THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE 

ON SOCIETY 

James Burke 

Jules Bergman 

Isaac Asimov 
NASA SP-482 

THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE 

ON SOCIETY 

James Burke 

Jules Bergman 

Isaac Asimov 

Prepared by Langley Research Center 

Scientific and Technical Information Branch 1985 

National Aeronautics and Space Administration 

Washington, DC 
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data 

Burke, James, 1936- 

The impact of science on society. 

(NASA SP ; 482) 

Series of lectures given at a public lecture series sponsored by NASA 

1. Science-Social aspects-Addresses, essays, lectures. I. Bergman, 

and the College of William and Mary in 1983. 

Jules. 11. Asimov, Isaac, 1920- . 111. United States. National 

Aeronautics and Space Administration. IV. College of William and 

Mary. V. Title. VI. Series. 

Q175.55 .B88 1985 303.4’83 84 -1 4 1 59 

For sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office 

Washington, D.C. 20402 
Foreword 

Science and technology have had a major impact on society, 

and their impact is growing. By drastically changing our means of 

communication, the way we work, our housing, clothes, and food, 

our methods of transportation, and, indeed, even the length and 

quality of life itself, science has generated changes in the moral 

values and basic philosophies of mankind. 

Beginning with the plow, science has changed how we live and 

what we believe. By making life easier, science has given man 

the chance to pursue societal concerns such as ethics, aesthetics, 

education, and justice; to create cultures; and to improve human 

conditions. But it has also placed us in the unique position of being 

able to destroy ourselves. 

To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the National Aeronautics 

and Space Administration (NASA) in 1983, NASA and The College 

of William and Mary jointly sponsored a series of public lectures 

on the impact of science on society. These lectures were delivered 

by British historian James Burke, ABC TV science editor and 

reporter Jules Bergman, and scientist and science fiction writer 

Dr. Isaac Asimov. These authorities covered the impact of science 

on society from the time of man’s first significant scientific invention 

to that of expected future scientific advances. The papers are 

edited transcripts of these speeches. Since the talks were generally 

given extemporaneously, the papers are necessarily informal and 

may, therefore, differ in style from the authors’ more formal works. 

As the included audience questions illustrate, the topic raises 

far-reaching issues and concerns serious aspects of our lives and 

future. 

Donald P. Hearth 

Former Director 

NASA Langley Research Center 

... 

111 
Contents 

Foreword ...................... iii 

The Legacy of Science ................ 3 

James Burke 

Accomplishments of Science by the Year 2000 ...... 33 

Jules Bergman 

Our Future in the Cosmos-Computers ......... 59 

Isaac Asimov 

Our Future in the Cosmos-Space ........... 79 

Isaac Asimov 

V 
The Legacy of Science 

James Burke 
James Burke 

For more than a decade, James Burke has been one of the British 

Broadcasting Corporation’s outstanding television writers, hosts, 

and producers. Born in Northern Ireland and educated at Oxford 

University, Burke spent 5 years in Italy teaching at the Universities 

of Bologna and Urbino and directing the English Schools in Bologna 

and Rome. He made his television debut in 1965 as a reporter for 

Granada Television’s Rome Bureau. 

Burke’s impressive following in the British Isles dates back to 

1966, when he joined the BBC’s weekly science show, Tomorrow’s 

World. As the chief BBC correspondent for all Apollo space flights, 

Burke won critical acclaim for his interpretation of the US space 

program to an audience of over 12 million people. During this 

time he developed and presented a variety of documentaries, and 

in 1972 he became the host of his own weekly prime-time science 

series, The Burke Special. The programs earned for Burke a Royal 

Television Society Silver Medal in 1972 and a Gold Medal in 1973. 

In 1975-1976, Burke co-authored and co-hosted The Inventing of 

America, an NBC/BBC joint production for the US Bicentennial. 

Burke’s 10-part television series Connections, which aired 

in 1979, attracted one of the largest followings ever for a Public 

Broadcasting Station documentary series, and the companion book 

was a bestseller in both the UK and the US. The series, which took 

a year of research and another year to film at more than 100 locations in 22 countries, surveyed the history of technology and social 

change by tracing the evolution of eight major modern inventions: 

The atom bomb, telecommunications, computers, production lines, 

jet aircraft, plastics, rocketry, and television. In 1980 Burke wrote 

and presented Burke: The Real Thing, a BBC six-part series on 

reality and human perception. He is a regular contributor to such 

major magazines as Vogue, The Atlantic Monthly, Harpers, New 

York Magazine, and New Scientist. 
The Legacy of Science 

Change is one of mankind’s most mysterious 

creations. The factors that operate to cause it came 

into play when man produced his first tool. With it he 

changed the world forever, and bound himself to the 

artifacts he would create in order, always, to make 

tomorrow better than today. But how does change 

operate? What triggers a new invention, a different 

philosophy, an altered society? The interactive 

network of man’s activities links the strangest, 

most disparate elements, bringing together the most 

unlikely combinations in unexpected ways to create a 

new world. 

Is there a pattern to change in different times and 

separate places in our history? Can change be forecast? How does society live with perpetual innovation 

that, in changing the shape of its environment, also 

transforms its attitudes, morals, values? If the prime 

effect of change is more change, is there a limit beyond which we will not be able to go without anarchy, 

or have we adaptive abilities, as yet only minimally 

activated, which wall make of our future a place very 

different from anything we have ever experienced before? 

Somebody once apparently said to the philosopher Wittgenstein, “What a bunch of no-knows we medieval Europeans must 

have been! back in the days before Copernicus, to have looked up 

at the sky and thought that what we saw up there was the Sun 

going round the Earth, when, as everybody knows, the Earth goes 

round the Sun, and it doesn’t take too many brains to understand 

that!” Wittgenstein replied, “Yes, but I wonder what it would have 

looked like if the Sun had been going round the Earth.” The point 

is that it would, of course, have looked exactly the same. What he 

was saying was that you see what you want to see. 

Consider also the medieval Londoner or eighteenth-century 

American who, when asked what he thought of the prospect that 

3 
The Impact of Science on Society 

one day everybody would have his own individual form of personal 

transportation, laughed at the idea of the metropolis at a standstill 

when the streets became, as they surely would, 14 feet deep in 

horse manure. The concept of any other form of transportation 

was outside his context. 

I started with these two stories because they illustrate what I 

want to talk about today. If you look back at the cultural history 

of the West (and I do this on the premise that you only know where 

you’re going if you know where you’ve been, and that those who 

are not prepared to learn the lessons of history are condemned to 

repeat it), the most important thing about the process of change 

and forecasting change at any one time hasn’t been a matter of 

understanding the inner workings of the new gismos that mankind 

creates to make tomorrow better than today. In many cases, it 

has been the awareness that change was even happening at all, the 

understanding that the solid base from which prediction was being 

made might be about as solid as quicksand. 

Even the most apparently immutable system or structure may 

be experiencing change even as you look at it. By change I mean, 

of course, not just change in the sense of bigger and better models 

and new ways of doing the same things you were doing before, but 

qualitative change in the structure and behavior of the society in 

which you live. I mean new philosophies as well as new gadgets. 

I’m not saying that the appreciation of change is easy; far from 

it, particularly today. As one of your more respectable social 

forecasters said recently, “If you understand something today, that 

means it must by definition already be obsolete.” Our general 

relationship with the present accelerating rate of change reminds 

me of the postcard from the patient on holiday to his psychiatrist 

at home: “Having a wonderful time. Why?” 

The difficulty in recognizing change even when you fall into it, 

and the consequent off-the-cuff variety of forecasting that prevails, 

is, like most things (as I’ve just said), a matter of context. If you’re 

looking to assess the future performance of an artifact or a human 

system within the envelope delineated by the factors involved, then 

what is the envelope, and how much of it are you aware of when 

YOU yourself are in the envelope? I’d like to start off by looking at 

that first. 

4 
The Legacy of Science 

Let me look at the envelope from a very basic point of view, 

that of the neurophysiology of raw perception itself. Forgive me 

if it’s a bit oversimple. Take me-on the back of your retina 

I’m upside down, focused at the center but fuzzy at the edges, 

two-dimensional, a barrage of photons releasing rhodopsin and 

triggering neural impulses along the visual nerve. At the same 

time, the pressure wave I’m setting up right now with all this talk 

is causing little hairs inside the cochlea, in your inner ear, to shake 

around and send neural impulses into your brain. At no level am 

I aurally or visually more than a complicated version of the same 

neural impulse you’d get if you scratched yourself. 

So what is it that makes all that mush me? After all, you’ve 

never met me before, and yet here I am, identified by you with 

absolute certainty as a human being, male, standing more or less 

upright, talking, and doing all the other things you’ve already 

recognized. What accomplishes that recognition job for you is 

your cognitive model. This is the construct, both experiential and 

genetic in origin, that you use to check up on all the separate bits of 

me and everything else you experience, mentally and physically, for 

identification purposes. You are using a recognition system made 

up of dedicated cells, each one firing in reaction to the one highly 

specific bit of detail it’s built to react to. 

Interestingly, it may be that the genetic component in that 

model is greater than was once thought. Some work going on here 

and in the UK shows that on the back of the human embryo, very 

early on in its development, is the neural plate, which contains 

the nerves that will eventually expand to form the spinal cord and 

the brain-the nervous system, in fact. Apparently, embryonic 

development involves millions of those little baby neurons growing 

and traveling (thanks to some kind of genetic zip coding) to an 

exact position in three-dimensional space in the final brain, in 

order for you to function at all when you’re born and to lay 

down the basic matrix of interrelating neurons which will be the 

neurophysiological infrastructure of your personality and of the way 

you think. 

I labor the point to show that the cognitive model isn’t merely 

some psychologist’s fantasy. It has a physical existence as a 

recognition system acting in an individual way to determine what 

5 
The Impact of Science on Society 

reality is or is not for the organism. Anything that doesn’t get 

recognized in the most basic sense by the model is, naturally 

enough, rejected as meaningless. Of ‘course, meaning is defined 

by your neurophysiological construct, not anybody else’s. 

Perception is directed and controlled by this cognitive model, 

both at the individual level and at the level of whole societies. Both 

kinds of models are very idiosyncratic. The Italian model has a sign 

like a wave, meaning, “Come here.” Greek girls cause problems for 

non-Greek boys by saying “No” with a nod, not a shake, of their 

head. In New Zealand you can do one kind of V-sign but never 

the other. Americans look posh when they look neat; Europeans 

look posh when they look as if they’ve just come through a hedge 

backwards. A very fine linguistic example of model difference lies 

in the way the Irish and the English express themselves. Where 

the British will say that a situation is desperate but not hopeless, 

the Irish will say the situation is hopeless but not desperate. 

The cognitive model, then, is what sets the rules, defines the 

structures, bestows meaning, sets up the ethics, values, beliefs, 

knowledge-everything that permits the user to function as a 

sentient organism, because it provides a perceived reality. It tells 

you which way is up, if you like. The model, then, determines what 

the universe is. As Wittgenstein said, “You see what you want to 

see.” 

Let me give you a good example of that axiom from history. 

Back in the twelfth century, when we were looking up at a Sun 

going round the Earth because Aristotle and the Church said that’s 

the way it was, we were also looking up at what we thought was 

a perfect and unchanging universe, since if it had been created on 

day one of creation by the Deity, it had to be perfect. If it were 

perfect, there would be no change up there to see, so we didn’t 

look up much. At the same time, however, the Chinese were busy 

getting a crick in the neck from doing just that-observing what 

was going on up there and logging everything that moved. They 

became expert astronomers centuries before we did, not because 

they were clever and we were dummies but because there was 

nothing in their model, as there was in ours, to stop them from 

seeing changes up there. We saw no change up in the sky because 

we thought there was none to see. Comets and supernovae were 

thought of as warnings from God! 

6 
The Legacy of Science 

The cognitive model-or to give it a better name, the paradigmcontrols all decisions. If you believe the cosmos is made up of 

omelette, you build instruments specifically designed to find traces 

of intergalactic yolk. In that paradigm you reject phenomena like 

pulsars and black holes as paranormal garbage. In an omelette 

cosmos, the beginning of the universe becomes a chicken and egg 

problem, doesn’t it? 

Now, this definition of terms (like omelette universe) happens 

all the time. The reason that we today refer to electricity in terms 

of current is because in the eighteenth century people like Ben 

Franklin thought it was a fluid and tied all their experiments to 

that so-called fact. At the same time, in the eighteenth century, 

they thought all disease was caused by bad smells. Malaria is mal 

aria-bad air. We laugh at that, but for them, as for everybody 

at any time, the contemporary view of things is always the horse’s 

mouth. 

Every paradigm, at every time, in every place, is internally valid. 

By definition it has to be, for the organism or the group to function. 

Everybody has to have some version of reality-“the way things 

are for them,” their definition of which way is up. This is perfectly 

valid at the time. All you can logically say about a guy who thinks 

he’s a poached egg is that he’s in the minority. 

But then, if every paradigm is valid-set in philosophical 

concrete-what ’s the point in going through all that confusion 

when change happens? Metaphysically speaking, no one paradigm 

is innately any better than any other. A universe that began at 

9 a.m. on October 10, 4004 B.C. (which was official back in the 

seventeenth century) is intrinsically no less valuable for those who 

live by a belief in it than is our present uncertain universe, perhaps built like a yo-yo, forever destroying and remaking itself in 

never-ending big bangs. Each of the cosmological theories has, at 

different times, found totally ironclad evidence to support it. 

So, given that every paradigm in every place at every time has 

had epistemological reasons for being the only right one thus far, 

why does the boat get rocked time and again, why are waves made, 

why does change happen, when everything is fine as it is? Even if 

there are a few wrinkles in an otherwise fully adequate explanation 

of the universe, we try very hard to get around them. 

For instance, something that bothered people back in the eighth 

century B.C. was the way the planets appear to go backwards 

7 

I 
The Impact of Science on Society 

from time to time. According to Aristotle, who worked out a 

general theory in the fourth century B.C., the sky was made up 

of eight concentric crystalline spheres, each one carrying a planet 

and the outermost one carrying the stars, which were supposed 

to rotate east to west. This circular motion, being heavenly, was 

perfect-except for these planets going what looked like backwards 

from time to time. Well, that particular little inconvenience was 

solved by putting each planet in a littie epicycle, or mini-orbit, 

spinning round and round while still remaining attached to its own 

individual main sphere, which still rotated east-west like it was 

supposed to. That way, the planets only appeared to go backwards 

sometimes. 

The real explanation, that the Earth was moving as well and 

that this caused the appearance of retrograde motion, was unacceptable within the cosmological paradigm that was still operative 

in the Renaissance. It was unacceptable because it would have 

had philosophical and theological implications that were too hot to 

handle. The Bible would have been seen to be wrong, for example, 

because it said the Earth didn’t move. So epicycles fit the bill, and 

kept things the way they were supposed to be. However, you had 

to have over 70 of them, and even then they didn’t work absolutely 

perfectly. 

“Saving the appearances at all costs” in that way is generally 

how we react to little inconsistencies in our paradigm. If your 

paradigm is the rock of ages for you-and it always is-then you 

let go of it only with immense reluctance. We are, paradigmatically 

speaking, extremely conservative. 

Look at how often change is fought in history. Here’s an example 

that always tickles me. The chain of events back in the twelfth 

century that set Europe going economically after the Dark Ages 

was essentially the textile revolution. A new loom came in from 

Arab Spain. It had foot pedals, which left the weaver’s hands free 

to weave faster and make more cloth cheaper. The Dutch weavers 

smashed the thing up because it would have put people out of work. 

(That was a new idea in the twelfth century.) 

A generation later, when the dust had settled, in came the 

spinning wheel from left field-a total surprise from China. It 

made thread very much faster than before. When the wheel and 

the loom were put together, the production of cloth skyrocketed. 

So there were more riots, because the cloth was linen, which was 

8 
The Legacy of Science 

made from a plant and was cheaper than feeding sheep and making 

wool, so the rioters were sheep farmers. 

But soon everybody was wearing linen, because it was cheap, 

and throwing it away when they wore holes in it. So there was this 

giant pile of linen rag lying around fourteenth-century Europe. The 

price of paper dropped like a stone, because linen rag paper was 

the best you could make. There were more riots-sheep farmers 

again, because parchment was sheepskin, and it had become too 

expensive to use. 

So here was enough paper around to put on the walls, and the 

scribes were going like gangbusters and pretty soon they were on 

strike for higher wages because it was a seller’s market. Everybody 

wanted their paperwork done because the Black Death was just 

over and everybody was inheriting like crazy. There just wasn’t 

enough writing ability to go around, until Gutenberg came along 

in 1450 with the printing press. 

Now this was something the Church wanted like a hole in the 

head, because it would encourage free thinking-until they realized 

that you could print indulgences with it. People bought the indulgences, because when they did that they got remission of some sins. 

With all the demand for instant salvation that followed, the Church 

made a million-money to build the Vatican, pay Michelangelo’s 

bill, and generally get involved in prestigious projects that made 

certain German clerics really mad at this consumerist, moneymaking approach to religion. One of these Germanic chaps nailed 

up his criticisms, and there was the Reformation. 

It’s a little oversimplified, maybe, but you get my drift. People 

in general would rather fight than switch. So, to repeat myself, if 

the paradigm fits and people resist innovation, why does change 

happen at all? Well, let me give you some examples of the 

mechanisms that operate to produce change, and you’ll see why 

it isn’t that simple. 

To begin with, often you just don’t know change is coming. Even 

if you’re personally involved, you may be looking the wrong way 

at the time, like young William Perkin of London in 1856. Around 

then, everybody wits looking for benzene rings and chemistry was 

the flavor of the month, and Perkin, a chemist, was trying to be 

the young science hero who would save the great British empire by 

discovering the way to make artificial quinine chemically. You see, 

9 
The Impact of Science on Society 

our administration and army chaps were dropping like flies out in 

the Far Eastern colonies because of malaria, and artificial quinine 

would have fixed things up right. Besides that, we were having to 

buy natural quinine from the Dutch in Java, and they charged an 

outrageous price for it. So that great motivator, money, was also 

at work. Well, after a bit Perkin came up with some interesting 

sludge, but one thing it wasn’t was artificial quinine, so he threw 

it down the sink, and discovered that he had invented the world’s 

first aniline dye. Made a million. 

Sometimes, though, you may be looking in the right direction, 

but you don’t see what’s happening. In 1778, just after you people 

had gone off on your own and left us with no more South Carolina 

pitch to put on the bottom of our ships to protect them from rot, 

the rather seedy ninth Earl of Dundonald in Scotland thought up 

a plan to recoup the family fortunes by getting tar out of the coal 

from a couple of mines on his land. This tar would replace the 

pitch and make Dundonald a rich man. Unfortunately, the British 

government had already shifted to copper-bottoming its ships, so 

Dundonald’s coal-heating kiln, where he made the tar, was useless, 

and so were the vapors he had been watching coming out of the 

kiln. In fact, he’d even been lighting them and generally playing 

around, shooting flames out of a tube. He happened to mention 

this to his friend James Watt, and three years later, Watt’s sidekick 

“invented” coal gas. Dundonald died in poverty. 

However, even when you get what you’re looking for and 

you know you’ve got it, things can go haywire. Take Benjamin 

Huntsman, clockmaker, looking for a better clock spring in 1740 

because pendulum clocks were no good at sea and you needed 

a clock to work out longitude, and in an era of great maritime 

expansion east and west, longitude was kind of essential. Now 

Huntsman happened to live near a glass works, and he saw the 

glassmakers putting in chips of old broken bottles, doing hightemperature remelts, and coming out with really great glass. So 

he tried the trick with steel. It worked, and there was what he 

wanted, the world’s greatest spring. The point was, Huntsman’s 

steel would also cut anything you could think of, so what it did 

for the lathe, and machine tools in general, and micrometers, 

and precision engineering, and steam engine cylinders, and the 

whole Industrial Revolution was something nobody could ever have 

10 
The Legacy of Science 

dreamed of-least of all Huntsman, who sat there saying, “What 

happened?” 

Sometimes the catalyst for major change will simply come in, 

totally unexpectedly, from outside your paradigm. Take the case 

of the compass. It came in from China via the Arabs in the twelfth 

century. Nothing much happened until Sir Francis Drake came 

back from over here complaining about the way the needle did 

funny things when you got across to this side of the Atlantic. Queen 

Elizabeth’s doctor took time off (18 years) to look at why, and 

decided that the Earth was a gigantic magnet with poles. OK, 

so what? Well, to carry out his experiments, he built himself a 

lot of balls of various substances-lodestone, amber, sulfur, glass, 

and so on-to represent the Earth, so he could see what they did 

to his compass. As he busily rubbed these balls to make them 

attractive to his needle, he noted somewhat disinterestedly that 

sulfur was very attractive, and added a minor footnote to that 

effect. Around 1640 the mayor of Magdeburg in Germany, one 

Otto Guericke, read the aforesaid footnote and tried the trick again. 

While he was rubbing his sulfur ball one day to make it attractive, it 

cracked and gave off a spark, and-yes, you guessed it-electricity. 

From the compass. From China. Even if you’d spoken Chinese you 

wouldn’t have seen that one coming! 

One of the most common ways change is generated is through 

interaction between one factor and another, and usually in unexpected concatenations. Take the skills a goldsmith has. He’s good 

at working soft metals and using molten alloys, and the hallmark 

of a good goldsmith is just that, his hallmark, the punch that puts 

his impress on his work. If you are capable of seeing that punched 

image in reverse, you can see how to cast a shape in the pattern 

made by the punch. And the pattern could be a letter, in metal, 

which is why printing was invented by a goldsmith-that’s what 

Gutenberg was. 

