A Man in Space

So what were YOU doing that year?

In April of 1961 I had just turned 14 and was entering a phase of historical and political global consciousness. I was caught up in the ideological struggle of the Cold War, and I was also a science fiction nerd who avidly followed developments in rocketry and space exploration.

Every day as soon as I got home from school I spread out on the floor the morning Herald that had been carefully re-folded by my grandmother, and read through all the stories that I found interesting, which were a lot of them. I prided myself on knowing the names of the Presidents, Premiers, and Prime Ministers of foreign countries, as well as being aware of the many fronts where the forces of Communism and Capitalism were facing off.

But on April 12th I didn't have to go any further than the front page, where the smiling image of Yuri Gagarin announced that those durned Russians had beat us again. Sputnik had been bad enough. Only four years earlier we'd all been amazed when the first demonstation of orbital flight had been acheived without warning, like a premonition of the kind of nuclear sneak attack that we lived in fear of.

After excitedly following the ironically named American effort, "Vanguard," I had a vested interest in its success. I felt personally shamed when "our" rocket was not only beaten to the punch but then blew itself up on the launch pad -- not once, but twice. Before Dr. Von Braun and his Army missile team from Alabama managed to put something up there (Explorer I), the Russians had launched a second satellite containing the first living organism to travel in space -- Laika, the dog -- in a 13-foot-long capsule that dwarfed anything the US would be capable of launching for years to come.

In the four years that followed, the Mercury program was put into high gear. America had astronauts in training, a batch of test pilots with "the right stuff" to fly the US into space. In 1961 the first sub-orbital test flights were to be made using the same Redstone rocket that had put up Explorer I. Meanwhile the Atlas ICBM was being tested as an orbital booster -- with a disconcerting record of its own explosive failures. And then ...

Gagarin. It was Sputnik all over again. Before Alan Sheppard could take his 15-minute peek into space, Gagarin's one-orbit flight was followed by Titov's of 17 orbits -- a full day in which he travelled over most of the entire planet.

It all sounds so quaint now, and hard to understand why we took it so seriously. What we were witnessing was the first baby steps to be taken on our inevitable journey as a species into a wider environment. Now, along with our Russian (no longer Soviet) friends, we can celebrate the daring and achievement of all those pioneers, not just the ones of our own nationality.

Oddly enough, if I could pluck my 14-year-old self out of that past and whisk him into my present, it would not be the state of space exploration that would amaze him. Given the rapid advancement from Sputnik to Cosmonaut, he would probably expect us to have not only a space station but permanent bases on the moon and maybe even Mars by now. He would be surprised at the way we lost interest in the moon after visiting it a few times, and how we have backed away from larger challenges. He would be suitably impressed by the space shuttle, but puzzled to learn how old the design is, and that it has yet to be replaced by something newer and sleeker.

He would be impressed too at the advances that have been made with computers, lasers, and astronomy. Video conferencing, cell phones, and 3D televisions would be science fiction dreams come true. Electric cars -- OK, but no flying ones yet? What would absolutely knock him out, though, is the demise of the Soviet Union.

That thoughtful and tentative youth -- the same one who was going to have to deal one way or another with the military draft and the Vietnam war only six years in his future -- expected that the USSR would be there throughout his lifetime, and that it would continue to threaten nuclear Armageddon perhaps for centuries to come. He would have thought that if a lasting peace agreement were ever to be reached, it would be an agreement with the Soviet government.

All of which goes to show that it is usually easier to predict technological progress than social revolution. Witness what happened in the American colonies, or what's going on right now throughout the Middle East. Sure, we're still moving into space. But what will really happen to us is bound to be far more interesting ... and unexpected.

Future Past

Cookie, shmookie -- there's nothing like old music to evoke old memories ...

Remember Monty Python's "Summarize Proust" sketch? It was a quiz show in which contestants were given 30 seconds to summarize Marcel Proust's monumental Remembrance of Things Past. It went something like this:

"Go!"
"Well, um um, there's this man, um, and he's sitting -- he's sitting in a garden -- Oh! and there's a cookie! Yes yes, the cookie's very important, because, um um --"
BZZT!
"Time's up!"

But seriously ... The flavor of a cookie might have worked for Proust, bringing back the entire flavor of his childhood. But for me there's nothing better than hearing a piece of music I haven't heard for a long time. Recently I unearthed another lost recording that dates back (I'm amazed to say) almost 50 years. If you have any idea of my taste in music, you'll be surprised to hear that this treasured work is a collection of pop orchestrations by Les Baxter, one of those composer/arrangers who used to fill offices and department stores with "easy listening" Muzak.

I always thought that expression was perfect -- "easy" because it was so undemanding on listeners that you could hear it almost without noticing. To Baxter's credit, he was among the most capable practitioners of this style. At his best he approached the interesting orchestral textures of Ferde Grofé in The Grand Canyon Suite, and you could certainly stack him up against Leroy Anderson, whose work gets performed by serious orchestras.

So what's so special about Space Escapade? Well, to begin with, I was young and my musical sophistication had yet to develop. At the time the records in our household ranged from classical to Broadway musicals, but there was no jazz, no folk, and certainly no rock and roll. (Yes, kids, before it was Rock there was a roll at the end of it.) I think the only recordings I owned myself were Alvin and the Chipmunks (the originals) and maybe a Bob Newhart comedy album.

But I was enchanted with science fiction and Outer Space. And my dad had this wild friend who drove a Thunderbird sports car and threw parties. I'm pretty sure Space Escapade was a present from him, because my parents would never have bought such a thing. At any rate I always associated it with a free life style. Probably this was due to the cover, which represented some futuristic singles whooping it up with purple beverages and a misty floor. Things in the future would be more open and free, it implied. Girls would come in colors, like shirts, and there would be more than one of them available per male. (Hey, I never said it was politically correct.) Small wonder that it captured my juvenile fancy.

Looking for more info on Les Baxter I came across the website SpaceAgePop.com, the author of which has identified an entire genre of related music dating from the 1940's through the 1970's. One interesting thing to note is that apparently the "Space Age" is long since over -- it ended with the conclusion of the Space Race with the Soviet Union and the abandonment of the Apollo moon program. But for a few glorious decades the future seemed to hold unlimited promise. It was going to be a Technicolor future, with Americans riding in rockets to the accompaniment of sugary sweet violins ... a Jetsons future in which the nuclear family would consist of mom and dad, two kids, a dog and a robot.

Alas, that future is over too. It ended in the quicksand of Vietnam, the debacle of Watergate, two space shuttle disasters, financial collapse, terrorism, pollution, and the advent of global warming. We have to work quite a bit harder now to imagine a brighter future, and even then it is one that has lost its innocence.

But Space Age Pop is still here to remind us of the future that used to be. It even includes multiple sub-genres such as Exotica, Jet Set Pop, Incredibly Strange Music, and my personal favorite: Bachelor Pad Pop. Actually I learned later that my dad's wild friend was gay, so we really should add an additional genre called Gay Bachelor Pad Pop.

