(So far I have described how I now, only two years after I wrote the above, prepare my own books. The difference is that after I have them composed on the TV-like screen, and edited to my satisfaction—a computer-controlled typewriter puts it onto paper, which is mailed to New York, edited again, and given to someone to type into electronically readable form for typesetting. Obviously that stage will be eliminated soon; why can I not send a tape and be done with it? Incidentally, the NY Trib had no typewriters or paper at all: reporters and rewrite persons worked on a TV screen, editors called that up to their screens, and when done the text went directly to composing without ever being on paper at all. JEP)
Once a book is in the central utility data banks, those who want to read it can call it up to their TV screen; a royalty goes from their bank account to the author's; where is the need for printer or publisher? Of course some will still want books that you can feel and carry around; but a great deal of publishing can be as described above, and for that matter there's no reason why your home terminal cannot make at reasonable cost a hard copy of anything you really want to keep.
Few publishers own printing plants; most hire that done. What publishers provide is editorial services and distribution. The latter function will largely vanish: the information utility does that job. There remain editorial services.
With such a plethora of books as might appear given the above—after all, the only cost to "publish" a book would be to have it typed, plus a rather nominal fee to the utility for storing it—critics and editors will probably grow in importance. "Recommended and edited by Jim Baen," or "A Frederick Pohl Selection" would take on new significance, and one assumes that these editors would continue to work with authors since they'd hardly recommend a book they didn't like (and some authors might even admit that a good editor can help a book). "Big Name" authors would probably have little to worry about, with their readers setting in standing orders for their works; new writers would probably have to get a "name critic" to review their stuff.
OK; still not all that new for veteran science fiction readers; but did you catch the time scale? The equipment, all of it, exists now. The telephone net to link nearly everyone in the US with the information utilities exists now. Computer electronics costs are plummeting. McCarthy's home terminal can be with us in the next five years, with the information utility fully developed in ten to fifteen.
In fact, the only obstacle is entrepreneurial: the equipment and technology exist at affordable costs. It takes only someone to organize it.
But—in twenty years we may not need the home terminals except as backup. Dr. Adam Reed of Rockefeller University has a new scheme: direct computer to brain hookups.
Ten years: Dr. Reed believes that within ten years we will have cracked the code that the brain uses for information processing and storage. Once that's done, information can be fed directly into the brain's central processing unit without going through such comparatively slow peripheral equipment as eyes and ears. You need not read a book: the computer can squirt the book's contents directly into your mind.
Of course it won't be the same experience: that is, when I read War and Peace there was more than a transfer of information. There were also emotional responses. Those would be lacking in the direct information-acquisition experience. Thus there will probably remain a few nuts who read, just as TV hasn't quite eliminated literacy in the US; but it may well be that within your lifetime the normal method of acquiring information, particularly of grasping the content of dull books that everyone wants to have read but no one wants to read, will be through computers.
This means a complete restructuring of our education system, and perhaps it is high time; yet I have met few teachers who have thought about the new capability at all, and there is no one I know of planning for the time when we do not have to sit in classrooms for the first twenty years of our lives.
There will always be a need for education, of course; for those who can teach their pupils to use the information available to them; and who will teach them to be civilized (although that latter may not be a function of schools, and certainly is only indifferently performed in large areas just now.)
Incidentally: Reed believes that each of us has a different code; not all brains use the same information processing symbols. Thus each of us would need a computer that has been taught to use our coding system. That is no bar, of course; the computer system need not be very expensive, and probably won't be, at least not after a few years. (One speculation: if each of us uses a different coding system, then true telepathy would be rare—and far more common among identical twins than among others. All of which seems to echo experience.)
And the implications of all this are staggering. In the near future—in your lifetimes, most of you—there will be those who, having obtained an implant, will quite literally know everything known to the human race. (This assumes that the information utilities will also exist; but those seem inevitable.) Want a multiple-regression equation linking weather, gasoline consumption, electricity generation, ship keels laid, the price of wheat futures, and the number of wall posters in Peking? Merely think the question and wait; it shouldn't be long before you have it.
Because, according to Reed, the implanted transceivers I have used in various stories (High Justice, Exiles to Glory, etc.) are perfectly workable—but, as mentioned earlier, I may have been too conservative. Certainly though we will have implants that "talk" to you, feeding information directly to auditory and optic nerves; in fact we have them, crudely, now, and use them to make the blind see and the deaf hear. So far have we come in the past few years. In the not distant future we shall do more for the handicapped than was ever thought possible. The "Bionic Man," shorn of some of the more impossible touches that violate the laws of thermodynamics, may become reality in this century.
But go further: when the coding system is completely known, a human personality can be "recorded"; and if the cloning experiments prove out, the personality can be transcribed into a younger edition of the same person: know what you have learned at fifty, or eighty, and put that into a body aged 25.
