, you’ve got no fallback. That kind of domino effect-the knock-on effect of imbalance in one area upon another-gave us one of the major scientific 11 The Impact of Science o n Society discoveries in history. When cannons started being popular in the mid-fourteenth century, they pushed up the demand for metal, and that got people deeper into the ground than before. One of the things they found was that the deeper you go, the wetter it can get, and the old suction pumps wouldn’t lift the water up higher than about 30 feet. Well, this problem caused all sorts of grief until one of Galileo’s boys, called Torricelli, worked out that it had something to do with atmospheric pressure. A friend of a friend of his went up a mountain with a tube of mercury to see if pressures were different up there and down here. Well, they were, but what was the gap at the top of the tube full of mercury? It was the thing everybody said didn’t exist-the vacuum. And suddenly you had barometers, airpumps, a new view of interstellar space, and a very different basis for science. Now, the mechanism by which change can be generated isn’t by any means always a technology-technology interaction. Take the ultimate effect of the telescope. When Galileo looked through it he saw satellites circling Jupiter. That blew a hole in the Earth being the center of everything, took humanity off its special philosophical pedestal, and prepared the way for a universe that wasn’t arranged the way Aristotle had said, but the way Newton was to say-like a giant clock, running by itself, with God maybe long gone on other business. Religion took a knock from that from which it never fully recovered. The German mathematician and businessman Gottfried Leib- niz, working on the planetary dynamic problem at the same time as Newton and looking at the kinds of mathematics you’d need to measure infinitesimal rates of change in movement, decided that he had his hands on a tool of cosmic philosophical significance. If you could measure that infinitesimally, were you getting to be able to measure the basic units of existence? If you were, said the philoso- pher Immanuel Kant a bit later, you could discover and measure the way all things shaded into all other things at that scale. The new philosophy became known as. naturphilosophie. Its concept of “oneness in all” spawned romantic poetry and mu- sic, nationalism, and revolutions including yours. It won’t surprise you to know that Jefferson wm a naturphilosophe. Naturphiloso- phie also helped to bring about modern medicine. In 1810 a French surgeon named Xavier Bichbt, another follower of the new philos- ophy, went looking for the vital, infinitesimally small bits in his I 12 The Legacy of Scaence knowing and accepting where you stood in society and sticking to the rules that governed social class mobility, such as it was. “Happiness” meant amassing property and riches without being bothered by government! He would have thought we were living in anarchy. Be that as it may, we regard the institutions and their associ- ated slogans as helping to preserve cohesion and stability in our paradigm-except that this is a cohesion and stability which is, as you’ve seen, at best transient. Once the French philosopher and permanent exile Rend Descartes got his hands on the way we in the West thought, stability and permanence went out the window. Before Descartes and his seventeenth-century paradigm shift, you said credo ut intelligam-I believe, and through my belief I come to understand. After him you switched it around: intelligo ut credam-give me the facts and I’ll let you know. In his great Dis- c o w s Sur la Methode (or, “how to think”), he gave us the modern approach. He called it methodical doubt. He said, “If they tell you it’s certain, call it probable. If it’s probable, call it possible, and if the deal is that it’s possible, forget it.” And Cartesian methodical doubt is the engine of the modern scientific world and the bringer of accelerating rates of change. So, where have we ended up? If the mechanisms of change are as serendipitous and as hard to second guess as I have suggested- and we are, thanks to Descartes and others, in a world of increasing rates of change-are there any lessons to be learned from the past to help us at least adapt? Is it true that those who are not prepared to learn from the past are condemned t o repeat it? Do we really only know where we’re going if we know where we’ve been? Well, there are repeating factors, back then, that seem to be present when change occurs, much the way cholesterol is with heart attacks, present and only maybe causative. First there’s the one that appears to be the most obvious, that change happens because you need it-“Necessity is the mother of invention” and all that. There’s an interesting study of Europe up through the late Middle Ages that seems to show that innovation happens and is taken up most in areas of marginal circumstances and stress, and least where things are pretty comfortable. Let’s look at the ancient Egyptians. When you’ve established the simple fact that once a year the Dog Star, Sirius, appears just 15 T h e Impact of Science on Society before dawn (after having been invisible for seventy days) and one day later the Nile floods and dumps fertilizer and water on the land, and that it does so with extraordinary exactness every year, you develop a calendar just to tell you which day Sirius is going to appear, dig your irrigation canals, and sit back. That’s all you need in the way of new tricks, so Egyptian society never changed after that initial step. I t never needed to, in 3000 years. But the ancient Greeks? Well, put yourself in their position. In the eighth century B.C. you live on narrow coastal strips in what is now modern Turkey, in littIe city states with just enough to survive on. The weather is lousy and uncertain, and the barbarians are clobbering you with regularity. You’ve got to get out and trade, make a buck, just to keep going, so you think up ways of systematizing the method of hustling business. You look up at the sky, and what you see is not Sirius rising and nothing else; you see a great road map for your seaborne traders to use. You work out star tables to navigate by, and the more you look, the more you see that the permanent perfection of the night sky is a lot different from the temporary mess down here. So curiosity becomes a way of life. No wonder the Greeks invented their particular form of curiosity. (They called it philosophia.) It’s what you get when you’re looking for answers. In a sense, it was Greek philosophy, born of their difficult circumstances, their desire for answers to questions, that started change happening in Western culture. What got it accelerating, though, was something else, and that’s the ease with which people communicated, moved ideas around. The easier you cross-talk, the faster change happens. Take medieval Europe. When the Vikings and the Saracens and the Hungarians stopped the rape-and-pillage stuff in the tenth century, people started coming out of the woodwork and building little roads toward each other and traveling along them. The next thing you know, you got the medieval water-powered industrial revolution, which kicked the European economy into high gear within three generations. In the Renaissance, a hundred years after the arrival of printing, you had 20 million books, most of them in specialties that could only exist when the specialists had a way of reading each others’ stuff. This gave us nothing less than the scientific revolution of the 16 The Legacy of Science sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and a slew of people talking the kind of incomprehensible stuff most of you live with in your area of expertise. Don’t be insulted; how much do you understand of the language of paleontology? Specialization is essential. I’d hate to have flown here in a plane designed by a plumber. To return to my point about communication, in the nineteenth century, after the development of electromagnetic systems for moving messages around (Le., the telegraph and the telephone), the whole body of modern science emerges-in particular, physics. So, the ability to communicate seems to be a basic factor in the mechanism of change, and we have communications today that make earlier forms look like hieroglyphs painfully chiselled out in stone. New developments in areas like magnetic bubble domain memories and superconducting materials will enhance our ability to use data beyond anything we’ve even begun to think of. With our present facility for communication, we’re doing more of one particular trick than at any time before. And that trick, it seems to me, is putting things together. Let me suggest a new axiom: juxtaposition is the spice of life. Humanity’s biggest talent, unique to us, is juxtaposing, finding and operating novel relationships between things or ideas. Indeed, at the turn of this century in Vienna, a group of thinkers who were to have a profound influence on Einstein (the positivists, led by Ernst Mach) came to the conclusion that all science could talk about was relationships. This was after Michelson and Morley had failed to find the ether. You remember that up in Cleveland in the 1880’s the two of them were looking for a medium that would be the carrier of light, magnetism, and electricity. Everybody called this medium “ether.” Well, Michelson and his friend were trying to show that the two halves of a split light beam would come back together again, out of phase, because one-half had been shot in the direction of the Earth’s travel (against the so-called stream of ether) and would take a while, and the other, which had gone perpendicular to the ether, and so wouldn’t suffer drag, would return early. Actually, there had been no difference at all. The beams arrived back simultaneously. Then Fitzgerald, in Dublin, made things worse by saying that this was because the forward motion of the Earth was contracting one part of the instrument exactly the right amount to give the 17 T h e Impact of Science o n Society been describing? Is it due to shift? Well, obviously it is. But let me suggest that instead of moving to a radically new paradigm, we may, because of the tremendous facility for interaction that communications gives us, be moving to a no-paradigm culture. If a paradigm is, and has always been, a structure built on an agreed core of common beliefs, knowledge, value judgments, social constraints, and so on, then are we heading the opposite way, to a situation of no common agreed center, of shifting, pragmatic local standards, with failure of what we used to call consensus and re- gionalism globally on the increase again after the early years of Pax Americana, with the nation-state obsolete, and so on? We would be a society physically and psychologically fragmented, because with soft energy options and telecommunication, “centralization” and “economies of scale” (those catchwords of the last years of the Industrial-Revolution paradigm we’re coming to the end of) are no longer necessary. To those of us condemned to repeat the lessons of history because we won’t learn from them, what I’m describing sounds like a frightening prospect. Chaos is what it sounds like, but isn’t what’s happening just a paradigm shifting (like all the others did) because we’re ready for the shift? Change occurs ultimately because we want it to. We have the tools because at some time we decided we wanted them. These new tools, provided by science and technology, are more than just tools-they’re instruments of social revolution, violent or peaceful. As the tools change, so too does the ability of society to organize itself. Once we needed god-kings, or feudal lords, or absolute mon- archs, or no sex before marriage, or empires, or 12-hour days, or whatever, to keep ourselves together. Now, maybe, we don’t need centralized social structures and rigid regulatory mechanisms any more. We are, after all, as Immanuel Kant said, creatures of the imperative. If the ethics start to get in the way, we dump them. But let’s take a brief look at the kind of behavioral social dumping we may be up against with some of the possible results of our newfound abilities to initiate change much more readily and rapidly because we can juxtapose things inside the computer, where we have a facility for juggling the mix like never before, at a rate and in volume almost astronomical. And, by the way, for those of you who feel nice and safe because of the old sayings “Garbage 20 The Legacy of Science in, garbage out” and “A machine is only as good as the people punching the buttons,” try some of the newer heuristic systems that learn from their own experience. The main thing, it seems to me, is to remember that technology manufactures not gadgets, but social change. Once the first tool was picked up and used, that was the end of cyclical anything. The tool made a new world, the next one changed that world, the one after that changed it again, and so on. Each time the change was permanent. Using the tool changes the user permanently, whether we like it or not. Once when I was in Moscow talking to academician Petrov, I said, “Why don’t you buy American computers to get you into space quicker and more effectively?” He replied, “No fear; they’d make us think like Americans.” You only have to go back a few years in this century to see how our gestalt, our way of