By Any Other Name

by Spider Robinson

  With the technology we already know how to build, Mars is ten weeks away: the same length of time it took the Pilgrims to reach Plymouth Rock. Why are we squinting at Antarctic rocks, for heaven’s sake?

  The next most obvious example: I don’t think one sf writer predicted the quiet collapse of the Soviet Union. Even the most liberal of us accepted without question the seeming truism that a slave state could never collapse until the last kulak was expended. Apparently with all our vaunted exploration of the behavior of alien cultures, we failed to do enough homework on one of the most prominent ones available for study on this planet. In our defense, nearly every scrap of data permitted to leave the USSR was as suspect as they could make it—and even the spooks, privy to much more and better data than we were, and paid to specialize in it, were caught just as much by surprise. But it’s still embarrassing.

  Many sf writers have hopefully predicted the eventual conquest of all diseases. But none of us could have dreamed that one day mankind’s oldest and deadliest scourge, the taker of more human lives than any other single cause—smallpox—would be eradicated from the planet, utterly and forever…and the event would arouse no notice at all. Did they have a party on your block when the last smallpox vaccines were destroyed awhile back? Was there a parade in your town, honoring the heroes and heroines who avenged millions of our tortured, disfigured and slain ancestors? Are you familiar with their current efforts to do the same for polio, chickenpox, diphtheria and other diseases?

  Several sf writers foresaw the VCR. Not one of us ever guessed that by the time it arrived, a sizable fraction of the populace would feel incompetent to operate one. We still have trouble grasping that there are people with shoes on who find it a challenge to set a watch, twice, and specify a channel number. Even harder is understanding why some of them seem proud of it.

  I haven’t checked, but I’m sure at least some sf writer predicted the disposable lighter—and that none ever envisioned a feature mandated by law which would make them virtually useless for senior citizens, musicians and invalids, while perfectly accessible to toddlers.

  Nor could any of the thousands of us who foresaw computers, or even the dozens who foresaw personal computers, have guessed that in the end an operating system that Spoke Human would be supplanted by one that required you to learn to Speak Computer.

  Being logical folks, perhaps we tend to be interested in and think about and write about other logical folks—so all of us, save Robert Heinlein himself, failed to see The Crazy Years coming.

  And Now The News…

  In the early ’50s, the great sf writer Theodore Sturgeon wrote to his friend Robert Heinlein that he was both broke and blocked, literally could not think of a story to save his life. Robert’s reply was typical of him: a check…and several pages of story ideas. All of them made money for Ted—but one in particular inspired a very prescient and powerful story.

  Heinlein had said, “Write about the neurosis that derives from wallowing daily in the troubles of several billion strangers you can’t help…”

  From this seed, Sturgeon created “And Now The News—” (available in several collections and anthologies). His protagonist is a simple, good man with an obsessive addiction to the news—he takes every paper sold, subscribes to current affairs magazines, keeps news on the radio and TV at all times. When asked why, he quotes John Donne: “Every man’s death diminishes me/for I am part of mankind.” Over time, his obsession deepens, he makes a desperate attempt to go cold turkey…and events ensue so astonishing I honestly don’t think it’ll spoil the story for you if I give away the kicker here (SPOILER WARNING):

  In the end, the guy tells his shrink he’s finally found a viable solution to his problem: he’s going to go out there and diminish mankind right back. The last line is, “He got twelve people before they cut him down.”

  This was forty years before the Unabomber.

  If Earth is one big starship, the news media constitute its intercom. And almost nothing comes over the intercom but damage reports. Tragedies way over on the other side of the vessel, malfunctions in inaccessible compartments, tales of distant madness and mutiny, conflicting rumors of collision hazards in our path…and constant reminders that, first, our acceleration is increasing beyond design expectations, and second, there is no Captain, and the wheel is being fought over by vicious ignoramuses. Is it any wonder morale is so rotten on this starship?