Far out? Science fiction? No. There's a very real possibility that it can happen to some of you; a very small possibility that it might happen to me.
It's getting hard for science fiction writers to keep up: even we are getting future shock. But it's all for real, you know.
It can all happen. The Big Brains are coming.
The Big Rain
Mankind needs frontiers. We need new worlds to conquer, impossible odds to overcome, a place of escape from bureaucracy and government; a place where life is hard but the problems are simple, requiring no more than courage, determination, and hard work to win great rewards.
Even for those who will never go chasing out to the frontier there's a great comfort in knowing it's there: that you could, if you chose, pull up stakes and try your hand at making a new life. For the warriors and dreamers among us a frontier is so vital that if there isn't a physical one, we'll create an internal problem and fight that.
I suppose that man's need for a frontier is a debatable proposition, in that somebody might question it; but I doubt that many science fiction readers would dispute the point. To a very great extent this is what science fiction is all about.
Unfortunately, science hasn't been cooperating with us. First comes Special and General Relativity to say that we won't ever travel to the stars. Then come the space probes to rob us of our traditional solar system. What's left?
As I've said before, I firmly believe we'll overcome the speed-of-light barrier, and if we don't, we'll still find a way to leave the Solar System; but that may take quite a while, and suppose I'm wrong. Are there no frontiers left?
Venus was once a favorite. Hot and swampy, a younger sister of Earth, with grey skies laden with thick clouds; primordial ooze, scattered thick forests burdened with heavy vines and hanging mosses; thick fungus that ate men alive; a world populated with strange animals, dragons an
d dinosaurs and swamp creatures resembling the beastie from the Black Lagoon, Venus was a world to challenge us.
Then the scientists took away our Venus, as they had taken away our Mars. For a time the extremely high temperatures of Venus gave some comfort to Velikovsky and his supporters, and thus argued for a more unstable and less orderly Solar System than we had imagined—we could take comfort in fright. In a world of cosmic catastrophes there is room aplenty for adventure and derring-do.
After all, Dr. V. had predicted that Venus would be very-hot, possibly even still molten from her fiery birth from Jupiter; but, alas, even that is denied us. Pioneer looked down on Jupiter and found that he is not even solid. The Queen of Heaven does not resemble her mythological father, no, not in the least.
Velikovsky would have hydrocarbons (and carbohydrates) in the Venerian atmosphere, and he may well be right; but mostly there is carbon dioxide (CO2) in fearful amounts, diluted with sulfuric and hydrofluoric acids. Here and there may lurk clouds of ice crystals and water vapor, but mostly there is a poisonous and corrosive brew pressing down with 90 atmospheres on Aphrodite's face.
Venus does not seem an attractive place.
* * *
When I was a boy I read a juvenile" novel so utterly forgettable that I recall neither plot nor title nor author nor characters. One incident in that book impressed itself in my mind.
The heroes had stranded themselves in the Arabian (or Moroccan or Tunisian or Saharan) desert, and were about to be engulfed by wild barbaric tribesmen on camels—when lo!, the tribesmen retreated in panic, driven away by the sight of a regiment of British Tommies in full uniform.
There were, of course, no British troops for hundreds of miles. The author made a point of explaining that this sort of mirage happens quite often in the desert. I remember looking for one many years later; it's true enough.
There are numerous stories of ghost cities in the Mediterranean. One can often be seen across the straits of Messina: a full city, with moving traffic, nestled onto the dry and barren hills. The illusion has been known for at least three thousand years.
What happens is that changing air densities will affect light rays so that under the proper conditions the image is refracted over the horizon. A British regiment marching in Aden is seen a hundred miles away. Ghostly images of cities form on barren shorelines.
This is rare on Earth. On Venus it's inevitable. The Venerian atmosphere is so thick that light is refracted through 90° and more. The whole planet is visible from any point on the surface. The explorer will seem to stand in the bottom of an enormous bowl, with cliffs towering high above him.
This doesn't have a lot to do with the subject of this column, but it fascinates me. Venus must be a confusing place, where one sees the back of one's own head spread about on the top of an enormous cliff. . .
* * *
The mirages might be worth seeing, but there's not a lot else to attract colonists or tourists. Carl Sagan, Cornell U's resident genius and expert on Venus, once said "Venus is very much like Hell," and a glance at Figure 10 shows why.
It's just not a very attractive place to live. In fact, a more useless planet is hard to imagine. What good is a lump of desert whose surface temperature is up there about the melting point of lead, whose atmosphere is too thick, with winds of fearful velocity and force blowing dust across craters and jumbled structures like the surface of the Moon?
Some writers have proposed that since we can never visit Venus (and wouldn't want to if we could), we should make her the Solar System's garbage heap. Venus could become the repository for all the long-term radioactive wastes produced by nuclear power plants. It's cheaper to drop a load onto the surface of Venus than to send it into the Sun, and what other use do we have for Hell anyway?
