by Larry Niven
We have learned, yes. Cast your memory back to Kitty Genovese, who was knifed to death in New York over a period of several hours. Witnesses watched from scores of windows in surrounding apartment buildings. None of them so much as phoned the police.
And everyone wondered why, but the answer is simple. They had been trained not to help…even as you and I have learned not to interfere with the horrors we see happening…on our television sets. From adult Westerns to Alien to The Exorcist to live coverage of the Vietnam War, we watch people bleeding and we remain seated.
Jon Sheen is an aspiring writer stationed in Germany. In 1984 he wrote to me as follows:
“I just witnessed a murder. Don’t worry about me; I’m in no danger: the killer was caught immediately. In fact, you probably witnessed the same murder, and in the same way: on television. I’m sure you know the case I’m talking about: Gary Plauche murdered the man who kidnapped his son Jody: one Jeffrey Doucet. You’ve seen the same tape, I’m sure, and my God, it is astounding! If you were directing a suspense film, you couldn’t ask for a more dramatic scene, right down to the way the victim’s head eclipses the gun just as the shot is fired. This is the third such piece of astounding newsfilm I’ve seen since the beginning of February…”
“It’s affected me strongly. How, precisely, I don’t know, but watching that and, earlier, watching two grown men in Rhode Island walking to a car in a comical embrace (rendered entirely unamusing by the fact that one of the men was a cop, and the other a hunted criminal holding a gun to his head) and seeing the car shot to pieces by half-a-dozen cops, wounding the captive officer and killing the fugitive; and watching a Lebanese man in a light blue shirt writhing in pain, denying that his factory held armaments, his right arm broken and mangled and twisted within the sleeve—and then, watching the films taken moments later, of his corpse being carried away…All these will stay with me for a long time, and I don’t know how I’m going to judge this new capacity to eyewitness mayhem, but when I finally do decide how to react, it will be strongly.
“I know what I’ll have to weigh against it, though: I’ve seen the Shuttle launch, and land, live. I’ve seen astronauts floating along through the void, untethered—live. I’ve seen the Earth, so huge and blue and beautiful—even on a 25" RCA—that it made my throat close up. And I was one of the first human beings to gaze across the sands of Mars; at the same time as Sagan, Hibbs, and the whole gang at JPL, I looked at the place that is Mars, watched sliver after sliver of Viking’s-eye-view of another planet—live.
“Electronic Global Village,” the man said.
“Yeah.”
You don’t feel rich. Right? But you’re very aware of the taxes you pay. In California some years ago, it reached the point of a taxpayer revolt. We set a legal limit on our property taxes.
But a taxpayers’ revolt used to mean tax collectors hanging from trees! partly because society could not yet afford lampposts. Taxes are enormously higher now than they were during the Whiskey Rebellion in Vermont. Why aren’t there tax collectors hanging from lampposts?
Because even after the tax collector gets through with you, you’ve still got too much to protect. Because you’re rich.
And if you don’t feel rich, the little old lady on a fixed income must feel still worse as she watches her dollar dwindle to its intrinsic value—high-quality paper. What is it that’s doing this to you?
It’s communications. Advertisements! An endless stream of advertisements interspersed with every kind of inducement to keep you watching. And while you learn of the wonders you can’t afford, you’re also learning not to believe what you hear; because after all, these products can’t all be best. What were you thinking while you watched the Presidential candidates on your television sets?
The world is rich, and the easy resources that won the wealth are nearly gone. Outcroppings of copper and iron ore. Surface seepages of crude oil. A place to dump the pollution. Don’t think that wasn’t a form of wealth! Even coal can’t be mined without technology; the first steam engines were built to pump water out of British coal mines. Once mined, the coal has to be moved to where it’s needed, somehow.
If civilization collapsed today, it may be that no future civilization could be built on our bones.
We have a great deal to lose.
We expect starvation to be rare.