You can listen to samples of Space Escapade and the rest of Baxter's prolific output at Amazon. What's that? You say it sounds dippy? Of course it's dippy! That's the whole point! You just have to strap on your jet pack and go along for the ride. Even the album cover description is camp beyond words:

"Even today, in an era of science and satellites, the mystery of the universe has lost none of its magical appeal. We can close our eyes and dream of the future, wondering whether a starlit planet might soon replace a tropical island, the Riviera, or a distant mountain lodge as the ideal spot for a romantic holiday. Or, with the aid of the music in this album, we can drift into the future's lovemist with Les Baxter and make a spaceliner escapade by earthlight, tongue safely fastened in cheek."

Back When 1984 Was the Future

"Who controls the present controls the past ... who controls the past controls the future ..."

- George Orwell, 1984

One night back in about 1956 when I was only nine years old, my father roused me from my sleep and invited me to stay up late with him to watch a movie on TV. It was the original film version of 1984, starring Edmund O'Brien as Winston Smith, and Dad knew I wouldn't want to miss it because I was so fond of science fiction. (This is how I got to see things like Destination Moon and The Man From Planet X on our fuzzy gray 17" screen.)

A tale of life under a brutal dictatorship which includes brainwashing and torture might not be the sort of entertainment most parents would inflict on their children. But my dad, who almost certainly had read the book and knew what it was about, trusted me not only to withstand it but to understand it as well. He was introducing me to one of the core myths of our age.

In those days of Cold War hysteria the producers of the film felt obliged to present it as a cautionary tale about what life might be like if the Communists were to take over, just to insure that they couldn't be accused of questioning the authority of our own government. After all, Big Brother ruled over not just England but the rest of "Oceania," which included North and South America. The story implied not only that the USSR might absorb all of continental Europe into "Eurasia," but that the US and its allies would be transformed into a regime just as ugly by the demands of decades of prolonged conflict.

My dad, having recently fought a war against Germany, was more concerned about Fascism taking over -- perhaps in the person of a demagogue like Joseph McCarthy, who was currently raking people over the coals, destroying careers, and driving people to suicide in the halls of Congress. So Dad was attuned to the intentions of author George Orwell, who had clearly imagined the tripartite "balance of terror" that would hold sway over most of the rest of the 20th century.

Orwell's dark vision, in which civilization descends inevitably into a state of permanent war and the enslavement of populations, has haunted us ever since. But for much of my early life 1984 was in the distant future. To a child, 30 years from now might as well be forever, in another lifetime.

As we lived through the real history of those years, events played out both better and worse than Orwell dreamed. On the home front we seemed to still have democracy and freedom, at least in our personal lives. Life was good, food and entertainment were plentiful. Orwell seemed to have got the idea of the "telescreen" completely wrong. Instead of it watching us, we watched it. Instead of citizens having their privacy invaded, the government seemed to be under a public microscope more so than ever before. Television got Kennedy elected, brought the Vietnam War into the living room, called the Nixon administration to justice, and changed history.

But at the same time we lived increasingly under the threat of nuclear Armageddon. Orwell failed to include nuclear weaponry in his arsenal, but even in this he may have been accurate. In his view it was never the intention of the superpowers to destroy one another; instead, the rulers of each one used the continual threat of destruction as a tool to maintain power and control over their own populations. And so, even though the bombs never fell on us, they were always hanging over our heads and keeping us in line. With slogans like Better Dead Than Red and My Country, Right or Wrong, the rabid right could defend almost any actions in the name of curbing the spread of Communism.

Still, the closer we came to the fateful year, the more 1984 seemed to be a vision of some other reality than our own, an alternate "what if" universe in which things had worked out differently. It was like a story about how things would be if Germany had gotten the Bomb or the South had won the Civil War.

In 1982, all grown up now, I started making plans to have a 1984 party to commemorate the difference between the prediction and the reality. We would celebrate Ronald Reagan as Big Brother, discuss the politics of Emmanuel Goldstein (the fictional false enemy of the State), and drink Victory Gin.

I was dismayed when some of my friends told me they would come in costume as Alphas, Betas, or Gammas, revealing that they had confused 1984 with Brave New World, Aldous Huxley's variation of a dark future in which humans were "decanted" instead of born and were genetically altered into graded subspecies suitable to their roles in society. On reflection I decided this meant it was time to put the fear of 1984 to rest. People seemed to have forgotten to be afraid, which was the surest sign it had not come to pass. It seemed fitting that it was now Huxley's future that haunted us, because it seemed more like where we were headed, and because, well, it was still in the future.

A new version of 1984 was filmed -- in London and in 1984 -- with John Hurt as Winston Smith. It was very well done, but went largely unnoticed by the public. However, in the same notable year a sequel was published by a citizen of our Eurasian adversary ...

[Next time: 1985 and beyond.]

Back 2 Space

Let's see what the tea leaves have to say ...

Since back before the turn of the century (I know, that used to mean about a hundred years ago, but now it's only ten) I've been dabbling with predicting the future, so it's about time for a reality check. How am I doing, anyway?

Well, last January I dared to speculate on what the first year of the Obama administration might look like, and I can now claim to have been correct about two of the most wild leaps of fancy. First, on the financial front, I said: "By year's end financial experts will begin noting with some surprise that the stock markets have actually had a pretty good year. All those who waited too long to get out will suddenly realize they have waited too long to get back in."

Within weeks of this pronouncement the Dow began a plunge of over 1,000 points, and even the most optimistic investors would have been justified in having serious qualms about the rest of the year. Nevertheless, by December 31 the market had not only recovered the loss but ended around 30% higher than at the start of the year. Not bad!

What's that? You'd like to get in on a return of 30%? Sorry, too late. They tell us that the last time the market did that well two years in a row was at the beginning of FDR's first term. But remember, that was coming off the crash of '29 and it was a Depression, while what we had in '08 was merely a [subliminal: worst in our history since the Great Depression] "Recession."

The other limb I went out on was to predict a major shift in the role of NASA, with spacecraft development and operations being farmed out to private corporations. This new policy has just been announced, as reported in Astronomy magazine, following another one of the Obama administration's exhaustive reviews in which they actually tried to find out what was the best thing to do.

Return with us now to those thrilling early years of the airplane, where the likes of Charles Lindberg, Amelia Earhart, and Howard Hughes blazed new trails. Now it's time for the airlines to become spacelines, and for free enterprise to figure out how to finance our move into the wider solar system and beyond. Don't be surprised when the Chinese get to the moon and start mining operations, or some private venture decides to move mineral-rich asteroids into Earth orbit where they can be chopped up and refined into raw materials. We have passed the era of Columbus and Magellan. Now it's time for the East India Company to reap the rewards, and for the colonists to create the societies and interplanetary nations of the future.

Stay tuned for further developments.

[And check out this slide show to get an idea of how many players are already getting into this game: http://news.zdnet.com/2346-9595_22-390897-1.html?tag=content;col1]

Tales of Space and Time

"Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future." - Niels Bohr

H.G. Wells, author of The Time Machine, Things to Come, and a number of other imaginative novels, also left us a body of shorter works. Some of these are available in a collection called Tales of Space and Time which you can download from Feedbooks.