This interaction that can lead to change is often caused by 

imbalance, a kind of domino effect. The well-known modern one is 

that of the superplants. They give great yield-better than the old, 

less productive types. But they replace variety with a monoculture, 

and, if disease hits that, you’ve got no fallback. 

That kind of domino effect-the knock-on effect of imbalance 

in one area upon another-gave us one of the major scientific 

11 
The Impact of Science on Society 

discoveries in history. When cannons started being popular in the 

mid-fourteenth century, they pushed up the demand for metal, and 

that got people deeper into the ground than before. One of the 

things they found was that the deeper you go, the wetter it can 

get, and the old suction pumps wouldn’t lift the water up higher 

than about 30 feet. Well, this problem caused all sorts of grief 

until one of Galileo’s boys, called Torricelli, worked out that it had 

something to do with atmospheric pressure. A friend of a friend of 

his went up a mountain with a tube of mercury to see if pressures 

were different up there and down here. Well, they were, but what 

was the gap at the top of the tube full of mercury? It was the thing 

everybody said didn’t exist-the vacuum. And suddenly you had 

barometers, airpumps, a new view of interstellar space, and a very 

different basis for science. 

Now, the mechanism by which change can be generated isn’t by 

any means always a technology-technology interaction. Take the 

ultimate effect of the telescope. When Galileo looked through it he 

saw satellites circling Jupiter. That blew a hole in the Earth being 

the center of everything, took humanity off its special philosophical 

pedestal, and prepared the way for a universe that wasn’t arranged 

the way Aristotle had said, but the way Newton was to say-like a 

giant clock, running by itself, with God maybe long gone on other 

business. Religion took a knock from that from which it never fully 

recovered. 

The German mathematician and businessman Gottfried Leibniz, working on the planetary dynamic problem at the same time 

as Newton and looking at the kinds of mathematics you’d need to 

measure infinitesimal rates of change in movement, decided that he 

had his hands on a tool of cosmic philosophical significance. If you 

could measure that infinitesimally, were you getting to be able to 

measure the basic units of existence? If you were, said the philosopher Immanuel Kant a bit later, you could discover and measure 

the way all things shaded into all other things at that scale. The 

new philosophy became known as. naturphilosophie. 

Its concept of “oneness in all” spawned romantic poetry and music, nationalism, and revolutions including yours. It won’t surprise 

you to know that Jefferson wm a naturphilosophe. Naturphilosophie also helped to bring about modern medicine. In 1810 a French 

surgeon named Xavier Bichbt, another follower of the new philosophy, went looking for the vital, infinitesimally small bits in his 

I 12 
The Legacy of Science 

business, and found body tissue-20 types of it. Incidentally, he 

set the fashion for grave robbing and also noticed that, if you were 

sick, changes showed up later on in the tissues of your unfortunate 

corpse. Maybe these happenings could be correlated. So pathological anatomy was born, and with it the modern idea of disease as a 

localized phenomenon, as well as the opportunity to look for, and 

find, bacteria. 

Canal building, spurred by the transportation needs of the 

industrial revolution in Britain at the beginning of the last century, 

turned up fossils in the strata they were cutting through. However, 

mysteriously, some of the fossils were of animals that didn’t exist 

any more, and most of the strata didn’t have fossilized humans 

in them. Well, here was a big problem! God was supposed to 

have made everything at once, during creation, and yet here were 

some animals that obviously had failed, and no people back at the 

beginning of everything. 

So what was this-mistakes by God, with some things having 

been created later than others? Well, you know where that led. By 

the time the geologists had finished discovering that the extent of 

the entire fossil record through time was like an eyeblink compared 

with the age of the Earth, it was a simple matter for the whole 

thing to be organized into a new view of things by Darwin. This 

brings us to the materialist, physicalist world we live in today, 

where people maybe aren’t something special created by God in 

his own image but just a pile of chemicals. 

This is also a world where one interpretation of what Darwin 

meant by “the survival of the fittest” boosts rugged individualism 

and makes life not so easy on the underprivileged, and where his 

idea of “perfectable humans behaving according to laws like the rest 

of the organisms in nature” and, therefore, being part of societies 

that perhaps can be “changed for the better” is alive and well and 

regimented in the Siberian labor camps. 

I went through all those examples of change in action at length 

to give you a good idea why, when paradigms start to shift, the 

unexpected way they go is a shock to the system. This is why any 

time you do manage to produce a way of thinking or of doing things 

that seems to work well, you hang onto it. If you can work out a 

way to maximize what your society can do with the tools at its 

13 
The Impact of Science on Society 

disposal-give it the widest flexibility in terms of individual action 

and at the same time protect it from random, maverick action with 

some kind of rules-great. That’s why the institutions survive; 

they’re set up with the tools of the time and they’re systems 

that permit routinization of the group’s operating problems SO the 

individual members can get on with working or having fun while 

the institutions handle the day-to-day running of the place. 

So we keep the institutions that appear to do a good enough 

job because it’s easier than handling the problem of assessing 

how well whatever new tools you might have come up with could 

handle the same basic daily problems in radically restructured 

institutions. So never mind if the institutions don’t quite fit the 

new paradigm you’re moving into with your new tools; it’s better 

than experimenting. Corn, after all, is only corn because it’s stood 

the test of time. So most of the institutions we live with are, in 

some aspect or another, anachronistic. 

Take the law. Cross examination originated far from the courtroom, as a teaching technique in eleventh-century Italy for making 

sense out of old manuscripts. The technique was called glossing. 

Another institution, the language I’m speaking now, effectively 

froze when it was printed in grammars in the fifteenth century. The 

modern university started life as a place in twelfth-century Bologna 

designed to train lawyers to handle jurisdictional and property 

cases, particularly between the Pope and the Emperor. Many of 

the internal structures of our universities, at least in Britain, remain unchanged since that date. Representational government is 

something that was thought up in the eighteenth century when 

only the foolhardy few would risk the mud and the bandits to get 

to London or Philadelphia. 

We hang onto institutions as if they still meant what they 

did originally, as if the paradigm in which they originated hadn’t 

shifted. We accept politicians talking about what they can do to 

the economy as if the world still consisted of independent, separate 

sovereign states whose acts had no effect on each other, or as if 

the meaning of fundamental beliefs had not changed. One good 

example is yours: “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” 

means nothing like what John Locke meant when he thought about 

it in the seventeenth century. Our freewheeling adaptation of it 

today would have shocked him rigid. “Liberty” for Locke meant 

14 
The Legacy of Scaence 

knowing and accepting where you stood in society and sticking 

to the rules that governed social class mobility, such as it was. 

“Happiness” meant amassing property and riches without being 

bothered by government! He would have thought we were living in 

anarchy. 

Be that as it may, we regard the institutions and their associated slogans as helping to preserve cohesion and stability in our 

paradigm-except that this is a cohesion and stability which is, as 

you’ve seen, at best transient. Once the French philosopher and 

permanent exile Rend Descartes got his hands on the way we in 

the West thought, stability and permanence went out the window. 

Before Descartes and his seventeenth-century paradigm shift, you 

said credo ut intelligam-I believe, and through my belief I come 

to understand. After him you switched it around: intelligo ut 

credam-give me the facts and I’ll let you know. In his great Discows Sur la Methode (or, “how to think”), he gave us the modern 

approach. He called it methodical doubt. He said, “If they tell you 

it’s certain, call it probable. If it’s probable, call it possible, and if 

the deal is that it’s possible, forget it.” And Cartesian methodical 

doubt is the engine of the modern scientific world and the bringer 

of accelerating rates of change. 

So, where have we ended up? If the mechanisms of change are 

as serendipitous and as hard to second guess as I have suggestedand we are, thanks to Descartes and others, in a world of increasing 

rates of change-are there any lessons to be learned from the past 

to help us at least adapt? Is it true that those who are not 

prepared to learn from the past are condemned to repeat it? Do 

we really only know where we’re going if we know where we’ve 

been? Well, there are repeating factors, back then, that seem to 

be present when change occurs, much the way cholesterol is with 

heart attacks, present and only maybe causative. First there’s the 

one that appears to be the most obvious, that change happens 

because you need it-“Necessity is the mother of invention” and 

all that. There’s an interesting study of Europe up through the 

late Middle Ages that seems to show that innovation happens and 

is taken up most in areas of marginal circumstances and stress, and 

least where things are pretty comfortable. 

Let’s look at the ancient Egyptians. When you’ve established 

the simple fact that once a year the Dog Star, Sirius, appears just 

15 
The Impact of Science on Society 

before dawn (after having been invisible for seventy days) and one 

day later the Nile floods and dumps fertilizer and water on the 

land, and that it does so with extraordinary exactness every year, 

you develop a calendar just to tell you which day Sirius is going 

to appear, dig your irrigation canals, and sit back. That’s all you 

need in the way of new tricks, so Egyptian society never changed 

after that initial step. It never needed to, in 3000 years. 

But the ancient Greeks? Well, put yourself in their position. In 

the eighth century B.C. you live on narrow coastal strips in what 

is now modern Turkey, in littIe city states with just enough to 

survive on. The weather is lousy and uncertain, and the barbarians 

are clobbering you with regularity. You’ve got to get out and 

trade, make a buck, just to keep going, so you think up ways of 

systematizing the method of hustling business. You look up at the 

sky, and what you see is not Sirius rising and nothing else; you see 

a great road map for your seaborne traders to use. You work out 

star tables to navigate by, and the more you look, the more you 

see that the permanent perfection of the night sky is a lot different 

from the temporary mess down here. So curiosity becomes a way 

of life. No wonder the Greeks invented their particular form of 

curiosity. (They called it philosophia.) It’s what you get when 

you’re looking for answers. 

In a sense, it was Greek philosophy, born of their difficult 

circumstances, their desire for answers to questions, that started 

change happening in Western culture. What got it accelerating, 

though, was something else, and that’s the ease with which people 

communicated, moved ideas around. The easier you cross-talk, the 

faster change happens. 

Take medieval Europe. When the Vikings and the Saracens 

and the Hungarians stopped the rape-and-pillage stuff in the tenth 

century, people started coming out of the woodwork and building 

little roads toward each other and traveling along them. The next 

thing you know, you got the medieval water-powered industrial 

revolution, which kicked the European economy into high gear 

within three generations. 

In the Renaissance, a hundred years after the arrival of printing, 

you had 20 million books, most of them in specialties that could 

only exist when the specialists had a way of reading each others’ 

stuff. This gave us nothing less than the scientific revolution of the 

16 
The Legacy of Science 

sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and a slew of people talking 

the kind of incomprehensible stuff most of you live with in your 

area of expertise. Don’t be insulted; how much do you understand 

of the language of paleontology? Specialization is essential. I’d 

hate to have flown here in a plane designed by a plumber. 

To return to my point about communication, in the nineteenth 

century, after the development of electromagnetic systems for 

moving messages around (Le., the telegraph and the telephone), 

the whole body of modern science emerges-in particular, physics. 

So, the ability to communicate seems to be a basic factor in 

the mechanism of change, and we have communications today that 

make earlier forms look like hieroglyphs painfully chiselled out in 

stone. New developments in areas like magnetic bubble domain 

memories and superconducting materials will enhance our ability 

to use data beyond anything we’ve even begun to think of. With 

our present facility for communication, we’re doing more of one 

particular trick than at any time before. And that trick, it seems 

to me, is putting things together. 

Let me suggest a new axiom: juxtaposition is the spice of life. 

Humanity’s biggest talent, unique to us, is juxtaposing, finding and 

operating novel relationships between things or ideas. Indeed, at 

the turn of this century in Vienna, a group of thinkers who were to 

have a profound influence on Einstein (the positivists, led by Ernst 

Mach) came to the conclusion that all science could talk about was 

relationships. This was after Michelson and Morley had failed to 

find the ether. You remember that up in Cleveland in the 1880’s 

the two of them were looking for a medium that would be the 

carrier of light, magnetism, and electricity. Everybody called this 

medium “ether.” Well, Michelson and his friend were trying to 

show that the two halves of a split light beam would come back 

together again, out of phase, because one-half had been shot in 

the direction of the Earth’s travel (against the so-called stream of 

ether) and would take a while, and the other, which had gone 

perpendicular to the ether, and so wouldn’t suffer drag, would 

return early. Actually, there had been no difference at all. The 

beams arrived back simultaneously. 

Then Fitzgerald, in Dublin, made things worse by saying that 

this was because the forward motion of the Earth was contracting 

one part of the instrument exactly the right amount to give the 

17 
The Impact of Science on Society 

forward-moving beam a shorter route to travel, so it could get 

back exactly that much faster, and match its other half. And, the 

experiment could never be carried out without that happening. SO, 

whether or not there was an ether, you’d never be able to find out, 

since all you could get would be the local-effect results from your 

work. That led the positivists to state that science could only ever 

produce relative, not absolute, results. All you could talk about 

was relationships. 

But I mean relationships in a rather more limited sense-the 

sense of the way properly original thinking involves juxtapositions 

that have never happened before. Of all the mechanisms of change, 

it seems to me that this is the fundamental one, the on-the-spot 

local “fitting together” of disparate phenomena that comes up with 

the kind of changes I’ve been describing. This ability to juxtapose 

is not a very surprising one; it’s logical enough in the light of our 

own neurophysiology. 

Recent ideas on neural activity suggest that the brain operates 

in a very associative way, with small neuron clusters containing 

core concepts, rather in the way a battery holds a trickle charge. 

These core concepts would be irreducibly small fragments of sounds 

or sights, or any phenomena that you experience. And these 

clusters are all, in some way, apparently interconnected, set up 

in microcolumns and macrocolumns, each column made up ofmillions of these lit,tle clusters of neurons. Now, if you consider 

that the brain passes information by means of synaptic junctions 

(the bits where one neuron almost touches another) and that there 

are potentially more of those kinds of connections in the brain 

than there are atoms in the known universe, you get a feel for the 

immensity of the network. With this associative system, to retrieve 

data, you go in, so to speak, anywhere on the network and find the 

target by association. Given the scale of things, an associative 

approach might be the only way the whole huge complex could 

work. Anyway, retrieval by association would be a good survival 

mechanism, because it would make you very flexible. 

The other interesting thing about functioning in that associative 

way is that as you head along the associative links toward the 

target, you may become aware of other core clusters that you 

weren’t aware of before, because in a sense you simply drive through 

them. That, in the simplest sense, would be why the brain is 

18 
The Legacy of Science 

capable of associative chains of thought like this one: look, see, 

water, glass, mirror, image, painting, oil, Arabs, desert, sand, 

castle, and so on. It’s why poetry works: “What oft was said 

but ne’er so well expressed.” 

Jokes appear to work like that too; the punch line makes an 

association you hadn’t thought of before, and you laugh because 

you didn’t get to the new associative link before the person telling 

the joke (which is bad for survival, but, as it turned out, you weren’t 

in any danger). Let me try what I mean. Take the concepts “bird” 

and “fruit.” All of you have those concepts associated in your own 

personal way in your network. I don’t know whether it’s like mine, 

with “bird” and “fruit” associated by “trees,” but let me see if I 

can put those two concepts together in a way that they’ve not been 

put together in your brain before, and we’ll see if my theory works. 

A drunk goes up to his host at a party and says, with all that 

clarity used by the very small and young: “Excuse me. Do lemons 

whistle?” To which his host replies: “No, lemons don’t whistle. 

Why do you ask?” And the drunk says, very chagrined: “Oh. In 

that case, I have just squeezed your canary into my gin and tonic.” 

What I’m saying is that the basic 

mechanism of change-the juxtaposition, in a novel relationship, of 

apparently unrelated phenomena- may operate in the same way 

a good joke does! It may also be why change is almost always so 

serendipitous and unexpected-and hard to forecast. 

Given all I’ve said so far, let me be extremely speculative. We’ve 

seen how the model I’m talking about functions, and some of the 

ways in which it’s changed. We’ve seen how difficult it is from 

within the paradigm to see why moving to a new model would be 

beneficial-“Better to keep the devil you know.” 

We’ve seen that when paradigms are about to crack, there’s 

generally some social unrest going on. In Copernicus’s time it 

was barbecuing freethinkers (they called them heretics). With 

Darwin it was supposed to be the end of beliefs and standards. 

In the thirteenth century they said paper would devalue the words 

written on it, and for Gutenberg it was, “Printing will take away 

our memories.” 

With us, it’s all the words you see in the media: alienation, 

frustration, me-generation, immorality, illiteracy, and so on. So 

is our paradigm about to go through some of the agonies I’ve 

You see what I mean. 

i 

19 
The Impact of Science on Society 

been describing? Is it due to shift? Well, obviously it is. But 

let me suggest that instead of moving to a radically new paradigm, 

we may, because of the tremendous facility for interaction that 

communications gives us, be moving to a no-paradigm culture. 

If a paradigm is, and has always been, a structure built on an 

agreed core of common beliefs, knowledge, value judgments, social 

constraints, and so on, then are we heading the opposite way, to a 

situation of no common agreed center, of shifting, pragmatic local 

standards, with failure of what we used to call consensus and regionalism globally on the increase again after the early years of Pax 

Americana, with the nation-state obsolete, and so on? We would 

be a society physically and psychologically fragmented, because 

with soft energy options and telecommunication, “centralization” 

and “economies of scale” (those catchwords of the last years of the 

Industrial-Revolution paradigm we’re coming to the end of) are no 

longer necessary. 

To those of us condemned to repeat the lessons of history 

because we won’t learn from them, what I’m describing sounds 

like a frightening prospect. Chaos is what it sounds like, but 

isn’t what’s happening just a paradigm shifting (like all the others 

did) because we’re ready for the shift? Change occurs ultimately 

because we want it to. We have the tools because at some time 

we decided we wanted them. These new tools, provided by science 

and technology, are more than just tools-they’re instruments of 

social revolution, violent or peaceful. As the tools change, so too 

does the ability of society to organize itself. 

Once we needed god-kings, or feudal lords, or absolute monarchs, or no sex before marriage, or empires, or 12-hour days, or 

whatever, to keep ourselves together. Now, maybe, we don’t need 

centralized social structures and rigid regulatory mechanisms any 

more. We are, after all, as Immanuel Kant said, creatures of the 

imperative. If the ethics start to get in the way, we dump them. 

But let’s take a brief look at the kind of behavioral social 

dumping we may be up against with some of the possible results 

of our newfound abilities to initiate change much more readily and 

rapidly because we can juxtapose things inside the computer, where 

we have a facility for juggling the mix like never before, at a rate 

and in volume almost astronomical. And, by the way, for those 

of you who feel nice and safe because of the old sayings “Garbage 

20 
The Legacy of Science 

in, garbage out” and “A machine is only as good as the people 

punching the buttons,” try some of the newer heuristic systems 

that learn from their own experience. 

The main thing, it seems to me, is to remember that technology 

manufactures not gadgets, but social change. Once the first tool 

was picked up and used, that was the end of cyclical anything. The 

tool made a new world, the next one changed that world, the one 

after that changed it again, and so on. Each time the change 

was permanent. Using the tool changes the user permanently, 

whether we like it or not. Once when I was in Moscow talking 

to academician Petrov, I said, “Why don’t you buy American 

computers to get you into space quicker and more effectively?” 

He replied, “No fear; they’d make us think like Americans.” 

You only have to go back a few years in this century to see how 

our gestalt, our way of behaving, our values, have been changed 

by science. If I say just a few names, you’ll get my point: the 

Pill, calculators, jet airplanes, television. Take those examples 

and look at their secondary social effects. Yes, the Pill has made 

family planning feasible, but now the Third World regards it as a 

suspicious imperialist Western trick to keep their numbers down 

while we go on with our “economic imperialism.” 

Calculators have changed the meaning of testing people in certain kinds of knowledge, which we need to do to ensure publicly 

accepted standards of professional ability. Jets mean people can 

now fly and visit the ends of the Earth, but they also mean that 

we export our way of life and our sometimes unacceptable value systems to places that neither want nor need them. Television makes 

my life one of totally vicarious experiences. It gives me packaged 

glimpses of the world beyond my horizons, takes away my comfortable preconceptions, and replaces them with glossy, quick-fix 

substitutes that are even less good to me than my preconceptions 

were. All I know now is that I don’t know! 

To get back to my “dumping” idea, you see how the gadget 

changes more than just what the ad says it will do. With our rates 

of change, the only constant in our paradigm may well become 

change itself. All you can be sure of about tomorrow is that it 

will go on being different, and, if you’re lucky, only at the same 

accelerating rate. 

Above all, the judgmental systems from the old paradigms may 

21 
The Impact of Science on Society 

not work in that world. Today we are, in fact, the last of the old 

world, living with institutions that are already creaking, facing 

twenty-first-century problems with nineteenth-century attitudes. 

Most of us find difficult to accept what we might have to dump. 

We face questions like these: 

If criminality is caused by XYY chromosomes, who do you 

blame for a crime, and why do you punish at all? 

When everybody has a home computer work station, what 

happens to unions, the infrastructure that runs the roads and 

transportation systems, the community life that “work in a 

central location” means, the new isolation of being alone most 

of the time? 

If data banks carry all the knowledge we possess, to be accessed 

at need, what will be the purpose of memory, of “knowing” 

anything? And what happens if what you got from the machine 

yesterday (what we’ll call “what you know”) is different when 

you go back to the machine today? 

If you have no expertise because expertise is no longer necessary, 

what are you left with? 

If technology provides virtually free energy, with the ability to 

turn anything into anything else (which we can already doit’s just too expensive to be feasible), and we no longer need 

the raw materials we used to because we can now make them, 

what happens to the materials producers in the Third World? 

