B. U. G. S.

Will the future be built on hugeness or smallness?

When I was young, the future was all big. We would go to the stars in huge ships.

In the 1950s we dreamed of it. In the 1960s and 1970s it began to come true. A titanic program costing over twenty billion dollars put men on the moon.

In the 1970s the Supersonic transport began to fly the ocean at speeds of up to half a mile a second.

And there the Age of Bigness died. The astronauts of 1969 are old men now. As one of them said, “I always thought it was possible I would be the first man on the moon. I never imagined I would be the LAST man on the moon.”

The last SST flight took place. It’s all back to subsonic.

The moon landing was what science fiction had assumed the future would be. Giant projects would send men to explore new worlds, and on earth we would wait breathlessly for them to report back what they found.

What they found in the moon landing was stuff that they brought back to earth for analysis. They didn’t discover a thing on the moon that we didn’t already know about.

So we realized that what we needed to send into space was not men to bring back samples, but machines that could do the sampling there. The romance died.

Meanwhile, in physics, the Einsteinian Universe of hugeness was being replaced y the quantum universe of smallness. Drexler wrote his book on nanotechnology. While everybody was concentrating on the scifi-come-true ideas of men into space, Drexler talked about manipulating and building from molecules up.

Then cyberspace was invented.

We could live in cyberspace. But we probably won’t.

See next article.