Quotes: Profiles of the Future (1962, 1999) by Arthur C. Clarke

Arthur C. Clarke

 

Profiles of the Future:

An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible

 

Indigo, Paperback, 2000.

8vo. ix+211 pp. Millennium Edition. New Foreword by the author, April 1999 [1-3].

 

First published, 1962.

Second Revised Edition, 1973.

Third Revised Edition, 1982.

Millennium Edition by Gollancz, 1999.

Paperback reprint by Indigo, 2000.

 

Foreword to Millennial Edition

This book began, in 1961, as a series of essays for the Playboy magazine. They were assembled in one volume the following year, and a revised edition was published in 1982. It is hard to remember that the later date was two years pre-Orwell, while the earlier one now seems halfway back to the Jurassic. What, no VCRs, no laptops, no Internet, no World Wide Wait – sorry, Web – no CDRoms! How did people manage to live in those primitive times?

Quite apart from the technological revolution, largely due to the invention of the microchip, the last four decades of the twentieth century also witnessed the greatest age of exploration in human history. Although the landings on the Moon were the undoubted highlights, equally important was the reconnaissance of all the planets (except Pluto – whose status as a genuine planet is now being challenged!) by robot probes. Though I had no doubt that all these events would occur, I never expected to see them in my lifetime. Still less did I imagine that, after reaching the Moon, we would abandon it for – how long? Your guess is as good as mine, for the answer depends on politics and economics as much as on technology.

This book’s subtitle is still an accurate description of its intention: ‘An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible’. Not, be it noted, the probable – still less the desirable; in fact, it will mention many very undesirable possibilities, as well as some desirable impossibilities.

As the examples quoted in the opening chapters amply demonstrate, ‘Impossible’ is an extremely dangerous word, and I have tried to defined its sphere of application by Three Laws which were originally enunciated in this book (the first now updated for Political Correctness, though I do not guarantee continuing to do so):

1.     When a distinguished but elderly scientist says that something is possible, (s)he is almost certainly right. When (s)he says it is impossible, (s)he is very probably wrong.

2.     The only way of finding the limits of the possible is by going beyond them into the impossible.

But perhaps the best-known, and most often quoted, of the Laws is the Third:

3.     Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Nowadays, there are innumerable proofs of the Third Law, but here is my favourite: if anyone had told me, in 1962, that one day there would be book-sized objects that would hold the contents of an entire library, I would have believed him. But if they had said that I could find any page – or even word – in an instant, and then display it in scores of different typefaces ranging Albertus Extra Bold to Zurich Calligraphic, any font size from 8 to 72, I would have protested that no imaginable technology could perform such a feat. I can still remember seeing – and hearing! – Linotype machines slowly converting molten lead into front pages that required two strong men to lift them. Now, of course, Microsoft Word performs far greater miracles, every day, in millions of homes all over the world.

And while we’re on the subject of the word-processing revolution – how would a mid-century typist have reacted to the prediction that within twenty years she’s spend most of her working hours fondling a mouse?

[...]

 

Introduction

It is impossible to predict the future, and all attempts to do so in any detail appear ludicrous within a very few years. This book has a more realistic, yet at the same time more ambitious, aim. It does not try to describe the future, but to define the boundaries within which possible futures must lie. If we regard the ages which stretch ahead of us as an unmapped and unexplored country, what I am attempting to do is to survey its frontiers and get some idea of its extent. The detailed geography of the interior must remain unknown – until we reach it.

With a few exceptions, I am limiting myself to a single aspect of the future – its technology, not the society that will be based upon it. This is not such a limitation as it may seem, for science will dominate the future even more than it dominates the past. Moreover, it is only in this field that prediction is at all possible; there are some general laws governing scientific extrapolation, as there are not (pace Marx) in the case of politics and economics.  

I also believe – and hope – that politics and economics will cease to be as important in the future as they have been in the past; the time will come when most of our present controversies on these matters will seem as trivial, or as meaningless, as the theological debates in which the keenest minds of the Middle Ages dissipated their energies. Politics and economics are concerned with power and wealth, neither of which should be the primary, still less the exclusive, concern of adult human beings.

[...]

Over the last half century, tens of thousands of stories have explored all the conceivable, and many of the inconceivable, possibilities of the future; there are few things that can happen that have not been described somewhere, in books or magazines. A critical – the adjective is important – reading of science fiction is essential training for anyone wishing to look more than ten years ahead. The facts of the future can hardly be imagined ab initio by those who are unfamiliar with the fantasies of the past.

This claim may produce indignation, especially among those second-rate scientists who sometimes make fun of science fiction (I have never known a first-rate one to do so – and I knew several who wrote it). But the simple fact is that anyone with sufficient imagination to assess the future realistically would, inevitably, be attracted to this form of literature. I do not for a moment suggest that more than one per cent of science fiction readers would reliable prophets; but I do suggest that almost one hundred per cent of reliable prophets will be science fiction readers – or writers.

As for my own qualifications for the job, I am content to let the published record speak for itself. Although, like all other propagandists for space flight, I overestimated the time scale and underestimated the cost, I am not in the least contrite about this error. Had we known, back in the 1930s, that it was going to cost billions of dollars to develop space vehicles, we would have been completely discouraged; in those days no one could have believed that such sums would ever be available.

The speed with which space exploration actually progressed would have seemed equally unlikely. When Hermann Oberth’s pioneering book Die Rakete zu den Planetenraumen was reviewed by Nature in 1924, that journal remarked, with great daring, ‘In these days of unprecedented achievements one cannot venture to suggest that even Herr Oberth’s ambitious scheme may not be realised before the human race becomes extinct.’ It had been realised, in large measure, before Professor Oberth became extinct in 1989 – twenty years after the first Moon landing!

I can claim a slightly better record than Nature’s reviewer. On glancing into my first novel Prelude to Space (written in 1947) I am amused to see that I scored a direct hit by giving 1959 as the date of the first lunar impact, I put manned satellites in 1970 and the landing on the Moon in 1978. This seemed wildly optimistic to most people at the time, but now demonstrates my innate conservatism. A still better proof of this is provided by the fact that I made no attempt whatsoever, in 1945, to patent the communication satellite. I couldn’t have done so, as it happens; but at least I would have made the effort, had I dreamed that the first experimental models would be operating while I was still in my forties.

In any event, this book is not concerned with time scales – only with ultimate goals. At the present rate of progress, it is impossible to imagine any technical feat that cannot be achieved, if it can be achieved at all, within the next hundred years. But for the purposes of this inquiry, it is all the same whether the things discussed can be done in ten years, or in ten thousand. My only concern is with what, not with when.

For this reason, many of the ideas developed in this book will be mutually contradictory. To give an example, a really perfect system of communication would have an extremely inhibiting effect on transportation. Less obvious is the converse; if travel became effortless and instantaneous, would anyone bother to communicate? The future will have to choose between many competing superlatives; in such cases, I have described each possibility as if the other did not exist.

In a similar manner, some chapters end on an optimistic note, others on a pessimistic. According to the point of view, both unlimited optimism and unlimited pessimism about the future are equally justified. In the final chapter, I have tried to reconcile both.

It has been said that the art of living lies in knowing where to stop, and going a little further (an early version of my Second Law!). In Chapters 14 and 15 I have attempted to do this by discussing conceptions which are almost certainly not science-fact, but science-fantasy. Some people may regard a serious treatment of such ideas as invisibility and the Fourth Dimension as a waste of time, but in this context it is fully justified. It is as important to discover what cannot be done as what can be done; and it is sometimes considerably more amusing.

While writing this introduction, I came across a review of a somewhat pedestrian Russian book about the twenty-first century. The distinguished British scientist writing the review found the work extremely reasonable and the author’s extrapolations quite convincing.

I hope this charge will not be levelled against me. If this book seems completely reasonable and all my extrapolations convincing, I will not have succeeded in looking very far ahead; for the one fact about the future of which we can be certain is that it will be utterly fantastic.     

 

1. Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Nerve

Before one attempts to set up in business as a prophet, it is instructive to see what success others have made in this dangerous occupation – and it is even more instructive to see where they have failed.

With monotonous regularity, apparently competent men have laid down the law about what is technically possible or impossible – and have been proved utterly wrong, sometimes while the ink was scarcely dry from their pens. On careful analysis, it appears that these débâcles fall into two classes, which I will call Failures of Nerve and Failures of Imagination.

The Failure of Nerve seems to be the more common; it occurs when even given all the relevant facts the would-be prophet cannot see that they point to an inescapable conclusion. Some of these failures are so ludicrous as to be almost unbelievable, and would form an interesting subject for psychological analysis. ‘They said it couldn’t be done’ is a phrase that occurs throughout the history of invention; I do not know if anyone has ever looked into the reasons why ‘they’ said so, often with quite unnecessary vehemence.

It is now impossible for us to recall the mental climate which existed when the first locomotives were being built, and critics gravely asserted that suffocation lay in wait for anyone who exceeded the awful speed of twenty miles an hour. It is equally difficult to believe that the idea of the domestic electric light was pooh-poohed by all the ‘experts’ – with the exception of a thirty-one-year-old American inventor Thomas Alva Edison. When gas securities nose-dived in 1878 because Edison (already a formidable figure, with the phonograph and the carbon microphone to his credit) announced that he was working on the incandescent lamp, the British Parliament set up a committee to look into the matter. (Westminster can beat Washington hands down at this game.)

The distinguished witnesses reported, to the relief of the gas companies, that Edison’s ideas were ‘good enough for our transatlantic friends... but unworthy of the attention of practical or scientific men.’ And Sir William Preece, engineer-in-chief of the British Post Office, roundly declared that ‘Subdivision of the electric light is an absolute ignis fatuus.’ One feels that the fatuousness was not in the ignis.

The scientific absurdity being pilloried, be it noted, is not some wild-and-woolly dream like perpetual motion, but the humble little electric bulb, which for more than a century has been part of everyday life, completely taken for granted, except when it burns out...

Yet although in this matte Edison saw far beyond his contemporaries, in later life he was also guilty of the same short-sightedness that afflicted Preece, for he furiously opposed the introduction of alternating current. However, his often unscrupulous campaign – which included electrocuting animals to demonstrate the lethal properties of a/c as opposed to d/c! – was probably dictated by economics rather than genuine conviction. Edison’s direct-current system was engaged in a desperate battle with the rival Westinghouse a/c network. It lost: but the Electric Chair is one of Edison’s less-heralded bequests to the world.[1]

The most famous, and perhaps the most instructive, failures of nerve have occurred in the fields of aero- and astronautics. At the beginning of the twentieth century, scientists were almost unanimous in declaring that heavier-than-air flight was impossible, and that anyone who attempted to build aeroplanes was a fool. The great American astronomer, Simon Newcomb, wrote a celebrated essay which concluded:

The demonstration that no possible combination of known substances, known forms of machinery and known forms of force, can be united in a practical machine by which man shall fly long distances through the air, seems to the writer as complete as it is possible for the demonstration of any physical fact to be.

Oddly enough, Newcomb was sufficiently broadminded to admit that some wholly new discovery might make flight practical. He even wrote a science fiction novel, incorporating the invention of antigravity, so he certainly cannot be accused of lacking imagination; his error was attempting to marshal the facts of aerodynamics, when he clearly did not understand its basic principles. His failure of nerve lay in not realising that the means of flight were already at hand.

For Newcomb’s article received wide publicity at just about the time that the Wright brothers, not having a suitable antigravity device in their bicycle shop, were mounting a gasoline engine on wings. When news of their success reached the astronomer, he was only momentarily taken aback. Flying machines might be a marginal possibility, he conceded – but they were certainly of no practical importance, for it was quite out of the question that they could carry the extra weight of a passenger as well as that of a pilot.

[...]

Closer to the present, the opening of the Space Age has produced a mass vindication (and refutation) of prophecies on a scale and at a speed never before witnessed. Having taken some part in this myself, and being no more immune than the next man to the pleasures of saying ‘I told you so,’ I would like to recall a few of the statements about space flight that have been made by prominent scientists in the past. It is necessary for someone to do this, and to jog the remarkably selective memories of the pessimists. The speed with which those who once declaimed ‘It’s impossible’ can switch to ‘I said it could be done all the time’ is really astounding. (There is sometimes a third stage: ‘I thought of it first.’)[2]

As far as the general public is concerned, the idea of space flight as a serious possibility first appeared on the horizon in the 1920s, largely as a result of newspaper reports of the work of the American, Robert Goddard, and the Rumanian, Hermann Oberth (the much earlier studies of Tsiolkovsky in Russia then being almost unknown outside his own country). When the ideas of Goddard and Oberth, usually distorted by the press, filtered through to the scientific world, they were received with hoots of derision. For a sample of the kind of criticism the pioneers of astronautics had to face, I present this masterpiece from a paper published by one Professor A. W. Bickerton in 1926. It should be read carefully, for as an example of cocksure thinking it would be very hard to beat.

This foolish idea of shooting at the moon is an example of the absurd length to which vicious specialisation will carry scientists working in thought-tight compartments. Let us critically examine the proposal. For a projectile entirely to escape the gravitation of the earth, it needs a velocity of 7 miles a second. The thermal energy of a gramme at this speed is 15,180 calories... The energy of our most violent explosive – nitroglycerine – is less than 1,500 calories per gramme. Consequently, even had the explosive nothing to carry, it has only one-tenth of the energy necessary to escape the earth... Hence the proposition appears to be basically impossible...

Indignant readers in the Colombo Public Library pointed angrily to the SILENCE notices when I discovered this little gem. It is worth examining it in some detail to see just where ‘vicious specialisation’, if one may coin a phrase, led the professor so badly astray.

His first error lies in the sentence: ‘The energy of our most violent explosive – nitroglycerine...’ One would have thought it obvious that energy, not violence, is what we want from a rocket fuel; and as a matter of fact nitroglycerine and similar explosives contain much less energy, weight for weight, that such mixtures as kerosene and liquid oxygen. This had been carefully pointed out by Tsiolkovsky and Goddard years before.

Bickerton’s second error is even more culpable. What does it matter if nitroglycerine has only a tenth of the energy necessary to escape from the Earth? That merely means that you have to use at least ten pounds of nitroglycerine to launch a single pound of payload.*

For the fuel itself has not got to escape from Earth; it can all be burned quite close to our planet, and as long as it imparts its energy to the payload, this is all that matters. When Lunik II lifted thirty-three years after Professor Bickerton said it was impossible, most of its several hundred tons of kerosene and liquid oxygen never climbed more than a few miles above Russia – but the half-ton payload reached the Mare Imbrium.

As a comment on the above, I might add that Professor Bickerton, who was an active populariser of science, numbered among his published books one with the intriguing title Perils of a Pioneer. Of the perils that all pioneers must face, few are more disheartening than the Bickertons.

Right through the 1930s and 1940s, eminent scientists continued to deride the rocket pioneers – when they bothered to notice them at all.

[...]

The lesson to be learned from these examples is one that can never be repeated too often, and is one that is seldom understood by laymen – who have an almost superstitious awe of mathematics. But mathematics is only a tool, though an immensely powerful one. No equations, however impressive and complex, can arrive at the truth if the initial assumptions are incorrect. It is really quite amazing by what margins competent but conservative scientists and engineers can miss the mark, when they start with the preconceived idea that what they are investigating is impossible. When this happens, the most well-informed men become blinded by their prejudices and are unable to see what lies directly ahead of them. What is even more incredible, they refuse to learn from experience and will continue to make the same mistake over and over again.

Some of my best friends are astronomers, and I am sorry to keep throwing stones at them – but they do seem to have an appalling record as prophets. If you doubt this, let me tell you a story so ironic that you might well accuse me of making it up. But I am not that much of a cynic; the facts are on file for anyone to check.

Back in the dark ages of 1935, the founder of the British Interplanetary Society, P. E. Cleator, was rash enough to write the first book on astronautics published in England. His Rockets through Space gave an (incidentally highly entertaining) account of the experiments that had been carried out by the German and American rocket pioneers, and their plans for such commonplaces of today as giant multi-stage boosters and satellites. Rather surprisingly, the staid scientific journal Nature reviewed the book in its issue for March 14, 1936, and summed up as follows:

It must be said at once that the whole procedure sketched in the present volume presents difficulties of so fundamental a nature that we are forced to dismiss the notion as essentially impracticable, in spite of the author’s insistent appeal to put aside prejudice and to recollect the supposed impossibility of heavier-than-air flight before it was actually accomplished. An analogy such as this may be misleading, and we believe it to be so in this case...

The reviewer, as was normal procedure, was identified only by the unusual initials R.v.d.R.W.

In 1956 – the year after President Eisenhower had announced the United States satellite program! –           a new Astronomer Royal arrived in England to take up his appointment. The press asked him to give his views on space flight, and after two decades Dr Richard van der Riet Woolley had seen no reason to change his mind. ‘Space travel’, he snorted, ‘is utter bilge.’

The newspapers did not allow him to forget this when Sputnik I went up the very next year. And later – irony piled upon irony – Dr Woolley became, by virtue of his position as Astronomer Royal, a leading member of the committee advising the British government on space research. The feelings of those who had been trying, for a generation, to get the United Kingdom interested in space can well be imagined.**[3]

Even those who suggested that rockets might be for more modest, though much more reprehensible, purposes were overruled by the scientific authorities – except in Germany and Russia.

In late 1944, when the existence of the 200-mile-range V-2 was disclosed to an astonished world, there was considerable speculation about intercontinental missiles. This was firmly squashed by Dr Vannevar Bush, the civilian general of the United States scientific war effort, in evidence before a Senate committee on December 3, 1945. Listen:

There has been a great deal said about a 3,000 mile high-angle rocket. In my opinion such a thing is impossible for many years. The people who have been writing these things that annoy me, have been talking about a 3,000 mile high-angle rocket shot from one continent to another, carrying an atomic bomb and so directed as to be a precise weapon which would land exactly on a certain target, such as a city.

I say, technically, I don’t think anyone in the world knows how to do such a thing, and I feel confident that it will not be done for a very long period of time to come... I think we can leave that out of our thinking. I wish the American public would leave that out of their thinking.

A few months earlier (in May 1945) Prime Minister Churchill’s scientific advisor Lord Cherwell had expressed similar views in a House of Lords debate. This was only to be expected, for Cherwell was an extremely conservative and opinionated scientist who had advised the government that the V-2 itself was only a propaganda rumour.

In the May 1945 debate on defence, Lord Cherwell impressed his peers by a dazzling display of mental arithmetic from which he correctly concluded that a very long-range rocket must consist of more than 90 per cent fuel, and thus would have a negligible payload. The conclusion he let his listeners draw from this was that such a device would be wholly impracticable.

This was true enough in the spring of 1945, but it was no longer true in the summer. One astonishing feature of the House of Lords debate is the casual way in which much-too-well-informed peers used the words ‘atomic bomb’, at a time when this was the best kept secret of the war. (The New Mexico test was still two months in the future!) Security must have been horrified, and Lord Cherwell – who of course knew all about the Manhattan Project – was quite justified in telling his inquisitive colleagues not to believe everything they heard, even though in this case it happened to be perfectly true.

When Dr Bush spoke to the Senate committee in December of the same year, the only important secret about the atomic bomb was that it weighed five tons. Anyone could then work out in his head, as Lord Cherwell had done, that a rocket to deliver it across intercontinental ranges would have to weigh about 200 tons – as against the mere fourteen tons of then awe-inspiring V-2.