Unlimited energy, the so-called philosopher’s stone, brings far 

more questions than answers. Not the least of these is the new 

importance it will have for the planetary heat budget, which at 

the moment is pretty much only the business of nature. 

Well, my guess is (and here I remind you of the unquestionable 

value of any guess made from within the inevitable limitations of 

our paradigm) that we’re all headed for one of two kinds of future. 

In one future, we take on the new data systems the way we 

took on all the other tools in the past, with a view to making them 

do what we’ve always done up to now, only better, faster, and 

cheaper. In this case, I think we’re in for a dose of Luddite reaction 

as our social structures fail to take the strain of that much shift 

that fast in the working habits of the population, not to mention 

22 
The Legacy of Science 

the redundancies that come if all you do is replace people with 

machines. The other problem with that old-paradigm approach is, 

of course, that you do what Bell up at Yale says, and turn into 

a two-class society. You have the numerate, who have access to 

and ability to maximize use of the data systems, and you have the 

leisured serfs, who don’t, and who get paid for a 10-hour week with 

nothing to do but wish they knew how to use their spare time. 

It has often been said that the public doesn’t appreciate the 

speed with which things have developed in data systems. I like the 

analogy that if your Rolls Royce had done what computers have 

done over the last 20 years, it would cost a dollar and do a million 

miles to the gallon. People, I think, just don’t understand the 

velocity with which this new post-Gutenberg era is coming toward 

The other future I mentioned is a good deal more difficult to 

forecast. All I can do is to be 

extremely speculative again. I suppose what I’m suggesting is a 

crash restruchring of the educational system. I’ve been a teacher 

myself, so I know how easy this is to say and how difficult to 

do. However, if we were to manage some kind of interdisciplinary 

curriculum that taught people not the facts, which would be 

obsolete before they used them, but how to use the data systems 

to juxtapose, to look for relationships in knowledge, to see patterns 

in the way things happen and affect their lives, then perhaps we 

would be moving toward a very different type of society, one free 

of a central paradigm at all. 

After all, the only need there ever was for a paradigm was 

based on the strictures placed on society by its contemporary 

tools-or rather, lack of them. Now we have a tool-electronic 

data systems-that could lift almost all of those strictures from 

us, that could create a society that might be pluralistic in the 

extreme, lacking in any of the virtues we now ascribe to concensus, 

materialistic in every sense, highly articulate, what we would 

call unethical and immoral (what it would call pragmatic), selfsufficient (what we would call isolationist), libertarian (what we 

would call permissive), and above all, open-minded, curious, and 

tolerant. 

Sounds like a weird mix? Well, you asked me here to speculate. 

But in one sense it‘s what we’ve been heading for all along-a kind 

us. 

It’s very much up in the air. 

23 
The Impact of Science on Society 

of controlled anarchy, kept in balance by the electronics. It’s the 

truest version yet of what John Locke meant by “the unfettered 

pursuit of happiness by every man.” And if the vision bothers you, 

remember that once we decide that the paradigm is shifting, we 

adapt extremely quickly. Your great-grandmother, after all, would 

have thought you a drug addict for taking an aspirin. 

Question: You discussed the future paradigm as perhaps being 

nonexistent. Is it possible that the paradigm might be evolving 

just as human evolution evolved to the point where it is reaching 

its own sense of oneness with its future? In other words, we are 

part of the paradigm and the paradigm is what is evolving. We are 

part of the evolution. 

Answer: The great thing about that question is that it’s 

unanswerable. I mean, by definition it’s shear speculation again. 

All we can do is talk about it because we’re inside the paradigm. 

These wild speculative guesses are set in concrete because they’re 

within my paradigm. If they sound wild you should hear what 

happens if you come from another planet. 

Question: At the end of your talk you quoted Locke and said 

we should all seek our own happiness. Happiness is a paradigm. 

We all live in dreams. Every person has his own idea of what 

happiness is. We have paradigms that are imposed on us by the 

world, but we each have our own paradigm. I don’t know what 

human life means without dreams that are paradigms. 

Answer: Yes, I think that’s very well said. All I was suggesting 

was that this might become more possible than in the past. I 

didn’t mean that you lose your paradigm. I meant that perhaps 

your paradigm becomes a little less constrained by everybody else’s 

paradigm. 

Question: As scientists working for the government we are often 

asked to forecast what new inventions we might come up with over 

the next year. I wonder what implications that has for our role in 

bringing innovation into the world. 

Answer: I think it’s a superb example of what I was talking 

about. The government decides to make you decide what you’re 

24 
The Legacy of Science 

going to discover, and if you don’t come up with it you lose the 

grant! 

Question: Of all the countries you’ve worked in, which one, in 

your opinion, provides the best education, and, in particular, how 

do you view education in the United States? 

Answer: That sure sounds like a quick way to get my head 

chopped off! I think educational systems tend to be structured 

according to the societies in which they work. I mean, our 

educational system in England is extremely difficult, different from 

yours, and very elitest. A very small percentage of us go to 

university, and we’re used to choosing the subject that we study 

at university at the age of 16. We specialize in only two subjects 

from ages 16 to 18, and we then take a national examination in 

those two or three subjects. Only one of those subjects is what 

we go to university for, if we pass a competitive examination to 

get a place at the university, and the ratio is usually about three 

or four hundred people to each place. Now, we have to have an 

elitest educational system like that because we are very small and 

we’ve become quite poor ever since we lost the jolly old empire. If 

we didn’t have that kind of high-quality turnout we wouldn’t have 

enough people producing enough stuff on the market for us to sell 

anything to anybody. So I think we have an elitest educational 

system not because it’s a hangover from the old imperial days, but 

because if we don’t produce a very, as it were, sharp-edged elite 

intellectually, we won’t be able to compete with giants like you on 

the market. 

Question: I would like to ask whether the, what shall I say, 

elite in Britain and perhaps in Western Europe believe in full 

employment not merely because of the necessity for having the 

things that people produce when they’re fully employed, but rather 

as occupational therapy for the masses, around the idea that idle 

hands do the devil’s work, and that whereas intellectuals can keep 

their minds occupied and out of mischief, the common man is not 

capable of this. George Orwell said something like this (and it’s not 

something I agree with), but I would remark that Eric Hoffer said 

the common man was lumpy with talents and could do all kinds of 

things besides produce goods and shouldn’t be viewed merely as a 

production machine. Can you speak to that, sir? 

25 
The Impact of Science on Society 

Answer: Well, I can’t speak for all of Europe, but I think the 

French probably think that full employment’s essential and they’ve 

had four devaluations of the franc as a result. It seems to me 

that full employment is a relatively new phenomenon. We’ve slid 

over into economics, and I’m extremely worried-I think anybody 

with any sense and honesty always is, in that subject. However, 

I believe I’m right in saying that full employment is a twentiethcentury phenomenon. The concept didn’t exist to any great extent 

at all prior to that. And I think it probably came at the tail end 

of a very healthy, burgeoning post-Industrial Revolution in both 

America and Europe. I think what we’re seeing now is a transition 

period to what Bell calls a post-industrial society, and it’s a period 

aided and abetted, of course, by the recession, which is caused not 

by the fact that we can’t switch paradigms but because oil costs a 

great deal. I think the situation, fortunately for me, is so confused 

that no clear statement can be made on it by me or anybody else 

except a politician. 

Question: If I understand you correctly, it seem5 to me that 

you’re putting out the impression that our technology is running 

away from our society. In other words, it’s speeding up at a rate 

that we can’t quite keep up with. In the past, when this has 

happened to societies, some major upheaval has occurred, whether 

it be sociological or financial, economical, or revolutionary, like 

wars. Do you have any idea what is going to cause us to catch up 

with our rapidly advancing technology? 

Answer: Well, I think part of what I said earlier indicates what 

I think about that. First let me just dispel any idea that I believe 

in the so-called force of technology. I mean, technology is what 

people do. You invent the tool because you want it, or because you 

perceive an imbalance or a need, or you’re just greedy. You say, “I 

want this piece of technology,” and it comes into existence and you 

use it. I think society gets technology as it gets governments that 

it deserves. Sometimes, but not very often, technology tends to go 

a little faster than our ability to keep up with it. I’m not sure that 

this has happened to any great extent in the past, but I’m sure 

that it’s about to happen now. I think anybody with any sense 

would recognize that electronic data systems are going to make a 

quantum leap in terms of the effect of juxtapositioning, as I said 

earlier. As to what we can do about it, it seems to me that the 

26 
The Legacy of Science 

only way to get into it is through the educational process. It’s too 

quick, and you can’t have a quick-fix answer. It’s no good teaching 

us what to do. I think you’ve got to begin with the children who 

are 4 years old now and start the process there. As I said, I just 

hope some teachers who are better than I am at organizing this 

kind of thing in education, which is tremendously difficult, will get 

on with it, but I can’t see any other way of doing that. We are up 

against a period of very difficult transition. 

Question: Being somewhat of a video game fanatic, I’ve noticed 

that extremely small children play video games much better than 

anyone else. They’re well adapted to the electronic age because 

they have far fewer preconceptions, apparently. The way things are 

going, it looks as if things are going to get less and less expensive 

and more and more reachable in terms of the spread of technology 

and the spread of knowledge. Everyone can learn. Even if we 

can’t feed everybody in India, we can teach them all how to read. 

Pretty soon everybody will have his own terminal. Now, over the 

years, one of the major complaints of the Third World, even the 

Third World in the United States, has been that they never had 

the chance to get a leg up because they were deprived from the 

start. So, could it be possible now that we really will achieve a 

parity of sorts because everybody will have the same chance once 

this technology becomes more equally spread? 

Well, it depends entirely on what regulations are 

applied to the use of the technology. If I live in a totalitarian 

state and I produce a computer you can bet the people who use 

it are going to use it in a very different way than they use it in 

Spokane. As Petrov said to me, “I don’t want American computers; 

they make us think like Americans.” So, first of all, I think the 

thing you’re discussing is a matter primarily of social and political 

consequence. Technology doesn’t do things to us; we, I hope, do 

things to technology. So, the fact that every man has his own 

computer does not necessarily mean that we will have instant parity 

and literacy everywhere and a bright and happy future, because 

there are a lot of governments that would like to make sure that 

half their population only ever plays video games. Keeps them 

quiet. It’s no good having all the terminals in the world unless 

you’ve been taught to ask the questions. If you’re given all the 

knowledge that ever existed, where do you start? How do you 

27 

Answer: 
The Impact of Science on Society 

know how to structure your approach to the knowledge? I don’t 

think that the mere existence of the games presupposes that we’re 

on the verge of that kind of understanding. 

Question: Mr. Burke, in your book Connections you speak 

about the development of fusion power, which could provide unlimited energy, yet it also gave us the bomb. You seem very optimistic 

about the future as it applies to free peoples, let’s say Western Europe and America. What do you see in the future for change in the 

Soviet bloc, or in Russia? 

Answer: I don’t think I’m blindly optimistic. I think we have a 

great survival capacity, we human beings; otherwise there wouldn’t 

be a crowd of us in this room tonight. We’ve survived an awful lot 

of vicissitudes. So, in that sense I’m a long-term optimist, because 

I believe in evolution. In the short term I’m not too sure whether 

somebody’s going to put a nuclear device downtown somewhere in 

the world and that will be goodbye everything, possibly. So I’m 

not sure that I’m just a straight optimist in that sense. I think the 

business about what would happen in societies that are less “free” 

relates to what I was saying earlier about the kinds of societies that 

Professor Bell suggests we might be coming up against, in which 

the technology is a marvelous way of imprisoning people. You can 

as easily imprison people with it as free them. Go back to Petrov. 

They’re going to make their computers to function the way they 

want them to because they don’t want to have to start thinking 

like we do. In this sense, your question does tie in to the previous 

question in that the technology by itself is nothing; therefore, what 

you’re talking about is again a political thing. You can as easily 

imprison people with computers as liberate them. It seems to me 

that’s all one can say about it. 

Question: With your rich background in the development of 

technology, I’d like to know if one thing that I think that I’ve 

noticed in my lifetime has a precedent in history. When I was a 

kid I remember that cars had a top speed on the highway of 55 mph, 

and then they souped up the highways and the cars and started 

going 65 mph, then 70 mph, and then there was a choice to go back 

to 55 mph because it wasn’t safe and because it used up too much 

fuel. On the issue of nuclear power, even if there hasn’t been any 

sort of decision as far as moving away from nuclear power and the 

28 
The Legacy of Science 

other sorts of technologies that have come out of it, at least the 

dangers have become very much more a question now than they 

ever were. It’s not that a technology came in which was questioned 

and then accepted; it’s a matter of a technology that came in and 

was accepted first and then questioned. I’m just wondering if that’s 

something new. 

Answer: Technology assessment, as far as I can see, is quite 

new, yes. I think it has to do with the fact that we are more 

capable of discussing these matters among ourselves than we ever 

were before. I think that when two or three people are gathered 

together they start to ask questions. I don’t think that has been the 

case before on this kind of scale. I can think of inventions that came 

ahead of their time and weren’t used, but not as a result of cogent 

argued discussion among members of the community, because there 

really wasn’t any such thing before 1900. My favorite invention 

that didn’t get anywhere was Voltaire’s electric gas bomb. It had a 

spark igniting this mal aria, what they called bad air, but nobody 

really did anything with it until the spark plug came along, under 

totally different circumstances. 

Could you speculate as to whether or not there 

could ever be communication, and I ask this technically, between 

the hearts of men? I’m very nervous about how you’ll take that. 

In view of the confrontation we have between East and West and 

the nuclear aspects, all the communication we have today doesn’t 

seem to be breaking through some problem area there. This is 

very philosophical or theological, but if you care to speculate on it 

I would appreciate it, sir. 

Answer: I don’t know how you encourage people to have one 

heart talk to another. I presume you don’t mean the pump, you 

mean more than that. I’m always attracted to the fact that the only 

purely democratic, purely objective, purely self-regulating, purely 

honest activity known to mankind is science. Everything else is 

lies and partial views. There is nothing you can do about the fact 

that when I drop this piece of paper, it falls. You can’t tell lies 

about that. I can’t think of how you can tell lies about it. And it 

seems to me, therefore, that I’ve gone into this spurious, superficial 

television approach to try to tell people about science principally 

because I believe that science is the truest possible route to what 

you do want to happen. 

Question: 

29 
The Impact of Science on Society 

I remember once we were having a discussion in the BBC when 

there was regionalism in Britain, when Scotland was going to 

secede, and the BBC began seriously to consider maybe moving 

some of its offices out into the provinces to find out what the grass 

roots thought. Well, somebody killed the idea by saying, “If you 

tell me what the difference between Edinburgh physics and London 

physics is, I’ll move to Edinburgh.” It seems to me, as I say this, 

that the way I describe science gives me the hope that it’s the only 

way one can survive because everything else has to be persuasion, 

partial view, opinion, and belief. But nobody can alter the fact 

that this page drops when I let it go. 
Accomplishments 

of Science 

by the Year 2000 

Jules Bergman 
32 

Jules Bergman 

As the first full-time television network science editor in the US, 

ABC News Science Editor Jules Bergman covered all 37 manned 

flights in the US space program, beginning with the original seven 

Mercury astronauts and the Space Task Group at NASA Langley 

Research Center. He frequently participated in the astronauts’ 

rigorous training programs and flight simulations. He also covered 

the historic US-USSR joint Apollo-Soyuz Test Project and the fall 

of the American Skylab. In the 1960’s, when the US was deeply 

involved in its emerging space program, Bergman’s reports were the 

main source of information on this subject for many Americans. A 

pilot himself, Bergman has also covered the first flights of almost 

every new US military and commercial aircraft as well as major 

airline disasters around the world. 

In the 1970’9, Bergman turned more of his attention to documentary work, winning an Emmy Award for his contributions as 

co-writer and narrator of the ABC documentary Closeup on Fire. 

He has written and narrated documentary programs dealing with 

the energy crisis, sports injuries, aircraft and automobile safety, 

the hazards of asbestos, and nuclear power. In the spring of 1979 

Bergman contributed to ABC’s coverage of the nuclear power plant 

accident at Three Mile Island. 

In the field of medicine, Bergman covered the beginning of 

the transplant era as well as various new developments in cancer 

treatment. More recently he reported on the swine flu controversy 

and the “legionnaire’s disease” mystery for both the ABC Evening 

News and ABC’s Good Morning America. He occasionally hosts 

ABC’s Sunday afternoon interview program Issues and Answers, 

questioning guests from the fields of science and space. Bergman 

has won many awards for scientific journalism and has written 

numerous articles on space and science for such magazines as 

Readers’ Digest, The New York Times Magazine, and Esquire. He 

is a native of New York City and attended City College of New 

York, Indiana University, and Columbia College. He completed 

postgraduate studies at Columbia University, where he held a 

Sloan-Rockefeller Advanced Science Writing Fellowship. 
Accomplishments of Science by the Year 2000 

By the year 2000 we’ll be flying on supersonic 

transports or, more likely, hypersonic transports. 

We’ll have put the genetic code to work and begun 

to engineer out congenital birth defects and inherited 

diseases. We’ll have made a real start toward the prevention and conquest of both heart disease and cancer. The normal life span should be 85 to 90 years, 

and anybody suggesting mandatory retirement at 

age 65 wall face unthinkable punishment. However, 

these advances require that this country correct its inadequacy in science and technology. We are living 

off the past and ignoring the future. Other industrial 

countries now turn out more engineers and scientists 

than we do. The United States needs a manned space 

station-it may be the most worthwhile investment 

in future technology and science that we can make. 

We should also start planning for a manned Mars 

mission. Of course, it would be so expensive that no 

single nation could aflord it, which is probably good. 

It would then become an International Mars Mission 

and would involve at least the United States, Western Europe, Japan, and very possibly Russia. Such a 

joint mission could pave the way for world disarmament. 

As a society, we walk a tightrope between limbo and extinction. 

We’re on a threshold of survival, in a society threatened as never 

before to find the way, with less and less margin for error. The 

decades ahead to the year 2000 and beyond, as were the decades 

just past, can be either interrogative, presumptuous, or insane. 

And we have to create our own flight plan, because this Earth 

didn’t come with one telling us how to get to the future safely. 

The winds of change are blowing across this land. We’re a nation 

that can’t afford many more crash landings, yet we keep putting 

untrained pilots in the cockpit and thinking we’ll all somehow come 

out all right. No way. No longer. 

33 
The Impact of Science on Society 

Today’s climate of controversy, confusion, and too often outright 

hysteria, compounded by exaggeration and often lies, has brought 

us to a real crisis, a crisis of confidence in ourselves, a crisis of 

credibility, and we’re all close to totally disbelieving one another 

in this country, the media and the government, the people and the 

government, and sometimes, although not enough, the people and 

the media. You don’t ask us enough questions. The day’s news 

leaves even us in the news business feeling stupified, outraged, and 

heipless. The whole thing reminds me of the 91-year-old astronaut 

who was asked for his views on homosexuality and replied, “They 

used to hang men for it in my grandfather’s day. In my father’s 

day, they put people in prison for it. Now it’s permitted. Well, 

I want to get out of here before it becomes compulsory!” Or, as 

one researcher friend puts it, “It’s always darkest just before it gets 

totally black.” The lesson of the past, if there is one, is that we 

can’t ignore the future. It is here, now, and inescapable. 

Right after Sputnik, 25 years ago, you may recall we were 

warned that we lacked enough engineers and scientists, so engineering schools were enlarged. Classes doubled, and the liberal arts 

and humanities were sacrificed when they needn’t have been. Now 

we’re entering a new era, the era of microminiaturization. After 

a lengthy study, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) warned 

that “we’re raising a new generation of Americans who are scientifically and technologically illiterate.” Other countries, specifically 

Russia, China, and Japan, put much greater emphasis on math 

and science education than we do. Russia graduates 300000 engineers a year; Japan, with half of our population, 75000; and the 

US, 60000. The number of class hours spent on math, science, 

and engineering in those countries is about three times greater, 

according to the NAS report, than those spent by even the most 

science-oriented students in the US. That report has already gone 

to each of the nation’s 16000 school districts and school boards. 

As for the Japanese, they’re so far ahead of us in many areas that 

they actually have the answers to our problems before we know we 

have a problem. 

It’s not all bad news technologically; the lesson of the past 

is that we underestimate the future. The history of science is 

loaded with underestimates, short-sightedness, and skepticism. In 

the March 1904 issue of The Popular Science Monthly, a famous 

34 
Accomplishments of Science by the Year 2000 

engineer reviewed the first flight of the Wright Brothers at Kitty 

Hawk. Half the newspapers neglected the event, thinking the 

Wrights pure nuthatches and the story too ludicrous even to 

deserve mention. If there had been television, we would have 

covered it just to show you the crash. The famous engineer, Octave 

Chanute, looked deep into his crystal ball and predicted “that such 

flying machines may even carry mail in special cases, but the useful 

loads carried will be very small. The machines will eventually be 

fast, they will be used in sport, but they are not to be thought of 

as commercial carriers.” 

A new climate of almost hysterical disregard for the technological needs of an overpopulated world has sprung up, a world which 

would starve and succumb to disease if we tried to return to the 

simple life of a century ago. Technology must not be destroyed; 

it can and must be controlled, and not with distortions leading 

to erroneous conclusions, not with unproven charges. As Admiral 

Rickover once put it, “Half truths are like half a brick; they can be 

thrown farther.” 

