The Way the Future Blogs

John Diebold
 

Isaac Asimov and I often argued, though seldom rancorously — it was our idea of fun — but on questions of fact I knew better than to disagree with him. He had a wonderfully retentive and accessible memory, which allowed him to speak extempore a lot more comfortably than I. From time to time we discussed the question of which of us was smarter, especially when we were speaking on the same program.

On one occasion when we had been discussing collaborating on a book about the environment. I said, “It shouldn’t be too much trouble. Between the two of us, we know everything there is to know about the environment already.”

And Isaac cut me down to size with, “And what is the one fact about it that you know and I don’t?”

With all the lecturing we both did, we wound up now and then on the same program, frequently at a science-fiction gathering, but pretty often at almost anything that inspired groups of human beings to want to listen to someone talk about possible futures. Business and management groups in particular seemed to have an unslakable appetite for what we had to say, and one of the most high-end such groups was run by a man named John Diebold.

I was always glad to take part in a Diebold event, because you met such interesting people, but there was one in particular that is particularly vivid in my mind for three reasons: 1) It occurred while the first American rocket was landing on Mars. 2) In my after-dinner talk I made two of the wrongest predictions of future events that any human being has ever made. And, 3) it was the only time in my life that I ever saw Isaac Asimov drunk. (Maybe the only time he ever was.)

That particular John Diebold event was in one of the big Boston hotels, and for once in these as-I-remember-it recountings, I can tell you exactly when it happened. That is, I can if I’m correctly remembering which flight it was. I believe it was Mars 3, and I believe the meeting took place on 12 December 1971. The first American spaceship to make a soft landing on the planet Mars was going into its landing maneuvers while we were getting ready to sit down to our dinner. No one else in the room seemed greatly worried that they were missing a historic event, but Isaac and I were yearning to get to a TV. As soon as we could we sneaked out of the conference rooms and headed for my room on an upper floor of the hotel.

Our timing was splendid. The spaceship was on its way down with its cameras pointing toward the area where our Eagle was to land. Although the ship was still high in the lunar sky it and its cameras were so close to the Martian surface that we were seeing more detail than any previous human eye, with even the greatest of modern telescopes, had ever been able to make out.

One of those previously unseen details drew a yelp from Isaac. “Look at those craters! But I didn’t ever talk about craters on the Martian surface!” Come to think about it, neither had I.

We lingered until the spacecraft was down. (It was what you’d call a partial success — made an exemplary soft landing but seconds later stopped transmitting for good. Still no other spacecraft, U.S. or U.S.S.R. had done even that well at that time, so we were cheered,)

But then I had to get back because it was my turn to be the after-dinner speaker, and that is where I made a fool of myself twice in a single talk.

John Diebold had asked me to talk about the future of business, and I was explaining how wise America’s heads of major corporations had become. As an illustration, I mentioned some planning sessions I had recently sat in on at one of General Motors’ subdivisions, perhaps the one that specialized in transmissions. I had been impressed by the free and easy discussions and by the way each executive seemed to be familiar with the problems, and solutions, of all of the others. After telling my audience about some of the things I had observed I added, “That’s why I have confidence in the future for General Motors. If something should happen so that they couldn’t make cars and trucks any more they would transition quite smoothly to some other kind of business — maybe even some kind we’ve never heard of before, like importing Martian artichokes — and they would make a great success of that, too.”

2008 conclusively demonstrated the folly of that asinine opinion, which was probably brought about by the amount of time I had been spending with B-school graduates with their pernicious doctrines. (”If you’re on a search committee to find a new president for a grocery chain, you don’t want to hire an expert grocer to run it. You want someone skilled in business management who will have expert grocers under him.”)

The other stupidity was even worse. I called it the Corporate Leisure Time scenario. When successful businesses reach a certain stage in their development, I said, they often decide to devote at least a small fraction of their corporate energy on projects that are not directed at making a profit but are good for the community — underwrite college courses; support libraries and theaters; Forbes has its open-to-the-public art galleries; AT&T allows its scientists at that jewel in the diadem of American research facilities, Bell Labs, to spend part of their time working on pure science problems, etc.

