and/or Congress got it through their heads that not one but all of our crisis
problems can be solved by exploiting space. Employment, inflation, pollution,
Page 136
population, energy, running out of nonrenewable resources- there is pie in the sky
for the U.S.A. and for the entire planet including the impoverished “Third World.”
I won’t try to prove it here. See THE THIRD INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION by G.
Harry Stine, 1979, Ace Books, 51 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10010, and see A STEP
FARTHER OUT by Dr. Jerry Pournelle, also Ace Books 1979-and accept my assurance that
I have known both authors well for twenty-odd years, know that each has years of
experience in aerospace, and that each has both the formal education and the
continuing study-and the horse sense!-to be true experts in this matter.
From almost total disbelief about space travel (99.9% +)to a landing on the
Moon in twenty years
from President Kennedy’s announcement of intention to that Lunar landing in only
seven years . . . and still twenty years to go until the year 2000-we can still
shift to curve #4 (and get rich) almost overnight. By 2000 A.D. we could have
O’Neill colonies, self-supporting and exporting power to Earth, at both Lagrange-4
and Lagrange-5, transfer stations in orbit about Earth and around Luna, a permanent
base on Luna equipped with an electric catapult-and a geriatrics retirement home.
However, I am not commissioned to predict what we could do but to predict
(guess) what is most likely to happen by 2000 A.D.
Our national loss of nerve, our escalating anti-intellectualism, our almost
total disinterest in anything that does not directly and immediately profit us, the
shambles of public education throughout most of our nation (especially in New York
and California) cause
me to predict that our space program will continue to dwindle. It would not surprise
me (but would distress me mightily!) to see the Space Shuttle canceled.
In the meantime some other nation or group will start exploiting space-industry,
power, perhaps Lagrange-point colonies-and suddenly we will wake up to the fact that
we have been left at the post. That happened to us in ’57; we came up from behind
and passed the competition. Possibly we will do it again. Possibly- But I am making
no cash bets.
2. 1950 Contraception and control of disease is revising relations between
the sexes to an extent that will change our entire social and economic structure.
1965 This trend is so much more evident now than it was fifteen years ago
that I am tempted to call it a fulfilled prophecy. Vast changes in sex relations are
evident all around us-with the oldsters calling it “moral decay” and the youngsters
ignoring them and taking it for granted. Surface signs: books such as Sex and the
Single Girl are smash hits; the formerlytaboo four-letter words are now seen both in
novels and popular magazines; the neologism “swinger” has come into the language;
courts are conceding that nudity and semi-nudity are now parts of the cultural
mores. But the end is not yet; this revolution will go much farther and is now
barely started.
The most difficult speculation for a science fiction writer to undertake is
to imagine correctly the secondary implications of a new factor. Many people
correctly anticipated the coming of the horseless carriage; some were bold enough to
predict that everyone would use them and the horse would virtually disappear. But I
know of no writer, fiction or nonfiction, who saw ahead of time the vast change in
the courting and mating habits of Americans which would result primarily from the
automobile-a change which the diaphragm and the oral contraceptive merely confirmed.
So far as I know, no one even dreamed of the change in sex habits the
automobile would set off.
There is some new gadget in existence today which will prove to be equally
revolutionary in some other way equally unexpected. You and I both know of this
gadget, by name and by function-but we don’t know which one it is nor what its
unexpected effect will be. This is why science fiction is not prophecy-and why
fictional speculation can be so much fun both to read and to write.