Isaac Asimov On Cosmos.

Discussion in 'Astronomy, Exobiology, & Cosmology' started by Rick, Feb 11, 2002.

  1. Rick Valued Senior Member

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    This was his second speech describing the topic given below.it has been taken from<url>http://info.rutgers.edu/Library/Reference/Etext/Impact.of.Science.On.Society.hd/3/</url>


    Our Future in the Cosmos - Space

    Througnout the history of humanity, we have been etending our range
    until it is now planet-wide, covering all parts OJ Earth's surface and
    reaching to the bottom OJ the Of ean, to the top of the atmosphere,
    and beyond it to the Moon. We will fiourish only as long as we
    continue to ectend that range, and although the potential range is not
    infinite, it is incredibly vast even by present standards. We will
    eventually etend our range to cover the whole of the solar system, and
    then we will head outward to the

    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 Or 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 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
    1000? 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 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 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 picture 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 IJnited 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 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 wi;l 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 iarge 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 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!

    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
    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 speciaiists,
    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
    great 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 more slosely 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 ormation 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 Inay 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 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.

    Space is huge compared to the surface of the Earth. 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 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 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
    lmnatural 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 tlose 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 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 fs)rget? 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, 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 difflcult for me to resist NASA, knowing full well that it
    symbolizes what I believe in too.

    Interesting...


    bye!
     
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  3. Pollux V Ra Bless America Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    6,495
    Way tooooo long zion. What do you want to tell us?
     
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  5. wet1 Wanderer Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    8,616
    Most interesting, by an author who's works I have devoured some time ago. Asimov has the ability to put into words the thoughts, feelings, and ideas that inspire people to see the future. To be able to see, feel, and experience it gives that future body. With vision can come substance, maintaining the interest of the common man and setting up the ground swell to make it happen. I have no arguements with his suppositions...
     
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  7. Rick Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    3,336
    Hey Shrike,

    Read a little bit,but remember though that he 's an old guy talking waaaaaaaay back,notice how interestingly,amusingly he predicts...

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