Science fiction’s 2012
Twenty-five years ago, a group of scientists and writers offered their visions of today's world. Were they close?
Topics: AIDS, AlterNet, Health, L. Ron Hubbard, literature, Science, science fiction, technology, Life News
Back in 1987, L. Ron Hubbard created a time capsule of sorts. He challenged his fellow science fiction writers, along with a smattering of famous scientists, to write letters to the people of 2012 offering their visions of what the world might look like in another 25 years. (Yes, that Hubbard — the Scientology guy. But he was a well-known SF writer before he started the church, and it was in that guise that he threw down this challenge.)
So here we are, in the high summer of 2012, and it’s time to go back and see just how much they got right — and wrong.
The full collection of letters Hubbard got for his time capsule is here. A lot of the greats offered their thoughts. There’s Fredrick Pohl, the genre’s legendary editor (who’s still at it, after 70 years in the business); Jerry Pournelle, writer of political and military SF, who also did some speechwriting for President Reagan; Roger Zelazny, who mined the world’s great mythologies for his stories; Gregory Benford, astrophysicist-turned-Hugo winner; Nobel Prize–winning physicist Sheldon Glashow; and Isaac Asimov, arguably the greatest of them all.
I invite you to go read the whole thing, because it’s fascinating to see what some of the most forward-thinking and imaginative storytellers of that time saw when they cast themselves toward today. It’s a portrait of the hopes and desires of an earlier generation — some of them uniquely of their time, others the same dreams that every generation carries for its children. And looking at what they got right — and what they got wrong — offers some insight into the way we think about our own future now.
Here’s my commentary on some of the topics they touched on.
Population
Asimov and Benford both relied on mid-’80s projections that the Earth’s population would be at or over 8 billion by now. We should take some encouragement from the fact that they overestimated that figure by a billion souls. Unlike climate change, where our experts’ most dire worst-case predictions have consistently undershot what reality delivered, the reverse is true for population. Over the past 40 years, we’ve succeeded in bending the expected population curve downward significantly — and that’s a really important win for the future of the planet.
Technology
The old lions had high hopes for the emergent technologies of the time: nanotech, biotech, genetic engineering. Their letters ooze with envy: they’d love to be here among us here in 2012, enjoying what they imagine will be the abundant fruits of these ripened technologies. (And some of them are indeed still among us — even old Fred Pohl, who’s in his 90s and published his most recent book just last year.)
Unfortunately, almost none of their expected harvest has come to pass. We are not yet storing computer information in atoms (as Gerald Feinberg, the Columbia physicist who discovered the tachyon, suggested). Using genetic medicine to end diabetes, gout, MS, and Parkinson’s (as Glashow forecast) is within just a few years’ reach now, but we’re not actually there yet. Dave Wolverton did accurately describe the GMO food that’s on every American’s plate now — though he underestimated the degree to which some of us would be very creeped out by it.
Almost everybody, save writer’s writer Gene Wolfe, thought we’d be well into space by now. Zelazny congratulates us on our space colonies. Benford wonders how things are on Mars. We’re still wondering, too.
Health
The Big Thinkers, as a group, might be surprised at how healthy we are. In 1987, AIDS was just hitting its full stride as a global health crisis. The first treatments were finally emerging, but nobody knew how far the disease could go or how fast it might overtake humankind. So it’s clear that some of them considered it their solemn duty to prepare us for the worst.
And apart from AIDS, it seemed like a safe prediction then (and still is now) that the next quarter-century would see some kind of Spanish flu-like global pandemic that would cut the world’s human population by a billion or more. Wolfe further predicted that fear of increasingly virulent sexually transmitted infections would bring about an age of strict marital fidelity enforced by draconian penalties. We are delighted to report that he could not have possibly been more wrong.
The fact that the global pandemics so many of the entrants worried about didn’t happen is, not to overstate the case, a miracle. Yet they probably weren’t wrong to put this on their list back then — and, given that the odds that we’ll produce a world-killer supervirus are even higher now than they were then, we’re still right to worry about it today.
Energy and the Environment
In 1987, peak oil and climate change weren’t widely popular concepts — but they were already well-understood by people whose business it was to pay attention. Benford accurately predicted our increasing dependence on shale oil — and also the looming water crisis, which has the potential to be a far bigger global nightmare than our energy problem, even though it still isn’t on enough people’s radar even now.
Rogue Moon author Algis Budrys, in what’s easily the most presciently spot-on entry of the entire pack, described a future in which the central driver is the overwhelming need to stop using so much energy, while having no real options to fall back on yet:
Because we will be in a trough between 20th-century resources and 21st-century needs, in 2012 all storable forms of energy will be expensive. Machines will be designed to use only minimal amounts of it. At the same time, there will be a general expectation that a practical cheap-energy delivery system is just around the corner. Individuals basing their career plans on any aspect of technology will concentrate on that future, leaving contemporary machine applications to the less ambitious or to those who foresee a different future … It should be noted that most minimal-energy devices process information and microscopic materials, not consumer goods. The function of “our” society may depend on processing information and biotechnology to subjugate goods-producing societies. These societies may be geographically external, or may be yet another social stratum within central North America. In either case, crowd-management technologies will have to turn away from forms that might in any way impair capital goods production. Social regimentation will then have become so deft that most people will regard any other social milieu as pitiable.
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