2081: A Hopeful View of the Human Future

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Princeton physicist Gerard K. O'Neill's 1981 book, 2081: A Hopeful View of the Human Future was an attempt to predict the technological and social state of humanity one hundred years in the future.

As the title indicates, O'Neill's positive attitude towards both technology and human potential distinguished this book from gloomy predictions of Malthusian catastrophe by contemporary scientists such as Paul R. Ehrlich's 1968 The Population Bomb ("…in the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death …") and the Club of Rome's 1972 Limits to Growth prediction of a catastrophic end to the Industrial Revolution within 100 years from resource exhaustion and pollution.

O'Neill's contrary view had two main components. First, he analyzed the successes and failures of previous attempts to predict the future of society -- including many predictions of catastrophe that had not materialized. Second, he extrapolated historical trends such as increasing income (leading to a prediction of a 2081 average American family income of $1M/year) under the assumption that the obstacles identified by other authors would be overcome by five technological "Drivers of Change". Two that were based on his own research were responsible for much of his optimism. As O'Neill's The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space describes, solar power satellites will provide unlimited clean energy, making it far easier for all of humanity to reach and exceed present developed-world living standards. Over-population pressures will be relieved as billions of people eventually emigrate to colonies in free space (i.e. not on the surface of a planet) that offer an Earth-like environment but with vastly higher productivity for industry and agriculture. These colonies and satellites will not be launched expensively from Earth, but largely constructed from asteroid or lunar materials moved into the desired orbits cheaply by the mass drivers O'Neill's group developed.

Contents 1 Part I: The Art of Prophecy 2 Part II: The Drivers of Change 2.1 Computers 2.2 Automation 2.3 Space Colonies 2.4 Energy 2.5 Communications 3 Part III: The World in 2081 3.1 INTRODUCTION 3.2 SPACE TRAVEL 3.3 FLYING THROUGH THE EARTH 3.4 HONOLULU, PENNSYLVANIA 3.5 HOMES AND CASTLES 3.6 WINDOW ON THE WORLD 3.7 HIGHWAY IN THE SKY 3.8 THE LOTUS AND THE THORN 3.9 FOR RICHER, FOR POORER 3.10 THE RESTING EARTH 4 Part IV: Wild Cards 5 Evaluation 6 See also 6.1 Prediction 6.2 Technologies discussed 7 References

[edit] Part I: The Art of Prophecy

Previous futurist authors he cites:

• Thomas More's Utopia;
• Jules Verne,
• H.G. Wells,
• Rudyard Kipling,
• J. B. S. Haldane,
• Sir George Darwin, The Next Million Years "A depressing little book" because it ignored the possibility of space travel in all that time
• Sir George Thompson,
• Konstantin Tsiolkowski, J.D. Bernal, and Dandridge Cole, (space colony designs)
• Arthur C. Clarke (many)
• Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward: 2000-1887,
• George Orwell's 1984,
• Eugene Zamiatin's We,
• Aldous Huxley's Brave New World
• Club of Rome/MIT Limits to Growth
• McGeorge Bundy, After the Deluge, the Covenant
• Robert Heilbroner, An Inquiry into the Human Prospect

Arthur C. Clarke's Profiles of the Future included a long list of predictions, many of which O'Neill endorsed. Two of his maxims O'Neill quotes ^[1] seems to sum up O'Neill's attitude, as well:

• "anything that is theoretically possible will be achieved in practice, no matter what the technical difficulties, if it is desired greatly enough"
• "We can never run out of energy or matter, but we can all too easily run out of brains."

[edit] Part II: The Drivers of Change

Sections are included on the five key "Drivers of Change" believed by O'Neill (correctly, as apparently shown by current societal and technological trends) to be the focus of future development:

• Computers
• Automation
• Space Colonies
• Energy
• Communications

[edit] Computers

This section is a straightforward application of O'Neill's methods of prediction in an area where he did not have special expertise. He applies basic physics to understand the limits of possible change, uses the history of the technology (in this case, especially Moore's Law) to extrapolate likely progress, and applies history again to reason about how people and institutions will shape and be shaped by the likely changes.

His physics appears sound: the limits to computer speed and capacity he mentions would all figure prominently in a current article on the subject. The fundamental limit to computation speed is the speed of light. Because light or electrical impulses can only travel about 30 cm in a nanosecond (10^-9 second), a 1-gigaHertz (10^9 cycles/second) computer cannot be any larger; a 1 teraHertz computer would need to be 3 cm or smaller. Thus, while the nanosecond speed of the best 1940's vacuum-tube computers has been improved considerably, speed will not increase nearly as much as storage capacity.

