The Future We
Were Promised

The Future We
Were Promised
An annotated bibliography from
Where Is My Flying Car?

J. STORRS HALL

“The Future We Were Promised” is an expanded and annotated version of the bibliography from J. Storrs Hall’s 2018 book Where Is My Flying Car?, which offers an impassioned account of technological stagnation and an imaginative blueprint for a bold future.
Stripe Press is republishing a revised and updated edition of the book in fall 2021.

Where Is
My Flying Car?
Annotated
Bibliography

9

There are two main classes of works listed here. First, I have tried to include much of what I
consider “classic” science fiction, i.e., works that would have contributed to the overall
sense of “the future we were promised.” Then there are nonfiction references that canform a basis for further and deeper reading about the various topics in the book. I haveattempted to include books that are readable, rather than more voluminous academic
tomes. You might reasonably expect to read or to have read any, or even all, of these. This
list does not include scientific papers, which are referenced in the the footnotes of WhereIs My Flying Car?.
Of course, it was in the 20th century that we began to have our worldview significantly
enhanced by movies and television as well as books. Thus I include various formative
films as well.

Chapter 1: The World of Tomorrow
Fifty years ago, it was clear that flying cars were in our future. Or at least it was clear
to any 10-year-old boy who read the stories of Tom Swift Jr. His “triphibian atomicar”
was held in the air by “repellatron rays” and powered by an “atomic capsule,” which
could “change atomic energy directly into electricity.”
Tom Swift Jr., was, of course, a literary offspring of the original Tom Swift, who wasseen having adventures with gadgets like an “electric runabout” and a “photo telephone” just about a century ago. He, in turn, was modeled, in a boy’s-adventure-­
story way, on Thomas Edison, who was something of a popular hero.
“The Future We Were Promised” is the penumbra of a spectrum of works, from science fiction to “serious” futurism, with a seasoning of decades of Popular Mechanics.

• Victor Appleton II, Tom Swift and his Triphibian Atomicar (1962).
• Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future (1962). This is an eclectic mixture of

takes on future technology ranging from specific existing machines (hovercraft) to informed speculation on possible capabilities based on new physics(antigravity). The perspective of a science fiction writer surely helped. Both
Clarke and Isaac Asimov predicted self-driving cars; by comparison, “serious”

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futurists predicted electric cars (along with pneumatic-tube trains), but not
self-driving ones. In their defense, this was a perfectly reasonable prediction in
the ’60s. But it was Clarke’s genius at inspired guessing just outside the boxthat makes Profiles an enduring classic.

• H. G. Wells, Things to Come (1935). The book (The Shape of Things to Come,published in 1933) is of historical interest, but the work that contributed mostto the popular conception of a wonderful future was, of course, the 1935 movie, with a script by Wells. In an amusing side note, when Arthur C. Clarke andStanley Kubrick got together to plan and plot the movie that became 2001: A
Space Odyssey, Clarke showed Kubrick Things, which apparently had had amajor influence on his thinking. Kubrick was singularly unimpressed.

• Robert A. Heinlein, Podkayne of Mars (1963), and many other works. Heinlein’s

juveniles are actually a much better part of the fare available for teenagers in
the ’50s and ’60s (more realistic, better written) than Tom Swift Jr.; the latter
owe their cachet to the original Tom Swift novels.

• Herman Kahn and Anthony J. Wiener, The Year 2000: A Framework forSpeculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years (1967). This is a good example ofwhat the “serious” futurists thought the new century would bring. They wereactually closer to right with the technology than with their geopolitics.

• The Jetsons (first aired 1962–1963, rebooted 1985–1987). It’s hard to know

where to put The Jetsons on a spectrum from pure fantasy to semi-serious, if
firmly tongue-in-cheek, forecasting. After all, we would never watch The
Flintstones to give us any idea at all of what life was like in the Neolithic, nor
Yogi Bear to gain an insight into Yellowstone. The cartoonists simply used asmorgasbord of woodland and paleontological creatures and phenomena, totally out of context, to lampoon current American suburban life. The Jetsons
was much closer to reality, but it’s clear that the family and their world werealso intended to lampoon the Popular Mechanics-style world-of-tomorrow
optimism, if only gently and hopefully. If you are at all interested in this subject,
you owe it to yourself to find and watch the entire first episode.

