Centauri Dreams has no idea how you quantify something as elusive as imagination, but if anyone should have a go at it, that man is Arthur C. Clarke. Thus the interesting news of the center being established in his name in Las Vegas. Its goal: “…to investigate the reach and impact of human imagination.” The Clarke Foundation hopes to raise $70 million for the project, which Clarke says aims to “…accord imagination as much regard as high academic grades in the classroom – anywhere in the world.” Exactly how this is done will be fascinating to see.
It’s good to learn that Sir Arthur’s health is on the mend, and to hear him in this recent message on KurzweilAI.net talking about a rejuvenated space program:
Notwithstanding the remarkable accomplishments during the past 50 years, I believe that the Golden Age of space travel is still ahead of us. Before the current decade is out, fee-paying passengers will be experiencing sub-orbital flights aboard privately funded passenger vehicles, built by a new generation of engineer-entrepreneurs with an unstoppable passion for space (I’m hoping I could still make such a journey myself). And over the next 50 years, thousands of people will gain access to the orbital realm—and then, to the Moon and beyond.
Talk of ‘golden ages’ sits well with me, as one who reveres a great author from science fiction’s own golden age. And isn’t it amazing that the era of commercial space travel is really a return to ideas promoted by the Clarkes, Heinleins and Asimovs of this world long before we decided that only the resources of big government were up to such challenges?
Hi Paul
The “Golden Age” began a decade before Sir Arthur’s first US published stories, I think. Technically – and I’m going off Asimov himself on this – the Golden Age began with John Campbell taking over editorship of “Astounding” and lasted until “Galaxy” appeared in 1950, breaking Campbell’s monopoly on “credible” SF. After 1950 SF still followed Campbell’s style but had gained a lot more credibility and began appearing in book form, not just magazine serialisations. The next major change was New Wave in the 1960s.
Sir Arthur is considered “Golden Age” but his material is more the astronautically informed SF that grew out of post-war work by the British Interplanetary Society, not the “naive” work of Asimov or Heinlein. The difference is almost certainly the pre-War/post-War start to their American writing careers. When Asimov and Heinlein began in 1939 rockets were still limited to solid-propellant, single-staged ballistic devices.
After the V-2 that all changed, especially once multi-stage high altitude sounding rockets began bringing movies back from space. That changed the politics of spaceflight forever – Heinlein could still imagine private spaceflight, but the satellite studies of c. 1948 meant the Military and Government had to take the issue seriously, especially after the USSR exploded their first nuke in 1949. Ballistic missiles were a single stage short of being satellite launchers and thus the horrible hybrid of “expendable” launchers was born in military programs.
What should have happened in spaceflight was the development of reusable first stages, which is infinitely easier than reusable final stages, as Buzz Aldrin’s “StarBooster” designs illustrate. That would’ve changed the economics utterly from the beginning, but the ICBM booster was pushed into rapid service because of Cold War politics. And now it’s entrenched.
Of course the other factor was the development of micro-electronics and solid-state circuits. Prior to the late 1950s all the communications and weather satellites envisaged were manned – some one had to nursemaid all the vacuum-valve electronics. But by 1960 transistor technology made unmanned satellites vastly more capable than they seemed in 1950, and the justification for manned space stations pretty much vanished. No one realised this through out the 1960s, but it was obvious by the 1970s.
Now, post Cold War, we’re left with the difficult task of justifying “humans in space”. All of us space colonisation enthusiasts know what it’s all about, the expansion of our species horizon, the export of Life to dead worlds, but selling such ideals is damned hard in a World built on economies driven by scarcity. Science and “humans in space” has become divorced and antagonistic, and “wars of Empire” distract and divert resources into hopeless quagmires, just like what killed the hopes of the 1960s space program.
Sir Arthur has rightly followed the trend of space tourism as a good Next Step, but he’s not the innovator he used to be, now more the respected enthusiast.
Adam, Clarke’s first was published in 1937, a piece called “Travel by Wire.” Campbell took over at Astounding in that same year. I don’t know when Clarke’s first American appearance was; maybe one of the readers can help us with that one.