The heat generated by computation limits how many components can be crammed into this space; so he predicts future computers must be very low-voltage. The greatly reduced voltages and cooling problems of modern microprocessors reflect this limitation.

Finally, information can be stored very densely; the limit would be around one bit per atom. One can argue that an atom could store more than one bit via its multiple possible quantum states, or on the contrary that practical limitations will make storing even one bit per atom infeasible, but it still seems like a reasonable guess at the ultimate limit.

The main basis of his technology extrapolation for computers is Moore's Law, one of the greatest successes of Trend estimation in predicting human progress. In 1965, Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel Corporation, observed that the number of transistors per unit of area on an electronic "chip" was doubling every 2 years, and he predicted that the trend would continue -- and so it has, for over 40 years. This is one of the clearest examples in history of Arthur Clarke's maxim quoted above, that anything theoretically possible will be achieved if it is desired greatly enough.

His success at predicting the social aspects is also impressive, although he certainly had help from many in the field who speculated about the future of computers. Interestingly, he identified computers as the most certain of his five "drivers of change", because their adoption could be driven primarily by individual or local decisions, while the other four such as space colonies depended on large-scale decision-making that is much more chancy -- certainly borne out by our failure to establish any permanent human colony in space to date. He had observed the success of minicomputers, calculators, and the first home computers, and correctly predicted that every home would have a computer in a hundred years -- a gross underestimate, it seems.

With the aid of speculations by computer pioneers such as John von Neumann and the writers of "tracts" such as Zamatian's We, O'Neill also correctly predicted that privacy would be under siege from computers in 2081 -- again, a prediction amply fulfilled in a quarter of that time.

Based on the difficulties and failures of computer use he had observed by 1981, including an unusually candid horror story of his own Princeton University library's attempt to computerize its operations, O'Neill correctly predicted that software engineering issues and the intractability of artificial intelligence problems like speaker-independent speech recognition and natural language processing would require massive programming efforts and very powerful processors to achieve truly usable computers such as the robot butler his visitor to Earth encounters in 2081. O'Neill correctly points out the huge difference between computers and human brains (still true), and states that, while a more human-like artificial brain is a worthy goal, he takes the conservative position that 2081 computers will be vastly improved descendants of today's rather than truly intelligent and creative artificial brains (a prospect he considers under #Part IV: Wild Cards).

[edit] Automation

[edit] Space Colonies

[edit] Energy

[edit] Communications

[edit] Part III: The World in 2081

[edit] INTRODUCTION

This section is written as a series of dispatches home from "Eric C. Rawson", a native of a distant space colony called "Fox Cluster". By analogy with American religious colonists such as the Puritans and Mormons, O'Neill suggests that such a colony might have been founded by a group of pacifists who chose to live about twice as far from the Sun as Pluto in order to avoid involvement in Earth's wars. (His calculations indicate that colonies at this distance could have Earth-level sunlight using a mirror the same weight as the colony itself.) Eric pays a visit to the Earth of 2081 to take care of family business and explore a world that is nearly as foreign to him as it is to us.

After each dispatch, O'Neill adds a section describing his reasoning for each situation the visitor describes, such as riding a "floater" train going thousands of miles per hour in vacuum, interacting with a household robot or visiting a fully-enclosed Pennsylvania city that enjoys a tropical climate in midwinter. Many of the descriptions reveal considerable inventiveness, much of it presumably O'Neill's, as well as a physicist's grip of the basics. For example, the description of "Honolulu, Pennsylvania" includes descriptions of how multiple layers of roof sections would be retracted in good weather (leaving a layer of glass, or in the best weather only a screen to keep out insects), where they would be stored, how well they could insulate, their strength and economics, how snow would be removed, etc.

[edit] SPACE TRAVEL

[edit] FLYING THROUGH THE EARTH

The description of magnetically-levitated "floater" trains moving in evacuated tunnels calculates the parameters of the transport. At the limit, trains would accelerate at 2G to a speed at which the earth's curvature produced a force of 1G upwards (the vignette describes how the train rotates in the tunnel so passengers perceive normal gravity). Under these assumptions, then travel half-way around the Earth would take only 39 minutes.