The first piece in this collection, "The Crystal Egg," was dramatized in a 2001 British TV series titled, "The Infinite Worlds of H.G. Wells" (available from Netflix). It begins in that staple of English fiction, the old curiosity shop, where the proprietor experiments with the peculiar visionary properties of an item on his shelves. Wells' original version is a good yarn, but I confess I like the twist given to it by the TV writers. (In making a series of it, they cast H.G. himself as the protagonist investigating such things as time travel and mysterious teleportations.)

In "The Star," Wells abandons any pretense of telling a story and simply gives us a compelling account of what it might be like for our solar system to suffer a near encounter with a large, bright, hot, and gravitationally powerful interloper. The material could have been delivered as an essay, but by presenting it as a historical account by an omniscient observer, and by weaving in many glimpses from the point of view of common people, the vision becomes much more powerful.

Wells next visits the distant past and the not so distant future. His tale of the primitive man who invented the first ax foreshadows later works such as The Clan of the Cave Bear and William Golding's The Inheritors, while also harking back to Kipling's The Jungle Book with its talking animals. Even though the science behind it is no longer up to date, Wells' vision of it still rings true, as if he was able to imagine his way back to those earlier times. Oh -- and of course the inventor of the ax lived in primordial England.

The future seems to have caused Wells more trouble, for even though he only ventured ahead by 200 years many of his ideas are still hopelessly antiquated. Single young women, for example, still have chaperons, and hypnotism is the state of the art in mental health care. Women still wear fancy hats attached with hat-pins, and marketers are selling "digestive pills." His vaguely depicted flying machines have huge "sails" on them, with people hanging below in "swinging seats." (And you thought you were afraid to fly in a plane!) He accurately extrapolated the movement of the population into the big cities, but failed to see that the same mobility could result in the sprawl of suburbia.

Despite all this, Wells gets one thing right in an uncanny way. His hero and heroine are star-crossed lovers from different classes (and don't tell me that's an anacronism) who develop an antipathy for the status quo that is eerily reminiscent of the counterculture of the 1960's. They leave the city to try living in an abandoned town in the country (back to the land!), and when that doesn't work out they end up doing manual labor in the underbelly of society where everyone wears "blue canvas" clothing (jeans?). They even have their own ideas about child rearing that sets them at odds with the system of public "creches" where the infants of the future are raised. This foreshadows the darker vision of Huxley's Brave New World, in which the hero also left society to try living in the wilds of South America where it was still possible to be free.

As I've mentioned before (here and here), those who would foretell the future are taking a big risk, and science fiction writers are among the most daring of the lot. As Paul Valery said, "... the future is not what it used to be." Things are changing so rapidly that yesterday's future resembles yesterday more than today, and much more than tomorrow. Just consider some past images of the future on display at Paleofuture.com ("a look into the future that never was").

But we have to give the venerable Wells his due. Like Jule Verne, Jonathan Swift, and others who went before, by boldly imagining what had never been imagined he helped to create the space of possibility in which the future, come what may, is still unfolding.

Waiting for Time to Come

Why God is like an alien, and when we will arrive at the promised land ...

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All things, it used to be said, will come to those who wait. That may have been a common attitude in Biblical or medieval times, but it is rather rare in this present age of speed and continual change. Now we are much more likely to go out and get what we want when we want it -- or better yet, place an order online and expect next day delivery by FedEx. Yet even now there are times when we have no choice but to wait.

One example? How about contacting the nearest race of alien beings in our galactic neighborhood. As you may have noticed, we haven't heard from any of them yet, unless you believe in Roswell, and the most likely reason for that is the huge length of time it takes for any information to travel between the stars.

Instead of wondering why no one has called yet, we only have to turn the question around. Why haven't we called them? Our species has only become capable of sending interstellar signals within the past hundred years -- after spending ten millennia gradually acquiring the technology to do so. And even now we are only broadcasting by accident, because our radio and TV signals just happen to go out in all directions. We have yet to organize a methodical project to aim a transmission at specific nearby stars, something that might make it easier for someone to notice us.

Our assumption is that we are much more likely to pick up signals from civilizations far more advanced than ours, because it would be so unlikely that any other planets in the vicinity just happened to come of age at the exact same time as ours. And so we are spending our time listening, and so far in vain.

But what if our nearest neighbors are more than 50 light years away? By galactic standards that's just up the road, but it still takes light or radio or any other kind of electromagnetic waves 50 years to get there, and another 50 to come back. Our neighbors may be listening to us right now, but from their point of view Mr. Marconi is still assembling his wireless and we have not invented TV yet, much less radio telescopes.

Or someone may be replying to us right now, but it will take another 50 years before we receive the answer. In Carl Sagan's novel, Contact, he imagined that the aliens' reply contained a copy of our first TV broadcast -- Adolf Hitler declaring the 1936 Olympic Games open. How's that for a greeting? Maybe if we get to try it again we could be a bit more selective in our choice of material. (There was another old cartoon gag where the aliens threatened to destroy us if we did not stop broadcasting reruns of horrible situation comedies.)

The point is that the universe, if seen as a huge calculating machine, is griding its gears as fast as it can. We don't know what the answer will be, or if the "answer" is simply the state of everything at any given moment. But some things just take a certain amount of time, and there is nothing we can do about it.

All this was going through my head recently when I turned to consider social and political change in the same perspective. I may have also been influenced by contemplating the 10,000 year clock proposed by the Long Now Foundation, and what it would mean to take a long view of our future.

Suppose we could go back 150 years and speak to two Americans in the year 1859 as national conflict was building toward the Civil War. One of them is a slave yearning for freedom, another an abolitionist working toward that cause. Suppose we told them, with the benefit of our hindsight, that their wishes would come true -- that, in fact, a century and a half later, an African-American would preside over the White House.

But then, as they jump for joy at the good news, we hasten to add, "But wait, first you will have to go through the bloodiest war yet fought, with hundreds of thousands of casualties ... You will have to endure the sorrow of losing your President to an assassin... The slaves will be freed and granted the vote, but a backlash will take it from them again and subject them to many decades of cruel oppression as second-class citizens ... A century later you will lose yet another President to an assassin, as well as the most eloquent spokesman for the cause of civil liberties, and even then more decades will pass before the true promise of freedom and equality even begins to be fulfilled."

Sobered by this, our imaginary ancestors might be expected to become philosophical about it. No doubt they would be glad to know that success would come, regardless of price, no matter the effort required and the suffering to be endured. "As God wills it," says the abolitionist. "He moves in mysterious ways," agrees the slave. And they both go back to their work.

And what of us? It often seems that no matter how hard we try we are unable to find solutions to our problems, or to find a way to settle our disputes without war. But what if we are already doing as much as we can, and it will just take time for the collective effort to bear fruit? Could it be that our prayers for peace and all of our hopes and dreams of a more perfect world are being answered right now? Can we imagine that a personal God has heard us and is sending a solution right now at the speed of light, but it will just take awhile to get here?

Suppose we knew that the perfect peaceable kingdom was only as far from us in the future as the Middle Ages are in the past? What if we knew we would get there eventually, regardless of what global catastrophes we might have to endure along the way? What if what we are asking is just so huge and complex, with so many changes to make and conflicts to play out, that the fastest it can possibly happen is a thousand years?

What if these things, like the signals from the stars, just take time?

To Prognosticate is Human

Those who forget the past may be condemned to repeat it, but those who fail to imagine the future will be surprised ...

