WHICH UNIVERSE IS THIS, ANYWAY?

I have a compulsive interest in visualizing the future. You are the perfect audience to try out some new ideas about our Present and our Future. However, this talk was not coming together properly--it lacked an organizing theme. I grumbled to my wife Suzanne as this day approached. "But, you gave that Nebula Award Banquet address before!" , she replied. I checked my files. Sure enough that Nebula Banquet was held at the Century Plaza Hotel, APRIL 27, 1974, precisely 22 years ago. Finally, my memory rebooted and I remembered Robert Heinlein being named a Grandmaster.

Best of all for tonight, I found my notes for that 1974 talk, "Where Do We Go From Here?". And there was the missing organizing theme!

Let's look back together at my 1974 views of the future. Then, I will elucidate novel aspects of 1996 that for me portend big changes for the future. Finally, I will try your risky game again and share some of my own visions and nightmares about the future.

Every speaker likes to start with a light touch of some kind. In 1974, I used Ray Bradbury. He had just given the keynote address for an International Mars Conference at Caltech. His opener there was "YOU NEED ME!" He then proceeded to put humanity, humor and poetry into the otherwise dry scientific discourse of the Mars Conference. My opener for the 1974 banquet was to wonder, in contrast, if this banquet audience needed me. I always seem to end up playing the heavy -- which I then illustrated by stating "Science Fiction is too hung up on Space"! I wondered if the just-completed Apollo Moon program may have been an historical anomaly. A wonderful anomaly that profoundly enriched humanity with a sense of its potential. .. but not the beginning of a new trajectory of history. It did not lead to a new start somewhere else where Earth's problems linger only as dim memories.

Playboy magazine has just published an interview with that same Bradbury who so eloquently had insisted 22 years ago that we celebrate the human potential and opportunity of space. The 1996 interview reveals a rather different Bradbury. Indeed, it suggests to me you consider a special new award for Ray to add to his Grand Master award of 1988. The Curmudgeon Award!!

The 1996 Bradbury remains unchanged from the 1974 version in his passionate defense of imagination, and of humanistic Science Fiction in particular. What seems to be diminished is that vibrant optimism and enthusiasm for the future which so many of us felt then. Indeed, unease with the Present and fear and anxiety about the Future now define the American political scene. How strange. In 1974, the ghostly veil of Armageddon seemed to block any plausible pathway to the future. But World War 3 DIDN'T HAPPEN. Instead the Cold War ended abruptly and peacefully in 1989, unlike Greg Benford's compelling Timescape where we end up in the parallel universe in which Earth does not make it. This time we ended up in the favorable universe with a "soft landing" (An outcome almost universally missed by policy analysts and science fiction writers alike.) .

The parallel universe approach can shed light on our times in another way. Let me tamper with the story only to the extent that Franklin D. Roosevelt serves just two terms as President. In that event there would have been no political force to amend the Constitution at the end of World War 2 to limit the Presidency to only two terms. Thus, in 1960 the widely liked and respected Dwight Eisenhower would probably have succumbed to pressure to run for a third time . He would have easily beaten John Kennedy. Whatever else might have been different with Eisenhower as President in 1961, there surely would not have been an Apollo Moon program! Eisenhower deeply opposed "Pie in the Sky". It was Eisenhower who coined the term "military/industrial complex" in his Farewell Address and cautioned against it's growing power and influence. JPL launched Explorer 1 on January 30,1958 in a frantic bid to reclaim US prestige in the wake of the Soviet Sputnik 1, 2 and 3 successes and the humiliating US fail

Without Kennedy's overt decision to challenge the Soviet Union to a space race only we could win, the Apollo anomaly would never have occurred. Instead, civil space development would have progressed much more slowly. Indeed President George Bush in 1989 might have been calling for the first human flight to the Moon rather than "Return to the Moon, this time to Stay". There would have been no Voyager Odyssey to reveal the close up wonders of the giant planets. Europa would still be an obscure dot on a photographic plate, not the alien venue for Arthur Clarke's adventurous astronauts and cosmonauts. There would have been no Viking to look for Martian microbes. No Hubble to take us deeper into the Universe than could have been imagined by in 1961.

