Requiem for the Future

[Mark Reiff <markreiff@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

FYI,

"Requiem for the Future - Where Are the Interplanetary Wonders We Read
About When We Were Kids?"
Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/0,,SB112370259710910021-9oQKxfyaCk0aP_48abu68_o2EzI_20060815,00.html?mod=rss_free

: Where'd the future go?

: You remember it, don't you? It's the one with moon bases and
: intrepid Mars colonists and asteroid miners, with spaceports and
: space elevators and sprawling habitations up at the Lagrange
: points. The one we read about when we were kids, the one written
: about by the likes of Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein, with
: thrilling chronologies that had us on Mars or beyond by now, or at
: least heading that way.

: You know, the future.

: We got to wondering where it went amid last week's space news: The
: Discovery landed safely, a private company said it plans to fly
: tourists around the moon, and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter
: lifted off from Cape Canaveral.

: We read all these stories the moment they popped onto our screens,
: just as we'll read all the space-exploration stories to come -- we
: love this stuff. But that said, those stories didn't deliver the
: same thrill they would have 25 years ago. And we doubt very much
: that the next quarter-century will be much different. (We assumed
: we'd see men on Mars by now; at today's pace, we'd be pleasantly
: surprised if our grandkids do.)

: Start with the space shuttle. Without taking anything away from the
: astronauts, the biggest accomplishments of the Discovery mission
: were that a) it came back; and b) an astronaut pulled bits of cloth
: out from between tiles. Moreover, NASA had already announced future
: flights will be grounded because the agency can't keep foam from
: falling off fuel tanks. The first of the shuttles took off in 1981;
: for minor space repairs and a safe return to be front-page news
: today shows how poorly the program has fared, and how dangerous
: even modest space missions remain.

: Then there's Space Adventures' plan to ferry two tourists around
: the moon for a cool $100 million. The idea has been touted as a
: step forward for private-sector exploration of space, which gets
: some people very excited -- particularly people convinced that
: governments can never accomplish anything. But leaving aside our
: doubts that even a Gates-Buffett-Ellison-Prince Alwaleed private-
: sector dream team could get us to Mars, Space Adventures' plan
: strikes us as private-sector exploration with a really big
: asterisk: After all, the company is essentially a middleman
: connecting the Russian government with techno-zillionaires.

: Space Adventures CEO Eric Anderson has said the trip will inspire
: countries, citizens and young people. He's right, and Lord knows we
: could use that inspiration. But that was also true when Frank
: Borman, James Lovell and William Anders became the first people to
: orbit the moon -- something they did in 1968, when 8-track tapes
: were new and whizzy. So what that Space Adventures' tourists will
: be private citizens? The only difference we can see is that maybe
: now kids will dream of growing up to be techno-zillionaires instead
: of astronauts.

: Wonderful stuff, but given the rest of space exploration can't seem
: to get back to 1981, we hope we'll be forgiven for wanting more
: -- and for wanting it now.  After all, Jace was seven and Tim was
: three when the Viking landers were digging around in Martian soil
: in 1976; we figured the place would be necklaced with orbiters and
: cris-crossed by rovers by now. Maybe there'd even be astronauts (or
: cosmonauts or taikonauts) tracing the courses of unimaginably
: ancient rivers. Plucky rovers are great, but by now Sir Arthur's
: Banyan trees should either be long since revealed as geological
: illusions or studied in every high-school biology book.

: Contrast this quarter-century of near-stasis with the technological
: revolution that's remade our daily lives. When we were kids,
: computers were hulking things off in universities that chattered
: and blinked mysteriously before spitting out reams of paper. Today,
: we feel guilty about putting exponentially more-powerful machines
: than those out on the curb. Back then if you wanted cash you
: structured your day around when you'd stand in line at the bank;
: today your choice might be between deli ATMs or settling a debt via
: PayPal. We have Web-enabled phones in our pockets, instant
: messaging at the office and can shop in our skivvies at 3 a.m.
: Wonders upon wonders -- it's only up in the heavens that we're a
: generation behind.

: What's the difference? The obvious answer is that space exploration
: has been driven, if that's the word, by fitful competition between
: two governments responding to oft-hazy rationales, while closer to
: home the tech revolution has been fueled by millions of
: entrepreneurs wanting to get rich. That makes the race to the moon
: the exception we mistook for the rule: John F. Kennedy had the
: vision to capture the public imagination, and cold-war competition
: kept the government bureaucracy on board. Once that mission was
: accomplished, space exploration was left to wither and sour in the
: absence of a compelling new vision: We got a big bureaucracy doing
: bureaucratic things, a space truck that didn't work and the
: occasional deep-space probe. (Spare us President Bush's tepid,
: pennies-on-the-dollar talk of eventually going back to the moon and
: then to Mars, maybe.)

: Still, the Internet began life as a big government project too
: -- without those efforts, the tech revolution never would have
: gained traction. Space exploration needs another shot of big-
: government money and big-government commitment, something we doubt
: it'll get.

: Which brings us back, unhappily, to the future all those sci-fi
: books of our youth described. Looking 25 more years down the road,
: we fear we'll find an amplified, more-depressing version of today:
: Maybe Real Time 2030 will fret about how our college kids do little
: more than steal full-res holographic porn when they're not getting
: their financial identities stolen by cyber-jihadists eager to build
: more backpack nukes.

: And this isn't unfamiliar, alas. A common theme of those dog-eared,
: much-loved paperbacks was that the Earth of the future was the dull
: place, a decadent dead end reserved for the poor, the defective and
: the luckless. (Think "Blade Runner" with its promise of a new life
: awaiting you in the off-world colonies.) In fact, we remember
: flipping ahead irritably to see when the characters' dull visits to
: Earth would end and they'd get back on the spaceships where they
: belonged. It never occurred to us that the parts we wanted to skip
: would be the only parts we'd get to live.

: Are we being unfair to NASA, Space Adventures and others trying to
: push us farther into space? Are we being too pessimistic about
: space exploration? (We hope so -- please convince us.) Write to us
: at realtime@xxxxxxx .

--
Mark Reiff <markreiff@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>

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