Chapter 2: The Graveyard of Dreams“You call this the future?” Calvin (the little boy) famously complains to Hobbes(the imaginary tiger) in the comic strip. “Where are the flying cars?” That was
December 30, 1989. A quarter-century has gone by, and we’re still waiting. According
to Wikipedia, the question “Where is my flying car?” “is emblematic of the supposed
failure of modern technology to match futuristic visions that were promoted in earlier decades.” A Google search for the question returns 781,000 results. Flying cars
have become a symbol of a mismatch: the future as imagined in the first half of thetwentieth century seemed a lot brighter than the present we’re living in now. We
have seen the future, and it doesn’t work as well as we expected. Progress has
slowed to a crawl.

11• Back to the Future (1985). The difference between the future we were prom-ised and what we got is neatly captured by the comparison of the Hill Valley
town square between 1955 and 1985, as Marty McFly manages to return to the
future.

• Tyler Cowen, The Great Stagnation (2011). This book and the work of Gordon,
below, are serious treatments of the late-20th-century shortfall of achievement versus expectations.

• Robert Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth (2016).
• Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (1907). This autobiography of
one of the leading American figures of the 19th century shows us that the optimism of the 1950s and sixties had firm roots in over a century of technological progress.

Chapter 3: The Conquest of the Air
In the 1930s, it was understood what would be needed in an aircraft “designed forthe needs of the private owner.” The autogyro might well have been just the thing to
revolutionize private aviation. For one brief historical moment, we had the rare combination of an aeronautical genius, in Juan de la Cierva, and a leading businessman
with substantial engineering experience and resources, in Harold Pitcairn, both men
dedicated to bringing the flying car to the people. This hope was destroyed by theGreat Depression and the war; average Americans could not afford cars, much lessairplanes, until the later 1940s.
But you could buy a perfectly useful flying car in the ’30s for $5,000. Here is their story.

• Jules Vernez, Robur the Conqueror (1886). This novel does for flying machines
what Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea did for submarines.

• Juan de la Cierva, Wings of Tomorrow: The Story of the Autogiro (1931). Veryreadable account by the inventor himself. This and the following constitute a
good background to understand how we almost had flying cars in the 1930s.

• Frank Kingston Smith, Legacy of Wings: The Harold F. Pitcairn Story (1981).
• Patrick Gyger, Flying Cars: The Extraordinary History of Cars Designed forTomorrow’s World (2011). This book, together with the de la Cierva and Smithaccounts, will give you a good overview of all the attempts to build and market
flying cars in the 20th century.

• Andrew Glass, Flying Cars: The True Story (2015).
• George Green, Flying Cars, Amphibious Vehicles and Other Dual Mode
Transports: An Illustrated Worldwide History (2010).

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Chapter 4: Waldo and Magic, Inc.
In 1942, Robert A. Heinlein, under the pseudonym of Anson MacDonald, publishedthe cover story in the leading SF magazine, Astounding. This story introduced the“Waldo F. Jones Synchronous Reduplicating Pantograph.” Heinlein is recognized as
the conceptual inventor of the telemanipulator, often termed a “waldo” for thatreason. It is not as widely remembered that the original waldoes in the story were (a)self-replicating (“Reduplicating”) and (b) scale-shifting (“Pantograph”).
It seems almost certain that the young Richard Feynman would have read Waldo or
known about it. He had been, after all, an undergraduate at M.I.T., at the time perhaps one of the very biggest hotbeds of science fiction fandom. And note his reference to “atomic energy plants,” where the telemanipulators were in those days
commonly referred to as waldoes.

• Robert Heinlein, Waldo and Magic, Incorporated (1950), in which Heinlein con-

ceptually invents the telemanipulator and very nearly invents nanotechnology.
Note that the name of the telemanipulator story is “Waldo”; it has been published with the novel “Magic, Inc.” so often that the names have become inseparable. This is an amusing coincidence, given that Arthur C. Clarke told us thata sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

• K. Eric Drexler, Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology (1986).

This and the following are popular accounts of what we might expect from amature nanotechnology.

• J. Storrs Hall, Nanofuture: What’s Next for Nanotechnology (2007). This in-cludes my early attempts to design flying cars using nanotech, which havebeen filtered through 10 years of actual flying experience for the present
volume.

