Gregory Benford - Essays and Short Stories Part 3

In a parallel world with Eisenhower in office until 1964, we would have had no brave setting of the Apollo goal, no race to the moon. "It was that close," Bruce said.

He thinks that by 1990 we would probably have seen some US-USSR muscle-flexing in near Earth orbit and probably a few unmanned probes would have studied the moon. No Grand Tour trajectory for Voyager, probably no Mariner to Mars or any of the rest of it. George Bush's 1989 speech might have been a stalwart call for a manned moon landing before the turn of the millennium.

Not impossible. I can scarcely argue that such a plausible, sensible s.p.a.ce program was unlikely. After all, I had once written a story in which Robert Taft got the nomination in 1952, not Eisenhower. (And Taft's private choice for the vice presidency was one Senator McCarthy of Wisconsin...) The plausibility of this imaginary history tells us that we have been very lucky. We lived through dramatic times, Sputnik-Apollo-Voyager, which quite probably will be seen as like Columbus-Magellan-Drake. Maybe we are now getting back to normal. And normal means, alas, dull.

The trick in using a.n.a.logies and scenarios is knowing when to stop. How does our predicament differ from the past? We must play to those differences if we are to steer a better course than Destiny would give us.

Large s.p.a.ce projects have fed off nationalism. Kennedy sold fears of Soviet technology, with an attractive patina of worry over our science education. This worked well -- and I directly benefited, being a senior in high school in 1959, from the special science courses rushed into the schools; in fact, I might well not be a scientist today, were it not for the sudden spotlight cast on lowly high school physics courses.

Gerard K. O'Neill tried to hook up his giant solar power collecting satellites to the energy "crisis" of the 1970s, but of course the price of oil fell well before any such gargantuan project could get under way.)I never really believed in the O'Neill designs or strategy, and spent an entire dinner in a pricey restaurant trying to argue him out of the approach. He was sure that eventually energy prices would prove him right.

When he died in 1992 he was still rather wistfully pushing the project.} The paranoia road is necessarily short. Fears abate. Enemies topple. So it's time to face "s.p.a.ce as a Place" -- a terrain to be studied and used in its own right, not as a sideshow battleground for earthly concerns.

We must also face the fact that we've done the easy things. Putting a pressurized Huygens probe on t.i.tan, amid chilly winds and with many more light-minutes of delay in getting radio orders through, will be a much tougher job than was landing Viking on Mars.

There are some signs of intelligent management. In January 1994 NASA launched Clementine, a bargain bas.e.m.e.nt mission. It rose on a t.i.tan IIG rocket, recycled after spending 25 years in an Arkansas ICBM silo. It is a light, low-cost probe, using land testing) sensors developed by the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, the heir to the Strategic Defense Initiative, a.k.a. "Star Wars." Clementine is state of the art with powerful laser-ranging device which can map our moon completely for the first time, then leave the moon and fly by an asteroid to within 100 kilometers, 1620 Geographos, about the time you read this.

Contrasting with the billion dollar Mars Observer, Clementine cost a mere 75 million. Plans for a second mission which will rendezvous with an asteroid and study it come in at about 30 million dollars. A small team put Clementinc together in two years. Such savings point to the hard-nosed, realistic program we need.

s.p.a.ce must be made cheaper. Even s.p.a.ce Station Freedom, an orbiting pork barrel, is proving to be more than the congress can swallow. The present NASA Administrator, Daniel Goldin, has negotiated with Russia to combine Freedom and Mir, their already orbiting station.

The reality of the mid-1990s seems to be that a go-it-alone station is not going to get funded by congress. A three-step plan appeals: first, send shuttle flights to the existing Mir for early experiments.

Second, fly up US add-ons, so we get our own gear running. Third, collaborate on Mir II, a much fancier station, somewhere a decade or so hence. The trouble here is that shuttles can carry only light payloads into the high-lat.i.tude Mir orbit. We can't get by with this "workhorse" any longer. This opens the door to a new, better workhorse vehicle to come.

I suspect this is how matters will work out. US-Russian joint ventures contain the ominously large station costs, letting the rest of the s.p.a.ce program go on with long-range plans that have some fiscal plausibility. Symbolizing the end of the Cold War, collaboration will also provide jobs for Russian engineers who might otherwise be working on North Korean or Libyan missile projects.

