Expanded Universe Part 33

Nevertheless Pluto remains a most mysterious and most intriguing heavenly body. A planet the size and ma.s.s of Mars might not be too much use to us out there . . . but think of it as a fuel dump. Many stories and many nonfictional projections speak of using the gas giants and/or the rings of Saturn as sources of fuel. But if Pluto is methane ice or water ice or frozen hydrogen or all three, as a source of fuel- conventional, or fusion, or even reaction ma.s.s-Pluto has one supremely important advantage over the gas giants: Pluto is not at the bottom of a horridly deep gravity well.

Finished calculating? Good. Please turn to page 368 and see why I wanted our trip to Pluto to be a distance of 31.6 A.U.-plus other goodies, perhaps.

11. 1950 Your personal telephone will be small enough to carry in your handbag. Your house telephone will record messages, answer simple inquiries, and transmit vision.

1965 No new comment.

1980 This prediction is trivial and timid. Most of it has already come true and the telephone system will hand you the rest on a custom basis if you'll pay for it. In the year 2000, with modern telephones tied into home computers (as common then as flush toilets are today) you'll be able to have 3-dimensional holovision along with stereo speech. Arthur C. Clarke says that this will do away with most personal contact in business. I agree with all of Mr. Clarke's arguments and disagree with his conclusion; with us monkey folk there is no subst.i.tute for personal contact; we enjoy it and it fills a spiritual need.

Besides that, the business conference is often an excuse to loaf on the boss's time and the business convention often supplies some of the benefits of the Roman Saturnalia.

Nevertheless I look forward to holovideostereophones without giving up personal contacts.

12. 1950 Intelligent life will be found on Mars.

1965 Predicting intelligent life on Mars looks pretty silly after those dismal photographs. But I shan't withdraw it until Mars has been thoroughly explored. As yet we really have no idea-and no data-as to just how ubiquitous and varied life may be in this galaxy; it is conceivable that life as we don't know it can evolve on any sort of a planet. . . and nothing in our present knowledge of chemistry rules this out. All the talk has been about life-as-we-know-it-which means terrestrial conditions.

But if you feel that this shows in me a childish reluctance to give up thoats and zitidars and beautiful Martian princesses until forced to, I won't argue with you-I'll just wait.

1980 The photographs made by the Martian landers of 1976 and their orbiting companions make the prediction of intelligent Martian life look even sillier. But the new pictures and the new data make Mars even more mysterious. I'm a diehard because I suspect that life is ubiquitous-call that a religious opinion if you wish. But remember two things: Almost all discussion has been about Life-as-we-know-it.. . but what about Life-as-we-don't-know-it? If there were Martians around the time that those amazing gullies and canyons were formed, perhaps they went underground as their atmosphere thinned. At present, despite wonderful pictures, our data are very spa.r.s.e; those two fixed landers are a.n.a.logous to two such landing here: one on Canadian tundra, the other in Antarctica-hardly sufficient to solve the question: Is there intelligent life on Sol III?

(Is there intelligent life in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C.?) Whistling in the dark-I think I goofed on this one. But if in fact Mars is uninhabited, shortly there will be a land rush that will make the Oklahoma land stampede look gentle. Since E = mc2 came into our lives, all real estate is potentially valuable; it can be terraformed to suit humans. There has been so much fiction and serious, able nonfiction published on how to terraform Mars that I shan't add to it, save to note one thing: Power is no problem. Suns.h.i.+ne at that distance has dropped off to about 43% of the maximum here-but Mars gets all of it and gets it all day long save for infrequent dust storms . . . whereas the most that Philadelphia (and like places) ever gets is 35%-and overcast days are common. Mars won't need solar power from orbit; it will be easier to do it on the ground.

But don't be surprised if the j.a.panese charge you a very high fee for stamping their visa into your pa.s.sport plus requiring deposit of a prepaid return ticket or, if you ask for immigrant's visa, charge you a much, much higher fee plus proof of a needed colonial skill.

For there is intelligent life in Tokyo.

13. 1950 A thousand miles an hour at a cent a mile will be commonplace; short hauls will be made in evacuated subways at extreme speed.

1965 I must hedge number thirteen; the "cent" I meant was scaled by the 1950 dollar. But our currency has been going through a long steady inflation, and no nation in history has ever gone as far as we have along this route without reaching the explosive phase of inflation. Ten-dollar hamburgers?

Brother, we are headed for the hundred-dollar hamburger-for the barter-only hamburger.

But this is only an inconvenience rather than a disaster as long as there is plenty of hamburger.

1980 I must scale that "cent" again. In 1950 gold was $35/troy ounce; this morning the London fix was $374/troy ounce. Just last week my wife and I flew San Francisco to Baltimore and return. We took neither the luxury cla.s.s nor any of the special discounted fares; we simply flew what we could get.