Chapter 5: Cold Fusion?
Petrified with astonishment, Richard Seaton stared after the copper steambath upon which he had been electrolyzing his solution of “X,” the unknown
metal. For as soon as he had removed the beaker the heavy bath had jumped
endwise from under his hand as though it were alive. It had flown with terrificspeed over the table, smashing apparatus and bottles of chemicals on its way,
and was even now disappearing through the open window.
—The Skylark of Space, E. E. “Doc” Smith
What happens next might have been predicted. When Seaton attempts to demonstrate his new discovery to his friends, it doesn’t work, and he is dismissed as crazy.
Then he goes off to develop it on his own, and established industrial interests whowant to maintain a monopoly on power generation send thieves to steal his work, hit
men to assassinate him and his partner, and finally operatives to abduct his fiancée
in a spaceship. The novel is only slightly more melodramatic than the reality.

13• E. E. “Doc” Smith, The Skylark of Space (1928). An electrochemist accidentally
discovers a reaction involving a rare platinum-group metal that produces
enormous amounts of power.

• John Huizenga, Cold Fusion, the Scientific Fiasco of the Century (1992). Thisand the following are opposing interpretations of the cold fusion phenomenon.

• Charles Beaudette, Excess Heat: Why Cold Fusion Research Prevailed (2000).
Chapter 6: The Machiavelli Effect
There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, ormore uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a neworder of things.
—The Prince, Niccolò Machiavelli
Machiavelli then goes on to tell us why innovation is difficult, perilous, and uncertain.
His analysis illuminates 500 years of history and forms the basis for all of theselatter-­day elaborations on the phenomenon.

• Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince (1532).
• Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Gods of Mars (1913). The ancient religion of theMartians turns out to be a cruel fraud.

• Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants (2010). This and the following argue that

innovation and scientific discovery work best as a bottom-up, evolutionary
process.

• Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History ofInnovation (2011).

• Matt Ridley, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom (2020).
• Terrence Kealy, The Economic Laws of Scientific Research (1996).
Chapter 7: The Age of Aquarius
It seemed to me that I had happened upon humanity on the wane. The ruddy
sunset set me thinking of the sunset of mankind. For the first time I began torealize an odd consequence of the social effort in which we are at present engaged. And yet, come to think, it is a logical consequence enough. Strength isthe outcome of need; security sets a premium on feebleness. . . .
. . . . What, unless biological science is a mass of errors, is the cause of human
intelligence and vigour? Hardship and freedom: conditions under which theactive, strong, and subtle survive and the weaker go to the wall; conditions
that put a premium upon the loyal alliance of capable men, upon self-restraint,patience, and decision. . . .

14. . . . For countless years I judged there had been no danger of war or solitary
violence, no danger from wild beasts, no wasting disease to require strengthof constitution, no need of toil. For such a life, what we should call the weak
are as well equipped as the strong, are indeed no longer weak. . . . This has
ever been the fate of energy in security; it takes to art and to eroticism, andthen come languor and decay.
—The Time Machine, H. G. Wells
Wells’s account of the degeneration of mankind is iconic and striking. But somehow
we have managed to accomplish it in living memory instead of the geologic time heimagined. The following come nowhere near a full story, but they are a start.

• H. G. Wells, The Time Machine (1895). This is perhaps the watershed work ofscience fiction. It established the genre as being not just about this or thatamazing machine or discovery, but as encompassing the whole of human history, of the fate of the Universe, of an illimitable sense of wonder. And it introduces the feckless Eloi, whom we are fated to become . . . .

• Robert Trivers, Deceit and Self-Deception: Fooling Yourself the Better to Fool
Others (2011). . . . But once we are the Eloi, we’ll spend all our energy pretending otherwise.

• Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson, The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives inEveryday Life (2017).

• Matt Ridley, The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of

Cooperation (1996). One of the really towering intellectual achievements ofthe 20th century—ranking with relativity, quantum mechanics, the molecularbiology of life, and computing and information theory—was understanding theorigins of morality in evolutionary game theory. The details are worth many
books in themselves, and this is one. But the salient point for our purposes isthat the evolutionary pressures upon what we consider moral behavior arise
only in non-zero-sum interactions. In a dynamic, growing society, people caninteract cooperatively and all parties can come out ahead. In a static, nogrowth society, pressures toward morality and cooperation vanish; you can
only improve your situation by taking from someone else. The zero-sum society is a recipe for evil.