  Pessimism has become the very hallmark of sophistication. Only a dullard would go see a movie known to have a happy ending, these days. Every Hollywood sci fi future is either a nightmare…or dismissed as a fairy tale. We, the richest and luckiest humans who ever got to gripe for 70 or 80 years, are coming to subconsciously expect—in some perverse way, to crave—the imminent End of All Things. And so we find ourselves obsessed with damage reports, like a man staring in fascination at the slow progression of gangrene up his leg.

  No rational person can blame the media for this: we demand it of them. We won’t pay for good news. We insist on knowing the worst, even when we’re helpless to do anything about it. God knows why. Attempts have been made to establish cheerful media, which would scour the planet to tell you everything that went right today, every averted tragedy, miraculous serendipity or realized dream that might give you hope, lighten your load…and they all went belly-up. There is no media conspiracy to depress people. I think most of us in the media realize we live in the same starship. But there is a media conspiracy to feed ourselves and our families, and that means we must sell you what you want to buy.

  I don’t propose that the media lie, or suppress facts, or strain for Panglossian slants—but if we’re going to convey the truth and nothing but the truth, we ought to shoot for the whole truth. Every news outlet needs a regular feature, given equal weight with the day’s lead story, titled “Silver Lining.” The massive resources of the newsgathering industry could—and should, as both public- and self-service—manage to come up with one story a day that made us feel a little less like diminishing mankind right back. And it wouldn’t hurt to quadruple the comics section, while we’re at it.

  I’ve experienced nearly five decades. With all its plagues, wars, disasters and injustices, the one just past (in which computers got friendly, the Berlin Wall came down, the Soviet Union peacefully folded its cards, nuclear apocalypse receded for the first time in my life, smallpox was annihilated, Mr. Mandela walked free, perfect music reproduction became trivially cheap, Geraldo’s nose was broken on camera, and the Beatles put out two new singles) has been hands down the best. Yet it was back in 1965-75, a decade when just about everything that could possibly go wrong did, that a significant fraction of us last seemed to believe we could change the world.

  Hope—belief in the possibility of beneficial change—is a scarce and precious resource. It has been throughout history; every society that ever ran out of it died. Our hope is battered daily by the barrage of bad news, and by the defeatist attitude it engenders: the cynical compulsion to deconstruct every comforting myth, to find (or if necessary invent) feet of clay for every hero, to explain away every hopeful event as a cursing in disguise.

  Granted: we can’t hide our heads in the sand. It is my obligation as a crewman of Starship Earth to listen to the intercom regularly. But it’s also my obligation to turn the damn thing off when it starts to impair my morale. That means triaging my newspaper, and removing CNN and Newsworld from my remote-menu, and zapping the network news fungus whenever it appears. (You’d be surprised how little you miss that way: after a dogged, relentless effort to ignore the O.J. Simpson story, I find I know far more about it than the jury was allowed to.) It’s possible to have too much information to do your job.

  Fear is a subtle and potent drug, and it has its uses. Daily news is civilized man’s analog for the exhilaration of facing the sabertooth: a daily hit of bracing fear. But dosage is crucial: at high concentrations (particularly if mainlined: taken by television), evil side effects start to set in. You c
annot kill the sabertooth. There is nothing one can do about any of the horrors in the news (purely local bunfights excepted), except fret…and at some point panic, yield to despair. And when there are enough panicked, despairing people on the starship, The Crazy Years come.

  Time we all turned to the funny pages. It’s important to remember something else Robert Heinlein once said: “The last thing to come out of Pandora’s Box was Hope…”

  Says Who?

  What are the facts? Again and again and again—what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what “the stars foretell,” avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable “verdict of history”—what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your only clue.

  —Robert Heinlein,

  Time Enough For Love

  The first and most obvious problem is, it’s getting harder to tell a fact from a factoid—let alone a factoid from pure mahooha.