Re reusable first stages, imagine where we would be now if that had been the priority back around 1960!
Hi Paul
Clarke’s first professional (and US) sale was “Rescue Party” (c.1946) and his first book was “Prelude To Space” (1949), so he beat Asimov to novelisation – whose first book was “Pebble in the Sky” (1950). His really early stories were all fanzine stories.
“Fly by Wire” was rewritten in conjunction with Stephen Baxter and is a really good “sideways in time” story now.
I’ve a few personal favourites of Sir Arthur’s tales – I read, and re-read, “Islands in the Sky”, as well as “The Sands of Mars” and “Prelude to Space”. I’ve read all his solo novels at least once, except “Glide Path”, but I’ve never gotten into his collaborations, though I am a big fan of Stephen Baxter. Of the “Odyssey” novels I actually like “3001” the best, though my preference has changed with time, but the cultural stasis of the Europans and the frailty of the Monolith appeals to my sense of hope about humans and their role in the future, as well as confirming my bias against the likelihood of intelligent non-oxygen breathers. Vague hints at “Judgement by ETs”, in “2001” and “2010”, used to appeal to me, and Clarke it seems, but perhaps we’d be better at the task ourselves. Maybe Sir Arthur feels the same way too.
As for where we’d be today… well there were plans for air-augmented rockets by 1975 to come into service as satellite launchers, so we’d probably have much more economical access to LEO. Manning space stations would’ve been a lot cheaper, I suspect, if there was significant demand.
Phil Bono designed a Moon/Mars space-lift architecture that would’ve been flying into space in the scale needed back in c. 1965. He planned on a 1,000 person Moonbase by 1980 to support a manned Mars mission by 1986. LEO and Lunar access would’ve been via his ROMBUS SSTOs – giant plug-nozzle rockets – and these were “pre-adapted” for Lunar missions because they were to fly in VTOVL mode. Hundreds of missions would’ve flown to build the 1,000 person base.
http://astronautix.com/lvs/rombus.htm
http://astronautix.com/craft/proelena.htm
If you know your Arthur Clarke you’ve probably read his original introduction to “2001” which was a ‘history’ of spaceflight c.1970 – 1990. And in that little summary a 1,000 person moonbase was expected by 1980. Clarke collected that intro in “Lost Worlds of 2001” which is a fascinating read all by itself.
Astronomy benefits from the truths about the rocks studied by Mojzsis — to see under what conditions life emerged — and all the other disciplines too lend their truths to our astronomical clarity, but the one “science” that is the most important contributor to astronomy is psychology.
“Urp, you say?” “Er,” you say, “isn’t psychology the least scientific endeavor of all of them?” That’s what Clarke is pointing to, and he “calls us to arms” about this great impoverishment of today’s science — if we understand HOW we imagine a very large portal opens, he tells us. That’s the deepest raison d’tre of his foundation.
I personally have been involved in just such research for four decades, and I gotta tell ya, psychology is the “white trash” of the “scientific community.” The Tao of Physics and so many many other works like it have tried to show the impact of mind on matter, but, mostly, when it comes to understanding human thought processes, western knowledge is in the dark ages. But I’ll tell you something: the techniques for exploring consciousness are already there definitively explained in the various literatures — lying unnoticed amongst a pile of bogus offerings posing as “psychological truths made into tools for self empowerment.” But they’re there, and all it will take is for some lab guys to finally get the funding to study the effects of various mental techniques with a truly scientific intent, and the “good stuff” will be discovered for the powerhouse psyche-oomph they pack.
Remember, it took 30 YEARS before anyone tried to do what Mendel did with the pea plants, and only then did three separate research efforts go back to the literature and discover Mendel’s work — published in a respectable but back-waters journal. Where would the knowledge of genetics be today with 30 more years of research under our belts? But his work was lost amongst a ton of junk called Natural Philosophy back then. Just so, laying untested, unmeasured, untried, all around us are ways to practice being more conscious, more imaginative, more loving, etc. All these techniques are not-yet-validated by research and promoted usually by some sort of true believer without credentials.