Chapter 8: Forbidden Fruit
In the name of safety, the FAA has been given control over the airspace of theUnited States. They have made it a desert, and they call it peace.
Herewith, a family biography, an academic analysis, and a global perspective:• Austin B. Hallock, Sky Full of Dreams: The Aviation Exploits, Creations, and
Visions of Bruce K. Hallock (2010).

15• Alex Tabarrok, Launching the Innovation Renaissance: A New Path to Bring
Smart Ideas to Market Fast (2011).

• Hans Rosling, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World—and

Why Things are Better Than You Think (2018). Rosling’s “4 Levels” descriptionof the state and development of human welfare is essential to understanding
today’s world and allows us to ask the key question: why is there no Level 5?

Chapter 9: Ceiling and Visibility Unlimited
Throughout the rest of the book, I have tended to analyze air travel as if it were
purely a question of time, or economic productivity, or the like. It is much easier tomeasure such things, but they don’t come close to capturing the full value of flight.
Flying has been a dream of mankind since time immemorial, and with good reason.
This world is a wonderful place, and you simply don’t see it from the ground. Your
point of view is terribly limited crawling around on the surface. People get the same
experience of taking off blinders and seeing the whole world from mountain climbing, or even from dining in a restaurant on the top floor of a skyscraper. But when
you fly, you get to take the mountain with you.
Bishop Wright’s sons were, as you might expect, quite literate. The other threebooks listed are among the great books of the 20th century that captured, to someextent, the romance of aviation.

• Orville and Wilbur Wright, The Early History of the Airplane (1922).
• Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand, and Stars (1939).
• Ernest K. Gann, Fate is the Hunter (1961).
• Richard Bach, Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1970).
Chapter 10: Dialogue Concerning the Two Great Systems of the WorldBy far the closest you can come in the real world to the experience of a personal
flying car as expected by the science fiction writers and pundits of the postwar
world is a small helicopter. The Robinson R44 has about the same total weight, interior size, useful load, cruise speed, and operational ceiling as the airplane I own.
But, of course, the real difference isn’t in flying; it’s taking off and landing. Instead of
thousands of feet of runway, 50 to 100 feet wide, the helicopter only needs a padthat is 10 feet by 10 feet. The amount of land taken up is little enough that most
hospitals—and many high-end resorts, corporate headquarters, and snooty wineries—have them, even though the amount of traffic is typically small.

• Steve Markham and Bill Holder, Straight Up: A History of Vertical Flight (2000).
• James R. Chiles, The God Machine: From Boomerangs to Black Hawks: The
Story of the Helicopter (2007).

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Chapter 11: The Atomic Age
Moving matter (as opposed to bits) around, or so goes the argument, requires acertain amount of energy, period. And energy is expensive. Some people will go farther and argue that the optimism and progress of the first half of the century wasdue to the rapidly expanding supply of cheap fossil fuel, and we ran out of that. Butthat doesn’t work as an explanation for the divergence of science fiction predictions and what we actually managed to build. In Profiles, Clarke wrote specifically ofneeding new energy sources to take over “when the oil wells run dry.”By the golden age of science fiction, we had already shifted from wood to coal, andfrom coal to oil, as our major energy source. George Jetson’s car isn’t going to foldup into a briefcase if its tanks are carrying 1,000 pounds of jet fuel. There was aconsensus among futurists and science fiction writers that the next shift was already beginning to happen, and we were on the verge of the Atomic Age.
Again, we have the range from prophetic science fiction through history to the current day:

• H. G. Wells, The World Set Free (1914). When this was written, only natural ra-

dioactivity was known. Wells imagined that it might be artificially produced as a
power source and weapon. Then physicist and inventor Leo Szilard, who hadread Wells, realized that this might be accomplished with a neutron-mediatedchain reaction.

• L. Sprague de Camp: Man and Power, The Story of Power from the Pyramids to
the Atomic Age (1961).

• Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1966). . . . And the rest is

history. If you read only one book about nuclear history, this Pulitzer-winningvolume is the one you should read.

• Jack Devanney, Why Nuclear Power Has Been a Flop (2020). Imagine a practicing nuclear engineer and entrepreneur expanded this zine to book length. This
is what you would get.