Anyway, my point was that American business was doing what it could to make the world better, and I anticipated it doing more and more. (Oh, so wrong! What actually happened was that the practice of giving enormous bonuses to top executives even if they lead their businesses right over the cliff sopped up all the money and there wasn’t any much left for making a better world. Bell Labs still exists, though in diminished form, and much of the other business generosity to the community has simply disappeared. )

That was my record for wrongness in a single evening. I’ve been even wronger now and then, but not in public.

 
When my talk was over, the hotel waiters brought out the wine fountains. Those were a sort of cute example of modern technology that was just becoming popular around then, and Isaac was intrigued. He watched to see how it was done, then picked up a glass and filled it under the red-wine stream. He drank it down, then got in the white-wine line and refilled his glass. He saw me standing there near the red fountain and came over. “The red wine is good,” he informed me, “but I like the yellow better.”

Then we were talking to other people and then, a while later, I saw him standing by himself, holding onto the back of a chair and looking concerned. And that was the last I saw of him that night, though someone said he’d lurched up to his room. When I saw him the next day I asked him how he’d liked the wine fountains. “Interesting,” he said, and would go no farther, and I never saw him touch an alcoholic drink again.

    John Lindsay
 

There was another Diebold occasion that I remember well, although I’m not sure whether Isaac was present at it or not. This one was a party at the Diebold home on East End Avenue. Among the guests was New York City’s mayor, John Lindsay. He was one of the few Republicans I admired, and he and I found ourselves chatting as the party wound down.

I had been explaining to him that a plan he had just announced for curing some of New York City’s ills was unlikely to work, because the city had become too big, and too divided, to be governable in that way. He put his watch away and frowned. Then he asked, “Did you say you were going to Penn Station? I’ll be going right past it, so why don’t you let me give you a lift?” So after we had said our good-byes and got into the mayoral limousine he politely and friendlily explained to me the numerous ways in which I was out of my cotton-pickin’ mind, with twenty or thirty minutes of statistics, polls and quotes that lasted him until we pulled up in the station — and not in any crummy old taxi rank but in the police entrance that took us right into the heart of the structure.

Lindsay had been plausible and persuasive, and he fairly nearly convinced me I was wrong. All the same, I think I may have won the argument. About ten days after that, I picked up a paper and discovered he had just announced that he wasn’t going to run for reelection after all.

 
Next installment coming up when I write it.

    Peripherally inserted central catheter.
    (Photo by Pinkfud.)

A few days ago I had what’s called a PICC line installed in my right arm. This isn’t a big deal; it’s just a tube that they run up through one of your big veins to transport things like antibiotics to where they’ll do the most good. There are other ways to do that job — for instance to lie in a hospital bed for a week or so and have a nurse come by and stick a needle in you every now and then. That works just as well, but with the PICC line you can go home and do it yourself.

I wouldn’t even have mentioned it except for a coincidence. There’s a tiny possibility of some kinds of problems, like infections. The day after I got the thing, there was a story in the paper about how widely hospitals varied in the number of serious infections they gave patients who got the procedure. The number they’re all supposed to aim for is zero, but not one of the hospitals in this study made it. Some give their patients hardly any, others more than they like to admit to. (Which is really shameful because this is one of the absolute easiest to prevent problems in medicine. The most important thing the OR people need to do to eliminate them is wash their hands.)

So what I’d like to know, if any of you know the answer, is how many patients do get infected from these procedures. Any of you happen to know anything about that?

This isn’t urgent, by the way. I don’t even know anybody who had such an infection. It’s just curiosity, which is to say it’s a part of my plan for all of us to know everything so we can educate the rest of the world.

Wind farm.

• About a quarter of a million American water mains burst every year.
• Henry David Thoreau once started a campfire to cook some fish he had just caught and inadvertently burned down 300 acres of Connecticut forest.
• Wind energy employs more people than coal mining.

Sun Myung Moon

Back in the late 1970s, I got a call from a scientist friend I had last seen at a meeting on energy storage in what then was still Yugoslavia. (I don’t know if he would like me to mention his name in this connection.) We’d had a good time exploring the place between sessions — Yugoslavia was a beautiful and welcoming country, before they decided to begin killing each other off — and now he was offering me an all-expenses-paid trip to South Korea to attend what he promised would be an interesting conference. That was a country I’d never visited before, and I knew just what to say to that offer.

I said it: “What’s the catch?”