We expect paved streets. Sidewalks. Sidewalks with ramps for wheelchairs. Freeways. Lighted streets at night, all night. Universal schooling.
We used to expect cheap gasoline. Remember?
We expect that the streets will be empty of dead bodies in the morning. Every morning. All of this is fairly recent. Consider Welfare: for the failure, total failure has a bottom limit. Some can crawl back up from there. In The Way the Future Was, Frederik Pohl tells of being a boy in the Depression. It was ugly, before Welfare.
We expect help in time of disaster. Communications and easy transportation will mitigate the effects of famine and flood. Somebody will know it’s happening; somebody will come with what we need.
We expect the freedom to go our own way, without the compulsion to be like our neighbors. But being unlike your neighbors has always been a crime. Your present freedom of lifestyle depends utterly on your freedom to move away from your neighbors, to find a place where you needn’t conform, or even to find people who think like you do.
You are not a representative sampling of the population. Your freedom to assemble here, now, together, depends utterly on easy communications and easy transportation.
We can lose all of that. We can lose more. We can lose the vote.
Collecting and tabulating votes is terribly expensive. Many nations can’t afford it. We could be one of them, if we continue shipping our money to the Arabs while we shut down power plants. Tyranny is cheaper than democracy. Only one nation in all of Africa offers its citizens the vote. Can you name it? It’s the rich one. It’s South Africa.
We are richer than other nations. If starvation among our neighbors didn’t bother us, we wouldn’t be human—and all nations are our neighbors on this single planet. But the wealthy nations are vulnerable to more than guilt. The have-not nations outnumber us. Modern communications, including advertisements, have told them what they’re missing, and who’s got it.
We could share the wealth equally—and make the whole world poor. You’ve heard that before, but you may not have grasped what it means.
As long as there have been cities, corpses in city streets have posed a continual health problem.
The police force paid by taxes is a recent invention.
Murder is a recent invention—as distinctly opposed to killing a man who has armed relatives. That has always been dangerous. But killing a tramp used to be quite safe.
Throughout human history, women have been property. In general women are less muscular than men, more vulnerable to enslavement.
Slavery in general was the result of better farming techniques. It allowed civilized peoples to take prisoners instead of killing them, because now they could feed prisoners. The horse collar was a first step in freeing slaves; it meant that the horse could do about three times as much work as a man, without strangling. But if civilization collapsed now, could we afford horses? And grasslands to feed them, instead of farms to feed us? I think we’d go back to slavery.
In the name of “protecting the environment”—surely a laudable aim in itself—there are those who would oppose all forms of industrial power. I believe that they have forgotten what the environment is like before men shape it. They have forgotten tigers and tsetse flies and rabies. It would cost us dearly to lose our present level of civilization.
We also can’t stay where we are.
The easy resources are running out, yes, but there’s more to it than that. No civilization has ever been able to stay in one place.
We have to deal, somehow, with the information explosion. The proliferation of laws and rules and regulations is part of that. Perhaps we can be educat
ed to tolerate the flow, assimilate it. Perhaps we need information-free vacations—“anarchy parks,” places with no news-flow and no rules at all, as in “Cloak of Anarchy”—for our sanity’s sake.
Cars and freeways and airlines give us the freedom to be ourselves, but easy transportation carries its own penalties. Almost every state in the Union has too few state hospitals for the criminally insane. Every time a judge sends a patient to a California mental institution, some doctor has to decide not whether to put a patient back on the street, but whom. Now the patient is out here with me.
Why can’t we build more psychiatric hospitals, and schools, and prisons? Because voting citizens are not trapped where they are. Some won’t vote their money to improve their neighborhood because it’s easier to move.
We can’t stay the way we are. We have to go up—or down.
Today we have the power to make the whole world as wealthy as we are right now. It would take thirty to fifty years, if we start now…and we have to start now. If we wait, we may wait too long.
I’m pushing space travel. The resources are all up there, and the first resource we need is solar power.
