Turn Down an Empty Glass
by
Leonard Reiffel
Delivered to
The Chicago Literary Club
May17, 1999
Copyright 1999 by Leonard Reiffel
It is a delight and a privilege for me to participate in this
Closing Program of the 125th season of our
much beloved Chicago Literary Club and, as it happens, my
fortieth season of membership. Before I
proceed further, you are entitled to know a few behind-the-scenes
facts. The innocent suggestion of the
Program Committee that I present a paper on this occasion
instantly triggered a long series of subtle
changes in my life that began well over a year and a half ago and
have lasted to the present moment.
More particularly, the Club's invitation immediately galvanized
my wife, Nancy, into a markedly
intensified version of her decades-long, always gentle, and truly
indispensable program of tracking my
impending obligations.
You see, in addition to my many other shortcomings, an
uncharitable observer might conclude that I am
something of a procrastinator. I prefer to say I work best
against close-in deadlines. Nancy and I long
ago developed a symbiotic relationship around this issue.
Mysteriously, and in ways I certainly don't fully
understand, she has become a master of managing without nagging.
She delivers quiet reminders and I
respond by becoming a man better than I really am at oiling
sticking locks, fixing switches, or writing
papers. But I sense she does pay a heavy price for my improved
performance. Indeed, when I announced
to her that I had accepted the Club's well-meant invitation, she
greeted the news first by silence and then
with a momentary, but unmistakable, expression of pure panic. I
could read her mind ---- Oh God!
Another thing to remind him of and make him do!
Casting all modesty aside, I must also tell you now that by
choosing me, the program committee has
unknowingly selected a true expert on the subject of
anniversaries. Again this is due to my wife's
influence or perhaps more precisely to the years of careful
training I have undergone at her hands. To
prove my point, I tell you now that I am a veteran of no fewer
than 68 wedding anniversary celebrations,
a figure that will rise to 70 in the next six weeks or so. And
this doesn't count a small set of vaguely
similar occasions related to my one earlier and lamentable lapse
of matrimonial judgment. Lest you
conclude that I was married twice before the age of puberty, I
hasten to explain that Nancy loves all sorts
of celebrations and, among other things, she seems to like to get
married. We have been married three
times so far with more, I suspect, to come. And, despite the fact
that we have never been divorced, each
of these marriages brings its annual requirement for
celebration--its anniversary. Lets see---its May 28th
for the one in Perouge, France; June 26th for London; April 11th
for Chicago--- or was it May 26th in
France and June 28th in London----??? Ah well, perhaps I'll just
press on and worry about that later. To
these dates, whatever they are, must be added her birthday, my
birthday, and a multitude of other days
she deems worthy of recognition in some fashion, such as the
Vernal Equinox, Halloween, First Crocus
day, first day to use the fireplace in the Fall and still others.
Perhaps now you, especially you males,
begin to see my problem and the resulting depth of my experience.
The days must be marked--nothing
elaborate, a bottle of wine, a dinner, a card, any small thing
will do--but marked they must be. Since she
more than does her share in making preparations for whatever the
ceremony is to be, Nancy obviously
has long since come to understand that I am prone to forgetting a
critical date or two during the year.
And so it was that, years ago, reminders began to appear on my
business calendar: Four days to my
birthday"... London anniversary in two weeks ." And so on.
These notes are often reinforced with
verbal messages delivered with dinner or over breakfast.
Sometimes they even come in soft sleepy
whispers in the middle of the night. I am not sure she is awake
when this happens.
Now, consider the 125th Anniversary of this Club. Could one
possibly conceive of any more perfect
candidate for these campaigns? Absolutely not. Thus, May 17th
1999 was duly added to Nancy's list for
top priority treatment well over 12 months ago. "Len, your paper
for the... " I would nod and respond by
jotting down some notes. Nothing more would happen for a few
weeks or so. Then another reminder,
"Len, The Literary Club" More notes or a mumbled promise to
check some facts I would want to
include as soon as dawn breaks--let's say around 11am. Peace
again. Of course, she was really winning. I
was not writing the paper, but I was working on it nevertheless.
The crunch finally came when the Formal Announcement of the
meeting date arrived in the mail a little
less than four weeks ago. "OK," said Nancy, "shall I RSVP saying
you're going to be out of town?" She
propped the invitation against a candleholder on our kitchen
table. "This is staying here until you're
finished writing". Her voice was very firm.
"Maybe if you light the candle it will burn the thing up",I
suggested hopefully as I stared at my little
pile of accumulated notes. "OK", I sighed, "I'll start now, Pour
me some wine would you?"
She shook her head, "You know very well you never drink wine when
you're trying to write."
"But listen," I pleaded with a poorly suppressed grin, My title
is Turn Down an Empty Glass
and all I thought I'd do for now is try it out..." Needless to
say, I never did get that glass of wine but I
did start to write. She had won again ...
Fate seems to have decreed that the Chicago Literary Club shall
exist at that singular tick of the cosmic
clock when almost all of the deepest secrets of Nature are
destined to be cracked open and laid bare.