“I thought you would ask that,” he said. “Well, it’s the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s, what he calls a Conference on the Unity of the Sciences.”

That was a pretty big catch. I’m not fond of weird made-up religions in the first place (I’m personally an infrequent Unitarian) and of Moon’s in particular, because I think he is an evil man, with his relentlessly right-wing Washington Times and unpleasant doctrines, not to mention that I had been buttonholed in airports by too many of his zombie saved souls to be impartial.

But my friend assured me that I wouldn’t have to fight off zealots intent on converting me — “There will be sessions about the Unification Church but you won’t have to attend. I don’t.” And there were guaranteed to be some good papers and interesting entertainments.

Well, those things pretty much convinced me anyhow, and when you added in that it was a chance to visit a previously unexperienced foreign country, the pressure to say yes was irresistible. I did say yes, though not without some apprehension..

Which increased after I got a call from the Moonie organization in New York inviting me to visit them in New York City to pick up tickets and program and advance copies of some papers.

Like most New Yorkers (all right, I was living in Red Bank, New Jersey, at the time but New York was where my heart was), I was wary of the Moonie outposts. They had bought outright one of the city’s better hotels, the 43-story New Yorker, and made it their dormitory and nerve center. (Just across the street was the new Madison Square Garden, which Moon chartered to hold his mass marriages, several hundred Moonie couples at a time.)

What had been the lobby was now divided into lanes and divisions like a Motor Vehicle Bureau office. I found the right one; they gave me my documents with a minimum of conversation and no proselytizing at all, and I escaped to Penn Station, which sits right under the Garden.

Continue reading ‘Interesting Meetings I’ve Attended:
Weekends with the Moonies’ »

Gunnar Heinsohn

There’s this sociologist from Germany, Gunnar Heinsohn, who has an interesting slant on what it takes for a country to be warlike, and how to avert it. According to Heinsohn, bellicosity is a function of the number of unemployed young men in the population and his star exhibit is the island nation known to all Arthur Clarke lovers, Sri Lanka.

Twenty-odd years ago, the average Sri Lankan family had three point something sons; there was a lot of unemployment and the violent war between the government and the rebellious Tamil Tigers had been going on for decades and seemed to be getting worse all the time. Now the average Sri Lankan family has only one son, and the war ended this year.

Heinsohn points to such militant countries as Lebanon, with a declining birthrate, and Iran, now down to an average family size of 1.7, as less likely to get into wars than their historical records and warlike declarations would suggest. Be nice if he were right.

If there was one program that every single human being alive would benefit from, it is the identification and control of N.E.O.s — Near Earth Objects — which is to say some wandering asteroid or comet core that sets its sights on this nice planet we live on. The thing is that if one turned up in our telescopes now, say one the size of the Chicxulub one that did the dinosaurs in, there’s nothing much we could do about it beyond waving “bye bye.”

This is not to say that we can do nothing at all. Au contraire. It’s just that we have no capacity to do anything about it right now. In the future, assuming we started preparing for action now, we could do a hell of a lot — starting, say, with a systematic scan of N.E.O.s to identify which are threats (this has already begun, and in fact has routinely picked out the ones that come closest to Earth — although, annoyingly, it hasn’t identified most of them until they have already passed us by. This is not a situation that is useful to us). But if we achieved earlier identification, why then, we could even design and build a fleet of space tugs to change the orbits of threatening N.E.O.s from collision to miss.

These are not trivial chores. Put them together just that far and you’ve already run up a total bill that probably exceeds the tab for the total present world space program, by how much I don’t know.

But that’s only the beginning. If we successfully carried out such a program, it might save us from an abrupt extinction. But here we’re only talking about something that would wipe out a majority of life on the planet itself. What about something smaller, say a Tunguska collision that would wipe out a single city? The actual Tunguska Event (on June 30, 1908) didn’t wipe out a city. It didn’t wipe out anything but a few thousand acres of uninhabited Siberian forest, because that’s where it chanced to land.

It didn’t have to be that harmless . Since the location of such an impact point is essentially random, it could just as easily have landed on Times Square, which would have meant the instant annihilation of the entire city of New York.

Does that make you think of anything, well, scary? Because it does me. And I’m fairly sure that there are a lot of people in this world who would consider it greatly interesting, to use your space tug, in a different manner.

