Space Travel: Science Fiction's Biggest Underachiever

In 1968, futurist Arthur C. Clarke wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey, which quickly became one of the most popular science fiction novels of the 20^th century. In Clarke’s vision of tomorrow, mankind in 2001 would have ring-shaped space stations that rotate to provide gravity, permanent lunar colonies which people routinely visit for business meetings, and fully-functional (if evil) artificial intelligence. The zeitgeist of the late 1960s, at the height of the space race, was one of unbridled optimism in the future of space travel. Just two years before Clarke’s novel was published, Star Trek had first premiered. It seemed inevitable that we were destined for the stars.

Looking at the world around us, it is easy to be disappointed at how space travel has progressed. The world today looks nothing like Star Trek, or even 2001: A Space Odyssey. After the Apollo missions ended in 1972, something strange happened that few futurists anticipated: mankind stopped exploring space, and turned inward to focus on problems at home. NASA’s budget was slashed. To the extent that space exploration progressed, it was done almost exclusively by robots rather than manned missions. If we were able to go back in time to the late 1960s and tell people that we would indeed have a permanent space settlement today, they would almost certainly envision something far grander than the International Space Station.

Why were the space enthusiasts wrong? The biggest obstacle has been political, not technological. In my opinion, political trends are much more difficult to predict than technological trends. From a 1968 perspective, the US and USSR were locked in a Cold War that would soon extend far above the earth’s surface. It was much easier to forecast the trends in space technology than to predict that the USSR would throw in the towel on the space race by the mid-1970s, and cease to exist at all soon thereafter. With the collapse of the USSR, the impetus for a space race has disappeared. No nation is willing to spend large sums of money exploring space without the threat of a rival beating them to it.

In light of this political reality, the exploration of other worlds seems to be permanently on hold. I do not envision this changing any time in the next couple decades. Although President George W. Bush called for the United States to return to the moon by 2020 and NASA stated that a permanent manned lunar base would be operational by 2024, it is highly unlikely that these goals will be fulfilled. The US is simply not motivated to do so.

Additionally, the economics of space travel have changed significantly since the Apollo missions. Due to advances in computer technology, it is now much cheaper to send robots to explore other worlds than it is to send human astronauts. Robots don’t need food, water, and air to keep them alive, and don’t need a return trip to earth. They can do almost everything a human astronaut can do, and can wirelessly transmit the data back home. Indeed, NASA has had some great achievements exploring our solar system, but the pioneers have all been robots.

It is possible that the private sector will be able to pick up part of the slack left by governments. SpaceShipOne, the first privately-owned spacecraft, claimed the Ansari X Prize in 2004. However, private space travel will never progress beyond orbital missions for super-rich adventure-seekers until there are some fundamental breakthroughs in rocketry. It currently costs $10,000 to send one pound into orbit, because rocket fuel itself is responsible for 90% of the weight of a rocket. As long as fossil fuels are the standard propulsion technology, human space travel will continue to be unaffordable for most people. Futurist and theoretical physicist Michio Kaku suggests that rockets could be powered by lasers instead of by fuel. Lasers on earth could fire at a water tank, vaporizing the water and propelling a rocket upward. Since the thrust would come from the ground instead of the rocket itself, it would eliminate the need for fuel and make rocketry 10 times more efficient.

Although this technique has been demonstrated to work in prototypes, it will be a long time before it can be applied to something as large as a rocket. Although many emerging technologies few people have imagined will suddenly take us by surprise, I think that space travel is something that will continue to disappoint us for many years.

PREDICTIONS:

As of 2025 – No human being has set foot on the moon since the Apollo missions.

As of 2035 – No human being has ever set foot on Mars.

Predictions For 2011

After revisiting my list of predictions, I realized that I didn’t have very many for 2011, due to my focus on things at least five years out. In honor of the new year, here are some of my predictions for 2011, in no particular order:

Electronic wallet? There’s an app for that. On December 16, 2010, Google and Samsung released the Nexus S, the first smartphone equipped with near-field communication. Near-field communication is an emerging technology that enables the transfer of data between devices at a range of 4 inches or less. This will eventually replace boarding passes, credit cards, and ATM cards among other things and will allow the easy transfer of money over the phone. 2011 is the year when the technology will first be useful, if not exactly mainstream yet. The places where it will take off the most quickly are developing countrieswhere credit card companies have never posed a lot of competition. Those of us in the US and Europe will probably have to wait a couple more years.