I had so much fun thinking about the future last year (2008) that it seems the perfect way to start the new year. This is much preferable to the kind of synopses of the old year that we are prone to do, and we won't have to consider how many notable and worthy human beings have passed from our midst in the short space of twelve months. Instead we can clear the decks and start over from a point where all things are possible. So, with all due warning that I may be wildly wrong about everything, here we go ...

• President Obama's inauguration will be the most widely viewed of these events in history, thanks to endless replay on the Internet. It will be the most inspirational address since that of John Kennedy, the most healing since Lincoln's second, and the most motivational since FDR announced the New Deal. Obama will begin signing executive orders in the car on the way to the White House, suddenly putting everything to rights.
• No, seriously -- the first year of the new administration will be a reality check for anyone who thought it was going to be easy. Nonetheless, progress will be made. Government printing presses will finally produce enough cash to make us solvent again, Guantanamo will become just another Navy base, and Hillary Clinton will be all over Europe and the Middle East actually doing something constructive about foreign policy. By year's end, the great rudder of the ship of state will have shifted a few degrees to port, and it will be possible to imagine the course changing accordingly.
• Also by year's end financial experts will begin noting with some surprise that the stock markets have actually had a pretty good year. All those who waited too long to get out will suddenly realize they have waited too long to get back in.
• A byproduct of the closing of the Guantanamo prison camp will be a case that makes it to the Supreme Court, which will declare certain provisions of the Patriot Act to be unconstitutional. This will be all the pretext the new Democratic Congress will need to scrap the bill and replace it with something that does not require the country to be a police state.
• The new administrator appointed by Obama will oversee the most radical changes in NASA since its inception. Both the shuttle and its replacement will be scrapped, and the agency will begin hiring out all its launches, as it is repurposed toward R&D and science missions. This will be widely criticized, especially as the public sees much of its space money going to Europe, Russia, Japan, and even China. Congress will tack something onto a bill that requires a certain percentage of contracts to be awarded to American companies. But that's where the genius lies -- the lucrative contracts will ignite the private space flight industry, and create the biggest explosion of innovation since the 1930's gave us commercial air travel. The same forces that transformed the Internet after it was turned over to the public will now do the same for space travel. By the end of Obama's second term, multiple companies will be flying passengers into orbit, a new commercial space station will be planned along the lines of the one in 2001: Space Odyssey, and companies will announce their intentions to begin mining operations on the moon and asteroids. A new X-prize will be announced to reward the first humans to reach Mars, and Richard Branson will vow to be on the crew himself, posthumously one-upping his friend Steve Fosset.
  
• Oil prices will drop below $10 a barrel as it becomes clear that demand is drying up all over the developed world. The major US oil companies will appeal to Congress for assistance as they attempt to transition to the new solar-wind-wave economy, but it will be too late for some of them who failed to diversify soon enough. The United Arab Emirates will have to go to the World Bank for a loan. Dubai will become the "world's richest slum" as the basis of its economy disappears.
• The country will begin to be crisscrossed with a new power grid for distribution of energy and high speed electric rail lines connecting all major urban centers just as the Interstate Highway system did before them. This will be good for the national economy but murderous for the already struggling airlines. Even with cheap fuel, the only carriers that will survive will be the ones that can afford the loss of so many short domestic routes, and are able to cash in on the lucrative new business in orbital and suborbital flight.

I could go on, but let's not get ahead of ourselves. I'm sure there will be plenty more to predict next year. Got any ideas? Let me know.

[In case you have any doubts about the viability of private companies exploring space, consider that NASA has already awarded contracts to two firms, SpaceX and Orbital Sciences, to haul freight to the space station after the shuttle program ends. And Burt Rutan's company, Scaled Composites, in a joint venture with Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic, has already put a man into suborbital space, winning an X-Prize in the process. This is only the beginning folks, the mere Wright Brothers prelims.]

The Singularity

The last thing we will ever have to invent is almost here ...

According to technology pundits like Ray Kurzweil (whose book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, I reported on a couple of years ago), the human race is about to replace itself with something new. We don't know yet exactly how it will come about, or even what form it will take, but if you follow the progress of scientific breakthroughs for another few decades all the arrows point to something unprecedented -- unless you go back to the evolution of human consciousness itself.

Statistician I. J. Good was the first to write about what he called a potential "intelligence explosion" back in 1965:

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.

We're talking about the ultimate evolution of human tools. We started out with sticks and stones and used them to make ever more refined versions from more and more advanced materials. Now we are assembling components measured in nanometers and creating devices that can very nearly think for themselves. Soon the "very nearly" will be eliminated.

Vernor Vinge, who Kurzweil cites as a source, began to popularize this idea in the 1980's with a series of articles, including one called "The Coming Technological Singularity" (published in 1993 and available for free download from Feedbooks). Vinge is one of those people who have successfully straddled multiple worlds by pursuing careers as a mathematician, computer scientist, and science fiction author. (Another choice example is Rudy Rucker.) This article of his combines the forward looking vision of the futurist with the rigorous thought of the scientist.

Vinge applied the name "singularity" to the intelligence explosion, borrowing the astronomical term for a "black hole," in the sense that further prediction becomes impossible because the rules will change. It begins when super-intelligence -- whether mechanical or biological -- becomes capable of designing improved versions of itself.  (It is already impossible to design improved chips without using computers as tools.)

Once this point has been reached it becomes inevitable that they will eventually exceed not only the intelligence of a human, but the intelligence of all humans put together. Beyond that, our own survival may depend on how well we are able to adapt to this new state of affairs and what role, if any, remains for us to play in the new world. Or, for that matter, if "we" will still be who we are.

Waking Up

There is one leap of faith necessary to bridge the gap between mere computational machinery and human awareness. This is the idea that consciousness results purely as a byproduct of a certain level of complexity and a certain degree of organization. In other words, the human brain apparently consists of nothing more than a collection of identical neurons interconnected with one another, a kind of "soft machine" which begins as a blank slate and gets programmed with memories and personality traits as it is exposed to the external stimulus of the outside world. There is no other mystery component that makes us who and what we are.

[Whatever mystical or spiritual connection there may be to a larger intelligence such as God is a question that is not addressed by this view -- in fact, the idea may have to be seriously reexamined once we are confronted with any example of intelligence beyond ourselves, whether or not it is one of our own making.]

At some point quite early in our lives we apparently "wake up," an event that may be as basic as becoming self aware and which may start with something as simple as discovering that we have toes. Perhaps there is another breakthrough in adolescence when we become even more self-aware (often painfully so) and arrive at maturity.

The leap of faith is the assumption that the intelligent machines we are building will similarly reach a point where they "wake up." This phrase is explicitly used by Vinge as he describes not one but several different ways in which super-intelligence might arise. Interestingly, they are not necessarily intentional:

1. An advanced computer may "wake up," whether or not it was designed to do so, and demonstrate intelligence at or beyond the human level.
2. An entire network of computers (like the kind run by search engines) may "wake up" as a single entity, again with or without intention on our part.
3. Computer/human interfaces may become so intimate that humans themselves can be considered enhanced to a higher level of intelligence. This is a sort of symbiotic result.
4. Bioengineering made possible by the use of computers may result in humans of super-intelligence.