Let me give you two examples of leaping to conclusions without 

the full facts. Back in the 1890’s, a certain California newspaper 

was apprehensive about the harmful effects the railroads would 

have on the environment. If the trains crossed the Mojave to get 

to the Pacific, this newspaper editorialized, “the huge iron rails 

will reverse the Earth’s magnetic field with catastrophic effects.” 

Now that’s real science! One hundred forty years ago, the Royal 

Society in England warned against the railroads, claiming that at 

speeds over 30 mph, the air supply to the passenger compartment 

would be cut off and people would die of asphyxiation. And the 

college of physicians in Munich, for its part, warned that at 30 mph, 

travelers would suffer headaches, vertigo, and possibly lose their 

sight because of a blurring effect. Over 30 mph, great catastrophes 

were predicted, because everyone knew that even a twig would 

shatter the wheels. In 1936, to come closer to the present, a 

War Department colonel visited Robert Goddard, the father of 

American rocketry, who had by then clearly demonstrated the 

practicality of the rocket. The colonel, doubtless fresh from the 

calvary in George Custer’s historic triumph at Little Big Horn, 

dismissed Goddard’s work as “sheer poppycock of no practical use 

in modern warfare.” After World War 11, Wernher von Braun said 

35 
The Impact of Science on Society 

that it was Goddard’s work that led the Germans directly to both 

the V-1 and V-2 rockets. It was Goddard, by the way, who left 

us with this legacy: “It is difficult to say what is impossible, for 

the dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of 

tomorrow.” To put it another way, as Santayana did, “Those who 

do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat its mistakes.” 

We in the media have learned to view prose, projections, and 

predictions with a jaundiced eye. As a famed aircraft accident 

report concluded, and I cite this to my engineering friends all the 

time, “Extrapolation is the fertile parent of error.” Enough of 

the reports and predictions that have crossed my desk in the last 

decade have suffered from exactly that fault to teach me to be 

supercautious. As Pogo once said, “We have met the enemy and 

he is us.” To which we might add, we have faults we have hardly 

used yet. 

The Space Shuttle is the beginning of an era, one of our 

practical utilization of space as well as of its exploration. I 

envision our use of space to be about one-third commercial, onethird military, and one-third scientific. There are, by the way, 

nearly 400 communications satellites already in orbit. They have, 

of course, revolutionized our society, giving us everything from 

cheaper phone calls over longer distances to better TV signals. 

When the President promised us that the era had come to safeguard 

our security, he was referring to Star War type lasers and particle 

beam weapons, which, as you know, are already in progress. Lasers 

are working experimentally and have shot down drone planes and 

missiles and bored holes through the solid steel sides of target ships. 

Particle beams may be just a scientific figment of fiction, but can we 

afford that risk when the Russians are fast moving ahead in their 

development? I don’t think so. I think that all research has to be 

done, all that’s realistically profitable when decided by reasonable 

men of intelligence. As for the Star Wars speech, I happen to 

believe that it was pure politics to get the defense budget through 

Congress. 

Arthur C. Clarke, who is credited as the father of the communications satellite, once wrote that every revoluEionary idea seems 

to evoke three stages of reaction which may be summed up by the 

phrases (1) it’s completely impossible; don’t waste my time, (2) it’s 

possible, but it’s not worth doing, (3) I said it was a good idea all 

36 
Accomplishments of Science by the Year 2000 

along. We are gathered to talk about the future, or a reasonable 

facsimile thereof, if there is to be any future. For a generation with 

so much ahead of it, technologically and exploratively, we seem to 

have an abnormal fear of the future. We have nothing to fear if we 

act and act now. And it doesn’t apply so much to the engineering 

types out there as to the public across the country. As Kirkegaard 

once said, “It is not at all true that the scientist goes after truth; it 

goes after him.” Or, as Wilbur Wright put it back in 1909, “There 

are three classes of people: one class thinks the flying machine is 

going to do everything, the second class thinks it’s going to do 

nothing, and the third class gets in the air and sees what it can 

do.” 

Too many of us die too young in this country. Medical care is 

obviously our single most explosive crisis, whether it concerns the 

ghetto dweller in many major cities, for whom the emergency room 

has become his doctor’s office, or the rural resident, who finds that 

his doctor’s office disappeared a long time ago. A few years ago, 

everybody was shouting about the doctor shortage. Politicians 

said we were 50 000 doctors short. Medical schools enlarged their 

classes, and special loan funds were established. Well, we’ll soon 

have 600000 practicing doctors in this country, nearly twice the 

number we had 15 years ago, and it has now become obvious that 

we never really had a doctor shortage; we had a doctor dislocation, 

with too many grouped in the most attractive or well-paying cities 

and too few elsewhere. We still have, by the way, far too many 

surgeons and far too few GPs, internists, and pediatricians. The 

most dramatic example I know is that New York City alone has 

twice the number of neurosurgeons as all of Russia. Medicine in 

this country is in the middle of a mass care and inflation crisis. 

There are 30 million poor in America. For them, death comes 

earlier, illness is twice as frequent, and there is four times as much 

chronic illness. The poor believe that poverty is disease and they 

are right. If you are poor, the risk of dying under the age of 25 is 

four times the national average. 

The really major steps that lie ahead in conquering disease are 

in brand new fields: bioelectronics, or new kinds of biochemistry 

that may even eliminate some forms of disease. To get better 

care, discovery must be initiated and urgently encouraged. New 

hospitals are needed with more efficient, newer physical plants that 

37 
The Impact of Science on Society 

can be run more cheaply; otherwise, the nation is on the verge of 

medically bankrupting itself. The old answers no longer work. New 

methods of diagnosis that are less invasive, such as CAT scanners 

or NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance), are part of the answer. 

After you’ve covered as many medical stories as I have and 

been in and out of as many hospitals as I have, both vertically and 

horizontally, as newsman and as patient, you realize that the old 

answers have mostly failed. The cost of medical care has got to be 

lowered. Some costs, such as labor, are virtually fixed. Roughly 

66 percent of every hospital dollar goes for labor. Medical care last 

year was still the most rapidly rising area of inflation, increasing 

by 11.7 percent in 1982 and virtually the same percentage in 1981. 

And it may get worse. The Irving Trust Company in New York 

ran a study last year of its own medical costs for its employees. 

The results were frightening. They showed that medical costs rose 

40 percent in 1981 and 1982, and their projections for 1983 are 

another 40 percent. As for medical costs overall, there are some 

cuts that can be made in lab tests. For example, at costs that now 

exceed 21 billion dollars a year across the country, too many of these 

tests are useless or redundant. A University of California study 

calls them CUTS- “conditionally useless tests” ; what a marvelous 

acronym that is. When the outcome is predictable by any doctor 

with the information he already has, many such tests come from 

fear of malpractice suits. Society is being nickeled, dimed, and 

dollared to death. 

As for artificial organs, we can look back on the Barney Clark 

story just a few months ago. What did it teach us? What did 

it mean? Beyond his personal saga of courage, there are these 

simple facts. No more than 5 percent of heart disease cases suffer 

from worn out heart muscle, or cardiac myopathy, so no more 

than 5 percent can be helped by artificial hearts or transplants. 

Compare that to the simple fact that 85 percent of heart disease 

patients have hardening of the arteries or cardiac artery disease. 

Those are the ones who need bypasses or perhaps the new laser 

vaporizing techniques to clean out their plaque, if it works. It 

does in animals, and many hospitals are now testing it in humans. 

Another 12 percent have valve disease. So we rapidly see that only 

a few percent can be helped with artificial hearts. Is it worth the 

estimated 200 million dollars in research funds that the mechanical 

38 
Accomplishments of Science by the Year 2000 

heart development costs, in this era of shrinking research funding? 

I pose the question, but I do not answer it, for I am now wise 

enough to know that if it’s your loved one who is dying and might 

be helped, no price tag can be put on survival. And although the 

Barney Clark case may just be the beginning, it is new technology, 

and as you heard, there is no telling where it can lead. 

Let me point out a few things that need more attention and 

are not getting it. First, not enough young medical scientists are 

going into research. You can hardly blame them when a thirdyear resident makes about $25 000 a year, whereas research grants 

for individuals with the same training average about $16000 a 

year. Soon it will not be just autos, steel, and our high-technology 

industries that are slipping away from us, but medical progress 

as well. US science has dominated the Nobel prizes for the last 

decade and longer, but I submit that we are probably living off 

the past and ignoring the future. Japan doesn’t even have such 

a degree as an MBA, and it’s perhaps significant to note that its 

giant industries, its Sonys and Toyotas, are headed by engineers, 

not MBAs. 

Bright young physicians are drawn into private practice. Unless and until research grants offer competitive living wages, the 

number of MBAs our universities turn out compared with scientists and engineers is irrelevant. Lawyers, for example, now start at 

$30 000 to $35 000 a year. Well, you know what scientists start at: 

$10 000 to $15 000 a year. A promising young scientist can look at 

a former classmate who’s making an arm and a leg in private practice. The young scientist’s lot at most universities is to struggle to 

make ends meet. These young scientists and researchers urgently 

need to be encouraged. The Achilles’ heel of US science is training 

its scientists and starting them in challenging research jobs. 

Despite research grants from the government, we are not making 

enough progress in the conquest of the basic diseases-heart disease, lung cancer, brain tumors, and asbestosis, or occupational 

asthma-and in finding the basic pathways by which these diseases 

work and cause chemical injury to the lungs, the airways: the brain, 

and other vital sections of the body. We face the enormous task 

of creating a preventive medicine system for a nation that now 

practices and always has practiced corrective medicine. This task 

really overshadows anything America has ever done, from creating 

39 
The Impact of Science on Society 

nuclear energy to getting to the Moon, because it involves changing 

the system, telling doctors how and where they can practice, up to 

a point, and then finding a way to pay for all of it. Believe me, I 

know; I come from a family of doctors. Yet once this is under way, 

it will actually save large sums of money by stopping many diseases 

when they are preventable or correctable, and not yet fatal. 

Deep in our crisis (and I see this all around the country, mostly 

in ghetto cities) is the individual’s fear that no one cares, that he 

has lost his identity as well as his power to do anything about what 

is happening to him. He feels hopelessly trapped in an ocean of 

polluted air, rampant inflation with a recession, jammed roads with 

an energy shortage, run-down housing and broken promises from 

our politicians-promises that now have to be kept. Our people feel 

that they’re in a rip-off society, and too often they are. The great 

hope is that we may have just discovered all this in time. In many 

ways this is because of the news media-the same media, especially 

television, which is accused of distorting and overplaying the news, 

and sometimes does so by mediocrity, accident, or deadline, but 

seldom by intention. That same media may just have saved us by 

focusing attention on these crises in time, before they get out of 

control. 

You’ve heard a lot about EPA and dioxin recently; well, let me 

tell you what’s coming up. I happen to know because I’ve been 

researching this. You’ve read about the dioxin sites in Missouri; 

well, it’s likely that there are thousands of dioxin sites across this 

country, most of them unknown. Dioxin is nothing new, by the way. 

It was identified as a contaminant left over from manufacturing 

pesticides, including PCBs and Agent Orange, decades ago. What 

we don’t know about are the long-range effects on our children and 

their children. Scientists are fearful that it may be a delayed time 

bomb, like asbestos, that lurks beneath the flesh, only to spring up 

15 to 25 years later. The dioxin horror is a national disgrace. 

Some days I get so mad that I feel like the speech writer told 

by his boss that he’d better deliver a flawless job this time or else. 

The speech writer, intimidated by this, turned out an absolute gem, 

with the boss telling how he was going to reshape his industry and 

reduce costs at the same time. After describing several of the 

steps, the boss came to the end of the page and turned it over; it 

was completely blank except for the words “OK turkey, you’re on 

your own.” 

40 
Accomplishments of Science by the Year 2000 

One of my favorite slogans is that people who leap to conclusions 

generally jump over the facts. Well, we’d leap from what is to what 

could be without stopping in between to be accurate. There are 

no easy answers to our problems. They’ll be costly and take time. 

We don’t even have really good data as yet on how severe many of 

them are, much less how to conquer them. But technology is the 

answer-not instant miracles, but the technological excellence that 

comes from space and aeronautical research, not even to mention 

the jobs it supplies. Using research in space as a scapegoat may 

make good politics, but it solves nothing. 

As I said earlier, we cannot suppress change; we can and will 

manage it. As a nation we’ve got to stop finding reasons why 

things can’t be done and find the reasons why they must be done, 

as well as the right way to do them, before we wipe ourselves out. 

The widening gap between what we know and what we do with 

it, between finite knowledge and infinite failure to use it, threatens 

to destroy the belief of all of us in our society. As usual, we have 

more questions than answers, and answers for which there are no 

questions. But it is glaringly clear that no one is really in charge 

in Washington to harness and use science and technology; they are 

playthings of political whim and expediency. No one really has the 

power and skill, much less the authority, to do the job now needed. 

Anyone who thinks that things will ever again be the way they 

were, or that they should be that way, is dreaming. Not only will 

this not happen, it should not. Our lifestyle and ways have been 

challenged and found lacking. What is happening is very much as if 

we were in the last 15 seconds of the decline and fall of the Roman 

Empire, with the seconds ticking away, and then the clock was 

stopped for us for an instant replay and a second chance, a chance 

to discover how we should go, not only in the decades immediately 

ahead, but in the third century of our country. Socrates, you’ll 

remember, asked all the important questions but never answered 

any of them. This generation has to answer those questions, and 

we’re the people who can do it and have to do it. You can call this 

the age of overact and underthink, or whatever you like. The point 

is simple: people must prevail. If we lose track of that, we will lose 

ourselves. So the study of mankind, peoplekind (bioecology, I call 

it), the art and science of the individual, must be given far more 

41 
~ 

The Impact of Science on Society 

attention than it now receives. Why we do what we do is perhaps 

far more important than what we do. 

The glib words of years past from our politicians are hollow 

nightmares indeed when we are confronted with the staggering 

realities of what has to be done. But the key is there--technology, 

using it-and we hardly do now. The future may be unpredictable, 

but we can make a few well-aimed guesses about what life will 

be like in the year 2000. We’ll fly on supersonic transports, or 

more likely hypersonic transports, for which the ground work (or 

should I call it air work) has already been laid at places like NASA 

Langley Research Center. We’ll have put the genetic code to work 

and begun to engineer out congenital birth defects and inherited 

diseases. We’ll have made a real start toward the prevention and 

conquest of both heart disease and cancer. The remaining villains, 

of course, will be the common cold and hay fever. 

The normal life span should be 85 to 90 years, and anybody 

who suggests mandatory retirement at age 65 will face unthinkable 

punishment. What that longer lifespan will make possible is two 

or more careers for most of us. At age 40 or 50, we might go back 

to school and retrain ourselves for another career. Just think of 

the possibilities-politicians could even become statesmen. But 

those promises are distilled from much research by top thinkers, 

and you’ve got to watch researchers carefully. Our real goal in 

research, as one friend persists in telling me, is to reduce utter 

chaos to mere disorder. Well, we’re a little like Columbus before 

he set sail. When he departed he didn’t know where he was going. 

When he got there he didn’t know where he was. When he returned 

he didn’t know where he’d been, and he borrowed all the money 

to do it with. As George Bernard Shaw once said, “Some men see 

things as they are and say why; I dream things that never were 

and say why not.” Let me end on a quote from T. S. Eliot, who 

once wrote, “We shall never cease our exploration, and at the end 

of our exploring we will get back to where we started and know it 

for the first time.” 

And now I’ll be happy to tackle any questions you have. 

Question: Why do you think there has been the tendency 

towards a decline in science and engineering education in this 

country during the last 5 years? 

42 

I 
Accomplishments of Science by the Year 2000 

Answer: I think it’s the almighty dollar; I think people go where 

the money is. I know; I have two kids, and they’re both trying to 

make up their minds what to do. A neighbor’s son just graduated 

from Harvard with his MBA and started in at a $35 000 to $40 000 

a year job at age 27. Do you know any engineers who start with 

that kind of money? The only other people I know who start at 

anywhere near that kind of money are lawyers and doctors. There’s 

something wrong. There’s something wormy in the wood of the 

US infrastructure. There’s something wrong in where we place our 

values. I submit I am terribly worried that the same work that put 

NACA wings, designed here at Langley, on 707’s and Piper Cubs 

is not being done now, and that when you guys out there retire, 

the new generation of engineers and aerodynamicists won’t be in 

the works to take over. 

Question: Do you have any thoughts or suggestions on how 

we as technical people might better communicate or interface this 

upcoming technology with the nontechnical person? 

Answer: Yes; explain it! Don’t fall back on acronyms. My 

job is really as a translator between the scientists and the public. 

If I talk about HSTs or SSTs, to use two examples, or TDRSSs 

or IUSs, I get my head blasted off by my producers, and for good 

reason, if I’m assuming that the public understands. Unless they’re 

co-workers or your family, you can’t assume anybody understands. 

So you have to explain what “L over D” is, for example, what a 

chord is, what a root is, what a dihedral is, what “BLC” is. And 

then, having done that, you have to go for the gut. You have to 

say why you think what you’re doing is most important or why you 

think it’s not important, or why Langley’s work or your section’s 

work is or is not important, and what is important. And don’t stop 

with the public. Go to your congressman, your state legislators. 

Given the aviation environment of today, do you 

see us, without changing the way we’re going now, maintaining a 

superiority as far as aviation technology is concerned, or are we 

losing that one too? 

Answer: I think we’re losing that one too. Bill Magruder, 

the L-1011 project chief for Lockheed, used to say in every speech 

that aviation was the only favorable balance-of-trade item that 

we had, or one of the two or three: aviation, agriculture, and 

Question: 

43 
The Impact of Science on Society 

electronics. Well, electronics is sure gone, and aviation can’t be 

very far from gone. I suppose some of the foreign carriers are 

buying Boeing 767’s and 757’s, but as for the next generation of 

transports, what company do you suppose is going to gamble on 

that? 

Question: You’ve covered our first 25 years in space as far as 

the public is concerned. What do you see for the next 25 years? 

If someone-one of your friends in Washington-were to ask you 

what thrust NASA should take over the next 25 years in planetary 

exploration, Earth observation, and communications, what do you 

see? 

Answer: I would say two things: Mars and the manned space 

station. We’ve got to settle the Mars thing. There has to be a 

companion planet to flee to when some nut starts World War 111, 

because there’ll be no place to hide. Well, let’s hope that never 

happens. But that’s one of the things I worry about. 

Getting back to your original point, I feel that we have done the 

basic outer-planetary job with Viking, Voyager, and the Pioneers. 

Now, I do think there is some use for other outer planetary 

experiments that can be repeated. But I think probably the key 

thing is the search for life in our solar system, if there is any, and 

I think it’s going to take another variety of unmanned lander on 

Mars to do that. Why isn’t NASA planning that? The second thing 

is the manned space station, which is just as desperately needed. 

And the third thing is a new generation of safe small airplanes. A 

new generation of small planes is a much smaller job in magnitude 

and dollars than a manned space station or Mars, but it’s just as 

desperately needed. 

Question: You pointed to the personal value system as being 

a problem now and in the future. Well, how much does the media 

take something like that into account in reporting the news, as far 

as trying to change personal value systems? 

Answer: By personal value system you mean, “How do I make 

a good living fastest and with the least effort?” I think the media 

is fairly clear and clean on that one. I don’t think we ever get into 

it, beyond the involvement you just heard from me, and I’m not 

reporting today. I get very worked up over things like that, when 

I see MBAs earning what young researchers and young scientists 

44 
Accomplishments of Science by the Year 2000 

should be earning for essentially sitting around pushing a pencil. I 

don’t think the media really cares, if that’s what you’re getting at. 

Question: What do you see as a specific role that the media 

can play in correcting the antitechnology attitude that society has? 

I think that I, for one, know I am doing what I 

can. We should more clearly spotlight the truth as well as the 

technical failures of our time, and there have been several. The 

media does the job of clarifying. It forces every public official to be 

more responsible and to check out projects more thoroughly before 

investing taxpayers’ dollars. That is the role of the media, and I 

Answer: , 

I 

I think to a large extent it’s being done. In fact, it may be overdone. 

Question: I want to ask you a question about the weapons 

community. It seems that we have a lot of weapons now and we’re 

asking for more. Because of Russia, I don’t think we can throw 

them away, but it seems that we come closer and closer to ending 

it all by pushing a button. Could you give me your opinion as 

to the direction Americans could take? Could you include some 

specifics with regard to the MX, deployment of missiles in Europe, 

and the Bl? 

Answer: Let me merely say, to answer your question briefly, 

that the more equally armed we and the Russians are, the greater 

the chances of peace, because each nation is fearful of the other. 

I don’t think there’s a ghost of a chance of major war or even a 

minor war ever erupting (a nuclear war, that is) between us and 

Russia. What I worry about are the maniacs, the smaller powers 

who are trying to attract attention to themselves. As for the MX, 

you’ve seen the Washington confusion about which way to go, and 

I think it has a distance to go before it straightens itself out. 

Question: We read often about the medical, technological, and 

particularly of medicine, do you see in the future the possibility 

for greater foreign cooperation? I know there has supposedly 

been some tremendous research on cancer in Sweden, Norway, 

and England, which we can’t take advantage of because of FDA 

restrictions. I’m thinking, for example, of the stories we’ve been 

hearing of the boy, Todd Cantrell, who had the eye problems and 

went to Russia for treatment. 

I military research from overseas-say Japan or Russia. Speaking 

I 

, 

, 45 
The Impact of Science on Society 

Answer: It didn’t do him any good; in fact, it set him back, 

according to one of the top eye surgeons. So I urge upon you 

a greater respect for ambiguity, a greater caution and a greater 

respect for US medicine. There is nothing in our country which 

doesn’t get approved, although it sometimes takes too long. The 

FDA is slow to move, but there is no cancer cure that’s been held 

back. 