We have several choices as to how to use it. Most people favor picking up the sunlight with collectors several miles across—which doesn’t mean they’re particularly heavy; the Echo satellite was both huge and flimsy. The collectors would convert the power into microwaves, or laser beams, and beam it down to collectors on Earth.
Or try this. Big, flimsy solar mirrors. Beam the sunlight down directly, all to one tiny patch of desert. Nobody would live there, of course. The collectors would run at around 350 degrees F.
Again we face choices. We can carefully intercept only the sunlight that would have reached Earth anyway. No heat pollution. Or we can pick up light that was on its way to interstellar space.
Do we want heat pollution? Ocean thermal difference plants (OTEC, using the temperature difference between the top and bottom of an ocean) produce none. Nuclear plants produce just as much heat pollution per kilowatt as coal plants do. But maybe heat pollution is what we want! We’ve got fair evidence that the next Ice Age is starting now. Right now.
We may have been holding off the next Ice Age for the last couple of hundred years, just by burning so much of our fossil fuels, polluting the troposphere, producing a greenhouse effect. The fuels are running out. If we build nuclear plants and put them on line as fast as we can, it may be enough; though we’d have to be producing more power, because there’s no particulate pollution. But these mirrors would do the job for us too.
There’s a second choice, and if you like protecting the environment, you’ll love this. Besides beaming power down to the factories from orbit, we can move the factories into orbit, and beyond.
The resources of the Moon include metals and oxygen-bearing rock. An astronaut who has worked on Earth, in free-fall, and on the Moon prefers the Moon for working conditions. Something has been leached from Earthly soil over billions of years; mix lunar dust into it and the plants fall in love.
A nickel-iron asteroid a mile across would hold five years’ worth of the Earth’s total production of metals, in metal deposits richer than any now to be found on Earth. If you like iridium, you’ll love the asteroids; it was that which gave Alvarez his clue to the extermination of the dinosaurs. We’ll probably find water ice; certainly we’ll find water loosely bound in compounds.
Behind the problem you just solved you will find another problem, always. There are social implications to making the whole world rich. “The poor are always with us”—up to now. Somebody’s going to face a hell of a servant problem.
Well, we’ll burn that bridge when we come to it.
• • •
• • •
His eyes shifted…and the sky had opened a mouth.
The shock only lasted a moment. A great empty mouth closed and opened again. It was rotating slowly. An eye bulged above one jaw; something like a skeletal hand was folded below the other. It was a klomter away and still big.
THE INTEGRAL TREES, 1983
THE KITEMAN
BLOWING SMOKE
We had come to Jet Propulsion Laboratory, northwest of Pasadena, to watch the pictures Voyager 1 would send back as it passed Saturn.
We were science fiction writers from everywhere in the United States. Over the years Jerry Pournelle had managed to establish a place for us at JPL: the SFWA members were a special case of “Press.” Some of us had been here to watch the first pictures from the surface of Mars, and the featureless first close-up photos of Venus before JPL started playing with them, and the stunning pictures of Jupiter’s moons, and Jupiter itself…as if God had taken a tremendous spray-painter and had Himself a wonderful time…
In the opening scenes of FOOTFALL Jerry and I captured some of the flavor of those wonderful few days. The probe fell past Saturn, past various moons, through the ring. We waited for some iceflake to smash it, but it never happened. The F Ring was twisted. [“Haven’t you ever seen three earthworms in love?”] The panel of experts hadn’t figured out why [“We’re sure Saturn is doing everything right…”]. Perhaps the exhaust from a passing interstellar spacecraft had roiled it? Europa had a huge crater [“Well, we’ve found the Death Star.”]
There was an orientation film for the Press. General laughter was heard when the narrator said, “We expect to find at least six rings.” He hadn’t seen the pictures. We had. Thousands of rings!
In the Press Kit was a lecture about the atmosphere of Titan. Astronomers have long known that Titan has a cloudy atmosphere. They can also demonstrate that Titan isn’t massive enough to hold an atmosphere. What’s it doing there?