It would also lessen the load on the Shuttle. This is a time bomb in the belly of NASA, for its own internal studies show that the odds are about one in seventy-eight of a major accident, every time it flies. I served on a study group a.s.sessing the Shuttle in the 1970s, and we calculated the odds rather higher -- about four percent, or one flight in twenty-five. Regrettably, Challenger was right on the money. Then NASA became obsessed with hand-tuning every bolt on the craft, and now the odds are better.

But they will never be good. Rockets are not safe, period. The t.i.tan failure rate is about three percent, and the Russian Protons do about the same. No rocket has ever done better over the long haul.

The schoolteachers-in-shuttles agenda, sold to the public for so long, came out of wanting to project the Eisenhower perspective-- a go-slow s.p.a.ce Age, elbows tucked in, chin down, making no mistakes.

How can we counter that?

First, appeal to the frontier. Young people, not just Americans, want to believe in an expansive sense of the future. More than consumerism and the Beavis & b.u.t.thead worldview. Our time needs heroes rather desperately. Notice how the media seize on the merest sign of character, such as Attorney General Janet Reno's accepting some blame for the errors of her underlings.

Political leaders are tuned to sense this better than scientists. That's why the emphasis on manned s.p.a.ce, which scientists like James Van Allen deplore because, after all, it is pricey and returns little for research folk to study. Man-in-s.p.a.ce is a political event.

Actually, the general risk of rocketry plays to this. Danger equals drama. It would be a breath of fresh air if the President would simply tell the public that every launch is much more like a test pilot run, with casualties expected. No schoolteachers riding a bus into orbit. Instead, gutsy men and women on a wing and a prayer. As in The Right Stuff, "No Buck Rogers, no bucks."

We'll probably have a shuttle blowup before this decade is out, a fiery finish with grieving widows, and we might as well be prepared. Indeed, the deeper lesson we should drive home is that s.p.a.ce will never be safe. Adventures aren't.

Second, we should have a clear set of cost-conscious reasons for every single project. Here the Antarctica a.n.a.logy helps.

There are still solid national reasons for s.p.a.ce. n.o.body thought that there were good scientific uses to Antarctica when Scott and Amundsen raced across it. We didn't see that chilly clime as a laboratory peculiarly sensitive to the whole planetary system.

Now the "ozone hole" is a major diagnostic of our planetary health, an early indicator of the depletion which is hard to measure globally, but gives itself away among the frozen crystals floating high above the poles.

The s.p.a.ce a.n.a.logy to this is "comparative planetology." We can learn basic information about how our system works by seeing the variants played out on Mars, Venus and elsewhere. These places can teach us much about the sensitivity of planets to the sun, to chemical components in their atmospheres, and much else. Clearly there is some connection between solar activity and climate, but we know little of how it works, much less how to make predictions. Mankind arose during the last great inter-glacial time, and another may be coming. What should we do about it.?

The Martian polar caps contain layers going back to the Ice Ages of Earth. Was the main cause external to both planet s-- the sun? Or is there something more complicated going on, involving the atmospheres as primary players?

These questions are best answered by robots. They send back reams of data, grist for the scientists' mill -- for people like me, who explore the solar system in their mind's eye. What about manned flight?

An old siren song might work here: leadership in aeros.p.a.ce. Control of how to get into orbit. Further, dominance of the technologies which might be useful in future conflicts. This certainly means communication and surveillance satellites, but it probably implies some s.p.a.ce station capability as well.

Certainly, even big robotic expeditions to other worlds will take some a.s.sembly in orbit.

I doubt that robots can do that, though the answer is not obvious. Politically, the manned solution to orbital a.s.sembly might be preferred simply because the public will find it far more interesting than watching a cousin of R2D2 fitting pipes together in zero g.

Most s.p.a.ce advocates have regrouped around a clear, seemingly inevitable goal: Mars. Mostly, I suspect, for its romance, mystery and the cla.s.sic: because it's there. Of all manned projects-- the s.p.a.ce station, a moon base, even power satellites--it promises the least, Alan Steele argues, in economic or technological spinoff benefits. Probably true. But it's also the one goal which can quicken the pulse of the mult.i.tude.

I don't think anything on the s.p.a.ce menu can satisfy a public longing for action with meaning nearly as well as Mars. It will be expensive and dangerous and we can all go, via TV.

But to even propose such a thing, as George Bush did, pushes quite a few problems to the top of any s.p.a.ce agenda. Current blue-sky planning for Mars exploration a.s.sumes that we will use liquid rockets and take about a year each way. This means problems of human deterioration in zero g become major.

calcium leaches from bones, muscles atrophy. Should we do studies of people inside spinning cans, to see if centrifugal effects will duplicate gravity in the physiological sense?