[edit] HONOLULU, PENNSYLVANIA

This section focusses on a fully-enclosed city in future Pennsylvania, which enjoys an artificial tropical climate all year round thanks to internal climate control and advanced insulatory materials.

[edit] HOMES AND CASTLES

[edit] WINDOW ON THE WORLD

[edit] HIGHWAY IN THE SKY

[edit] THE LOTUS AND THE THORN

[edit] FOR RICHER, FOR POORER

[edit] THE RESTING EARTH

[edit] Part IV: Wild Cards

This section explores, not the most probable outcomes, but "the limits of the possible": how likely some scenarios O'Neill considered less probable are, and what they might mean. These included nuclear annihilation, attaining immortality, and contact with extraterrestrial civilizations. For this last case, he presents a thought experiment about how a hypothetical alien civilization, the "Primans", could explore the galaxy with self-replicating robots, monitoring every planetary system in the Galaxy without betraying their own position, and destroying intelligent life (by building giant mirrors to incinerate the planet) if they felt threatened. This experiment seems to prove that conflict or even surprise contact with an intelligent alien life form -- that staple of science fiction -- is highly unlikely.

[edit] Evaluation

It is interesting to compare O'Neill's predictions for a century later with the actual history over a little more than a quarter of that time. Although he clearly tried to avoid it, his observation that futurists underestimate technical change but over-estimate social change seems to be true of his work, as well. Where society has pursued them, an impressive number of his technical predictions have come true already. For example, his knowledge worker of 2081, Mr. Tehaney, conducts global teleconferences from his home office, chats by cell phone and emails large files over a global data network. Except for the 3D holographic images in his teleconference, all these are mundane already in 2007; so it is hard to realize the imagination required to predict them in 1981, when ARPANET, the precursor of the Internet had just 213 computers in total and communicated at kilobit rates. In contrast, none of O'Neill's space ideas have been implemented, in large part because of social issues such as politics, bureaucracy and lack of vision in the American space program. After landing a man on the moon in less than a decade (surely encouraging O'Neill's optimism as he began his space colony research in 1969), performed much less impressively in the Space Shuttle era. (O'Neill's experiments were on the Space Shuttle payload list before the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986, but never came close to being launched^{[citation needed]}. Interestingly, as O'Neill had warned, both energy and global warming have already become serious issues, which may lead to a reappraisal of his ideas.

As he pointed out, fundamental science usually takes decades to affect everyday life. In 1981, the major American biological research program inaugurated by President Nixon's "war on cancer" was still in relatively early stages; while "recombinant DNA" was being eagerly investigated, the Human Genome Project was still far in the future. Therefore, it isn't surprising that O'Neill missed biotechnology as a driver of change -- today's futurists would surely include it.

Whether because he was unconsciously reflecting the beliefs of his era, or because he commonly used energy needs as an argument for his research into space colonies and space solar power, O'Neill did not question the inevitability of the historical linear relationship between power consumption and standard of living. Today's sustainable development movement emphatically rejects this link, claiming that human needs can be met with much less non-renewable resource use than today's economy is accustomed to. For example, advocates of sustainable architecture or green building such as the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) claim that buildings can be designed to use little energy for heating or cooling in any climate, and pay for any extra construction costs in a few years. ^[2] Sustainable transport proposals in the Personal Rapid Transit category promise dramatically better energy efficiency than automobiles. For example, the ATS Ltd. ULTra PRT currently being installed at London's Heathrow Airport will consume 839 BTU per passenger mile, and the proposed SkyTran PRT system (based on the magnetic levitation concept that O'Neill proposed for his "floater" inter-city trains and automated intra-city package delivery systems) only 151 BTU/passenger mile, versus 4,318 BTU for today's buses, 3,496 BTU for automobiles, and 4,329 BTU for personal trucks; see Personal rapid transit#Energy efficiency. ^[3] Sustainable development ideas have helped industries save money while dramatically cutting energy use in a variety of areas. ^[4]

[edit] See also

[edit] Prediction

• Futures studies
• 2000s in science and technology

[edit] Technologies discussed

• Space advocacy
• Space technology
• Space colonization
• Solar power satellite
• Asteroid mining
• Space elevator

• Mining the Sky: Untold Riches from the Asteroids, Comets, and Planets
• Space manufacturing
• Space mining
• Space-based industry
• Domed city

[edit] References