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.

I’ve been thinking about a little girl I heard of — I’ll call her Susan, because that wasn’t her name. Susan’s mother was HIV positive two years ago, when Susan was born. There is a treatment for children being born of HIV-positive mothers and it works well, but for religious reasons Susan’s mother wouldn’t allow the doctors to treat Susan. So Susan died of AIDS at the age of two.

The game is that you and I pretend that we’re the U.S Senate and we’re writing a law about Susan and her mother. Do we conclude that Susan’s mother has committed a crime? And, if so, what is the crime, and what is the punishment?

Leave your comments here.

Stanislaw Lem

The late great Stanislaw Lem has such a towering reputation for social criticism that we forget that, for most of his career, he had to be extraordinarily careful about how he used it. If he got too comical about the wrong people, his career could easily have come to a quick end in the gulag.

All the same, he couldn’t help himself. In the 1940s, while Lem was still a medical student, he found Josef Stalin too tempting a target to ignore and wrote a satirical opera about (says the “Feedback” columnist in the 18 December 2008 issue of New Scientist) a Soviet secret policeman and the “superhumanly intelligent and inhumanly smiling Josef Stalin.” Then, having written it, he did what any sensible person of that time and place would do. He hid it where it would never be found.

Only that was then. But this is now, and now it has been found — at last, after sixty years of dogged searching. Which American publisher is going to be the first one to translate it into English and publish it for me to read?

Vincent Bugliosi, who put Charles Manson away, is probably the world’s most successful prosecuting attorney. He knows all about bringing a charge of murder and getting a conviction, and in this book he argues that George W. Bush, along with Dick Cheney, Condoleeza Rice and perhaps other members of the Bush administration are guilty of the crimes of murder and conspiracy to commit murder under the laws of the U.S.A. He describes how he could prosecute them if he had standing to bring an action, and points out that any district attorney in any state or county from which any soldier was shipped to Iraq and was killed there does have standing. Moreover, any one of them can bring an action at any time since there is no statute of limitations on murder.

Now, do you think there is any chance that any one of these sworn law enforcers will actually issue an arrest warrant and have the cops haul one or more of these malefactors in for the customary fingerprinting, mug shots and residence in a cell?

I don’t. And that makes me wonder what kind of a country we’re living in.

Vocabulary question: When your weird Uncle Mortimer left you all that money, the tax people who work for your other uncle — for Uncle Sam, that is — took part of it back. What is the name of the tax that gave them the right to do that?

Answer: It’s called an “inheritance tax.” If you said “estate tax” you would also be right. However, if you said “death tax,” you would not only be wrong but you would have fallen (I learned from reading the 21 May issue of the New York Times Magazine) for one of the sneaky tricks of a man named Frank Luntz who works for the Republican Party (and other right-wing bodies). What does Luntz do for them? He thinks up emotionally loaded names for things that they want people to have an emotional reaction to.

Take for instance President Obama’s health-care program. That’s a perfectly descriptive name for a specific plan, but it’s not how Luntz wants you to think of it. He prefers that you call it “a Washington takeover.”

That’s not one of his most ingenious creations, because it’s based on an outright lie: there’s no “takeover” in the President’s plan. The consumer keeps all his freedom of choice. He simply has more options to choose from.

But actually Luntz can get people to change how they feel — and vote — without even having to lie. Do the oil companies to want to make voters feel more kindly about despoiling an environment? Don’t call it “drilling for oil” any more. Call it just “energy exploration.”

If you want to see how this relabeling works in action, just turn on the Fox news channel for a while, or listen to a panel of Republican senators discussing world events.

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.

  Dick Cheney

I was never a fan of Dick Cheney, but since he has been out of office he seems to have got even worse. Some of the things he says simply can’t be defended.

In just one example, he says that the blame for al Qaeda’s bloody and brutal destruction of the World Trade Center and the death of the thousands of people it murdered belongs to one man alone, namely Dick Clarke, because Clarke had the responsibility for warning President Bush in such matters and failed to do as he was sworn to do.

But that is not simply untrue, it is the opposite of true. On several occasions Clarke sent clear and unambiguous written warnings, one of them just days before the actual attack and they were ignored. That is a matter of public record.

So there are only two possibilities. Either Cheney is flat-out lying though aware that his lies can be proven on him, or he has simply lost touch with the real world.

Either way, whatever he says, he is not to be believed.

Lefty, the Cat

Turns out that cats, like people, have handedness. Females are more likely to be southpaws, males righties, but it can go either way. If you want to know the leanings of the Felis domestica in your house watch it the next time it has a one-paw job to do, like fishing something out of a jar,

 
You’re Never Too Poor to Swindle

The bloodsuckers are up and about and their specialty now is seeking out the people who are already in terrible financial shape, to whom they promise help. Which, of course, they don’t deliver, preferring to vacuum out and appropriate whatever crumbs of cash the impoverished may have left. (Bernie Madoff was a great villain, but at least he stole from the rich.) So I went back through my files and came up with “Financial traps are flourishing: Tough times have bred five costly come-ons” in the March ’09 Consumer Reports. So if you, or someone you know, has been hit with threats of foreclosure or evaporation of your 401K or the like, you should take a look at it.

I’ll give you just one example. If all your credit cards had been taken away and nobody would give you a new one, Continental Finance Classic MasterCard was more obliging. You probably don’t want its help, though. The maximum chargeable credit line was $300, and by the time the customer got the card $250 had already been taken out of your balance to pay for the account processing fee: $50, and annual membership fee, $200. The $50 of credit that was left you could use as you liked, bearing in mind that an account management fee would have had to be paid every month, with other fees coming due later. So beware!

So long, Fertile Crescent

The Fertile Crescent, which is the land between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, is the place in the Middle East where our planet’s civilizations were born. It was the home of the world’s greatest early cities — Sumer, Ur, Babylon and more — and it fed them from its rich and well watered soil; it is where many of the stories in the Bible took place and where they invented beer.

It is projected to become a full-fledged desert by the end of this century. There’s a brutal drought going on in the region, but the real enemy is dams — the big ones Turkey has erected along the Euphrates and the ones Iran has installed along the tributaries of the Tigris. Both countries have indicated they’ll go right on building them. Already some of the smaller rivers are running dry.

 
The Bush-Cheney Alumni Association

No, we didn’t make that up. It’s real. It’s what it says it is, an association of the people who were most closely connected with President Bush and Vice President Cheney over the last eight years, and its purpose, they say, is “dedicated to setting the record straight.”

Maybe so, but I can’t help thinking it’s more like getting their stories together so they’re all giving the same answers to the hard questions. Questions like: When you had the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden and all of Al Qaeda licked and running and it only took one more push to put them away for good, why did you pull the troops out to invade Iraq? And when you did go ahead and invade, why didn’t you immediately seize all the Iraqi explosives and weaponry instead of leaving them unguarded for the terrorists to steal and kill American soldiers with, as they’ve been doing ever since? And about forty other questions about the doings of the most wrong-headed administration this country has seen, ever.

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