The outcome was the greatest Failure of Nerve in all history, which changed the future of the world – indeed, perhaps of many worlds. Faced with the same facts and the same conclusions, American and Russian technology took two separate roads. The Pentagon – accountable to the taxpayer – virtually abandoned long-range rockets for almost half a decade, until the development of thermonuclear bombs made it possible to build warheads five times lighter yet several hundred times more powerful than the low-powered and now obsolete device that was dropped on Hiroshima.

The Russians had no such inhibitions. Faced with the need for a 200-ton rocket, they went right ahead and build it. By the time it was perfected, it was no longer required for military purposes, for Soviet physicists had bypassed the United States’ billion-dollar tritium cul-de-sac and gone straight to the far cheaper and simpler lithium-hydride bomb. Having backed the wrong horse in rocketry, the Russians then entered it for a much more important event – and won the race into space.

Of the many lessons to be drawn from this slice of history, the one that I wish to emphasise is this. Anything that is theoretically possible will be achieved in practice, no matter what the technical difficulties, if it is desired greatly enough. It is no argument against any project to say: ‘The idea’s fantastic!’ Most of the things that have happened in the last fifty years have been fantastic, and it is only by assuming that they will continue to be so that we have any hope of anticipating the future.

To do this – to avoid that Failure of Nerve to which history exacts so merciless a penalty – we must have the courage to follow all technical extrapolations to their logical conclusion. Yet even this is not enough, as I shall now demonstrate. To predict the future we need logic; but we also need faith and imagination which can sometimes defy logic itself.

______________________________

*The dead weight of the rocket (propellant tanks, motor, etc.) would actually make the ratio very much higher, but that does not affect the argument.

**In all fairness to Dr Woolley, I would like to record that his 1936 review contained the suggestion – probably for the first time – that rockets could contribute to astronomical knowledge by making observations in ultra violet light beyond the absorbing screen of the Earth’s atmosphere. Thanks to the orbiting astronomical observatories, this idea has been overwhelmingly realised.

 

2. Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination

In the last chapter, I suggested that many of the negative statements about scientific possibilities, and the gross failures of past prophets to predict what lay immediately ahead of them, could be described as Failures of Nerve. All the basic facts of aeronautics were available – in the writings of Cayley, Stringfellow, Chanute, and others – when Simon Newcomb ‘proved’ that flight was impossible. He simply lacked the courage to face those facts. All the fundamental equations and principles of space travel had been worked out by Tsiolkovsky, Goddard and Oberth for years – often decades – when distinguished scientists were making fun of would-be astronauts. Here again, the failure to appreciate the facts was not so much intellectual as moral. The critics did not have the courage that their scientific convictions should have given them; they could not believe the truth even when it had been spelled out before their eyes, in their own language of mathematics. We all know this type of cowardice, because at some time or other we all exhibit it.

The second kind of prophetic failure is less blameworthy, and more interesting. It arises when all the available facts are appreciated and marshalled correctly – but when the really vital facts are still undiscovered, and the possibility of their existence is not admitted.

A famous example of this is provided by the philosopher Auguste Comte, who in his Cours de Philosophie Positive (1835) attempted to define the limits within which scientific knowledge must lie. In his chapter on astronomy (Book 2, Chapter 1) he wrote these words concerning the heavenly bodies:

We see how we may determine their forms, their distances, their bulk, their motions, but we can never know anything of their chemical or mineralogical structure; and much less, that of organised beings living on their surface.

We must keep carefully apart the idea of the solar system and that of the universe, and be always assured that our only true interest is in the former. Within this boundary alone is astronomy the supreme and positive science that we have determined it to be... the stars serve us scientifically only as providing positions with which we may compare the interior movements of our system.

In other words, Comte decided that the stars could never be more than celestial reference points, of no intrinsic concern to the astronomer. Only in the case of the planets could we hope for any definite knowledge, and even that knowledge would be limited to geometry and dynamics. Comte would probably have decided that such a science as ‘astrophysics’ was a priori impossible.

Yet within half a century of his death, almost the whole of astronomy was astrophysics, and very few professional astronomers had much interest in the planets. Comte’s assertion had been utterly refuted by the invention of the spectroscope, which not only revealed the ‘chemical structure’ of the heavenly bodies but also told us far more about the distant stars than we knew of our planetary neighbours – at least until recently.

Comte cannot be blamed for not imagining the spectroscope; no one could have imagined it, or the still more sophisticated instruments that have now joined it in the astronomer’s armoury. But he provides a warning that should always be borne in mind: even things that are undoubtedly impossible with existing or foreseeable techniques may prove to be easy as a result of new scientific breakthroughs. From their very nature, these breakthroughs can never be anticipated; but they have enabled us to bypass so many insuperable obstacles in the past that no picture of the future can hope to be valid if it ignores them.

Another celebrated Failure of Imagination was that persisted in by Lord Rutherford, who, more than any other man, laid bare the internal structure of the atom. Rutherford frequently made fun of those sensation-mongers who predicted that we would one day be able to harness the energy locked up in matter. Yet only five years after his death in 1937, the first chain reaction was started in Chicago. What Rutherford, for all of his wonderful insight, had failed to take into account was that a nuclear reaction might be discovered that would release more energy than that required to start it. To liberate the energy of matter, what was wanted was a nuclear ‘fire’ analogous to chemical combustion, and the fission of uranium provided this. Once that was discovered, the harnessing of atomic energy was inevitable, though without the pressures of war it might well have taken the better part of a century.

The example of Lord Rutherford demonstrates that it is not the man who knows most about a subject, and is the acknowledged master of his field, who can give the most reliable pointers to its future. Too great a burden of knowledge can clog the wheels of imagination; I have tried to embody this fact in Clarke’s Third Law, which I make no excuse for repeating here:

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

Perhaps the adjective ‘elderly’ requires definition. In physics and mathematics it means over thirty; in other disciplines, senile decay is sometimes postponed to the forties. There are, of course, glorious exceptions; but as every researcher just out of college knows, scientists of over fifty are good for nothing but board meetings, and should at all costs be kept out of the laboratory...

[...]

One can only prepare for the unpredictable by trying to keep an open and unprejudiced mind – a feat which is extremely difficult to achieve, even with the best will in the world. Indeed, a completely open mind would be an empty one, and freedom from all prejudices and preconceptions is an unattainable ideal. Yet there is one form of mental exercise that can provide good basic training for would-be prophets: anyone who wishes to cope with the future should travel back in imagination to 1900 – and ask just how much of today’s technology would be not merely incredible, but incomprehensible to the keenest scientific brains of that time. 1900 is a good round date to choose, because it was just about then that all hell started break loose in science.

[...]

The collapse of ‘classical’ science actually began with Roentgen’s discovery of X-rays in 1895; here was the first clear indication, in a form that everyone could appreciate, that the commonsense picture of the universe was not sensible after all. X-rays – the very name reflects the bafflement of scientists and laymen alike – could travel through solid matter, like light through a sheet of glass. No one had ever imagined or predicted such a thing; that one would be able to peer into the interior of the human body – and thereby revolutionise medicine and surgery – was something that the most daring prophet had never suggested. Indeed, the titan of British physics, Lord Kelvin, roundly declared it was all a hoax...

The discovery of X-rays was the first great breakthrough into the realms where no human mind had ever ventured before. Yet it gave scarcely a hint of still more astonishing developments to come – radioactivity, the internal structure of the atom, Relativity, the Quantum Theory, the Uncertainty Principle...

As a result of this, the inventions and technical devices of our modern world can be divided into two sharply defined classes. On the one hand there are those machines whose would have been fully understood by any of the great thinkers of the past; on the other, there are those that would be utterly baffling to the finest minds of antiquity. And not merely of antiquity; there are devices now in common use that might well have driven Edison or Marconi insane had they tried to fathom their operation.

Let me give some examples to emphasise this point. If you showed a modern diesel engine, an automobile, a steam turbine, or a helicopter to Benjamin Franklin, Galileo, Leonardo da Vinci, and Archimedes – a list spanning a time period of two thousand years – not one of them would have any difficulty in understanding how these machines worked. Leonardo, in fact, would recognise several from his notebooks! All four men would be astonished at the materials and the workmanship, which would have seemed magical in its precision, but once they had got over that surprise they would feel quite at home – as long as they did not delve too deeply into the auxiliary control and electrical systems.

But now suppose that they were confronted by an electronic computer, a nuclear reactor, a radar set, a VCR.[4] Quite apart from the complexity of these devices, the individual elements of which they are composed would be incomprehensible to any man born before this century. Whatever his degree of education or intelligence, he would not possess the mental framework that could accommodate electron beams, transistors, atomic fission, microchips and cathode-ray tubes.

The difficulty, let me repeat, is not one of complexity; some of the – apparently – simplest modern devices, such as the featureless silver platter of a DVD, would be the most difficult to explain. A more dramatic example is the atomic bomb...[5]      

[...]

The wholly unexpected discovery of uranium fission in 1939 made possible such absurdly simple (in principle, if not in practice) devices as the atomic bomb and the nuclear chain reactor. No scientist could ever have predicted them; if he had, all his colleagues would have laughed at him.

It is highly instructive, and stimulating to the imagination, to make a list of the inventions and discoveries that have been anticipated – and those that have not. Here is my attempt to do so. All the items on the left have already been achieved or discovered, and all have an element of the unexpected or the downright astonishing about them. To the best of my knowledge, not one was foreseen very much in advance of the moment of revelation.

On the right, however, are concepts that have been around for hundreds or thousands of years. Some have been achieved; others will be achieved; others may be impossible. But which?

The Unexpected	The Expected
X-rays	Automobiles
Nuclear energy	Flying machines
Radio, TV	Steam engines
Electronics	Submarines
Photography	Spaceships
Sound recording	Telephones
Quantum mechanics	Death rays
Relativity	Transmutation
Transistors	Artificial life
Masers; lasers	Immortality
Superconductors; superfluids	Invisibility
Atomic clocks; Mössbauer effect	Levitation
Determining composition of celestial bodies	Teleportation
Dating the past (Carbon 14, etc.)	Communication with dead
Detecting invisible planets	Observing the past and the future
The ionosphere; van Allen belts	Telepathy

The right-hand list is deliberately provocative; it includes sheer fantasy as well as serious scientific speculation. But – to repeat my Second Law – the only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. In the chapters that follow, this is exactly what I propose doing; yet I am very much afraid that from time to time I too will exhibit Failure of Imagination – if not Failure of Nerve. For as I glance down the left-hand column I am aware of a few items which, not many years ago, I would have thought were impossible...

 

3. The Future of Transport

Most of the energy expended in the history of the world has been used to move things from one place to another. For thousands upon thousands of years, the rate of movement was very slow – about two or three miles an hour, the pace of a walking man. Even the domestication of the horse did not raise this figure appreciably, for though a racehorse can exceed forty miles an hour for very short periods, the main use of the horse has always been as a slow-moving beast of burden or hauler of vehicles. The fastest of these – the stagecoaches immortalised by Dickens – could seldom have travelled at more than ten miles an hour on the roads that existed before the nineteenth century.

For almost the whole of history and prehistory, therefore, humanity’s thoughts and ways of life have been restricted to the tiny band of the speed spectrum between one and ten miles an hour. Yet within the span of a few generations, the velocity of travel has been multiplied more than a thousandfold; indeed, there are good grounds for thinking that the acceleration that took place round the mid-twentieth century will never again be matched.

Speed, however, is not the only criterion of transport, and there are times when it is positively undesirable – especially if it conflicts with safety, comfort or economics. As far as transportation at ground level is concerned, we may well have reached (if not passed) the practical limit of speed, and future improvements must lie in other directions. No one wants to travel down Fifth Avenue at the velocity of sound, but most New Yorkers would be very happy if they could always be sure of doing so at the speed of a stagecoach.

[...]

Yet, it is becoming obvious that vehicles – except public utility ones – cannot be permitted much longer in urban areas. We have taken some time to face this fact; more than two thousand years have passed since increasing traffic congestion in Rome compelled Julius Caesar to ban all wheeled vehicles during the hours of daylight, and the situation has become slightly worse since 46 BC. If private cars are to continue operating inside cities, we will have to put all the buildings on stilts so that the entire ground area can be used for highways and parking lots – and even this may not solve the problem.

[...]

Even if they are banned from the city, motor vehicles are likely to dominate the short (10–100 mile) range of transportation for a long time to come. There is no one now alive who can remember when it was otherwise – the automobile has become so much a part of our existence. Though it was conceived in the late Nineteenth, it is essentially a child of the Twentieth Century.

Looked at dispassionately, it is an incredible device, which no sane society would tolerate. If anyone before 1900 could have seen the approaches to a modern city on a Monday morning or a Friday evening, he might have imagined that he was in hell – and he would not be far wrong. Here we have a situation in which millions of vehicles, each miracle of (often unnecessary) complication, are hurtling in all directions under the impulse of anything up to two hundred horsepower. Many of them are the size of small houses and contain a couple of tons of sophisticated alloys – yet often carry only a single passenger. They can travel at a hundred miles an hour, but are lucky if they average forty. In one lifetime they have consumed more irreplaceable fuel than has been used in the whole previous history of mankind. The roads to support them, inadequate though they are, cost as much as a small war; the analogy is a good one, for the casualties are on the same scale.

Yet despite the appalling expense in spiritual as well as material values (look what Detroit has done to aesthetics) our civilisation could not survive for ten minutes without the automobile. Though it can obviously be improved, it seems hard to believe that it can be replaced by anything fundamentally different. The world has moved on wheels for six thousand years, and there is an unbroken sequence from of cart to Rolls-Royce and Mercedes-Benz.[6]

Yet one day the sequence will be broken – perhaps by ground effect vehicles riding on air blasts, perhaps by gravity control, perhaps by still more revolutionary means. I shall discuss these possibilities elsewhere; meanwhile, let us take a brief glance at the future of the automobile as we know it.

It will become much lighter – and hence more efficient – as materials improve. Its complicated and toxic gasoline engine (which has probably killed as many people by air pollution as by direct physical impact) will be replaced by clean and silent electric motors, built into the wheels themselves and so wasting no body space. This implies, of course, the development of a really compact and lightweight method of storing or producing electricity, at least an order of magnitude better than our present clumsy batteries. Such an invention has been overdue for the best part of a century; it may be made possible either through improvements in fuel cells, or as a by-product of solid-state physics. An alternative that has attracted much attention is fly-wheel energy storage, already used in some buses.[7]

These improvements, however, will be much less important than the fact that the automobile of the day-after-tomorrow will not be driven by its owner, but by itself; indeed, it may one day be a serious offence to drive an automobile on a public highway. I would not care to say how long it will take to introduce completely computerised motoring, but dozens of techniques already developed by airlines and railroads already point the way to it. Automatic spacing, electronic road signs, radar obstacle detectors, navigational grids – already we have the basic elements required, and many have been tested experimentally, especially in Japan. An automatic highway system will, of course, be fabulously expensive to install and maintain – but in the long run it will be much cheaper, in terms of time, frustration, and human lives, than the present manual one.

The automobile of the future will really live up to the first half of its name; you need merely tell it your destination – by dialling a code, or perhaps even verbally – and it will travel there by the most efficient route, after first checking with the highway information system for blockages and traffic jams. As a mere incidental, this would virtually solve the parking problem. Once your car had delivered you to the office, you could instruct it to head out of town again. It would then report for duty in the evening when summoned by radio, or at a prearranged time. This is only one of the advantages of having a built-in chauffeur.

Some people, I know, enjoy driving, for reasons which are simple and perhaps[8] Freudian, though none the worse for that. Their desires could easily be fulfilled at dedicated race-tracks – but not on the public highways.

The most revolutionary – indeed, from the viewpoint of all earlier ages the most incredible – event in the history of transport has been the rise of aviation. Eventually all passenger traffic will go by air when stage-lengths of more than a couple of hundred miles are concerned; the railroads recognised this long time ago, as is proved by their often unconcealed efforts to discourage customers. They would much prefer to concentrate on freight, which is more profitable and far less troublesome, for it is seldom in a frantic hurry and does not object to being parked in sidings for a few hours. Nor does it insist that its feet be warmed and its martinis chilled – vide Peter Arno’s once-famous cartoon, which showed an irate passenger in the club car, holding up an unsatisfactory drink and complaining, ‘This is a hell of a way to run a railroad.’[9]

The story of the railroads, which have served mankind so well for almost a century and a half, is now entering its final chapter. As industry becomes decentralised, as the use of coal for fuel diminishes and self-contained power sources enable factories to move nearer to their sources of supply, so the very need for shifting megatons of raw materials over thousands of miles will dwindle away.

Already some young countries – Australia, to give a middle-aged example – have virtually bypassed the railroad age and are building transportation systems based on highways and airlines. The day will come, if it has not already, when Pullmans and diners and roomettes will be as much period pieces as the Mississippi paddle-boats, and will evoke equal nostalgia.

Nevertheless, by a strange paradox it is quite possible that the heroic age of railroads still lies ahead. On airless worlds like the Moon, Mercury, and the satellites of the giant planets, alternative forms of transport may be impracticable, and the absence of atmosphere will permit very high speeds even at ground level. Such a situation almost demands railroads, or equivalent systems. On rugged, low-gravity worlds there is a good deal to be said for cars suspended from overhead monorails or cables, which could be slung across valleys and chasms and craters, with complete indifference to the geography below them. A century from now, the face of the Moon may be covered with such a network, linking together the pressurised cities of the first extraterrestrial colony. 

[...]

When this chapter was first written, the Mach 2 (1,200 mph) Concorde was still fourteen years in the future. A technological triumph, but an economic disaster (like that other one-off product, the Space Shuttle!), it now appears that it will have no successors, for commercial and environmental reasons rather than engineering ones. After much initial optimism, and the expenditure of millions of dollars, dreams of hypersonic – say Mach 10 – flight for paying passengers seem to have faded out. To mix metaphors slightly, has commercial aviation come to the end of the line? Before we jump to that conclusion, here is another cautionary tale from the past, almost matching the Pickering débâcle quoted in Chapter One.[10]

Back in 1929 a leading aeronautical engineer, who later became a famous author (I’ll give his name in a moment, he was the Tom Clancy of his day[11]) wrote a paper on the future of aviation which opened with the words: ‘The forecast is freely made that within a few years passengers-carrying aeroplanes will be travelling at over 300 mph, the speed record today.’ This, he stated pontifically, was gross journalistic exaggeration, as ‘the commercial aeroplane will have a definite range of development ahead of it beyond which no further advance can be anticipated.’

Here are the advances this farsighted prophet anticipated when the aeroplane had reached the limit of its development, probably by the year 1980:

Speed: 110–130 mph

Range: 600 miles

Payload: 4 tons

Total weight: 20 tons

Well, every one of these figures had been multiplied by more than five by the time their proponent died in 1960, mourned by thousands of readers in many countries. For in 1929 he was N. S. Norway, chief calculator on the R100 airship design; but in 1960 he was famous as Nevil Shute. One can only hope, as he himself must have done, that his post-nuclear-war novel On the Beach turns out to be as wide of the mark as this earlier and lesser-known prediction.

[...]

 

4.     Riding on Air

Re-reading this chapter, after almost forty years, has been a chastening – even embarrassing – experience. Despite the obvious temptation, I have left the original text unchanged, apart from minor editorial corrections, as a splendid example of the Perils of Prediction.

Apologies and excuses will be found in the postscript.

[...]

Postscript, 30 years later...

Well, it hasn’t worked out quite that way – yet...