Chapter 12: When Worlds Collide
As a member of the Foresight/Battelle Roadmap to Productive Nanosystems working group, I was the champion of Feynman’s scheme as one of the possible pathways to molecular manufacturing. It was decided, however, that the Roadmap
should focus only on those techniques which produced atomically precise products.
This seems a bit counterintuitive, like insisting that the only area on a map be that ofthe destination, excluding the starting point and intervening territory. There were,
however, sound political reasons for the decision, primarily as a hard stop to exclude
the “nanopants” nonsense (which revolves around thin films and particulates) fromtaking over the proceedings.

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But now the time has long since come to examine the possibility of actually doing
what Feynman proposed. You may, if you like, consider this the missing Roadmap
chapter. Outside of this chapter in the book itself, there are not, to my knowledge,
many great resources bearing on the project, but the following are useful background material.

• Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer, When Worlds Collide (1933). Of course, the true
cultural icon was the George Pal film with the group of scientists working desperately under the giant sign “Waste Anything but Time,” racing to build aspaceship to escape the imminent destruction of the Earth.

• Foresight Nanotech Institute/Battelle Memorial Institute, Technology Roadmap

for Productive Nanosystems (2007). This is a relatively technical guide toachieving nanotech capability, and is mostly bottom-up; the others are more
focused on a self-replicating-machine approach that would be used in a topdown approach or a mature technology.

• Robert Freitas and Ralph Merkle, Kinematic Self-Replicating Machines (2004).
Everything you always wanted to know about self-reproduction but were afraid
to ask.

• R. A. Freitas and W. P. Gilbreath, Advanced Automation for Space Missions,NASA CP 2255 (1980). NASA’s study of doing the same thing on the Moon.

• Neil Gershenfeld, Fab: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop—from
Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication (2005). How to build somethingthat can build anything!

Chapter 14: The Dawn of Robots
A decade ago, in my book Beyond AI, I took up cudgels against those who were predicting a major takeoff in artificial intelligence by virtue of a self-improving super-AI.
Long before that happens, I said, we will see something a bit more mundane but
perfectly effective: AI will start to work, and people will realize it, and lots of money,
talent, and resources will pour into the field. That will produce an acceleration of
results, which will attract more money, and there’s your feedback loop. That’s what
happened, for example, in aviation in the decades following 1910.
Something of the kind appears to be happening in AI now.

• Karel Čapek, R.U.R. (1920). The title of this play stands for “Rossum’s Universal
Robots.” The script coined the word “robot,” and also firmly attached what
Asimov termed the “Frankenstein Complex” to them.

• Isaac Asimov, I, Robot (1950). Asimov’s attempt to refute R.U.R. (andFrankenstein).

• Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Race Against the Machine (2011).
Of course, they might not wipe us out, they may just take all the jobs.

18• Randall Garrett, Unwise Child (1962). . . . Or become converted to some strange
religion.

• J. Storrs Hall, Beyond AI: Creating the Conscience of the Machine (2005).
Chapter 15: The Second Atomic Age
There are something like four billion tons of uranium dissolved in the Earth’s oceans.
That works out to be over 100 quadrillion watt-years of energy, enough to supply
the current American 10-kilowatt-per-capita level of power to 10 billion people for
10,000 years. Economical extraction would be a cakewalk with full-fledged nanotech. We could put the entire world back on generating more energy and harnessing it more effectively—what I call the Henry Adams Curve—and the only environmental impact would be to make the oceans imperceptibly less radioactive.
The book on the thoroughgoing application of nanotech to nuclear technology has
yet to be written. Here are a few morsels for thought.

• Richard Rhodes, Energy: A Human History (2018).
• Robert Freitas Jr., Nanomedicine Volume I: Basic Capabilities (1999). Althoughoriented toward working with the intricacies of the body at a molecular scale,this technical but not-too-technical tome gives a broad overview of the kindsof things we should expect nanotechnology to be able to do.

• K. Eric Drexler, Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will

Change Civilization (2013). Drexler brings his previous book, Engines ofCreation, up to date.

• Mats Lewan, An Impossible Invention (2014). An experienced Swedish technology reporter investigates one of the more publicized cold fusion entrepreneurs. Genius or fraud? Or something in between, like Babbage’s AnalyticalEngine, based on a sound idea but constantly revised to the point of never being completed? Your guess is as good as mine.