It was easy in 1974 to interpret the events of the preceding decade as the nearly inevitable bend in the trajectory of humanity outward toward space. Some even regarded Apollo as the manifestation of some hidden determinism.

But it was not.

The Apollo anomaly has run its course. We are drifting back to more typical trajectories, the way Antarctic exploration evolved . The high drama of the Shackelton- Amundsen-Scott glory seeking race to the South Pole was followed by four decades of virtual neglect from a world convulsed by two world wars. Finally, sustained scientific exploration resumed under the auspices of the International Geophysical Year , enabled by surplus naval air and ocean transportation capabilities left over from World War 2. So too, affordable space transportation technology developed for earth orbit may enable humans once again to set foot on the Moon. So too, the focus may become similarly scientific. So too, the context may become similarly international.

On April 27, 1974, I had just finished writing "Navigating The Future" (Harper and Row, 1975). I hope you all have it on your bookshelves -- it is a very rare book! It conveyed my private framework to view the future, based upon the presumption that the Present is Unprecedented. I characterized the (then) present as the beginning of the "Crunch", the unique epoch in human history when exponentiating trends of growth and change for the first time begin to challenge even the finite capacities of Earth. Traditional systems of belief and patterns of behavior reel under unprecedented pressure.

As one views the world of 1996, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that indeed we are irreversibly into the Crunch.

To illustrate the range of possibilities humanity faces, I sketched several very different scenarios that the world might follow through the Crunch to some more stable (but not necessarily desirable) outcome. One scenario was escalating conflict leading to global collapse into barbarism and economic disintegration -- The Shape of Things to Come of H.G. Wells. Indeed, Earth did suffer a second world war of unprecedented destruction after Wells' published his pessimistic projection in 1932. But there has been no industrial collapse. Quite the reverse. Global economic and population growth and consumption are fueling unprecedented environmental destruction and modification, challenging for the first time Earth's natural regenerative processes on a global scale.

A very different scenario featured massive technological intrusion to create the nearly artificial people who inhabit Aldus Huxley's ordered Brave New World. Huxley in 1936 had to rely basically on animal husbandry techniques to genetically re-engineer humans. Imagine if he could have envisioned today's molecular sequencing, much less an "International Human Genome Project". Today's pharmacology -- legitimate and underground -- makes Huxley's "Soma" seem rather prosaic. And we have the electronic version as well--free TV. But Huxley needed a totalitarian global governance run by the benign Mustafa Mond to maintain his insipid, sterile but orderly future world. That part seems truly fictional in our post Cold War era of accelerating privatization, decentralization, and violence worldwide. Practically each day's front page stuns us with new atrocities accompanying the explosive return everywhere to traditional ethic, religious and geographic tribalisms. From the spreading

The truly big event of the last 22 years was the sudden of the Cold War confrontation between the US and USSR empires. Suddenly there are no Empires left. Perhaps not since the collapse of the Roman Empire has the "global" command and control system become so decentralized. The US remains the leading nation economically and militarily. But it no longer heads a global economic, political and military alliance of partners and client states unified by a common fear of Soviet aggression. Indeed, I believe we have witnessed in the last decade the end of the era of empires. Since agricultural surpluses first enabled centralized power, ascendant nations have imposed their domain over surrounding regions and distant colonies. Their waxing and waning provided the metronome of history, from the arts to the zodiac. But, I seriously doubt that a single nation will ever do that again. The end of the Cold War may prove to be the punctuation mark at the end of a long phase of human development st

Humanity may be entering a new stage of Homo evolution, becoming the first truly planetary culture with globally linked economics, politics, cultures ... and with nobody in charge! George Bush was correct to quest for a "New World Order", but it is not likely to be either orderly or dominated by governments.