They call it the gas torus effect, and it works like this—
Titan isn’t massive enough, so molecules of atmosphere leak away. [It’s happening to Earth’s air, too, but much more slowly.] But the gas molecules are still bound by a strong gravitational field: Saturn’s. They remain in orbit around Saturn.
The gas torus is of low density, and is shaped like an overinflated inner tube—or a smoke ring, if a smoke ring were spinning, with the inner part going somewhat faster than the outer. Some of the trapped gas escapes anyway. Most of it will end up back in Titan’s atmosphere, and leak away again, and return…
Wow!
I made notes all over my press kit, and presently transferred them to my computer. Those notes include an intermediate case. It’s up for grabs: you can easily beat me into print.
We’ll put a Mars-size moon in orbit about a Jupiter-size body, and move it to halfway between Mars and Earth.
The Jovian primary will radiate some heat. If we want Earthlike temperature we must put the system farther from the sun than Earth is. It’ll still be warmer than Saturn’s moon Titan, so the warmer gas will escape faster unless we make the body more massive than Titan. Almost certainly it will be tidally locked, with one face turned toward the Jovian at all times; so days will be long. With all of that in mind…we now have a world with an Earthlike atmosphere and four-tenths of Earth’s gravity.
Man-powered flight becomes easy. You need no more than bicycle gears and a propeller and a lot of wing…say a hang glider or a short-winged Gossamer Albatross…or even bird-wings, for a flyer with an injured leg. Notice that if I bring the moon closer to the Jovian [and move the Jovian farther from the sun, and make the sun a little bluer so it will put out more UV for plants, and so forth; don’t forget that the moon will become gradually more egg-shaped] I can shrink the moon and thus the gravitational pull, until your arthritic Aunt Tanya can fly.
But I became fascinated by an extreme case.
Forget the dinky little Jovian. Let’s put a neutron star at the center! That gives us a ferocious gravity gradient. We’ll put a gas giant planet in close orbit around it…not necessarily something as big as Jupiter, but a world more like Neptune. The planet won’t be habitable, not by a damn sight. But the gas torus itself should have enough pressure to support life. If we g
ive it enough time, if we let life develop, and green plants…
We’ll get a breathable Earthlike atmosphere in a doughnut-shape larger than a world, where everything is in free-fall except for tidal effects; where gravity is found only at the endpoint tufts of what I then called “spoke trees,” that look like a tree with two tops and no bottom; where everything that lives can fly, except men.
Time must pass, not only for green life to produce raw oxygen, but for the neutron star to spin down. Remember, that’s the ashes of a supernova explosion. It carried the magnetic field of a murdered star into itself when it collapsed. A star like that, spinning within a nebula-cloud that used to be the outer layer of that same murdered star, generates a signal powerful enough to shower Sol system with X-rays from hundreds of light-years away. That’s why it’s called a pulsar. We’re describing enough radiation to fry any human.
So give it time to spin down. A billion years may be enough. Two would be better…except that the Smoke Ring is not really very stable. It might be gone by the time we arrive.
This is the point at which I began to need hard numbers.
Dr. Robert Forward worked at Hughes Research in Malibu, California. His interests were and are wide-ranging. When I first met him he had a prototype mass detector on display; I described it in “The Hole Man.” And he was about to publish a paper demonstrating that gravity-wave storms can result if mass spirals down into a black hole…when Jerry Pournelle’s “He Fell Into a Dark Hole” appeared in Analog.
So Forward located this Jerry Pournelle’s phone number and called him to acknowledge that Jerry had beaten him into print. And Jerry wangled an interview. And invited me to go along.
Forward talked about everything under the sun. He described a new concept, Hawking’s quantum black holes, black holes of all sizes formed in the extreme conditions of the Big Bang. They’re a natural for stories, and I told Jerry I’d beat him into print. [And did.]