A Step Farther Out (35 page)

And more, none of it science fiction. These are all concepts which we could start work on next year. They are understood far better than was currently in-place space technology at the time John Kennedy set us the goal of the Moon in a decade. We could start work knowing that it's nearly certain that we'll get all our money back within 30 years, and that there's a very good chance we'll all get rich from fallout benefits.

After all, for the $50 billion a year we spend on importing oil, we ought to be able to buy any number of better systems.

Why don't we get started?

This will be my fourth annual report on the State of the Sciences—that is, I've just attended the 1978 annual meeting of the AAAS, and it's time to review what's going on.

There's a lot. Before this is over you'll hear proof of immortality, see projections of history out farther than anyone I know of has ever looked, get the latest on the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (SETI), and learn what's coming next in climate (warmer for a hundred years, Ice Age in a thousand).

* * *

Science marches on. There wasn't anything really spectacular in this year's meeting; just a confirmation of trends that we've seen before. There weren't any wild disappointments, either, except for the announcement that one of the shuttles would never go to space. Those fans who worked to get the first ship's name changed to "Enterprise" have legitimate grounds for complaint: that's the one the Ad-301 ministration has chosen to cancel.
Enterprise
will never go to space, and I for one can't help thinking there's a kind of grim vengeance in that.

It was mildly amusing to listen to Mr. Carter's spokesman explain why killing one of the shuttles would be good for science. Of course one had to hang on to one's sense of humor. A few of those listening couldn't, and asked just how it might help the sciences to kill off some 25% of our capability for going to space. I heard no very satisfactory answer to that. The theory is that the money saved will be available to other science projects, but none of the lucky recipients were named, and you can believe as much of the theory as you want.

Enough gloom. I really don't want to write a political column.

SETI. Surely the search for others out there is worth a note. No alien intelligence has been found, of course, although enthusiasts continue to listen. Their efforts have been hampered by the limits of their receivers: there are just a lot of possible channels on which the others might be talking, and we don't have much spare radio-telescope time anyway. Thus it would make sense to listen to a very large number of channels all at once. The only problem is that no one has ever built a one-million channel receiver.

The "how to" of such a receiver has been known for years. It wouldn't even be expensive, at least not by Federal standards—under five million dollars, probably under half that. So why has it never been done?

Because no one ever asked for the money. NASA's budget people are terrified that if they ask for a couple of megabucks for a receiver with which to listen for alien intelligence, Senator Proxmire will (a) refuse the request, (b) denounce NASA and perhaps hand them his "Golden Fleece Award," and (c) wreak terrible vengeance by chopping out several tens of millions from the NASA request.

Although this is hardly a courageous stand on NASA's part, it is, alas, rather realistic. This year, though, it is said that NASA will screw up its courage and ask for the million-channel receiver for listening to possible messages from Out There. Watch for Proxmire's reactions.

* * *

There was a lot of attention to the weather at this year's AAAS meeting. I don't suppose that comes as much of a surprise, given the terrible weather we've
had lately. I wish I had good news, but in fact, the consensus of opinion among the weather and climate people is that things are likely to get worse, not better.

According to the long-range weather prediction people, what we've experienced the last couple of years is "normal"; what was abnormal, and we have no right to expect for the future, is the extraordinarily
good
weather of the past 20 to 30 years.

Now things are getting back to normal, and if that turns out not to be to our liking, well, the universe never promised us anything different. The normal climate generates highly variable weather. For reasons not clearly understood, during the 50's and 60's the weather wasn't very variable, and the climate was highly benign. For the future, if you don't like the weather, wait a few decades. It will probably change.

That turns out to have a number of consequences, of course. For the moment famine is at a minimum; there are comparatively few areas of the world in which starvation is a major contributor to the death rate. Given drastic changes in climate—and we now have good reason to expect such massive changes—there will be nothing for it: either we increase productivity, or famine stalks the land again. Not, of course,
our
land.
We
won't starve; but the universe has so arranged things that if there are to be major gains in agricultural productivity, they will almost certainly come about through intensive use of western technology transplanted to the "developing nations"—or they will not come about at all. Whether we will do the necessary development is another question.

___________

___________

___________

Last year I reported that physicists were challenging the General Theory of Relativity. I may not have put it precisely that way; what I said was that top physicists were fairly sure that within the century they would have a unified field theory.
That,
however, implies the overthrow of General Relativity, because GR treats gravity as a phenomenon fundamentally different from the "forces" of nature such as electro-magnetism. In General Relativity, gravity results from distortions in the fabric of space itself; it is not really a "force" at all.

Incidentally, Einstein himself searched for a unified field theory, something to relate gravity to the other forces, and although he invented GR, he didn't believe in it.

At any event, the trend is toward unification of the fundamental forces, as shown in Figure 30.

There are also continued attempts to describe the universe in simple terms—that is, what with all the elementary particles floating around, theory has become very complex, and physicists are trying to get rid of some of the particles by showing they are made up of something else, as shown in Figure 30. Like it or not, the name given the "something else" now seems to be "Quark," and the terms "Up, Down, Strange, and Charmed" also seem destined to stay; however, some physicists such as D. Allan Bromley of Yale are resisting "Truth and Beauty" as the names of the newest candidate quarks.