Tonight, I ask that you allow me the modest assumption that we
are here celebrating an event that
symbolizes just one particular moment in a Club history that will
span at least 200 years. If that rather
small assumption is valid, then some of our future members will
understand, in the grandest meaning of
that word, the farthest reaches of the observable universe, the
laws under which it operates, the processes
that brought it into being and even its ultimate fate. They will
understand the blueprint of life and how to
manipulate it to their own desires. They will re-engineer
themselves to be almost like Gods. They will
reign over the molecular, atomic and sub-atomic worlds and use
the evanescent radiations that stream
silently through space and through our very bodies in ways only
dimly foreshadowed today. And for all
of that, they may still reside in a world where, as now, many of
their brethren feel lost and purposeless
and subject to, as well as capable of, almost infinite cruelty.
But we will not talk of that last sad
likelihood tonight. Science and technology are much more
congenial subjects for an evening of
celebration.
Standing at this present instant in our Club's story, I propose
to look both backward and forward. We will
visit a few moments from the past and project ourselves as far as
75 years into the future, that is, to our
200th Anniversary. In these mirror-images in time, I hope to
catch at least some glimpses of what lies
ahead as the calendar spins through the next three-quarters of a
century.
Of course, we all know very well how dangerous the sport of
prediction is. When you look through a few
small knotholes in the fence of time, you almost always miss the
important sights on the other side, I will
try to make my task a little less daunting by focusing mostly on
the next quarter century. That is really
foolhardy enough. But throwing all caution to the winds, I will
also venture a peek at the 50 years after
that.
In all of this, I am consoled somewhat by the fact that these
remarks will soon fade into invisibility. At
most, they may someday serve to amuse some far-future researcher
working in a rarely visited and
quaintly non-electronic archive of the Newberry Library. I can
see him now as he happens across a dried
out and brittle gray folder in the Club's long-used standard
format. It contains the typed manuscript that,
in accordance with Club rules, I shall obediently hand over
tonight. The researcher shakes his head as he
skips through my predictions. I can almost hear his uncharitable
and derisive laughter. In my imagination,
the annoyed "Shuuush!" of a wonderfully tough little Newberry
custodian finally shuts him up. Serves the
bastard right, I say!
Twenty-five years ago, then President Nathaniel S. Apter, when
speaking of our club in his inaugural
address at the annual dinner of our centennial season, remarked,
"We are indeed old, but renewable each
autumn." As we will see later, this comment may not only apply to
our club but ultimately to our
members as well. Earlier in that same calendar year, long-time
member Lester King delivered a paper
entitled "..du Temp Perdu" in which he discussed not Proust but
Ponce de Leon and the Fountain of
Youth and recalled boyhood memories of the joy of reading
adventure books. His favorites were the 1911
Motor Boys Series, featuring boy-heroes Bob, Jerry, and
Ned as well as a villain who went by
the interesting name of "Noddy" Nixon. Mr. Nixon, by the way, had
no redeeming features whatsoever.
In the end, Lester King concluded that the Fountain of Youth
might not be such a great thing. Some of
our future members, and even some among us now, may be destined
to find out.
In the world of 1974, while Lester King was re-living his boyhood
memories and Nathaniel Apter was
delivering the third of his series of papers on the poet William
Carlos Williams, there was no Internet, no
millions upon millions of personal computers scattered throughout
the world, no lasers everywhere
including even in the pockets of grammar school kids, no DNA
replication technology, no space stations
or space telescopes, no 200 channel cable systems fiercely
contesting for our attention, and no cellular
telephones to follow us wherever we go. But there were inklings
of all of these things and many of the
other life-changing developments that surround us now.
As it happens, it was in 1974 that a tiny company with the rather
grand name of Micro Instrumentation
Telemetry Systems in Albuquerque NM, offered history's very first
personal computer for sale to
hobbyists. It was called the ALTAIR 8800. It cost four hundred
dollars; you had to assemble it yourself.
It used a panel of toggle switches instead of a keyboard to input
a few very simple commands. It could
do almost nothing-- nothing that is except trigger a
technological avalanche.
About that same time, a 30-year-old technician Kary B. Mullis was
working at Cetus Corporation. He
was casually dabbling in biochemistry when he discovered the
process we now know as PCR, the
Polymerase Chain Reaction which can multiply a tiny bit of DNA
into millions upon millions of exact
copies. PCR and similar techniques are now at the very heart of
the current biotechnology revolution.
Ironically, the method is best known to the public because of its
starring role in the O.J. Simpson trial.
Kary Mullis won the Nobel Prize in 1993. He got only $10,000 from
his company for his discovery and
his paper on his work was refused publication in the premier
scientific journal Nature. Perhaps
this history partially accounts for the fact that, as I know from
brief but direct personal experience with
him, Mullis is one of the most idiosyncratic of all Nobel
Laureates in a group that has more than its fair
share of unusual personalities. Most of his peers feel that
Mullis has done no other scientific work of any
merit. He is now a California eccentric, largely uninvolved with
the scientific research community, and
living in a small cabin on the Pacific Shore. He spends a lot of
his time surfing and dreaming up wildly
implausible theories of almost everything imaginable from the
structure of the universe to his claimed
correlation between genius and birth month.
Leaving Kary Mullis bobbing peacefully up and down in the ocean,
let us return to the days of our 100th
anniversary year. It was just about then that the US Advanced
Research Projects Agency in Washington
commenced a project to tie most of the big mainframe computers
and laboratories of the US government,
into a single cooperative system. Soon various university labs
joined the network and ARPA-NET, as it
came to be called, was born. It was destined to change our lives.
