Heinlein, Robert A – Expanded Universe

there intelligent life on Sol III?

(Is there intelligent life in Washington, D.C.?)

Whistling in the dark-I think I goofed on this one. But if in fact Mars is

uninhabited, shortly there will be a land rush that will make the Oklahoma land

stampede look gentle. Since E = mc2 came into our lives, all real estate is

potentially valuable; it can be terraformed to suit humans. There has been so much

fiction and serious, able nonfiction published on how to terraform Mars that I

shan’t add to it, save to note one thing:

Power is no problem. Sunshine at that distance has dropped off to about 43%

of the maximum here-but Mars gets all of it and gets it all day long save for

infrequent dust storms . . . whereas the most that Philadelphia (and like places)

ever gets is 35%-and overcast days are common. Mars won’t need solar power from

orbit; it will be easier to do it on the ground.

But don’t be surprised if the Japanese charge you a very high fee for

stamping their visa into your passport plus requiring deposit of a prepaid return

ticket or, if you ask for immigrant’s visa, charge you a much, much higher fee plus

proof of a needed colonial skill.

For there is intelligent life in Tokyo.

13. 1950 A thousand miles an hour at a cent a mile will be commonplace;

short hauls will be made in evacuated subways at extreme speed.

1965 I must hedge number thirteen; the “cent” I meant was scaled by the 1950

dollar. But our currency has been going through a long steady inflation, and no

nation in history has ever gone as far as we have along this route without reaching

the explosive phase of inflation. Ten-dollar hamburgers? Brother, we are

headed for the hundred-dollar hamburger-for the barter-only hamburger.

But this is only an inconvenience rather than a disaster as long as there is

plenty of hamburger.

1980 I must scale that “cent” again. In 1950 gold

was $35/troy ounce; this morning the London fix was $374/troy ounce. Just last week

my wife and I flew San Francisco to Baltimore and return. We took neither the luxury

class nor any of the special discounted fares; we simply flew what we could get.

Applying the inflation factor-35/374-our tickets cost a hair less than one

cent a mile in 1950 dollars. From here on I had better give prices in troy ounces of

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gold, or in Swiss francs; not even the Man in the White House knows where this

inflation is going. About those subways: possible, even probable, by 2000 A.D. But I

see little chance that they will be financed until the dollar is stablized-a most

painful process our government hates to tackle.

14. 1950 A major objective of applied physics will be to control gravity.

1965 This prediction stands. But today physics is in a tremendous state of

flux with new data piling up faster than it can be digested; it is anybody’s guess

as to where we are headed, but the wilder you guess, the more likely you are to hit

it lucky. With “elementary particles” of nuclear physics now totaling about half the

number we used to use to list the “immutable” chemical elements, a spectator needs a

program just to keep track of the players. At the other end of the scale,

“quasars”-quasi-stellar bodies-have come along; radio astronomy is now bigger than

telescopic astronomy used to be; and we have redrawn our picture of the universe

several times, each time enlarging it and making it more complex-I haven’t seen this

week’s theory yet, which is well, as it would be out of date before this gets into

print. Plasma physics was barely started in 1950; the same for solid-state phys

ics. This is the Golden Age of physics-and it’s an anarchy.

19801 stick by the basic prediction. There is so much work going on both by

mathematical physicists and experimental physicists as to the nature of gravity that

it seems inevitable that twenty years from now applied physicists will be trying to

control it. But note that I said “trying”-succeeding may take a long time. If and