  Witness the public humiliation of poor old Pierre Salinger, unwary enough to trust data he’d gotten from the Internet, and publicly proclaim that Flight 800 had been shot down by the US Navy. (A theory which, at a minimum, requires one to believe not one sailor on the hypothetical offending vessel harbors the slightest desire to be rich and famous, and the captain has no enemies.) It has always surprised me to meet people who believed “It must be true: I read it somewhere,” and in my lifetime it became surprising to find people who believed “It must be true: it was on TV.” And still I find myself astonished again, now that I’m meeting people who tell me, “It must be true: I downloaded it.”

  The Internet, as presently constituted, is anarchy. Information ka-ka. Garbage in, garbage out. There are no fact-checkers. There is no peer review. Any fool who fancies him or herself an information guerilla can publish any gibberish he or she likes. Therefore all Internet “facts” not supported by checkable references have the same value: zero.

  Our culture appears packed with people desperately eager to lay down a kilobuck or two, fill their desktops with large cranky gear, and devote hundreds of hours of skullsweat—to gain access to an endless cornucopia of suspect data. And, since it arrives via the highest of high tech, treat all of it as revealed truth. We’re piloting on the basis of the most up-to-the-minute rumors. This strikes me as a recipe for the first global riot.

  But the Internet is not the problem; only its latest avatar. No matter how information comes to us, it takes hard work and careful analysis to decide how much it’s worth. Okay, we can automatically discount anything on government stationery, or paid for by any political party or interest group. Sure, we can be suspicious of any announcement from anything calling itself an institute. Sooner or later Time or Newsweek will report on something of which we have personal experience, and we’ll get a sense of how much faith can be placed in them. When I receive (and I swear I did) a junkmail from some psychic advisors that begins, “We hope this did not reach you too late,” I can tell at once that it has reached me about 45 years too late.

  But what are we to do when, for example, we read the flat assertion that “Children born to women who smoked dope while pregnant cannot make decisions. They cannot learn,” in a November 20 Vancouver Sun Op-Ed column by one Connie Kuhns? Let’s even suppose for argument that some shred of documentation had been offered, some study cited, some scientist named—suppose we’d been given facts, rather than a claim they exist. How are we to check the facts? Required: at least an hour in a good library (or navigating cyberspace) just to find the cited study and read it. (How many of us possess the necessary intellectual training to tell a good study from a statistical massage?) Another half hour to assess the professional competence of the author(s). An hour, minimum, wading through fat indexes of technical journals, to learn whether the claimed result is reproducible, or unique to the claimant. More work will be required to trace who funded the study, and where they got their money. Then, for context, you have to step back and derive for yourself the ratio of anti- to pro-marijuana studies that receive funding—and a dozen other threads. It was kind of Ms. Kuhns to spare us all that tedious work—but in consequence only those of us who chance to actually know any children of mothers who smoked pot while pregnant can tell she is speaking pernicious nonsense.

  Bad data are dangerous, whether cybernetic or semantic. We all know that some downloaded programs contain viruses, bits of bad programming that instruct the host computer to do self-destructive things, and that the wise hacker practices safe surfing. But Richard Dawkins pointed out that ideas are very like viruses. If I think up a good idea and tell it to you, it takes over a little of your brain’s processing power, forces it to make a copy of itself, and encourages you to pass it on to others. The stronger the idea, the faster and farther it replicates itself, until—if it be vigorous enough—it saturates the whole infoculture. An early hacker named K’ung Fu Tse, for instance, wrote some viruses that have survived for millennia. Such protonerds as Muhammad, Buddha and Jesus programmed infobots so powerful that they continue to crash operating systems and reformat whole hard drives to this day. A really good idea can spread like chicken pox through a daycare center.

  So can a really bad one. As Heinlein said, “The truth of a proposition has nothing to do with its credibility—and vice versa.”

  We need some real-life equivalent of Disinfectant, the clever little program written by John Norstad of Northwestern University which constantly guards my Mac against infection by corrupting ideas. Information hygiene requires a cultural Crap-Detector, that will allow us to practice safe sentience.