However, some of my less optimistic extrapolations have come true. GEMs are in widespread use for tourism (e.g. Channel crossing, the Adriatic) and very large models have been built for military applications. There is one Russian monster in the multi-thousand ton class, which caused great apprehension in Western intelligence circles when first spotted by reconnaissance satellites. It’s probably moth-balled now, while its rouble-starved owners wait for some Hollywood producer willing to pay the fuel bills.

And that may be one of several reasons why family-sized, private GEMs never became popular, except with more affluent members of the sporting-car set. They are gas-guzzlers – as well as being noisy, and prone to rearranging the ground over which they float.

I discovered this when, during my initial enthusiasm, I imported a four-seater ‘Hover Hawk’ into Sri Lanka. It was great fun to drive, but only in large open spaces: because steering depended on rudders, it had poor lateral control. I would never have dared to take it on a busy highway, and on water, visibility was liable to be obscured by clouds of spray.

My final excursion was on a wide beach, which seemed a safe enough venue. However, I failed to notice a small pile of brushwood in time to avoid it, and the flexible rubber skirt which trapped the supporting bubble of air was torn open. With a mournful sigh, my Hover Hawn sank on to the sand.

It would have been easy enough to repair the trivial damage, but I decided not to bother, and presented the vehicle to the University of Moratuwa’s Engineering Department.

That was twenty years ago. I have never driven anything since, without or without wheels.

 

5. Beyond Gravity

Of all the natural forces, gravity is the most mysterious and the most implacable. It controls our lives from birth to death, killing or maiming us if we make the slightest slip. No wonder that, conscious of their earthbound slavery, men have always looked wistfully at birds and clouds, and have pictured the sky as the abode of the gods. The very expression ‘heavenly being’ implies a freedom from gravity which, until the present, we have known only in our dreams.

There have been many explanations of those dreams, some psychologists trying to find their origin in our assumed arboreal past – though it is unlikely that many of our ancestors spent their lives jumping from tree to tree, and any who experienced more than one second of free fall could have made no further contribution to the human gene – or meme – bank. One could argue almost as convincingly that the familiar levitation dream is not a memory from the past, but a premonition of the future. Some day ‘weightlessness’ or reduced gravity will be a common, and perhaps even a normal, state of mankind. The day may come when there are more people living on space stations and worlds of low gravity than on the Mother Planet; indeed, when the history of our race is written, the estimated one hundred billion humans who have already spent laborious lives struggling against gravitation may turn out to be a tiny minority. Perhaps our space-faring descendants will be as little concerned with gravity as were our first ancestors when they floated effortlessly in the buoyant sea.

Even now, most of the creatures on this planet are hardly aware that gravity exists. Though it dominates the lives of large land animals such as elephants, horses, H. sapiens and dogs, to anything much smaller than a mouse it is seldom more than a mild inconvenience. To insects it is not even that; flies and mosquitoes are so light and fragile that the air itself buoys them up, and gravity bothers them no more than it does a fish.

But it bothers us a great deal, especially now that we are making determined efforts to escape from it. Quite apart from its relevance to space flight, the problem of gravitation has always worried physicists. It seems to stand           completely apart from all the other forces – light, heat, electricity, magnetism – which can be generated in many different ways, and are freely interconvertible. Indeed, most of modern technology is based upon such conversions – of heat into electricity, electricity into light, and so on.

Yet we cannot generate gravity at all, and it appears completely indifferent to all the influences which we may bring to bear on it. As far as we know, the only way a gravitational field can be produced is by the presence of matter. Every particle of matter has an attraction for every other particle of matter in the universe, and the sum total of those attractions, in any one spot, is the local gravity. Naturally, this varies from world to world, since some planets contain large amount of matter and others very little. In our solar system the three giant planets Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune all have surface gravities greater than Earth’s – two and a half times greater, in the case of Jupiter. At the other extreme, there are moons and asteroids where gravity is so low that one would have to look at a falling object for several seconds to be certain that it was moving.

Gravitation is an incredibly, almost unimaginably, weak force. This may seem to contradict both common sense and everyday experience, yet when we consider the statement it is obviously true. Really gigantic quantities of matter – the six thousand million million million tons of the Earth – are required to produce the rather modest gravity field in which we live. We can generate magnetic or electric forces hundreds of times more powerful with a few pounds of iron or copper. When you lift a piece of iron with a simple horseshoe magnet, the amount of metal the magnet contains is outpulling the whole Earth. The extreme weakness of gravitational forces makes our total inability to control or modify them all the more puzzling and exasperating.

From time to time, one hears rumours that research teams are working on the problem of gravity control, or ‘anti-gravity’, but these stories usually turn out to be misinterpretations. No competent scientist, at this stage of our ignorance, would deliberately set out to look for a way of overcoming gravity. What a number of physicists and mathematicians are doing, however, is something less ambitious: they are simply trying to uncover basic knowledge about gravity. If this plodding, fundamental work does lead to some form of gravity control, that will be wonderful, but I doubt if many people in the field believe that it will. The opinion of most scientists is well summed up by a remark once made by Dr John Peerce, Father of Telstar and part-time science fiction writer: ‘Anti-gravity,’ he said, ‘is strictly for the birds.’ But the birds don’t need it – and we do.

We still know so little about gravitation that we are not even sure if it travels through space at a definite speed – like radio or light waves – or whether it is ‘always there’. Until the time of Einstein, scientists thought that the latter was the case, and that gravitation was propagated instantaneously. Today, the general opinion is that it travels at the speed of light and that, also like light, it has some kind of wave structure.

Gravitational waves will be fantastically difficult to detect, because they carry very little energy. It has been calculated that the gravity waves radiated by the whole Earth have an energy of about a millionth of a horsepower, and the total emission from the entire solar system – the Sun and all the planets – is only half a horsepower. There is good evidence that gravitational radiation has been detected from very dense, rapidly moving stars, but any conceivable man-made generator would be billions of billions of times feebler than this.

[...]

It is also probable that we will not make much progress in understanding gravity until we are able to isolate ourselves and our instruments from it by establishing laboratories in space. Attempting to study it on the Earth’s surface is rather like testing hi-fi equipment in a boiler factory; the effects we are looking for may be swamped by the background. Only in a satellite laboratory will we be able to investigate the properties of matter under weightless conditions.

The reason why objects are – usually – weightless in space is one of those elusive simplicities that is almost invariably misunderstood. Most people are probably still under the impression that astronauts are weightless because they are ‘beyond the pull of gravity’.

This is completely wrong. Nowhere in the universe – not even in the remotest galaxy that appears as a faint smudge on a Hubble Telescope image – would one be literally beyond the pull of Earth’s gravity, though a few million miles away it is completely negligible. It falls off slowly with distance, and at the modest altitudes reached by the first astronauts it was still almost as powerful as at sea level. When Yuri Gagarin looked down on Earth from a height of nearly two hundred miles, the gravity field in which he was moving still had ninety percent of its normal value. Yet, despite that, he weighed exactly nothing.

If this seems confusing, it is largely due to poor semantics. The trouble is that we dwellers on the Earth’s surface have grown accustomed to using the words ‘gravity’ and ‘weight’ almost interchangeably. In ordinary terrestrial situations, this is safe enough; whenever there’s weight there’s gravity, and vice versa. But they are really quite separate entities, and either can occur independently of the other. In space, they normally do.

On occasion, they can do so on Earth, as the following experiment will prove. I suggest you think about it rather than actually conducting it, but if you are unconvinced by my logic, go right ahead. You will have the tremendous precedent of Galileo, who also refused to accept argument but appealed to experimental proof. However, I disclaim all responsibility for any damage.

You will need a quick-acting trapdoor (one of those used by hangmen will do admirably) and a pair of bathroom scales. Put the scales on the trapdoor and stand on them. They will, of course, register your weight.

Now, while your eyes are fixed on the scale, get one of your acquaintances (‘That’s not an office for a friend, my lord,’ as Volumnius said to Brutus on a slightly similar occasion) to spring the trapdoor. At once the needle will drop to zero; you will be weightless. But you will certainly not be beyond the pull of gravity; you will be one hundred per cent under its influence, as you will discover a fraction of a second later.

Why are you weightless in these circumstances? Well, weight is a force, and a force cannot be felt if it has no point of application – if there is nothing for it to push against. You cannot feel any force when you push against a freely swinging door; nor can you feel any weight when you have no support and are falling freely. An astronaut, except when the spaceship’s rockets are firing, is always falling freely. The ‘fall’ may be downwards or upwards or sideways – as in the case of an orbital satellite, which is in an eternal fall around the world. The direction does not matter; as long as the fall is free and unrestrained, anyone experiencing it will be weightless.

You can be weightless, therefore, even if there is plenty of gravity. The reverse is also true; you don’t need gravity to give you weight. A change of speed – in other words, an acceleration – will do just as well.

[...]

It is conceivable that by some treatment we might permanently ‘degravitise’ ordinary substances, in much the same way that we can turn a piece of iron into a permanent magnet. (Less well-known is the fact that continuously charged bodies – ‘permanent electrets’ – can also be made.) To do so would require a great expenditure of energy, for to degravitise one ton of matter is equivalent of lifting it completely away from the Earth. As any rocket engineer will tell you, this requires as much energy as raising four thousand tons a height of one mile. That four thousand mile-tons of energy is the price of weightlessness – the entrance fee to the universe. There are no concession and no cheap rates. You may have to pay more, but you can never pay less.

On the whole, a permanently degravitised or weightless substance seems less plausible than the gravity neutraliser or ‘gravitator’. This would be a device, supplied with energy from some external power source, which will cancel gravity as long as it was switched on. It is important to realise that such a machine would give not only weightlessness, but something even more valuable – propulsion.

For if we exactly neutralised weight, we would float motionless in midair; but if we over-neutralised it, we would shoot upwards with steadily increasing speed. Thus any form of gravity control would also be a propulsion system; we should expect this, as gravity and acceleration are so intimately linked. It would be a wholly novel form of propulsion, and it is difficult to see what it would ‘push against’. Every prime mover must have some point of reaction; even the rocket, the only known device that can give us a thrust in vacuum, pushes on its own burned exhaust gases. (We premature Space Cadets spent much of our youth explaining this to sceptics: in 1920 the New York Times published an editorial – for which it apologised in 1969 – castigating Goddard for his apparent ignorance of this elementary law of physics.)

The term ‘space drive’, or just plain ‘drive’, has been coined for such nonexistent but highly desirable propulsion systems. It is an act of faith among science fiction writers, and an increasing number of people in the astronautics business, that there must be some quieter, cheaper and safer way of getting to the planets than the rocket. The tanks of the Space Shuttle contain as much energy as an atomic bomb – and as ‘Challenger’ demonstrated so tragically, it is not always reliably controlled.

It may seem a little premature to speculate about the uses of a device which may not even be possible, and is certainly beyond the present horizon of science. But it is a general rule that whenever there is a technical need, something always comes along to satisfy it – or to bypass it. For this reason, I feel sure that eventually we will have some means of either neutralising gravity or overpowering it by brute force. In any event, it will give us both levitation and propulsion, in amounts determined only by the available power.      

[...]

The value of gravity control for space vehicles, both for propulsion and the comfort of their occupants, needs no further discussion – but there are other astronautical uses that are not so obvious. Jupiter, the largest of the planets, appears barred from direct human exploration by its high gravity, two and a half times that of Earth. This giant world has so many other unpleasant characteristics (an enormously dense, turbulent and poisonous atmosphere, for example) that few would take very seriously the idea that we will ever attempt personal exploration; surely we will always rely on robots...

I doubt this; in any event, there will often be cases when robots run into trouble and humans will have to get them out of it, as has already been demonstrated in near-Earth orbit. Sooner or later scientists – even tourists! – will wish to visit Jupiter – perhaps in ‘hot hydrogen’ balloons. (See my novella ‘A Meeting with Medusa’ for the technology – and dangers – involved.*)

Before it was known that Jupiter had no solid surface, John W. Campbell, the famed editor of Analog Magazine, suggested that we might have to breed a special class of Jovian colonists with the physiques of gorillas. Though this won’t happen, much closer to home there is an even more important example of a high-gravity planet which, perhaps less than fifty years from now, humans may not be able to visit. That planet is our own Earth.

Without gravity control, we may be condemning the space travellers and settlers of the future to perpetual exile. Anyone who had lived for a few years on the Moon, at only a sixth of terrestrial ‘g’, would be a helpless cripple back on Earth. It might take him months of painful practice before they could walk again, and children born on the Moon (as they soon will be[12]) might never be able to make the adjustment. One can think of few things more likely to breed bitterness and interplanetary discord than such gravitational expatriation.

To avoid this we need a really portable gravity-control unit, so compact that it could be strapped it on the shoulders or round the waist. Indeed, it might even be a permanent article of clothing, taken as much for granted as the wristwatch or the personal communication device. It could use it to reduce one’s apparent weight down to zero, and also to provide propulsion.

Anyone who is prepared to admit that gravity control is possible at all should not boggle at this further development. Miniaturisation is one of the everyday miracles of our age, for better or for worse. The first thermonuclear bomb was as big as a house; today’s economy-sized warheads are the size of a wastepaper basket – and one of those baskets contains enough energy to carry a large ocean liner to the Moon, though not in one piece. This everyday fact of modern missilery is, I submit, is just as fantastic as the possibility of personal gravity control.[13]

The one-person gravitator, if it could be made cheaply enough, would be among the most revolutionary inventions of all times. Like birds and fish, we would have escaped from the tyranny of the vertical – we would have gained the freedom of the third dimension. In the city, no one would use the elevator if there was a convenient window. The degree of effortless mobility that would be attained would demand re-education to an entire new way of life – an almost avian order of existence. By the time it arrives, it will not be unfamiliar, for countless films of spacemen in orbit will have made everyone accustomed to the idea of weightlessness, and eager to share its pleasures. Perhaps the levitator may do for the mountains what the aqualung had done for the sea. The Sherpas and Alpine guides will, of course, be indignant; but progress is inexorable. It is only a matter of time before tourists are floating all over the Himalayas, and the summit of Everest is as crowded as the seabed round the Florida Keys or off Cannes.**

[...]

_________________________________

*In the collection The Wind From the Sun.

**See my short story ‘The Cruel Sky’ in The Wind From the Sun.

 

8. Rocket to the Renaissance

Foreword

This essay originally appeared in a 1960 Playboy magazine, and summarises my hopes and expectations in the first dawn of the Space Age, which had opened just three years earlier.

I am not ashamed of what some may consider my naïve optimism: surely it is preferable to the all-too-common alternative, naïve pessimism.

Five centuries ago, European civilisation started expanding into the unknown, in a slow but irresistible explosion fuelled by the energies of the Renaissance. After a thousand years of huddling round the Mediterranean, Western man had discovered a new frontier beyond the sea. We know the very day when he found it – and the day when he lost it. The American frontier opened on October 12, 1492; it closed on May 10, 1869, when the last spike was driven in the intercontinental railway.

In all the long history of mankind, ours is the first age with no new frontiers on land or sea, and many of our troubles stem from this fact. It is true that, even now, there are vast areas of the Earth still unexploited and even unexplored, but dealing with them will only be a mopping-up operation. Though the oceans will keep us busy for centuries to come, the countdown started even for them, when the bathyscaphe Trieste descended into the ultimate deep of the Marianas [sic] Trench.

There are no more undiscovered continents; set out toward any horizon, and on its other side you will find someone already waiting to check your visa and your vaccination certificate.

[...]

The road to the stars has been discovered none too soon. Civilisation cannot exist without new frontiers; it needs them both physically and spiritually. The physical need is obvious – new lands, new resources, new materials. The spiritual need is less apparent, but in the long run it is more important. We do not live by bread alone; we need adventure, variety, novelty, romance. As the psychologists have shown by sensory deprivation experiments, a man goes swiftly mad if he is isolated in a silent, darkened room, cut off completely from the external world. What is true of individuals is also true of societies; they too can become insane without sufficient stimulus.

It may seem overoptimistic to claim that our escape from Earth, and the crossing of interplanetary Space, will trigger a new Renaissance and break the patterns into which our society, and our arts, must otherwise freeze. Yet this is exactly what I propose to do; first, however, it is necessary to demolish some common misconceptions.

[...]

Whatever the eventual outcome of our exploration of Space, we can be reasonably certain of some immediate benefits – and I am deliberately ignoring such ‘practical’ returns as the multibillion dollar improvements in weather forecasting and communications, which may in themselves put space travel on a paying basis. The creation of wealth is certainly not to be despised, but in the long run the only human activities really worthwhile are the search for knowledge and the creation of beauty. This is beyond argument; the only point of debate is which comes first.

Only a small part of mankind will ever be thrilled to learn the composition of the Jovian atmosphere, the strength of Mercury’s magnetic field or the exact length of the Venusian day. Though the time may come when the existence of whole nations may be determined by such facts, and others still more esoteric, these are matters which concern the mind, and not the heart. Civilizations are respected for their intellectual achievements; they are loved – or despised – for their works of art. Can we even guess, today, what art will come from Space?

Let us first consider literature, for the trajectory of any civilisation is most accurately traced by its writers. To quote again from Professor Webb’s The Great Frontier: ‘We find that in general each nation’s Golden Age coincides more or less with that nation’s supremacy in frontier activity... It seems that as the frontier boom got under way in any country, the literary genius of that nation was liberated.’

Writers cannot escape from his environment, however hard they try. When the frontier is open we have Homer and Shakespeare – or, to choose less Olympian examples nearer to our own age, Melville, Conrad, and Kipling. When it is closed, the time has come for – well, quite a few contemporaries come to mind, but perhaps the best example is Proust, whose last horizon was a cork-lined room.[14]

It is too naïve to imagine that astronautics will restore the epic and the saga in anything like their original forms; space flight will be too well documented, and Homer started off with the great advantage of being untrammelled by too many facts. But surely the discoveries and adventures, the triumphs and inevitable tragedies that must accompany our drive towards the stars will one day inspire a new heroic literature, and bring forth latter-day equivalents of The Golden Fleece, Gulliver’s Travels, Robinson Crusoe, The Lusiads and Moby Dick.[15]

[...]

It is perhaps too early to speculate about the impact of space-flight on music and the visual arts. Here again one can only hope – and hope is certainly needed, when one looks at the canvases upon which some contemporary painters all too accurately express their psyches. The prospect for modern music is a little more favourable; now that electronic computers have been taught to compose it, we may confidently expect that before long some of them will learn to enjoy it, thus saving us the trouble.

Maybe these ancient art forms have come to an end of the line, and the still unimaginable experiences that await us beyond the atmosphere will inspire new forms of expression. The low or nonexistent gravity, for example, will certainly give rise to a strange, other-worldly architecture, fragile and delicate as a dream. And what, I wonder, will Swan Lake be like on Mars, when the dancers have only a third of their terrestrial weight – or on the Moon, where they will have merely a sixth?

[...]

Contact with a contemporary, nonhuman civilisation will be the most exciting thing that has ever happened to our race; the possibilities for good and evil are endless. In the Twenty-First Century, some of the classic themes of science fiction may enter the realm of practical politics. It is much more likely, however, that if our Solar System[16] ever produced intelligent life, we have missed it by geological ages. Since all the planets have been in existence for at least five billion years, the probability of cultures flourishing on two of them at the same time must be extremely small.

