What Big Thing Are We Getting Wrong About the Future?
Plus some more reasons for optimism about the future.
I have a new piece up at Discourse inspired by a gem of a book that I found thanks to a recommendation by Jason Crawford.
I recently tracked down a copy of a fascinating old book, Our World in Space, by Isaac Asimov with illustrations by Robert McCall. Published in 1974, five years after the moon landing, it wonderfully captures a moment of exuberant excitement about the achievements of space exploration….
Asimov was a writer of classic science fiction (his Foundation series was recently brought to the screen) and a prolific popularizer of science. McCall was an artist known for his portrayals of space exploration—real NASA missions as well as imagined future technology—and for the giant mural, “The Prologue and the Promise,” that he created for Disney’s Horizons pavilion at EPCOT, which set a standard for optimistic portrayals of the future. You can see his visual influence in “2001: A Space Odyssey” and the Star Trek franchise. And his 1974 illustration of a spherical space station just might have had an influence on another big science fiction franchise.
I have used “The Prologue and the Promise” as an illustration several times before to sum up the attitude of techno-optimism. McCall died in 2010, but there is a magnificent website with high-quality images of his work. Go ahead, poke around there for a bit. I’ll be waiting here.
Oh, and did McCall influence Star Wars? I haven’t been able to find direct evidence, but the timeline works out, and, well, you tell me what this McCall illustration might have inspired.
But all of this is not primarily what my article is about. My article was touched off by a passage from Asimov’s text that I found jarringly incongruous.
In one respect, a Moon colony, or any colony or combination of colonies outside the Earth, cannot help us. No one of them, nor all of them together, can help us solve our population dilemma. If anyone thinks that the important reason for exploring space is to find outlets for our expanding population, let him think again....
We must, of our own determination, and here on Earth, halt the population increase by balancing the birth and death rates.... That leaves us with the necessity of decreasing the birth rate....
Remember that, above all.
The thing that jumps out most is that this was completely wrong, and fifty years later, we’re worrying that we have too little population growth. But the overpopulation hysteria was so completely dominant in 1974 that Asimov felt compelled to stick this bit of Malthusian pessimism right in the middle of a book that is in all other respects wildly optimistic.
I go on to ask what other idea we’re getting similarly wrong today. My answer is global warming, which even pro-progress, techno-optimist writers will almost universally append with a similar warning: “Remember that, above all.” I go on to examine why overpopulation turned out to be a bust and to apply those lessons to global warming. The central lesson is this:
Asimov—who had just predicted that abundant energy from fusion reactors (always 30 years in the future) would enable us to provide all the resources for hundreds of millions of people to live on the moon—could not imagine humans being able to support another four billion people in the much more favorable conditions on Earth….
The 20th-century economist Julian Simon famously argued that the human mind is the “ultimate resource.” Ingenuity and innovation allow us to tap into far more new resources than humans can use up—so long as people are free to put these innovations into action. The bursting of the overpopulation hysteria proved him right, but those looking for a new reason for pessimism, and a new justification for restrictive policies, simply fell back onto global warming. Many of them still reject the possibility that the same ultimate resource that allowed us to prosper with a growing population could also allow us to thrive even if the climate is changing.
All of this is distracting us from building the hyper-technological future Asimov and McCall envisioned.
Read the whole thing.
Speaking of techno-optimism, there are a few links I’ve been holding onto about some recent progress. Let’s start with the kind that would have inspired Asimov and McCall.
Last September, a space probe I’ve been following with great interest completed its mission. OSIRIS-REx returned a sample of an asteroid to Earth.
The capsule, released four hours earlier by the spacecraft, parachuted onto the Utah Test and Training Range. Recovery teams in four helicopters raced to the landing site in a carefully rehearsed effort designed to bag the capsule quickly to lower the risk of contamination.
They found the capsule on the desert floor, intact and sitting perfectly upright, as if it had taken pains to be presentable. A helicopter hauled the capsule on a 100-foot line to a specially prepared “clean room” in a military hangar. It will be flown Monday to the NASA Johnson Space Center in Texas for scientific study.
And here’s the even cooler part of the story.
The parent spacecraft then fired thrusters to ensure that it would not wind up in Utah, but would instead move on to another target, the asteroid Apophis, with a scheduled encounter in 2029.
Apophis? Man, some of these asteroid names are pretty heavy.
There are a couple of reasons for studying the asteroids. One is “planetary defense.” The asteroid targeted in this mission, Bennu, has an orbit that crosses that of the Earth.
NASA’s DART mission last year demonstrated that it is possible to fly a spacecraft into an asteroid and change its motion. The space agency would still like to know more about the composition of these dangerous near-Earth objects and how they might potentially be diverted, which is part of what scientists will study using the sample from Bennu.
The other is asteroid mining. In theory, certain rare elements that are difficult to find on Earth may be present in larger quantities in asteroids. This idea led to a wave of asteroid mining startups about ten years ago, which subsequently went bust. But people are trying again.