Ten years later, in 1984, the
ARPA-NET was opened to access by the private sector; the Internet
and then the World Wide Web were
about to thunder in upon us.
Three immensely powerful forces were thus gathering as this Club
met to celebrate 25 years ago: the
personal computer, biotechnology, and the Internet. The signs
were there if one could only have read
them. And these are but three examples among many from those days
that one could cite in all-seeing
retrospection. They are, however, striking ones and they make my
point. Now let us look in the other
direction along time's arrow. What, for better or for worse, is
out there preparing to swoop in upon us by
our 150th celebration? And what, even 25 years hence, may still
be merely lingering on the far horizon
or will have faded away entirely? Promise me you will be more
forgiving than my fictional Newberry
researcher and I will dare to make some guesses. By the way, it
occurs to me that I might have put up at
least a weak counter-attack against that Newberry fellow by
huffily informing him that, in several public
venues well over thirty years ago, I was perhaps one of the first
to predict laptop computers and also
electronic computer pets almost exactly like those Sony and
others have been introducing in the last few
days and weeks. Of course, that hardly insures the validity of a
single word I'll say tonight.
Some predictions for the next 25 years do seem to be fairly low
risk, especially in information
technology, where much of the basic science is already in hand or
clearly hinted. The Internet, or really
its much more powerful children, will soon envelope the earth
providing not merely dial-up or sign-on
communications but truly continuous "always on" connectivity.
Where today's networks handle streams of
hundreds of millions of bits of information per second and most
users now sip the flow at 56,000 bits per
second or so, successor systems will be 1000 to 10,000 times
faster. Incidentally and lest any one here
feel intimidated by this ones and zeros digital world of
kilobits, megabits and gigabits that we all are
being immersed in, let me point out that, at its most basic
level, it really isn't much different than the
technology used hundreds, even thousands, of years ago to send
smoke signals. Build a fire and cover it
with a blanket, Lift the blanket for moment and out comes a short
puff of smoke. That's a "1" bit. Cover
the fire and cause a gap to appear in the rising smoke column.
That's a "0" bit. I might even argue that in
those days too there were Netservers, ancient AOLs that relayed
the digital signals from one hilltop to
another across the land until the message got to the right place.
So you see, its just the same old stuff
except that we don't use smoke and we do it just a little faster.
In fact, ARPA is already starting to
design a military Terabit per second network (Tera means a
million million) for the third millennium.
Literally, say the name of a person, a place, a resource,
anything you like, and you'll be in touch instantly
and in any medium or form you like.
Tiny but very smart computers with enormous memories will reside
on your wrist, hide in your pocket or
be literally a part of your clothing perhaps nestled behind a
belt buckle or a button. Poor old Dick
Tracy's wristwatch two-way radio and even his wrist TV will be
very much old hat. These computers will
be running powerful software programs that have learned almost as
much or more about your personal
world than you know yourself merely by experiencing it along with
you. They will also be able to
communicate with each other by all the obvious means and some new
ones as well. All of your
computers, your appliances, your inanimate servants at home and
at the office, will be able to talk to
each other in order to serve you better.
Take the simple matter of a business card. Engineers have already
produced business cards that are
"smart" so that when you hand someone your card, you hand them a
whole brochure about you and your
company. That, frankly, isn't really much of a trick. But taking
it a step further, consider this: The human
body conducts electrical signals quite well. There are already
prototypical systems for transferring
extensive data electronically via a finger touch to an appliance
or by a simple handshake between two
people wearing computers--perhaps even embedded in their bodies,
The mind boggles at what this could
do to the boy-meets-girl rituals in singles bars or on the beach.
To tell you the truth, at this very moment,
a squeaky and definitely adolescent but otherwise quite familiar
voice has begun whispering in my ear---
Like OK, great! So like where in hell was all this stuff when I
really needed it?
Computers are becoming ever more adept at using human languages.
It will not be long before our
telephones will become multi-lingual real-time translators
allowing people from different cultures to
speak fluently to each other, each in their own native languages.
Wearable gadgets that will do the same
thing for face-to-face conversations will soon follow, What, I
wonder, does that mean for Berlitz, the
language departments of our schools, and the politics of official
national languages. One certainly
suspects the French will oppose such technology.
While computer voice input and output will obviously be highly
perfected soon and very versatile, one
problem that I think will still be with us in twenty five years
is the lack of a really good way to get
information out of extremely small personal computers and into
our eyes. Head--mounted displays will
get better and better, but the best answer would be a way of
getting detailed imagery delivered directly
into the brain somehow. I believe that is a good deal more than
25 years away. On the other hand, totally
synthesized TV and movie actors indistinguishable from humans
will soon star in our soap operas and
films. The synthetic stars will inspire fan clubs. And while they
won't make personal appearances, they
will show up on TV interview shows where they will often carry on
more entertaining conversations than
their worried human competitors. We will watch them, if we wish,
on bright and beautiful and flat
whole-wall TV screens, Electronic screen walls will be
commonplace, but such improved screens will
hardly be the latest and greatest in entertainment technology. I
think something else is coming.