  And so we come at last to the second, less obvious and more serious problem, which I will have to leave for another column:

  Nobody wants one. Not enough to pay for it. Deep down, we don’t really care if the stories we download from the Net are true, as long as they’re good stories, and support our preconceived prejudices. These are, after all, The Crazy Years.

  Fat City

  A previous column discussed the pernicious effects of the daily bath of Bad News we all receive, and ended by paraphrasing a Robert Heinlein quote I here reproduce accurately:

  “Last to come out of Pandora’s Box was a gleaming, beautiful thing—eternal Hope.” At least one reader has since challenged me to specify at least one or two realistic Hopes, for that future which most other pundits assure him will be grim beyond imagining. Glad to oblige. For openers:

  1) How would you—personally—like a hundred billion dollars? (U.S.)

  Ever seen mining done? Metals cost so much because It’s so hard to get them—immense amounts of energy are needed to rip them up out of the ground and haul them to where they’re needed. Well, God obligingly took a large ore-rich planet, crushed it up into bite-sized chunks, and hung it in the sky, just past Mars. It’s called the asteroid belt. Iron, nickel, platinum, cobalt, gold, silver, copper, titanium, uranium—gigatons of it.

  Once you reach High Earth Orbit—which we achieved 30 years ago—you’re halfway there (You’re halfway to anywhere: the same rocket blast that will send you to the Moon can, if differently aimed, send you to Mars, or Pluto, or Alpha Centauri…eventually. All it takes is more time.) In orbit you build a robot probe with a solar sail capable of a thousandth/g constant boost—which we already know how to do. It reaches the asteroid belt in (very) roughly a hundred days, picks out a likely rock and installs a rocket on it. Some time later (how much later depending on how big a rocket you sprang for) the rock arrives in Earth orbit for processing. And there are more in the pipeline behind it; they’ll be arriving regularly, now…

  What do you care? Well, if the entire asteroid belt could be sold, and the money divided equally among every man, woman and child presently alive on earth…your personal share would be US $100 billion. If you worked 40 hours a week counting $100 bills at a rate of one per second, you’d die before you could finish counting your take—even if you lived another 70 years. (These figu
res from John S. Lewis’s Mining the Sky.)

  Let’s say something goes wrong, and somehow you don’t get your fair share. Don’t you think the trickle-down from that much wealth might at least help ease your mortgage some?

  All this, of course, is over and above the hundreds of billions that are already there in High Orbit, right now, waiting for us to come and get them any time we’re bright enough: zero g for convenient manufacture of priceless alloys and pharmaceuticals, infinite free solar power (not the 0.35% that strikes Toronto on (half of) the sunniest day, mind you: ALL of it), free vacuum, that sort of thing.

  And that’s just using existing, proven technology.

  2) How about INFINITE wealth—with immortality thrown in?

  There is a new and utterly astounding prospect on the horizon, called nanotechnology. It may change everything. It involves Very Tiny Machines, that move individual atoms around, in order to build things the same way nature does: molecule by molecule. At viral speeds. If it can be done, the implications are…well, totally unprecedented.

  Picture a molecule-sized computerized probe, injected in your arm: programmed to make X copies of itself from available atoms, which will then cruise your bloodstream looking for (say) arterial plaque cells, disassemble any found, and build (for example) bourbon molecules from the parts. Now extrapolate to any other metabolic condition you’d like to correct: cancer cells, tobacco tar, glandular deficiency, organic damage. There’s no reason to tolerate ill health—no reason to die until it suits you. Muscles of steel seem literally possible…though impractical.

  Want to take the family to Venus for vacation? Buy an invisibly tiny spaceship-seed, drop it into a vat of chemicals, and close the lid. Your self-piloting fully fueled space yacht builds itself. If you like, turn it back into the vat of chemicals when you and the family get home from Venus.