“The space infrastructure on Earth is pretty mature and we can buy a fairly high-energy launch for a fairly low cost,” says Jose Acain, AstroForge’s cofounder and Chief Technology Officer. He adds that there are also now a lot of satellite manufacturers to choose from; for its CubeSat tests launching this year, AstroForge has chosen Orb Astro in Oxford in the U.K.
“A lot of capital expenses that we would have had if we had started this company 10 or 15 years ago, we don't have now,” Acain adds, “so we can really focus on the actual mining tech that we need to actually extract these platinum-group metals from these asteroids.”
The platinum-group metals (PGMs)—iridium, osmium, palladium, platinum, rhodium, and ruthenium—which are among the rarest mineral commodities in Earth’s crust. Just 30 tonnes of rhodium, used in catalytic converters, are mined every year, and only three tonnes of iridium. Mostly these minerals come from mines in South Africa, Siberia, with some mines in the US and Canada.
But Acain coauthored a paper published in the January Planetary and Space Sciencesuggesting PGMs are abundant in meteorites. “From studying the meteorite database, we found that in general there is a higher concentration of PGMs regardless of what asteroid type you go after, but it’s significantly higher if you go after metallic M-types,” says Acain.
As another asteroid mining startup put it: “Nobody wants to think about a future in which humans don’t thrive. So it’s time for us to go into space.”
This is not happening perhaps in the form McCall had in mind, which is to say that the current round of space exploration is being done by robots, not humans. Then again, I don’t think that would have been as much of a surprise for Asimov.
Asteroid mining is still somewhat speculative, but human thriving does not depend on us having to go into space—not quite yet. There is great deal of abundance still untapped on Earth.
I linked recently to a discussion about environmental objections to mining new deposits of lithium—which is ironic, since lithium is a key material for the batteries in electric cars, which we supposedly need for environmental reasons.
But it’s worth exulting in the sheer size of these new discoveries.
Straddling the border of Oregon and Nevada rests McDermitt Caldera. Barren and desolate, the crater-like depression pockmarked with crags and scars might seem bland and lifeless to the layperson’s eye, but the real treasure is what lies just below ground. The 616-square-mile region could be home to the world’s largest known lithium deposit….
Reporting new readings in the journal Science Advances from mineral samples taken at Thacker Pass, home to a future lithium mine in the southern part of McDermitt, geologists say that unique clays composed of a mineral called illite hold nearly unprecedented lithium concentrations. While most claystone lithium concentrations average around 0.4% by weight, the illite clays contain 1.3% to 2.4%.
The finding reinforces estimates made by the authors’ colleagues back in 2020 — that sediments within McDermitt Caldera hold 20 to 40 million metric tons of extractable lithium, and perhaps far more. That’s at least twice the amount held within the brines beneath the Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia, the former largest known lithium deposit on Earth.
See another report on a big lithium find in Maine, and the political obstacles to mining it. Perhaps this is the reason we have to go into space: to get far enough away from regulators and NIMBYs.
The prospects for development on Earth are not just mineralogical.
I mention the Green Revolution in my article on the overpopulation hysteria. By way of Jason Crawford, I recently came across a journal article quantifying the gain for just one food item: the strawberry.
Incidentally, what I didn’t know is that modern strawberries are all derived from a spontaneous hybrid found in the gardens of Versailles 300 years ago. But they have been developed a great deal since then.
The annual production of strawberry has increased by one million tonnes in the US and 8.4 million tonnes worldwide since 1960. Here we show that the US expansion was driven by genetic gains from Green Revolution breeding and production advances that increased yields by 2,755%.
We’re about to experience a similar explosion of benefits from mRNA vaccines.
Moderna has already filed for regulatory approval of an mRNA vaccine for the respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), a cold-like illness that can be severe in infants and older adults. The company also has an mRNA flu vaccine in late-stage clinical trials….
[R]esearchers can add in mRNA for many different flu strains to create a vaccine that might provide broader protection. Last year, a team at the University of Pennsylvania tested an mRNA vaccine containing antigens from all 20 known influenza subtypes that infect humans….
Flu is just the beginning. The list of diseases for which mRNA vaccines are being developed goes on (and on and on): malaria, HIV, Zika virus, Epstein-Barr virus, cytomegalovirus, herpes, norovirus, Lyme disease, Nipah virus, C. difficile, hepatitis C, leptospirosis, tuberculosis, shingles, acne, chlamydia, and many others.
And the report goes on to list potential mRNA therapies for cancer and cystic fibrosis. But I should warn you that there is already a new wave of technophobe hysteria over mRNA technology.
Here’s an anecdote I found very revealing.
When Karikó and Weissman made their breakthrough discovery in 2005, “I told Kati our phones are going to ring off the hook,” Weissman said in an interview with Boston University’s alumni magazine in 2021. “But nothing happened. We didn’t get a single call.”
There’s a lesson here about the unpredictability of scientific advances, which often develop in obscurity, and perhaps also about the perverse human preference for bad news over good news.