behaving, our values, have been changed by science. If I say just a few names, you’ll get my point: the Pill, calculators, jet airplanes, television. Take those examples and look at their secondary social effects. Yes, the Pill has made family planning feasible, but now the Third World regards it as a suspicious imperialist Western trick to keep their numbers down while we go on with our “economic imperialism.” Calculators have changed the meaning of testing people in cer- tain kinds of knowledge, which we need to do to ensure publicly accepted standards of professional ability. Jets mean people can now fly and visit the ends of the Earth, but they also mean that we export our way of life and our sometimes unacceptable value sys- tems to places that neither want nor need them. Television makes my life one of totally vicarious experiences. It gives me packaged glimpses of the world beyond my horizons, takes away my com- fortable preconceptions, and replaces them with glossy, quick-fix substitutes that are even less good to me than my preconceptions were. All I know now is that I don’t know! To get back to my “dumping” idea, you see how the gadget changes more than just what the ad says it will do. With our rates of change, the only constant in our paradigm may well become change itself. All you can be sure of about tomorrow is that it will go on being different, and, if you’re lucky, only at the same accelerating rate. Above all, the judgmental systems from the old paradigms may 21 The Impact of Science on Society not work in that world. Today we are, in fact, the last of the old world, living with institutions that are already creaking, facing twenty-first-century problems with nineteenth-century attitudes. Most of us find difficult to accept what we might have to dump. We face questions like these: If criminality is caused by XYY chromosomes, who do you blame for a crime, and why do you punish at all? When everybody has a home computer work station, what happens to unions, the infrastructure that runs the roads and transportation systems, the community life that “work in a central location” means, the new isolation of being alone most of the time? If data banks carry all the knowledge we possess, to be accessed at need, what will be the purpose of memory, of “knowing” anything? And what happens if what you got from the machine yesterday (what we’ll call “what you know”) is different when you go back to the machine today? If you have no expertise because expertise is no longer necessary, what are you left with? If technology provides virtually free energy, with the ability to turn anything into anything else (which we can already do- it’s just too expensive to be feasible), and we no longer need the raw materials we used to because we can now make them, what happens to the materials producers in the Third World? Unlimited energy, the so-called philosopher’s stone, brings far more questions than answers. Not the least of these is the new importance it will have for the planetary heat budget, which at the moment is pretty much only the business of nature. Well, my guess is (and here I remind you of the unquestionable value of any guess made from within the inevitable limitations of our paradigm) that we’re all headed for one of two kinds of future. In one future, we take on the new data systems the way we took on all the other tools in the past, with a view to making them do what we’ve always done up to now, only better, faster, and cheaper. In this case, I think we’re in for a dose of Luddite reaction as our social structures fail to take the strain of that much shift that fast in the working habits of the population, not to mention 22 The Legacy of Science going to discover, and if you don’t come up with it you lose the grant! Question: Of all the countries you’ve worked in, which one, in your opinion, provides the best education, and, in particular, how do you view education in the United States? Answer: That sure sounds like a quick way t o get my head chopped off! I think educational systems tend to be structured according to the societies in which they work. I mean, our educational system in England is extremely difficult, different from yours, and very elitest. A very small percentage of us go to university, and we’re used to choosing the subject that we study at university a t the age of 16. We specialize in only two subjects from ages 16 to 18, and we then take a national examination in those two or three subjects. Only one of those subjects is what we go to university for, if we pass a competitive examination to get a place at the university, and the ratio is usually about three or four hundred people to each place. Now, we have to have an elitest educational system like that because we are very small and we’ve become quite poor ever since we lost the jolly old empire. If we didn’t have that kind of high-quality turnout we wouldn’t have enough people producing enough stuff on the market for us to sell anything to anybody. So I think we have an elitest educational system not because it’s a hangover from the old imperial days, but because if we don’t produce a very, as it were, sharp-edged elite intellectually, we won’t be able to compete with giants like you on the market. Question: I would like to ask whether the, what shall I say, elite in Britain and perhaps in Western Europe believe in full employment not merely because of the necessity for having the things that people produce when they’re fully employed, but rather as occupational therapy for the masses, around the idea that idle hands do the devil’s work, and that whereas intellectuals can keep their minds occupied and out of mischief, the common man is not capable of this. George Orwell said something like this (and it’s not something I agree with), but I would remark that Eric Hoffer said the common man was lumpy with talents and could do all kinds of things besides produce goods and shouldn’t be viewed merely as a production machine. Can you speak to that, sir? 25 T h e Impact of Science o n Society Answer: Well, I can’t speak for all of Europe, but I think the French probably think that full employment’s essential and they’ve had four devaluations of the franc as a result. It seems to me that full employment is a relatively new phenomenon. We’ve slid over into economics, and I’m extremely worried-I think anybody with any sense and honesty always is, in that subject. However, I believe I’m right in saying that full employment is a twentieth- century phenomenon. The concept didn’t exist to any great extent at all prior to that. And I think it probably came at the tail end of a very healthy, burgeoning post-Industrial Revolution in both America and Europe. I think what we’re seeing now is a transition period to what Bell calls a post-industrial society, and it’s a period aided and abetted, of course, by the recession, which is caused not by the fact that we can’t switch paradigms but because oil costs a great deal. I think the situation, fortunately for me, is so confused that no clear statement can be made on it by me or anybody else except a politician. Question: If I understand you correctly, it seem5 to me that you’re putting out the impression that our technology is running away from our society. In other words, it’s speeding up at a rate that we can’t quite keep up with. In the past, when this has happened to societies, some major upheaval has occurred, whether it be sociological or financial, economical, or revolutionary, like wars. Do you have any idea what is going to cause us to catch up with our rapidly advancing technology? Answer: Well, I think part of what I said earlier indicates what I think about that. First let me just dispel any idea that I believe in the so-called force of technology. I mean, technology is what people do. You invent the tool because you want it, or because you perceive an imbalance or a need, or you’re just greedy. You say, “I want this piece of technology,” and it comes into existence and you use it. I think society gets technology as it gets governments that it deserves. Sometimes, but not very often, technology tends to go a little faster than our ability to keep up with it. I’m not sure that this has happened to any great extent in the past, but I’m sure that it’s about to happen now. I think anybody with any sense would recognize that electronic data systems are going to make a quantum leap in terms of the effect of juxtapositioning, as I said earlier. As to what we can do about it, it seems to me that the 26 The Legacy of Science only way to get into it is through the educational process. It’s too quick, and you can’t have a quick-fix answer. It’s no good teaching us what to do. I think you’ve got to begin with the children who are 4 years old now and start the process there. As I said, I just hope some teachers who are better than I am at organizing this kind of thing in education, which is tremendously difficult, will get on with it, but I can’t see any other way of doing that. We are up against a period of very difficult transition. Question: Being somewhat of a video game fanatic, I’ve noticed that extremely small children play video games much better than anyone else. They’re well adapted to the electronic age because they have far fewer preconceptions, apparently. The way things are going, it looks as if things are going to get less and less expensive and more and more reachable in terms of the spread of technology and the spread of knowledge. Everyone can learn. Even if we can’t feed everybody in India, we can teach them all how to read. Pretty soon everybody will have his own terminal. Now, over the years, one of the major complaints of the Third World, even the Third World in the United States, has been that they never had the chance to get a leg up because they were deprived from the start. So, could it be possible now that we really will achieve a parity of sorts because everybody will have the same chance once this technology becomes more equally spread? Well, it depends entirely on what regulations are applied to the use of the technology. If I live in a totalitarian state and I produce a computer you can bet the people who use it are going to use it in a very different way than they use it in Spokane. As Petrov said to me, “I don’t want American computers; they make us think like Americans.” So, first of all, I think the thing you’re discussing is a matter primarily of social and political consequence. Technology doesn’t do things to us; we, I hope, do things to technology. So, the fact that every man has his own computer does not necessarily mean that we will have instant parity and literacy everywhere and a bright and happy future, because there are a lot of governments that would like to make sure that half their population only ever plays video games. Keeps them quiet. It’s no good having all the terminals in the world unless you’ve been taught to ask the questions. If you’re given all the knowledge that ever existed, where do you start? How do you 27 Answer: The Impact of Science o n Society I remember once we were having a discussion in the BBC when there was regionalism in Britain, when Scotland was going to secede, and the BBC began seriously to consider maybe moving some of its offices out into the provinces to find out what the grass roots thought. Well, somebody killed the idea by saying, “If you tell me what the difference between Edinburgh physics and London physics is, I’ll move to Edinburgh.” It seems to me, as I say this, that the way I describe science gives me the hope that it’s the only way one can survive because everything else has to be persuasion, partial view, opinion, and belief. But nobody can alter the fact that this page drops when I let it go. Accomplishments of Science by the Year 2000 Jules Bergman 32 Jules Bergman As the first full-time television network science editor in the US, ABC News Science Editor Jules Bergman covered all 37 manned flights in the US space program, beginning with the original seven Mercury astronauts and the Space Task Group at NASA Langley Research Center. He frequently participated in the astronauts’ rigorous training programs and flight simulations. He also covered the historic US-USSR joint Apollo-Soyuz Test Project and the fall of the American Skylab. In the 1960’s, when the US was deeply involved in its emerging space program, Bergman’s reports were the main source of information on this subject for many Americans. A pilot himself, Bergman has also covered the first flights of almost every new US military and commercial aircraft as well as major airline disasters around the world. In the 1970’9, Bergman turned more of his attention to docu- mentary work, winning an Emmy Award for his contributions as co-writer and narrator of the ABC documentary Closeup on Fire. He has written and narrated documentary programs dealing with the energy crisis, sports injuries, aircraft and automobile safety, the hazards of asbestos, and nuclear power. In the spring of 1979 Bergman contributed to ABC’s coverage of the nuclear power plant accident at Three Mile Island. In the field of medicine, Bergman covered the beginning of the transplant era as well as various new developments in cancer treatment. More recently he reported on the swine flu controversy and the “legionnaire’s disease” mystery for both the ABC Evening News and ABC’s Good Morning America. He occasionally hosts