My bet is that before 2024AD, strange new brightly painted
pod-like shapes will have begun to appear
either in our homes or garages. Those pods will be totally
immersive, completely enveloping, shared
virtual worlds with high fidelity multi-sensory simulation. How
do you like the sound of that
commercial? Pretty impressive, right? What all that gobbledygook
means is that when you enter your
personal pod, which will be somewhat like the simulators you've
probably seen at amusement parks such
as DisneyWorld, you will be surrounded by, and able to interact
with, a complete 3D virtual world that
includes virtual images of other people who are far away
physically but who appear to be right there with
you. Each of you will be in your own personal pod, but all of you
will feel like you are together, playing
games, climbing mountains, walking through Venice or doing almost
anything else. Sight, sound, smell,
touch, forces of wind and water, accelerations and temperature
change along with many other sensory
cues will precisely follow your actions and be consistent with
the actions and reactions of your
companions. I do not mean to imply that this will be done using
the science-fiction idea of direct brain
simulation. These pods will use the ordinary sensory input
systems with which we all come equipped.
Building such a pod in 25 years or thereabouts should be no more
difficult or expensive than the building
of a high performance luxury auto fully loaded with modern
electronics is today. You'd save up and pay
$50,000 or $60,000 today for one, would you not? I certainly
would. In this sense, and in this sense only,
teleportation will become a reality. And yes, you can be alone in
your pod and yes, there will be those
who visit pornographic sites.
By the way, you might ask yourself what the computer and
telecommunications-based pods I've just
described would do to the tourist business. Or if the demand for
fast gasoline-powered automobiles suited
to long distance road travel would be reduced, possibly
stimulating the growth in popularity of the
coming electric cars and the infrastructure needed to support
them.
Some of the technical methods for doing all of the things I've
discussed so far and countless more will
evolve very rapidly over the next 25 years. Just to cite one
example, in today's laboratories, scientists are
learning how to assemble nano-structures one thousand times
smaller than the already almost microscopic
structures used in the most modern of today's electronic chips.
Sub-microscopically sharp needles, used
first just a few years ago in what are called atomic force
microscopes, are becoming tools to build
exquisitely small devices single atom by single atom. The age of
nano-technology is being born and
within a few decades it will grow into robust adolescence. The
ultimate result will be an astonishing
shrinkage in the size of computer elements, memory devices,
imaging systems, communications devices
and all the rest of the great panoply of gadgets and systems that
surround us today. Devices that work
using only one single electron to represent a bit of information
seem possible someday. But, even sooner,
other mechanisms with undreamed of capabilities, mechanical
insects for example, will come spilling out
of the laboratories and into our lives.
Even without nanotechnology, entire video cameras are already
being built as single little chips. Soon
those single chip cameras will include electronic intelligence
allowing them to recognize shapes and
interpret the visual scenes before them. No longer will they be
mere pickups for imagery. They will
become interpreters that can automatically initiate actions that
depend upon what they "see" and also
what they "hear". They will include microphones much smaller than
pinheads and possess the power to
understand speech and other sounds. Since they will be cheap and
perhaps no larger than a single black
peppercorn, they will quickly become ubiquitous. And while many
will be coupled to the ultrafast
Internet, others will be smart enough to save up their data so as
not to reveal their presence to so-called
bug detectors. They will transmit only upon coded command from a
friendly data harvester. I gladly
leave to you the task of sorting out the fuller implications of
tiny but very smart electronic eyes and ears
that might be anywhere and everywhere.
While what one might call "ordinary" computers will be shrinking
almost without limit, certain special
kinds of computers will probably stay about the same size they
are today but will have unimaginably
greater power. I speak especially of the supercomputers whose
tasks will expand as their power increases,
Today's supercomputers explore the detailed structure of the
universe, the workings of the mind, the
prediction of the weather, and countless other complexities of
nature and human activity. Such
electron-based supercomputers will certainly continue to operate.
Some of them, so-called massively
parallel systems, will consist of many thousands of basic
computer chips all built into a cooperative
architecture inside a single "box". Other supercomputers using
light particles -- photons -- rather than
electrons may also have begun operation on practical problems.
Their great virtue will also be an ability
to quickly process parallel streams of information simultaneously
and at the speed of light. But in 2024,1
would not expect optical computers to be carried around like
super-laptops, if for no other reason than
the challenge of creating software applications that would
justify the expense of such packaging. One
further point: think about l00s of millions of powerful personal
computers about half of which will stand
more or less idle while their owners sleep. This represents a
huge under-used global resource. Imagine
the kinds of problems that could be attacked if very large
numbers of "ordinary" computers at many
different locations were tied together cooperatively at certain
times of the day by a lightning fast Teranet.
What you would have is a sort of coral reef of
computers--fantastic results from the working together of
hordes of very small participants. This type of computer
cooperative has already been tried (on a much
smaller scale than I am suggesting) to search for large prime
numbers and to crack security codes.
Further development of the method could threaten other advanced
supercomputers with serious technical
and economic competition. It could, for example, delay or stunt
the development of optical computing for
an indeterminate time. Wonderful and unpredictable things can
come from such contesting means of
achieving a technical goal.