Yet the impact of even an extinct civilisation could be overwhelming; the European Renaissance, remember, was triggered by the rediscovery of advanced societies that flourished more than a thousand years earlier. When our archaeologists reach Mars, they may find waiting for us a heritage as great as that which we owe to Greece and Rome. The Chinese scholar Hu Shih has remarked: ‘Contact with strange civilisations brings new standards of value, with which the native culture is re-examined and re-evaluated, and conscious reformation and regeneration are the natural outcome.’[17]

[...]

Until a few years ago, even the most optimistic scientists though it impossible that we could ever span this frightful abyss, which light itself takes years to cross at a tireless 670,000,000 miles an hour. Yet now, by one of the most extraordinary and unexpected breakthroughs in the history of technology, there is a good chance that we may make contact with intelligence outside the Solar System before we discover the humblest mosses or lichens inside it.

This breakthrough has occurred in electronics. It now appears that by far the greater part of our exploration of space will be by radio, which can put us in touch with worlds that we can never visit – even with worlds that have long ceased to exist. The radio telescope, and not the rocket, may be the instrument that first discovers intelligence beyond the Earth.

Even a few decades ago, this idea would have seemed absurd. But now we have receivers of such sensitivity and antennae of such enormous size, that we can hope to pick up radio signals from the nearest stars – if there is anyone out there to send them. The search for such signals began early in 1960 at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, Greenbank, West Virginia, and many other observatories have now followed suit. This is perhaps the most momentous quest upon which men have ever embarked, sooner or later, it will surely[18] be successful.

From the background of cosmic noise, the hiss and crackle of exploding stars and colliding galaxies, we will some day filter out the faint, rhythmic pulses which are the voice of intelligence. At first we will know only (only!) that there are other minds than ours in the universe; later we will learn to interpret these signals. Some of them, it is fair to assume, will carry images – the equivalent of picture telegraphy, or even television. It will be fairly easy to deduce the coding and reconstruct these images. One day, perhaps not far in the future, some cathode-ray screen will show pictures from another world.

Let me repeat that this is no fantasy. At this very moment millions of dollars’ worth of electronic equipment are engaged upon the search. It may not be successful until the radio astronomers can get into orbit, where they can build antennae miles across and can screen them from the incessant din of the Earth: the Far Side of the Moon would be an excellent location. We may have to wait ten – or a hundred – years for the first results; no matter. The point I wish to make is that even if we can never leave the Solar System in a physical sense, we may yet learn something about the civilisations circling other stars – and they may learn about us. For as soon as we detect messages from Space, we will attempt to answer them.

[...]

Radio prehistory – electronic archaeology – may have consequences at least as great as the classical studies of the past. The races whose messages we interpret and whose images we reconstruct will obviously be of a very high order, and the impact of their art and technology upon our own culture will be enormous. The rediscovery of Greek and Latin literature in the fifteenth century, the avalanche of knowledge when the Manhattan Atomic Bomb Project was revealed, the glories uncovered at the opening of Tutankhamen’s tomb, the excavation of Troy, the publication of the Principia and The Origin of Species – these widely dissimilar examples may hint at the stimulus and excitement that may come when we have learnt to interpret the messages which for ages have fallen upon the heedless Earth.

Not all of these messages – not many, perhaps – will bring us comfort. The proof, which is now only a matter of time, that this young species of ours is low in the scale of cosmic intelligence will be a shattering blow to our pride. Few of our current religions can be expected to survive it, contrary to the optimistic forecasts from certain quarters. The assertion that ‘God created man in his own image’ is ticking like a time bomb in the foundations of Christianity. As the hierarchy of the Universe is slowly disclosed to us, we will have to face this chilling fact: If there are any gods whose chief concern is man, they cannot be very important gods.

The examples I have given, and the possibilities I have outlined, should be enough to prove that there is rather more to Space exploration than walking on the Moon, or even landing on Mars. These are merely the preliminaries to the age of discovery that is now about to dawn. Though that age will provide the necessary ingredients for a Renaissance, we cannot be sure than one will follow. The present situation has no exact parallel in the history of mankind; the past can provide hints, but no firm guidance. The find anything comparable with our forthcoming ventures into space, we must go back far beyond Columbus, far beyond Odysseus – far, indeed, beyond the first ape-man. We must contemplate the moment, now irrevocably lost in the mists of time, when the ancestors of all of us came crawling out of the sea.

For this is where life began, and where most of this planet’s life remains to this day, trapped in a meaningless cycle of birth and death. Only the creatures who dared the hostile, alien land were able to develop intelligence; now that intelligence is about to face a still greater challenge. It may even be that this beautiful planet Earth of ours is no more than a brief resting place between the sea of salt where we were born, and the sea of stars on which we must now venture forth.

There are, of course, many who would deny this, with varying degrees of indignation or even fear. Consider the following extract from Lewis Mumford’s The Condition of Man (1944):

Post-historic man’s starvation of life would reach its culminating point in interplanetary travel... Under such conditions, life would again narrow down to the physiological functions of breathing, eating and excretion... By comparison, the Egyptian cult of the dead was overflowing with vitality; from a mummy in his tomb one can still gather more of the attributes of a full human being than from a spaceman.

I sincerely hope that Dr Mumford (who died in 1990 at the ripe age of 95) listened to some of the ecstatic broadcasts of the Gemini, Apollo and Skylab astronauts as they described the wonders of Space and weightlessness. But when he wrote: ‘No one can pretend... that existence on a space satellite or on the barren face of the Moon would bear any resemblance to human life’, he may well be expressing a truth he had not intended. ‘Existence on dry land’, the more conservative fish may have said to their amphibious relatives, a billion years ago, ‘will bear no resemblance to piscatorial life. We will stay where we are.’

They did. They are still fish.[19]

 

9. You Can’t Get There From Here

There is a striking though clumsy phrase from the autobiography of the Nineteenth Century writer Richard Jefferies that has stuck in my mind for many years: ‘The unattainable blue of the flower of the sky.’ Unattainable: that is a word we seldom use these days, now that we have reached the greatest heights and depths on Earth and have even set foot upon the Moon. Yet only a century ago the Poles were utterly unknown, much of Africa was still as mysterious as in the time of King Solomon, and no human being had descended a hundred feet into the sea or risen more than a mile in the air. We have gone so far in so short a time, and will obviously go so much further if our species survives its adolescence, that I would like to pose a question: Is there any place which will always remain inaccessible to us, whatever scientific advances the future may bring?

[...]

There is one useful trick we may employ to get quite close to the Sun in (almost) perfect safety. This is to use a convenient asteroid or comet as a sunshade; a good choice is the little flying mountain appropriately named Icarus.

This minor planet travels on an orbit that every thirteen months brings it within a mere 17 million miles of the Sun. Occasionally, it also passes quite close to Earth; it was within 4 million miles of us in 1968: now we know that other asteroids NEOs (or Near Earth Objects) come much closer.

Icarus is an irregular chunk of rock one or two miles in diameter, and at perihelion, beneath a sun that appears thirty times as big in the sky as it does from Earth, the surface of this little world may reach temperatures not far short of 1,000°F. But it casts a cone of shadow into space; and in the cold shelter of that shadow, a ship could ride safely around the Sun.

In a short story called ‘Summertime on Icarus’,* I described how scientists might embark on such a somewhat hair-raising sleigh ride to get themselves and their instruments close to the Sun, which would be unable to touch them as long as they remained on the night side of their mile-thick shield of rock. Though it would be possible to construct artificial heat shields, like today’s re-entry nose cones, it will be a long time before we can give ourselves the protection that Icarus would provide for nothing. Small though it is, this minor planet must weigh about 10 billion tons.

There may be other asteroids that go even closer to the Sun; if there are not, we may one day make them do so by a nudge at the right point of the orbit. And then, dug well in below the surface, scientists would be able to skim the atmosphere of the Sun, whipping across it and out again into Space on a tight hairpin bend.

It is interesting to work out how long the ride would take. Being a rather small star, the Sun is ‘only’ three million miles in circumference. A satellite just outside its atmosphere would move at about a million miles an hour, so would circle it every three hours.

A comet or asteroid falling toward the Sun from the distance of Earth would be moving somewhat faster than this at its point of closest approach. It would flash across the surface of the Sun at a million and a quarter miles an hour, before heading off into space again. Even if a few megatons of rock boiled away in the process, the instruments and observers deep inside the asteroid would be safe – unless, of course, there was a navigational error and they plunged too deeply into the solar atmosphere, to burn up through friction as so many artificial satellites on Earth already done.

What a ride that would be! Imagine flashing high above the centre of a giant sunspot, a gaping crater a hundred thousand miles across, spanned by bridges of fire over which our planet Earth could roll like a child’s hoop along a pavement. The explosion of the most powerful hydrogen bomb would pass unnoticed in that inferno, where whole continents of incandescent gas leap skyward at hundreds of miles a second, sometimes escaping completely into space.

[...]

I have already mentioned dwarf stars, which are tiny suns in the last stages of stellar evolution. Some of them are smaller than Earth, yet they contain, packed within their few thousand miles of radius, as much matter as goes to make up a normal star. The very atoms of which they are composed are crushed beneath the enormous pressures in their interiors, to densities which may rise to many millions of times that of water. A cubic inch of matter from such a star may weigh more than a hundred tons.

Though most dwarfs are red or white-hot, cool ‘black dwarfs’ are a theoretical possibility. They would be the very end of the evolutionary line, and would be extremely difficult to detect because, like planets, they would radiate no light of their own, but could be observed only by reflection, or when they eclipsed some other body. Since our Galaxy is still quite young – not much more than 15 billion years old! – it is probable that none of its stars has yet reached the final black dwarf stage; but their time will come.

These stellar corpses will be among the most fascinating (and sinister) objects in the universe. Their combination of great mass and tiny size would give them enormous gravitational fields – up to a million times as powerful as Earth’s. A world with such a gravity would have to be perfectly spherical; no hills or mountains could rear themselves more than a fraction of an inch above its surface, and its atmosphere would be only a few feet in depth.

At million gravities, all objects – even if made of the strongest metal – would flow under their own weight until they had flattened themselves into a thin film. A man could weigh as much as the Queen Elizabeth and would collapse so quickly that his disintegration could not be followed by the naked eye, for it would take less than a thousandth of a second. A fall through a distance of a third of an inch would be equivalent to falling, on Earth, from the top of Mount Everest to sea level.

Yet despite the enormous gravitational field, it would be possible to approach within a few miles of such a body. A spaceship or a space-probe aimed into a sufficiently precise orbit could, in theory at least, swing past it like a comet whipping round the Sun. If you were in such a ship you would feel nothing, even at the moment of closest approach. At an acceleration of a million gravities, you would still be completely weightless, for you would be in free fall. The ship would reach a maximum speed of some 25 million miles an hour as it raced low over the surface of the dying star; then it would recede into space once more, escaping beyond its reach.

In 1967, just five years after the first edition of this book was published, the next – though probably not final – stage in stellar evolution was discovered, to the delighted amazement of astronomers: I refer, of course, to the now famous ‘pulsars’. And far from being ‘difficult to detect’, they announced their existence so loudly that any well-equipped radio amateur can listen to their exquisitely precise time signals.

Pulsars were quickly identified (by the ubiquitous Dr Gold) as ‘neutron stars’ whose existence had been predicted decades earlier on theoretical grounds by the brilliant Swiss astrophysicist Fritz Zwicky. Little more than ten miles in diameter, yet containing the mass of a whole sun, their average density is some 100,000,000,000,000 times that of water, so a thimble-full would have a mass of – fasten your seat-belt – about a hundred thousand super-tankers! Their surface temperature is around a million degrees, and the idea that any organisms could exist under such conditions is so absurd as to be unworthy of serious consideration.

[...]

As in the case of a white dwarf already discussed, it would be safe (ignoring its lethal outpouring of radiation!) to approach a neutron star by going into free fall around it. At distances of a few thousand miles you would still feel weightless, but if you were foolish enough to get closer, conditions would change rapidly. The intensity of the gravitational field might be so different between your head and your feet that you would be swiftly pulled apart by the same kind of tidal force that rules the oceans of Earth. Even the strongest metals would flow like liquid, a hundred miles above a neutron star.

This fact prompted me to make an entry into the fierce-fought contest for the worst pun in science fiction. My deplorable squib ‘Neutron Tide’** describes the tragic fate of the United States Space Fleet’s supercruiser Flatbush, which was unlucky enough to approach a neutron star too closely. The only recognisable piece of the resultant debris was ‘one star-mangled spanner’.

Sorry about that...

But what of an actual landing on a white dwarf – or even a neutron star? Such a feat is conceivable if we make two assumptions, neither of which violates any known physical laws. We would need propulsion systems billions of times more powerful than any known today, and we would require an absolutely complete and reliable means of neutralising gravity, so that the crushing external field could be cancelled a dozen to a dozen decimal places. If even a microscopic – no, nanoscopic – fraction of that appalling gravity ‘leaked’ into the ship, its occupants would be pulped. They would never feel anything, of course, if the compensating field failed; it would all be over so quickly that nerve fibres would have no time to react.

In our own time, men have peered through the portholes of a bathyscaphe into a region, only inches away, where they would be crushed in a fraction of a second by a pressure of a thousand tons on every square foot of their bodies. That was a wonderful achievement – a triumph of courage and engineering skill. Centuries in the future, and light-years from Earth, there may be men peering out of portholes into the still more ferocious environment of a dwarf star.

How strange it will be, to look down upon the smooth, geometrically perfect surface on the other side of the ship’s compensating field – and to realise that, measured in terms of Earth’s feeble gravity, your head is the equivalent of thousands – even millions – of miles above your feet.

_________________________________________

*In the collection Tales of Ten Worlds.

**In the collection The Wind From the Sun.

 

10. Space, the Unconquerable

Man will never conquer Space. After all that has been said in the last two chapters, this statement sounds ludicrous. Yet it expresses a truth which our forefathers knew, which we have forgotten – and which our descendants must learn again, in heartbreak and loneliness.

Our age is in many ways unique, full of events and phenomena which never occurred before and can never happen again. They distort our thinking, making us believe that what is true now will be true for ever, though perhaps on a larger scale. Because we have annihilated distance on this planet, we imagine that we can do it once again. The truth is far otherwise, and we will see it more clearly if we forget the present and turn our minds towards the past.

To our ancestors, the vastness of the Earth was a dominant fact controlling their thoughts and lives. In all earlier ages than ours, the world was wide indeed and no man could ever see more than a tiny fraction of its immensity. A few hundred miles – a thousand, at the most – was infinity. Great empires and cultures could flourish on the same continent, knowing nothing of each other’s existence save fables and rumours as faint as though from a distant planet. When the pioneers and adventurers of the past left their homes in search of new lands, they said goodbye for ever to the places of their birth and the companions of their youth. Only a lifetime ago, parents waved farewell to their emigrating children in the virtual certainty that they would never meet again. Those they loved would be almost as good as dead.

And now, within little more than one generation, all this has changed. Over the seas where Odysseus wandered for a decade, the jumbo jets hurtle within the hour. And far higher, orbiting astronauts span the distance between Troy and Ithaca in less than a minute.       

Psychologically as well as physically, there are no longer any remote places on Earth. When a friend leaves for what was once a far country, even with no intention of returning, we cannot feel that same sense of irrevocable separation that saddened our forefathers. We know that we are only hours apart by jet, and that we have merely to touch a keyboard to hear a familiar voice – or, better still, to see a beloved face. The world can shrink no more: it has become a dimensionless point.

But the new stage that is opening up for the human drama will never shrink as the old one has done. We have abolished space here on this little Earth; we can never abolish the Space that yawns between the stars. Once again, as in the days when Homer sang, we are face to face with immensity and must accept its grandeur and terror, its inspiring possibilities and its dreadful restraints. From a world that has become too small, we are moving out into one that that will be for ever too large, whose frontiers will recede from us as always more swiftly than we can reach out towards them.

Consider first the fairly modest Solar System distances which we are now challenging. Though the Moon is only a few days away, our space probes take months to reach Mars and Venus – years to reach the outer planets. However, when we have harnessed nuclear – or alternative – energy for space flight, the empire of the Sun will contract until it will seem little larger than the Earth today. The remotest of the planets will be no more than a week away – Mars and Venus, only a few hours.

This achievement, which will be witnessed within a century, might appear to make even the Solar System a comfortable, homely place, with such giant planets as Saturn and Jupiter playing much the same role in our thoughts as do Africa or Asia today. (Their qualitative differences of climate, atmosphere, and gravity, fundamental though they are, do not concern us at the moment.) To some extent this may be true, yet as soon as we pass beyond the orbit of the Moon, a mere quarter-million miles away, we will meet the first of the barriers that will sunder Earth from her scattered children.

The marvellous telephone and television networks that now enmesh our planet, making all men and women neighbours, cannot be extended into space. It will never be possible to converse with anyone on another world.

Please do not misunderstand this statement! Even with amateur radio equipment, the problem of sending speech to the outer planets is almost trivial. But the message will take minutes – sometimes hours – on their journey, because radio and light waves travel at the same limited speed of 186,000 miles a second. Twenty years from now you will be able to listen to a friend on Mars, but the words you hear will have been spoken at least three minutes earlier, and your reply will take a corresponding time to return. In such circumstances, an exchange of verbal messages is possible – but not a conversation. Even in the case of the nearby Moon, the two-and-a-half second time lag is slightly annoying. At distances of more than a million miles, it will be intolerable.

To a culture which has come to take instantaneous communication for granted, as part of the very structure of civilised life, this ‘time barrier’ may have a profound psychological impact. It will be a perpetual reminder of universal laws and limitations against which not all our technology can ever prevail. For it seems as certain as anything can be that no signal – still less any material object – can ever travel faster than light.

The velocity of light is the ultimate speed limit, being part of the very structure of space and time. Within the narrow confines of the Solar System, it will not handicap us too severely, once we have accepted the delays in communication which it involves. At the worst, these will amount to eleven hours – the time it takes a radio signal to span the orbit of Pluto, the outermost planet. Between the three inner worlds Earth, Mars, and Venus, it will never be more than twenty minutes – not enough to interfere seriously with commerce or administration, but more than sufficient to shatter those personal links of sound and vision that can give us a sense of direct contact with friends on Earth, wherever they may be.

It is when we move out beyond the confines of the Solar System that we come face to face with an altogether new order of cosmic reality. Even today, many otherwise educated men – like those savages who can count up to three but lump together all numbers beyond four – cannot grasp the profound distinction between solar and stellar space. The first is the space enclosing our neighbouring worlds, the planets; the second is that which embraces those distant suns, the stars. And it is literally millions of times greater.

There is no such abrupt change of scale in terrestrial affairs. To obtain a mental picture of the distance to the nearest star, as compared with the distance to the nearest planet, you must imagine a world in which the closest object to you is only five feet away – and then there is nothing else to see until you have travelled a thousand miles.

Many conservative scientists, appalled by these cosmic gulfs, have denied that they can ever be crossed. Some people never learn; those who a century ago scoffed at the possibility of flight, and – halfway between today and the Wright brothers! – pooh-poohed the idea of travel to the planets, are quite sure that the stars will always be beyond our reach. And again they will be wrong, for they have failed to grasp the great lesson of our age – that if something is possible in theory, and no fundamental scientific laws oppose its realisation, then sooner or later it will be achieved.

One day – it may be within the next few decades, or it may be a thousand years from now – we shall discover a really efficient means of propelling our space vehicles. Every technical device is always developed until its limits (unless it is superseded by something better) and the ultimate speed for spaceships is the velocity of light. They will never reach that goal, but they will get very close to it. And then the nearest star will be less than five years’ voyaging from Earth.