ABC’s Sunday afternoon interview program Issues and Answers, questioning guests from the fields of science and space. Bergman has won many awards for scientific journalism and has written numerous articles on space and science for such magazines as Readers’ Digest, The New York Times Magazine, and Esquire. He is a native of New York City and attended City College of New York, Indiana University, and Columbia College. He completed postgraduate studies at Columbia University, where he held a Sloan-Rockefeller Advanced Science Writing Fellowship. Accomplishments of Science by the Year 2000 engineer reviewed the first flight of the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk. Half the newspapers neglected the event, thinking the Wrights pure nuthatches and the story too ludicrous even to deserve mention. If there had been television, we would have covered it just to show you the crash. The famous engineer, Octave Chanute, looked deep into his crystal ball and predicted “that such flying machines may even carry mail in special cases, but the useful loads carried will be very small. The machines will eventually be fast, they will be used in sport, but they are not to be thought of as commercial carriers.” A new climate of almost hysterical disregard for the technologi- cal needs of an overpopulated world has sprung up, a world which would starve and succumb to disease if we tried to return to the simple life of a century ago. Technology must not be destroyed; it can and must be controlled, and not with distortions leading to erroneous conclusions, not with unproven charges. As Admiral Rickover once put it, “Half truths are like half a brick; they can be thrown farther.” Let me give you two examples of leaping to conclusions without the full facts. Back in the 1890’s, a certain California newspaper was apprehensive about the harmful effects the railroads would have on the environment. If the trains crossed the Mojave to get to the Pacific, this newspaper editorialized, “the huge iron rails will reverse the Earth’s magnetic field with catastrophic effects.” Now that’s real science! One hundred forty years ago, the Royal Society in England warned against the railroads, claiming that at speeds over 30 mph, the air supply to the passenger compartment would be cut off and people would die of asphyxiation. And the college of physicians in Munich, for its part, warned that at 30 mph, travelers would suffer headaches, vertigo, and possibly lose their sight because of a blurring effect. Over 30 mph, great catastrophes were predicted, because everyone knew that even a twig would shatter the wheels. In 1936, to come closer to the present, a War Department colonel visited Robert Goddard, the father of American rocketry, who had by then clearly demonstrated the practicality of the rocket. The colonel, doubtless fresh from the calvary in George Custer’s historic triumph a t Little Big Horn, dismissed Goddard’s work as “sheer poppycock of no practical use in modern warfare.” After World War 11, Wernher von Braun said 35 The Impact of Science on Society that it was Goddard’s work that led the Germans directly to both the V-1 and V-2 rockets. I t was Goddard, by the way, who left us with this legacy: “It is difficult to say what is impossible, for the dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow.” To put it another way, as Santayana did, “Those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat its mistakes.” We in the media have learned to view prose, projections, and predictions with a jaundiced eye. As a famed aircraft accident report concluded, and I cite this to my engineering friends all the time, “Extrapolation is the fertile parent of error.” Enough of the reports and predictions that have crossed my desk in the last decade have suffered from exactly that fault to teach me to be supercautious. As Pogo once said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” To which we might add, we have faults we have hardly used yet. The Space Shuttle is the beginning of an era, one of our practical utilization of space as well as of its exploration. I envision our use of space to be about one-third commercial, one- third military, and one-third scientific. There are, by the way, nearly 400 communications satellites already in orbit. They have, of course, revolutionized our society, giving us everything from cheaper phone calls over longer distances to better TV signals. When the President promised us that the era had come to safeguard our security, he was referring to Star War type lasers and particle beam weapons, which, as you know, are already in progress. Lasers are working experimentally and have shot down drone planes and missiles and bored holes through the solid steel sides of target ships. Particle beams may be just a scientific figment of fiction, but can we afford that risk when the Russians are fast moving ahead in their development? I don’t think so. I think that all research has to be done, all that’s realistically profitable when decided by reasonable men of intelligence. As for the Star Wars speech, I happen to believe that it was pure politics to get the defense budget through Congress. Arthur C. Clarke, who is credited as the father of the commu- nications satellite, once wrote that every revoluEionary idea seems to evoke three stages of reaction which may be summed up by the phrases (1) it’s completely impossible; don’t waste my time, (2) it’s possible, but it’s not worth doing, (3) I said it was a good idea all 36 Accomplishments of Science by the Year 2000 along. We are gathered to talk about the future, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, if there is to be any future. For a generation with so much ahead of it, technologically and exploratively, we seem to have an abnormal fear of the future. We have nothing to fear if we act and act now. And it doesn’t apply so much to the engineering types out there as to the public across the country. As Kirkegaard once said, “It is not at all true that the scientist goes after truth; it goes after him.” Or, as Wilbur Wright put it back in 1909, “There are three classes of people: one class thinks the flying machine is going to do everything, the second class thinks it’s going to do nothing, and the third class gets in the air and sees what it can do.” Too many of us die too young in this country. Medical care is obviously our single most explosive crisis, whether it concerns the ghetto dweller in many major cities, for whom the emergency room has become his doctor’s office, or the rural resident, who finds that his doctor’s office disappeared a long time ago. A few years ago, everybody was shouting about the doctor shortage. Politicians said we were 50 000 doctors short. Medical schools enlarged their classes, and special loan funds were established. Well, we’ll soon have 600000 practicing doctors in this country, nearly twice the number we had 15 years ago, and it has now become obvious that we never really had a doctor shortage; we had a doctor dislocation, with too many grouped in the most attractive or well-paying cities and too few elsewhere. We still have, by the way, far too many surgeons and far too few GPs, internists, and pediatricians. The most dramatic example I know is that New York City alone has twice the number of neurosurgeons as all of Russia. Medicine in this country is in the middle of a mass care and inflation crisis. There are 30 million poor in America. For them, death comes earlier, illness is twice as frequent, and there is four times as much chronic illness. The poor believe that poverty is disease and they are right. If you are poor, the risk of dying under the age of 25 is four times the national average. The really major steps that lie ahead in conquering disease are in brand new fields: bioelectronics, or new kinds of biochemistry that may even eliminate some forms of disease. To get better care, discovery must be initiated and urgently encouraged. New hospitals are needed with more efficient, newer physical plants that 37 T h e Impact of Science o n Society nuclear energy to getting to the Moon, because it involves changing the system, telling doctors how and where they can practice, up to a point, and then finding a way to pay for all of it. Believe me, I know; I come from a family of doctors. Yet once this is under way, it will actually save large sums of money by stopping many diseases when they are preventable or correctable, and not yet fatal. Deep in our crisis (and I see this all around the country, mostly in ghetto cities) is the individual’s fear that no one cares, that he has lost his identity as well as his power to do anything about what is happening to him. He feels hopelessly trapped in an ocean of polluted air, rampant inflation with a recession, jammed roads with an energy shortage, run-down housing and broken promises from our politicians-promises that now have to be kept. Our people feel that they’re in a rip-off society, and too often they are. The great hope is that we may have just discovered all this in time. In many ways this is because of the news media-the same media, especially television, which is accused of distorting and overplaying the news, and sometimes does so by mediocrity, accident, or deadline, but seldom by intention. That same media may just have saved us by focusing attention on these crises in time, before they get out of control. You’ve heard a lot about EPA and dioxin recently; well, let me tell you what’s coming up. I happen to know because I’ve been researching this. You’ve read about the dioxin sites in Missouri; well, it’s likely that there are thousands of dioxin sites across this country, most of them unknown. Dioxin is nothing new, by the way. It was identified as a contaminant left over from manufacturing pesticides, including PCBs and Agent Orange, decades ago. What we don’t know about are the long-range effects on our children and their children. Scientists are fearful that it may be a delayed time bomb, like asbestos, that lurks beneath the flesh, only to spring up 15 to 25 years later. The dioxin horror is a national disgrace. Some days I get so mad that I feel like the speech writer told by his boss that he’d better deliver a flawless job this time or else. The speech writer, intimidated by this, turned out an absolute gem, with the boss telling how he was going to reshape his industry and reduce costs at the same time. After describing several of the steps, the boss came to the end of the page and turned it over; it was completely blank except for the words “OK turkey, you’re on your own.” 40 Accomplishments of Science by the Year 2000 One of my favorite slogans is that people who leap to conclusions generally jump over the facts. Well, we’d leap from what is to what could be without stopping in between to be accurate. There are no easy answers to our problems. They’ll be costly and take time. We don’t even have really good data as yet on how severe many of them are, much less how to conquer them. But technology is the answer-not instant miracles, but the technological excellence that comes from space and aeronautical research, not even to mention the jobs it supplies. Using research in space as a scapegoat may make good politics, but it solves nothing. As I said earlier, we cannot suppress change; we can and will manage it. As a nation we’ve got to stop finding reasons why things can’t be done and find the reasons why they must be done, as well as the right way to do them, before we wipe ourselves out. The widening gap between what we know and what we do with it, between finite knowledge and infinite failure to use it, threatens to destroy the belief of all of us in our society. As usual, we have more questions than answers, and answers for which there are no questions. But it is glaringly clear that no one is really in charge in Washington to harness and use science and technology; they are playthings of political whim and expediency. No one really has the power and skill, much less the authority, to do the job now needed. Anyone who thinks that things will ever again be the way they were, or that they should be that way, is dreaming. Not only will this not happen, it should not. Our lifestyle and ways have been challenged and found lacking. What is happening is very much as if we were in the last 15 seconds of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, with the seconds ticking away, and then the clock was stopped for us for an instant replay and a second chance, a chance to discover how we should go, not only in the decades immediately ahead, but in the third century of our country. Socrates, you’ll remember, asked all the important questions but never answered any of them. This generation has to answer those questions, and we’re the people who can do it and have to do it. You can call this the age of overact and underthink, or whatever you like. The point is simple: people must prevail. If we lose track of that, we will lose ourselves. So the study of mankind, peoplekind (bioecology, I call it), the art and science of the individual, must be given far more 41 ~ The Impact of Science o n Society attention than it now receives. Why we do what we do is perhaps far more important than what we do. The glib words of years past from our politicians are hollow nightmares indeed when we are confronted with the staggering realities of what has to be done. But the key