Is that a television or a computer? 2011 will be the year when the television and computer converge, just as the cell phone and computer have done in the last three years. An assortment of devices that hit the market in the last half of 2010 will serve up video content from the internet onto the television. The immediate effects will be relatively unimportant – people will be able to enjoy their favorite videos from YouTube, Netflix, Vevo, and Hulu on a much larger screen. In the longer term, this will change the way people view television and make them question if paying for channels they never use is really a good investment, especially if the same content is available online.

Human development will be widespread. Last year, all but seven countries in the world improved their score on the UN's Human Development Index (5 of those were stagnant while 2 actually lost ground). Emerging markets developed much more rapidly than wealthy nations. The long-term global trend has always been toward higher standards of living, and barring another severe economic downturn, we can expect the same from 2011. The vast majority of countries will share in economic gains, and developing countries will continue to outpace the US, Europe, and Japan.

At least one company offers genome sequencing for $1,000 or less. This one may be a bit of a reach, but I’m going to predict that 2011 will be the year that the holy grail of genomics – the $1,000 genome – is finally reached. For the last several years, the cost of genome sequencing has been following a Moore’s Law like trajectory, dropping nearly tenfold per year. A year ago, the cost of a simple genome sequencing was $6,000 and $10,000 from the two leading companies, Life Technologies and Illumina, respectively. It is therefore possible that by the end of 2011 a company will be able to do it for $1,000 which will throw open the doors to many more customers. Shortly after this milestone is reached, health insurance companies may begin covering the service, and the era of personalized medicine will dawn.

Shake-ups in the Axis of Evil. In his 2002 State of the Union address, President George Bush famously labeled Iraq, Iran, and North Korea the “Axis of Evil” and called for regime change in the three nations. During his presidency, Bush only deposed one of those regimes, but in 2011 he may get his wish in at least one more. Kim Jong-il, the supreme leader of North Korea, is believed to have suffered a stroke and has appeared very frail in his recent public appearances. He has been hastily creating a succession plan to transfer power to his 26-year-old son, Kim Jong-un, but the younger Kim has very little influence with key military officers who are necessary to sustain the regime. Wikileaks recently reported that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei of Iran has terminal leukemia. Khamenei is the glue holding the regime together; for example, he recently intervened personally to dissuade the Iranian Parliament from impeaching President Ahmadinejad. It is unclear if the Iranian regime can survive in any form without Khamenei. If either Kim or Khamenei dies, there will be a power struggle as various factions within the governments jockey for position in the power vacuum left in the deceased leader’s wake. Iran stands a real chance of serious democratic reform. North Korea does not (barring a total collapse and reunification with South Korea), but a shakeup could at least generate some Chinese-style economic reforms and perhaps an end to the bellicosity on the Korean Peninsula.

PREDICTIONS:
By 2011 – Near-field communication comes equipped in many new smartphones. Mobile payments become even more popular in the developing world, and makes inroads in Europe and the United States.
By 2011 – Internet-equipped televisions or add-ons will become popular.
By 2011 – At least 75% of countries improve their score on the Human Development Index compared to 2010, with the biggest improvements in developing countries.
By 2011 – At least one company offers genome sequencing for $1,000 or less.
By 2011 – There will be a major shakeup (or a total implosion) in the top leadership of North Korea and/or Iran.
By 2011 – Tablet computers continue to sell well. The market will become competitive with several new tablets seriously challenging Apple’s iPad.
By 2011 – Gaming (led by Microsoft’s Xbox Kinect) will begin to become gesture-based, rather than controller-based.
By 2011 – Voice Over IP services, such as Skype, become popular on smartphones, thus portending the eventual demise of traditional voice-telephone services.

Political Issues on the Horizon, Part 2

In my last entry, I explored two political issues that I expect to grow in importance in the United States over the next decade: privacy and bioethics. Today the focus is on two issues which already have a firm hold on the political landscape, but will nevertheless continue to evolve and grow in importance.