What triggered this unprecedented change in the human dynamic?

It began with that mushroom-shaped cloud rising over an annihilated Hiroshima. One plane, one bomb, one city. Slowly, the world began to believe for the first time that war -- nuclear war -- was not a practical means to resolve conflict. That collective epiphany relentlessly spread, eventually overcoming even the deeply held military view that increased destructive force led to increased security. It took over four decades for the unprecedented destructive power of nuclear weapons to finally induce an unprecedented global political response.

Another unprecedented gobal crisis looms, every bit as threatening as was global nuclear war. The 21st Century will surely see the climactic collision between the relentless growth of the human enterprise and the carrying capacity of Earth itself, accompanied initially at least by the progressive breakdown of traditional means of governance. This unprecedented challenge to collective human behavior and management goes under the ambiguous title of "Sustainability Crisis". But sustainability lacks Hiroshima's threatening icon to unify diverse groups. Once again, deeply held conventional wisdom is an obstacle to developing unprecedented global political responses. This time it emanates from economists who argue that the "free' market alone will bring into being the necessary new technologies and institutions for long-term global prosperity and security.

For the first time in human history, humanity will have to manage the planetary environment and our interaction with it. The frontier days of mining the forests and seas, and of dumping waste products into politically unrepresented environments, are rapidly approaching an end forever. The inexorable growth of human civilization since the onset of agriculture has been financed by consumption and degradation of much of the inherited biospheric potential of soils and forests. Well before the end of the next Century the world will have consumed nearly all the easily extracted and transported oil that has fueled rapid the global economic growth since the middle of this Century. Well before the end of the next Century much of the natural capital Man the Toolmaker inherited will be gone forever.

There will be no chance to start over again. All that is uncertain is whether we will have used our collective intelligence to transform that inherited natural capital into a self-sustaining social and economic system no longer dependent on exploitation of natural resources.

I believe communications technology -- not nuclear power --has been the great change agent of this Century. From battery-powered transistor radios, to broadcast TV, to fax machines, communication technology has been too vital for rulers to ignore. Despite the best efforts of secret police everywhere, it proved to be the ultimate source of seditious attitudes and feelings as brainwashed billions learned about a different "outside" world. The Soviet obsession with controlling the printed word was well founded. Indeed, the global breakdown of governance now unfolding flows from the same wine. All governance has rested to some extent on "Belief Control" and suppression of opposing beliefs. All systems of governance -- even our most enlightened one -- must evolve to be stable in the presence of an extraordinary range of information, misinformation and disinformation. Once again unprecedented new technology is forcing humanity to develop unprecedented social and political responses. The co-evol

The newest Faustian potion to tempt humankind is millions of personal computers connected by the Net. David Brin in Earth cogently described the implications of a "netified "world struggling with the sustainability crisis. However, many of the "futuristic" applications of the net are already becoming apparent in the US only six years after Earth was published. Sorry, David there goes that long-term royalty stream! You'll have to bombard us with sequels to pay for the kids' education after all.

What lies ahead in communication and connectivity during the next 22 years? Many surprises, I am sure. The PC was not even invented in 1974 when I gave that first Nebula Banquet address. However, some of that future has already arrived with the World Wide Web. (and it's static analog, CD ROM). For the first time in human civilization, knowledge and information are no longer slaves to serial systems of categorization and storage such as letters of alphabets, or the ordering of Chinese characters by sequence of strokes ,or the classification of books by the Dewey Decimal System. Quite the opposite. With the Web and CD ROM, all entries are defined by their links to other entries. Einstein would have been intrigued with this ultimate perceptual relativity.

The Web is an unprecedented self-organizing, adaptive social phenomenon, growing incredibly fast and evolving its form and substance virtually without any central planning. I am struck by the analogy with how the human brain is organized, But, in the Web individual brain cells are replaced with individual brains! Vernor Vinge's dark vision of the technological singularity awaiting when networked artificial intelligence awakens into self awareness seems more fictional to me than the prospect of a real collective human superintelligence developing from the Web and it's descendants.