Our exploring ships will spread outwards from their home over an ever-expanding sphere of space. It is a sphere which will grow at almost – but never quite – the speed of light. Five years to the triple system Alpha Centauri, ten to that strangely matched double Sirius A and B, eleven to 61 Cygni, the first star suspected of possessing a planet. (Today, we are certain of many more.) These journeys are long, but they are not impossible. Our species has always accepted whatever price was necessary for its explorations and discoveries, and the price of Space is Time.

Even voyages which may last for centuries or millenniums will one day be attempted. Suspended animation, an undoubted possibility, may be the key to interstellar travel. Self-contained cosmic arks which will be tiny travelling worlds in their own right may be another solution, for they would make possible journeys of unlimited extent, lasting generation after generation. The famous time-dilation effect predicted by the Theory of Relativity, whereby time appears to pass more slowly for a traveller moving at almost the speed of light, may be yet a third. And there are others.

With so many theoretical possibilities for interstellar flight, we can be sure that at least one will be realised in practice.

[...]

I will not argue the point, or give the reasons scientists believe that light can never be outraced by any form of radiation or any material object. Instead, let us assume the contrary and see just where it gets us. We will even take the most optimistic possible case, and imagine that the speed of transportation may eventually become infinite.

Picture a time when, by the development of techniques as far beyond our present engineering as the microchip is beyond a stone axe, we can reach anywhere we please instantaneously, with no more effort than by dialling a number. This would indeed cut the Universe down to size, and reduce its physical immensity to nothingness. What would be left?

Everything that really matters. For the Universe has two aspects – its scale, and its overwhelming, mind-numbing complexity. Having abolished the first, we must now confront the second. We must try to visualise not size, but quantity.

[...]

The number of other suns in our own Galaxy (that is, the whirlpool of stars and cosmic dust of which our Sun is an out-of-town member, lying in one of the remoter spiral arms) is estimated at about 10¹¹ or, written in full, 100,000,000,000. Our present telescopes can observe something like 10⁹ other galaxies, and they show no sign of thinning out even at the extreme limit of vision. There are probably at least as many galaxies in the whole of creation as there are stars in our own Galaxy, but let us confine ourselves to those we can see. They must contain a total of about 10¹¹ times 10⁹ stars, or 10²⁰ stars altogether.

One followed by twenty other digits is, of course, a number beyond all understanding. There is no hope of ever coming to grips with it, but there are ways of hinting at its implications.

Just now we assumed that the time might come when we could dial ourselves, by some miracle of matter transmission, effortlessly and instantly round the Cosmos, as today we call a number in our local exchange. What would the Cosmic Telephone Directory look like, if its contents were restricted only to suns and it made no effort to list individual planets, still less the millions of places and entities on each planet?

The directories of such cities as London and New York are already getting somewhat out of hand, but they list only about a million – 106 – or so numbers. The cosmic directory would be 10¹⁴ times bigger, to hold its 10²⁰ numbers. It would contain more pages than all the books that have ever been produced since the invention of the printing press.

[...]

Before such numbers, even spirits brave enough to face challenge of the light-years must quail. The detailed examination of all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the world is a far smaller task than the exploration of the Universe.

And so return to our opening statement. Space can be mapped and crossed and occupied without definable limit; but it can never be conquered. When our race has reached its ultimate achievements, scattered far and wide across the stars, we will still be like ants crawling on the face of the Earth. The ants have covered the world, but have they conquered it – for what do their countless colonies know of it, or of each other?

So it will be with us as we spread outwards from Mother Earth, loosening the bonds of kinship and understanding, hearing faint and belated rumours at second – of third – of thousandth-hand of an ever-dwindling fraction of the entire human race. Though Earth will try to keep in touch with her children, in the end all the efforts of her archivists and historians will be defeated by time and distance, and the sheer bulk of material. For the number of distinct societies or nations, where our race is twice its present age, may be far greater than the total number of all men who have ever lived up to the present time.

[...]

                             

11. About Time

Man is the only animal to be troubled by time, and from that concern comes much of his finest art, a great deal of his religion, and almost all his science. For it was the temporal regularity of Nature – the rising of sun and stars, the slower rhythm of the seasons – which led to the concept of law and order and in turn to astronomy, the first of all sciences. Changeless environments like the deep ocean or the cloud-wrapped surface of Venus provide little stimulus to intelligence, and in such places it may never be able to arise.

It is not surprising, therefore, that cultures which existed in regions of negligible climatic variation, like Polynesia and tropical Africa, often had little conception of time. Other societies, forced by their surroundings to be aware of it, have become obsessed by time. Perhaps the classic example is that of ancient Egypt, where life was regulated by the annual flooding of the Nile. No other civilisation, before or since, has made such determined efforts to challenge eternity, and even to deny the existence of death.

Time has been a basic element in all religions, where it has been combined with such ideas as reincarnation, foretelling the future, resurrection, and the worshipping of the heavenly bodies – as shown by the monolithic calendar of Stonehenge, the zodiac from the Dendera Temple, and the ecclesiastical architecture of the Mayas. Some faiths (Christianity, for instance) have placed Creation and the Beginning of Time at very recent dates in the past, and have anticipated the end of the Universe in the near future. Other religions, such as Hinduism, have looked back through enormous vistas of time and forward to even greater ones. It was with reluctance that Western astronomers realised that the East was right, and that the age of the universe is to be measured in billions rather than thousands of years – if it can be measured at all.

And it was only in the Twentieth Century that we learned something about the true nature of Time, and were even able to influence its progress – though, so far, merely by nanoseconds. Now we know that Time is neither absolute nor inexorable, and that tyranny of the clock may not last forever.

It is hard not to think of Time as an adversary, and in a sense, all the achievements of human civilisation are small victories in the war against Time. Whatever their motives may have been, the cave artists of Lascaux were the first to win any gains for mankind. About a thousand generations ago, when the mammoth and saber-toothed tiger still walked the Earth, they discovered a way of sending not merely their bones but some at least of their thoughts and feelings into the future. We can look through their eyes, across the gulfs of time, and see the animals that shared their world. But we can see little more than that.

The invention of poetry, perhaps as part of religious rituals, was the next advance. Ordinary words and phrases are fleeting, forgotten as soon as uttered. However, once they are arranged in a pattern, something magical happens. Shakespeare (most time-obsessed of writers) truly remarked:

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments

Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme.

Bards and minstrels like Homer carried in their heads the only record of prehistory we possess, though until the invention of writing it was always liable to distortion or total loss. Writing – perhaps the most important single invention of mankind – changed all that. Plato and Caesar speak to us across the ages more clearly than most of our fellow men. And with the invention of the printing press, the written word became virtually immortal. Manuscripts and scrolls and papyri are vulnerable and easily destroyed, but since the time of Gutenberg, very few works of permanent value can have vanished into oblivion.

[...]

The most convincing argument against time travel is the remarkable scarcity of time travellers. However unpleasant our age may appear to the future, surely one would expect scholars and students to visit us, if such a thing was possible at all. Though they might try to disguise themselves, accidents would be bound to happen – just as they would if we went back to imperial Rome with cameras and tape recorders concealed under our nylon togas. Time travelling could never be kept secret for very long; over and over again down the ages, chronic argonauts (to use the original and singularly uninspiring title of Wells’ The Time Machine) would get into trouble and inadvertently disclose themselves. As it is, the chief evidence of a security leak from the future appears to be the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci. Their parade of inventions from the succeeding centuries is astonishing, but hardly conclusive proof that Fifteenth Century Italy had visitors from Elsewhen.

[...]

Yet we know so little about Time, and have made such scanty progress in understanding and controlling it, that we cannot rule out even such outrageous possibilities as limited access to the future. Professor J. B. S. Haldane once shrewdly remarked: ‘The Universe is not only queerer than we imagine – it is queerer than we can imagine.’ Even the Theory of Relativity may only hint at the ultimate queerness of Time.

In his poem The Future, Matthew Arnold described man as a wanderer ‘born in a ship, On the breast of the river of Time’. Through all history, that ship has been drifting, rudderless and uncontrolled; now, perhaps, we are learning how to start the engines. They will never be powerful enough to overcome the current; at the best, we may delay our departure, and get a better view of the lands around us, and the ports we have left for ever. Or we may speed up our progress, and dart downstream more swiftly than the current would otherwise bear us. What we can never do is to turn back and revisit the upper reaches of the river.

And in the end, for all our efforts, it will sweep us with our hopes and dreams out into the unknown ocean:

As the pale waste widens around him –

As the banks fade dimmer away –

As the stars come out, and the night-wind

Brings up the stream

Murmurs and scents of the infinite Sea.

 

12. Ages of Plenty

[...]

Whatever new reserves may be discovered, ‘fossil fuels’ such as coal and oil can last for only a few more centuries; then they will be gone forever. They will have served to launch our technological culture into its trajectory, by providing easily available sources of energy, but they cannot sustain civilisation over thousands of years. For this, we need something more permanent.

Until recently, there seemed little doubt that the long-term (and perhaps the short-term) answer to the fuel problem would be nuclear energy. The weapons now stockpiled by the major powers could run all the machines on Earth for several years, if their energies could be used constructively. The warheads in the American arsenals alone are equivalent to thousands of millions of tons oil or coal.

It is not likely that fission reactions (those involving such heavy elements as thorium, uranium and plutonium) will play more than a temporary role in terrestrial affairs. One hopes they will not, for fission is the dirtiest and most unpleasant method of releasing energy that man has ever discovered. Some of the radioisotopes from today’s reactors will still be causing trouble, and perhaps injuring unwary archaeologists, a thousand years from now.

But beyond fission lies fusion – the welding together of light atoms such as hydrogen and lithium. This is the reaction that drives the stars themselves; we have reproduced it on Earth, but have not yet tamed it. When we have done so, our power problems will have been solved for ever – and there will no poisonous by-products but only the clean ash of helium.

Controlled fusion is the supreme challenge of applied nuclear physics; some scientists believe it will be achieved in ten years, some in fifty. But almost all of them are sure that we will have fusion power long before our oil and coal run out, and will be able to draw fuel from the sea in virtually unlimited amounts.

[...]

The Earth’s magnetic field is so extremely feeble (a toy magnet is a thousand times stronger) that it is not even worth considering. From time to time one hears optimistic talk of ‘magnetic propulsion’ for space vehicles, but this is a project somewhat comparable to escaping from Earth via a ladder made of cobwebs. Terrestrial magnetic forces are just about as tough as gossamer.

Yet so much of the universe is indetectable to our senses, and so many of its energies have been discovered only during the last few moments of historic time, that it would be rash to discount the idea of still unknown cosmic forces. The concept of nuclear energy seemed nonsense only a lifetime ago, and even when it was proved to exist, most scientists denied that it could be tapped. There is considerable evidence that a flood of energy is sweeping through all the stars and planets in the form known as neutrino radiation (discussed in more detail in Chapter Nine) which challenges our powers of observation. So might Isaac Newton, for all his genius, have failed to detect anything emerging from a radio antenna.

For terrestrial projects, it does not greatly matter whether or not the Universe contains unknown and untapped energy sources. The heavy hydrogen in the seas can drive all our machines, heat all our cities, for as far ahead as we can imagine. If, as is perfectly possible, we are short of energy two generations from now, it will through our own incompetence. We will be like Stone Age men freezing to death on top of a coal bed.

For most of our raw materials, as for our power sources, we have been living on capital. We have been exploiting the easily available resources – the high-grade ores, the rich lodes where natural forces have concentrated the metals and minerals we need. These processes took a billion years or more; in mere centuries, we have looted treasures stored up over aeons. When they are gone, our civilisation cannot mark time for a few hundred million years until they are restored.

Once more, we will be forced to use our brains instead of our muscles. When all the ores are exhausted we can turn to ordinary rocks and clays: one hundred tons of average igneous rock such as granite contains: 8 tons of aluminium, 5 tons of iron, 1,200 pounds of titanium, 180 pounds of manganese, 70 pounds of chromium, 40 pounds of nickel, 30 pounds of vanadium, 20 pounds of copper, 10 pounds of tungsten and 4 pounds of lead.

To extract these elements would require not only advanced chemical techniques, but very considerable amounts of energy. The rock would first have to be crushed, then treated by heat, electrolysis and other means. However, a ton of granite contains enough uranium and thorium to provide energy equivalent to fifty ton of coal. All the energy we need for the processing is there in the rock itself.

Another almost limitless source of basic raw materials is the sea. A single cubic mile of seawater contains, suspended or dissolved, about 150 million tons of solid material. Most of this (120 million tons) is common salt, but the remaining 30 million tons contains almost all the elements in impressive quantities. The most abundant is magnesium (about 18 million tons) and its large-scale extraction from the sea during the Second World War was a great, and highly significant, triumph of chemical engineering. It was not, however, the first element to be obtained from seawater, for the extraction of bromine in commercial quantities started as early as 1924.

The difficulty with ‘mining’ the sea is that the materials we wish to win from it are present in very low concentrations. The 18 million tons of magnesium per cubic mile sounds an enormous figure, but it is dispersed in 4 billion tons of water. Regarded as an ore, therefore, seawater contains only four parts of magnesium per million; on land, it is seldom profitable to work rocks containing less than one part in a hundred of the commoner metals. Many people have been hypnotised by the fact that a cubic mile of seawater contains about twenty tons of gold, but they would probably find richer pay dirt in their own back gardens.

[...]

In view of the present astronomical cost of space travel (several thousand dollars per pound of payload for even the simplest orbital missions) it may seem fantastic to suggest that we will ever be able to mine and ship megatons of raw materials across the Solar System. Even gold could hardly pay its way, and only diamonds would show a profit.

This view, however, is coloured by today’s primitive state of the art, which depends upon hopelessly inefficient techniques. It is something of a shock to realise that, if we could use the energy really efficiently, it would require only about a dollar’s worth of chemical fuel to lift a pound of payload completely clear of Earth – and a few cents more to carry it to the Moon. For a number of reasons, these figures represent unattainable ideals, but they do indicate how much room there is for improvement. Some studies of nuclear propulsion systems suggest that, even with technique we can imagine today, space flight need be no more expensive that jet transportation; as far as inanimate cargoes are concerned, it may be very much cheaper.

When those somewhat optimistic words were written, I was unaware that an amazing idea had already surfaced, which could        turn them into reality sooner than I dared to imagine. In the July 31, 1960 issues of Komsomlskaya [sic] Pravda[20], Yuri Artsutanov, a Leningrad (now St Petersburg) engineer, published an article describing a ‘heavenly funicular’, to use his engaging term, which could lift 12,000 tons of payload a day to synchronous orbit. The basic idea could hardly be simpler: merely a system of cables linking a point on Earth’s equator to a geostationary satellite poised 22,000 miles above it. Goods and passengers could be carried up it purely by electrical energy; it would be the exact analogy of the elevator familiar in every high-rise building – but a million times taller.

The concept received little publicity outside the USSR and quite independently discovered by Isaacs, Bradner and Backus, of Scripps Institute of Oceanography, and Vine, of Wood’s Hole Oceanographic Institute, who published a paper, ‘Satellite Elongation into a True “Sky-Hook”’ in Science (February 11, 1966). When it was pointed out to them that Yuri had been there six years earlier, they immediately acknowledged his priority.

The ‘space elevator’ was quite clearly an idea whose time had come: as is demonstrated by the fact that within a decade it was independently re-invented by several different groups. A very detailed treatment, containing many new ideas, was published by Jerome Pearson in Acta Astronautica for September-October 1975 (‘The Orbital Tower: a spacecraft launcher using the Earth’s rotational energy’). Dr Pearson was astonished to hear of the earlier studies, which his computer survey had failed to locate; he discovered them through reading my own testimony to the House of Representatives Space Committee in July 1975! (See The View From Serendip.[21]) 

Though the space elevator was a delightful idea in theory, for the first few decades it seemed likely to remain there, because the only material strong enough to build it was the crystalline form of carbon – better known as diamond, and scarcely available in the megaton qualities required. However, this did not stop me from assuming in The Fountains of Paradise that this minor problem could be overcome when we had zero-gee manufacturing facilities in orbit.

And now for a truly extraordinary coincidence: I swear I’m not making this up...

In 1978, the year before Fountains was published, I had the great pleasure of flying Buckminster Fuller over the places in Sri Lanka that I had chosen as key locations for the story. The next years, when I recorded extracts from the novel on a 12’’ LP (remember them, anyone? It was Caedmon TC 1606) Bucky very kindly wrote the sleeve-notes, and drew a picture of the elevator reaching from Ceylon up to orbit. He also made this astonishing comment:

‘In 1951, I designed a free-floating tensegrity ring-bridge to be installed way out from and around the Earth’s equator. Within this “halo” bridge, the Earth would continue its spinning while the circular bridge would revolve at its own rate. I foresaw Earthian traffic vertically ascending to the bridge, revolving and descending at preferred Earth loci.’

It appears, therefore, that Bucky anticipated Artsutanov by almost a decade! But that’s the beginning of the story.

In 1985, two years after Bucky’s death at the age of 88, a new form of carbon was discovered, in which sixty atoms are arranged in a structure exactly like the geodesic domes for which he is most famous. It was, of course, instantly named Buckminsterfulleren, or Fullerene for short, and the three co-discovers were awarded a Nobel Prize. Needless to say, chemists all over the world quickly started to investigate the properties of this remarkable substance.

Now for the eerie coincidence...

It was soon found that C60 could also occur in the form of minute tubes – Buckytubes, of course – which possess extraordinary strength. The discoverers claimed that this is not only the strongest material known, but the strongest material that could ever exist (I don’t know if they’ve given any thought to choice pieces of neutron star). And they immediately added that it would make the space elevator possible.

If Buckytubes could be made in quantity, they would revolutionise almost every aspect of life here on Earth as well as in Space. Just imagine what a material hundreds of times stronger times stronger than steel, and far lighter, would do to all the industries involved in building and transportation! The furniture of the average house might weigh virtually nothing: chairs and tables would seem like frozen soap-bubbles.

What a tragedy that Bucky missed, by only two years, the amazing molecule that has now contributed greatly to his posthumous fame – and has perhaps heralded the dawn of what future historians may call the Carbon Age...       

[...]

Having, in imagination, raided the Solar System in the search for raw materials, let us come back to Earth and explore a completely different line of thought. It may never be really necessary to go beyond our own planet for anything we need – for the time will come when we can create any element, in any quantity, by nuclear transmutation.

Until the discovery of uranium fission in 1939, practical transmutation remained as much as a dream as it had been in the days of the old alchemists. Since the first reactors started operating in 1942, substantial amounts (to be measured in hundreds of tons) of the synthetic metal plutonium have been manufactured, and vast quantities of other elements have been created as often unwanted and embarrassingly radioactive by-products.

But plutonium, with its overwhelmingly[22] important military applications, is a very special case, and everyone is aware of the cost and complexity of the plants needed to manufacture it. Gold is cheap by comparison, and synthesising common metals like lead or copper or iron seems about as probable as mining them from the Sun.

We must remember, however, that nuclear engineering is in roughly the same position as chemical engineering at the beginning of the Nineteenth Century, when the laws governing reactions between compounds were just beginning to be understood. We now synthesise, on the largest scale, drugs and plastics which yesterday’s chemists could not even have produced in their laboratories. Within a few generations, we will surely be able to do the same thing with the elements.