Question: But do you think that countries will ever be able to 

cooperate in medical research? 

Answer: They cooperate right now. One area that we and the 

Russians still cooperate in (or one of the few areas) is biomedical 

research. Anybody in the medical arm of the government can tell 

you that. With the Chinese, too, it’s the one area we cooperate 

with them in. They, for example, have availed themselves of our 

latest surgical techniques, and we’ve availed ourselves of what look 

like very promising herbal cures. You can’t beat experience. In 

truth it’s a mix of everybody’s cures and everybody’s components. 

Question: Regarding this boy who went to Russia recently, the 

media at the time really made every effort to make a story out of it. 

Everybody in the United States had some opinion about that story 

at the time because it was blown up by the media. Isn’t it a fact 

that the media to a large degree abdicates its responsibility to our 

society in the quest of a story for the sake of the story, so that they 

can get the readership arid the television viewership? The media 

seems to be money oriented; it doesn’t seem to want to contribute 

to society. 

Answer: You’re right. The media did blow the Todd Cantrell 

story completely out of proportion. However, I can also throw into 

that mix the hour-long asbestos documentary I did last December, 

when I threw the book at both industry and government for failing 

to protect us when they had known about the problem for 30 or 

40 years. But don’t tell me you haven’t heard me speak of the 

media’s failings, because there are many. There are too many Todd 

Cantrell stories. 

Question: Is there any sense of responsibility to society, not on 

an individual case, but on a media-wide base, or is it just that the 

companies have to answer to their stockholders? 

46 
Accomplishments of Science by the Year 2000 

Answer: That doesn’t get into it at all, because commercial 

minutes on the news shows on all three networks sell for about the 

same amount of money. Each rating point is a couple of thousand 

dollars a week, but the news shows all lose catastrophic amounts 

of money; they’re loss leaders, if you will. So even if we can raise 

our ratings and our share of points over CBS or NBC, that’s not, 

a governing factor. There is only one governing factor, and that is 

attracting the audience with the truth. That’s my mission at ABC, 

but sometimes I’m not there, or I’m off on other projects. I was 

off on another project the day the Todd Cantrell story ran. The 

next day I asked an eye surgeon in New York, “Can this Russian 

treatment help this kid?” She said, “NO.” I tried to make the 

point! but it was too late, the story was gone. We did make the 

point when the kid came back, although by then the parents were 

elated because their son was potentially cured. People in that role 

are searching for what I call magic helpers. They’re not searching 

for the truth-they don’t care about the truth-they’re looking for 

magic helpers. 

Question: May I pursue one more point? There are, on your 

network, programs that in my opinion masquerade as news programs. These hour-long programs come out with more or less sensationalist stories, and they serve the same purpose as the National 

Enquirer, as far as I’m concerned, because the sensationalism is 

there to generate points. I don’t think we had as many of these 

a few years ago. The documentaries that were of value have all 

disappeared. 

Answer: All I can tell you is that ABC does 12 documentaries 

a year, more than the other two networks put together. We’re 

the only active documentary unit in the country among the major 

networks. 

Question: You noted that Socrates asked political and world 

questions that are still important and pertinent today, and you also 

noted that science has advanced immensely since Socrates’ time. 

Does this mean you agree that technology is advancing faster than 

our political institutions? 

I said Socrates asked all the 

important questions, but never answered any of them. It is for 

our generation to answer them. 

Answer: I didn’t say that. 

47 
The Impact of Science on Society 

Question: Could you give us some suggestions on how to 

avoid problems that might result from this uneven growth between 

science and the political institutions? 

Answer: If I knew that I wouldn’t be a mere science editor. 

Question: I have a question and a statement. If we have to 

answer the questions Socrates asked, we’re in trouble. As for my 

question, I’m very interested in artificial intelligence and the development of robotics, including the consequences of this development 

for our political and social institutions. Two interesting theories 

about the development of robotics are that it might revamp the 

scarcity-based theories on economics and change our economic system, and it might add a certain bundle of commodities or basic 

services to our political rights and what we consider to have inherited from our economic and political institutions. Could you just 

comment on what you think about the evolution of robotics and 

artificial intelligence, politically and economically, over the next 

20 years? 

Answer: Well, I would point out to you the conclusions reached 

by the recent conference of top business leaders in the country, 

including those in the steel and auto industries. They pointed 

out that many of their workers who have been laid off will never 

be rehired because their jobs have been either taken over by 

automation or eliminated. Obviously, it’s a major problem that 

we have to deal with. You can have a robot science editor too, or 

a robot to do your job. It won’t be as skillful, perhaps, but it will 

be cheaper. 

You spoke several times of the international exchange of ideas and scientific knowledge, particularly the biomedical exchanges that even this country and the Soviet Union can be 

happy with. Do you think there’s a possibility that over the next, 

20 years this type of scientific interchange could help bring about 

more of a global perspective on citizenship, which would then have 

some positive effects on the political conflicts that are present right 

now? Could such an interchange give people a more global concept 

of society to replace the nationalism that is present now? 

Answer: Good question. Let’s say the Russians come up with a 

cure for one kind of cancer and we come up with a cure for another 

kind of cancer; very quickly you’re going to see an international 

Question: 
Accomplishments of Science by the Year 2000 

exchange. Now if you want to extrapolate that (and there are 

obvious dangers, as I pointed out, in extrapolation) to future space 

activities, the next great exploration in space has to be Mars. The 

studies we have (and there are only a few) indicate that a manned 

Mars expedition will be very expensive. A study done in 1970 

for the Air Force estimated that with a six-man crew, a two-year 

round-trip flight would cost $100 billion in 1970 dollars. Carry 

that forward to today and it would cost about $350 billion. By the 

time such a project gets started it will probably cost $500 billion, 

which is more than any single country can afford. You see what I’m 

getting at-it will have to become an international project. There 

is great hope for unifying the world in that way, and for eliminating 

hostilities. 

Question: So you see the space exploration system as the way 

to break down some of the conflicts? 

Answer: Yes. 

Question: A few years ago I heard one of our congressmen talk 

about using the Sun’s energy by collecting it with a dish in space, 

changing it to microwave energy, transporting it to Earth like a 

radar beam, and then converting it back to use as energy. Do you 

have any knowledge of this program? 

Answer: The congressman was talking about what is called 

the solar power station. It’s still being studied by NASA and the 

Department of Energy, but there are several problems as well as 

much promise. One problem is that if you’re a half degree off in 

aiming the microwave energy to Earth, instead of beaming it to 

the five-mile-square field outside Phoenix you might just burn up 

Phoenix. So it has to be totally reliable. What’s more, you have to 

put a lot of hardware into orbit, requiring a much larger boosting 

system than the Shuttle has. 

Question: Can you give me an estimate on when you think this 

could be accomplished? 

Answer: At the rate we’re going now? 

Question: Yes; we had been investigating this for a few years 

and then all of a sudden it was just left hanging. 

49 
The Impact of Science on Society 

Answer: All of a sudden the energy crisis slowed down and 

gasoline went below a dollar a gallon, so the project was put on the 

back burner. 

Question: I have a question about the Space Telescope. How 

much coverage will there be of the launch, and after the Space 

Telescope is in orbit and operating, how much coverage will be 

available? 

Answer: You’re talking about 3 years or so from now, and 

there are new reports of major problems in both the mirrors and the 

optics of the Space Telescope, which had been scheduled for launch 

in 1986. It will have live TV cameras on it; all three networks will 

bring you the pictures. 

Question: Concerning propulsion as a source of energy, how 

Answer: You mean nuclear fusion. Not as far as we should, but 

Question: I think it’s obvious to all of us that the Three Mile 

Island incident had a disastrous effect on the nuclear industry. 

That, coupled with lagging electrical sales demands, makes me 

fairly confident that no new nuclear plants will come on line in 

this country between now and the year 2000. With the existing 

nuclear power plants producing electricity on a commercial basis, 

what is it going to take to get the Federal government to take a 

decisive stance on the problem of storage of the nuclear waste that 

we’re producing at present? 

far along are we coming in the area of nuclear fission? 

we’re getting there slowly. 

Answer: I don’t think you understand fully the fact that nuclear 

power plants produce only low-level radioactive waste. The highlevel radioactive waste is from weapons systems, and they’re the 

more immediate problem. 

Question: There is an immediate problem in the sense that 

some of these nuclear power plants are going to be forced to shut 

down within the next year or two because they don’t have the 

storage available. 

Answer: Well, we’re talking politics again. I don’t pretend to 

be any great nuclear expert. It’s tough enough just keeping up 

with space and aviation. One of the problems we have is that our 

50 
Accomplishments of Science by the Year 2000 

whole society has gotten so complex that no one person can keep 

up with anything. All these reprocessing plants that could have 

handled much of the waste are still mired in political battling. So 

go see your congressman. 

Question: What’s it going to take to get us out of that political 

mire? Do you suspect the government will actually take a decisive 

stance, or can the media help with this problem? 

Answer: Probably it’s going to take a new Arab oil embargo to 

bring us to our feet, begging for oil and thus begging for nuclear 

power. That’s the only real chance of getting out of it. The media, 

as you have noticed, is antinuclear, except for iconoclasts like me 

who perversely persist in telling the truth. 

Question: I work for the power company, so I happen to agree 

with that. My last question, if you don’t mind, is how serious do 

you think this dioxin problem is? 

Answer: We don’t know. We don’t have enough data on it, 

and the fact that we don’t is just downright disgraceful because 

dioxin is nothing new and we should have had the data by now. 

All we know is that dioxin causes chloracne, which goes away, and 

also some neurological disorders. The Swedes claim it causes bone 

cancer, but some of our people dispute that study. I have yet to 

see a definitive study on it. 

Question: You mentioned the lack of understanding and 

appreciation of science in Washington. Do you have any idea 

how this situation arose and why it continues today? Is there 

any relation between the lack of understanding and appreciation 

of science in Washington and the fact that, as you mentioned, 

Japanese companies are usually headed by engineers instead of 

MBAs? 

Answer: No, I don’t think that’s related to the lack of 

appreciation of science in Washington. I think you’re talking about 

apples and oranges. I don’t know how or why Washington became 

disenthused with science, but I suspect that it was a few too many 

Three Mile Islands, a few too many power companies lying and 

failing to do their job, a few too many regulatory agencies not 

doing their job to protect the public, as is implicit in their charter. 

51 
The Impact of Science on Society 

Question: You said that we will be technologically illiterate in 

the future. Do you think this is inevitable, or can we prevent it? 

Answer: That’s what the National Academy of Sciences warns. 

There are steps already under way to upgrade science and math 

education in high schools, but it’s going to be a long time before the 

problem is solved. For example, you can put in computers for 6- 

year-olds to use, but who is going to do the software programming 

and teach the teachers how to use them? 

Question: In light of dioxin, Agent Orange, and everything else 

we read about in the newspapers, do you see a more conservative 

trend in research in that area or are we just going to be reading 

more and more about it in the next 30 years or so? 

Answer: Do I see a more conservative trend in chemical research 

on pesticides? I certainly hope not. I think what’s needed is a more 

conservative system of checks and controls but not necessarily a 

more conservative trend in research. I think this country’s great 

advances have been made because we took on the impossible and 

proved it possible, but when something is basically dangerous, like 

dioxin, and people know it, that’s something else again. 

Question: I’m an engineer, and I remember when you talked 

about the difference between what you earn in basic research and 

what you earn out in the marketplace working in a production-type 

atmosphere. Very little basic research is done without government 

sponsorship. Do you think that private industry should be taking 

on more of this responsibility in order to promote a higher standard 

of living for people doing basic research? 

1 

Answer: Yes. 

Question: I would like to know what you think about the 

advancement of research in new materials. Do you think this 

research has reached a peak as far as the resources we have on 

Earth, or do you think we’ll be able to go to other places, such as 

the Moon, for new materials? 

Answer: Do I think the advancement of research in new 

materials has reached a peak on Earth? Well, you could have 

said that 5 or 10 years ago, and then along came Kevlar or some 

other new material. Every time we say we’ve reached the limit, 

there’s no further to go, this is the peak, some quiet little guy in a 

52 
Accomplishments of Science by the Year ,2000 

a lab comes up with something new. As for the Moon, I know of 

no chemical or mineral found on the Moon that is any different 

from those found on the Earth. The proportions vary, but when 

you factor in the cost of getting material back or building a lunar 

camp to refine it, it comes out as being more expensive. 

Question: A few years ago, during the energy crisis, there were 

plans for plants to convert coal to oil. Now they’ve discarded the 

whole idea, although I understand it was feasible. Can you tell me 

why you think it was discarded, besides the fact that the energy 

crisis is over, and whether you think it will ever be renewed or 

should be renewed? 

Answei.: I think you’ve answered your own question in your 

statement. This country has, as you’ve read in all the ads, 

80 percent of the world’s coal. Five or ten years ago, at the height 

of the energy crisis, one top scientist said, “The best way to gasify 

coal is to burn it.” 

You mentioned earlier that Russia, Japan, and 

China graduate many more engineers than the US does. How much 

of the cost of that education was handed down to the individual 

student, compared to in the United States? 

Answer: I don’t know, but obviously the state assumes a very 

high percentage of it, I would think. 

Question: Wouldn’t you say that would account for our lack 

of engineers? 

Answer: No, I don’t think so at all. I think that if others 

were given the freedom of choice that we have in this country, the 

freedom to commit suicide, if you will, the freedom to sit back as 

a big fat-cat MBA and rake in the dollars, they would do it too. 

But I think in those countries the state decrees, “You will be an 

engineer, you will be a scientist,” and then offers attractive lures. 

Question: What I’m trying to say is that I would much rather 

be an electrical engineer right now, but my pocketbook says I’m 

going to have to settle for being an electronics technician. 

Question: 

Answer: Join the parade. 

Question: How do you see the tremendous increase in technology affecting the Third World countries? 

53 
The Impact of Science on Society 

Answer: Favorably, I trust, so they become relatively faster 

second-world countries and then first-world countries, so it doesn’t 

take them three centuries or two centuries or even a century and a 

half to get to our point. 

Question: Do you think there is a reason for us to share this 

technology with them or is there more of a reason for us to keep it 

to ourselves and keep them where they are? 

I know of no technology except highly classified 

technology, which the Russians seem to steal anyway, that this 

country hasn’t openly shared with the rest of the world. 

Question: Referring to the deficiencies in our education system 

which you spoke of, would you attribute them to a lack of impetus 

on the part of the student or a lack of incentive on the part of the 

schools? 

Answer: 

Answer: Both. 

Question: When research projects such as the ion engine, 

coal gasification, or solar power go stale, is that because of the 

government falling back, saying we don’t need it, or the scientist 

saying we don’t want to do it? 

I think it’s a combination of both. I think if the 

scientists say, “We don’t want to do it,” the government then says, 

“It’s not needed.” 

Question: On the subject of space exploration, what types of 

fuels are presently available and what types are being studied? 

Answer: The available fuels are primarily the liquid and solid 

fuels, but everything from solar sails to nuclear propulsion is being 

studied. I’ve contended for some time that we can’t get to Mars, for 

example, with a manned flight (presently a 2-year mission, round 

trip) using the conventional chemical rockets, even liquid hydrogen 

and liquid oxygen, unless we have more efficient, higher thrust 

engines. The speed required to escape the Earth’s gravitational 

pull is about 25000 mph, or about 35000 feet per second. But 

then, as many of you know, at midpoint the vehicle will slow down 

to 4000 mph until the next planet’s gravitational attraction begins 

to pull it in. That’s where you’ve got to make up the time with 

some sort of constant drive; it could even be an electron motor. 

They’re all being studied. 

Answer: 

54 
Accomplishments of Science by the Year 2000 

Question: How do you think the advancement of technology is 

going to affect the environment that we all share, and do you think 

the technology that is proposed and discovered is going to be able 

to keep up with the problem of storing our nuclear waste in a way 

that will not affect future generations? 

Answer: That’s a sweeping question you’ve asked, but I can 

answer it by simply saying that the gross crimes of the past two 

decades have guaranteed that out of the ashes of the old EPA will 

come a new EPA. I believe that no new technology that pollutes 

will be allowed. 

1 

55 
Our Future in the 

Cosmos-Computers 

Isaac Asimov 
Isaac Asimov 

For more than 45 years, Isaac Asirnov has been a professional 

writer of renowned versatility. The Russian-born scientist and 

author, who has been called a genius and “the nearest thing to a 

human writing machine,” is perhaps best known as one of today’s 

major science fiction writers. His broad range of works includes 

histories, childrens’ books, collections of articles, mysteries, and 

books concerning the Bible, literature, geography, and nonfiction 

science material. 

Blessed with total recall, Asimov entered Columbia University 

at the age of 15 and graduated with a doctorate in chemistry. 

Beginning in 1949, as instructor, associate professor, and later full 

professor, he taught biochemistry at Boston University’s School 

of Medicine. His scientific research includes work in kinetics, 

photochemistry, enzymology, and irradiation. 

Asimov’s impressive list of writings includes hundreds of articles 

in publications ranging from Esquire, Harpers, and The Saturday 

Review, to pamphlets of the Atomic Energy Commission. His latest 

and just-published novel, Robots of Dawn, is the third book in 

a series concerning his fictional character, Elijah Baley, and he 

is currently working on a revision to Asimov’s Guide to Science 

and on a new novel, Opus 900, which will be his 300th book. 

He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the American 

Association for the Advancement of Science Westinghouse Award 

for excellence in magazine writing and a 1983 Hugo Award from 

the World Science Fiction Convention for his novel Foundation’s 

Edge, a sequel to a trilogy of novels that he wrote 3 decades ago 

concerning the distant future. 

Known to type 90 words a minute and to produce as much 

as 35 pages of manuscript a day, Asimov maintains an 8-hour-aday, 4-day-a-week writing schedule and calls writing “my idea of 

a vacation. Most of all, I want to be writing,” he says. “If I 

could, I’d write every book in the world.” Dr. Asimov lectures as 

enthusiastically as he writes, and has been referred to as one of the 

“great explainers” of our technological age, helping to bridge the 

gap between science and the public. 
Our Future in the Cosmos-Computers 

No matter how clever or artificially intelligent 

computers get, and no matter how much they help us 

advance, they will always be strictly machines and we 

will be strictly humans. When we finally do extend 

the living range of humanity throughout near space, 

possibly throughout the entire solar system and out 

to the stars, it will be done in tandem with advanced 

computers that will be as intelligent as we are, but 

never intelligent in the same way that humans are. 

They will need us as much as we will need them. 

As far as our destiny in the cosmos is concerned, I think that it 

will arise out of the two important changes that are taking place 

before our very eyes. One change involves the computerization 

of our society, and the other change involves the extension of our 

capabilities through aeronautical and space research. And the two 

are combined. Decades ago we science fiction writers foresaw a 

great many things about space travel, but two things we did not 

foresee. In all the time that I wrote stories about our first Moon 

landing and about the coming of television, nobody, it5 far as I 

know, in the pages of the science fiction magazines, combined the 

two. Nobody foresaw that when the first Moon landing took place, 

people on Earth would watch it on television. Nor did science 

fiction writers foresee that in taking ships out into space, they 

would depend quite so much on computers. The computerization 

of space flight was something that eluded them completely. So, I 

have two broad areas that I can discuss in talking about our destiny 

in the cosmos. One area is the future of computerization, and the 

other area is the future of space itself. In this presentation, I will 

talk about computers and their future, and I think I have a kind 

of right to do so. I have never done any work on computers, but I 

have speculated freely concerning them. 

Despite my gentle appearance as a gentleman a little over 30, I 

have been a published writer for 45 years. If I can make it 5 more 

years, I will celebrate my golden anniversary as a published writer, 

which isn’t too bad for a fellow in his early thirties. Perhaps 

59 
The Impact of Science on Society 

the most important thing I did as a speculator was to foresee 

the various properties and abilities of computers, including those 

mobile computerized objects called robots. As a matter of fact, I 

sometimes astonish myself. Back in 1950, in a passage that was 

eventually published as the first section of my book Foundation, 

I had my protagonist pull out a pocket computer. I didn’t call 

it a pocket computer, I called it a “tabulator pad.” However, I 

described it pretty accurately, and this at a time when computers 

filled up entire walls! Decades later, someone said to me, “Hey 

Asimov, you described a pocket computer a long, long time ago; 

why didn’t you patent it and become a trillionaire?” And I said, 

“Did you notice, perchance, that I only described the outside?” I’ll 

be frank, to this day I don’t know what is inside. I have evolved a 

theory; I think it’s a very clever cockroach. But that was in 1950; I 

did a lot better in 1939, long before many of you were born. I began 

writing about robots. Robots had been written about for years 

before this. The word had been invented in 1921 by Karel Capek, 

a Czechoslovakian playwright. However, until I started writing, 

robots were, for the most part, either menaces or sort of wistful 

little creatures. As menaces, they always destroyed their creator; 

they were examples to humanity of what to avoid. They were 

symbols of the egregious hubris of the scientist. According to that 

plot you did something that infringed upon the abilities reserved 

for the creator, you made life. No one objected to destroying life, 

you understand (don’t let me get radical here), but making life was 

wrong, especially if you didn’t use the ordinary method. Even if 

you did use the ordinary method, the robot, as though to explain 

to you that you had done wrong, sometimes killed you. Well, I 

got tired of that plot. There was another plot in which the robot 

was a good and noble but picked-on member of a minority group 

but everyone was mean to him. I got tired of that plot too. I 

decided that robots really ought to be (hold your breath now) . . . machines, to do work that they were designed to do, but with 

safeguards built into them. Looking around the world, I noticed 

that practically everything human beings had made had elements 

of danger in them, and that, as best we could (being fallible human 

beings), we had safeguards built in. For instance, you will notice 

that swords have hilts, so that when you thrust the sword forward 

and it goes into the other guy the way it is supposed to, your 

60 
Our Future in the Cosmos-Computers 

hand doesn’t slide along the blade and cut all your fingers off. 