is there--technology, using it-and we hardly do now. The future may be unpredictable, but we can make a few well-aimed guesses about what life will be like in the year 2000. We’ll fly on supersonic transports, or more likely hypersonic transports, for which the ground work (or should I call it air work) has already been laid at places like NASA Langley Research Center. We’ll have put the genetic code to work and begun to engineer out congenital birth defects and inherited diseases. We’ll have made a real start toward the prevention and conquest of both heart disease and cancer. The remaining villains, of course, will be the common cold and hay fever. The normal life span should be 85 to 90 years, and anybody who suggests mandatory retirement at age 65 will face unthinkable punishment. What that longer lifespan will make possible is two or more careers for most of us. At age 40 or 50, we might go back to school and retrain ourselves for another career. Just think of the possibilities-politicians could even become statesmen. But those promises are distilled from much research by top thinkers, and you’ve got to watch researchers carefully. Our real goal in research, as one friend persists in telling me, is to reduce utter chaos to mere disorder. Well, we’re a little like Columbus before he set sail. When he departed he didn’t know where he was going. When he got there he didn’t know where he was. When he returned he didn’t know where he’d been, and he borrowed all the money to do it with. As George Bernard Shaw once said, “Some men see things as they are and say why; I dream things that never were and say why not.” Let me end on a quote from T. S. Eliot, who once wrote, “We shall never cease our exploration, and at the end of our exploring we will get back to where we started and know it for the first time.” And now I’ll be happy to tackle any questions you have. Question: Why do you think there has been the tendency towards a decline in science and engineering education in this country during the last 5 years? 42 I Accomplishments of Science by the Year 2000 should be earning for essentially sitting around pushing a pencil. I don’t think the media really cares, if that’s what you’re getting at. Question: What do you see as a specific role that the media can play in correcting the antitechnology attitude that society has? I think that I, for one, know I am doing what I can. We should more clearly spotlight the truth as well as the technical failures of our time, and there have been several. The media does the job of clarifying. It forces every public official to be more responsible and to check out projects more thoroughly before investing taxpayers’ dollars. That is the role of the media, and I Answer: , I I think to a large extent it’s being done. In fact, it may be overdone. Question: I want to ask you a question about the weapons community. It seems that we have a lot of weapons now and we’re asking for more. Because of Russia, I don’t think we can throw them away, but it seems that we come closer and closer to ending it all by pushing a button. Could you give me your opinion as to the direction Americans could take? Could you include some specifics with regard to the MX, deployment of missiles in Europe, and the Bl? Answer: Let me merely say, to answer your question briefly, that the more equally armed we and the Russians are, the greater the chances of peace, because each nation is fearful of the other. I don’t think there’s a ghost of a chance of major war or even a minor war ever erupting (a nuclear war, that is) between us and Russia. What I worry about are the maniacs, the smaller powers who are trying to attract attention to themselves. As for the MX, you’ve seen the Washington confusion about which way to go, and I think it has a distance to go before it straightens itself out. Question: We read often about the medical, technological, and particularly of medicine, do you see in the future the possibility for greater foreign cooperation? I know there has supposedly been some tremendous research on cancer in Sweden, Norway, and England, which we can’t take advantage of because of FDA restrictions. I’m thinking, for example, of the stories we’ve been hearing of the boy, Todd Cantrell, who had the eye problems and went to Russia for treatment. I military research from overseas-say Japan or Russia. Speaking I , , 45 The Impact of Science o n Society Answer: It didn’t do him any good; in fact, it set him back, according to one of the top eye surgeons. So I urge upon you a greater respect for ambiguity, a greater caution and a greater respect for US medicine. There is nothing in our country which doesn’t get approved, although it sometimes takes too long. The FDA is slow to move, but there is no cancer cure that’s been held back. Question: But do you think that countries will ever be able to cooperate in medical research? Answer: They cooperate right now. One area that we and the Russians still cooperate in (or one of the few areas) is biomedical research. Anybody in the medical arm of the government can tell you that. With the Chinese, too, it’s the one area we cooperate with them in. They, for example, have availed themselves of our latest surgical techniques, and we’ve availed ourselves of what look like very promising herbal cures. You can’t beat experience. In truth it’s a mix of everybody’s cures and everybody’s components. Question: Regarding this boy who went to Russia recently, the media at the time really made every effort to make a story out of it. Everybody in the United States had some opinion about that story at the time because it was blown up by the media. Isn’t it a fact that the media to a large degree abdicates its responsibility to our society in the quest of a story for the sake of the story, so that they can get the readership arid the television viewership? The media seems to be money oriented; it doesn’t seem to want to contribute to society. Answer: You’re right. The media did blow the Todd Cantrell story completely out of proportion. However, I can also throw into that mix the hour-long asbestos documentary I did last December, when I threw the book at both industry and government for failing to protect us when they had known about the problem for 30 or 40 years. But don’t tell me you haven’t heard me speak of the media’s failings, because there are many. There are too many Todd Cantrell stories. Question: Is there any sense of responsibility to society, not on an individual case, but on a media-wide base, or is it just that the companies have to answer to their stockholders? 46 Accomplishments of Science by the Year 2000 Answer: That doesn’t get into it at all, because commercial minutes on the news shows on all three networks sell for about the same amount of money. Each rating point is a couple of thousand dollars a week, but the news shows all lose catastrophic amounts of money; they’re loss leaders, if you will. So even if we can raise our ratings and our share of points over CBS or NBC, that’s not, a governing factor. There is only one governing factor, and that is attracting the audience with the truth. That’s my mission at ABC, but sometimes I’m not there, or I’m off on other projects. I was off on another project the day the Todd Cantrell story ran. The next day I asked an eye surgeon in New York, “Can this Russian treatment help this kid?” She said, “NO.” I tried to make the point! but it was too late, the story was gone. We did make the point when the kid came back, although by then the parents were elated because their son was potentially cured. People in that role are searching for what I call magic helpers. They’re not searching for the truth-they don’t care about the truth-they’re looking for magic helpers. Question: May I pursue one more point? There are, on your network, programs that in my opinion masquerade as news pro- grams. These hour-long programs come out with more or less sen- sationalist stories, and they serve the same purpose as the National Enquirer, as far as I’m concerned, because the sensationalism is there to generate points. I don’t think we had as many of these a few years ago. The documentaries that were of value have all disappeared. Answer: All I can tell you is that ABC does 12 documentaries a year, more than the other two networks put together. We’re the only active documentary unit in the country among the major networks. Question: You noted that Socrates asked political and world questions that are still important and pertinent today, and you also noted that science has advanced immensely since Socrates’ time. Does this mean you agree that technology is advancing faster than our political institutions? I said Socrates asked all the important questions, but never answered any of them. It is for our generation to answer them. Answer: I didn’t say that. 47 The Impact of Science on Society Answer: All of a sudden the energy crisis slowed down and gasoline went below a dollar a gallon, so the project was put on the back burner. Question: I have a question about the Space Telescope. How much coverage will there be of the launch, and after the Space Telescope is in orbit and operating, how much coverage will be available? Answer: You’re talking about 3 years or so from now, and there are new reports of major problems in both the mirrors and the optics of the Space Telescope, which had been scheduled for launch in 1986. It will have live TV cameras on it; all three networks will bring you the pictures. Question: Concerning propulsion as a source of energy, how Answer: You mean nuclear fusion. Not as far as we should, but Question: I think it’s obvious to all of us that the Three Mile Island incident had a disastrous effect on the nuclear industry. That, coupled with lagging electrical sales demands, makes me fairly confident that no new nuclear plants will come on line in this country between now and the year 2000. With the existing nuclear power plants producing electricity on a commercial basis, what is it going to take to get the Federal government to take a decisive stance on the problem of storage of the nuclear waste that we’re producing at present? far along are we coming in the area of nuclear fission? we’re getting there slowly. Answer: I don’t think you understand fully the fact that nuclear power plants produce only low-level radioactive waste. The high- level radioactive waste is from weapons systems, and they’re the more immediate problem. Question: There is an immediate problem in the sense that some of these nuclear power plants are going to be forced to shut down within the next year or two because they don’t have the storage available. Answer: Well, we’re talking politics again. I don’t pretend to be any great nuclear expert. It’s tough enough just keeping up with space and aviation. One of the problems we have is that our 50 Accomplishments of Science by the Year 2000 whole society has gotten so complex that no one person can keep up with anything. All these reprocessing plants that could have handled much of the waste are still mired in political battling. So go see your congressman. Question: What’s it going to take to get us out of that political mire? Do you suspect the government will actually take a decisive stance, or can the media help with this problem? Answer: Probably it’s going to take a new Arab oil embargo to bring us to our feet, begging for oil and thus begging for nuclear power. That’s the only real chance of getting out of it. The media, as you have noticed, is antinuclear, except for iconoclasts like me who perversely persist in telling the truth. Question: I work for the power company, so I happen to agree with that. My last question, if you don’t mind, is how serious do you think this dioxin problem is? Answer: We don’t know. We don’t have enough data on it, and the fact that we don’t is just downright disgraceful because dioxin is nothing new and we should have had the data by now. All we know is that dioxin causes chloracne, which goes away, and also some neurological disorders. The Swedes claim it causes bone cancer, but some of our people dispute that study. I have yet to see a definitive study on it. Question: You mentioned the lack of understanding and appreciation of science in Washington. Do you have any idea how this situation arose and why it continues today? Is there any relation between the lack of understanding and appreciation of science in Washington and the fact that, as you mentioned, Japanese companies are usually headed by engineers instead of MBAs? Answer: No, I don’t think that’s related to the lack of appreciation of science in Washington. I think you’re talking about apples and oranges. I don’t know how or why Washington became disenthused with science, but I suspect that it was a few too many Three Mile Islands, a few too many power companies lying and failing to do their job, a few too many regulatory agencies not doing their job to protect the public, as is implicit in their charter. 