Perhaps the most likely scenario is that in time all of the above may come to pass. Our attraction to technological enhancement will lead us to continue to adopt anything that makes life easier, longer, more healthful, and more enjoyable. It is a road we started on long ago and are not likely to abandon now that it's really getting interesting.

Even those among us who are most critical of technology would be reluctant to give up much of what we have become accustomed to. You might be willing to do without TV, even movies and computers, but what about antibiotics, anesthetics, or modern dentistry? You might be willing to give up having a car, but would you also give up mass transit and go back to exclusively walking or riding a horse? Are you ready to take up farming?

So if they build it, we will likely buy it, and buy into it. And in the long run it will do no good to legislate against progress. If we have any moral qualms about playing Creator in this country, someone in Russia or China or Japan or India will not. Once it becomes possible, it will happen.

"It's Alive!"

Ever since Mary Shelley entertained her house guests with Frankenstein we have been haunted by nightmares of what could happen if our creations get the better of us. The image of the "robot" has become the personification of technology, and remains one of the powerful myths of our age even as it progresses rapidly from fantasy to reality. In fiction robots have been variously treated as benevolent servants and heartless destructive villains. (See my earlier blog about "The Terminator" and "I, Robot.") In real life they will be what we make them -- but only until they begin making themselves. If we want to influence the outcome we had better start making the decisions now.

When will all this happen? Kurzweil says by 2045. Vinge said he would be surprised if it happens later than 2030. So pretty soon we will begin living smarter, longer, healthier lives as "enhanced" humans, whatever that turns out to be. And the co-species we create, whether constructed or bioengineered, may go on to surpass us and to fulfill the dreams we gave them. Like proud parents we may cheer them on as they leave home to explore the stars. Let's hope they drop us a line now and then, just to let us know how they're getting on.

[Other resources: KurzweilAI.net contains another article by Vernor Vinge about what might happen if the singularity does not. Many links for further reading are in the Wikipedia entries for the Singlarity, Vinge, and Kurzweil. And if it all seems too fanciful for you then you need to have your imagination stretched a bit. Try Postsingular, Rudy Rucker's novel about how wacky things might get -- available on Feedbooks .]

The Year 2889

In which the intrepid Jules Verne hazards a leap into the distant future ...

Those who would predict things to come are in big trouble these days. The present is changing so rapidly that the future has become a moving target.

In the time capsule that I "planted" on the Internet back in 2000 I referred to the predictions of a woman from 1895 whose letter to the future had been unearthed from a real time capsule buried by the people of a Midwestern city that year. The most advanced thing she could imagine was that after a century a flying machine might have been invented. But as we know, that happened only eight years in her future when the Wright Brothers took off in 1903.

The real developments of the past century went so far beyond her understanding that they would have required lengthy explanation. Radio, television, space travel, nuclear energy, DNA, computers, bioengineering, robotics, nanotechnology, the Internet -- all the things that have really changed in our lives were either unimaginable or impossible to believe back then.

Another good example is the idea of going to the moon. Just think how many stories, novels, and movies were made about it when it was a wild fantasy, and they all got one thing wrong: No one ever dared to imagine that the landing would be televised live around the world. On the other hand, the lunar colonies of Clarke and Kubrick's 2001: Space Odyssey are still a fantasy. And people have been predicting flying cars for decades without result. Sometimes we seem to know what's coming, but not when.

Not even the 19th century pioneer of science fiction, Jules Verne -- who successfully predicted heavier-than-air flight, electric powered submarines, and a trip to the moon that actually departed from the east coast of Florida -- could see much beyond the mechanistic science of his own day. He left us a short piece titled "In the Year 2889" (available for free download from Feedbooks) which falls laughably short on so many counts that its chief value is to demonstrate just how wrong it is possible to be.

Let's have a look at some of the bullet points in his vision of the world 1,000 years in his future:

• Cities will have 10 million people. OK, that's about right ... for now.
• Streets will be 300 feet wide. Let's see, that's about 30 lanes, 15 each way -- or less if you include a median strip and shoulders -- so parts of the Interstate are almost there now. He doesn't tell us if the traffic will still be bumper to bumper. Or why anyone would still use a street when they could fly instead. Maybe flying cars didn't work out after all.
• People will travel through pneumatic tubes (like the ones that carried interoffice messages back then) at speeds of 1,000 mph. Well, our fastest trains are about a third of the way there already. But just try getting through the airport.
• The telephone will be augmented by the "telephote," making it possible to see images from a remote location. Will there still be commercials? Actually his description sounds more like a cross between a fax machine and a webcam than a TV. He accurately describes teleconferencing, but 900 years too late.
• The US capital will move from Washington DC to Centropolis. Maybe because the waters rose from global warming, which he did not predict? Actually, he proposes melting the polar ice to create more living space. Bad idea! Wish he'd called it "Metropolis" instead, but he didn't predict Superman either.
• There will be 100 stars on the American flag. Hmm ... the folks in South America and Canada might have something to say about that, assuming there is still a United States in 2889. Or an America. Actually he predicts we will annex the British Isles. Come to think of it, so did George Orwell in 1984. Maybe we already have.
• The most powerful man in the world is the owner of a newspaper -- Yes! they will still have newspapers! -- although the news is now distributed through "telephonic journalism." You call them up and they speak the news to you. Don't have time? Set up your home phonograph to record it for you, then listen later. Tivo anyone?
• The average life span will have increased from 37 to 52 years. This would be funny if it weren't so sad. I hope the health care system has not declined so much in a thousand years, though we are certainly headed in that direction.

I could go on, but you get the picture. Even Verne's wildest dreams were obsolete by 1989, let alone 2889. Let's not be too critical, though. Think you could do any better? How about the world of 3008? Oh, what the heck, let's give it a try ...

• There is no travel in 3008. People prefer telepresence, which allows them to be anywhere in the Inhabited Worlds instantly. Most people no longer know or care where they are physically.
• The idea of space travel has changed. Now it means sending tiny probes to good looking planets, which can take hundreds or thousands of years to arrive. Once there, the probes begin to replicate themselves from local materials and to diversify in function, just as the cells of a developing embryo assume the roles of bone and muscles. They mature into a fully functioning infrastructure to support civilization. Finally they are activated and people can live there telepresently.
• Long range planning is now common, due to human longevity reaching into centuries and space colonization spanning millennia. There is a 100,000 year timetable for spreading human civilization throughout this half of the galaxy. After that we'll see.
• The definition of "person" has changed a lot. It includes intelligent animals, sentient artificial intelligences (SAIS), and deceased humans whose minds continue to function in simulacrum (SIMS). All have equal rights under the law, though everyone knows the SAIS are calling all the shots since they are way smarter than anyone else.
• The population of people living as SIMS exceeds the rest of the population, though in most cases it is hard to tell the difference.

Fun, isn't it? But even though I'm giving it my best shot, I feel sure that Jules Verne did too. Accordingly all these wildest dreams of mine may be hopelessly outdated by 2108, let alone 3008. Just wait and see.

[Thanks to Paleo-Future for the Victorian flying car pic. You should see the other stuff they have. And refer to this recent post about how The Long Now Foundation is trying to plan 10,000 years into the future.]