Starting with the simplest element hydrogen (one electron revolting around one proton) or its isotope deuterium (one electron revolving round a nucleus of a proton and a neutron) we can ‘fuse’ atoms together to make heavier and heavier elements. This is the process operating in the Sun, as well as in the H-bomb; by various means, four atoms of hydrogen are combined to make one of helium, and in the reaction enormous quantities of energy are released. (In practice, the third element in the periodic table, lithium, is also employed.) The process is extremely difficult to start, and still harder to control – but it is only the very first step in what might be christened ‘nuclear chemistry’.

At even higher pressures and temperatures than those produced in today’s thermonuclear explosions or fusion devices, the helium atoms will themselves combine to form heavier elements; this is what happens in the cores of stars. At first, these reactions release additional energy, but when we reach elements as heavy as iron or nickel the balance shifts and extra energy has to be supplied to create them. This is the consequence of the fact that the heaviest elements tend to be unstable and break down more easily than they fuse together. Building up elements is rather like piling up a column of bricks; the structure is stable at first, but after a while it is liable to spontaneous collapse.

Inside the stars, nuclear synthesis is produced by temperatures of between 1,000 and 5,000 millions degrees, and the pressures millions of billions of atmospheres. But there are other ways of starting reactions, besides heat and pressure. The chemists have known this for many years; they employ catalysts which speed up reactions or make them take place at far lower temperatures than they would otherwise do. Much of modern industrial chemistry is founded on catalysts (vide the ‘cat crackers’ of the oil refineries) and the actual composition of these is often a closely guarded trade secret.

Are there nuclear, as well as chemical, catalysts? Yes: in the Sun, carbon and nitrogen play this role. There may be many other nuclear catalysts, not necessarily elements. Among the legions of misnamed fundamental particles which now perplex the physicist – the mesons and positrons and neutrinos – there may be entities that can bring about fusion at temperatures and pressures that we can handle.

Or there may be completely different ways of achieving nuclear synthesis, as surprising today as was the uranium reactor half a century ago. In 1958 Luis Alvarez and his colleagues discovered a rare form of nuclear catalysis, involving particles known as negative muons. As he remarked rather sadly in his autobiography Alvarez: Adventures of a Physicist (1987):

For a few exhilarating hours we thought we had solved mankind’s energy problem for ever. Our first hasty calculations indicated that in liquid hydrogen-deuterium a single negative muon should catalyse enough fusion reactions before it decayed to supply enough energy to operate the accelerator to make more muons, to extract the necessary hydrogen and deuterium from the sea, and to feed the power grid. While everyone else had been trying to control thermonuclear fusion by heating hydrogen plasmas to million of degrees, we seemed to have stumbled upon a better than break-even reaction that operated at minus 250 degrees Celsius.

More realistic calculations showed us we were short of the mark by several orders of magnitude... In physics that’s a near miss. In recent years there has been a great resurgence of interest in fusion catalysed by muons...

In 1989, only two years after Louie wrote those words, there was indeed a great resurgence in fusion, when Pons and Fleischman reported the generation of energy apparently at room temperature with very simple equipment. After the initial excitement, when several leading laboratories failed to reproduce the so-called ‘Cold Fusion’ effect, their results were almost universally dismissed as erroneous.

However, during the last decade scores of independent groups, many led by competent and experienced scientists, have also claimed to have detected anomalous sources of energy – some of which can have nothing to do fusion, hot or cold. Despite announcements from numerous authorities that the whole matter is closed, this is far from being the case.

Whatever the final outcome, the ‘Cold Fusion’ story is the biggest scandal in the history of science, and has prompted me to frame my Fourth Law: ‘For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert.’

So there is a real possibility that the most important event of the early Twenty-First Century will be the advent of unlimited amounts of clean, cheap energy. This would change our world beyond recognition: it would mean the end of the fossil fuel age, the air pollution of our cities, the fear of global warming – in fact, it seems too good to be true. (In that case, as some of my more sceptical friends keep reminding me, it probably is.)

Whatever type of energy technology evolves – fusion, or something completely different – there will be no shortage of raw material. The seas of this planet contain 100,000,000,000,000,000 tons of hydrogen and 20,000,000,000,000,000 tons of deuterium – the fundamental building blocks of all matter. One day we will learn to join these together to create any element we please.   

This survey should be enough to indicate – though not to prove – that there need never be any permanent shortages. Yet Sir George Darwin’s prediction that ours would be a Golden Age compared with the aeons of poverty to follow, may well be perfectly correct. In this inconceivably enormous universe, we can never run out of energy or matter. But we can all too easily run out of brains.

 

13. Aladdin’s Lamp

[...]

In Chapter Seven, when discussing the possibility of instantaneous transportation, we considered a device that would scan solid objects atom by atom to make a ‘recording’ that could ultimately be played back, either at the spot or at a distance. Though such device cannot be realised, or even remotely envisaged, in terms of today’s science, no philosophical contradictions or absurdities are raised if we suppose its operations limited to fairly simple, inanimate objects. It is worth remembering that an ordinary camera can, in a thousandth of a second, make a ‘copy’ of a picture containing millions of details. This would indeed have been a miracle to an artist of the Middle Ages. The camera is a general-purpose machine for reproducing, with considerable, though not complete, degree of accuracy, any pattern of light, shade, and colour.

[...]

Leaping lightly across some centuries of intensive development and discovery, let us consider how the replicator would operate. It would consist of three basic parts – which we might call store, memory and organiser. The store would contain, or would have access to, all the necessary raw materials. The memory would contain the instructions specifying the manufacture (a word which would then be even more misleading than it is today!) of all the objects within the size, mass, and complexity limitations of the machine. Within these limits, it could make anything – just as a tape-recorder can play any conceivable piece of music that is presented to it. The physical size of the memory could be quite small, even if it had a large built-in library of instructions for the most commonly needed artefacts. One can envision a sort of directory or catalogue, with each item indicated by a code number which could be punched as required.

The organiser would apply the instructions to the raw material, presenting the finished product to the outside world – or signalling its distress if it had run out of some essential ingredient. Even this might never happen, if the transmutation of matter ever becomes possible as a safe, small-scale operation, for then the replicator might operate on nothing but water and air. Starting with the simple elements, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen, the machine would first synthesis higher ones, then organise these as requested. A rather delicate and fail-safe mass-balancing procedure would be necessary, otherwise the replicator would produce, as a highly unwanted by-product, rather more energy than an H-bomb. This could be absorbed in the production of some easily disposable ‘ash’ such as lead – or gold.  

[...]

Despite what has been said earlier about the appalling difficulty of synthesising higher organic structures, it is absurd to suppose that machines cannot eventually create any material made by living cells. Any last-ditch vitalists who still doubt this are referred to Chapter Eighteen, where they will discover why inanimate devices can be fundamentally more efficient and more versatile than living ones – though they are very far from being so at the present stage of our technology. There is no reason to suppose, therefore, that the ultimate replicator would not be able to produce any food that men have ever desired or imagined. The creation of an impeccably prepared filet mignon might take a few seconds longer, and require a little more material, than a paper-clip, but the principle is the same. If this seems astonishing, no one today is surprised that a hi-fi set can reproduce the sound of a massed choir as easily as the twang of a tuning fork.

The advent of the replicator would mean the end of all factories, and perhaps all transportation of raw materials and all farming. The entire structure of industry and commerce, as it is now organised, would cease to exist. Every family would produce all that is needed on the spot – as, indeed, it has had to do throughout most of human history. The present machine era of mass production would then be seen as a brief interregnum between two far longer periods of self-sufficiency, and the only valuable items of exchange would be the matrices, or recordings, which had to be inserted in the replicator to control its operations.

No one who has read thus far will, I hope, argue that the replicator would itself be so expensive that nobody could possibly afford it. The prototype, it is true, might cost trillions, spread over a few centuries of time. The second model would cost nothing, because the replicator’s first job would be to produce other replicators. It is perhaps relevant to point out that in 1951 the great mathematician John von Neumann established the important principle that a machine could always be designed to build any desirable machine – including itself. The human race has squeaking proof of this more than a hundred thousand times a day.

A society based on the replicator would be so completely different from ours that the Twentieth Century’s debates between capitalism and communism would seem quite meaningless. All material possessions would be literally as cheap as dirt. Soiled handkerchiefs, diamond tiaras, Mona Lisas totally indistinguishable from the original, once-worn mink stoles, half-consumed bottles of the most superb champagnes – all would go back into the hopper when they were no longer required. Even the furniture of the future might cease to exist when it was not actually in use.

At first sight, it might seem that nothing could be of any real value in this utopia of infinite riches – this world beyond the wildest dreams of Aladdin or Croesus. This is a superficial reaction, such as might be expected from a Tenth Century monk if you told him that one day every man could own far more books than he could read in a lifetime. Yet the invention of the printing press has not made books less valuable, or less appreciated, because they are now amongst the commonest instead of the rarest of objects. Nor has music lost its charms, now that any amount can be obtained at the turn of a switch.

When material objects are all intrinsically worthless, perhaps only then will a real sense of values arise. Works of art would then be cherished because they were beautiful, not because they were rare. Nothing – no ‘things’ – would be as priceless as craftsmanship, personal skills, professional services. One of the charges often made against our culture is that it is materialistic. How ironic it will be, therefore, if science give us such total and absolute control over the material universe that its products no longer tempt us, because they can be too easily obtained.

It is certainly fortunate that the replicator, if it can ever be built at all, lies far in the future, at the end of many social revolutions. Confronted by it, our own culture would collapse speedily into sybaritic hedonism, followed immediately by the boredom of absolute satiety. Some cynics may doubt if any society of human beings could adjust itself to unlimited abundance and the lifting of the curse of Adam – a curse which may be a blessing in disguise.

Yet in every age, a few men have known such freedom, and not all of them have been corrupted by it. Indeed, I would define a civilised man as one who can be happily occupied for a lifetime even if he has no need to work for a living. This means that the greatest problem of the future is civilising the human race; but we knew that already.

So we may hope, therefore, that one day our age of roaring factories and bulging warehouses will pass away, as the spinning wheel and the home loom and the butter church passed before them. And then our descendants, no longer cluttered up with possessions, will remember what many of us have forgotten – that the only things in the world that really matter are such imponderables as beauty and wisdom, laughter and love.    

 

16. Voices from the Sky

Foreword

After a good deal of heart-searching, I decided that (apart from minor editorial corrections) this chapter should be reprinted exactly as it appeared in 1962, because it started to become history three years later.

For its occasional Failures of Imagination, see the Postscript...

In the closing days of 1958, a human voice spoke for the first time from space. It was the President of the United States, broadcasting a Christmas message to the world. Yet that friendly greeting from an orbiting Atlas satellite, leaping across all barriers of geography and nationality, was as fateful a sound as any in the history of mankind. It marked the dawn of a new age of communication, which will transform the cultural, political, economic and even linguistic patterns of our world.

It is simple enough to demonstrate this logically – as I hope to do – but very difficult to grasp its full meaning. So wonderful are today’s techniques of communication, so integrated into the very fabric of our society, that we overlook their gross limitations, and find it hard to imagine any substantial improvements. We are like the early Victorians who saw no value in the electric telegraph; semaphores or flashing lights were quite adequate, for anyone who wanted something faster than the mail coach.

We may laugh at this attitude; yet we are still, for all our ability to pluck sound and vision from the empty air, scarcely out of the Morse Code age. Within a few years, communications satellites beyond the atmosphere will make our present facilities seem as primitive as Indian smoke signals, and we as blind and deaf as our grandparents before the coming of the electron tube.

[...]

Perhaps at this point I may be permitted what has been called the modest cough of the minor poet. To the best of my knowledge, the use of artificial satellites to provide global TV was first proposed by myself in the October 1945 issue of the British radio journal Wireless World. The scheme then put forward, under the snappy title ‘Extraterrestrial Relays’[23], envisaged the use of three satellites 22,000 miles above the Equator. At this particular height, a satellite takes exactly twenty-four hours to complete one orbit, and thus stays fixed for ever over the same spot on the Earth. The laws of celestial mechanics can thus provide us with the equivalent of invisible TV towers 22,000 miles high. Even as I write these words, preparations are being made by the Hughes Aircraft Company and the United States Army to launch communications satellites into this twenty-four-hour orbit.

At first sight, global TV may hardly seem a revolutionary force capable of transforming our civilisation. Let us, therefore, look at some of its consequences in more detail.

In a few years every large nation will be able to establish (or rent) its own space-born radio and TV transmitters, able to broadcast really high-quality programmes to the entire planet. There will be no shortage of wavelengths – as there is today even for local services. One of the incidental advantages of satellite relays is that they will make available vast new bands of the radio spectrum, providing ‘ether space’ for at least a million simultaneous TV channels, or a billion radio circuits!

This will mean the end of all distance barriers to sound and vision alike. New Yorkers and Londoners will be able to tune in to Moscow or Peking as easily as to their local station. And, of course, vice versa.

Think what this will mean. Until today, even radio has been parochial, except to the shortwave fan willing to put up with the fades and crackles and banshee wailings of the ionosphere. Yet now the great highway of the ether will be thrown open to the whole world, and all men will become neighbours – whether they like it or not. Any form of censorship, political or otherwise, would be impossible; to jam signals coming down from the heavens is almost as difficult as blocking the light of the stars. The Russians could do nothing to stop their people from seeing the American way of life; on the other hand, Madison Avenue agencies and censorship committees might be equally distressed – though for different reasons – at a nationwide switch to uninhibited telecasts from Montmartre.

Such freedom of communication will have an ultimately overwhelming effect on the cultural, political and moral climate of our planet. It holds danger as well as promise. If you doubt this, consider the following quite unimaginative extrapolation, which might be entitled ‘How to Conquer the World without Anyone Noticing.’

By 1970 the USSR has established the first high-powered satellite TV relay above Asia, broadcasting in several languages so that more than a billion viewers can understand the programmes. At the same time, in a well-organised sales campaign spearheaded by demonstrations, Russian trade missions have been flooding the East with cheap, transistorised battery-powered receivers. There is scarcely a village which cannot afford one and it doesn’t cost the USSR a thing; it even makes a small profit on the deal.

And so millions who have never learned to read, who have never seen a movie, who have no rival distractions, fall under the hypnotic spell which even ostensibly educated nations have been unable to resist. Good entertainment, rapid (if slanted)  news reporting, Russian language lessons, instructional programmes of a ‘Do It Yourself’ type useful to backwards communities, quiz shows in which the first prizes are usually trips to the Soviet Union – it takes little imagination to see the pattern. In a few years of skilful propaganda, the uncommitted nations would be committed.

But let us turn aside from the political aspects of the TV satellites and look in more detail at their domestic effects.

[...]

The effect on the cultural content of our local TV and radio programmes, when faced with direct competition from the whole world, is a subject for lively speculation. Some cynics maintain that the TV relay system is the best argument against space travel that has ever been conceived; they shudder at the thought of hundreds of simultaneous Westerns, thousands of rock-and-rolling disc jockeys. Yet the very profusion of available channels, each capable of being received by most of the human race, will make possible services of a quality and specialised nature quite out of the question today. There are probably enough viewers on Earth to make channels carrying nothing but Greek plays, lectures on symbolic logic or championship chess an economic possibility.

[...]

The advent of global TV and radio coverage will end, for better or worse, the cultural and political isolation which still exists over the whole world, outside the great cities. As one who has travelled widely throughout the United States, I have long been appalled by the intellectual vacuum into which you are plunged as soon as you get out of range of New York, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, and a handful of other cities. This applies both to newspapers and to radio/TV; how often have I spent fruitless hours in places like Skunksville, Ugh., searching for a copy of the New York Times so that I could find out what was happening to the planet Earth. And as far as the ether waves are concerned, there are few more harrowing experiences than a sweep across the radio bands in the Deep South, especially on a Sunday morning. In England, at least, one is never far from civilisation (ie the BBCs Third Programme).

The abolition of all barriers to free intellectual and cultural intercourse will complete the revolution started by the automobile half a century ago and timidly continued by today’s short-range electronics. It will mean the eventual end of the limited, small-town mentality which, it is true, has a certain charm (especially to nostalgic novelists, and especially from a distance). When all men, wherever they may be, have equal access to the same vast communications network, they will inevitably become citizens of the world, and a major problem of the future will be the preservation of regional characteristics of value and interest. There is grave danger of global levelling-down; the troughs in man’s cultural heritage must not be filled at the price of demolishing the peaks.

[...]

All that has been described so far – even this last development [two or three dominant world languages – Ed.] – will result from the application of existing techniques, merely made worldwide by the use of satellite relays. It is time to consider some of the wholly new series which will become feasible, if we wish to exploit them.

The most obvious is the personal transceiver, so small and compact that every man carries one with no more inconvenience than a wristwatch. This, of course, is an old dream, and anyone who doubts that it can be realised is simply unaware of current achievements in electronics. Radio receivers have now been built which make the most compact transistor portables look like the 1925 cabinet models. The smallest so far revealed by the micro-miniaturisation experts is about the size of a lump of sugar.

Without going into technical details (of interest largely to those who can already think of the answers) the time will come when we will be able to call a person anywhere on Earth, merely by dialing a number. He will be located automatically, whether he is in mid-ocean, in the heart of a great city, or crossing the Sahara. This device alone may change the patterns of society and commerce as greatly as the telephone, its primitive successor, has already done.

Its peril and disadvantages are obvious; there are no wholly beneficial inventions. Yet think of the countless lives it would save, the tragedies and heartbreaks it would aver. (Remember what the telephone has meant to lonely people everywhere.)

No one need ever again be lost, for a simple position-and-direction-finding device could be incorporated in the receiver, based on the principle of today’s radar navigational aids. And in case of danger or accident, help could be summoned merely by pressing an ‘Emergency’ button.

If you think that this will make the world a claustrophobically small place, in which you can never escape from friends and family, or even run any stimulating risks, you are quite correct. But you need not worry; there is more than enough danger and distance in the bottomless chasm of Space. Earth is home now; let us make it cosy and comfortable and safe. The pioneers will be elsewhere.

As communications improve, so the need for transportation will decrease. Our grandchildren will scarcely believe that millions once spent hours of every day fighting their way into city offices – where, as often as not, they did nothing that could not have been achieved over telecommunication links.

For global phone and vision services, enabling men to confer with each other anywhere on the planet, are only a beginning. Even now we have data-handling systems linking together factories and offices miles apart, controlling nationwide industrial empires. Electronics is already permitting the decentralisation which rising rents and transport costs – not to mention the threat of the mushroom cloud – encourage more strongly than ever before.

The business of the future may be run by executives who are scarcely ever in each other’s physical presence. It will not even have an address or a central office – only the equivalent of a telephone number. For its files and records will be space rented in the memory units of computers that could be located anywhere on Earth: the information stored in them could read off on high-speed printers whenever any of the firm’s offices needed it.

The time may come when half the world’s business will be transacted through vast memory banks beneath the Arizona desert, the Mongolian steppes, the Labrador muskeg, or whatever land is cheap and useless for any other purpose. For all spots on Earth, of course, would be equally accessible to the beams of the relay satellites: to sweep from Pole to Pole would mean merely turning the directional antennae through seventeen degrees.

And so the captains of industry of the Twenty-First Century may live where they please, running their affairs through computer keyboards and information-handling machines in their homes. Only on rare occasions would there be any need for more of the personal touch than could be obtained via wide-screen full-colour TV. The business lunch of the future could be conducted perfectly well with the two halves of the table ten thousand miles apart; all that would be missing would be the handshakes and exchange of cigars.