One way you could make an N.E.O. miss a city and instead fall into the sea (which raises its own problems of tsunamis and so on, but never mind that for now) is to fly up to it in your space tug and push it into a slightly different orbit.

No problem?

Well, not exactly no problem at all. There are certain quite problematical theoretical possibilities.

Suppose the pilot of your space tug was, well, Iranian. And suppose he was an enthusiastic believer in the rightness of his president’s views on Israel, and why wouldn’t it be just as easy to dump that N.E.O. right on top of, say, Tel Aviv?

Re-orbiting N.E.O.s, as we have described, might someday save us all from extinction. But another way to look at it is that it could become the deadliest weapon that this endlessly inventive species of ours has ever devised.

 
Still, we don’t really have to worry about that as a real possibility, do we?

I mean, the world’s astronauts and cosmonauts are all sane, calm human beings who would never allow themselves to be distracted from their duties by any other consideration. Trust me on this. The people in the International Space Station are not harmed in their duties by extraneous forces.

Still, if you’ve been troubled by these stories of discord on the space station that have been coming to us now and then, calm yourself. Yes, the Russians once stopped the Americans from using their toilets. The Americans then retaliated by ejecting Russians from the American gym. And measures involving food, water and even air were then threatened.

But all is well. Relax. Have a good night’s sleep.

“Homo artificialis” as conceived by Joseph H. Kraus & H. Winfeld Secor in 1924, from Hugo Gernsback’s Science and Invention Magazine. (Via davidszondy.com)

So I was feeling pretty good, this day a few weeks ago, and I thought it was about time that I got back to the three-times-a-week cardiovascular exercise group I’d been faithfully working out with since around the year 2001. That is going on nine years. It is also, I believe, the principal reason I’m still alive now. Of course, since I’ve been pretty much housebound for most of this year with one confounded thing after another, I couldn’t get there. So I had to start all over again like a rookie.

I made an appointment and got over to the place and had a nice talk with Rose, who is now the head rehab nurse. All went well. We settled on when, where and what, exactly, I would be doing, and then Rose took my vital signs. And then it all fell apart. My heart rate was 41.

This is not a pulse that is compatible with staying alive for very long. So Rose called Adrian Deme, my new primary-care doctor. He told her to get me to an ER for evaluation. And next thing you know, I was in a hospital bed getting ready for a pacemaker.

 
Actually it wasn’t quite that fast. There were a few little annoyances they had to track down and fix first, but then it was straightforward. A pacemaker implant requires cutting a little hidey-hole into the flesh of your chest just under the collarbone, tucking the little electroshock-emitting gadget in there, with its powerful little battery. Then they run a wire from the gadget to your heart. The wire ends in something like a tiny ordinary wood screw, which the surgeon screws into the flesh of your heart with something like a tiny screwdriver. Since he can’t see through the meat and blood he has to operate this by x-ray. Then, when he gets it well screwed, he closes you up and you’re done.

Before you get to that point, though, they wheel you into the operating room, which you are not overjoyed to discover is really chilly. They keep it that way to discourage germs, and they won’t let you put on a sweater, Then the nurse spreads some soap on your bare chest and scrubs it vigorously. When she gets it the cleanest it has ever been, she spreads a fresh batch of soap on your chest and repeats the process. She does this three times. Then the surgeon steps up and starts to cut.

Were you thinking that might hurt? It doesn’t. You don’t feel any pain. At some time when you weren’t looking the anesthesiologist has put that whole area of your chest to sleep. You do feel that there is somebody doing all kinds of unexpected things down there, and you aren’t at all sure that you care for it. But then that stops and you’re on your way back to your hospital bed, all done.

And the next morning they send you home.

See more Lolcats and funny pictures

Back last winter, Deborah Webster, of Meadowbrook, NSW, Australia grew concerned about the way many scientists seemed to feel about the animals they studied — as “stimulus-response-driven robots incapable of thought or feeling” — so she wrote New Scientist with a suggestion: “Every scientist working in the field should be given a cat.”

That would be for training purposes. Then, when fully trained in such matters as opening and closing doors, choosing the right cat food and providing a comfortable lap to sit on, the scientist could return to his laboratory with an enhanced understanding of his subject.