51 The Impact of Science on Society Question: You said that we will be technologically illiterate in the future. Do you think this is inevitable, or can we prevent it? Answer: That’s what the National Academy of Sciences warns. There are steps already under way to upgrade science and math education in high schools, but it’s going to be a long time before the problem is solved. For example, you can put in computers for 6- year-olds to use, but who is going to do the software programming and teach the teachers how to use them? Question: In light of dioxin, Agent Orange, and everything else we read about in the newspapers, do you see a more conservative trend in research in that area or are we just going to be reading more and more about it in the next 30 years or so? Answer: Do I see a more conservative trend in chemical research on pesticides? I certainly hope not. I think what’s needed is a more conservative system of checks and controls but not necessarily a more conservative trend in research. I think this country’s great advances have been made because we took on the impossible and proved it possible, but when something is basically dangerous, like dioxin, and people know it, that’s something else again. Question: I’m an engineer, and I remember when you talked about the difference between what you earn in basic research and what you earn out in the marketplace working in a production-type atmosphere. Very little basic research is done without government sponsorship. Do you think that private industry should be taking on more of this responsibility in order to promote a higher standard of living for people doing basic research? 1 Answer: Yes. Question: I would like to know what you think about the advancement of research in new materials. Do you think this research has reached a peak as far as the resources we have on Earth, or do you think we’ll be able to go to other places, such as the Moon, for new materials? Answer: Do I think the advancement of research in new materials has reached a peak on Earth? Well, you could have said that 5 or 10 years ago, and then along came Kevlar or some other new material. Every time we say we’ve reached the limit, there’s no further to go, this is the peak, some quiet little guy in a 52 Accomplishments of Science b y the Year 2000 Question: How do you think the advancement of technology is going to affect the environment that we all share, and do you think the technology that is proposed and discovered is going to be able to keep up with the problem of storing our nuclear waste in a way that will not affect future generations? Answer: That’s a sweeping question you’ve asked, but I can answer it by simply saying that the gross crimes of the past two decades have guaranteed that out of the ashes of the old EPA will come a new EPA. I believe that no new technology that pollutes will be allowed. 1 55 Our Future in the Cosmos-Computers Isaac Asimov Isaac Asimov For more than 45 years, Isaac Asirnov has been a professional writer of renowned versatility. The Russian-born scientist and author, who has been called a genius and “the nearest thing to a human writing machine,” is perhaps best known as one of today’s major science fiction writers. His broad range of works includes histories, childrens’ books, collections of articles, mysteries, and books concerning the Bible, literature, geography, and nonfiction science material. Blessed with total recall, Asimov entered Columbia University at the age of 15 and graduated with a doctorate in chemistry. Beginning in 1949, as instructor, associate professor, and later full professor, he taught biochemistry at Boston University’s School of Medicine. His scientific research includes work in kinetics, photochemistry, enzymology, and irradiation. Asimov’s impressive list of writings includes hundreds of articles in publications ranging from Esquire, Harpers, and The Saturday Review, to pamphlets of the Atomic Energy Commission. His latest and just-published novel, Robots of Dawn, is the third book in a series concerning his fictional character, Elijah Baley, and he is currently working on a revision to Asimov’s Guide to Science and on a new novel, Opus 900, which will be his 300th book. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science Westinghouse Award for excellence in magazine writing and a 1983 Hugo Award from the World Science Fiction Convention for his novel Foundation’s Edge, a sequel to a trilogy of novels that he wrote 3 decades ago concerning the distant future. Known to type 90 words a minute and to produce as much as 35 pages of manuscript a day, Asimov maintains an 8-hour-a- day, 4-day-a-week writing schedule and calls writing “my idea of a vacation. Most of all, I want to be writing,” he says. “If I could, I’d write every book in the world.” Dr. Asimov lectures as enthusiastically as he writes, and has been referred to as one of the “great explainers” of our technological age, helping to bridge the gap between science and the public. Our Future in the Cosmos-Computers hand doesn’t slide along the blade and cut all your fingers off. So, I figured robots would also have safeguards built in, and I finally listed these safeguards in the March 1942 issue of Astounding Science Fiction on page 100, first column, about one-third of the way down. Since then, I have had occasion to look up the list and memorize it. I called it the “Three Laws of Robotics.” I will now recite these laws for you because I have memorized them. I have made a great deal of money from them, so it sort of warms my heart to think of them for purely idealistic reasons. 1. A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, 2. A robot must obey orders given to him by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law. None of these laws is interesting in itself, although it is obvious that the laws apply to all tools. If you stop to think, the first rule of any tool is that you operate it safely. Any tool that is going to kill you when you use it is not going to be used. It won’t even be used if it merely maims you! The second rule is that a tool should do what it is supposed to as long as it does so safely. And the third rule is that a tool ought to survive its use and be ready for a second use, if that can possibly be arranged. Nowadays, people who are working with robots actually debate the methods by which these three rules can be installed. This flatters me, but what interests me most is that I called these rules the Three Laws of Robotics, and that use of the word “robotics” in the March 1942 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, (page 100, first column, one-third of the way down) was the first use of this word anywhere in the English language. I made up the word myself; this is my contribution to science. Someday, when a truly encyclopedic history of science is written (you know, one with 275 volumes), somewhere in volume 237, where the science of robotics is discussed, there will be a footnote: The word was invented by Isaac Asimov. That is going to be my only mention in all 275 volumes. But, you know, better than nothing, I always say. The truth is that I didn’t know I was inventing a word; I thought it was the word. If you will notice, physics ends in “ics” and just about every branch of physics, such as hydraulics, celestial allow a human to come to harm. 61 The Impact of Science on Society mechanics, and so on, ends in “ics.)’ So I figured that the study of robots would be robotics, and anyone else would have thought of that too if they had stopped to think that there might be a study of robots. What’s more, I quoted those three laws from the Handbook of Robotics, 56th edition (c.2058 A.D.), and the first edition of such a handbook is actually about to come out. It is a handbook of industrial robotics, and I was asked to write the introduction. Who would have thought, when I was a little kid writing about robots, that such a handbook would actually be written! It just shows that if you live long enough, almost anything can happen. The question then is: What is going to happen with robotics in the future? Well, as we all know, it’s going to create a certain amount of economic dislocation. Jobs will disappear as industries become robotized. What’s more, robots are dangerous, very literally dangerous sometimes. There has already been one case of a robot killing a human being. A few years ago a robot in a Japanese assembly line stopped working, and a young mechanic went to see what was wrong with it. The robot was surrounded by a chain-link fence, and the safeguard system was designed to cut off power to the assembly line when the fence gate was opened, thus deactivating the robot and making it just a lump of dead metal. This safeguard was designed to implement the First Law: Thou shalt open the chain fence before you approach the robot. (You have to understand that what we call industrial robots are just a bunch of computerized levers, nothing more. They’re not complicated enough to have the three laws built into them, so the laws are implemented outside them.) Well, this mechanic thought he would save himself a second and a half, so he lightly jumped over the fence and manually turned off that particular robot. This will do the trick just as well, unless you happen to push the “on” button with your elbow while you’re busy working on the robot. That is apparently what he did, so the robot, in all innocence, started working. I believe it was a gear-grinding robot, so it ground a gear in the place where a gear was supposed to be, which was where the guy’s back really was, and it k’illed him. The Japanese government tried to keep it quiet, because they didn’t want anything to spoil their exploitation of robotics. But it is difficult to keep a thing like that completely quiet. Eventually the news got out. In all the newspapers the headlines were: “Robot Kills Human Being.” 62 Our Future in the Cosmos-Computers When you read the article you got the vision of this monstrous machine with shambling arms, machine oil dribbling down the side, sort of isolating the poor guy in a corner, and then rending him limb from limb. That was not the true story, but I started getting telephone calls from all over the United States from reporters saying, “Have you heard about the robot that killed the human being? What happened to the First Law?” That was flattering, but I suddenly had the horrible notion that I was going to be held responsible for every robotics accident that ever happened, and that made me very nervous. I am hoping that this sort of thing doesn’t happen very often. But the question is: What’s going to happen as robots take over and people are put out of jobs? I am hoping that that is only a transition period and that we are going to end up with a new generation that will be educated in a different way and that will be ready for a computerized world with considerably more leisure and with new kinds of jobs. It is the experience of humanity that advances in technology create more jobs than they destroy. But they are different kinds of jobs, and the jobs that are going to be created in a computerized world are going to require a great deal more sophistication than the jobs they destroy. It is possible that it won’t be easy to reeducate or retrain a great many people who have spent their whole lives doing jobs that are repetitive and stultifying and therefore ruin their brains. Society will have to be extremely wise and extremely humane to make sure that there is no unnecessary suffering during this interval. I’m not sure that society is wise enough or humane enough to do this. I hope it is. Regardless, we will eventually come to a period when we will have a world that is adjusted to computerization. Perhaps then we will have another and even more intractable problem. What happens if we have computers and robots that are ever more capable, that are ever more versatile, and that approach human activity more and more closely? Are we going to be equaled? Are we going to be surpassed? Will the computer take over and leave us far behind? There are several possible answers to these questions, depending upon your mood. If you are in a cynical mood, if you have been reading the newspapers too closely, the answer would be: who cares? Or if you have become even more cynical, the answer would be: why not? You might look at it 63 T h e Impact of Science o n Society instrument and because it happens to be hard and heavy using it as a hammer. It may be a very good hammer, but obviously you are going to destroy the instrument. Well, we take our brain and what do we use it for? We file things alphabetically, make lists of things, work out profit and loss, and do a trillion and one other things that are completely trivial. We use our fancy instrument for trivia simply because there is nothing else that can do it. Now enters the computer. The computer is a halfway fancy instrument. It’s a lot closer to a hammer than it is to a brain. But it’s good enough to be able to do all those nonsense things that we have been wasting our brains on. The question is, what then is it that our brain is designed for? The answer, as far as I’m concerned, is that it is designed to do all sorts of things that involve insight, intuition, fantasy, imagination, creativity, thinking up new things, and putting together old things in completely new ways; in other words, doing the things that human beings, and only human beings, can do. I t is difficult for me to put myself into the minds of others; I can only put myself into my own mind. For example, I know that I write stories, and I write them as fast as I can write. I don’t give them much thought because I’m anxious to get them down on paper. I sit and watch them being written on the paper as my fingers dance along the keys of my typewriter, or occasionally of my word processor. I start a story in the right place and each word is followed by another word (a correct other word) and each incident is followed by another incident (a correct other incident). The story ends when it is supposed to end. Now, how do I know that all the words are correct, all the ideas are correct, and all the incidences are correct? I don’t know in any absolute sense, but a t least I can get them published. I virtually never fail! The thing is, I literally don’t give it any thought. People ask me, “HOW can you write all the stuff that you write?” (1 have written 285 books at the moment, and I’ve been busy writing Opus 300 so it can be published as my 300th book.) I say, “Well, I cut out the frills, like thinking.” Everyone laughs; they think I’m being very funny. But I’m not; I mean it literally. If I had to stop and think, I couldn’t possibly do all that I do. All right, I’m not as good as Tolstoy, but considering that I don’t think, I’m surprisingly good. Of course, the real answer is that I don’t consciously think. Something inside 66 Our Future in the Cosmos-Computers my brain puts the pieces together and turns out the stories. I just don’t know how it’s done. I don’t know how the devil I do it. Some change is taking place in my muscle molecules, in the actomyosin, which causes them to assume another shape. There is a ratchet or something that drags the actin molecules along the myosin; who knows? The theory changes every year. But whatever it is, I say to myself, “flex” and it flexes. I don’t even know what I did; in fact, I don’t even have to say “flex.’’ If I’m driving my automobile and something appears before me, my foot flexes and stamps down on the brake before I can say to myself “brake.” If it didn’t do that before I could say to myself “brake,)’ I wouldn’t be alive now. The point is that our brain does things, sometimes very complex things, that we don’t know how it does. Even the person who does it doesn’t know how he does it. If you don’t want to take me as an example, consider Mozart who wrote symphonies at the ridiculously early age of 7 or 8. Somebody wrote to him when Mozart was an old man of 26 and asked him how to go about writing symphonies. Mozart said, “I wouldn’t if I were you; you are too young. Start with something simple, a concerto or sonata; work your way up to symphonies.” The guy wrote back and said, “But Herr Mozart, you were writing symphonies when you were a little boy.” Mozart wrote back, “I didn’t ask anybody.’’ It’s quite possible that we will never figure out how to make computers as good as the human brain. The human brain is perhaps a little more intractable than we imagined. Even if we could, would we? Is there a point to it? There may not be, you know. We talk about artificial intelligence as though intelligence is a unitarian, monolithic thing. We talk about intelligence quotient as though we can measure intelligence by a single number. You know, I’m 85, you’re 86, you’re more intelligent than I am. It’s not so. There are all sorts of varieties of intelligence. I believe that people who make up intelligence tests make up questions that they can answer. They’ve got to! Suppose I want to design a test to decide which of you has the potential to become a great punk rock musician. I don’t know what to ask; I know nothing about punk rock. I don’t even know the vocabulary. All I know are the words “punk rock.” So this is not the kind of test I can make up. My point is that we have a whole set of intelligence tests designed by It is a similar situation if I want to flex my arm. 67 The Impact of Science on Society people who know the answers to the questions. You are considered intelligent if you are like they are. If you’re not like they are you rate very low. Well, what does that mean? It just means that it is a self-perpetuating process. I am fortunate-I happen to have exactly one kind of intelli- gence, the kind that enables me to answer the questions on an in- telligence test. In all other human activities I am abysmally stupid. But none of that counts; I’m tabbed as intelligent. For instance, suppose something goes wrong with my car. Whatever it is that goes wrong, I don’t know what it is. There is nothing that is so simple about my car that I understand it. So, when my car makes funny sounds, I drive it in fear and trembling to a gas station where an attendant examines it while I wait with bated breath, staring at him with adoration for a god-like man, while he tells me what’s wrong and fixes it. Meanwhile, he regards me with the contempt due someone so abysmally unintelligent as to not understand what is going on under the hood. He likes to tell me jokes, and I always laugh very hard because I don’t want to do anything to offend him. He always says to me, “DOC,” (he always calls me Doc; he thinks it’s my first name). “DOC,” he says, “A deaf and dumb man goes into a hardware store. He wants nails, so he goes up to the counter and goes like this and they bring him a hammer. He shakes his head and he hammers again. So, they bring him a whole mess of nails. He takes the nails that he wants, pays for them, and walks out.” And I nod. Then the attendant says, “Next a blind man comes in and he wants scissors. How does he ask for them?” I ges- ture to show scissors but the attendant says, “No, he says, ‘May I have a pair of scissors?”’ Now, from the dead silence I always get when I tell this joke, I can tell that you agree with my answer. But a blind man can talk, ipso facto, right? All right! Well that shows your intelligence. I t is an intelligence test, right there, and every one of you probably flunked! So, I maintain that there are all kinds of varieties of intelligence and that’s a good thing too because we need variety. The point is that a computer may well have a variety that is different from all the human varieties. In fact, we may come up with a whole set of varieties of intelligence. We would have a number of species of the genius-human intelligence and a number of species of the genius-computer intelligence. That’s the way it should be; let the computers do what they are designed to do and 68 Our Future in the Cosmos-Computers decide that there are limits to how far computers should be allowed to go. I t may not be what computers may actually do, but what they may threaten in the human mind, and what humans may think of them. In my robot stories, I used the Frankeustein complex in which human societies refuse to allow robots to work because they have decided they don’t want to lose their jobs, they don’t want to undergo the painful period of transition, and they don’t trust the robots to be harmless. They call a halt to computer development. The only place robots can be used is in outer space, where there is no competition with human beings. And this, indeed, is the sort of situation that could conceivably take place. No matter how much people like myself (the cockeyed optimist) may think that a computerized society will be beautiful, we may come up against an absolutely immovable object, the suspicion of the average human being of being replaced by a computer. And in that case, it may be that a computerized society is not going to develop. I must say, though, that human beings are really not afraid of the computer. They may have already lost the fight, because computerization has already taken over society to such an extent that if every computer on Earth were suddenly to disappear, no industry of any size could probably continue for very long. As an example, Doubleday and Company decided to switch computer systems, but they didn’t do anything as dull as build up a new system, run it in tandem with the old one until they were quite satisfied, and then pull out the old one. No, they did it computer fashion. They pulled out the old system first, then they built up the second system, and are now engaged in the interesting process of trying to make it work. The result is that I cannot determine how many of my next novels have been distributed to the bookstores, nor do they know when they need to send out more copies. Who knows, they may ruin my entire theory because they have been getting along without a computer for a few weeks. So if all computers were to disappear, not only would industries come to a halt, but the United States would no longer be able to collect income taxes (except what we voluntarily send), the Army wouldn’t be able to do its work, and the space exploration industry would come to a halt. In short, we are already inextricably tied to the computer, and it is going to be difficult to stop it at any particular level. 71 T h e Impact of Science on Society Question: About 20 years ago, your view of the future was that humanity was basically in a disaster situation and might not survive the next 50 years. Furthermore, if we did survive the next 50 years, then getting through the next 50 years would be almost impossible. Have you changed your views or do you think we still have a difficult 30 years ahead? Answer: I still think we are headed for a difficult 30 years. I mean, everyone here understands that someone could press the button tomorrow. We still face the possibility of a nuclear war. Little things happen that exacerbate feelings and make it difficult to talk sensibly. So we are constantly facing the destruction of civilization, not only by the instant blast of nuclear war but also by the continuing processes of increasing population, increasing pollution, foolish misuse of resources, and chemical damage (for instance, acid rain). We are in the uncomfortable position of facing the possible destruction of civilization either very quickly or a little more slowly in any of at least a dozen different directions. But, so far, we are still concentrating on localisms. Every nation worries about its neighbor, every nation sees as its primary concern the evil machinations of someone just across the border. We are so much more concerned about what the Soviet Union is doing than about what acid rain is doing, and the Soviet Union is more concerned about us than about any long-range danger to human beings. As long as that is true, by the time we wake up to the true dangers that face us all, if we ever do, it may be too late. So, yes, I still worry about civilization being a short-term process. Naturally, in a talk like this, I pretend that we will be wise enough to overcome the problems. As a matter of fact, in my presentation on space exploration, I discuss what I think is the only practical way that I can see of overcoming all this suspicion. It is a very slim chance indeed, but I don’t see any other alternative. Question: If computers eventually get rid of all the drudgery, will humans actually be capable of taking advantage of that, and how? Answer: The easy answer is that if computers do all the stupid things we shouldn’t be doing, then we will have time to do all the things we love. I mean, if you actually get fun out of alphabetizing cards, then do it. I do! 1 make all my own indexes, even though 72 Our Future in the Cosmos-Computers my publisher begs me to allow an expert to do them. He won’t listen to me when I tell him that I am better than an expert. He says, “But your time is more valuable.” I answer, “But I love it.” I make all the little cards and I alphabetize them; I spend all evening long alphabetizing them, and I love it. If they ever design a computer to do it, I won’t let it. So, we can keep our fun; what I am talking about is computers doing things that we don’t want to do so that we can engage in creative endeavors. People will be designing, programming, and maintaining computers, working in scientific research or the arts, writing history books and novels, sculpting, or whatever it is that they want to do. You respond, “Yes, but you are assuming that all human beings are creative in one way or another, and we all know that it isn’t so because just look at all the noncreative people around you.” To this I reply, “Well, you’re looking at a ruined world.” In medieval times, during the Dark Ages (at least in Western Europe), reading and writing were the province of a small group of clerks (clerics), and most other people, whether they were brutish aristocrats or bovine peasants, couldn’t read or write. They didn’t have any reason to read and write. If you had asked any of the few people who could read and write whether it was conceivable for either the aristocracy or the peasants to learn to read and write, the clerks would have said, “NO, they are just animals, they are just brutes. Reading and writing are just for the very few with the kind of mind that we have.” Yet, when the time came, we developed printing and the idea of mass education; it turned out that almost everybody could be taught to read and write, after a fashion. Reading and writing were not such unusual processes once we actually developed the educational procedures for them and made them economically feasible. In fact, once we developed a sufficiently complex culture, once we had a technological civilization, it became necessary for most people to read and write if they were to have any kind of job at all. And so it was possible. We live in a world now in which education isn’t geared for creativity and the kinds of jobs you have destroy any feeling of creativity you might have had to begin with. If you spend all day in the assembly line, what the heck are you going to develop? Your mind goes to pot. So it is amazing that the human brain, for the most part, is as well off as it is, that it hasn’t totally dissolved 73 Our Future in the Cosmos-Space Isaac Asimov Our Future in the Cosmos-Space Throughout the history of humanity, we have been extending our range until it is now planet-wide, covering all parts of Earth’s surface and reaching to the bottom of the ocean, to the top of the atmosphere, and beyond it to the Moon. W e will flourish only as long as we continue to extend that range, and although the potential range is not infinite, it is incredibly vast even by present standards. We will eventually extend our range to cover the whole of the solar system, and then we w‘ll head outward to the stars. It frequently happened in my business as a writer, especially in my younger days when I knew some pretty overwhelming editors, that an editor would say to me, “I have a great idea for a story.’’ He’d slap me on the back and say, “Now go home and write it.” I would always think how easy it was for him to give me an idea for a story, but it was I, not the editor, who had to sit down and look at the most terrifying of all things: a blank page. In the same way, it’s fun to be introduced and have someone tell a lot of exaggerations about me; however, then he sits down and I’m the one who has to face the audience. I must say that it helps a great deal to face an obviously friendly and intelligent audience. I have brought almost the entire MENSA organization of this region to this presentation, and, naturally, they take it personally when I talk about intelligence. I am the international president of that organization, not because of anything I have done but because of a whim of the organization. I want to discuss our future in the cosmos. One of the things I think will mean the most to us and will make the future different from the past is the coming of a “space-centered society.” We are going to expand into space, and I think it is fitting and right that we should do so. All through the 50000 years of Homo sapiens, to say nothing of their hominoid precursors, humanity has been expanding its range of habitation. We don’t know exactly where the first Homo sapiens made their appearance, but they have been 79 T h e Impact of Science on Society expanding until they now inhabit the entire face of the Earth. For the first time in human history, we are faced with a situation in which we literally have no place on Earth to expand. We have crossed all the mountains; we have penetrated all the oceans. We have plumbed the atmosphere to its height and the oceans to their depths. Unless we are willing to settle down into a world that is our prison, we must be ready to move beyond Earth, and I think we are ready. We have the technological capacity to do so; all that we need is the will. I think it is quite possible, starting now, to build settlements in space, to build worlds miniature in comparison to the Earth but large in comparison to anything we have done so far. These worlds, in orbit around the Earth, would be capable of holding tens of thousands of human beings. This idea of space settlement seems odd to people; it doesn’t seem inviting. When I suggested such an idea in an article I wrote a few years ago, I received a number of letters arguing against the possibility of space settlements. The arguments weren’t based on economics; the main argument was that nobody would want to live in space. Nobody would want to leave his comfortable home on Earth. As nearly as I could tell from their addresses, all the people who wrote to me were Americans, and I presume that they knew American history. Americans should understand exactly what it means to leave their comfortable homes and to go to a completely strange world. This country was a wilderness at the beginning, and even after it was settled, it was a foreign land for most people. We in the United States are the descendents (unless any of you happen to be American Indians) of people who came here from other continents in search of something. Our forefathers, who came, at first, under harsh conditions, knew it would take them weeks to cross the ocean. They knew that if they met a serious storm, they would probably not survive. They also knew that when they landed, they would find a wilderness and possibly hostile natives. Yet, they still came. Between 1607 and 1617, 11000 Englishmen came to the new colony of Virginia. In 1617, the population of Virginia was 1000. How was it possible for 11000 people to come and yet to have only a population of lOOO? The answer is easy; 10000 died. Yet people continued to come. Why? They came because life in Europe, for many, was intolerable and because they wanted to come to a new land to start a new life. Whatever 80 Our Future an the Cosmos-Space coal indefinitely, we will increase that fraction of the atmosphere which is made up of carbon dioxide. At the beginning of this century, approximately 0.03 percent of the air was carbon dioxide. This amount has increased almost 50 percent since then, and it will probably double within another half century. There won’t be enough carbon dioxide in the air to interfere with breathing, but it may produce what we call “the greenhouse effect” because it tends to be opaque to infrared radiation. Ordinary sunlight that shines on the Earth passes through the atmosphere with little absorption and hits the Earth’s surface. At night, the Earth reradiates a portion of this energy as heat (infrared radiation). If the level of carbon dioxide increases even slightly, this infrared radiation will have more difficulty getting out. It will be absorbed by the carbon dioxide, thus heating the atmosphere and raising the temperature of the Earth very slightly. It won’t take much heating to cause the polar ice caps to melt, thus changing the climate of the Earth, undoubtedly for the worse! If you think that nuclear energy has the potential to make the Earth unlivable, so has the indefinite burning of coal and oil. We are going to have to find some other sources of energy, and the only two sources of energy that will last as long as the Earth does are fusion energy and solar energy. I don’t mean that we are going to have to depend solely on one or the other; there are other sources of energy that can be developed as well. There is geothermal energy, energy from under the Earth. There is biomass energy, the energy of the plant world. There is the energy of tides, wind, waves, and running water. All these can and will be used, but they are all relatively limited and there is no likelihood that they will supply all the energy we need. So, in addition to all these sources, we will need forms of energy that we can rely on in huge quantities forever. That brings us back to fusion energy and solar energy. We don’t have fusion energy yet, although we’ve been working towards it for more than 30 years. We’re not sure exactly what difficulties might exist between demonstrating it in the laboratory and developing huge power plants that will supply the world. We do have solar energy, but it’s difficult to get in large quantities because it is spread thinly over the world. If we could get millions of photovoltaic cells (a kind of silicon cell that sets up a small electric current when exposed to light) and stretch them over 83 The Impact of Science on Society half of Arizona (I only mention Arizona because there is usually a lot of sunshine there), we could perhaps supply enough energy for America’s needs. If we did that in other parts of the world as well, we could supply the entire world. There is no doubt, however, that setting up solar cells (photovoltaic cells) on the Earth’s surface is not very efficient. For one thing, there is no solar energy for the cells to absorb during the night. Even in the daytime under the best conditions (for example, in a desert area without fog, mist, or clouds), clear air absorbs a substantial portion of the sunlight, especially if the Sun is near the horizon. And of course, you also have the problem of maintaining these cells against nature’s effects and against vandalism. For these reasons it might be more reasonable to build a solar power station in space. Under such conditions, we could make use of the entire range of solar energy 98 percent of the time, because the stations could easily be positioned so they would fall into the Earth’s shadow only 2 percent of the time, at the equinoxes. A chain of these stations around the Earth would allow most of them to be in the sunshine all the time. Optimists have calculated that in space, a given area of solar cells will provide 60 times more energy than on the Earth’s surface. We can then imagine this chain of power stations circling the Earth in the equatorial plane at a height of approximately 22 000 miles above the Earth’s surface. At this distance their orbital position will just keep time with the surface of the Earth as it rotates about its axes. If you stood on a spot at the equator and looked up at the sky with a sufficiently strong telescope, you could see the solar power station apparently motionless above you. I feel a certain proprietorship toward this idea of a space station. It was advanced about 20 years ago by people at the AVCO Corporation in Massachusetts, but about 40 years ago I wrote a story called “Reason” in which I talked about just such a power station. Of course, I missed the important point of having it in orbit around the Earth. I described it in an orbit similar to Mercury’s around the Sun so that it could get even more energy. I ignored the fact that it would be awfully difficult to aim it at Earth from such a distance; in science fiction stories, you can dismiss such problems by saying that an advanced technology won’t find it difficult to achieve. Nevertheless, solar power stations are my idea, and I’m proud of it! 84 Our Future in the Cosmos-Space There are a great many other things we could do in space. We could set up mining stations on the Moon and have laboratories in space to perform experiments you wouldn’t want to do on Earth because of the risks involved to the population. Some years ago, people were very worried about recombinant DNA research. They feared that scientists would come up with a new strain of bacteria which would get out into the biosphere, and once it did, you would never get rid of it. It was like Pandora’s box, when she opened it, all the ills of the world flew out and have plagued humanity ever since. In this same vein, suppose that for some very good reason, from the standpoint of research, scientists developed a strain of E. coli (a common bacteria that lives in the human large intestine) which had a very interesting chemical property that they wanted to study. But at the same time, it might turn out that this strain would make people prone to diarrhea. Suppose this strain is released to the world. People always speak about the danger of developing a “black death” germ that would kill everybody it touches and how terrible it would be if it were released. I don’t think we have to be that extreme. An E. coli strain that would bring about diarrhea could be extremely disturbing to the entire Earth. However, at the time when people spoke and worried about recombinant DNA research and worked up all kinds of horrible nightmares in connection with it, I believed it might turn out to be important and valuable research. It occurred to me then that this research might develop strains of bacteria that could form in- sulin, other hormones, and certain blood fractions, things that we need in quantity and can’t get in the usual way. Recombinant DNA research might produce microorganisms that could fix ni- trogen from the atmosphere and form terrific fertilizers or other microorganisms that could consume hydrocarbons under certain conditions and clean up oil spills. The research might simply give us information about the organization of living cells so that we could better understand what causes and what might cure cancer, or arthritis, or any of the other degenerative diseases that are now the major inflictions of the human race. How nice it would be to set up a space laboratory in Earth orbit in which the recombinant DNA research could be done. I t wouldn’t matter how dangerous the research was. I suppose it would still be mathematically pos- sible for bacteria to escape and infect the Earth, but the chances T h e Impact of Science o n Society technological civilizations in space besides our own. Who knows what else such instruments may discover? Another kind of structure in outer space is factories. There is no reason why a good proportion of our industrial factories couldn’t be placed into orbit. Space has very unusual properties that may be helpful to us. It has unlimited vacuum, zero gravity, the possibility of high and low temperatures, and hard radiation. There are a great many things we can do in space that we can do only with difficulty, if at all, on Earth. Most important of all, when we have a factory in space, any unavoidable pollution that it produces can be discharged into space. Some people argue that to earlier generations the ocean seemed huge and capable of absorbing any amount of pollution. But now we are in danger of poisoning the entire atmosphere. Some people argue that in the future we may be so casual about releasing pollutants into space that we may gradually poison all the space around ourselves. However, that won’t happen, for not only is space literally millions of times more voluminous than the biosphere and not occupied by trillions of living things, but it is also true that nothing we release into space is going to stay there because of something called the solar wind. The Sun emits speeding particles in every direction; it has been doing this as long as it has been in existence and will continue to do this for billions of years. This solar wind will push the pollutants out beyond the orbit of Mars, beyond the asteroids and into the outer solar system, where there is a trillion times more room than in the Earth’s neighborhood. The solar wind has a natural ventilating effect. This is important because it means that perhaps Earth can get rid of its “dark satanic mills” (to quote William Blake, who wrote in the first decades of the 19th century) without abandoning industrialization. People who view industrialization as a source of the Earth’s troubles, its pollution, and the desecration of its surface, can only advocate that we give it up. This is something that we can’t do; we have the tiger by the tail. We have 4.5 billion people on Earth. We can’t support that many unless we’re industrialized and technologically advanced. So, the idea is not to get rid of industrialization but to move it somewhere else. If we can move it a few thousand miles Space is huge compared to the surface of the Earth. 