Heinlein, Robert A – Expanded Universe

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