Maybe. Or perhaps we should look beyond chemical rockets. To fast ships which can get a small payload, of people plus a few weeks' rations, to Mars within a month. Their supplies could be pre-positioned, waiting in orbit at Mars. n.o.body needs to leave until all their support gear is in place and working.

Of course, s.p.a.ce station research in rotating living quarters has more human involvement, so it might be politically preferred. But the other major problem of a Mars expedition, really high reliability of all that gear, is best served by sending backup systems along long, slow, cheap orbits.

This underscores another need: really big rockets for getting considerable ma.s.ses into Earth orbit. Or else, much better ways to do it --laser-driven systems, say.

All these are policy decisions, but they must be made in light of what humanity as a whole wants to see in s.p.a.ce. Drama. People. Mystery. Wonder.

Perhaps manned presence should be seen now as intrinsically international, because we desperately need goals as big as the human prospect. The world needs lofty aims. s.p.a.ce buffs love their iconography -- the drama of liftoff, of horizons br.i.m.m.i.n.g with the unknown, of Voyagers serenely gliding above alien landscapes. As well, they have an answer to those who say that these are simply the distractions of a high culture, perched atop a seething, oppressed ma.s.s.

The industrial nations have about twenty percent of the world's population. The bulk of humanity labors long and hard for little. Not because the advanced nations steal their wealth -- that same twenty percent produces two thirds of the world's output, including agriculture -- but because most of the world has never learned the many social and intellectual abilities which produce wealth.

We will probably have no real peace in the world until most of humanity is somewhat prosperous, or at least has solid hope of becoming so. But if they pursue the agenda of the industrial nations, the strain on raw resources will be vast. So, too, will be the pollution from more mining, metal smelting, fossil fuel burning, irrigation and the like. The planet simply can't support it, not with present technology.

The energy and ma.s.s needed for uplifting humanity must come from elsewhere -- s.p.a.ce. And it is quite foolish, in the long run, for us to do messy, polluting things in this thin sh.e.l.l of vulnerable air and water which gave birth to us all.

We're fouling our nest. But a smart bird learns to fly.

Gregory Benford Joe Haldeman 8,256 words posted: august 29, 1998

[The material below is an edited version of a discussion held at MIT on October 15, 1997.]

What Happens to the Body in Cybers.p.a.ce Jenkins: Both of your selections tonight picked up on a theme that was very common last time: what happens to the body in cybers.p.a.ce or what happens to the body in a world where we can shape information in new ways. What are your current a.s.sumptions about the relationships between bodies and information?

I was here at MIT for a day-long program on wearable computers, watching all the many ways people were thinking of adhering computers to clothes or to various portions of their anatomy so that you can carry them around. At first glance, it seemed improbable. I can remember when fifteen years ago people started turning up with these rather awkwardly large boxes and they were wearing headphones and I said: "Who wants to walk around listening to radio?" [laughter]

Yes, yes, I was really right on the cutting edge there. So Sony Walkman has become one of the most popular pieces of consumer electronics ever. I must say that it still occurs for me that if I go for a run on the beach I would rather hear the waves than what pa.s.ses for music these days, or at least popular music, but so what, I am out of it. But I was fascinated today by the very idea of wearable ( i.e.

portable) computers, the idea that they don't actually have to be carried around like a f.a.n.n.y pack, that they can be woven into your clothes. If you want to really get sophisticated about it, you can weave electronic capacities into your clothes. There were people wearing jackets which were musical instruments we played, actually, at the reception afterwards. You go up and hit these various commands that are right here on the jacket and it plays melodies, it plays whatever you want to play; you are a walking piano. It's got a power pack and a processor and so on. But you can go far beyond that. You can imagine clothes that in fact do what clothes really do. Clothes don't just keep you warm, they are actual signals. This actually doesn't occur to people very often on the east coast where everybody seems to wear things that are dark. I don't know why since it's dark here already. We from the west coast wear color and we have more color anyway.

Haldeman: It effects the brain.

Benford: ...and it effects the brain, right. Yes, it does. The ineffable lightness of being. And I thought of a stunt you could do: you a.s.semble a coat and trousers made out of light pipes; they take the information coming from your back, pipe it around, computer process it and emit it in this direction. And vice versa in the other direction. You split the light pipe, half goes this way, the other half goes the other way. To someone on that side, you appear to be not there; instead they are looking at the building behind you; you have become invisible. Now if that's not alteration of the body, what is? Well, it's a kind of invisibility. Of course, you can try for a partial effect. Say, you only do it for a hole about this large. You walk down the streets; you seem to have a large hole blown through you. You look like a victim from a war that hasn't happened yet. Nice effects, you know, people are not going to forget seeing you today which is the part of the thrust of some clothes I've seen.