Chapter 16: Tom Swift and his Flying Car
Can we go whole hog, and put in down-blowing fans in the trunk and hood areas ofour cars for true vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) flying machines? In theory,
there is enough thruster area for 1,000 horsepower to lift the car. The airjeeps ofthe 1960s were designed along these lines. The ones with turbines (e.g., the actual
AirGeep VZ-8P) flew well, while the ones with piston engines (the Curtis/WrightBee) made barely working hovercraft. The question is, is there room for anythingelse, including the engine?
Perhaps surprisingly, the answer is probably. In theory, you only need about 20
square feet of footprint (out of the 100 in a typical car) to lift 3,000 pounds, drawing
850 kilowatts. In practice, you might use a few more. In either case, there is plenty

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of footprint left over for an engine, passenger compartment, wheels, and so forth.
The Doak VZ-4 put 1,000 hp into 50 square feet of lift-fan area; a similar area in our
car would leave us 50 square feet of floor space for passengers, engine, and soforth. (If that doesn’t fit, you can add another 50 square feet and still have the footprint of a Ford F-150 pickup or a 1959 Cadillac.)
Ranging from the popular to the technical, these books explain what you need toknow to have a shot at designing a flying car. Or, perhaps more to the point, they’ll
help you look at a proposed plan for one and see if it makes any sense.

• Henk Tennekes, The Simple Science of Flight (1996).
• Daniel Raymer, Simplified Aircraft Design for Homebuilders (2002).
• Ira H. Abbot and A. E. von Doenhoff, Theory of Wing Sections (1959).
• Barnes W. McCormick Jr., Aerodynamics of V/STOL Flight (1967).
Chapter 17: Escape Velocity
A classic 1920s-era Koken barber chair weighs about 250 pounds. It is a solid pieceof old-fashioned machinery; many original ones are still in use today. Chairs like thatwere also something of a luxury item: the Titanic had two of them in its first-classonly barber shop, as did many top ocean liners of the day. But nobody in his rightmind would design a spacecraft with a barber chair in it!
Well, nobody except Ted Taylor. Taylor was an interesting figure in technologicalhistory: as a nuclear engineer, he designed both the smallest and the largest fission
devices that the United States ever built. Taylor’s insistence that there be a barberchair in his spaceship was an in-your-face way of saying that this was a ship, like anocean liner, and not a dinky little capsule stuck on top of a skyrocket.
Taylor’s ship, of course, was Project Orion, the very first study funded by ARPA (later
DARPA), the now-famous research arm of the Department of Defense (and the second major project of General Atomics, after the TRIGA reactor). They started studying Orion in earnest in 1959. It was a serious engineering effort, with some of thecountry’s top minds (besides Taylor, most famously Freeman Dyson). Some of thedesign is still classified top secret.

• George Dyson, Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship (2002).
• Robert A. Heinlein, Space Cadet (1948). This classic Heinlein juvenile spawned

a host—nay, a whole industry—of imitators, and added a phrase to thelanguage.

• Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff (1979).
• Eugene Cernan and Don Davis, The Last Man on the Moon: Astronaut Eugene
Cernan and America’s Race in Space (1999).

20• Mike Gray, Angle of Attack: Harrison Storms and the Race to the Moon (1992).

The previous books describe the experience of flying the rockets. This is one of
the best at explaining what it was like to build them.

• Gerard O’Neill, The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space (1976). The future

is not what it used to be. Most of the golden-age science fiction writers envisioned us getting into spaceships and going to other worlds, interacting withnatives and establishing colonies in essentially a rerun of the voyages of exploration in wooden boats 500 years ago. Instead, it seems much more likely that
we will go and build brand new worlds where nothing was before. Instead of afew small worlds ill-adapted to humanity, the solar system beckons with theequivalent of 20,000 Earths.

Chapter 18: Metropolis
The value of a city is not to bring people closer together. The value of a city is to reduce the time, the opportunity cost, to get from one place—a home, business, institution, restaurant, recreation—to another. It’s pure travel theory.
One would think that, with the density of prospective riders, economies of scale
would allow a well-designed and integrated transportation system to do better thanprivate independent vehicles going between ranch houses across the open plains.
Instead, our cities do worse by an order of magnitude.
A mystery, a misery, and a mythology:• Isaac Asimov, The Caves of Steel (1953). Although nominally a murder mysterywith a robot detective, this is lifetime NYC resident Asimov’s best backgrounder for what the city of the future would be like.