Applying the inflation factor-35/374-our tickets cost a hair less than one cent a mile in 1950 dollars.

From here on I had better give prices in troy ounces of gold, or in Swiss francs; not even the Man in the White House knows where this inflation is going. About those subways: possible, even probable, by 2000 A.D. But I see little chance that they will be financed until the dollar is stablized-a most painful process our government hates to tackle.

14. 1950 A major objective of applied physics will be to control gravity.

1965 This prediction stands. But today physics is in a tremendous state of flux with new data piling up faster than it can be digested; it is anybody's guess as to where we are headed, but the wilder you guess, the more likely you are to hit it lucky. With "elementary particles" of nuclear physics now totaling about half the number we used to use to list the "immutable" chemical elements, a spectator needs a program just to keep track of the players. At the other end of the scale, "quasars"-quasi-stellar bodies-have come along; radio astronomy is now bigger than telescopic astronomy used to be; and we have redrawn our picture of the universe several times, each time enlarging it and making it more complex-I haven't seen this week's theory yet, which is well, as it would be out of date before this gets into print. Plasma physics was barely started in 1950; the same for solid-state phys ics. This is the Golden Age of physics-and it's an anarchy.

19801 stick by the basic prediction. There is so much work going on both by mathematical physicists and experimental physicists as to the nature of gravity that it seems inevitable that twenty years from now applied physicists will be trying to control it. But note that I said "trying"-succeeding may take a long time.

If and when they do succeed, a spinoff is likely to be a s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p that is in no way a rocket s.h.i.+p-and the Galaxy is ours! (Unless we meet that smarter, meaner, tougher race that kills us or enslaves us or eats us-or all three.) Particle physics: the situation is even more confusing than in 1965. Physicists now speak of more than 200 kinds of hadrons, "elementary" heavy particles. To reduce this confusion a mathematical construct called the "quark" was invented. Like Jell-0 quarks come in many colors and flavors.. . plus spin, charm, truth, and beauty (or top and bottom in place of truth and beauty-or perhaps "truth" doesn't belong in the list, and no jokes, please, as the physicists aren't joking and neither am I). Put quarks together in their many attributes and you can account for (maybe) all those 200-odd hadrons (and have a system paralleling the leptons or light particles as a bonus).

All very nice.. . except that no one has ever been able to pin down even one quark. Quarks, if they exist, come packaged in clumps as hadrons-not at random but by rules to account for each of that mob of hadrons.

Now comes Kenneth A. Johnson, Ph.D. (Harvard '55), Professor of Physics at the Ma.s.sachusetts Inst.i.tute of Technology (which certainly places him in the worldwide top group of physicists) with an article (Scientific American, July 1979, p. 112, "The Bag Model of Quark Confinement"), an article which appears to state that quarks will never be pinned down because they are in sort of an eternal purdah, never to be seen even as bubble tracks. - Somehow it reminds me of the dilemma when the snark is a boojum.

I'm not poking fun at Dr. Johnson; he is very learned and trying hard to explain his difficult subject to the unlearned such as I.

But, in the meantime I suggest reading The Hunting of the Snark while waiting patiently for 2000 A.D. We have a plethora of data; perhaps in twenty more years the picture will be simplified. Perhaps-

15. 1950 We will not achieve a "World State" in the predictable future. Nevertheless, Communism will vanish from this planet.

1965 I stand flatly behind prediction number fifteen.

1980 I still stand flatly behind the first sentence of that two-part prediction above. The second part I could weasel out of by pointing out that on this planet no state that calls itself Marxist or Socialist or Communist has ever established a system approximating that called for by the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. And never will; Marx's utopia does not fit human beings. The state will not "wither away."

But I shan't weasel as I am utterly dismayed by the political events of the past 15-20 years. At least two thirds of the globe now calls itself Marxist. Another large number of countries are military dictators.h.i.+ps. Another large group (including the United States) are const.i.tutional democratic republics but so heavily tinged with socialism ("welfare state") that all of them are tottering on the brink of bankruptcy and collapse.

So far as I can see today the only thing that could cause the soi-disant Marxist countries to collapse in as little time as twenty years would be for the United States to be conquered and occupied by the USSR- and twenty years ago I thought that this was a strong possibility. (I'm more optimistic now, under the pres ent three-cornered standoff.) If we were to be conquered and occupied, the Communist world might collapse rather quickly. We have been propping them up whenever they were in real trouble (frequently!) for about half a century.

16. 1950 Increasing mobility will disenfranchise a majority of the population. About 1990 a const.i.tutional amendment will do away with state lines while retaining the semblance.