88 Our Future in the Cosmos-Space into space, we still have it, but not on Earth. Earth can then become a world of parks, farms, and wilderness without giving up the benefits of industrialization. All this will be possible because we will have structures built in space. Who will build these space structures? It seems to me that it’s an unnecessary expense to have them built by commuters. I t wouldn’t make sense to send people into space every morning and have them come back every evening or, even, to send them up every spring and have them come back every fall. We would want the people who are busy constructing the necessary structures in space, maintaining them, and improving them t o be people who live in space. Why should the people of the space settlements labor to do this? They would share in the benefits to be derived from it, and, I suppose in the last analysis, they would do it for money. In other words, in exchange for their labor, they would get some things that would otherwise exist only on Earth. There would be a fine economic balance that I will allow economists to work out. The fact of the matter is that we would have a much larger, more variegated, and versatile world; it would be much richer and more advanced in knowledge so that we would look back on the present and think of it as a dark age when human beings lived only on Earth. The space settlers, who will live on these worlds in orbit, will be the cutting edge of humanity for the future. These are the people who will move farther out into the solar system. It was difficult to reach the Moon although the flight took only 3 days. Imagine the problems for us to reach Mars when it might take months of travel or to reach the outer solar system when it might take years of travel? We are not really built for space flight; we are used to living on the outside of a huge world, not in the inside of a spaceship. We are used to a system of cycling air, food, and water that is so large that we are unaware of the actual process. We don’t know where the pure sparkling water that we drink comes from, and we don’t care. We don’t know how the plants that we eat grow or what they use for food, and we don’t care. We don’t know what processes the atmosphere uses to clean itself. But if we lived in a spaceship, we’d know. We’d know that our air was manufactured from the carbon dioxide that we exhaled and that the food and water were once part of our waste products. (That’s 89 The Impact of Science o n Society also true on Earth, of course, but we’re not aware of it.) We would also be subjected to gravitational systems that would not be like those on Earth; they would vary. For all these reasons, space flight seems unnatural to us. But to the space settlers, who would arrive by space flight and live and work in larger versions of a spaceship, these conditions would seem natural. They might run mines on the Moon, and they would travel in a spaceship that would be very much like the space stations in which they would live (maybe a little smaller but that’s all). They would be living inside a world with tight cycling and varying gravitational forces. They would be the natural pioneers. They, not we, would be the Vikings, the Phoenicians, the Polynesians of the future. They would make the long trips to Mars and the asteroids and learn how to mine the asteroids. They could travel out into the solar system and make plans to reach the stars someday. All we can do here on Earth, maybe, is reach the Moon. From worlds in orbit around the Earth, we can reach all the rest. Beyond all these material things that space exploration can bring us, there is something completely immaterial that counts more than anything else. One thing that can stop us from going into space, from realizing what I consider a glorious possible future for humanity, is the fact that here on Earth, most people, especially those in power, are far more concerned with the immediate threat from other countries than they are with the possible dangers to civilization as a whole. How much of any country’s mental energy, money, effort, and their emotion is directed towards saving civilization from destruction by pollution, overpopulation, or war, and how much is spent maintaining armed forces because of the danger from neighboring countries? You know the answer; the world is now spending 500 billion dollars every year for war and preparations for war. That’s half a trillion dollars every year spent on forces that we don’t dare use, or if we do use them, it is only to wreak destruction. The United States and the Soviet Union quarrel over differences that may be extremely important, but if the quarrel extends to the point of a nuclear war that destroys civilization, the differences become inconsequential. How are we to prevent this whole thing from happening? There is one example in history that is very unusual. From 1861 to 1865, the United States fought the War Between the States, and many 90 Our Future in the Cosmos-Space of Robotics, from which I quoted my three laws. I said they were from the 56th edition, in 2058 A.D. Now someone is actually in the process of putting out the first edition of that book, and they’ve asked me to write the introduction. I guess the people who are working in robotics see themselves moving toward the world I described 40 years ago, and I’m willing to accept their judgment. Question: Why do you restrict yourself to looking for Earth- like planets in the search for technological civilizations, why not Jupiter-like planets, for instance, or Pluto-like planets? Answer: If we assume that there can be life even under widely varying conditions, we make the problem perhaps a little too easy. There is also the chance that life evolving under such conditions might be so different from human life in very basic ways that we will not be able to detect it or to understand that it is a technological civilization even if we encounter it. As our information and knowledge grow, we might be able to widen our view to recognize life and civilization of widely different kinds. But to start with, acknowledging our own limitations and the fact that we know so little, we are looking for technological civilizations sufficiently like our own to be perhaps recognizable. So at the start, but not necessarily forever, we restrict ourselves to Earth- like planets. Question: Do you think, because our bodies are fragile and we have limited life spans, that what we now know as humanity would ever be replaced by inorganic intelligence? Answer: I believe that computers have a kind of intelligence which is extremely different from our own. The computer can do things that we are particularly ill adapted to do. Humans don’t handle rapid intricate calculations very well, and it’s good to have computers do them. On the other hand, we have the capacity for insight, intuition, fantasy, imagination, and creativity, which we can’t program into our computers, and it is perhaps not even advisable to try because we do it so well ourselves. I visualize a future in which we will have both kinds of intelligence working in cooperation, in a symbiotic ‘relationship, moving forward faster than either could separately. The fact that we are so fragile and short lived is an advantage in my way of thinking. In Robots of Dawn, I compare two civilizations; one is our own in which people 93 I The Impact of Science o n Society are short lived, and the other is that of our descendants in which they are long lived. I point out the disadvantage to the species a~ a whole of being long lived. I won’t repeat the arguments, because if I don’t you may storm the bookstores out of sheer curiosity to see what I’ve said. One of the great themes of science fiction is the settlement of other planets. Is there any place in this solar system or nearby that might be habitable? Answer: As far as we know, there is no world in our solar system that is habitable by human beings without some form of artificial help. The Moon and Mars, which come the closest to being tolerable, will require us to build underground cities or dome cities, and if we venture on the surface, we will have to wear space suits. This is not to say that it will not be possible someday to terraform such worlds and to make them habitable; but I honestly don’t know if it will be worth it for us to do so. As to planets circling other stars, we do not really know of such planets in detail. We suspect their existence, and we figure statistically that a certain number of them ought to be habitable, but we have yet to observe any evidence of such a thing. It is still very much in the realm of speculation. Question: You made the analogy between the migration from Europe at the turn of the century and possible future migrations to space stations and other planets. It has been shown that as a result of our technology, people in this country are taller, heavier, better built, and able to set new records in endurance and physical capabilities. Would you speculate about the effect that living in space stations might have on the human body and its evolutionary potential? It is hard to tell. I suspect that people will make the environment of these space settlements as close to that of Earth as possible. But in one respect, they will have problems; there is no way that they can imitate Earth’s gravitational field. They can produce a substitute by making the space settlement rotate, so that the centrifugal effect will force you against the inner surface and mimic the effects of gravity. But it won’t be a perfect imitation; there won’t be a Coriolis effect and, also as you approach the axes of rotation, the gravitational effect will become Question: Answer: 94 Our Future in the Cosmos-Space weaker. The people who will live in a space settlement will be exposed to variations in the gravitational effect far greater than any you can possibly feel on the surface of the Earth. This may give rise to all sorts of physiological changes in human beings. I don’t know what they will be; we can’t know until we actually try living in space. So far, people have been subjected t o essentially zero gravity for as long as 7 months at a time without apparently permanent ill effects. But human beings have never been born at zero gravity or under varying gravitational conditions; they have never developed and grown up under such conditions, and we can’t be sure what the effects will be. From an optimistic standpoint, I suppose that under such conditions human beings will develop a greater tolerance of gravitational effects than they now possess. This will further prepare them for life in the universe, whereas we ourselves have been specifically evolved and conditioned for life in one very specialized place in the galaxy. The overall effect may be to strengthen the human species; at least, I’d like to think so. The future will tell us if that is so. In your opinion, when will there be solar power stations in orbit and manned ventures to Mars, considering the technological leaps with the Space Shuttle and the Soviet’s Salyut space stations? Answer: It is hard to say when solar power stations in space will be developed. It’s up to the human governments that control the money and the manpower. If we begin to cooperate and make a wholesale attempt, we could have solar power stations in space before the 21st century was very old. In other words, someone as young as the person who asked me this question, may see space stations by the time he is middle-aged. But on the other hand, if we choose not to do it, then we may never have these stations in space. The choice is ours. We can choose to develop space or we can choose world destruction. I’m at a loss to state in words how desirable the first alternative is and how likely the second alternative is. Question: What kind of timetable do you envision for human- ity’s exploration of space, and what good or harm do you think is done by prospace groups? Answer: Well, we can’t expect things to happen too quickly. Question: 95