The impulse toward unification theories of the universe is a very old one, of course, beginning with the Greeks and their early "atomic" models. Aldous Huxley once remarked that it made no difference whether the universe "really" conformed to the simplest explanation, or scientists were just not capable of understanding anything else; and possibly there is an impulse to simplicity rooted in the human psyche. Occam's razor need not have anything to do with the real world. Yet—there are intriguing hints that the universe may after all be built more simply than it appears.

For instance, there is that intriguing number 10
⁴⁰
which appears so often. The age of the universe, calculated in units of the time required for light to cross an atomic nucleus; the diameter of the universe in units of nuclear diameters; the ratio of the strongest (strong nuclear) to the weakest (gravity) known force. There is also the mass of the universe as measured in masses of elementary particles; that turns out to be 10
⁴⁰
squared, no small number, but there is that pesky 10
⁴⁰
again.

And of course it may be pure coincidence. "What does it all mean, Mr. Natural?"

* * *

Let's see. What else? You must remember, an AAAS meeting is a 5-ring circus, and every day there is far more to do and see than you can possibly get to. This year it was a bit easier, because there were more of "us"; in addition to Larry Niven and myself and Mrs. Pournelle, there were from the SF community Mr. and Mrs. Frank Herbert, Joe and Gay Haldeman, David Gerrold, Charles Sheffield, Karl Pflock, Ben and Barbara Bova, and probably some others I don't remember; this made it a bit easier to trade notes on various sessions, although it also made for longer nights. Incidentally, we found a very good Afghanistani restaurant near the Sheraton Park, where we enjoyed good food while Frank and Bev Herbert regaled us with stories of their visit to the Khyber Pass.

There was also a science fiction writers panel; it was well attended, and seemed to be enjoyed by those who came. Panelists Bova, Gerrold, and Herbert spoke of matters science fiction, probably appropriate for the audience. For myself I would have preferred that they
do
SF rather than talk about it, but I was probably alone in that wish.

* * *

The single most fascinating session of the AAAS meeting was a panel entitled "Prospects for life in the universe: the ultimate limits to growth." Chaired by William Gale of the Bell Telephone Labs, it featured former astronaut Brian O'Leary, Freeman Dyson, Dr. Gale himself, Gregg Edwards of NSF, and Carl Sagan as discussant. Since neither Dyson nor Sagan can read the telephone book aloud without making it interesting, that was obviously the one panel not to miss, and none of us did. It began prosaically enough, with von Puttkamer of NASA projecting space industrialization over the next 25 years; it ended with the darndest thing I've ever seen. Understand—in a sense, these were amateurs at my business, and in fact a great deal of the panel was a bit like that, scientists playing science fiction writer with no more spectacular success than most SF writers; that is, until Freeman Dyson gave his paper.

Before Dyson we had O'Leary on asteroid mining and space colonization, themes we've dealt with in this chapter and elsewhere. Not surprisingly, O'Leary recommends use of the O'Neill "mass driver" (O'Leary is O'Neill's associate at Princeton) to move asteroids around. The mass driver is that gizmo so beloved by science fiction writers, a kind of electronic catapult to fling ships—or buckets of goo—into space. Drivers don't work from Earth, but they will from the Moon, and certainly from an asteroid.

The usual SF story uses the driver to launch ships; Mr. Heinlein used one to launch capsules in THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS, and a few stories have had the drivers launching raw materials from the lunar surface. The latter is the concept O'Neill's plan for space colonies employs. O'Leary's presentation proposed using the driver to move an asteroid: power the driver with solar cells, and use chunks of the asteroid as reaction mass. I've often spoken of the concept in my lectures, but whether I heard it first from O'Neill's people I don't know. Certainly it would work.

It takes, according to O'Leary's figures, about 4000 tons of equipment to haul in an asteroid. And—one asteroid brought to high Earth orbit could provide all the materials needed to build enough Solar Power Satellites to power the entire world by the year 2000. As O'Leary was speaking I made the note "Hell, it's my lecture"; which may not strictly be true, but it's close enough. We certainly could, by the year 2000, power the world from space, and we could do it without bankrupting ourselves—and I've said all this before in other columns, and although the temptation is severe I'll leave the topic alone here.

The next lecture was by Dr. Gale of Bell Labs, and once again it was a bit like listening to my own presentation—not that Dr. Gale didn't say some things I don't, but the theme was remarkably similar to my "Survival with Style," at least at first. He began by reviewing the limits to growth on Earth itself; they are, not surprisingly, pretty severe, although not as severe as the Zero-Growth people like to postulate.

The solar system, however, provides somewhat more room. It could furnish for each of a sextillion (that's 10
¹⁶
) people: 200 tons of hydrogen; 5 tons of iron; 5 tons of glass; 400 pounds of oxygen; 400 pounds of carbon; and 50,000 kilowatt-hours of energy. Perhaps that's life on the cheap, and we wouldn't want the full sextillion people living here, so adjust the available wealth according to the population you like.