1965 No further comment.

19801 goofed. I will be much surprised if either half of this double prediction comes to pa.s.s by 2000-at least in the form described and for the reasons I had in mind. The franchise now extends to any warm body over eighteen years of age and that franchise can be transferred to another state in less time than it takes the citizen to find housing in his/her new state.

Thus no const.i.tutional amendment is needed. But the state lines are fading year by year anyhow as power continues to move from the states to the Federal government and especially into the hands of nonelected bureaucrats.

17. 1950 All aircraft will be controlled by a giant radar net run on a continent-wide basis by a multiple electronic "brain."

1965 No further comment.

1980 This prediction still stands-although it may be my wishful thinking. Such a system was designed over thirty years ago; Congress wouldn't buy it. It would be more expensive today . . . and is far more urgently needed. Anyone who has ever been in the tower of a busy field or has ever ridden in the "office"

of a commercial plane during a takeoff or landing at a busy field knows what I mean. All our fields are overloaded but anyone who goes in or out of San Diego or of O'Hare-Chicago or-but why go on? Our airplanes are pretty durn wonderful . . . but our method of handling air traffic at fields is comparable to Manhattan with out traffic lights. - I shall continue to fly regularly for two reasons: 1) Mrs. Heinlein and I hope to go out in a common disaster. 2) Consider the alternatives: AMTRAK (ugh!), buses (two ughs!), and driving oneself. The latter is fine for short distances (OPEC and Was.h.i.+ngton permitting) but, while in my younger days I drove across this continent so many times that I've lost count, today I am no longer physically up to such a trip even with a chauffeur.

But that totally-automated traffic control system ought to be built. Expensive, yes-but what price do we place on a hundred dead pa.s.sengers, a flight crew, and a modern airliner? In the present state of the art in computers and in radar neither the pilot nor the controller should be in the loop at landing or take off; they should simply be alert, ready to override, because even the most perfect machinery is subject to Murphy's Law. But all routine (99.9%+)takeoffs and landings should be made by computer.

If this pushes small private planes onto separate and smaller fields, so be it. Bicycles do not belong on freeways. I hate to say that, as there is nothing more fun than a light sports plane.

(Nothing that is not alive, I mean. Vive la difference!) (On air traffic control I speak with a modic.u.m of authority. I returned to the aircraft industry for a short time in 1948 to research this subject, then wrote an article aimed at the slicks: THE BILLION-DOLLAR EYE. I missed; it is still unpublished.)

18. 1950 Fish and yeast will become our princ.i.p.al sources of proteins. Beef will be a luxury; lamb and mutton will disappear.

1965 I'll hedge number eighteen a little. Hunger is not now a problem in the USA and need not be in the year 2000-but hunger is a world problem and would at once become an acute problem for us if we were conquered.. . a distinct possibility by 2000.

Between our present status and that of subjugation lies a whole spectrum of political and economic possible shapes to the future under which we would share the worldwide hunger to a greater or lesser extent. And the problem grows. We can expect to have to feed around half a billion Americans circa year 2000-our present huge surpluses would then represent acute shortages even if we never s.h.i.+pped a ton of wheat to India.

1980 It would now appear that the USA population in 2000 A.D. will be about 270,000,000 instead of 500,000,000. I have been collecting clippings on demography for forty years; all that the projections have in common is that all of them are wrong. Even that figure of 270,000,000 may be too high; today the only reason our population continues to increase is that we oldsters are living longer; our current birthrate is not sufficient even to replace the parent generation.

19. 1950 Mankind will not destroy itself, nor will "Civilization" be destroyed.

1965 I stand by prediction number nineteen.

1980 I still stand by prediction number nineteen. There will be wars and we will be in some of them- and some may involve atomic weapons. But there will not be that all-destroying nuclear holocaust that forms the background of so many SF stories. There are three reasons for this: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the People's Republic of China.

Why? Because the three strongest countries in the world (while mutually detesting each the other two) have nothing to gain and everything to lose in an allout swapping of H-bombs. Because Kremlin bosses are not idiots and neither are those in Beijing (Peiping)(Peking).

If another country-say Israel, India, or the South African Republic-gets desperate and tosses an A- or H-bomb, that country is likely to receive three phone calls simultaneously, one from each of the Big Three: "You have exactly three minutes to back down. Then we destroy you."

After World War II I never expected that our safety would ever depend on a ma.s.sive split in Communist International-but that is exactly what has happened.

1950 Here are things we won't get soon, if ever: Travel through time.

Travel faster than the speed of light.

"Radio" transmission of matter.

Manlike robots with manlike reactions.

Laboratory creation of life.

Real understanding of what "thought" is and how it is related to matter.

Scientific proof of personal survival after death.

Nor a permanent end to war. (I don't like that prediction any better than you do.)

