hosting tonight's program and marilyn welcome to the program and isaac asimov welcome very much indeed the conversation i wonder i wonder if you might you've written such a wide variety of subject matter over the course of your career and so forth i wonder maybe i might ask you a question the outset is what areas have not come under your purview as far as writing is concerned because you've written such a wide variety of topic areas but maybe that you just move to a different kind of question in a certain sense but some areas you've not chosen to turn your attention and what are some of the areas that you haven't but i've never written a book specifically on psychology obo i have written some science fiction stories which were psychological not look i've never written art  which accounts for why for poor it that but you have but you have had an interest in such a wide variety of subject matter have you i mean ranging all the way from esoteric questions of science to shakespeare and to other kinds of question that makes it easier to write you rather than becoming heavily specialized in one particular field a lot of people complain is too much specialization say within academia i just wonder generally when we're going to have some specialization there are some fields where you can't really contribute anything new until you spend trying to do your whole life studying at the dangerous not that we're not going to have enough specialization in the dangerous that the specialists in assistance specialization as the only pathway to scholarship and i think there's no harm in having some people be generous even if it means that any want to give and feel that they're a little superficial so i want it's interesting to interest yourself in a lot of different things and be able stories suddenly everything changed it became mostly a literary diary what i was writing that day when i have submitted it when i have an acceptance or rejection i would also write other things  sometimes i'm lucky they just somebody says something i read something and it starts me thinking on one occasion and western science fiction was a mystery story i dreamed the story well at least in my complex background there are different aspects of it and it makes life a little easier for you if you don't have to start from scratch with everything you do so i have my foundation series of which the th book is going to be published but there are three so called empire novels that come before it and i now have five robots five robot books that come before that so that i have thirteen books and there are still perceptions of what actually has taken place and you can perceive a thing differently than someone else can you know well look at i imagine every house and everybody have had fights and each one will say well you said inspirational molyneux that's all gone history we never captured at the foreground the technology has allowed us to capture in reality more and more and we're going to have a sort of replay of technology of reality perhaps more and more then certainly we ever had historically i mean the forth that we can see aunt sarah at the christening and we can see people within our own immediate environment in the that that ability to have that kind of quality you know be part of the human condition is growing more and more you know i don't know how much of the good we're going to fix my present life as a lot tendency says all right in greater detail you're going to forget and i can't make myself because i've got too many other things to do but i remember one time when i was a graduate chemistry course and on that day in my diary i wrote this was just about the worst day i ever had i don't write anything about it because it's burned into my head never forget it but i just stare at it i don't forget ways we can call upon reality reality was there was a reality that was there and these are ways in which we can call upon reality and we're getting a better and better fix that being able to have real i want to ask you broad general question you've written a wide thing are you optimistic range in other words we've got a mess of problems right now that we may not win if we don't stop we're going to destroy ourselves if we do solve them if we are sufficiently saying to solve them through all very nuclear war to correct pollution to maintain livable environment to expand the human range and move out into space if we can do world that and achieve sanity then it seems to me the future is golden but can really achieve sanity the record of the human species is not a very good one and that respect you think we have in our hands now after i don't know what three million years or thirty thousand years or whatever when humanity st is counted to begin to appear in the evolution of one did we don't think we have well you know i have a feeling that no matter what we do that there will be some at the very least some bacteria some funds that will keep trying to somewhere but  promethean condition now after three million years it's incredible that we should be alive conscious and participant in a time when that it is in our hands in a way that it hasn't been historically we can try and wipe out the tribe in the other valley carl sagan says this is the most glorious most glorious generation for an astronomer to be alive because he witnesses to gain the knowledge in so many different ways close is making these enormous advances i know it is an amazing time and you can also say this is an unfortunate generation because until now no matter how much human beings try they could never stop the spring time they could never stop the generations no matter who died and how many humanity would continue on and in future generations will be either dead or else we have would have solved this problem and will know we're going to continue in this one generation there is a the possibility of the strong ourselves and the lack of knowledge whether we will or not it's the only thing that keeps i think humanity from from getting very upset about this is that almost nobody thinks about it nobody thinks about it they prefer to think about where the next meal is i don't play the where the next meal is coming from and who's going to ok what program to watch on television busy having a fight with their wives or husbands as the case may be i mean there are all kinds of small concern small day to day concerns how many times do they stop and entitled to anything about it i think that's an excuse and i think that's an excuse i mean if you you don't think about it because you say well what can i do to heck with them concentrate on something else but you know we have had one other thing that you yourself would have to die someday and very few people think about that either you always behave as though you're going to live forever and you think  just be sitting around on what you haven't that's for sure you have a future you certainly i saw i saw a sculpture just last summer by the same guy where i forget his name french the guy who did lincoln and the lincoln memorial the guy that did the anything you know we don't mean philosophical contemplation but there's times that there are only wasted perhaps times when they're doing nothing but paying attention to the fullest comedy or something like that's fine if they're laughing i suppose but you know the sort of another and while i'm working on that other that old well of inspiration fills up with the st electrical back then it's interesting idea with a number of different projects at the same time saying yes for some working on a novel now but i'll stop in order to write an essay which mechanics i draw leaks i drew pontiacs statics and dynamics with respect to electricity and so on the i c s is almost and then variable lending for a branch of physics therefore we invent some fields of knowledge that we have that we can draw on fifteen years ago we didn't know about neurotransmitters or with biochemistry there was the knowledge base that were the knowledge base is advancing almost faster than we can keep up with the interest of trying to understand it almost constantly stand we're constantly inventing new words for new knowledge new concepts and so on it's a little humbling to think that what is most likely to survive everything i i've published now i publish now at least twenty million dollars words i have to figure it out maybe even more but all those millions of words that i've published i am convinced that one hundred years from now only transformation even at this point it gets harder and harder to look ahead because things are changing so quickly that's this problem however so far i had my robots begin to be practical in the eighty's and ninety's in some respects there were complex the robots we actually have some respects the robots we're having are shall we say more and other words when you get a guy like down where you where you have backed up against the wall he says i did it for national security i remember the president said but what to have to we can no longer try to try to divide humanity into a tiny little groups with each one having the right to do anything it wanted to do in the name of its own security  at the present moment any nation which develops the power could destroy all of humanity and claim if they could begin to survive and claim they have done it in the name of sacred honor of national security and all that we can't afford anymore we've got to recognize the fact that the world is too small for nations particularly when we can as you indicated earlier on at some point here in the t century reached the point where we can create a species wide with the technology of this bill that our hands there's a term that i've used marijuana use sometimes james joyce has daedalus a history of the nightmare from which we're attempting to awaken i wonder if even that something you might feel in a certain sense accord with and with the adverse side of this destructive capability that we can see the human society if we look ahead and our time is almost millennia in use that are millennial signs of the times in which we pious and roman history which was just before marcus are released and after hadrian there was a twenty year period when he was emperor in this very little to say about it it was a time of peace and he said that the time passed without notice without history which after a roll speaking of history is nothing but a list of the crimes of some misfortune of the human species your own life but you want to be a story where you're safe devoted for him to be able to put a frozen to be able to communicate these things well i tell you touched on a wide variety of subjects and so forth and it's really exciting i don't know how to congratulate you all the work you've done you've heard that many many times to do congratulate you on all the work i certainly want to thank you for participating has been called evening like to thank you for having good conversations again to remind you that it's been your pleasure to have the perceptions of isaac asimov a person of prodigious work and creative capability has contributed mightily if i may say so toward