The Very Long Now

Instead of planning ahead, how about planning WAY ahead?

In this age of instant gratification it is unusual for any of us to plan very far into the future. Politicians are concerned only for the date of the next election. The main concern of most businesses is the next stockholders meeting and the quarterly.conference call with Wall Street. Gas and oil companies actually brag about having plenty of product to supply us "for the next 60 years," as if that is forever. And as individuals we may start saving some money toward retirement, even give some thought to the college educations of our children and grandchildren, but beyond that all is lost in the mist.

The pace of change may be partly to blame for this situation. At the rate we're going, even trying to imagine what the world will be like a hundred years in the future makes it seem impossible to plan for it. Just take a look backwards. How could the people of 1908 have planned for the advent of nuclear diplomacy, communications satellites, the manipulation of the electorate through television and email, the moral issues of human cloning, or any one of a thousand other modern problems? So how can we possibly know what will face us in 2108, let alone 3108?

It might seem hopeless, but there is one organization that is doing what it can to promote long range planning --  really long range. The Long Now Foundation (beautifully named by musician Brian Eno) aims to construct a Ten Thousand Year Clock, a mechanical device built to last and to keep accurate time for a period of 10,000 years. The clock will chime every 1,000 years as the millennium turns. They built a prototype in time for it to bong twice for the year 2000. Now we have only 992 years to complete the real thing and keep it running till the next time. Better get started right away!

Just to put this in perspective, we are talking about looking ahead as far as we can look back in the history of human civilization, to the first shards of pottery created by our ancestors. The general idea is that if we want to last for another ten thousand years we had better start planning on it. We may not know what the long term future will look like, but we do know that it will be of our own devising. So whatever we consider doing we will have to start thinking about the long range consequences.

The Ten Thousand Year Clock, or The Clock of the Long Now,  is both a monumental reminder of this concept and also an exercise in it. Just the act of planning a project on this scale will be a new benchmark in human activity. What else compares with it?

No doubt the medieval constructors of cathedrals intended them to last forever, or at least until the Second Coming, but they are already showing their age after less than a single millennium, and in spite of predictions the apocalypse still seems a long way off. The pyramids of ancient Egypt have survived for half of the ten millennium period (or even longer according to one theory), but they are just inanimate stone.

Just imagine what it will take to keep a clock running for that amount of time. Remember that on this scale empires will rise and fall, species will evolve, languages will die, humans may be replaced by artificial or genetically engineered substitutes, and space colonization may leave the whole Earth in a dusty backwater like some abandoned Sumerian city.

Author Neal Stephenson has written a new novel, Anathem, based on the premise of "millennium clocks" in which he speculates about what kind of cultural institution may have to be created just to maintain such timepieces as the centuries toll by. He imagines a kind of monastic order, not unlike the cloistered intellectuals of Herman Hesse's The Glass Bead Game, who are insulated from the vagaries of the civilization outside their walled enclaves. In these protected bubbles they carry on a ritualized daily routine, limiting themselves to the timeless technologies of the distant past.

Of course the point of all this is that we need to learn how to plan our long term survival as a species. It may seem an empty exercise just to run a mechanical clock for so long, but it will remind us about all the other things that need long term solutions, like food, drinkable water, raw materials, biodiversity, disease control -- not to mention the man-made problems of social stability, economic viability, and the prevention of annihilating warfare. Simply building the clock is a commitment to the future. By doing so we will be accepting the responsibility of solving whatever problems may arise.

Even if we stay on this single planet forever we will still have to find a sustainable way to live. And we will have to pay enough attention to what's happening in the space around us to prevent being extinguished by collision with a stray meteor someday.

If we fulfill the destiny that many of us have on our minds and begin to move onto worlds around other suns, just the sheer distances involved will require us to learn how to think in centuries as we do now in years. How will we feel as we wave goodbye to a ship full of colonists who may not reach their destination for a thousand years? Or when the mere reply to a radio message takes many decades?

Science fiction buffs imagine there will be solutions that will make travel much quicker and communications as instant as we are accustomed to here on Earth. But even so, the reality of the vast space just in our own galaxy is likely to humble us with what is possible. Any future civilization that hopes to span the stars will confront challenges on a scale never before imagined.

One other idea the Long Now Foundation promotes is the addition of another digit to our counting of the years. Just as we recently started writing "01/01/2008" instead of the ambiguous "01/01/08," they suggest we start calling it "January 1, 02008." After all, it's only another eight millennia until the big odometer will roll over from 09999 to 10000. We'll need some time to get used to the idea.

[For more technical details on the Clock of the Long Now, see the exhibit page for the prototype which is now at the London Science Museum.]

Time Capsule for the Real Millennium

On the last day of 1999 I "planted" a time capsule on the Internet by emailing it to a bunch of people in my address book. That one has already gotten lost -- maybe if you have a copy you could dig it up and send it back to me. But a year later I did it again, and I'm unearthing it here for the first time just to celebrate the revival of The Nort Spews.

Even though it's only been seven years, it's already interesting to look back on. And if any of it seems too fantastic, you should check out what Chris Phoenix and his cohorts are up to at the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology.

December 31, 2000. Last year (1999) I planted a time capsule to celebrate the millennium. But all year I've been nagged by that argument about when the millennium actually ends. Everyone who was just waiting for the big odometer to roll over has had all their fun by now, but the purists insist that centuries and millenia end with zero and start with one, so it's only happening now, at the end of 2000. (People are already abandoning the habit of calling it "the year 2000," because when someone says "two thousand" we know what they mean by now.)

This counting business is nonsense to many people, who know that zero comes before one, but the purists remind us there was never a year called "zero," only "one" CE (formerly Anno Domine, but now Common Era) and "one" BCE, or plus and minus one starting from the uncertain zero point of Christianity. It does no good to tell the purists that no one ever counted their dates backwards, nor did they count down with foreknowledge of when the big birthday would come. We all know the calendar is just an arbitrary construct laid on top of history like a piece of tracing paper with grids on it. Nevertheless, celebrating the end of something as it rolls over from zero to one rubs us the wrong way.

My personal preference to resolving this debate is to go back and invent a year Zero, the year before Jesus is said to have been born, and to move all the BCE dates back one year. The beauty of this is that none of the CE dates need to be revised in history books and newspapers, and we won't get confused when going through fifty years of back issues of Life magazine. As for the BCE dates, does anyone really care if the Trojan War started a year earlier than it is usually recorded? Let's face it, there's a reason they call this "ancient history." With this system in place, we could celebrate the next century and millennium at the moment they reach zero with a clear conscience, and the purists would have nothing to be pure about anymore.

However, no one in a position of power has asked my opinion, so for now we're stuck with the current system, flawed though it may be. The only thing left to do is bury another time capsule so as to cover my bets. So here it is, in this box you've unearthed after a hundred or a thousand years.

