[ExI] For your amusement

Keith Henson hkeithhenson at gmail.com
Thu Jan 10 14:15:26 UTC 2013


 Nature | Books and Arts
Limits be damned

    * Cyrus C. M. Mody

    Nature
    493,
    24–25
    (03 January 2013)
    doi:10.1038/493024a

Published online
    02 January 2013

Article tools

    * Download PDF
    * Citation
    * Reprints
    * Rights & permissions

Cyrus Mody applauds an examination of the twentieth-century scientists
who dreamed of breaking the bounds.
The Visioneers: How a Group of Elite Scientists Pursued Space
Colonies, Nanotechnologies, and a Limitless Future

W. Patrick McCray Princeton University Press: 2012. 328 pp. £19.95, $29.95

ISBN: 9780691139838

Buy this book: US UK Japan

To the best of our knowledge, human life is constrained by natural
limits: we do not live forever, we cannot transport ourselves or
transmit information faster than the speed of light, and there is a
finite supply of fossil fuels. Debates about such limits have shaped,
and been shaped by, scientific and technological knowledge for
centuries. Even faulty predictions about limits have made important
contributions. Thomas Malthus' pessimism, for instance, prepared the
ground for Darwin's theory of natural selection, and the overly
optimistic vision of Lewis Strauss, former chairman of the US Atomic
Energy Commission, of “energy too cheap to meter” facilitated decades
of nuclear-power research and development.

In The Visioneers, science historian Patrick McCray of the University
of California, Santa Barbara, argues that the resource-scarcity
debates of the 1970s inspired a generation of visionary scientists and
engineers. This influential crew had big dreams about overcoming all
kinds of limits; occasionally built working models to demonstrate
progress towards their dreams; and passionately assembled coalitions
to make those dreams a reality.



McCray focuses on Gerard K. O'Neill, the Princeton physicist and
designer of space colonies, and on his protégé, K. Eric Drexler, the
'speculative engineer' trained at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT) in Cambridge who helped to put nanotechnology on
political agendas in the early 1990s. Along the way, McCray introduces
a large and colourful cast of others who, over four decades, promoted
technological progress as the way to overcome every limit.

O'Neill's ideas reached a mass audience in part through the L5 Society
founded in 1975 by Keith and Carolyn Henson. These livestock farmers
and Tolkien enthusiasts from Arizona later drifted into advocacy for
the Strategic Defense Initiative and cryonic life extension, a
proposed technology by which all or part of a human body would be
frozen at death in the hope that it could be re-animated later.
Drexler also imagined that cryonic immortality could be facilitated by
programmable 'molecular assemblers' — nanometre-scale robots, or
nanobots — repairing the tissues of corpses frozen at death.

Pillars of the California counterculture — such as the psychologist
and LSD advocate Timothy Leary, and Stewart Brand, founder of the
Whole Earth Catalog — also took up the visions of O'Neill and Drexler,
working them into manifestos on transhumanism and the 'electronic
frontier'. Brand served on the board of the Foresight Institute, set
up in 1986 by Drexler, and made Drexler's molecular assemblers a
centrepiece of the future scenarios that his Global Business Network
sold to enthralled chief executives.

McCray documents how cryonics and radical life extension, space
colonies, molecular nanotechnology and exotic sources of energy (such
as solar-power satellites and zero-point energy) were widely
popularized, alongside unsceptical articles about paranormal
phenomena, by the pornographers Bob Guccione and Kathryn Keeton in
their glossy monthly magazine Omni. Indeed, McCray argues that the
audience that Omni catered to — young and male, with a taste for
luxury goods, high-tech gadgets, libertarian politics and libertine
excesses — strongly resembled the visioneers and many of their
followers.

One thread ran through all of this: the 1972 blockbuster The Limits to
Growth (Universe), by global think-tank the Club of Rome. This book
goaded O'Neill and Drexler, says McCray, into sketching their plans
for a limitless future. The Limits to Growth — along with public
intellectuals such as the biologist Paul Ehrlich and the ecologist
Garrett Hardin, plus fictional films such as Soylent Green, Logan's
Run and Silent Running — popularized the idea that resource scarcity
and a growing population would combine to create shortages of
economically crucial materials. That message took root around the
world in the 1970s, particularly (if temporarily) in a United States
beset by 'stagflation', oil shortages and environmental crises such as
the Santa Barbara oil spill of 1969.

However, the original computer models on which The Limits to Growth
was based, developed by veterans of Jay Forrester's systems-dynamics
group at MIT, failed to account adequately for the role of
technological innovation in ameliorating resource scarcity, at least
over the near term. Although the models were later refined, the 1972
version provoked a storm of criticism, much of it justified. Many lay
people, particularly those of the generation whose childhoods were
infused with the optimism of the US space programme, responded to talk
of scarcity with a visceral aversion. These teens and
twenty-somethings latched on to O'Neill's visions of suburbs in space
piping abundant solar power and lunar regolith back to Earth. O'Neill
himself was ambivalent about their support, and when his star faded
they moved on to form or follow other high-tech enthusiast movements,
each of which took The Limits to Growth as its foil.

McCray's book is especially convincing in following the various
movements that arose in reaction to the Club of Rome's 1972 book. At
present, we face genuinely alarming limits to growth. Our ability to
comprehend and act on such constraints — particularly with respect to
climate change and alternative energy — is still distorted by the
infelicities in the first edition of The Limits to Growth and the
ferocious reaction to its conclusions. Some visioneering ideas for
overcoming limits to economic growth have contributed to inaction on
climate change by promising an appealing but impossibly easy,
sacrifice-free, small-government path to a limitless future. These
have distracted attention from politically difficult, less
technology-intensive solutions.

McCray's argument that visioneers play an important part in the
“technological ecosystem” is also compelling, but asymmetrically
deployed. For one thing, as the book's subtitle implies, only those
who propose a limitless future get to be visioneers; technical experts
who popularize visions of a future that is constrained by scarcity
(Forrester or the biologist Barry Commoner, for example) apparently do
not count. McCray also sometimes treats his visioneers less critically
than their foils. He describes The Limits to Growth as “refuted” by
experts, but treats equally damning arguments against the visions of
O'Neill and Drexler in a 'he-said–she-said' fashion. For instance,
Nobel Laureate Richard Smalley's contention that Drexler's molecular
gears and conveyor belts obey an impossible chemistry is dismissed as
“Drexler and Smalley largely talk[ing] past one another”.

Yet McCray is correct that visioneers influence, and are influenced
by, an ecosystem of philanthropists, politicians, funding agencies,
entrepreneurs, undergraduates, scientists and others. That group spurs
technological innovation, crafts science policy, and shapes and shares
widely held visions of the future.




More information about the extropy-chat mailing list