Terrorism. Ever since 9/11, American political discussions about terrorism have tended to boil down to two main components: Airport security and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Unfortunately, there is little evidence that either component has actually done anything to prevent terrorism. Changes in airport security have been less about improving safety than creating the illusion of heightened security for travelers. And the grossly mismanaged wars have succeeded only in pushing terrorism across an arbitrary national border (in the case of Afghanistan) or actively creating terrorists where they were not previously a problem (in the case of Iraq). With these issues so completely dominating the discussion of how to fight terrorism, little attention has been given to important questions, such as how to keep weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of terrorists, and how to quickly respond to a WMD terrorist attack to minimize the devastation.

In the future, the United States will not have the luxury of being able to ignore these questions. Today’s terrorists typically have access to only the crudest weapons: bombs capable of killing, at most, a few hundred people. Spectacular attacks like 9/11 are vanishingly rare, making the current level of funding, military commitment, and political capital spent on terrorism vastly disproportionate to the actual problem. But it remains to be seen how long that will be the case. Weapons of mass destruction may soon be available to terrorists, which could pose a much more serious danger than traditional terrorist attacks. The most worrying threat in the near future is nuclear proliferation, as a growing number of unstable regimes acquire nuclear weapons. In the slightly more distant future, biological weapons may pose an even greater danger to the world, as the necessary ingredients and know-how will be available to nearly any university student. Governments need to begin developing serious plans for how to minimize the spread of weapons of mass destruction, or failing that, rapid response plans after a massive terror attack. To date, the United States has done neither.

As a political issue, I worry that debates over terrorism will continue to be dominated by those seeking to eliminate "terrorism" as a concept, with conservatives favoring an aggressive foreign policy to combat known terrorist havens, and liberals preferring more targeted nation-building efforts to eliminate the conditions in which terrorists typically arise (e.g. poverty and lawlessness). While this debate is not entirely unproductive, it is of secondary importance since terrorist attacks are relatively rare anyway. My hope is that the debate will shift from how to prevent "terrorism" as a whole, to how to prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction. This is a much more focused and achievable goal. But regardless of how the debate evolves, terrorism does not seem likely to disappear from the political landscape anytime soon.

Globalization. 20 years after the end of the Cold War and 15 years after the birth of e-commerce, it is almost a cliché to say that the world is becoming more interconnected. The nations of the world depend on one another more than ever. Wars between national governments are on a terminal decline, as the cost of waging these wars (in terms of being cut off from neighboring markets) continues to grow relative to the benefits. Many developing countries have found that globalization is the quickest path to economic development, with many hundreds of millions of Indians and Chinese escaping poverty in the last 20 years.

Many nations are seeing strong political backlashes against globalization. In the United States, this has manifested itself in debates over immigration and outsourcing. There does not seem to be any clear-cut ideological division on globalization. Traditionally, the Democratic Party has been friendlier toward immigration, and the Republican Party has been more receptive toward free trade, despite the fact that these policies are two sides of the same coin, pitting globalists against nationalists. However, even within these policies, the partisan lines are blurry: some Democratic politicians have been staunch supporters of free trade (including President Bill Clinton) and some Republican politicians have been ardent defenders of open immigration (including President George W. Bush).

As developing countries open up their markets and continue to grow richer, and rich countries become more dependent on economic rivals like China, the debate over globalization will continue to grow louder. The specific objections will vary depending on the specific policy: In some cases the opposition will be fueled by concerns over environmentalism, and other times by fears of rising income inequality. In some cases, nations may not like the fact that their economic well-being is so dependent upon their trading partners' policies, with economic problems in one nation spilling over to others. In 1999, labor activists in Seattle successfully disrupted a meeting of the World Trade Organization, largely motivated by fears that their jobs would be outsourced.

As globalization grows in importance as a political issue, it is likely that the advocates and opponents of globalization will firmly drag the political parties toward opposing viewpoints. One party will probably come to represent open immigration and trade, while the other becomes more nationalistic and inward-looking. At the present time, it is difficult to determine which party will be which.

In my next entry, I will look at two political issues which I think will fade in importance over the next decade.