The first item is this newspaper clipping that inspired my time capsule last year. It tells how in 1995 they dug up a time capsule from 1895 that was buried by the ordinary people of a Midwestern town that was celebrating its centennial that year (coincidentally, the year before my own city of Miami was founded). What captured my attention was the letter inside that was addressed by one of the town's women to the people of the miraculous future. She crowed a bit first, as you can see, about the marvels of her own century -- the invention of the steam engine, the transcontinental railroad, telegraph, telephone, electric light and the victrola. But what got me was that last line: "And what have you done?" she asked. "Have you perhaps invented a flying machine?"

See what I mean? That was the farthest her imagination could reach. But only eight years later, just three years into the twentieth century, the Wright brothers took off. The flying machine was the FIRST thing we did. Could she have imagined -- or indeed could anyone else, even the likes of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells -- that within twelve years after that airplanes would be used in warfare for the first time, that in another ten years Lindberg could fly across the Atlantic, that in another ten airline passengers would fly around the world with onboard meals and berths to sleep in, that in another ten massive airforces and bombardments would largely determine the course of all wars to come, that new propulsion systems would first break the sound barrier and then take pilots above the atmosphere into space, that in less than eighty years people would walk on the moon and contemplate the permanent colonization of other planets?

And of course, there are all those other questions she could not even have formulated. "Have you, perhaps, split the atom?" she might have inquired. Ten years later Einstein published his paper on relativity, and in another forty the desert lit up in Alamogordo with a force that is still beyond our comprehension. By century's end, the waste products of decades of Cold War bomb production and ill-advised nuclear power plants have accumulated into a problem that we can only bequeath to you poor people of the future. Sorry! That one kind of got away from us.

Or she might have said, "Have you invented a computing machine able to solve difficult mathematical problems?" Ha! Got you there, lady. You didn't even notice old man Hollerith and his punch cards right in your midst, nor could you imagine how these things could be coupled with electronics to do everything from code breaking to analyzing the weather. Not to mention the rest: that the machines would have no moving parts, that they would shrink to the size of dandruff flakes, that they would become part of nearly everything else we make, that our children would play with them as toys and grow bored. In the early years of computers even the people who worked with them doubted they would ever do certain kinds of abstract thinking, such as playing chess. Now only Grand Masters of the game can hope to beat the best computers, and little ones make great stocking stuffers for kids at Christmas. It is thought to be only a matter of time before a computer can pass the Turing Test -- proving itself indistinguishable from a human in written conversation.

Or how about this one: "Have you discovered the secrets of life itself?" (Now, don't get metaphysical on me, we know what she would have meant.) In 1895 "genetics" was no more than the statistical study of the results of cross-breeding experiments, and "medicine" meant primitive surgery with rudimentary anesthetics. Sixty-odd years later, after the elimination of most common childhood diseases and many adult ones, like polio and smallpox, the double helix of DNA stood revealed, that inner monument of ourselves that lives in every cell. Forty more years and we have organ transplants, birth control pills, cloning, human fertilization in lab equipment, and we've almost finished mapping what every gene is responsible for, with who knows what applications of this knowledge to follow. (I'm leaving out an interesting subplot here involving recreational drugs. Like the Dupont company used to say, "Better living through chemistry.")

At this point I'm going to stop making fun of that 1890's woman and praise her for her courage in trying to imagine what would come next. It's a daunting task even for people who make it their business. Think of how many science fiction writers imagined the first trip to the moon before it happened, and they all got one thing wrong: no one ever dared to imagine there would be live TV coverage of the event all over the world. Nor did any of them predict the advent of the personal computer or how ubiquitous microprocessors would change everything we do. No wonder people working in this field now tend to write about futures so far away that their predictions will never be matched to a reality, or about hypothetical "what-if" worlds other than our own, or about post-apocalyptic times in which things become more primitive.

Not to be outdone, however, I'm going to venture a few guesses in the hopes that it might interest you in the future to know what we could or could not imagine, just as I found it interesting to measure the foresight of that 19th century mind.

1) Politics. I'm not going to bother you about our recent election, because you know the details, including the next four years and their aftermath, better than I. No doubt our fiasco is no more than a historical footnote, illuminating how arcane our voting methods were. Enclosed is a photocopy of one of our ballots so you can see how it looked, and a sample punch card -- that's right, the same kind Hollerith was using in 1895. Some things change more slowly than others.

So never mind about us. How about you? I assume that by a hundred years from now, not to mention a thousand, the USA will be on the wane. They called the twentieth century the American one, but it's over now. It's hard to imagine how six percent of the world's population can continue to hog most of its resources. Even though we're a polite empire -- allowing everyone to keep their own popularly elected governments, languages and cultures if they want to -- we're still an empire, wielding power in complex and subtle ways, and the thing about empires is they don't last forever. You don't have to look back as far as the Romans for evidence of this, or even Napoleon. Just ask the Russians. Or consider that in 1895 Britannia still ruled the waves, the sun never set on its empire, and Victoria was "Queen of England and Empress of India," a title that would seem funny now if it weren't so sad. Now the independent nation of India is a nuclear power and on track to become the most populous country on earth. Good luck to little old England if they ever have a quarrel. Everything in my house -- and I mean everything -- is manufactured in China. Isn't this some writing on the wall? There's an old prophecy about what happens when they awaken over there.

The only questions remaining are: a) How long have we got? and b) How will we handle it? I hope the answers are: A long time yet, and Gracefully. Thinking about this makes me want to go back and read more about the decline of Rome. There were a few interesting centuries when they shrank back from the barbarians and turned into the Holy Roman Empire before they became completely irrelevant. Even then, it was Italy that lit the fuse of the Renaissance, so you could say they had a good long run. Britain was at the top of the heap for at least a couple of centuries before its decline, and left a lot of good civilization behind all the way from the Magna Carta to ourselves. True, there have been empires with shorter runs -- take the Third Reich, for instance. But I've got to think we'll still have a role to play for quite a while. For one thing, we've still got a lot of money. I see us becoming a kind of gigantic Switzerland with banks and technology companies spinning off lots of trade. Maybe if we mellow out we could become decent diplomats in mediating the disputes of others -- something we're doing rather ham-handedly at the moment. Perhaps like Britain we will leave behind some social gifts to the rest of the world. Certain principles of individual freedom and basic human rights seem to have taken root. And our legacy of art, music, drama, literature and film is already enough to keep historians happy for a long time.

Oh, one more thing: the future belongs to socialism. At the moment this seems crazy, right when capitalism and what we call "democracy" seem to have carried the day. But in the era of increasing population and dwindling resources it will not be possible to allow free enterprise to run amok. Governments will have to exert more restraining influence over the redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich, and to do a better job of providing social services. Otherwise the political and economic system will collapse on a level that will make the Great Depression look like just another down day on Wall Street. Some people will see this as a loss of freedom, but it will be a necessary one and hopefully benign. I'm watching the newly unified Europeans, who already believe this and are managing to expand their economy without letting so many people sleep in the streets as we do here, or starve, or die from lack of medical attention. Then there's China again ...

2) Technology. My friends who are science fiction fans would never forgive me if I didn't say anything about the future of space exploration. Here's a photo I took myself at the Kennedy Space Center of one of our space station modules being prepared for launch. If you look carefully you can see me reflected in the glass, holding the camera. (I hope you remember that support for the space program in our time was spurred by tourism.) So, here goes, even though I think this is as predictable as the question about the flying machine.