Administrative and executive skills are not the only ones which would thus become independent of geography. Distance has already been abolished for the three basic senses of sight, hearing, and touch – the latter, thanks to the development of remote-handling devices in the atomic energy field. Any activity which depends on these senses can, therefore, be carried out over radio circuits. The time will certainly come when surgeons will be able to operate a world away from their patients, and every hospitable will be able to call on the services of the best specialists, wherever they may be.

An application of satellites which has already been considered in some detail by the astronautical engineers is what has been called the orbital post office, which will probably make airmail obsolete in the quite near future. Modern facsimile systems can automatically transmit and reproduce the equivalent of an entire book in less than a minute. By using these techniques, a single satellite could handle the whole of today’s transatlantic correspondence.

[...]

Perhaps a decade beyond the orbital post office lies something even more startling – the orbital newspaper. This will be made possible by more sophisticated descendants of the reproducing and facsimile machines now found in most up-to-date offices. One of these, working in conjunction with the TV set, will be able on demand to make a permanent record of the picture flashed on the screen. Thus when you want your daily paper, you will switch to the appropriate channel, press the right button – and collect the latest edition as it emerges from the slot. It may be merely a one-page news sheet; the editorials will be available on another channel – sport, book reviews, drama, advertising, on others. We will select what we need and ignore the rest, thus saving whole forests for posterity. The orbital newspaper will have little more than the name in common with the newspaper of today.

Nor will the matter end here. Over the same circuits we will be able to conjure up, from central libraries and information banks, copies of any document we desire, from Magna Carta to the current Earth-Moon passenger schedules. Even books may one day be ‘distributed’ in this manner, though their format will have to be changed drastically to make this possible.

All publishers would do well to contemplate these really staggering prospects. Most affected will be newspapers and paperbacks; practically untouched by the coming revolution will be art volumes and quality magazines, which involve not only fine printing but elaborate manufacturing process. The dailies may well tremble; the glossy monthlies have little to fear.

How mankind will cope with the avalanche of information and entertainment about to descend upon it from the skies, only the future can show. Once again science, with its usual cheerful irresponsibility, has left another squalling infant on civilisation’s doorstep. It may grow up to be as big a problem child as the one born amid the clicking Geiger counters beneath the Chicago University squash court, back in 1942.

For will there be time to do any work at all on a planet saturated from Pole to Pole with fine entertainment, first-class music, brilliant discussions, superbly executed athletics, and every conceivable type of information service? Even now, it is claimed, our children spent a sixth of their waking lives glued to the cathode-ray tube. We are becoming a race of watchers, not of doers. The miraculous powers that are yet to come may well prove more than our self-discipline can withstand.

If this is so, then the epitaph of our race should read, in fleeting, fluorescent letters: Whom the Gods would destroy, they first give TV.

Postscript

Well...

Virtually everything in the above chapter has happened, far sooner than I imagined, though sometimes in a slightly different form. Thus I never imagined – who did? – that the fax machine, and the even more ubiquitous personal computer, would bring most of the services described above into every home. And the Information Technology revolution is still gathering momentum...

But one promised benefit of electronic data storage has still failed to materialise.

Have you seen any ‘paperless office’ yet? We are chopping down the world’s forests faster than ever...

 

17. Brain and Body

[...]

A safe and practical form of suspended animation – which involves no medical impossibility and may indeed be regarded as an extension to anaesthesia – could have major effects upon society. Men suffering from incurable diseases might choose to leapfrog ten or twenty years, in the hope that medical science might have caught up with their condition. The insane, and criminals beyond our present powers of redemption, might also be sent forwards in time, in the expectation that the future could salvage them. Out descendants might not appreciate this legacy, of course, but at least they could not send it back.

All this assumes – though no one has yet proved it – that the legend of Rip van Winkle is scientifically sound, and that the processes of ageing would be slowed down, or even checked, during suspended animation. Thus a sleeping man could travel down the centuries, stopping from time to time and exploring the future as today we explore space. There are always misfits in every age who might prefer to do this, if they were given the opportunity, so that they could see the world that will exist far beyond their normal span of life.

And this brings us to what is, perhaps, the greatest enigma of all. Is there a normal span of life, or do all creatures really die by ‘accident’? Though we now live, on the average, far longer than our ancestors, the absolute limit does not seem to have altered since records became available. The Biblical limit three-scores-years-and-ten is still as valid today as it was four thousand years ago.

No human being has been proved to have lived more than about 120 years; the much higher figures often quoted are almost certainly due to fraud or error. Man, it seems, is the longest lived of all the mammals, but some fishes and tortoises may attain their second century. And trees, of course, have incredible life-spans; the oldest known living organism is a small and unprepossessing bristlecone pine in the foothills of Sierra Nevada. It has been growing, though hardly flourishing, for 4,600 years.

Death (not ageing) is obviously essential for progress, both social and biological. Even if it did not perish from overpopulation, a world of immortals would soon stagnate. In every sphere of human activity, one can find examples of the stultifying influence of men who have outlived their usefulness. Yet death – like sleep – does not appear to be biologically inevitable, even if it is an evolutionary necessity.

Our bodies are not like machines; they never wear our, because they are continually rebuilt from new materials. If this process were uniformly efficient, we would be immortal. Unfortunately, after a few decades something seems to go wrong in the repair-and-maintenance department; the materials are as good as ever, but the old plans get lost or ignored, and vital services are not properly restored when they break down. It is as if the cells of the body can no longer remember the jobs they once did so well.

The way of avoiding a failure of memory is to keep better records, and perhaps one day we will be able to help our bodies to do just that. The invention of the alphabet made mental forgetfulness no longer inevitable; the more sophisticated tools of future medicine may cure physical forgetfulness by allowing us to preserve, in some suitable storage device, the ideal prototypes of our bodies. Deviations from the norm could then be checked from time to time and corrected, before they became serious.

Because biological immortality and the preservation of youth are such potent lures, men will never cease to search for them, tantalised by the examples of creatures who live for centuries and undeterred by the unfortunate experience of Dr Faust. It would be foolish to imagine that this search will never be successful, down all the ages that lie ahead. Whether success would be desirable is quite another matter.

(In The Last Mortal Generation (1999), the Australian polymath and science fiction writer Damien Broderick has suggested that immortality is not merely desirable – but inevitable. My recommendation of this truly mind-stretching book was not in the least affected by its dedication: ‘For Arthur C. Clarke, who profiled the future and dreamed a future of advanced sciences indistinguishable from magic.’)

The body is the vehicle of the brain, and the brain is the seat of the mind. In the past, this triad has been inseparable, but it will not always be so. If we cannot prevent our bodies from disintegrating, we may replace them while there is yet time.

The replacement need not be another body of flesh and blood; it could be a machine, and this may represent the next stage of evolution. Even if the brain is not immortal, it could certainly live much longer than the body whose diseases and accidents eventually bring it low. More than half a century ago, in a famous series of experiments, Russian surgeons kept a dog’s head alive for some days by purely mechanical means. I do not know if they have yet succeeded with humans, but I shall be surprised if they have not tried.

If you think that immobile brain would lead a very dull sort of life, you have not fully understood what has already been said about the senses. A brain connected by wire or radio links to suitable organs could participate in any conceivable experience, real or imaginary. When you touch something, are you really aware that your brain is not at your fingertips, but three feet away? And would you notice the difference if that three feet were three thousand miles? Radio waves make such a journey more swiftly than the nervous impulses can travel along your arm.

One can imagine a time when men who still inhabit organic bodies are regarded with pity by those who have passed on to an infinitely richer mode of existence, capable of throwing their consciousness or sphere of attention instantaneously to any point on land, sea, or sky where there is a suitable sensing organ. In adolescence we leave childhood behind; one day there may be a second and more portentous adolescence, when we bid farewell to the flesh. (Carnivale, in the literal sense!)

But even if we can keep the brain alive indefinitely, surely in the end it would be clogged with memories, overlaid like a palimpsest with so many impressions and experiences that there was no room for more? Eventually, perhaps yes, though I would repeat again that we have no idea of the ultimate capacity of a well-trained mind, even without the mechanical aids which will certainly become available. As a good round figure, a thousand years would seem to be about the ultimate limit for continuous human existence – though suspended animation might spread this millennium across far longer vistas of time.

Yet there may be a way past even this barrier, as I suggested in The City and the Stars (1956). This was an attempt to envisage a virtually eternal society, in the closed city of Diaspar, a billion years from now. I would like to end by quoting the words in which my hero learns the facts of life from his old tutor, Jeserac:

A human being, like any other object, is defined by its structure – its pattern. The pattern of a man is incredibly complex; yet Nature was once able to pack that pattern into a tiny cell, too small for the eye to see.

What Nature can do, Man can do also, in his own way. We do not know how long the task took. A million years, perhaps – but what is that? In the end our ancestors learned to analyse and store the information that would define any specific human being – and to use that information to recreate the original.

The way in which information is stored is of no importance; all that matters is the information itself. It may be in the form of written words on paper, or varying magnetic fields, or patterns of electric charge. Men have used all these methods of storage, and many others. Suffice to say that long ago they were able to store themselves – or, to be more precise, the disembodied patterns from which they could be called back into existence.

In a little while, I shall prepare to leave this life. I shall go back through my memories, editing them and cancelling those I do not wish to keep. Then I shall walk into the Hall of Creation, but through a door that you have never seen. This old body will cease to exist, and so will consciousness itself. Nothing will be left of Jeserac but a galaxy of electrons frozen in the heart of a crystal.

I shall sleep, and without dreams. Then one day, perhaps a hundred thousand years from now, I shall find myself in a new body, meeting those who have been chosen to be my guardians... At first I will know nothing of Diaspar and will have no memories of what I was before. Those memories will slowly return, at the end of my infancy, and I will build upon them as I move forward into my new cycle of existence.

This is the pattern of our lives... We have all been here many, many times before, though as the intervals of nonexistence vary according to random laws, this present population will never repeat itself. The new Jeserac will have new and different friends and interests, but the old Jeserac – as much of him as I wish to save – will still exist.

So at any moment only a hundredth of the citizens of Diaspar live and walk in its streets. The vast majority slumber in the memory banks, waiting for the signal that will call them forth on to the stage of existence once again. And so we have continuity, yet change – immortality, but not stagnation...[24]

Is this fantasy? I do not know; but I suspect that the truths of the far future will be stranger still.

Another possibility which has quite suddenly come to the attention of the world (largely through Dolly, the most famous sheep in history) is that of cloning. After denying for years that it could be done with mammals, biologists are now arguing whether it should be done with humans. I would not be in the least surprised to hear that it has already happened.

And now, to my considerable amusement, there is a remote (in all senses of the word) possibility that it may happen to me. I recently sacrificed some of my few remaining hairs, to be launched into space as part of the AERO Astro Corporation’s ‘Encounter Project’. If all goes well, they will leave the Solar System (after a boost from Jupiter) and the hope is that, maybe a million years from now, some super-civilisation will capture this primitive artefact from the past. Recreating its biological contents might be an amusing exercise for their equivalent of an infants’ class.

Of course, I’ll never know – unless the experimenters are both very considerate – and Masters of Time.

 

18. The Obsolescence of Man[25]

About a million years ago, an unprepossessing primate discovered that his forelimbs could be used for other purposes besides locomotion. Objects like sticks and stones could be grasped – and, once grasped, were useful for killing game, digging up roots, defending or attacking, and a hundred other jobs. On the third planet of the Sun, tools had appeared; and the place would never be the same again.

The first users of tools were not men – a fact appreciated only recently – but prehuman anthropoids; and by their discovery they doomed themselves. For even the most primitive of tools, such as a naturally pointed stone that happens to fit the hand, provides a tremendous physical and mental stimulus to the user. He has to walk erect; he no longer needs huge canine teeth – since sharp flints can do a better job – and he must develop manual dexterity of a high order. These are the specifications of Homo sapiens; as soon as they start to be filled, all earlier models are headed for rapid obsolescence. The quote Professor Sherwood Washburn of the University of California’s Anthropology Department: ‘It was the success of the simplest tools that started the whole trend of human evolution and led to the civilisations of today.’

Note that phrase – ‘the whole trend of human evolution’. The old idea that man invented tools is therefore a misleading half-truth; it would be more accurate to say that tools invented man. They were very primitive tools, in the hands of creatures who were little more than apes. Yet they led to us – and to the eventual extinction of the ape-men who first wielded them.

Now the cycle is about to begin again; but neither history nor prehistory ever exactly repeats itself, and this time there will be a fascinating twist in the plot. The tools the ape-men invented caused them to evolve into their successor, H. sapiens. The tool we have invented is our successor. Biological evolution has given way to a far more rapid process – technological evolution. To put it bluntly and brutally, the machine is going to take over.

This, of course, is hardly an original idea. That the creations of man’s brain might one day threaten and perhaps destroy him is such a tired old cliché that no self-respecting science fiction writer would dare to use it. It goes back, through Capek’s RUR, Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the Faust legend to the mysterious but perhaps not wholly mythical figure of Daedalus, King Minos’ one-man Office of Scientific Research. For at least three thousand years, therefore, a vocal minority of mankind has had grave doubts about the ultimate outcome of technology. From the self-centred, human point of view, these doubts are justified. But that, I submit, will not be the only – or even the most important – point of view for much longer.

When the first large-scale electronic computers appeared in the late 1940s, they were promptly nicknamed ‘Giant Brains’ – and the scientific community, as a whole, took a poor view of the designation. But the scientists objected to the wrong word. The electronic computers were not giant brains; they were dwarf brains, and they still are, though they have now grown a millionfold. Yet even in their present flint-axe stage of evolution, they have done things which not long ago almost everyone would have claimed to be impossible – such as translating from language to another, composing music, and playing a good game of chess. (The moment when IBM’s Deep Blue beat Kasparov is already regarded as a turning point in history.) And much more important than any of these infant jeux d’esprit is the fact that they have breached the barrier between brain and machine.

This is one of the greatest – and perhaps one of the last – breakthroughs in the history of human thought, like the discovery that the Earth moves round the Sun, or that man is part of the animal kingdom, or that E = mc². All these ideas took time to sink in, and were frantically denied when first put forward. In the same way, it will take a little while for humankind to realise that machines can not only think, but may one day think it off the face of the Earth.

[...]

The fact that most of today’s computers are still high-sped morons, capable of doing nothing beyond the scope of the instructions carefully programmed into them, has given many people a spurious sense of security. No machine, they argue, can possibly be more intelligent than its makers – the men who designed it, and planned its functions. It may be a million times faster in operation, but that is quite irrelevant. Anything and everything that an electronic brain can do must also be within the scope of a human brain, if it had sufficient time and patience. Above all, it is maintained, no machine can show originality or creative power or the other attributes which are fondly labeled ‘human’.

The argument is wholly fallacious; those who still bring it forth are like the buggy-whip makers who used to poke fun at stranded Model Ts. Even if it was true, it should give no comfort, as a careful reading of these remarks by Dr Norbert Wiener (the father of Cybernetics) will show:

The attitude (the assumption that machines cannot posses any degree of originality) in my opinion should be rejected entirely... It is my thesis that machines can and do transcend some of the limitations of their designers... It may well be that in principle we cannot make any machine, the elements of whose behaviour we cannot comprehend sooner or later. This does not mean in any way that we shall be able to comprehend them in substantially less time than the operation of the machine, nor even within any given number of years or generations...

This means that though they are theoretically subject to human criticism, such criticism may be ineffective until a time long after it is relevant.

In other words, even machines less intelligent than us might escape from our control by sheer speed of operation. And in fact, there is every reason to suppose that machines will become much more intelligent than their builders, as well as incomparably faster.

[...]

All speculations about intelligent machines are inevitably conditioned – indeed, inspired – by our knowledge of the human brain, the only thinking device currently on the market. No one, of course, pretends to understand the full workings of the brain, or expects that such knowledge will be available in any foreseeable future. (It is a nice philosophical point as to whether the brain can ever, even in principle, understand itself.) But we do know enough about its physical structure to draw many conclusions about the limitations of ‘brains’ – whether organic or inorganic.  

There are approximately ten billion separate switches – or neurons – inside your skull, ‘wired’ together in circuits of unimaginable complexity. Ten billion is such a large number that, until recently, it could be used as an argument against the achievement of mechanical intelligence. In the 1950s a famous neurophysiologist made a statement (chanted briefly like some protective incantation by the advocates of cerebral supremacy) to the effect that an electronic model of the human brain would have to be as large as the Empire State Building, and would need Niagara Falls to keep it cool when it was running.

This must now be classed with such interesting pronouncements as: ‘No heavier-than-air machine will ever be able to fly.’ For this calculation was made in the days of the vacuum tube, and the transistor promptly altered the picture. Indeed – such was the rate of technological progress – the transistor itself was quickly replaced by the microchip. If the problem was merely one of space, today’s electronic techniques would allow us, at least in theory, to pack a computer as complex as the human brain – inside a human skull. (Stop Press: now read ‘matchbox’.)[26]

[...]

During the 1950s, the electronic engineers learned to pack up to a hundred thousand components into one cubic foot. (To give a basis of comparison, a good hi-fi set may contain two or three hundred components, a domestic radio about a hundred.) In the ‘60s, the attainable figure was around a million components per cubic foot; by the 1970s, it was in the hundred millions.

Fantastic though this last figure is, the human brain surpasses it by a thousandfold, packing its ten billion neurons into a tenth of a cubic foot. And although smallness is not necessarily a virtue, even this may be nowhere near the limit of possible compactness.

For the cells composing our brains are slow-acting, bulky, and wasteful of energy – compared with the scarcely more than atom-sized computer elements that are theoretically possible. The mathematician John von Neumann once calculated that electronic cells could be ten billion times more efficient than protoplasmic ones; already they are a million times swifter in operation, and speed can often be traded for size. If we take these ideas to their ultimate conclusion, it appears that a computer equivalent in power to one human brain need be no bigger than a matchbox.

This slightly shattering thought becomes more reasonable when we take a critical look at flesh and blood and bone as engineering materials. All living creatures are marvellous, but let us keep our sense of proportion. Perhaps the most wonderful think about Life is that it works at all, when it has to employ such extraordinary materials, and has to tackle its problems in such roundabout ways.

As a perfect example of this, consider the eye. Suppose you were given the problem of designing a camera – for that, of course, is what the eye is – which has to be constructed entirely of water and jelly, without using a scrap of glass, metal or plastic. Obviously it can’t be done.

You’re quite right; the feat is impossible. The eye is an evolutionary miracle, but it’s a lousy camera. You can prove this while you’re reading the next sentence.

Here is a medium-length word: – PHOTOGRAPHY. Close one eye and keep the other fixed – repeat, fixed – on that centre ‘G’. You may be surprised to discover that – unless you cheat by altering the direction of your gaze – you cannot see the whole word clearly. It fades out three or four letters to the right and left.

No camera ever built – even the cheapest ‘disposable’ – has as poor an optical performance as this. For colour vision also, the human eye is nothing to boast about; it can operate only over a small band of the spectrum. To the worlds of the infrared and ultraviolet, visible to bees and other insects, it is completely blind.

We are not conscious of these limitations because we have grown up with them, and indeed, if they were corrected, the brain would be quite unable to handle the vastly increased flood of information. But let us not make a virtue of a necessity; if our eyes had the optical performance of even the cheapest camera, we would live in an unimaginably richer and more colourful world.

These defects are due to the fact that precision scientific instruments simply cannot be manufactured from living materials. With the eye, the ear, the nose – indeed, all the sense organs – evolution has performed a truly incredible job against fantastic odds. But it will not be good enough for the future; indeed, it is not good enough for the present.