There are some hints of still other fundamentally new types of
computers. One type envisions using the
basic structures of DNA and biochemical interactions in new and
very compact means of representing
digital ones and zeros. Single strands of DNA, it seems, also
conduct electricity quite well and have even
been proposed for wiring things up on a molecular scale, Yet
another dream depends upon the incredibly
mysterious behavior of matter and radiation that physicists
describe with the quantum theory. Physicists
today can make all sorts of elegant and precise calculations
using the rules of Quantum Theory in its
various forms, but even the great physicists of the 20th-century
like Albert Einstein and more recently
Richard Feynman, would be the first to admit that no one really
understands, in the sense of having a
comfortable mental image that comports with what we humans call
"common sense" precisely how
particles can behave like waves and waves can be particles at one
and the same time and how they can
influence each other in the astoundingly peculiar ways that they
do. Common sense simply does not work
in the quantum world and perhaps it never will. The human mind,
built over millions of years of
evolution to cope with the macroscopic world around us, may
simply not be equipped to visualize all the
phenomena of the sub-microscopic world. That need not stop us
however from exploiting that world
because, increasingly, we know its rules even if we don't
understand its ways. Rather than deal with ones
and zeros, a quantum computer would work with quantum states
about which we have no time to talk in
detail except to say that a given quantum state can represent a
great deal of information. A quantum
computer therefore could be awesomely powerful even as compared
to those I've already mentioned.
Personally, I doubt there will be a practical one in operation
within the next 25 years.
At this point, I cannot resist the temptation to re-tell a
slightly updated version of a very old computer
joke that has always been one of my favorites. My wife just
smiles indulgently when I tell it; she has
heard it far too often over the years. Screwing up my courage to
the breaking point I usually carry on
nevertheless:
Some time in the future, after a prodigious, decades-long
international effort, scientists succeed in making
the Great Quantum Computer-Mark I. It is by far the most awesome
computational engine ever to exist.
An international committee is appointed which is headed by Albert
Zweistein, a man purportedly twice as
smart as Albert Einstein. The task of the committee is to choose
a suitable inaugural problem for the new
quantum computer. Dignitaries from all over the world are to be
present for the occasion. After long and
very solemn debate, the committee decides to ask the Mark I this
three-word question: Does God exist?
The computer, the size of a building despite the fact that its
components are very small, hums and
rumbles for a long time, sparks fly, lights flash. Finally, just
as the crowd begins to mill about
impatiently, on the glowing main output screen there appears the
Great Quantum Computer's answer:
"NOW He does..."
Whenever capabilities, almost independently of what they are,
change by factors of tens or hundreds,
remarkable things suddenly become possible. When they change by
factors of thousands or millions or
even more, revolutions occur. Don't hold me too closely to the
numbers I'm about to give you. They are
strictly back-of-the envelope jottings, but precision is not
important to the point I want to make. The
step-up in speed from the hot air balloon or the Kitty Hawk
airplane to the SST is about 50 to1 and it's
another 50 to l between a 747 and the Saturn 5 that hurled man to
the moon. From the horse to fast
automobiles or high-speed rail it's crudely about 10 to l.
Perhaps that's why many of the world's ancient
roadways and paths, wider and paved, of course, are still in use
despite the remarkable influence of the
automobile. Had we found a way to build a cheap and safe personal
Hovercraft that was economical to
operate and that could move over all kinds of terrain including
water at, say, 500 miles per hour,
I assure you everything from our cities to our lifestyles would
be very different than they are. That
particular revolution, I herewith bravely declare, is not about
to happen, not now and not for many
decades to come. By the way, from the telegraph or telephone to
the Teranet is a step of 100 million or
more, while from the adding machine to present-day computers or
those that are coming soon, it's billions
or trillions. Surely there is no need to debate whether those two
are revolutions in progress, so let us look
for a moment in a somewhat different direction.
Only a couple of centuries ago, the exquisitely small creations
of the watchmaker's art were at the outer
limits of what was possible to make. The step-down in size from
parts made on a watchmaker's lathe to
the machining methods now used to fabricate silicon chips is
about 1000 to 1. And nanotechnology,
which 1 have already mentioned, is taking the final step toward
the absolute limit set by the size of
atoms by moving into a world 1000 times smaller still. As a
result, Man's ability to engineer the very
small has developed with astonishing rapidity and another
revolution is at hand.
Today, in an emerging field called MEMS, an acronym for
Micro-Electro Mechanical Systems, we are
learning to make gears smaller in diameter than a human hair. We
are working toward microscopic
motors and pumps and the valves and pipes to go with them along
with all the other building blocks
needed to make tiny analogs of the familiar gadgets in our
laboratories, our homes, our hospitals, our
production lines and even our satellites and spacecraft. MEMS was
born largely out of the realization that
the very same methods we have been using to make integrated
solid-state chips could be used to make
mechanical things. Many early MEMS devices are therefore being
made out of silicon and just like
silicon chips they can be made cheaply and by mass production
methods. Whole chemical laboratories
capable of analyzing body fluids are being created in tiny
packages smaller than a fingernail. There will
be disposable throwaway laboratories all over our hospitals, the
FDA willing, surprisingly soon. And
obviously, not just in our hospitals.