So, I figured robots would also have safeguards built in, and I 

finally listed these safeguards in the March 1942 issue of Astounding 

Science Fiction on page 100, first column, about one-third of the 

way down. Since then, I have had occasion to look up the list and 

memorize it. I called it the “Three Laws of Robotics.” I will now 

recite these laws for you because I have memorized them. I have 

made a great deal of money from them, so it sort of warms my 

heart to think of them for purely idealistic reasons. 

1. A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, 

2. A robot must obey orders given to him by human beings 

except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 

3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such 

protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law. 

None of these laws is interesting in itself, although it is obvious that 

the laws apply to all tools. If you stop to think, the first rule of any 

tool is that you operate it safely. Any tool that is going to kill you 

when you use it is not going to be used. It won’t even be used if it 

merely maims you! The second rule is that a tool should do what it 

is supposed to as long as it does so safely. And the third rule is that 

a tool ought to survive its use and be ready for a second use, if that 

can possibly be arranged. Nowadays, people who are working with 

robots actually debate the methods by which these three rules can 

be installed. This flatters me, but what interests me most is that 

I called these rules the Three Laws of Robotics, and that use of 

the word “robotics” in the March 1942 issue of Astounding Science 

Fiction, (page 100, first column, one-third of the way down) was the 

first use of this word anywhere in the English language. I made up 

the word myself; this is my contribution to science. Someday, when 

a truly encyclopedic history of science is written (you know, one 

with 275 volumes), somewhere in volume 237, where the science 

of robotics is discussed, there will be a footnote: The word was 

invented by Isaac Asimov. That is going to be my only mention 

in all 275 volumes. But, you know, better than nothing, I always 

say. The truth is that I didn’t know I was inventing a word; I 

thought it was the word. If you will notice, physics ends in “ics” 

and just about every branch of physics, such as hydraulics, celestial 

allow a human to come to harm. 

61 
The Impact of Science on Society 

mechanics, and so on, ends in “ics.)’ So I figured that the study of 

robots would be robotics, and anyone else would have thought of 

that too if they had stopped to think that there might be a study of 

robots. What’s more, I quoted those three laws from the Handbook 

of Robotics, 56th edition (c.2058 A.D.), and the first edition of 

such a handbook is actually about to come out. It is a handbook 

of industrial robotics, and I was asked to write the introduction. 

Who would have thought, when I was a little kid writing about 

robots, that such a handbook would actually be written! It just 

shows that if you live long enough, almost anything can happen. 

The question then is: What is going to happen with robotics 

in the future? Well, as we all know, it’s going to create a 

certain amount of economic dislocation. Jobs will disappear as 

industries become robotized. What’s more, robots are dangerous, 

very literally dangerous sometimes. There has already been one 

case of a robot killing a human being. A few years ago a robot in 

a Japanese assembly line stopped working, and a young mechanic 

went to see what was wrong with it. The robot was surrounded 

by a chain-link fence, and the safeguard system was designed to 

cut off power to the assembly line when the fence gate was opened, 

thus deactivating the robot and making it just a lump of dead 

metal. This safeguard was designed to implement the First Law: 

Thou shalt open the chain fence before you approach the robot. 

(You have to understand that what we call industrial robots are 

just a bunch of computerized levers, nothing more. They’re not 

complicated enough to have the three laws built into them, so the 

laws are implemented outside them.) Well, this mechanic thought 

he would save himself a second and a half, so he lightly jumped over 

the fence and manually turned off that particular robot. This will 

do the trick just as well, unless you happen to push the “on” button 

with your elbow while you’re busy working on the robot. That is 

apparently what he did, so the robot, in all innocence, started 

working. I believe it was a gear-grinding robot, so it ground a gear 

in the place where a gear was supposed to be, which was where the 

guy’s back really was, and it k’illed him. The Japanese government 

tried to keep it quiet, because they didn’t want anything to spoil 

their exploitation of robotics. But it is difficult to keep a thing 

like that completely quiet. Eventually the news got out. In all 

the newspapers the headlines were: “Robot Kills Human Being.” 

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Our Future in the Cosmos-Computers 

When you read the article you got the vision of this monstrous 

machine with shambling arms, machine oil dribbling down the side, 

sort of isolating the poor guy in a corner, and then rending him 

limb from limb. That was not the true story, but I started getting 

telephone calls from all over the United States from reporters 

saying, “Have you heard about the robot that killed the human 

being? What happened to the First Law?” That was flattering, 

but I suddenly had the horrible notion that I was going to be held 

responsible for every robotics accident that ever happened, and 

that made me very nervous. I am hoping that this sort of thing 

doesn’t happen very often. But the question is: What’s going to 

happen as robots take over and people are put out of jobs? I 

am hoping that that is only a transition period and that we are 

going to end up with a new generation that will be educated in a 

different way and that will be ready for a computerized world with 

considerably more leisure and with new kinds of jobs. It is the 

experience of humanity that advances in technology create more 

jobs than they destroy. But they are different kinds of jobs, and 

the jobs that are going to be created in a computerized world are 

going to require a great deal more sophistication than the jobs 

they destroy. It is possible that it won’t be easy to reeducate 

or retrain a great many people who have spent their whole lives 

doing jobs that are repetitive and stultifying and therefore ruin 

their brains. Society will have to be extremely wise and extremely 

humane to make sure that there is no unnecessary suffering during 

this interval. I’m not sure that society is wise enough or humane 

enough to do this. I hope it is. Regardless, we will eventually 

come to a period when we will have a world that is adjusted to 

computerization. 

Perhaps then we will have another and even more intractable 

problem. What happens if we have computers and robots that are 

ever more capable, that are ever more versatile, and that approach 

human activity more and more closely? Are we going to be 

equaled? Are we going to be surpassed? Will the computer take 

over and leave us far behind? There are several possible answers 

to these questions, depending upon your mood. If you are in a 

cynical mood, if you have been reading the newspapers too closely, 

the answer would be: who cares? Or if you have become even 

more cynical, the answer would be: why not? You might look at it 

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The Impact of Science on Society 

this way: The history of humanity is a long tale of misery and 

cruelty, of destroying each other and the Earth we live on, and 

we don’t deserve to continue anymore. If there is anything with 

more wisdom than people, with better brains than we have, that 

can think better . . . please let it take over. You might also argue 

this way: For 3% billion years, life has been evolving on Earth 

very slowly, in a hit or miss fashion, with no guiding principle, as 

far as we can tell, except survival. As the environment changes 

and the Earth undergoes various changes, life takes advantage of 

new niches, fumbles the old niches, and eventually, after 3% billion 

years, finally develops a species with enough brains to create a 

technological civilization. That is a long time to achieve so little. 

You must ask yourself, “Is that the best that can be done?” 

Well, maybe that is the best that can be done without a guiding 

intelligence, but, after 3% billion years, the guiding intelligence, 

such as it is, has been created, and now it can take over. You can 

even argue that the whole purpose of evolution has been, by hit and 

miss, to finally create a species that can then proceed to accelerate 

evolution in a guided direction. In that case, we are designing 

our own successors. Instead of waiting several million years just 

to develop enough of a Broca’s convolution in our brains so that 

we can learn to talk, we are deliberately designing computers so 

that they can speak, understand speech, and do a few more things. 

If there is a grand designer up above who has chosen this way of 

creating human beings, he is going to be rubbing his hands and 

calling for applause. He is going to say, “Watch the next step, this 

is going to be faster than you can possibly imagine.” 

On the other hand, there is another way to look at the future 

of the computer. You can also assume that you are not going 

to easily manufacture artificial intelligence that will surpass our 

natural intelligence. Miserable as we are, and deplorable as our 

records prove us to be, we nevertheless have 3V4 pounds of organic 

matter inside our skulls that are really worthy of 3% billion years 

of evolution. When you are being cynical you can speak of the 

brain as something so little to take so much time to evolve. But 

ccnsider it closely, it is extremely astonishing, really! There are 

10 billion neurons in the human brain, along with 10 times that 

many supporting cells. Each of these 10 billion neurons is hooked 

up synaptically with 50 to 500 other neurons. Each neuron is 

64 , 
Our Future in the Cosmos-Computers 

not just a mere on/off switch; it is an extremely complex system 

in itself, which contains many sets of very strange and unusual 

molecules. We really don’t know what goes on inside the neurons 

on an intimate basis, nor do we know exactly the purpose for the 

various connections in the human brain. We don’t know how the 

brain works in anything but its simplest aspects. Therefore, even if 

we can make a computer with as many switches as there are human 

neurons, and even if we can interconnect them as intricately it9 they 

are connected in the human brain, will the computer ever be able 

to do what we can do so easily? Now there are some things in 

which a computer is far ahead of us. Even the simplest computer, 

the very first computer, for that matter even before they became 

totally electronic, was far ahead of us in solving problems and 

manipulating numbers. There is nothing a computer can do that 

we can’t if we are given enough time and if we correct our errors. 

But that’s the point; we don’t have enough time and we don’t have 

the patience or the ability to detect all our errors. That is the 

advantage of the computer over us. It can manipulate numbers 

in nanoseconds without error, unless error is introduced by the 

human beings who give it the instructions. Of course, as humans 

we always like to think of the other side of this argument. My 

favorite cartoon, in the New Yorker, shows a computer covering an 

entire huge wall, as they did in those days, and two little computer 

experts. (You could tell that they were computer experts because 

they wore white lab coats and had long white beards). One of them 

is reading a little slip of paper coming out of a slot in the computer. 

He says, “Good heavens, Fotheringay, do you realize that it would 

take 100 mathematicians 400 years to make a mistake this big?” 

The question is: If computers are so much better than we are 

in this respect, why shouldn’t they be better than we are in all 

respects? The answer is that we are picking on the wrong thing. 

This business of fooling around with numbers, of multiplying, 

dividing, integrating, differentiating, and doing whatever else it 

is that computers do, is trivial, truly trivial! The reason that 

computers do so much better in these areas than we do is because 

our brains are not designed to do anything that trivial. It would 

be a waste of time. As a matter of fact, it’s only because we are 

forced, in the absence of computers, to do all this trivial work 

that our brains are ruined. It is like taking an elaborate electronic 

65 
The Impact of Science on Society 

instrument and because it happens to be hard and heavy using it 

as a hammer. It may be a very good hammer, but obviously you 

are going to destroy the instrument. Well, we take our brain and 

what do we use it for? We file things alphabetically, make lists of 

things, work out profit and loss, and do a trillion and one other 

things that are completely trivial. We use our fancy instrument 

for trivia simply because there is nothing else that can do it. Now 

enters the computer. The computer is a halfway fancy instrument. 

It’s a lot closer to a hammer than it is to a brain. But it’s good 

enough to be able to do all those nonsense things that we have 

been wasting our brains on. The question is, what then is it that 

our brain is designed for? The answer, as far as I’m concerned, 

is that it is designed to do all sorts of things that involve insight, 

intuition, fantasy, imagination, creativity, thinking up new things, 

and putting together old things in completely new ways; in other 

words, doing the things that human beings, and only human beings, 

can do. 

It is difficult for me to put myself into the minds of others; I 

can only put myself into my own mind. For example, I know that 

I write stories, and I write them as fast as I can write. I don’t 

give them much thought because I’m anxious to get them down 

on paper. I sit and watch them being written on the paper as my 

fingers dance along the keys of my typewriter, or occasionally of 

my word processor. I start a story in the right place and each 

word is followed by another word (a correct other word) and each 

incident is followed by another incident (a correct other incident). 

The story ends when it is supposed to end. Now, how do I know 

that all the words are correct, all the ideas are correct, and all the 

incidences are correct? I don’t know in any absolute sense, but at 

least I can get them published. I virtually never fail! The thing 

is, I literally don’t give it any thought. People ask me, “HOW can 

you write all the stuff that you write?” (1 have written 285 books 

at the moment, and I’ve been busy writing Opus 300 so it can be 

published as my 300th book.) I say, “Well, I cut out the frills, like 

thinking.” Everyone laughs; they think I’m being very funny. But 

I’m not; I mean it literally. If I had to stop and think, I couldn’t 

possibly do all that I do. All right, I’m not as good as Tolstoy, but 

considering that I don’t think, I’m surprisingly good. Of course, 

the real answer is that I don’t consciously think. Something inside 

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Our Future in the Cosmos-Computers 

my brain puts the pieces together and turns out the stories. I just 

don’t know how it’s done. 

I don’t 

know how the devil I do it. Some change is taking place in my 

muscle molecules, in the actomyosin, which causes them to assume 

another shape. There is a ratchet or something that drags the actin 

molecules along the myosin; who knows? The theory changes every 

year. But whatever it is, I say to myself, “flex” and it flexes. I don’t 

even know what I did; in fact, I don’t even have to say “flex.’’ If 

I’m driving my automobile and something appears before me, my 

foot flexes and stamps down on the brake before I can say to myself 

“brake.” If it didn’t do that before I could say to myself “brake,)’ 

I wouldn’t be alive now. The point is that our brain does things, 

sometimes very complex things, that we don’t know how it does. 

Even the person who does it doesn’t know how he does it. If you 

don’t want to take me as an example, consider Mozart who wrote 

symphonies at the ridiculously early age of 7 or 8. Somebody wrote 

to him when Mozart was an old man of 26 and asked him how to 

go about writing symphonies. Mozart said, “I wouldn’t if I were 

you; you are too young. Start with something simple, a concerto 

or sonata; work your way up to symphonies.” The guy wrote back 

and said, “But Herr Mozart, you were writing symphonies when 

you were a little boy.” Mozart wrote back, “I didn’t ask anybody.’’ 

It’s quite possible that we will never figure out how to make 

computers as good as the human brain. The human brain is 

perhaps a little more intractable than we imagined. Even if we 

could, would we? Is there a point to it? There may not be, you 

know. We talk about artificial intelligence as though intelligence is 

a unitarian, monolithic thing. We talk about intelligence quotient 

as though we can measure intelligence by a single number. You 

know, I’m 85, you’re 86, you’re more intelligent than I am. It’s not 

so. There are all sorts of varieties of intelligence. I believe that 

people who make up intelligence tests make up questions that they 

can answer. They’ve got to! Suppose I want to design a test to 

decide which of you has the potential to become a great punk rock 

musician. I don’t know what to ask; I know nothing about punk 

rock. I don’t even know the vocabulary. All I know are the words 

“punk rock.” So this is not the kind of test I can make up. My 

point is that we have a whole set of intelligence tests designed by 

It is a similar situation if I want to flex my arm. 

67 
The Impact of Science on Society 

people who know the answers to the questions. You are considered 

intelligent if you are like they are. If you’re not like they are you 

rate very low. Well, what does that mean? It just means that it is 

a self-perpetuating process. 

I am fortunate-I happen to have exactly one kind of intelligence, the kind that enables me to answer the questions on an intelligence test. In all other human activities I am abysmally stupid. 

But none of that counts; I’m tabbed as intelligent. For instance, 

suppose something goes wrong with my car. Whatever it is that 

goes wrong, I don’t know what it is. There is nothing that is so 

simple about my car that I understand it. So, when my car makes 

funny sounds, I drive it in fear and trembling to a gas station where 

an attendant examines it while I wait with bated breath, staring 

at him with adoration for a god-like man, while he tells me what’s 

wrong and fixes it. Meanwhile, he regards me with the contempt 

due someone so abysmally unintelligent as to not understand what 

is going on under the hood. He likes to tell me jokes, and I always 

laugh very hard because I don’t want to do anything to offend him. 

He always says to me, “DOC,” (he always calls me Doc; he thinks 

it’s my first name). “DOC,” he says, “A deaf and dumb man goes 

into a hardware store. He wants nails, so he goes up to the counter 

and goes like this and they bring him a hammer. He shakes his 

head and he hammers again. So, they bring him a whole mess of 

nails. He takes the nails that he wants, pays for them, and walks 

out.” And I nod. Then the attendant says, “Next a blind man 

comes in and he wants scissors. How does he ask for them?” I gesture to show scissors but the attendant says, “No, he says, ‘May I 

have a pair of scissors?”’ Now, from the dead silence I always get 

when I tell this joke, I can tell that you agree with my answer. But 

a blind man can talk, ipso facto, right? All right! Well that shows 

your intelligence. It is an intelligence test, right there, and every 

one of you probably flunked! So, I maintain that there are all kinds 

of varieties of intelligence and that’s a good thing too because we 

need variety. The point is that a computer may well have a variety 

that is different from all the human varieties. In fact, we may come 

up with a whole set of varieties of intelligence. We would have a 

number of species of the genius-human intelligence and a number 

of species of the genius-computer intelligence. That’s the way it 

should be; let the computers do what they are designed to do and 

68 
Our Future in the Cosmos-Computers 

let the human beings do what they are designed to do. Together, 

in cooperation, man and computer can advance further than either could separately. Of course, it is possible to imagine that we 

could somehow design a computer in such a way that it could show 

human intelligence, have insight and imagination, be creative, and 

do all the things we think of as typically and truly human. But, 

so what? Would we build such a computer, even if we could? It 

might not be cost effective. 

Consider it this way-we move by walking. We lift first one 

leg, then the next one; we are consistently falling and catching 

ourselves. This is a very good method of locomotion because we can 

step over obstacles that aren’t large, we can walk on uneven roads 

or through underbrush, and we can make our way through crowds. 

Other animals move differently; they jump, hop, fly, swim, glide, 

and so on. Finally, we invented artificial locomotion with the wheel 

and axle. It’s one method that no living creature has developed. 

There are good reasons for that; it would be very difficult for a 

living creature to have a wheel and axle supplied with nerves and 

blood vessels. Nevertheless, we have both artificial locomotion on 

wheels and human locomotion on legs, and each has its advantages. 

We can move a lot faster on a machine. On the other hand, when 

we walk we don’t need a paved highway or steel rails. We’d have to 

make the world very smooth and convenient if we were going to take 

advantage of wheels. But, it’s worth it, at least most of us think 

so. I’ve heard no suggestions that we go back to walking to New 

York. On the other hand, walking is not pass& I frequently have 

occasion to navigate from the bedroom to the bathroom sometime 

in the dead of night, and I tell you right now, I’m never going to 

take an automobile to do that. I’m going to walk; that is the sort 

of thing walking is for. 

The question is, can you invent a machine that will walk? Of 

course you can! I’ve seen machines that can walk, but they’re 

usually merely laboratory demonstrations. These machines might 

have very specialized uses, but I don’t think they can ever really 

take the place of walking. We walk so easily that it makes 

no sense to kill ourselves working up a machine that will walk. 

And, as far as computers and human beings are concerned, it is 

wasteful to develop a computer that can display a human variety of 

intelligence. We can take an ordinary human being and train him, 

69 
The Impact of Science on Society 

from childhood on, to have a terrific memory, to remember numbers 

and partial products, and to work out all kinds of shortcuts in 

handling addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, square 

roots, and so on. In fact, people have been born with the ability; 

they are mathematical wizards who can do this sort of thing from 

an early age, and sometimes they can’t do anything else. But 

once you train that ordinary human being, what do you have? 

You have a human being, which you’ve created, so to speak, at 

enormous effort and expense, who can do what any cheap twodollar computer can do. Why bother? In the same way, why go 

through the trouble of building an enormously complex computer, 

with complicated programming, so that it can create and write a 

story when you have any number of unemployed writers who can 

do it and who were manufactured at zero cost to society in general, 

by the usual process. To sum it up, I think we can be certain that 

no matter how clever or artificially intelligent computers get, and 

no matter how much they help us advance, they will always be 

strictly computers and we will always be strictly humans. That’s 

the best way, and we humans will get along fine. 

The time will come when we will think back on a world without 

computers and shiver over the loneliness of humanity in those days. 

How was it possible for human beings to get along without their 

friends? You will be glad to put your arm around the computer 

and say, “Hello, friend,” because it will be helping you do a great 

many things you couldn’t do without it. It will make possible, I am 

sure, the true utilization of space for humanity. When we finally 

do extend the living range of humanity throughout near space, 

possibly throughout the entire solar system and out to the stars, 

it will be done in tandem with advanced computers that will be as 

intelligent as we are, but never identically intelligent to humans. 

They will need us as much as we need them. There will be two, 

not one of us. I like that thought. 

Question: In your writings, do you address the issues of how 

far society wants computer technology to develop and how man’s 

preoccupation with his own preservation will inhibit the computer’s 

full utilization? 

Answer: Actually, I did address those issues in my writings. 

The gentleman points out that it’s possible human beings may 

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Our Future in the Cosmos-Computers 

decide that there are limits to how far computers should be allowed 

to go. It may not be what computers may actually do, but what 

they may threaten in the human mind, and what humans may think 

of them. In my robot stories, I used the Frankeustein complex in 

which human societies refuse to allow robots to work because they 

have decided they don’t want to lose their jobs, they don’t want to 

undergo the painful period of transition, and they don’t trust the 

robots to be harmless. They call a halt to computer development. 