The communications revolution will not be alone. Microminiaturization, biotechnology and other ascendant themes of our runaway technological society will surely catalyze the transformation of the industrialized world. I am even hopeful that the first human expedition could be on the way to Mars at the time of the Nebula Award banquet of 2018!

However, back on the Mother planet the strains of the Crunch likely will dominate the consciousness of Earthlings. The fissioning of this planet into hostile communities of Have's and Have Not's seems almost certain to continue, possibly triggering serious social instability within and between regions, especially in the developing world. Today's distant Bosnian and West African nightmares may seem insignificant to us two decades hence if Mexico is going unstable, China is forcibly grasping energy and food resources to its south, and rival totalitarian regimes in the Middle East have fused nuclear weapons into their control of most of the world's oil. Serious conflicts over fresh water may dominate nearly every arid region of the world.

Even as the possibilities of technological solutions to material needs seem more promising than ever, the social cohesiveness and stability necessary to implement them on a large scale may seem more remote than ever. Cynicism, nihilism, and anarchism may be the fastest growing cultural themes.

Not a pretty picture. Squeezing humanity through the narrow gateway of the Crunch will be traumatic in the large. No region, no class will be immune. Everyone will feel disoriented as all of humankind accelerates into unprecedented physical and cultural settings less and less stabilized by custom, once "the great flywheel of society".

These are the perfect prerequisites for the explosive development of a new belief system, a new paradigm, a new religion. We have already felt a premonitory shock with the worldwide rise of religious Fundamentalism -- Islamic, Christian, Hebrew, Hindu, even Buddhist. Will once again Prophets arise to announce the imminent arrival of the Messiah? Or will it be the Grand Talk Show Host -- the Great Communicator of the Electronic Age -- fluent as the Pope in languages and metaphors and as natural to the electronic medium as Ronald Reagan?

I think maybe neither. The new upcoming paradigm may develop in a manner as unprecedented as the times it will rationalize. An adaptive, self organizing belief system may accelerate through the web, synthesizing the thoughts and feelings of hundreds of thousands of individuals throughout the economically interconnected world. In the past, new belief systems propagated over centuries by dissemination of the spoken or written word. Even the swords of Islamic conquest required many decades to convert a critical mass of humanity. This time new ideas, even new cultures, may diffuse and interact through hyperlinks at breathtaking speed, shaping and focusing the ubiquitous pain of the Crunch into a a new planetary consciousness.

The greatest drama yet in Man the Toolmaker's unprecedented evolution awaits us in the next Century. Can that essential new paradigm arise swiftly enough to guide 10 billion individuals into unprecedented sustainable and socially cohesive patterns? Will Humanity's cultural and environmental inheritance survive the Crunch? Or, will Homo sapiens' noble effort to will itself above animal behavior collapse into the chaos of Barbarism, or stagnate into a Brave New World of individuals without individuality?

Humanity is reaching the end of ten Millennia of adolescence. We can evolve into maturity and join the Galactic Community. Or we languish in the endless conflicts and pain of a dysfunctional adolescence. The choice is ours, collectively.

Once again we must wonder which parallel universe are we in. Once again, it could go either way, as with the unexpectedly peaceful end of the Cold War. Humanity can influence its destiny now just as it did when facing the prospect of global nuclear war.

All of us alive today happened on the scene just at this critical time in human development. None of us volunteered! We all have the special opportunity -- and the special responsibility -- to try to influence the outcome. Science fiction writers, in particular, have the rare talent of transporting audiences into unprecedented future human circumstances and leading them to visualize the present in new, less parochial ways. Never have such talents been more important to the real future. They can make a real difference in determining which parallel universe we turn out to be in -- the one in which we make through the Crunch and on toward the Galactic Community... or the one in which we fail and are forgotten.

Let's take stock again.....at the Nebula Award Banquet on April 27, 2018!!

June 30, 1996