Our space program is pouring millions into research on MEMS
micro-machines for space exploration. If
you can make a Mars Rover a hundred or a thousand times smaller
than the one that sent back all those
magnificent pictures a few years ago, the savings in rocket size
and costs are prodigious simply because
it takes so much energy to lift a given amount of mass out of the
clutches of earth's gravitational field. It
takes even more energy to move around in the solar system to
explore and exploit the planets. In space,
big payoffs come from making things small and light. Before
another 25 years pass, I. believe
we will learn to do that reasonably well and there will be swarms
of micro-satellites in orbit around the
earth and the moon and on the surfaces of other worlds in our
solar system. They will be stuffed full of
little jewels of scientific instruments and devices like those
tiny cameras I mentioned earlier. And all of
this will be only a beginning.
Chemical laboratories on chips, micro-machines, and complex
electronic systems of similar size will soon
begin to salt themselves throughout our environment --land, sea,
and air. But they will hardly be content
with that. They will invade our bodies too. Micro-machines could
one day navigate the circulatory system
of the brain to treat stroke. And embedded micro--chemical
laboratories could also become
micro-dispensaries controlled by minute electronic computers and
sensors-- that is to say, artificial glands.
In our bodies however, MEMS technology, whatever it is ultimately
called, will not be alone. A
fascinating competition seems to be inevitable and while it won't
have played itself out by 2024, the
battle will be fully joined. Implantable MEMS devices and
internal computers will compete as well as
collaborate with synthetic, cultured tissue, and harvested animal
versions of some of the components in
our bodies for the privilege of assisting or replacing our
defective or aging parts. Disease-free, long-lived
and wholly artificial blood substitutes are on the threshold of
FDA licensing now. Cultured bladders,
fully functional in dogs, were recently reported. Replacement
human corneas have been formed in the
laboratory. Long sections of working rat intestine have been
grown on polymeric scaffolding, as has
bone. Working pig arteries have been produced. The tissue
engineers are coming.
As you may have noticed, I. haven't yet mentioned our exploding
knowledge of the molecular basis of
life and disease and where it might take us in the next 25 years.
There is such a flood of material
available and filled with all sorts of predictions that there
seems little point to adding more to the
information overload. Obviously, in just the next few years, we
will have fully mapped the human
genome. Genes related to specific diseases will continue to be
identified one after another in rapid
succession. My friends in this field are very optimistic that
remarkable treatments will inevitably follow
and specifically that many forms of cancer will be conquered
within this time-frame. Combine this
extraordinary progress with everything else going on and it's not
unreasonable to hope that human life
expectancy around 25 years from now will climb into the 90's or
even higher. Even more importantly,
given our growing ability to cope with worn-out or defective body
parts, the duration of high-quality life
will be extended dramatically.
For the most part, people (at least those living in the
technologically advanced areas of the world) should
live well and long and then, finally die quickly and comfortably.
What more could one ask? Well, for
one thing, it would be wonderful to believe that I could drop
that parenthetical modifying phrase
regarding the chief beneficiaries of impending medical progress.
Unfortunately, I'm not that optimistic.
Nevertheless, it's just possible that information technology will
deliver some pleasant surprises here, too.
Future information devices of considerable capability will be
cheap to make, require very little power,
and no maintenance because they will be too cheap to be worth
fixing, even as calculators and electronic
watches are today--unless, of course, your taste runs to Rolexes
or Vacheron Constantin. Future
communications networks will be truly global in reach. For the
first time in history someone in a small
African village will be able to afford access to the great pools
of modern knowledge almost as easily as
could someone in Chicago. It won't happen as fast as one might
like, given the other huge problems of
infrastructure and the social and attitudinal barriers to be
overcome, but the elements of a potent force for
raising the quality of life for all humankind may be gathering
itself around us.
And now away from the future and back to May 9th of our 75th
anniversary year, 1949. On that day, our
esteemed member Arthur A. Baer, fondly remembered now by the Club
Fellowship carrying his name,
presented a paper entitled "604 Jerusalem". Baer used the
artifice of writing his paper in the form of a
letter to a friend asking for more information about a small Inn
at that address in a small town on the
edge of the desert in southern Peru. In effect, he wrote his
paper in preparation for writing his paper.
Cute trick. Baer also faithfully observed the long-standing and
mischievous Club tradition of not letting
his title give his topic away.
About the time Baer was playing his little game with his Literary
Club audience, the British cosmologist
Fred Hoyle used the catchy phrase "Big Bang" for the very first
time; I believe it was in a radio
interview. Watson and Crick were still almost four years from
just beating Linus Pauling to the discovery
of the double helix of DNA, and the transistor had been invented
only two years earlier. The Grandparent
of all present-day electronic computers, the ENIAC with its
18,000 vacuum tubes roasting the room, had
been up and running for just 3 years. It was doing
multiplications at the blinding speed of several
hundred per minute. And, of course, the Cold War was full-on. In
fact, it wasn't until two years
after our Club's 75th Anniversary that the United States
conducted preliminary tests confirming
the principle of the hydrogen bomb in what was called Operation
Greenhouse. Greenhouse, incidentally,
sent many a wide-eyed kid, including this one, off on strange
adventures in the South Pacific. The first
true hydrogen bomb was tested out there a year later in the 1952
Mike Shot and by pure coincidence, a
reunion of some of those kids, now a little less wide-eyed, is
scheduled for next month.