You know, the insulting T-shirts. What's that supposed to do: it is supposed to make you remember that person. You won't necessarily like that person, but you'll remember that person.

Well, there are all kinds of social ways of expressing the body. Then, I began to think about really sophisticated computers. In a couple of generations, people looking back may think of us as people who lived in a dumb world. Once you have augmented your customary moving self, you have made your clothes smart. Then they would be able to respond to what is smart, what is interactive, in the environment. I mean this building is a dumb building . You walk into the building and it doesn't respond to your presence at all. But many buildings in a sense should; for example if you walk into a bank, it would be handy for the bank to know whether you are armed, or whether you belong there at all or what you want to do there. Exit the receptionist. You walk into the building; the building tells you what you need to know about what's in the building and it interrogates you and so forth. But all parts of the landscape, all parts of the artificial world that we have created can in some sense be smart and interact with you.

You walk into a hotel suite and say "I hate this color, turn everything in the room mauve, I hate this yellow," and BAM! it does that.

This is like being Bill Gates. Bill Gates does have these big screens in the house that he is building which produce very high resolution pictures such as the Madonna or any old landscape that you want; you can have it show a real time image of waves breaking in Mawai, if you want. You are looking out of the window at a sea scape on the other side of the planet.

Rooms, buildings can react to you in that way and they become smart in the sense that they become an interactive part of your environment. So the world divides, then, into smart and dumb. And your body has smart and dumb processes to the extent that there are these three spheres: there's a social world (clothes have social functions,) there's the physical world (we all have physical functions), and there is the digital world. The fact that these can all overlap simultaneously in some shared s.p.a.ce means that the entire concept of your body has changed.

Your concept of your body has already changed in ways that you really don't register anymore. Someone three thousand years ago would have found it very mysterious that we have things on our faces, in front of our eyes. Why? Or that we have odd pieces of metal stuck into our teeh; or my left shoulder, which I've stupidly broken twice, once playing softball and once surfing, is now made of metal. All of these things are augmentations, changes that we accept as natural. The next change, then, would probably be a smartening of the body. We would then have a division between smart and dumb interactions with the world. And the world would be divided between smart and dumb in the same way that human culture divides the world into artificial and natural. Chimpanzees almost certainly do not have the cla.s.sification of cultural and natural, and certainly, they don't have it in the way that we have it. Soon enough, our division would be between smart and dumb ways in which the body reacts to the world. And that will be as profound a change as anything that I can think of. And we can't really even glimpse what that would necessarily imply. It is very hard to get outside of your cultural perception but if computerization keeps on going for a couple of more decades at its current rate, all these things will become readily possible and I don't think we can quite understand how big a movement it will make.

Haldeman: Yes, it's interesting to talk along those lines. I am looking forward to a time in the very near future when the idea of the computer as a separate instrument is curiously quaint; when doors and tables and microphones have computers inside them and they just sense what you want and go ahead and do them. [Beeper phone beeps in audience] In fact, pockets would have little computers in them that would tell you that somebody is waiting for you.

One thing about the modification of the body is to make the body smarter. Some thing that I haven't seen investigated in science fiction and I am going to patent it right now so that Greg can't write about it. Our intelligence is actually not limited to the brain but spread all through the nervous system. A person who plays a musical instrument does not figure out which way to move his fingers everytime he moves his fingers. In fact, you go much faster than you could possibly think. After a certain amount of practice, you not only can memorize a piece very fast but you can improvise faster than you can actually do any cognitive work.

I find that fascinating and it's not something that is happening in your brain; it's happening somewhere between your spinal column and your fingers. What happens if you can actually modify that; what happens, if you can speed that up; what happens if you can actually do some time sharing between some part of your brain and that little autonomic stuff. I don't know, but it would be interesting, I think that we may see a revolution in the arts, for instance, to make a really conservative prediction: a kind of music so fast and so subtle that we couldn't even understand it now.

But when everybody can do it, when everybody who cares can do it, that may become a dominant form of music.