1950 Prediction of gadgets is a parlor trick anyone can learn; but only a fool would attempt to predict details of future history (except as fiction, so labeled); there are too many unknowns and no techniques for integrating them even if they were known.

Even to make predictions about overall trends in technology is now most difficult. In fields where before World War II there was one man working in public, there are now ten, or a hundred, working in secret. There may be six men in the country who have a clear picture of what is going on in science today.There may not be even one.

This is in itself a trend. Many leading scientists consider it a factor as disabling to us as the nonsense of Lysenkoism is to Russian technology. Nevertheless there are clear-cut trends which are certain to make this coming era enormously more productive and interesting than the frantic one we have just pa.s.sed through. Among them are: Cybernetics: The study of communication and con- trol of mechanisms and organisms. This includes the wonderful field of mechanical and electronic "brains"-but is not limited to it. (These "brains" are a factor in themselves that will speed up technical progress the way a war does.) Semantics: A field which seems concerned only with definitions of words. It is not; it is a frontal attack on epistemology-that is to say, how we know what we know, a subject formerly belonging to long-haired philosophers.

New tools of mathematics and logic, such as calculus of statement, Boolean logic, morphological a.n.a.lysis, generalized symbology, newly invented mathematics of every sort-there is not s.p.a.ce even to name these enormous fields, but they offer us hope in every field- medicine, social relations, biology, economics, anything.

Biochemistry: Research into the nature of protoplasm, into enzyme chemistry, viruses, etc., give hope not only that we may conquer disease, but that we may someday understand the mechanisms of life itself.

Through this, and with the aid of cybernetic machines and radioactive isotopes, we may eventually acquire a rigor of chemistry. Chemistry is not a discipline today; it is a jungle. We know that chemical behavior depends on the number of orbital electrons in an atom and that physical and chemical properties follow the pattern called the Periodic Table. We don't know much else, save by cut-and-try, despite the great size and importance of the chemical industry. When chemistry becomes a discipline, mathematical chemists will design new materials, predict their properties, and tell engineers how to make them-without ever entering a laboratory. We've got a long way to go on that one!

Nucleonics: We have yet to find out what makes the atom tick. Atomic power?-yes, we'll have it, in convenient packages-when we understand the nucleus. The field of radioisotopes alone is larger than was the entire known body of science in 1900. Before we are through with these problems, we may find out how the universe is shaped and why. Not to mention enormous unknown vistas best represented by ?????.

Some physicists are now using two time scales, the T-scale, and the tau-scaie. Three billion years on one scale can equal an incredibly split second on the other scale-and yet both apply to you and your kitchen stove. Of such anarchy is our present state in physics.

For such reasons we must insist that the Age of Science has not yet opened.

(Still 1950) The greatest crisis facing us is not Russia, not the Atom bomb, not corruption in government, not encroaching hunger, not the morals of young. It is a crisis in the organization and accessibility of human knowledge. We own an enormous "encyclopedia"-which isn't even arranged alphabetically. Our "file cards" are spilled on the floor, nor were they ever in order. The answers we want may be buried somewhere in the heap, but it might take a lifetime to locate two already known facts, place them side by side and derive a third fact, the one we urgently need.

Call it the Crisis of the Librarian.

We need a new "specialist" who is not a specialist, but a synthesist. We need a new science to be the perfect secretary to all other sciences.

But we are not likely to get either one in a hurry and we have a powerful lot of grief before us in the meantime.

Fortunetellers can always be sure of repeat customers by predicting what the customer wants to hear. . . it matters not whether the prediction comes true. Contrariwise, the weatherman is often blamed for bad weather.

Brace yourself.

In 1900 the cloud on the horizon was no bigger than a man's hand-but what lay ahead was the Panic of 1907, World War I, the panic following it, the Depres sion, Fascism, World War II, the Atom Bomb, and Red Russia.

Today the clouds obscure the sky, and the wind that overturns the world is sighing in the distance.

The period immediately ahead will be the roughest, cruelest one in the long, hard history of mankind.

It will probably include the worst World War of them all. It might even end with a war with Mars, G.o.d save the Mark! Even if we are spared that fantastic possibility, it is certain that there will be no security anywhere, save that which you dig out of your own inner spirit.

But what of that picture we drew of domestic luxury and tranquility for Mrs. Middlecla.s.s, style 2000 A.D.?.

She lived through it. She survived.

Our prospects need not dismay you, not if you or your kin were at b.l.o.o.d.y Nose Ridge, at Gettysburg- or trudged across the Plains. You and I are here because we carry the genes of uncountable ancestors who fought-and won-against death in all its forms. We're tough. We'll survive. Most of us.

We've lasted through the preliminary bouts; the main event is coming up.

But it's not for sissies.