Quite a lot: Venus is very likely to become the first terraformed planet. In a few hundred years there may be more people living on Venus than live on Earth at present.
The asteroids can be one frontier for the future, as I have described elsewhere; but they'll never be developed into a New World. That's reserved for Venus.
Not only can we terraform Venus, but we could probably get the job done in this century, using present-day technology. The whole cost is unlikely to be greater than a medium-sized war, and the pay-off is enormous: a whole New World, a frontier to absorb adventurers and the discontented. Few wars of conquest ever yielded a fraction of that.
Hardened veteran SF readers will have recognized the title of this chapter as coming from a 1955 ASTOUNDING novelette by Poul Anderson. His 'The Big Rain" should rank with all the other successful predictions by SF writers: when the Big Rain comes, we can live on Venus.
The Venerian atmosphere consists mainly of carbon dioxide plus some other junk that we'd like to get rid of.
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Figure 10
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The junk is water soluble, and will wash away when we get the rain to fall.
That thick CO2 blanket is the cause of all Venus's problems. Solar radiation comes in, a lot of it as visible light and hotter, into the ultra-violet. It penetrates into the atmosphere and is absorbed. As Venus slowly rotates, until she faces the absolute black of outer space, the absorbed radiation tries to go back out. But it has cooled off somewhat, from ultra-violet to infra-red. IR is absorbed nicely by carbon dioxide. The heat never gets back out, and up goes the Venetian temperature. This is called "the greenhouse effect" and works quite nicely for farmers on Earth, as well as out there.
In fact, there are theorists who wonder if burning all those fossil fuels won't loose so much CO2 into our own atmosphere in a couple of generations as to bring Earth's temperature up sharply. The result would be melting ice at the poles, and the drowning of most of our sea-coast cities.
Before we get too alarmed at that, though, there's something else to worry about: it seems that far from rising, the average temperature of the Earth is falling, and we may be due for a new ice age, complete with glaciers in North America and like that, within the next hundred years. For more on both subjects see other chapters; just now we're concerned with reducing the Venerian fever to manageable levels.
We need to break up that thick CO2 layer around Venus. This will automatically liberate oxygen. It will also chop down the atmospheric pressure to something tolerable.
Breaking up CO2 is a rather simple task Plants do it all the time. We'll need a pretty rugged plant, since the atmospheric temperatures of Venus range from below freezing to live steam, but fortunately one of the most efficient CO2 converters is also one of the most rugged.
In fact, it's generally thought that the blue-green algae were responsible for Earth's keeping her cool and not getting covered with a thick CO2 blanket like her sister.
The algae will need sunlight, water, and CO2. There's no question about finding those on Venus. The temperatures are all right, too, at least in the upper atmosphere where we'll seed the algae.
This isn't just theory. "Venus jar" tests have shown that blue-green algae thrive in the best reproduction of the upper Venerian atmosphere we can make, breaking down the CO2 and giving off oxygen at ever-increasing rates. In fact, to these algae, Venerian conditions are not Hell but Heaven.
We have the algae, and we can build rockets to send them. About a hundred rockets should do the job. Say each rocket costs 100 million dollars, and the ten billion dollar price doesn't seem unreasonable. Say we're off by a factor of ten, and we've a hundred billion, less than wars cost; and out of that much money we should be able to get a couple of manned Venus-orbit laboratories as a bonus. It will be, after all, a once-in-evolutionary-lifetimes opportunity.
Once the algae are sprayed into the upper atmosphere, they happily eat up CO2 and give off oxygen. They have no competition. Nothing eats them, and there's plenty of room for expansion, plenty to eat, and lots of sunlight.
Some calculations show that within a year of the initial infection the surface of Venus will be visible to Earth telescopes. Mea
nwhile the algae go on doing their thing. The atmosphere clears. Sunlight coming in begins to radiate back out. The atmospheric temperature falls, and lower levels are invaded by the algae.
There is about 100 inches of precipitable water in the Venerian atmosphere. This means that if it all fell as rain, it would cover the entire surface to a depth of 100 inches.
This sounds like a lot until you contemplate the miles of water standing over most of the Earth. Still, 100 inches is respectable. Compare it to Mars, with 10 microns of precipitable water, and you'll see what I mean.
As the air above Venus cools, raindrops form. Eventually it will rain, and rain, and rain. The first planet-wide storm probably won't ever get to the surface: the rain will evaporate long before that But as it evaporates, it cools still another layer of atmosphere; down move the algae.
Repeat as needed. In no more than twenty years from Go, the Big Rain will strike the ground. Craters will become lakes. Depressions will become shallow seas. Rivers will begin carving channels.
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