I Want My Space Ship!
The last couple of days, I’ve been listening to the radio and there has been a lot of reporting on the space shuttle taking a module to the space station: the launch, the arrival of the astronauts, the mission. Every time I hear something like this, I feel cheated. In 1969, when I was six years old and Neil Armstrong made one small step for man, one giant step for mankind, it seemed pretty obvious that we would all be visiting the Moon for vacation by the year 2000. Arthur C. Clarke, the author of Space Odyssey: 2001, said a few years back when we landed the rover on Mars that, back in 1969, he would never have believed that in 2001 we would land a toaster-sized unmanned rover on Mars and consider it a technological and scientific triumph.
In fact, when I was a kid, there was a show about a flying submarine that was set in 1985! Then in the mid-1970s, there was the show Space: 1999 about the inhabitants of the giant (and ill-fated) Moonbase Alpha – a veritable self-contained city on the moon. We were promised flying cars, energy too cheap to meter (an old slogan of the nuclear industry from the 1950s) and more. Of course, we were also promised destruction in a thermonuclear holocaust, but there are always a few troubling details in any utopian plan. Now we’re promised destruction in an overheated climate caused precisely because, in fact, we’ve never found that cheap and unmeterable energy we were promised.
On the plus side, we have regained our future. When I was a kid, everyone looked 30 years ahead, hypothesizing about what the world would be like in 2000, usually choosing between a techno-utopia (think TV and film), an irradiated planet (think the novels of Philip K. Dick
I noticed in the 1990s, that everyone still talked about the world in 2000. It was at that point that I first realized that I had been cheated and that I was never going to get my own spaceship. In fact, as warnings about climate change grew, I realized they might even take away my gravity-bound car and perhaps my electron-consuming computer too. For the most part, though, climate change was barely on the radar and everyone talked about the Y2K global collapse that threatened (remember that?). It was then that I discovered the remarkable book by Stewart Brand (founder of the Whole Earth Catalog and early organizer of Earth Day), Clock of the Long Now. The book is about a project to build a clock that would go round once every 10,000 years. The project came out of an observation by Danny Hillis, one of the architects of the Cray Supercomputer. Hillis noticed, as I did, that over hsi entire life, the future always meant the year 2,000. He came up with the brilliant observation that for every year he had been alive, we had lost one year of future.
The Long Now project is an attempt to prompt people to think over the longer term. The clock is just the means to get people thinking, not important in and of itself. The book is a fascinating read on the problems and benefits of planning for the long term. For example,
- When they were doing a restoration of one of the colleges at Cambridge some years ago, they realized that they didn’t have oak beams big enough to replace the historic beams in the building. In searching the records, they realized that the builders had thought of that. The oak grove near the college had been planted specifically to replace the beams centuries later.
- In Sweden, the navy realized that they would eventually run out of trees big enough to make masts for giant ships. In the late eigtheenth century, they asked the royal forester to plant some trees for delivery in 200 years. In the 1980s, the forester contacted the navy to say that their trees were ready. Stewart Brand points out that the trees were useless to the navy, but the effort to preserve a disappearing resource had an unexpected payoff in that, though we now place a low value on giant trees for masts, we place a high value on old-growth forests.
It occurred to me recently that the growing awareness regarding climate change, however, may once again turn us into long-term thinkers. As the number of sceptics decreases, there will be an increasing tendency for people to project their actions further and further into the future. As a historian, I see this as a good thing. Now that climate change gets so much publicity, I think that the last few years are the first time in my life that I have seen the future extend out in front of me rather than retract. The inability to look over long distances into the past and the future prevents us from solving any major problem. So though for the time being the bad news continues to pile up with regard to climate change, the turn toward looking into the future and thinking about consequences is a first step to finding solutions.
Popularity: 14% [?]
Add to: 
del.icio.us •
furl •
reddit
•
digg •
technorati cosmos