• Jane Jacobs, Dark Age Ahead (2004). David Altrogge quipped, “A dark age is

not when you’ve forgotten how to do something. It’s when you’ve forgottenthat you could.” Jacobs’s final book about the decay of several North American
institutions sounds quite a bit more prophetic today than when she wrote it 17
years ago.

• Randal O’Toole, The Vanishing Automobile and Other Urban Myths: How Smart
Growth Will Harm American Cities (2000).

Chapter 19: Engineers’ Dreams
Current efforts to regulate the Earth’s climate cost the world economy something
on the order of a trillion dollars a year, not counting the externalities of energy poverty and so forth. What’s more, by their own criteria, they are not succeeding: global
CO2 emissions are rising faster now than before the Kyoto Protocols were adopted.
Suppose we instead used that trillion—roughly 50 times NASA’s budget—to build arobust orbital infrastructure and simply put up some sunshades. The total area

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needed to negate the enhanced greenhouse effect would be a two-mile-wide ribbon around the equator. Then not only would you have cooled the climate, you’dhave a robust orbital infrastructure, a vastly more valuable thing. For example, if we
put up a solar power satellite instead of merely a shade, it would generate more
power than the human race currently uses.
If, after reading these, you are not seized with the urge to go out and build something 10,000 times bigger than the Earth, there is no poetry in your soul.

• Ben Bova, The Weathermakers (1967).
• L. Sprague de Camp, The Continent Makers (1951).
• Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker (1937). Freeman Dyson credits this as his inspiration for the concept that has come to be known as the Dyson sphere, a gadgetthat collects all the power put out by a star and supports a Kardashev Type II
civilization.

• John W. Campbell, The Mightiest Machine (serialized 1934–1935, collected1947). Literarily the Verne to Stapledon’s Wells, Campbell wrote about a gadgetthat could tap the power of a star two years before Star Maker, but in an “adventures in a spaceship” style, as opposed to a “history of the universe” one.

Chapter 20: Rocket to the RenaissanceYes, we should have flying cars. Yes, we should have power too cheap to meter. Yes,
we should have orbital hotels and a base on the Moon. Average family income in the
U.S. should be $200,000 by now, and growing at a sustained six percent. But what
has actually happened is that cultural reaction and regulatory ossification havecombined to dam up the normal flow of experimentation in high-power technology.
Where the technium would have spilled into the fertile valleys in idea space, we haveinstead built up a theoretical, scientific overhang. We built and tested molten salt
reactors and nuclear rocket engines over 40 years ago, but in the interim the UnitedStates has effectively used experimentation with nuclear capability as a casus belli
against anyone who has tried it. We could have been developing nanotech since1960, when Feynman first pointed out the possibilities. We know a lot more about
the molecular scale now, so when the dam breaks it will come a lot faster. We havesystem designs for self-replicating nanofactories. We have detailed, atom-for-atom designs and engineering analyses of gears, levers, bearings, shafts, and sprockets. We can simulate the quantum electrodynamics on our almost ridiculously powerful computers. It is as if we had gone into the Industrial Revolution already knowing
thermodynamics and high-temperature metallurgy.
We return to our roots of Chapter 1 with classic science fiction and a nonfiction
work by a science fiction writer.

• Poul Anderson, Vault of the Ages (1952). Five hundred years after a nuclear
holocaust, tribesmen fight with swords and spears over a prize: a time-capsulevault of technological knowledge.

22• Isaac Asimov, Foundation (1951). This time, the collapsing civilization is the entire

galaxy, and the old forgotten knowledge is held by an entire planet of scientists.
The Foundation series was awarded the once-only “Best of all Time” Hugoaward in 1966 by the fans; presumably they used a time machine to make sure.

• Robert Heinlein, Beyond This Horizon (serialized 1942, collected 1948). Perhaps,

instead, we are not doomed to follow historical patterns and become Eloi. Thiswidely misunderstood story (when I say misunderstood, I mean that virtuallynone of the reviewers or commentators I have seen have a shadow of a hint ofa clue what it’s about) is Heinlein’s attempt to refute Wells’s Time Machine,much as Foundation is Asimov’s attempt to refute Edward Gibbon.

• Jerry Pournelle, A Step Farther Out (1980). If we can keep our heads when all

those around us are losing theirs, we have a real opportunity not just to survive
but to thrive. As Wilbur Wright said, “It is not really necessary to look too far
into the future; we see enough already to be certain that it will be magnificent.
Only let us hurry and open the roads.”

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