The only place robots can be used is in outer space, where there 

is no competition with human beings. And this, indeed, is the 

sort of situation that could conceivably take place. No matter how 

much people like myself (the cockeyed optimist) may think that a 

computerized society will be beautiful, we may come up against an 

absolutely immovable object, the suspicion of the average human 

being of being replaced by a computer. And in that case, it may 

be that a computerized society is not going to develop. I must say, 

though, that human beings are really not afraid of the computer. 

They may have already lost the fight, because computerization has 

already taken over society to such an extent that if every computer 

on Earth were suddenly to disappear, no industry of any size could 

probably continue for very long. 

As an example, Doubleday and Company decided to switch 

computer systems, but they didn’t do anything as dull as build 

up a new system, run it in tandem with the old one until they 

were quite satisfied, and then pull out the old one. No, they did it 

computer fashion. They pulled out the old system first, then they 

built up the second system, and are now engaged in the interesting 

process of trying to make it work. The result is that I cannot 

determine how many of my next novels have been distributed to 

the bookstores, nor do they know when they need to send out more 

copies. Who knows, they may ruin my entire theory because they 

have been getting along without a computer for a few weeks. 

So if all computers were to disappear, not only would industries 

come to a halt, but the United States would no longer be able to 

collect income taxes (except what we voluntarily send), the Army 

wouldn’t be able to do its work, and the space exploration industry 

would come to a halt. In short, we are already inextricably tied 

to the computer, and it is going to be difficult to stop it at any 

particular level. 

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The Impact of Science on Society 

Question: About 20 years ago, your view of the future was 

that humanity was basically in a disaster situation and might not 

survive the next 50 years. Furthermore, if we did survive the next 

50 years, then getting through the next 50 years would be almost 

impossible. Have you changed your views or do you think we still 

have a difficult 30 years ahead? 

Answer: I still think we are headed for a difficult 30 years. 

I mean, everyone here understands that someone could press the 

button tomorrow. We still face the possibility of a nuclear war. 

Little things happen that exacerbate feelings and make it difficult 

to talk sensibly. So we are constantly facing the destruction of 

civilization, not only by the instant blast of nuclear war but also 

by the continuing processes of increasing population, increasing 

pollution, foolish misuse of resources, and chemical damage (for 

instance, acid rain). We are in the uncomfortable position of facing 

the possible destruction of civilization either very quickly or a little 

more slowly in any of at least a dozen different directions. But, so 

far, we are still concentrating on localisms. Every nation worries 

about its neighbor, every nation sees as its primary concern the evil 

machinations of someone just across the border. We are so much 

more concerned about what the Soviet Union is doing than about 

what acid rain is doing, and the Soviet Union is more concerned 

about us than about any long-range danger to human beings. As 

long as that is true, by the time we wake up to the true dangers 

that face us all, if we ever do, it may be too late. So, yes, I still 

worry about civilization being a short-term process. Naturally, in 

a talk like this, I pretend that we will be wise enough to overcome 

the problems. As a matter of fact, in my presentation on space 

exploration, I discuss what I think is the only practical way that 

I can see of overcoming all this suspicion. It is a very slim chance 

indeed, but I don’t see any other alternative. 

Question: If computers eventually get rid of all the drudgery, 

will humans actually be capable of taking advantage of that, and 

how? 

Answer: The easy answer is that if computers do all the stupid 

things we shouldn’t be doing, then we will have time to do all the 

things we love. I mean, if you actually get fun out of alphabetizing 

cards, then do it. I do! 1 make all my own indexes, even though 

72 
Our Future in the Cosmos-Computers 

my publisher begs me to allow an expert to do them. He won’t 

listen to me when I tell him that I am better than an expert. He 

says, “But your time is more valuable.” I answer, “But I love 

it.” I make all the little cards and I alphabetize them; I spend all 

evening long alphabetizing them, and I love it. If they ever design 

a computer to do it, I won’t let it. So, we can keep our fun; what 

I am talking about is computers doing things that we don’t want 

to do so that we can engage in creative endeavors. People will be 

designing, programming, and maintaining computers, working in 

scientific research or the arts, writing history books and novels, 

sculpting, or whatever it is that they want to do. 

You respond, “Yes, but you are assuming that all human beings 

are creative in one way or another, and we all know that it isn’t so 

because just look at all the noncreative people around you.” To this 

I reply, “Well, you’re looking at a ruined world.” In medieval times, 

during the Dark Ages (at least in Western Europe), reading and 

writing were the province of a small group of clerks (clerics), and 

most other people, whether they were brutish aristocrats or bovine 

peasants, couldn’t read or write. They didn’t have any reason to 

read and write. If you had asked any of the few people who could 

read and write whether it was conceivable for either the aristocracy 

or the peasants to learn to read and write, the clerks would have 

said, “NO, they are just animals, they are just brutes. Reading 

and writing are just for the very few with the kind of mind that 

we have.” Yet, when the time came, we developed printing and 

the idea of mass education; it turned out that almost everybody 

could be taught to read and write, after a fashion. Reading and 

writing were not such unusual processes once we actually developed 

the educational procedures for them and made them economically 

feasible. In fact, once we developed a sufficiently complex culture, 

once we had a technological civilization, it became necessary for 

most people to read and write if they were to have any kind of job 

at all. And so it was possible. 

We live in a world now in which education isn’t geared for 

creativity and the kinds of jobs you have destroy any feeling of 

creativity you might have had to begin with. If you spend all day 

in the assembly line, what the heck are you going to develop? Your 

mind goes to pot. So it is amazing that the human brain, for the 

most part, is as well off as it is, that it hasn’t totally dissolved 

73 
The Impact of Science on Society 

into a kind of undifferentiated goo. I have great hopes that if 

you could get to youngsters, have them grow up with the aid of a 

computer, so they would have a one-to-one relationship with the 

wisdom of the world (the computerized wisdom of the world), they 

could follow up what interested them at their own speed and time. 

They would not be put to work doing things that are stupid enough 

for a computer to do but would be encouraged to do things that are 

more human. It may turn out that what we call creativity is a much 

more common feature of the human mind than we think. Maybe 

I’m lucky that I live in the last generation of the noncreative human 

society so that the rotten little stories I write stand out and manage 

to make a good living for me. Maybe if I lived in the 21st century, 

they would say, “Nice stories, Asimov, but anyone can do it.” 

As computers get smarter, do you see us going 

through a scenario during the next 10 to 25 years like the one 

Toffler talked about in The Third Wave? 

Answer: Actually, Toffler wrote a very plausible scenario. I find 

myself attracted to some of its features as a natural concomitant 

of such a computerization procedure. But, history and the human 

species have a way of surprising us. If I were to describe today 

what I thought life would be like, say, in the year 2050, and then 

bury it in the ground, when people dug it up in 2050 and read it, 

they would probably get a good laugh. Edgar Allan Poe had an 

amazing, first-rate imagination. He wrote a story the year he died 

about travel a thousand years later, in the year 2848. Do you know 

what he envisioned? He predicted balloons that could race across 

the Atlantic Ocean at a hundred miles an hour! If he could have 

been told that we were going to have objects that moved 10 times 

as fast and carried many more people in one hundred years, not 

one thousand years, he would have been astonished! He wouldn’t 

have believed it! We always tend to underestimate the extent of 

human progress and what we can do if we don’t destroy ourselves. 

It’s very likely that what will be staring us in the face in the future 

will not be anything that anyone is predicting now, or if anyone is 

predicting it, no one else is paying any attention. 

Question: What will your next works be? 

Answer: 

Question: 

On my 45th anniversary, my new novel, Robots of 

Dawn, is coming out. It’s the third largest Elijah Baley novel, 

I 

74 
Our Future in the Cosmos-Computers 

following Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun, and is a terrific 

book. Doubleday has printed 150000 copies, which means they 

have confidence in it, but they still don’t know how many are in 

the book stores right now. 

I am also working on a revision to Asirnov’s Guide to Science, 

which is in its third edition, but it is now 12 years old, so you can 

imagine how out of date it is. I’m also trying to finish Opus 300, 

in time to have it published as my 300th book. 

75 
Our Future in the 

Cosmos-Space 

Isaac Asimov 
Our Future in the Cosmos-Space 

Throughout the history of humanity, we have 

been extending our range until it is now planet-wide, 

covering all parts of Earth’s surface and reaching to 

the bottom of the ocean, to the top of the atmosphere, 

and beyond it to the Moon. We will flourish only 

as long as we continue to extend that range, and 

although the potential range is not infinite, it is 

incredibly vast even by present standards. We will 

eventually extend our range to cover the whole of the 

solar system, and then we w‘ll head outward to the 

stars. 

It frequently happened in my business as a writer, especially in 

my younger days when I knew some pretty overwhelming editors, 

that an editor would say to me, “I have a great idea for a story.’’ 

He’d slap me on the back and say, “Now go home and write it.” 

I would always think how easy it was for him to give me an idea 

for a story, but it was I, not the editor, who had to sit down and 

look at the most terrifying of all things: a blank page. In the 

same way, it’s fun to be introduced and have someone tell a lot 

of exaggerations about me; however, then he sits down and I’m 

the one who has to face the audience. I must say that it helps a 

great deal to face an obviously friendly and intelligent audience. I 

have brought almost the entire MENSA organization of this region 

to this presentation, and, naturally, they take it personally when 

I talk about intelligence. I am the international president of that 

organization, not because of anything I have done but because of 

a whim of the organization. 

I want to discuss our future in the cosmos. One of the things I 

think will mean the most to us and will make the future different 

from the past is the coming of a “space-centered society.” We are 

going to expand into space, and I think it is fitting and right that 

we should do so. All through the 50000 years of Homo sapiens, 

to say nothing of their hominoid precursors, humanity has been 

expanding its range of habitation. We don’t know exactly where 

the first Homo sapiens made their appearance, but they have been 

79 
The Impact of Science on Society 

expanding until they now inhabit the entire face of the Earth. For 

the first time in human history, we are faced with a situation in 

which we literally have no place on Earth to expand. We have 

crossed all the mountains; we have penetrated all the oceans. We 

have plumbed the atmosphere to its height and the oceans to their 

depths. Unless we are willing to settle down into a world that is 

our prison, we must be ready to move beyond Earth, and I think 

we are ready. We have the technological capacity to do so; all that 

we need is the will. I think it is quite possible, starting now, to 

build settlements in space, to build worlds miniature in comparison 

to the Earth but large in comparison to anything we have done so 

far. These worlds, in orbit around the Earth, would be capable of 

holding tens of thousands of human beings. 

This idea of space settlement seems odd to people; it doesn’t 

seem inviting. When I suggested such an idea in an article I wrote 

a few years ago, I received a number of letters arguing against 

the possibility of space settlements. The arguments weren’t based 

on economics; the main argument was that nobody would want to 

live in space. Nobody would want to leave his comfortable home on 

Earth. As nearly as I could tell from their addresses, all the people 

who wrote to me were Americans, and I presume that they knew 

American history. Americans should understand exactly what it 

means to leave their comfortable homes and to go to a completely 

strange world. This country was a wilderness at the beginning, and 

even after it was settled, it was a foreign land for most people. We 

in the United States are the descendents (unless any of you happen 

to be American Indians) of people who came here from other 

continents in search of something. Our forefathers, who came, 

at first, under harsh conditions, knew it would take them weeks 

to cross the ocean. They knew that if they met a serious storm, 

they would probably not survive. They also knew that when they 

landed, they would find a wilderness and possibly hostile natives. 

Yet, they still came. Between 1607 and 1617, 11000 Englishmen 

came to the new colony of Virginia. In 1617, the population of 

Virginia was 1000. How was it possible for 11000 people to come 

and yet to have only a population of lOOO? The answer is easy; 

10000 died. Yet people continued to come. Why? They came 

because life in Europe, for many, was intolerable and because they 

wanted to come to a new land to start a new life. Whatever 

80 
Our Future in the Cosmos-Space 

the risks, whatever the chances, if they succeeded it would be 

something new. It is this same desire that will drive people into 

space and cause them to populate as many space settlements as 

they can build. The chances of survival in space will probably be 

greater than those of the first immigrants to the colony of Virginia. 

In their letters to me, some individuals wrote that people would 

not be able to endure the kind of engineered environment that 

would exist in the space settlements and that they wouldn’t be 

able to bear not living close to nature as they do on Earth. Who 

lives close to nature here on Earth? There are millions of people 

on Earth who are never close to nature. I know; I live in the 

middle of Manhattan. I admit, I can look out the window and 

see Central Park from a distance, but I don’t venture into it 

often. I think people should remember that the space settlements 

will probably be engineered to accommodate the comforts of the 

Earth’s inhabitants. It is possible that people will be closer to 

nature in these settlements than in many places on the Earth today. 

People also wrote that the existence of space settlements would be 

unfair to the wretched of the Earth because the educated people 

would go into space and leave the less advanced people behind. 

That is probably precisely the reverse of what might happen. If we 

use the United States as an example, which classes of people came 

to this country? Obviously, the European ruling classes did not 

come; they were comfortable where they were. Why should they 

have left their homelands? The people who came to the United 

States were precisely those who hoped for something better, even 

if it meant a great deal of risk. Think of the passage engraved 

on the base of the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your 

poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched 

refuse of your teeming shore.” I know those lines, you see, because 

in 1923, I was one of the “wretched refuse” who passed through Ellis 

Island. I’ve never forgotten 1923 because it was the last year in 

which people could enter this country without question. After that, 

the word went through the hallowed halls of Congress, “Asimov is 

in . . . close the golden door.” In 1924, the first strict quotas were 

placed on immigration. If I had tried to come a year later, I might 

not have been allowed to enter. 

I imagine that when the time comes to begin emigrating to 

the space settlements, it will be hard work to make sure that not 

81 
The Impact of Science on Society 

only the wretched of the Earth but also the educated people with 

usable skills are included. It’s going to be just the reverse of what 

people are afraid of. In fact, I have also been told in some letters 

that space colonization would be unfair because only those nations 

with a heritage of rocket travel, space flight, or of high technology 

would be able to take advantage of this new frontier, leaving the 

rest behind. Again, that idea flies in the face of historical fact. As 

an example, when my father decided to come to the United States, 

he hadn’t the slightest idea of what the ocean looked like; he had 

never seen it. He had no heritage of ocean travel. I don’t think he 

had any idea what a ship looked like unless he had seen a .$cture of 

one, and even when he was on the ship, he didn’t know what kept 

it afloat or how anyone on the ship could tell where they were going 

when they were in the middle of the ocean. I’m not sure I know, 

frankly. Yet he managed to get to the United States without any 

tradition or knowledge of seafaring because he had something else. 

I will tell you what people will need to get to a space settlement: 

it isn’t a background in rocketry, it isn’t technological know-how, 

it isn’t any tradition of high technology. I’ll tell you what it is if 

you will pay close attention because it’s rather subtle. What they 

will need is a ticket, because someone else is going to take them. 

Of course, you might ask yourself what these settlements in 

space will do for us. Will we settle in space just to make Asimov 

happy? Is there any other purpose to it? Yes, there is, because 

we’re going to do a great many things in space that we can’t 

do on Earth. For instance, 10 years ago, there was an energy 

crisis that most of us, perhaps, have now forgotten. These days 

we hear about an oil glut instead. Well the oil glut exists only 

because there was a world recession; there still is a recession, as 

a matter of fact. If we recover economically, the demand for oil 

will increase, the glut will disappear overnight, and OPEC will 

raise its prices again. There is a limited amount of oil and coal 

in the Earth (a great deal more coal than oil), but we could make 

do with coal for centuries except that it is increasingly dangerous 

to use. Coal is difficult to dig out and transport, and burning 

it results in air pollution, produces sulfur and nitrogen oxides 

that dissolve in the atmosphere’s moisture to produce the acid 

rain that is destroying life in our ponds and lakes and is killing 

our forests. But quite apart from all this, if we continue to burn 

82 
Our Future an the Cosmos-Space 

coal indefinitely, we will increase that fraction of the atmosphere 

which is made up of carbon dioxide. At the beginning of this 

century, approximately 0.03 percent of the air was carbon dioxide. 

This amount has increased almost 50 percent since then, and it 

will probably double within another half century. There won’t be 

enough carbon dioxide in the air to interfere with breathing, but it 

may produce what we call “the greenhouse effect” because it tends 

to be opaque to infrared radiation. Ordinary sunlight that shines 

on the Earth passes through the atmosphere with little absorption 

and hits the Earth’s surface. At night, the Earth reradiates a 

portion of this energy as heat (infrared radiation). If the level of 

carbon dioxide increases even slightly, this infrared radiation will 

have more difficulty getting out. It will be absorbed by the carbon 

dioxide, thus heating the atmosphere and raising the temperature 

of the Earth very slightly. It won’t take much heating to cause 

the polar ice caps to melt, thus changing the climate of the Earth, 

undoubtedly for the worse! If you think that nuclear energy has 

the potential to make the Earth unlivable, so has the indefinite 

burning of coal and oil. 

We are going to have to find some other sources of energy, and 

the only two sources of energy that will last as long as the Earth 

does are fusion energy and solar energy. I don’t mean that we 

are going to have to depend solely on one or the other; there are 

other sources of energy that can be developed as well. There is 

geothermal energy, energy from under the Earth. There is biomass 

energy, the energy of the plant world. There is the energy of tides, 

wind, waves, and running water. All these can and will be used, 

but they are all relatively limited and there is no likelihood that 

they will supply all the energy we need. So, in addition to all 

these sources, we will need forms of energy that we can rely on 

in huge quantities forever. That brings us back to fusion energy 

and solar energy. We don’t have fusion energy yet, although we’ve 

been working towards it for more than 30 years. We’re not sure 

exactly what difficulties might exist between demonstrating it in 

the laboratory and developing huge power plants that will supply 

the world. We do have solar energy, but it’s difficult to get in large 

quantities because it is spread thinly over the world. If we could 

get millions of photovoltaic cells (a kind of silicon cell that sets up a 

small electric current when exposed to light) and stretch them over 

83 
The Impact of Science on Society 

half of Arizona (I only mention Arizona because there is usually a 

lot of sunshine there), we could perhaps supply enough energy for 

America’s needs. If we did that in other parts of the world as well, 

we could supply the entire world. There is no doubt, however, that 

setting up solar cells (photovoltaic cells) on the Earth’s surface is 

not very efficient. For one thing, there is no solar energy for the 

cells to absorb during the night. Even in the daytime under the 

best conditions (for example, in a desert area without fog, mist, 

or clouds), clear air absorbs a substantial portion of the sunlight, 

especially if the Sun is near the horizon. And of course, you also 

have the problem of maintaining these cells against nature’s effects 

and against vandalism. 

For these reasons it might be more reasonable to build a solar 

power station in space. Under such conditions, we could make use 

of the entire range of solar energy 98 percent of the time, because 

the stations could easily be positioned so they would fall into the 

Earth’s shadow only 2 percent of the time, at the equinoxes. A 

chain of these stations around the Earth would allow most of them 

to be in the sunshine all the time. Optimists have calculated that 

in space, a given area of solar cells will provide 60 times more 

energy than on the Earth’s surface. We can then imagine this 

chain of power stations circling the Earth in the equatorial plane 

at a height of approximately 22 000 miles above the Earth’s surface. 

At this distance their orbital position will just keep time with the 

surface of the Earth as it rotates about its axes. If you stood on 

a spot at the equator and looked up at the sky with a sufficiently 

strong telescope, you could see the solar power station apparently 

motionless above you. I feel a certain proprietorship toward this 

idea of a space station. It was advanced about 20 years ago by 

people at the AVCO Corporation in Massachusetts, but about 

40 years ago I wrote a story called “Reason” in which I talked 

about just such a power station. Of course, I missed the important 

point of having it in orbit around the Earth. I described it in an 

orbit similar to Mercury’s around the Sun so that it could get even 

more energy. I ignored the fact that it would be awfully difficult to 

aim it at Earth from such a distance; in science fiction stories, you 

can dismiss such problems by saying that an advanced technology 

won’t find it difficult to achieve. Nevertheless, solar power stations 

are my idea, and I’m proud of it! 

84 
Our Future in the Cosmos-Space 

There are a great many other things we could do in space. We 

could set up mining stations on the Moon and have laboratories in 

space to perform experiments you wouldn’t want to do on Earth 

because of the risks involved to the population. Some years ago, 

people were very worried about recombinant DNA research. They 

feared that scientists would come up with a new strain of bacteria 

which would get out into the biosphere, and once it did, you would 

never get rid of it. It was like Pandora’s box, when she opened it, all 

the ills of the world flew out and have plagued humanity ever since. 

In this same vein, suppose that for some very good reason, from 

the standpoint of research, scientists developed a strain of E. coli 

(a common bacteria that lives in the human large intestine) which 

had a very interesting chemical property that they wanted to study. 

But at the same time, it might turn out that this strain would 

make people prone to diarrhea. Suppose this strain is released to 

the world. People always speak about the danger of developing a 

“black death” germ that would kill everybody it touches and how 

terrible it would be if it were released. I don’t think we have to be 

that extreme. An E. coli strain that would bring about diarrhea 

could be extremely disturbing to the entire Earth. 

However, at the time when people spoke and worried about 

recombinant DNA research and worked up all kinds of horrible 

nightmares in connection with it, I believed it might turn out to 

be important and valuable research. It occurred to me then that 

this research might develop strains of bacteria that could form insulin, other hormones, and certain blood fractions, things that we 

need in quantity and can’t get in the usual way. Recombinant 

DNA research might produce microorganisms that could fix nitrogen from the atmosphere and form terrific fertilizers or other 

microorganisms that could consume hydrocarbons under certain 

conditions and clean up oil spills. The research might simply give 

us information about the organization of living cells so that we 

could better understand what causes and what might cure cancer, 

or arthritis, or any of the other degenerative diseases that are now 

the major inflictions of the human race. How nice it would be to 

set up a space laboratory in Earth orbit in which the recombinant 

DNA research could be done. It wouldn’t matter how dangerous 

the research was. I suppose it would still be mathematically possible for bacteria to escape and infect the Earth, but the chances 
The Impact of Science on Society 

would be far less than if the work were actually done on Earth. 