Political Issues on the Horizon, Part 1

Americans went to the polls last Tuesday and, for the third time in as many election cycles, delivered a sharp rebuke to the incumbent party. No doubt concerned that the economic recovery seems to be stagnating and that unemployment remains high, the voters gave the House of Representatives back to the Republican Party. In the wake of the midterm elections in the United States, this is a good time to consider political issues on the horizon.

I generally shy away from making specific predictions about politics or the economy. Voters are fickle and economies are unpredictable, especially compared to the relatively simple trends that scientific and technological developments usually follow. However, I think we can at least speculate on the types of issues that are likely to become important, if not the precise way that they will be resolved by the voters and the government. In my next few blog posts, I’m going to explore some of the political issues that I think will grow in importance over the next decade, as well as a couple of oft-cited (and perhaps overblown) issues which may soon fade from the American political landscape.

Privacy. For the past couple decades, whenever a political gasbag has asked a judicial appointee about his or her views on “privacy,” it has typically been a code word for abortion. However, I believe privacy will soon become a political issue in its own right, spurred on by technological advances which encroach more and more on our privacy and demand access to sensitive information. Already, there have been court cases to determine if police can tag an automobile with a GPS tracker without a warrant, but this is just the tip of the iceberg of what is to come. RFID chips, which will soon replace bar codes on products, will be embedded in nearly everything we buy, allowing for constant surveillance and tracking of products (and by extension, of customers) from their point of manufacture to their point of disposal.

Additionally, we are probably no more than a decade from the point where sensors and face-recognition technology are commonplace in many public establishments, as in Minority Report, making it virtually impossible to step out of our own homes without appearing in a database somewhere. In the slightly more distant future (probably 10-20 years), insectoid-sized robots are on the horizon. DARPA is already designing them for use in military and spying applications, but eventually their spread to the general public is a virtual certainty as the cost of computing drops, allowing for practically anyone to monitor practically anyone.

In light of all of these emerging technologies, some erosion of our privacy seems almost inevitable. The extent of it remains open to debate. Will our governments pass privacy laws regulating how all of this information can be obtained and used? Or will our governments be part of the problem? Only time will tell.

Bioethics. The first decade of this century saw two important bioethical debates in the United States and Europe. In the United States, stem cell research was hotly debated in the first few years of the Bush presidency, but now seems to have decisively concluded in favor of scientific progress, as the huge benefits of stem cells become more obvious and the moral objections have fallen by the wayside. In Europe, the main bioethical debate of the past decade – genetically modified foods – is still ongoing. Many Europeans are concerned about the possibility of genetically modified foods wreaking unintentional havoc on the environment and public health. Although these fears do not have much scientific support, the controversy has nevertheless succeeded in quashing the industry in Europe, at least temporarily.

These are merely the first of many bioethical debates we will face in the 21^st century. Some will be relatively trivial. For example, concerns about athletes on steroids may soon give way to concerns about professional athletes with enhanced body parts. A few years ago, Tiger Woods opted to get superhuman 20/15 vision through Lasik surgery, and the range of upgrades available to those who can afford them will soon be much wider. If athletes are able to buy improved bodies, it will make it difficult for “natural” athletes to compete. Will we have separate leagues for enhanced athletes and natural athletes? Will we ban these superhuman enhancements entirely, and if so, what qualifies as a superhuman enhancement?

Other bioethical concerns will be much more profound, and the government will have to take a stand. For example, if the technology exists and is widely available to screen for genetic abnormalities, would it be child abuse to not tinker with a fetus’ genome to prevent birth defects? And if preventing birth defects is morally acceptable (indeed if it is the ONLY morally acceptable option), why not preventing other undesirable traits like ugliness, propensity to violence, or low intelligence? Where does one draw the line? Eugenics, long discredited due to its ties to Nazism, may make a comeback in a world of easy access to genetic therapy.

Many of the questions related to human augmentation and genetic engineering have no easy answer, and any government decision is bound to leave many people feeling morally queasy. Look for political parties to become increasingly divided along the lines of these bioethical questions, with conservatives preferring a more restrictive approach to avoid creating ghastly new moral quandaries, and liberals favoring a more open approach to improving humanity through reengineering our own biology.

To be continued in another blog post…