We now move back to seventy-five years ago. On December 15, 1924
when our Club was a youthful 50,
Ernst Wilfred Puttkammer, read a paper inscrutably titled "The
most Commonplace Thing in the World".
Mr. Puttkammer was not only elegantly named but also prolific; he
treated the Club to at least ten papers
during his time. The commonplace thing in his title turns out to
be the lowly postage stamp and he
makes a very good case for it being exactly what he claims for
it. His love of stamps, commonplace or
rare, shines through every word of his manuscript.
The year Puttkammer read his paper, and whether he knew it or
not, the world around him had suddenly
begun to enlarge. The first television camera tubes, soon to
bring distant places to his doorstep, had been
created the previous year. Less than three years later, Lindbergh
would fly the Atlantic and catalyze the
birth of the age of aviation. And in the very year of
Puttkammer's love letter to his little stamps,
Astronomer Edwin Hubble showed that certain fuzzy little spots in
his pictures of the Milky Way were
not part of our galaxy at all. They were other galaxies, just as
majestic as ours, and unimaginably far
away. For the first time, the Cosmos had revealed itself to Man
in all its awe-inspiring glory. All that just
75 years ago!
And now once again, we go back to the future. Perhaps you have
already noticed that I have slyly left
myself very little time to speculate about what may await us
beyond 2024 and on out to 2074AD, the
year we turn 200. I will give you a list. The list will no doubt
cause that future researcher at the
Newberry to laugh even louder, but I shall charge ahead anyhow. I
have developed a couple of
propositions that I cannot prove, but I shall nevertheless lean
on for guidance as I enter this terra
incognita. Here they are:
First, although it has been said many times before and always
wrongly, I think it is finally possible that
we will be approaching the limits of what there is to know in
important areas of knowledge. The universe
is infinite and complex, but the number of laws that Nature has
used to create it and all it contains seems
to be finite and therefore exhaustible. That there may be, in
fact, a finite number of natural laws is, in
itself, to me absolutely dumbfounding. Second, we have now had 50
years or more of experience with
so-called BIG Science and High Technology. We know their drivers,
or at least most of them. They
include fear, greed, ambition, power and fame, but also sometimes
altruism, curiosity, and love of
knowledge. We also know something about the gestation cycles of
large projects and how these driving
forces affect them. The first five generally drive fast; the last
three drive long.
Certainly all the threads of development we have already
discussed so far will weave their way onward
to 2074, but in order to look at other topics, I won't pursue
most of them. I will also continue to
deliberately omit topics concerned with the science and
technology of war at all levels of intensity and of
all types from the action of single terrorists to nuclear
catastrophe. These are large and depressing
subjects and not for a happy evening like this. And so now to my
list:
The first practical full-scale fusion power plants will not be
constructed before about 50 years from now.
It is a very tough engineering problem. Competition from both
non-renewable energy sources (known oil
reserves are supposedly actually growing) and possibly huge
stores of combustible methane ice under the
ocean will hold down funding levels.
A new generation of inherently stable fission-based power
reactors may appear and also compete. They
would be built in isolated areas, include reprocessing of waste
on-site, and feed into the world power
grids through new loss-free superconducting power lines.
Ocean exploration and exploitation, including perhaps the mining
of methane ice, will increase
dramatically. Oceans and ocean floors are extremely hostile
environments but they are of much greater
economic and military interest than the planets or the moon.
Project Neptune is already designing a
wide-band fiber optic network to service research needs on the
ocean floor.
Most of the holdings of the Library of Congress will finally be
digitized after a long effort and will be
stored in something the size of an ice cube.
NASA's hypersonic transport, the HST, will be flying in about 30
years; its development and that of
related transports-to-orbit will be motivated primarily by
spin-off potential to military aviation/space
vehicles and not by great interest from airlines.
Virtual meetings, virtual travel and simulated environments like
my "Pods" or Japan's existing
Surfing-Beaches-in-a-Building and faked-up indoor ski runs will
slow passenger aviation. Getting to
increasingly homogenized population centers will be less exciting
and escape off the beaten path to true
isolation will be expensive because of low passenger traffic
loads. God save the National Parks.
There will only be one or a very few space stations in orbit for
scientific purposes for most of the period
in question, but a great many more unmanned satellites.
It will take until about 2040 or beyond (at least a decade after
the HST starts flying) for the SpaceHilton
Orbital Hotel of "2001" fame to come into being. Rooms will be
damned small and very expensive. The
sports facilities will be popular and the bathroom facilities
will be peculiar. No hotels or vacations on the
moon's 1/6th G playground quite yet. The space rescue
capabilities just won't be there yet.
Large scale Zero-G factories in space are unlikely. Once any
zero-G effect that is really important to
commerce is discovered, it will usually drive successful efforts
to duplicate it on earth,
There will be only one or a few scientific outposts on the moon
because it is too far away to be of much
interest in an era when only near-earth military and
economically- motivated operations will continue to
be important. One small observatory may be built on the back of
the moon because it is electrically quiet
there.
During this time period, we won't have a permanent manned outpost
on Mars unless signs of life, past or
preferably present, are found there. If that happens, bigger
budgets will be available for many reasons,
including some dark ones like implications for novel bio-weapons.
Otherwise, Mars has no economic or
fear-driven military interest for now to push money its way. When
I was at NASA Headquarters during
Apollo, we joked about planting a fossil on the moon to get
budgets increased. So be wary.