We could perform many such dangerous experiments in space. We 

could establish fission and fusion power stations in orbit and not 

have to worry about Three Mile Island incidents. Naturally, people working in the stations would still be exposed to these dangers, 

but they would be relatively few in number. They would be volunteers and specialists, and would know the risks involved. That 

is a different matter than doing research surrounded by millions of 

innocent people who are not aware of the risks. 

We can also build observatories in space. I always said that we 

should set up a telescope in space which could look at the universe 

from outside the Earth’s atmosphere, and now events are finally 

catching up with my imaginings. Even at its best, the atmosphere 

obscures. It’s warm and its temperature varies so that there are 

always shifting columns of air. Whenever you look at the sky, it is 

like looking at it through frosted glass or through something that 

is transparent but trembling. If you have ever watched a television 

screen that for some reason is shaking, you realize how annoying 

it can be. When an astronomer looks at the heavens, the image 

is always shaking. That’s why stars twinkle and why you can’t 

see Mars’ surface from Earth any clearer with a large telescope 

than with a small one. The large telescope shows you a larger 

Mars; it also shows you larger twinkles, which obscure the surface. 

If we could get outside the atmosphere, we could see much more 

clearly. There would be no twinkles because the vacuum doesn’t 

interfere with viewing like the atmosphere does. We would be able 

to see the distant galaxies in great detail and possibly tell more 

about the beginning and the end of the universe. We could see all 

kinds of unusual stars in greater detail and learn more about stellar 

evolution and about some of the queer beasts in the astronomical 

zoo. But I always said this entirely on faith, and sometimes I 

wondered to myself, “What if we put a telescope out there and it 

doesn’t find anything!” Well, those are the breaks of the game, but 

I would have been very disappointed. 

Recently the United States launched the IRAS (infrared astronomy satellite) to examine the universe in the infrared range. It saw 

a grea.t deal that we can’t see from the surface because our atmosphere absorbs infrared radiation. One of the things the telescope 

looked at was the star Vega. It turns out, this star emits a surprising quantity of infrared radiation. However, astronomers looked 

86 
Our Future in the Cosmos-Space 

more closely at this phenomenon and determined that the infrared 

radiation was coming not from the star itself, but from an annular 

region all around it. Apparently, there are colder objects circling 

Vega which absorb some of Vega’s light and emit it as infrared 

radiation. These objects are not simply a shell of dust around 

Vega; they are larger particles, and the implication is that they are 

in the process of condensing into a planetary system. This is the 

first time we have ever acquired observational information concerning the development of any planetary system other than our own. 

There are various theories concerning the formation of planetary 

systems, and if these theories are correct, then almost every star 

should have a planetary system. For obvious reasons, we have not 

been able to actually see the planets of the distant stars. Stars are 

very far away and any planet shining only by reflected light can’t 

reflect enough light to show up in our telescopes. Even if they did, 

they are so close to the star that their light would be drowned out 

by the much brighter light of the star. But now, as a result of 

IRAS, we have seen what seems to be a planetary system in the 

process of formation about another star, which makes us feel a little more confident about our theories of the way planetary systems 

should form. We now feel a little more confident about saying that 

stars have planets, as a general rule. Why does this star theory 

matter to us on Earth? There is a long chain of reasoning; there 

are many stars in the universe and a certain percentage of them 

resemble our Sun. If all the stars have planetary systems and these 

Sun-like stars have planetary systems, then a certain percentage 

of these planets ought to be Earth-like. If Earth-like planets exist, then they probably have developed life, and if there are this 

many life-bearing planets, one of them should develop intelligent 

life. Perhaps one of these has developed a technological civilization 

that we can detect or, perhaps, they are trying to contact us. This 

chain of reasoning causes some astronomers to feel certain that the 

universe has a great many technological civilizations, of which we 

are only one. However, this chain is so attenuated, so weak, and 

so highly theoretical that it is perfectly possible to argue, as some 

astronomers do, that the chain is broken at one or more points 

and that we may be the only technological civilization in our entire 

galaxy. It would be nice to know the answer. A telescope in space 

has already given us some reason to think that there may be other 

87 
The Impact of Science on Society 

technological civilizations in space besides our own. Who knows 

what else such instruments may discover? 

Another kind of structure in outer space is factories. There is no 

reason why a good proportion of our industrial factories couldn’t be 

placed into orbit. Space has very unusual properties that may be 

helpful to us. It has unlimited vacuum, zero gravity, the possibility 

of high and low temperatures, and hard radiation. There are a 

great many things we can do in space that we can do only with 

difficulty, if at all, on Earth. Most important of all, when we have 

a factory in space, any unavoidable pollution that it produces can 

be discharged into space. 

Some 

people argue that to earlier generations the ocean seemed huge 

and capable of absorbing any amount of pollution. But now we 

are in danger of poisoning the entire atmosphere. Some people 

argue that in the future we may be so casual about releasing 

pollutants into space that we may gradually poison all the space 

around ourselves. However, that won’t happen, for not only is 

space literally millions of times more voluminous than the biosphere 

and not occupied by trillions of living things, but it is also true 

that nothing we release into space is going to stay there because of 

something called the solar wind. The Sun emits speeding particles 

in every direction; it has been doing this as long as it has been in 

existence and will continue to do this for billions of years. This 

solar wind will push the pollutants out beyond the orbit of Mars, 

beyond the asteroids and into the outer solar system, where there 

is a trillion times more room than in the Earth’s neighborhood. 

The solar wind has a natural ventilating effect. This is important 

because it means that perhaps Earth can get rid of its “dark satanic 

mills” (to quote William Blake, who wrote in the first decades of 

the 19th century) without abandoning industrialization. People 

who view industrialization as a source of the Earth’s troubles, its 

pollution, and the desecration of its surface, can only advocate 

that we give it up. This is something that we can’t do; we have the 

tiger by the tail. We have 4.5 billion people on Earth. We can’t 

support that many unless we’re industrialized and technologically 

advanced. So, the idea is not to get rid of industrialization but to 

move it somewhere else. If we can move it a few thousand miles 

Space is huge compared to the surface of the Earth. 

88 
Our Future in the Cosmos-Space 

into space, we still have it, but not on Earth. Earth can then 

become a world of parks, farms, and wilderness without giving up 

the benefits of industrialization. 

All this will be possible because we will have structures built 

in space. Who will build these space structures? It seems to me 

that it’s an unnecessary expense to have them built by commuters. 

It wouldn’t make sense to send people into space every morning 

and have them come back every evening or, even, to send them 

up every spring and have them come back every fall. We would 

want the people who are busy constructing the necessary structures 

in space, maintaining them, and improving them to be people who 

live in space. Why should the people of the space settlements labor 

to do this? They would share in the benefits to be derived from 

it, and, I suppose in the last analysis, they would do it for money. 

In other words, in exchange for their labor, they would get some 

things that would otherwise exist only on Earth. There would be 

a fine economic balance that I will allow economists to work out. 

The fact of the matter is that we would have a much larger, more 

variegated, and versatile world; it would be much richer and more 

advanced in knowledge so that we would look back on the present 

and think of it as a dark age when human beings lived only on 

Earth. 

The space settlers, who will live on these worlds in orbit, will be 

the cutting edge of humanity for the future. These are the people 

who will move farther out into the solar system. It was difficult 

to reach the Moon although the flight took only 3 days. Imagine 

the problems for us to reach Mars when it might take months of 

travel or to reach the outer solar system when it might take years 

of travel? We are not really built for space flight; we are used 

to living on the outside of a huge world, not in the inside of a 

spaceship. We are used to a system of cycling air, food, and water 

that is so large that we are unaware of the actual process. We 

don’t know where the pure sparkling water that we drink comes 

from, and we don’t care. We don’t know how the plants that we 

eat grow or what they use for food, and we don’t care. We don’t 

know what processes the atmosphere uses to clean itself. But if 

we lived in a spaceship, we’d know. We’d know that our air was 

manufactured from the carbon dioxide that we exhaled and that 

the food and water were once part of our waste products. (That’s 

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The Impact of Science on Society 

also true on Earth, of course, but we’re not aware of it.) We would 

also be subjected to gravitational systems that would not be like 

those on Earth; they would vary. For all these reasons, space flight 

seems unnatural to us. But to the space settlers, who would arrive 

by space flight and live and work in larger versions of a spaceship, 

these conditions would seem natural. They might run mines on 

the Moon, and they would travel in a spaceship that would be very 

much like the space stations in which they would live (maybe a 

little smaller but that’s all). They would be living inside a world 

with tight cycling and varying gravitational forces. They would 

be the natural pioneers. They, not we, would be the Vikings, the 

Phoenicians, the Polynesians of the future. They would make the 

long trips to Mars and the asteroids and learn how to mine the 

asteroids. They could travel out into the solar system and make 

plans to reach the stars someday. All we can do here on Earth, 

maybe, is reach the Moon. From worlds in orbit around the Earth, 

we can reach all the rest. 

Beyond all these material things that space exploration can 

bring us, there is something completely immaterial that counts 

more than anything else. One thing that can stop us from going 

into space, from realizing what I consider a glorious possible future 

for humanity, is the fact that here on Earth, most people, especially 

those in power, are far more concerned with the immediate threat 

from other countries than they are with the possible dangers 

to civilization as a whole. How much of any country’s mental 

energy, money, effort, and their emotion is directed towards saving 

civilization from destruction by pollution, overpopulation, or war, 

and how much is spent maintaining armed forces because of the 

danger from neighboring countries? You know the answer; the 

world is now spending 500 billion dollars every year for war and 

preparations for war. That’s half a trillion dollars every year spent 

on forces that we don’t dare use, or if we do use them, it is only 

to wreak destruction. The United States and the Soviet Union 

quarrel over differences that may be extremely important, but if 

the quarrel extends to the point of a nuclear war that destroys 

civilization, the differences become inconsequential. 

How are we to prevent this whole thing from happening? There 

is one example in history that is very unusual. From 1861 to 1865, 

the United States fought the War Between the States, and many 

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Our Future in the Cosmos-Space 

of its most epic battles were fought on Virginia’s soil. One side 

lost; one side won. For a period of years, the winners showed no 

mercy as far as the losers were concerned, and the losers lived under 

occupation forces. The South has lived with this loss ever since, 

and yet the bitterness passed. This is not to say that the South has 

forgotten the Confederacy (of course it hasn’t), but it’s not forever 

laying plans to reestablish it. It hasn’t maintained an attitude 

of unforgiveness; it doesn’t say, “We will never forget.” It doesn’t 

always try to find allies abroad to help it reestablish itself. We have 

reunited into a single nation. How did we manage to do that, when 

there are other places on Earth in which the mutual hatred has 

continued undiminished because of things that happened thousands 

of years ago, and people refuse to forget? My theory is that after 

the Civil War there was a period of the development in the West, 

in which the North and the South could take part indiscriminately. 

People from both sides traveled westward and established the new 

states, and in the positive task of developing the western half of 

the United States, the old quarrels were forgotten. What was 

needed was something new, something great, something growing 

into which the old problems would sink into insignificance. It was 

just our good fortune that we had the development of the West to 

occupy our minds in the half century after the Civil War. 

I have a feeling that if we really expanded into space with all our 

might and made it a global project, this would be the equivalent 

of the winning of the West. It’s not just a matter of idealism or 

preaching brotherhood. If we can build power stations in space 

that will supply all the energy the world needs, then the rest of the 

world will want that energy too. The only way that each country 

will be able to get that energy will be to make sure these stations 

are maintained. It won’t be easy to build and maintain them; 

it will be quite expensive and time-consuming. But if the whole 

world wants energy and if the price is world cooperation, then I 

think people are going to do it. 

We already cooperate on things that the whole world needs. 

International organizations monitor the world’s weather and pollution and deal with things like the oceans and with Antarctica. 

Perhaps if we see that it is to our advantage to cooperate, then only 

the real maniacs will avoid cooperating and they will be left out 

in the cold when the undoubted benefits come in. I think that, although we as nations will retain our suspicions and mutual hatreds, 

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we will find it to our advantage to cooperate in developing space. 

In doing so, we will be able to adopt a “globalist” view of our situation. The internal strife between Earthlings, the little quarrels over 

this or that patch of the Earth, and the magnified memories of past 

injustices will diminish before the much greater task of developing 

a new, much larger world. I think that the development of space is 

the great positive project that will force cooperation, a new outlook 

that may bring peace to the Earth, and a kind of federalized world 

government. In such a government, each region will be concerned 

with those matters that concern itself alone, but the entire world 

would act as a unit on matters that affect the entire world. Only in 

such a way will we be able to survive and to avoid the kind of wars 

that will either gradually destroy our civilization or develop into a 

war that will suddenly destroy it. There are so many benefits to 

be derived from space exploration and exploitation; why not take 

what seems to me the only chance of escaping what is otherwise 

the sure destruction of all that humanity has struggled to achieve 

for 50000 years? That is one of the reasons, by the way, that I 

have come from New York to Hampton despite the fact that I have 

a hatred of traveling and I faced 8 hours on the train with a great 

deal of fear and trembling. It was not only The College of William 

and Mary that invited me, but NASA as well, and it is difficult 

for me to resist NASA, knowing full well that it symbolizes what I 

believe in too. 

Question: The first book of yours that I read was I, Robot. In 

your opinion, how close are we today to the world you described in 

that book? 

Answer: Although the book was written in 1939, those robots 

were very intelligent and human-like in their capacity. As yet, the 

robots we use today are merely computerized arms that can do one 

specialized job. So, we’re not very close, but we’re heading in the 

right direction. Although I have never done any work on robots 

and know almost nothing about the nuts and bolts, I think that I 

came close enough that I am almost the patron saint of robotics. 

Most of the people who work in robotics obtained at least some 

of their early interest in the field by reading my books. I was the 

first person to use the word robotics, and I spoke of the Handbook 

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Our Future in the Cosmos-Space 

of Robotics, from which I quoted my three laws. I said they were 

from the 56th edition, in 2058 A.D. Now someone is actually in the 

process of putting out the first edition of that book, and they’ve 

asked me to write the introduction. I guess the people who are 

working in robotics see themselves moving toward the world I 

described 40 years ago, and I’m willing to accept their judgment. 

Question: Why do you restrict yourself to looking for Earthlike planets in the search for technological civilizations, why not 

Jupiter-like planets, for instance, or Pluto-like planets? 

Answer: If we assume that there can be life even under 

widely varying conditions, we make the problem perhaps a little 

too easy. There is also the chance that life evolving under such 

conditions might be so different from human life in very basic 

ways that we will not be able to detect it or to understand that 

it is a technological civilization even if we encounter it. As our 

information and knowledge grow, we might be able to widen our 

view to recognize life and civilization of widely different kinds. But 

to start with, acknowledging our own limitations and the fact that 

we know so little, we are looking for technological civilizations 

sufficiently like our own to be perhaps recognizable. So at the 

start, but not necessarily forever, we restrict ourselves to Earthlike planets. 

Question: Do you think, because our bodies are fragile and we 

have limited life spans, that what we now know as humanity would 

ever be replaced by inorganic intelligence? 

Answer: I believe that computers have a kind of intelligence 

which is extremely different from our own. The computer can do 

things that we are particularly ill adapted to do. Humans don’t 

handle rapid intricate calculations very well, and it’s good to have 

computers do them. On the other hand, we have the capacity 

for insight, intuition, fantasy, imagination, and creativity, which 

we can’t program into our computers, and it is perhaps not even 

advisable to try because we do it so well ourselves. I visualize 

a future in which we will have both kinds of intelligence working 

in cooperation, in a symbiotic ‘relationship, moving forward faster 

than either could separately. The fact that we are so fragile and 

short lived is an advantage in my way of thinking. In Robots of 

Dawn, I compare two civilizations; one is our own in which people 

93 

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The Impact of Science on Society 

are short lived, and the other is that of our descendants in which 

they are long lived. I point out the disadvantage to the species a~ 

a whole of being long lived. I won’t repeat the arguments, because 

if I don’t you may storm the bookstores out of sheer curiosity to 

see what I’ve said. 

One of the great themes of science fiction is the 

settlement of other planets. Is there any place in this solar system 

or nearby that might be habitable? 

Answer: As far as we know, there is no world in our solar 

system that is habitable by human beings without some form of 

artificial help. The Moon and Mars, which come the closest to 

being tolerable, will require us to build underground cities or dome 

cities, and if we venture on the surface, we will have to wear space 

suits. This is not to say that it will not be possible someday to 

terraform such worlds and to make them habitable; but I honestly 

don’t know if it will be worth it for us to do so. As to planets 

circling other stars, we do not really know of such planets in detail. 

We suspect their existence, and we figure statistically that a certain 

number of them ought to be habitable, but we have yet to observe 

any evidence of such a thing. It is still very much in the realm of 

speculation. 

Question: You made the analogy between the migration from 

Europe at the turn of the century and possible future migrations 

to space stations and other planets. It has been shown that as a 

result of our technology, people in this country are taller, heavier, 

better built, and able to set new records in endurance and physical 

capabilities. Would you speculate about the effect that living in 

space stations might have on the human body and its evolutionary 

potential? 

It is hard to tell. I suspect that people will make 

the environment of these space settlements as close to that of 

Earth as possible. But in one respect, they will have problems; 

there is no way that they can imitate Earth’s gravitational field. 

They can produce a substitute by making the space settlement 

rotate, so that the centrifugal effect will force you against the 

inner surface and mimic the effects of gravity. But it won’t be a 

perfect imitation; there won’t be a Coriolis effect and, also as you 

approach the axes of rotation, the gravitational effect will become 

Question: 

Answer: 

94 
Our Future in the Cosmos-Space 

weaker. The people who will live in a space settlement will be 

exposed to variations in the gravitational effect far greater than 

any you can possibly feel on the surface of the Earth. This may 

give rise to all sorts of physiological changes in human beings. I 

don’t know what they will be; we can’t know until we actually try 

living in space. So far, people have been subjected to essentially 

zero gravity for as long as 7 months at a time without apparently 

permanent ill effects. But human beings have never been born at 

zero gravity or under varying gravitational conditions; they have 

never developed and grown up under such conditions, and we can’t 

be sure what the effects will be. From an optimistic standpoint, 

I suppose that under such conditions human beings will develop 

a greater tolerance of gravitational effects than they now possess. 

This will further prepare them for life in the universe, whereas we 

ourselves have been specifically evolved and conditioned for life in 

one very specialized place in the galaxy. The overall effect may be 

to strengthen the human species; at least, I’d like to think so. The 

future will tell us if that is so. 

In your opinion, when will there be solar power 

stations in orbit and manned ventures to Mars, considering the 

technological leaps with the Space Shuttle and the Soviet’s Salyut 

space stations? 

Answer: It is hard to say when solar power stations in space 

will be developed. It’s up to the human governments that control 

the money and the manpower. If we begin to cooperate and make 

a wholesale attempt, we could have solar power stations in space 

before the 21st century was very old. In other words, someone as 

young as the person who asked me this question, may see space 

stations by the time he is middle-aged. But on the other hand, 

if we choose not to do it, then we may never have these stations 

in space. The choice is ours. We can choose to develop space or 

we can choose world destruction. I’m at a loss to state in words 

how desirable the first alternative is and how likely the second 

alternative is. 

Question: What kind of timetable do you envision for humanity’s exploration of space, and what good or harm do you think is 

done by prospace groups? 

Answer: Well, we can’t expect things to happen too quickly. 

Question: 

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The Impact of Science on Society 

The region that we now call the United States was being settled 

for nearly two centuries before this country came into existence. 

We’ve celebrated our bicentennial as a nation, but in a little over 

20 years we’re going to have to celebrate the tetracentennial of our 

existence as a community on American soil, from the establishment 

of Jamestown in 1607. If it took nearly two centuries to settle the 

United States to nationhood, it might take that long to establish 

a space community strong enough to be independent of the Earth. 

On the other hand, things move more quickly now; we’re more 

advanced. It may take less than a century to do so if we really try 

hard. As for the effects that prospace organizations might have, 

I’m not a sociologist so I just don’t know. I’m in favor of prospace 

organizations doing their best to persuade human beings to support 

space exploration. I don’t know how that can be bad. 

Question; Assuming that we do not annihilate ourselves, what 

is your view of how life on Earth will evolve, both humans and 

other life forms? 

Answer: You must understand that evolution naturally is a 

very slow process and human beings can well live for 100000 years 

without many serious changes. On the other hand, we are now 

developing methods of genetic engineering which will, perhaps, 

be able to wipe out certain inborn diseases, or correct them and 

improve various aspects of the human condition. I don’t know how 

we will develop or what we will choose to do; it’s impossible to 

predict. 

Question: How long do you think it will be before people live 

in outer space? 

Answer; That’s entirely up to us. In a way, we’ve had people 

living in outer space already, ever since the first Russian cosmonaut 

spent 1 1/2 hours in space. We have now had people living in outer 

space for 7 months at a time; in fact, one Soviet cosmonaut lived 

in outer space for 12 months over a period of 18 months. SO we’ve 

had people living in outer space already, and I’m sure we’ll have 

more and more of them for longer and longer periods of time. 

96 * U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE: 1985-470.563