Confession: I don’t know how to think a thought.
Neither do you.
But we both love to deny it.
Neither of us is on the “thought committee” — that processing that creates our flow of ideation is not something we are able to “do,” but instead we are, ahem, unwitting observers of that process’ last stage wherein the end product of that process, a thought, is finally experienced in consciousness. But though I (intellect) do not know how to purposefully form a thought, I (ego) do know “where they come from” and can “hang out by the doorway” as they come to manifestation. And hanging out at the doorway is something that can be taught to anyone, and all it takes is proper instruction and then, of course, practice practice practice. Anyone got a million dollar grant for me to prove this?
It is the “practice part” that all the established ivory tower disciplines “don’t get” about psychological techniques. The math geeks will say, “If you show me an algorithm, well, that’s all it takes — one time — and I understand it for all times and can use it — so show me a mental technique that is as reliable as an algorithm, and THEN I’ll support a billion dollar grant to study it. Show me a concept that changes how my mind functions — instantly.” But only years of practice with the techniques will bring the results that can be measured. The math geeks have no patience for such studies. The physics geeks want to see a machine that measures cognition-on-the-fly, before they’ll believe that a mental technique is “working.” It’ll be decades before that suitably subtle machine exists in any strong sense of the concept, so the physics geeks will sniff their noses at psychological techniques until then — and continue to scratch a bloody furrow in their noggins wondering why they can’t understand physics completely yet. But will they study “understanding” itself?
If someone is a smoker and then quits smoking, what scientist can measure the benefits-to-health of that after only one day of not smoking? Health is an extraordinarily nuanced concept, and we understand that, but when it comes to improving the mind, impatience rules the day — because the sincere and deeper offerings are mixed like diamonds in the dross of so many charlatans presenting such whack-job theories without any true grasp of what their promoting.
And though I am saying that after decades of research, I know of certain techniques that work, who will listen? Consult Thomas Kuhn for a timetable of when today’s world will “get it” that our inner mental foundations are the supports of our realities-of-science. Until we do this research and identify what works from what is pure crap, we won’t have a strong and strategic reply to the statement: “The universe may not only be stranger than we imagine; it may be stranger than we CAN imagine.”
We need to be able to understand imagination if we’re ever going to improve it as a process that aids our clarity about anything. Our colleges have yet to turn out a single person who can say, “I just got my doctorate in imagination.” What a concept, eh? Well, the gut feeling you just had shows where you’re at when it comes to “having a clue” about the importance of understanding “mind” BEFORE we use it to understand other parts of the universe. For the most part, psychologists today have yet to take up this cause. Think of a monkey driving a car, yeah, we can train the beast to do that, but who would toss their keys to their new car to that monkey? Who would put their baby-seat in the car? Yet we allow each and every person on the planet to just “get in and drive off” with meat-robot with a mind that has subtleties about which they have utterly no clue.
As for the most obvious and recent example, consider that poor lady astronaut. Big IQ, big grasp of all things rockets, big discipline and control, years of intense prepping, deep clarity, but she was blind-sided by her own brain. She seems to have had not the least grasp of how deeply she’d dived off the deep end. All that education and nary a bit of learning about emotions and what they actually are.
I’d would be vastly entertained by having the folks who post here with such deep understandings in other fields each tell us their “take” on present day psychology and the role it plays in the real world of science today. What hope do any of you have that there exists actual techniques out there that could, well, save us all from ourselves? Do any of you think that psychology should be a strong part of the education of anyone who would pursue a scientific career? Let’s see a show of hands — who would vote for congress to spend a billion — a lousy measly little billion — to try to find mental techniques that increase creativity, compassion, passion, honesty, hope, etc.? Stand up and be counted.
Edg
However, without the cold war (and other military drivers), rockets would likely not have advanced much at all. The problem then, and now, is lack of markets to fund the development, not incorrect technical decisions. Your reusable first stage wasn’t developed not because someone was stupid, but because there wasn’t anyone who actually needed it (in the sense of being willing to pay the extra cost for it).