We may be able to augment our eye sight so that the visual arts become..oh, I don't know...we could use up a lot more of the spectrum. Not a LOT more, we can't see radiowaves without having eyes this big, and you don't want to look at something that's in gamma rays for too long, it might hurt the other parts of the spectrum. But our visual acuity could increase by an order of magnitude and we could actually increase the visual spectrum by an octave or two and have things that are tremendously complex and moving paintings that you and I would just see as a piece of blank canvas, or a monochrome. I am fascinated by the stuff that we saw over at the wearable computers, a lot of the things that were interesting were just concept clothing; that is, n.o.body has figured out how to wire them yet, but the one that I really liked is the one that I read about in science fiction story a couple of years ago about a reporter who goes to cover a war and she's wearing everything she needs, she's got a camera in her hand and she's modemed fairly well. She speaks into her jaw and a computer a thousand miles away writes up her stories and projects them onto a little a screen in front of one eye so that she can edit it, and there was a gal wearing one of those things on a pedestal at the Media Lab show and it was functional. She had a little camera, not a great camera but a little camera on her palm and like a three by four inch screen in front of her eyes that showed what she was looking at. She had her left hand wired with five contacts where she could type by tapping different combinations of fingers into a little computer output that was

onto one breast. I could use on outfit like that!

After the first hundred thousand dollar one comes then comes the ten thousand dollar one and then finally it reaches Radio Shack. If you want to really spend money, you can get one that n.o.body can tell you are wearing. It's all heads up and its lens is built into your nail. We'll see that really soon because as a culture we are addicted to the preservation of information about our activities. This way, you can get real time the whole boring vacation, nail your relatives and say alright this is going to take about twenty hours. Yeah o this world does need editors; it already needs editors and think how horrible it is going to be in the next century.

Question: You mentioned before smart clothing that changes while you walk, while you're moving around the room. You meet somebody from across the room and your sweeter changes to match theirs and flashes. What does that change in the nature of communication?

Benford: Yes, s.e.xual signaling is very important in clothes.

Of course, the most important s.e.xual signaling is when you take them off. Yeah, there's certainly going to be stuff like that. Remember fifteen years ago when they had clothes that would change color because at places with direct contact with the body they would warm up Those didn't catch on, because of course, it was a random signal. With a smart system, you can interrogate somebody else's system and you can skip the c.o.c.ktail chat and get right down to the heavy breathing stuff, but the mind boggles. That's one thing that could happen, but you would a.s.sume that all people were smart unless, of course, they were wearing dumb clothing. That's yet another hierarchical thing that would start to separate us out in a way.

Haldeman: What happens when a dumb person wears smart clothing?

Benford: They just don't say much I guess.

Haldeman: They'll say you're new in town.

Benford: Well, smart, of course, means just capable of interacting and interrogating about all kinds of stuff.

Suppose you walk into a room and all you have to do is look at somebody and a couple of key touches here and there and you could instantly download his entire web site.

So you walk towards a person and you can read his website and you go up to the guy and you know something about him, a lot maybe. You could go off and have a drink, look at the skyline and read the whole website, read his last essay in theNew York Times Refuse of Books and come back and argue with him about it. The possibilities are endless here. Of course, a lot of reading, I know.

Haldeman: Well, we'll be able to read much faster in the future.

Benford: Oh yes, that's the one thing that hasn't improved.

We have all kinds of technology to make us disseminate words faster but nothing, except for the electric light, to make us read faster.

Haldeman: You've never taken that Evelyn Wood speed reading thing?

Benford: No, never had the time.

Haldeman: Too much to read.

Question: Both of your stories dealt with reinterpreting the senses, altering sensory information and subjectively changing reality. What kinds of effects do you see this technology having on people and on society?

Haldeman: Well, in one corner I can see profound changes in recreation, things like synesthesia o rearranging the input of the senses into something pleasing or strange or even horrifying and strange but therefore entertaining. In terms of actually coping with the real world, the external reality I see an amplification of the senses which would allow a normal person do more subtle work; I mean the obvious things like nanoengineering and so forth. We are already doing things that literally couldn't have been described fifty years ago, couldn't have been thought of.

The idea of operating on a nucleus of a cell by moving things around is incredible. It's everyday now, but when I was born n.o.body was even thinking about it. I got a little calculator, a little computer cost me three hundred bucks and I can write on it in script and it comes out printed as a word processed doc.u.ment.

When I was in graduate school, they put that about a hundred years in the future...and voice recognition and computers was something they said: "Well forget about it; that's science fiction." h.e.l.l, I can buy a little program that costs 25 bucks that does voice recognition on my machine.