Your host arrives home as you come out; he has taken a holiday from his
engineering job and has had the two boys down at the beach. He kisses his
wife, shouts, “Hi, Duchess!” at you, and turns to the video, setting it to
hunt and sample the newscasts it has stored that day. His wife sends the
boys in to ‘fresh themselves, then says, “Have a nice day, dear?”
He answers, “The traffic was terrible. Had to make the last hundred miles
on automatic. Anything on the phone for me?”
“Weren’t you on relay?”
“Didn’t set it. Didn’t want to be bothered.” He steps to the house phone,
plays back his calls, finds nothing he cares to bother with — but the
machine goes ahead and prints one message; he pulls it out and tears it
off.
“What is it?” his wife asks.
“Telestat from Luna City — from Aunt Jane.”
“What does she say?”
“Nothing much. According to her, the Moon is a great place and she wants us
to come visit her.”
“Not likely!” his wife answers. “Imagine being shut up in an
air-conditioned cave.”
“When you are Aunt Jane’s age, my honey lamb, and as frail as she is, with
a bad heart thrown in, you’ll go to the Moon and like it. Low gravity is
not to be sneezed at — Auntie will probably live to be a hundred and
twenty, heart trouble and all.”
“Would you go to the Moon?” she asks.
“If I needed to and could afford it.” He turns to you. “Right?”
You consider your answer. Life still looks good to you — and stairways are
beginning to be difficult. Low gravity is attractive, even though it means
living out your days at the Geriatrics Foundation on the Moon. “It might be
fun to visit,” you answer. “One wouldn’t have to stay.”
Hospitals for old people on the Moon? Lets not be silly —
Or is it silly? Might it not be a logical and necessary outcome of our
world today?
Space travel we will have, not fifty years from now, but much sooner. It’s
breathing down our necks. As for geriatrics on the Moon, for most of us no
price is too high and no amount of trouble is too great to extend the years
of our lives. It is possible that low gravity (one sixth, on the Moon) may
not lengthen lives; nevertheless it may — we don’t know yet — and it will
most certainly add greatly to comfort on reaching that inevitable age when
the burden of dragging around one’s body is almost too much, or when we
would otherwise resort to an oxygen tent to lessen the work of a worn-out
heart.
By the rules of prophecy, such a prediction is probable, rather than
impossible.
But the items and gadgets suggested above are examples of timid prophecy.
What are the rules of prophecy, if any?
[Image]
Look at the graph shown here. The solid curve is what has been going on
this past century. It represents many things — use of power, speed of
transport, numbers of 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