scientific and technical workers, advances in communication, average miles traveled
per person per year, advances in mathematics, the rising curve of knowledge. Call it
the curve of human achievement.
What is the correct way to project this curve into the future? Despite
everything, there is a stubborn “common sense” tendency to project it along dotted
line
number one-like the patent office official of a hundred years back who quit his job
“because everything had already been invented.” Even those who don’t expect a
slowing up at once tend to expect us to reach a point of diminishing returns (dotted
line number two).
Very daring minds are willing to predict that we will continue our present
rate of progress (dotted line number three-a tangent).
But the proper way to project the curve is dotted line number four-for there
is no reason, mathematical, scientific, or historical, to expect that curve to
flatten out, or to reach a point of diminishing returns, or simply to go on as a
tangent. The correct projection, by all facts known today, is for the curve to go on
up indefinitely with increasing steepness.
The timid little predictions earlier in this article actually belong to
curve one, or, at most, to curve two. You can count on the changes in the next fifty
years at least eight times as great as the changes of the past fifty years.
The Age of Science has not yet opened.
AXIOM: A “nine-days’ wonder” is taken as a matter of course on the tenth
day.
AXIOM: A “common sense” prediction is sure to err on the side of timidity.
AXIOM: The more extravagant a prediction sounds the more likely it is to
come true.
So let’s have a few free-swinging predictions about the future.
Some will be wrong-but cautious predictions are sure to be wrong.
1. 1950 Interplanetary travel is waiting at your front door-C.O.D. It’s
yours when you pay for it.
1965 And now we are paying for it and the cost is high. But, for reasons
understandable only to bureaucrats, we have almost halted development of a nu
clear-powered spacecraft when success was in sight. Never mind; if we don’t another
country will. By the end of this century space travel will be cheap.
1980 And now the Apollo-Saturn Man-on-the-Moon program has come and gone,
and all we have now in the U.S.A. as a new man-in-space program is the Space
Shuttle-underfinanced and two years behind schedule. See my article SPINOFF on page
500 of this book, especially the last two pages.
Is space travel dead?No, because the United States is not the only nation on
this planet. Today both Japan and Germany seem to be good bets-countries aware that
endless wealth is out there for the taking. USSR seems to be concentrating on the
military aspects rather than on space travel, and the People’s Republic of China
does not as yet appear to have the means to spare-but don’t count out either nation;
the potential is there, in both cases.
And don’t count out the United States! Today most of our citizens regard the
space program as a boondoggle (totally unaware that it is one of the very few
Federal programs that paid for themselves, manyfold). But we are talking about
twenty years from now, 2000 AD. Let’s see it in perspective. Exactly thirty years
ago George Pal and Irving Pichel and I-and ca. 200 others-were making the motion
picture DESTINATION MOON. I remember sharply that most of the people working on that
film started out thinking that it was a silly fantasy, an impossibility. I had my
nose rubbed in it again and again, especially if the speaker was unaware that I had
written it. (Correction: written the first version of it. By the time it was filmed,
even the banker’s wife was writing dialog.)
As for the general public- A trip to the Moon? Nonsense!
That was thirty years ago, late 1949.
Nineteen years and ten months later Apollo 11 landed on the Moon.
Look again at the curves on page 322. With respect
to space travel (and industry, power, and colonization) we have dropped to that
feeble curve #1-but we could shift back to curve #4 overnight if our President