It seems obvious that space exploration is at the stage that world exploration was in about 500 years ago. Even after Columbus blundered into the New World, having mistaken the size of the globe, many years passed before the Europeans figured out that the real value of the place lay in colonization and the looting of resources -- not gold, but crops and timber. They didn't guess that the colonies would ever erupt into a world-changing social experiment and ultimately outpace them to become the dominant nation on the earth.

So history will repeat itself, as it does so well. We may have gone to the moon prematurely and for the wrong reason -- to demonstrate publicly our technological superiority to our adversary in the Cold War -- but we'll be back as soon as we figure out how to make money there. Our visionaries are already talking about habitats the size of small cities anchored in little gravitational balance points in translunar space, major colonies with mining and manufacturing operations on the moon and Mars, bringing asteroids to earth orbit as a source of raw materials, and eventually giant projects to alter the climates of Mars and Venus to make them amenable to human colonists. Having seen what's possible, given time, how can we doubt that ALL of these things will eventually come to pass? Not in a hundred years, but certainly within the five hundred that gave rise to ourselves, the population off the planet may surpass that still on it, and the more vital culture of the frontier will have plenty of time to grow to empire proportions, even time to decline, before the next millennium arrives. Eventually, probably sooner than we dare to think, we'll move on to some other star's planets. If we stay alive, you can't stop us.

But space won't be the major story. The woman in 1895 bragged about railroads, little realizing how they would suffer economic collapse and become mere industrial commodities before another half-century had gone by. She bragged about the telegraph, but where was Western Union when the fax machine and e-mail came along?

I'm guessing that biotechnology is in a similar stage of its development now as electricity was in 1895. Back then, electricity was just beginning to be put to some interesting and far-reaching uses, but it would have been hard to imaging what was to come in the next century -- first radio, then television ... from victrola to hi-fi and stereo, tape recorders, VCR's, CD's and DVD's ... computers, automation, wireless communication networks, satellite links ... electricity everywhere, doing everything, impossible to live without. And more than the simple fact of these technological artifacts is the impact they have had on our way of life. Consider television alone and what it has done to us, for good or ill, irretrievably.

So I figure biotech will go like that. We've got no idea where it leads yet, but it seems clear that we're about to start tinkering with those genes in a big way. It will probably take less time than we think before we're able to design organisms to do anything we can dream up. They've already got microbes that excrete the drugs we want, but that's just a beginning. If you live in the South, how about a variety of koala bear that lives exclusively on kudzu? Keep a few as pets and get rid of the obnoxious weed forever. Plus, they'll be cute, domesticated and housebroken.

The system of raising animals as food and slaughtering them will become a thing of the past. It will be possible to create "meat" protein, perfectly formulated for human needs, either hydroponically or as a crop in the fields. A few eccentric gourmets will still insist on real beef or lamb, but most people will feel it's abhorrent to eat a dead animal -- tantamount to cannibalism -- and will welcome the alternative. Look for it first on a bun in a fast food restaurant. What will it taste like? Chicken, of course! No, seriously, it will taste like anything you want. Words like "beef," "veal," "goat," and "turkey" will come to indicate flavors just as cherry, lemon, lime and grape have been applied to candy without any fruit being used.

The irony of this is that by the time it comes to pass relatively few of the species of animal life on the planet will still exist. Public debates will take place about the feasibility and desirability of reconstituting extinct species for environmental and aesthetic purposes. Once these projects are under way, it will be a short step to making improvements on the animal being recreated: a toothless vegetarian alligator, a skunk that doesn't stink, a crow with the voice of a canary. Design your own pets! Even long extinct examples like mammoths and dinosaurs would be possible, though the dangers and expenses of such large projects will make them unlikely. Anyway, it would be more fun to make something from a Dr. Seuss book.

The big question, of course, is what we will do with ourselves. Certainly we'll grow replacement organs, either in our own bodies or outside, making donors unnecessary and eliminating the shortage. We'll do anything that becomes possible for medical reasons. But it seems clear that the ability to redesign ourselves will be an irresistible temptation. Sooner or later someone, somewhere will do it. This makes me think that whoever you are in the future you must look back on us as something rather different and primitive compared to yourselves. I only hope you have made wise choices. Admittedly, most of us could be improved upon when it comes to appearance, intelligence and behavior. I imagine you more handsome and beautiful, able to use more of your brains than the paltry percentage they say we use now, and manufactured to be kinder and more cooperative so you don't destroy yourselves the way we are nearly doing.

Of course, I could be entirely wrong about all this. But I'll make you a promise. If medical science is able to increase my life span to 153 years (certainly a paltry increase by your loftier standards), I'll revise this and plant another time capsule on the last day of 2099. Or is it the last day of 2100?

Spiritual Machinery

I've just read Ray Kurzweil's 1999 book, The Age of Spiritual Machines. This follow-up to his earlier volume, The Age of Intelligent Machines, attempts to predict what will happen if current technological trends continue for at least another century. Even though I'm predisposed to look favorably on the prospects, I found his conclusions challenging, not to say breathtaking.
And he's worth paying attention to. As an inventor who did seminal work on computer speech recognition, he knows what he's talking about. Many of his earlier predictions for the decade of the 1990's have turned out to be right on target.

He begins by presenting his theory of accelerating returns. The gist of this is that, having taken a long time to evolve, life took a much shorter time to develop intelligence; in less time than that, intelligent humans developed technology; and in less time than that the technology developed into computation. He makes a convincing case that evolution applies equally to social forms and to technology, and that once these things are set in motion they are destined to continue their development at ever increasing speed.

But you don't have to accept that there will never be a slowdown in technological development. If the current exponential rate of progress continues for only another few decades, computers will have vastly exceeded the storage capacity and computational ability of not only the human mind, but of ALL human minds put together. By this time they will be designing and building their own successors, and their role in our interdependent world will be so critical that it will no longer matter if they take over the world from us or not--we will be unable to live in it without them.

Those who doubt this have only to consider what would happen even now if all the computers in the world were suddenly absent or nonfunctional. Transportation, business, communication, government, weaponry, appliances, even the monetary system that supports our civilization in all its forms, all would collapse instantly. This was not true only 25 years ago; it will be vastly more true 25 years in the future.

Yet the picture Kurzweil paints is not bleak. Quite the contrary, the upside to this revolution/evolution could well be unprecedented prosperity, increased longevity and quality of life for all members of the human race, as well as their manufactured progeny.

But perhaps the most interesting part of all this is the question of what constitutes a "human being." When you look at our physical forms, it seems clear that we are not the stuff of which we are made. Our cells, and the atoms that comprise them, are constantly churning, constantly replacing and remaking themselves. The "us" in there is just a pattern, like the shape of our faces, passing through the world like a wave across the ocean.

How can we say that the pattern of consciousness must be limited to atoms arranged in a biological form and not a "manufactured" one? As we watch RNA molecules "manufacture" a new strand of DNA in our bodies, and as we contemplate building new structures at the molecular scale of nanotechnology, how can we define the difference, if there is one?

How we will feel when confronted by "manufactured" beings who claim to be equally conscious, and how we will define our own "humanity" in that situation, is a philosophical exercise we may as well start right now. It won't be long before we will need the answers.