There are some senses that do not exist, that can probably never be provided by living structures, and that we need in a hurry. On this planet, to the best of our knowledge, no creature has ever developed organs that can detect radio waves or radioactivity. Though I would hate to lay down the law and claim that nowhere in the Universe can there be organic Geiger counters or living TV sets, I think it highly improbable. There are some jobs that can be done only by transistors or magnetic fields or electron beams, and are therefore beyond the capability of purely organic creatures.

There is another fundamental reason living machines such as you and I cannot hope to compete with non-living ones. Quite apart from our poor materials, we are handicapped by one of the toughest engineering specifications ever issued. What sort of performance would you expect from a machine which has to grow several billionfold during the course of manufacture – and which has to be completely and continuously rebuilt, molecule by molecule, every few weeks? This is what happens to all of us, all the time; you are – quite literally – not the person you were last year.

Most of the energy and effort required to run the body goes into its perpetual tearing down and rebuilding – a cycle completed every few weeks. New York City, which is a very much simpler structure than a human being, takes hundreds of times longer to remake itself. When one tries to picture the body’s myriads of building contractors and utility companies all furiously at work tearing up arteries, nerves and even bones, it is astonishing that there is any energy left over for the business of thinking.

Now I am perfectly well aware that many of the ‘limitations’ and ‘defects’ just mentioned are nothing of the sort, looked at from another point of view; living creatures, because of their very nature, can evolve from simple to complex organisms. They may well be the only path by which intelligence can be obtained, for it is a little difficult to see how a lifeless planet can progress directly from metal ores and mineral deposits to electronic computers by its own unaided efforts.

Though intelligence can arise only from life, it may then discard it. Perhaps at a later stage, as the mystics have suggested, it may also discard matter; but this leads us in realms of speculations where an unimaginative person like myself would prefer to avoid. 

One often-stressed advantage of living creatures is that they are self-repairing and reproduce themselves with ease – indeed, with enthusiasm. This superiority over machines will be short-lived; the general principles underlying the construction of self-repairing and self-reproducing machines have already been worked out.

The greatest single stimulus in the evolution of mechanical – as opposed to organic – intelligence is the challenge of Space. Only a vanishingly small fraction of the Universe is directly accessible to mankind, in the sense that we can live there without elaborate protection or mechanical aids. [...] If we reduced the known Universe to the size of the Earth, then the portion in which we can live without space suits and pressure cabins is about the size of a single atom.

It is true that, one day, we are going to explore and colonise many other atoms in this Earth-sized volume, but it will be at the cost of tremendous technical efforts, for most of our energies will be devoted to protecting our frail and sensitive bodies against the extremes of temperature, pressure or gravity found in Space and on other worlds. Within very wide limits, machines are indifferent to these extremes. Even more important, they can wait patiently through the years and the centuries that will be needed for travel to the far reaches of the Universe.

Creatures of flesh and blood such as ourselves can explore Space and win control over infinitesimal fractions of it. But only creatures of metal and plastic can ever really conquer it, as indeed they have already started to do. The tiny brains of our Voyagers and Pathfinders[27] barely hint at the mechanical intelligence that will one day be launched at the stars.

It may well be that only in Space, confronted with environments fiercer and more complex than any to be found upon this planet, will intelligence be able to reach its fullest stature. Like other qualities, intelligence is developed by struggle and conflict; in the ages to come, the dullards may remain on placid Earth, and real genius will flourish only in Space – the realm of the machine, not of flesh and blood.

A striking parallel to this situation can already be found on our planet. Some millions of years ago, the most intelligent of the mammals withdrew from the battle of the dry land and returned to their ancestral home, the sea. They are still there, with brains larger and potentially more powerful than ours. But (as far as we know) they do not use them; the static environment of the sea makes little call upon intelligence. The porpoises and whales, which might have been our equals and perhaps our superiors had they remained on land, now race in simpleminded and innocent ecstasy beside the new sea monsters carrying a hundred megatons[28] of death. Perhaps they, not we, made the right choice; but it is too late to join them now.

If you have followed me so far, the protoplasmic computer inside your skull should now be programmed to accept the idea – at least for the sake of argument – that machines can be both more intelligent and more versatile than men, and may well be so in the very near future. So it is time to face the question: Where does that leave Man?

I suspect that this is not a question of very great importance – except, of course, to Man. Perhaps the Neanderthalers made similar plaintive noises, around 100,000 BC, when H. sapiens appeared on the scene, with his ugly vertical forehead and ridiculous protruding chin. Any Paleolithic philosopher who gave his colleagues the right answer would probably have ended up in the cooking pot; I am prepared to take that risk.

The short-term answer may indeed be cheerful rather than depressing. There may be a brief Golden Age when men will glory in the power and range of their new partners.

[...]

And this is perhaps the moment to deal with a conception which many people find even more horrifying than the idea that machines will replace or supersede us. It is the idea, already mentioned in the last chapter, that they may combine with us.

I do not know who first thought of this; probably the physicist J. D. Bernal (1901–71), who in 1929 published an extraordinary book of scientific predictions called The World, the Flesh and the Devil. In this slim volume (reprinted in 1968, after considerable bullying from me[29]) Bernal decided that the numerous limitations of the human body could be overcome only by the use of mechanical attachments or substitutes – until, eventually, all that might be left of man’s original organic body would be the brain.

This idea is already far more plausible than when Bernal advanced it, for now we have seen the development of mechanical hearts, kidneys, lungs and other organs, and the wiring of electronic devices directly into the human nervous system.

[...]

The now familiar word ‘Cyborg’ (cybernetic organism) was coined to describe the machine-animal of the type we have been discussing. Doctors Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline of Rockland State Hospital, Orangeburg, New York, who invented the name in the 1960s, defined a Cyborg in these stirring words: ‘an exogenously extended organisational complex functioning as a homeostatic system.’ So now you know...

To translate, it means a body which has machines hitched to it, or built into it, to take over or modify some of its functions. I suppose one could call a man in an iron lung a Cyborg, but the concept has far wider implications than this. One day we may be able to enter into temporary unions with any sufficiently sophisticated machines, thus being able not merely to control but to become a spaceship or a submarine or a TV network. This would give far more than purely intellectual satisfaction; the thrill that can be obtained from driving a racing car or flying an aeroplane may be only a pale ghost of the excitement our great-grandchildren may know when the individual human consciousness is free to roam at will from machine to machine, through all the reaches of sea and sky and space.

But how long will this partnership last? Can the synthesis of man and machine ever be stable, or will the purely organic component become such a hindrance that it has to be discarded? If this eventually happens – and I have given good reasons for thinking that it must – we have nothing to regret, and certainly nothing to fear.

The popular idea, fostered by comic strips and the cheaper forms of science fiction, that intelligent machines must be malevolent entities hostile to man, is so absurd that it is hardly worth wasting energy to refute it. I am almost tempted to argue that only unintelligent machines can be malevolent; anybody who has tried to start a baulky outboard motor will probably agree. Those who picture machines as active enemies are merely projecting their own aggressive instincts, inherited from the jungle, into a world where such things do not exist. The higher the intelligence, the greater the degree of cooperativeness. If there is ever a war between men and machines, it is easy to guess who will start it.

Yet however friendly and helpful the machines of the future may be, most people will feel that it is a rather bleak prospect for humanity if it ends up as a pampered specimen in some biological museum – even if that museum is the whole planet Earth. This, however, is an attitude I find hard to share.

No individual exists for ever; why should we expect our species to be immortal? Man, said Nietzsche, is a rope stretched between the animal and the superhuman – a rope across an abyss. That will be a noble purpose to have served.

Postscript

The above chapter was written in the year 6 BH (Before HAL) and many of the concepts in it are now taken for granted.

[...]

Although even 1992 seemed a reasonable date when we were working on the script in 1964–8, creating a computer with anything like Hal’s capabilities has proved far more difficult than any of the enthusiasts for artificial intelligence imagined: some of their predictions now make embarrassing reading. Ironically, one key incident in the movie which I thought somewhat improbable -           Hal’s lip-reading exploit – is now the subject of intensive research.

[...]

 

19. The Long Twilight

Looking back over the preceding chapters, I am aware of numerous inconsistencies and some omissions. As for the first, I am unrepentant, for the reasons given in the introduction. In attempting to explore rival and indeed contradictory possibilities, I have tried to go to the end of the line in each case; sometimes this has lead to a sense of pride in Man’s past and possible future achievements – sometimes to a conviction that we present only a very early stage in the story of evolution, destined to pass away leaving little mark on the universe.

Concerning the omissions, some are due to a frank lack of interest on my part, others to a feeling that I did not have the necessary qualifications to discuss them. The last reason accounts for the fact that medical and biological themes were not developed in much more detail. It seems perfectly possible that many future achievements of production, sensing, data-processing, and manufacture may be based on living or quasi-living creatures, rather than inorganic devices. Nature provides, at zero cost, so many marvellous mechanisms that it seems foolish not to employ them to the utmost. I have little doubt that our descendants will use many intelligent animals to do jobs that could otherwise be performed only by very expensive and sophisticated robots.

In this connection, I might have discussed the attempts that have been made to establish communication with dolphins. I might have said a good deal more about the possibility of contacting extraterrestrial intelligences by radio or laser (coherent light) beams. One or both of these objectives will be achieved, sooner or later, but both open up vistas so unlimited that it is fruitless to speculate about them; there are no boundary posts here, as yet, to mark the border between science and fantasy.

[...]

Certain types of symmetrical or ordered structure, certain kinds of energy release, are so abnormal that they point to an intelligent origin. Thus on our planet, when the energy equivalent to several megatons appears in an area a few miles across, it can be a volcano; when it appears at a point source, it can only be a bomb.

The radio astronomers are now discovering some most extraordinary phenomena in other galaxies; Virgo A (Messier 87), for example, has a brilliant jet extending from its nucleus, like a searchlight beam hundred of light-years long. What is so peculiar about this jet is the concentration of energy it contains – perhaps equivalent to that of millions of supernovae, or the radiation from millions of millions of ordinary stars. In fact, to power this jet, a mass equivalent to about a hundred suns would have to be completely annihilated!

This is hard to explain in terms of any known natural process; it is like comparing an H-bomb to a geyser. Almost certainly there is a natural explanation, which we have not yet discovered – though there are plenty of theories – but it is tempting to speculate about the alternative. Given sufficient time, rational beings might attain the power to manipulate not merely planets, not merely stars, but the galaxies themselves. If the jet from M.87 is artificial, what is its purpose? Is it an attempt to signal across intergalactic space? A tool of cosmic engineers? A weapon? Or some by-product of incomprehensible religions and philosophies – as on our own planet, the Great Pyramid is a gigantic symbol of a now almost wholly alien mentality?

Such projects would demand vistas of time, and continuity of cultures, on a scale inconceivable to us. The time is there; of that there is no doubt. Each generation of astronomers multiplies the age of the universe by ten; the current estimate appears to be about twenty-five billion years. If we say that human civilisation has existed for about a millionth of the age of this Galaxy, we may not be far wrong.

But it also appears that the past duration of the Galaxy is a mere flicker of time, compared to aeons that may lie ahead. At their present lavish rate of radiation, stars such as the Sun can continue to burn for billions of years; then, after various internal vicissitudes, they settle down to a more modest mode of existence as dwarf stars. The reformed stellar spendthrifts can then shine steadily for periods of time measured not in billions but in trillions (millions of millions) of years. The planets of such stars, if at the same distance from their primary as Earth (or even Mercury) would be frozen at temperatures hundreds of degrees below zero. But by the time we are considering, natural or artificial planets could have been moved sunwards to huddle against the oncoming Ice Age as, long ago, our savage ancestors must have gathered around their fires to protect themselves from the cold and the creatures of the night.

In a famous elegiac passage, Bertrand Russell once remarked:

...that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruin – all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand.[30]

Even if this is true, the ruin of the universe is so inconceivably far ahead that it can never be any direct concern of our species. Or, perhaps, of any species that now exists, anywhere in the spinning whirlpool of stars we call the Milky Way.

[...]

In that case, our Galaxy is now in the brief springtime of its life – a springtime made glorious by such brilliant blue-white stars as Vega and Sirius, and, on a more humble scale, our own Sun. Not until all these have flamed through their incandescent youth, in a few fleeting billions of years, will the real history of the Universe begin.

It will be a history illuminated only by the reds and infrareds of dully glowing stars that would be almost invisible to our eyes; yet the sombre hues of that all-but-eternal Universe may be full of colour and beauty to whatever strange beings have adapted to it. They will know that before them lie, not the millions of years in which we measure eras of geology, nor the billions of years which span the past lives of the stars, but years to be counted literally in trillions.

They will have time enough, in those endless aeons, to attempt all things, and to gather all knowledge. They will not be like gods, because no gods imagined by our minds have ever possessed the powers they will command. But for all that, they may envy us, basking in the bright afterglow of Creation; for we knew the universe when it was young.

 

---

[1] The electrocution experiments and the Electric Chair reference are not in the original 1962 edition.

[2] This addition in brackets is not in the original 1962 edition.

[3] Woolley has been somewhat vindicated in recent years. Apparently he was misquoted, having referred to sensational newspaper articles about space travel and moon colonisation with “All this talk about space travel is utter bilge, really”. (See the Omniscient Entity.) That may be so. Indeed, Arthur himself at least twice in later essays, “When Will the Real Space Age Begin?” (1996) and “Science and Society” (1998), both reprinted in Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds! (1999), admitted the misquotation. But if Mr Woolley, who died in 1986 at the age of 80, ever contributed anything to the British or any other space effort, history appears very silent about it. Arthur’s footnote in this book may be the only evidence.

[4] The original 1962 edition doesn’t, of course, mention VCR. The other machines are the same though, with the addition of “a television set” – still cutting-edge stuff in those days, rapidly becoming obsolete in ours.

[5] The fantasy of explaining to the scientist before 1900 the secrets of the atomic bomb is the same as in the 1962 edition. The latter, however, contains a charming example from much farther back in time which was later omitted: “What could be simpler than banging two lumps of metal together? Yet how could one explain to Archimedes that the result could be more devastating than that produced by all the wars between the Trojans and the Greeks?”

[6] The 1962 edition reads “from the ox cart to the Cadillac”, a more elegant alternative.

[7] The last sentence not in the 1962 edition.

[8] That “perhaps” charmingly skipped in the 1962 edition.

[9] In the 1962 edition the cartoon is just “famous” and remains unexplained.

[10] The Pickering “débâcle” is omitted in this selection of quotes. William Pickering was an astronomer who, a few years after the first airplanes flew, derided the idea of “gigantic flying machines speeding across the Atlantic and carrying innumerable passengers” as “wholly visionary”. Mr Pickering, in general not an unimaginative fellow, could only conceive of planes carrying one or two passengers at exorbitant expense and speeds that cannot compete with trains and cars. Arthur gleefully remarks that Mr Pickering, before his death in 1938, managed to see planes travelling at 400 mph and carrying quite a few passengers more than “one or two”.

[11] The Tom Clancy quip – shattering both him and Shute – was naturally not in the 1962 edition. Neither, of course, was the previous paragraph.

[12] The 1962 edition has “within another generation” instead of “soon”.

[13] The 1962 edition has “Queen Elizabeth to Mars” instead of a nameless liner to the Moon. The next sentence is also made more reasonable; the fact of “everyday missilry” is not “far more” but “just as” fantastic as personal antigravity devices.

[14] This paragraph is considerably different in the 1962 edition. Mark Twain has lost the battle with Kipling, Tennessee Williams is not mentioned by name at all and neither are Nabokov or Carroll referred to by their most famous works.

Writers cannot escape from his environment, however hard they try. When the frontier is open we have Homer and Shakespeare – or, to choose less Olympian examples nearer to our own age, Melville, Conrad, and Mark Twain. When it is closed, the time has come from Tennessee Williams and the Beatniks – and for Proust, whose horizon toward the end of his life was a cork-lined room. (If Lewis Carroll had lived today, he might have given us not Alice but Lolita.)

[15] This list is slightly different in the 1962 edition. The Ancient Mariner was originally included instead of The Lusiads.

[16] Mars in the 1962 edition.

[17] The 1962 edition has one sentence more here: “Hu Shih was speaking of the Chinese literary renaissance, circa 1915. Perhaps these words may apply to a terrestrial renaissance a century hence.”

[18] This “surely” is not in the 1962 edition. It seems Arthur’s notorious optimism, far from diminishing, grew stronger in his old age.

[19] Some interesting changes with the 1962 edition. The original, to begin with, contains almost two full pages more after Mr Mumford was reduced to fish; I suppose it was removed because references to the Soviet Union and articles in the Life magazine make it rather more dated than usual. Instead of hope that he listened to space broadcasts, Mumford’s view of space is dismissed as “slightly myopic, and conditioned by the present primitive state of the art.” The Mumford quote comes from The Transformation [sic] of Man [1954] in the original: I do not know which the correct reference is. Last and least, Arthur is slightly inaccurate that Mumford died at the age of 95. He actually passed away some four months after his 94^th birthday. 

[20] Arthur’s Russian was a little rusty there. He skipped an ‘o’ in Komsomolskaya Pravda (Комсомольская Правда).

[21] “To the Committee on Space Science”, hearing on 24 July 1975, also published in a volume with the juicy title page:

Future Space Programs 1975

Hearings

before the

Subcommittee on Space Science and

Applications

of the

Committee on

Science and Technology

U.S. House of Representatives

Ninety-fourth Congress

First session

July 22, 23, 24, 29, AND 30, 1975

[22] Here, as well as silently in many other places, the 1962 edition was used to correct rather obvious typos. The 2000 Indigo paperback, alas, contains a rich crop of these.

[23] This legendary paper has been reprinted at least thrice in Arthur’s books. The original version, figures, equations and all, appears as an appendix in one of his essay collections, Voices from the Sky (1965), and of course in his collected papers, Ascent to Orbit (1984). A simplified version is reprinted in Arthur’s collected essays entitled Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds! (1999).

[24] From Chapter 2, although heavily edited.

[25] Interesting companion pieces to this chapter are the essays “Of Mind and Matter”, first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (Oct 1958) and later collected in The Challenge of the Spaceship (1958), and “The Mind of the Machine”, first published in Playboy (Dec 1968) and later collected in Report on Planet Three (1972). Compare also this passage from 2010: Odyssey Two (1982):

‘Hell, Chandra – he’s only a machine!’

Chandra looked at Max with such a steady, confident gaze that the younger man quickly dropped his eyes.

‘So are we all, Mr Brailovsky. It is merely a matter of degree. Whether we are based on carbon or on silicon makes no fundamental difference; we should each be treated with appropriate respect.’

[26] The 1962 version is basically the same, but with some sweet adjustments of scale. No mention of microchip and the computer-as-complex-as-human-brain is squeezed on a single floor of the Empire State Building. But the matchbox equivalent is mentioned later in the text – only the first mention, in the brackets, belongs to the 1999 edition alone.

[27] “Prospectors and Rangers” in the 1962 edition.

[28] Only “sixteen megatons” in the 1962 edition. Such is progress, Arthur might have quipped.

[29] The 1962 edition has very different contents in these brackets: “I sometimes wonder what the sixty-year-old Fellow of the Royal Society now thinks of his youthful indiscretion, if he ever remembers it”.

[30] From “A Free Man’s Worship” (1903), one of Russell’s earliest and least characteristic writings.