I believe there is intelligent life in many places out there in
the Cosmos. But "Out There" is a very, very
big place and I'll wager life is very sparsely distributed except
in its own immediate vicinity. In other
words, in rare local solar systems, life may be present on
several planets huddled up near a single star (or
maybe a double one) like cave-dwellers around a lonely campfire.
But interstellar travel isn't going to
happen, wormholes in space-time or not. It won't happen in the
next 75 years or even in the next
75,000. Nor will true teleportation of the "Beam Me Up
Scotty" variety. Nature never signed a
contract that promised that life could completely conquer time
and distance.
On the other hand, we certainly could detect radio or laser
messages from some distant intelligences at
any time. Wouldn't that be absolutely marvelous? Or to use a word
Nancy made up just for occasions
when real words seem too puny, absolutely "plumboius" ! But don't
look for snappy conversations,
round-trip message times are likely to be measured in hundreds or
thousands of years or maybe much
longer.
By the time of our own 200th birthday, current problems like dark
matter and strange observations that
the expansion of the universe is mysteriously speeding up will be
long behind us. Great new multi-mirror
telescopes based in part on old Star-Wars defense ideas will help
provide the answers. And while our
minds will continue to struggle with the awesome infinities
involved, I believe we will have quite
complete and self-consistent theoretical models of the birth of
the universe, We will know the nature of
all its fundamental building blocks and we will have a convincing
picture of how it will end, if indeed it
ever does.
I do not think we will know the answers to the ultimate puzzles
of the quantum mechanics. As I said, we
may never "know" quantum theory and its deeper progeny in the
sense of common sense comfort, but we
will be total masters of the rules we must follow to make correct
calculations. Nor, by 2074, do I think
we will comprehend in that same gut sense, all the secrets of the
mind, and, in particular, how a wet blob
of matter or perhaps a sufficiently complex machine experiences
self-awareness. That, like infinity, is
something we may be ill-equipped ever to comfortably grasp. But I
do think we will know almost all the
externally knowable biological mechanisms by then. And I do not
exclude the possibility that, well within
100 years after that knowledge is ours, we will be able,
as far as we will be able to tell, to
re-create all of them. At that point, we would be able to alter
or augment ourselves as we choose and
seize total control of evolution, absent our demise from
all-consuming war, plague or, much less likely,
asteroid collision. And we also would be able to create, though
we may not choose to do so, entirely new
forms of life, totally artificial, self-replicating, and
presumably self-aware.
So ends my list. Its details are unimportant and many are surely
wrong. What is important is that we in
this Club-- past members, present members, and members to
come--will have existed during that singular
instant of cosmic time when Mankind is teasing out the very
deepest of Nature's secrets and gaining
unimaginable power over them. After that one brilliant flash of
revelation, the final challenge for
mankind may come down to simply this: With almost all the grand
mysteries of Nature solved and
almost all the magic gone except for an occasional message from
the stars, what will be left to captivate
us? Hopefully, not simply one long, never-ending, living
video-game!
I have concocted what I hope will be a way to show you exactly
how absolutely astounding the
timing of all of this really is. Imagine yourself at first in a
dark and mysterious room containing you
know not what. Time has magically compressed. The long five
billion years since the earth formed have
seemed to you like just a single twenty-four hour day-still a
very long time to be alone in the dark. Your
various humanoid ancestors joined you somewhere between 30
seconds and a few minutes ago. Members
of your own kind, Homo Sapiens, have entered just in the last ten
seconds. And then suddenly there is
this! (Flash picture of audience). During that single burst of
light, which lasted only l/l00th of a second
and corresponded on my compressed time scale to the span of 500
years from Galileo's first use the
experimental method of investigating Nature to a time a few
decades beyond 2074AD, the occasion of
our 200th Anniversary, you see everything.
And you understand it all!
Thank you very much .
Now, while we prepare for a toast specially arranged by the l25th
Anniversary Program Committee for
this most auspicious occasion, in a brief postscript I will
reveal the deep secret of my title.
Post-Script while the champagne is being poured
Eight hundred years ago in a far land, a man stared up at the
same stars we see. He watched the moon
and studied the seasons. Astronomer and philosopher, he not only
developed a very accurate calendar
whereby one could precisely reckon anniversaries, he also wrote
down his thoughts about life and death
and living fully. He loved wine as both a beverage and as a
symbol of what life could offer. Centuries
later, a very shy Englishman came upon those old words. With a
wonderful sense of the poetic, he
converted them into a collection of a hundred or so four line
quatrains in English. His collection was
published anonymously and achieved huge popularity at almost
precisely the time this Club was founded.
The Englishman was Edward FitzGerald, the astronomer Omar
Khayyam, and this is my favorite quatrain
and Nancy's too. It is the 101st quatrain, the final one of
FitzGerald's First Edition
And when Thyself with Shining Foot shall pass
Among the Guests Star-scatter'd on the Grass
And in thy Joyous Errand reach the Spot
Where I made one, turn down an empty Glass!
And now, if you would please stand, I would like to propose this
toast:
TO THE CHICAGO LITERARY CLUB----To its proud past. To its
fascinating present.... And to its long
and shining future! And if you so wish, turn down an empty
glass.
Good Night.