4. The trend curve for controllable energy is rising rapidly. The richest baron of feudal times did not control the same amount of energy in his human serfs and slaves as you have at your command beneath the hood of your automobile. The advent of controlled nuclear energy has boosted that curve even more. It is highly probable that controlled fusion has been achieved in the laboratory and will become commercial within a matter of years, thereby kicking the curve up to an even higher level. By 1981, this trend curve shows that a single man will have available under his control the amount of energy equivalent to that generated by the entire sun. To use an energy source, you must have an energy sink; you must have some place to dissipate the energy in performing work. What are we going to do with this much energy? How are we going to use it? How will this alter our way of life? What can we do then that we can’t do now because we don’t have the energy sources? Unless a man has the proper training, we presently deny him the use of certain forms of packaged high energy such as explosives, nuclear reactors, and highspeed vehicles; what kind of training must a man have before he is allowed to use the energy of a star?
5. The number of circuits in cybernetic devices is increasing on the familiar trend curve. The human brain has an estimated four billion neural circuits. By 1970, computer engineers may have achieved the same number of circuits in a digital computer; they may do this by building one large computer or by slaving many smaller computers together by data links as they have already started to do. The speed of digital computers is quite high, and they are getting faster all the time. What are the logical consequences of this? Will these machines think? Will they repair themselves? Will we finally achieve the ability with these machines to handle problems with extremely large numbers of variables, problems which cannot presently be solved? What problems? Will these machines be used in the manner of Ken Crossen’s SOCIAC, or will we put them to work as tools to help us solve the riddles of biochemistry and psychology? By building complex machines of this type, will we gain a better understanding of our own mental processes, and, if so, what are the consequences? Assume that mankind will not allow itself to be replaced by its own machines, and then consider what steps mankind must take to achieve a dynamic, viable solution to this problem.
6. The amount of knowledge that must be assimilated by our young people before they are equipped to earn a livelihood is also increasing on the super-exponential trend curve along with the curve representing the total accumulated knowledge of the human race. People used to spend only a few years in school learning the three R’s. Now, they must spend at least 12 years in school... or 16 and more if they desire to enter a profession. Question: Must we therefore spend more and more of our lives in school, or have we already reached the point where we must both study and work during our entire lives if we are to keep up with our own field of endeavor? What must we do to our educational system to cope with this? This is more serious than the growing shortage of classroom space and teachers, because there will always be a shortage of these two items from now on; we can’t catch up. But the amount we must learn continues to increase. What sort of educational system can be designed to cope with this?
All of these trend areas have been touched by science-fiction, mostly in a cursory and incomplete fashion, and mostly by extrapolating a single curve to its ultimate limit without consideration of the other curves. In writing such stories, the authors have allowed one factor to advance while everything else stood still. This isn’t the case. All the trends are upward, not just one of them, and any yarn based on a single curve without consideration of the others results in an unrealistic extrapolation toward a non-viable future state of affairs. But writers continue to make this mistake, and competent scientists and managers make the same one when they attempt to chart the future on the basis of extrapolation. In research management or science-fiction writing, one must consider every possible factor, weighing each as to its importance and recognizing that there is a time scale involved, too.
In other words, one says to himself that Gadget A is not possible until Metal B is developed. When Gadget A becomes a reality, Device C results. It is then possible to cross-fertilize this technology with the data now in existence in Science K. We come up with an instrument that will be useful at that time in thrimaline research over there, possibly leading to... In other words, a multi-dimensional array. Organized brainstorming, or cerebral popcorn.
Science-fiction, where it has considered future trends and future cultures, has been both unimaginative and conservative. In relation to reality, that is. The predictions of s-f are an order of magnitude better than those of professional scientists, but are still several orders of magnitude below reality. Things are going to happen much faster than we think, and they are going to have much wilder implications than we have considered. We need only look at the last twenty-five years. And we need to realize that we will see just as much change in the next ten years.
If we have the courage to admit this to ourselves, it means that it is time to think, time to argue, time to speculate, and time to philosophize. If the trend curves can tell us that all this—and more—is going to happen, we should try to do a little engineering and planning in advance so that they don’t happen willy-nilly, so that we can have some control over making them happen the way we want them to. We can and must plan for the future world in the same manner that a successful business plans for the inevitable retirement of a bond issue on a certain future date.
Science-fiction is the obvious and logical medium in which to do this. S-f is truly speculative fiction. It has been fairly successful in the past, but its true Golden Age is yet to come if it again realizes that the future is starting to happen right now. There is plenty left to speculate about because the well hasn’t gone dry.
Ed. Note: The latest set of Stine predictions will be available by the time you read this, in his new book. Man and the Space Frontier (Knopf. 1961).
SUMMATION
The Year in S-F
by Judith Merril
When I determined to include in this collection the excerpts from Harry Stine’s as yet (at this writing) unpublished article, I was motivated by several things.
First, and most evident, was the paucity of good science fiction. There was an abundance of high-quality speculative and imaginative fiction of various kinds, published in every conceivable medium, during 1960; there was very little “real science fiction” anywhere—in or out of the specialty publications—and of that little, most was mediocre to poor.
At the same time, I did not, and do not, believe that the genre is disappearing. It is, certainly, diffusing—spreading out from a limited-circulation group of fiction magazines and a select grouping of hardcover book titles, to the mass markets: paperback novels, radio and TV, comic books, newspapers, and large-circulation general magazines.
In another sense, too, it is diffusing. Until a few years ago, “pure science fiction” confined itself, with rare exceptions, to speculation about space, the atom, and possible inventions or discoveries in the physical sciences.
The very technological advances that have swallowed up the old subjects almost entirely have, meantime, opened up whole new frontiers. And in the same way, the new media of communication now open to science fiction provide it with a new function as well.
Science fiction did not invent speculative thinking; it was quite the other way round. For whatever reasons of historical happenstance, the special kind of thinking that lies between outright fantasy and scientific hypothesis was focussed for a while largely in the s-f magazines. Now, some of the best story plots are going into reports by research and development men for the government, the armed services, the big corporations, and such novelties in our scheme of things as the Rand Corporation. What part of this thinking is not channeled into governmental or industrial secrecy is as likely to appear in essay form in a serious journal as in adventure trappings in the magazines.