Maybe self-driving cars aren’t going to happen soon, after all. The car companies have found that the cars get confused by human behaviour–like a cyclist riding the wrong way down a one way street. (NYT, free, may need registration)

Cities will have to lead the way on climate innovation. Nowhere else has the right scale and enough resources and connections. A new manifesto argues that cities and communities can create better futures. Related: 25 books on cities written by women.

The future of buildings is biotech. The next generation of buildings will grow, breathe, eat, and heal themselves.

A vastly entertaining list of ‘laws’ about how the world works. From Littlewood’s Law to Goodhart’s Law to Parkinson’s Law, with quite a lot more in between. Sadly, Stein’s Law–which definitely deserves a place here–is missing. Via The Browser.

Leonard DiCaprio is Hollywood’s last star. His name sells tickets and gets films green-lighted.

One of the best things from the Apollo 11 anniversary: a swarm of 300 luminous drones (video, 40″) and a Duran Duran concert. Well, maybe not the Duran Duran concert. Related: a long essay also re-surfaced about poets, poetry and the Moon.

The Simpsons titles, as Soviet art-house cinema. Homer could have been working at Chernobyl. Suddenly it all makes sense. (Video 1’10”)

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Image courtesy of Road.cc, and used with thanks.

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 “The whole world’s at sixes and sevens, and why the house hasn’t fallen down about our ears long ago is a miracle to me.” (Thornton Wilder)

Readers will know that I come back to the subject of space from time to time. Having seen Duncan Jones’ science fiction film Moon this weekend, it’s as good reason as any for a return visit – while trying to avoid any spoilers. As a film, it should be said, there’s a lot to like; an intriguing story, well told, and the production design is dazzling. It pays its respects to other space films, but is, unmistakably, a film of the ‘noughties’. As a piece of futures (it’s set in the mid-2020s) the on-board computer, with more than a nod to HAL and Dark Star, is like the human resources department of a global company – sometimes solicitous and caring, sometimes trying to enforce the bottom line – and the task the workers are engaged in is to harvest energy.

Since this blog is about futures rather than film, however, I’m going to concentrate on the apparent social and economic world of the film, not the movie itself. Sam Bell is reaching the end of a three year contract as a technician, working on his own, on a moon base set up to extract helium. When we (he) visit the “harvesters” working the surface, it’s like nothing so much as a large open-cast mine, dirty and dangerous. The dirty moonsuit he dons when he leaves the base for the first time – shades of Outland – differs from the clean world of 2001, or come to that, the first moon landing.

It takes three days to get home. The communications technology appears to be unreliable. Why someone would volunteer for such conditions is unclear, although there are hints that the job of “astronaut” still has some cachet. Sam seems to be hallucinating a bit after three years on his own. There’s a sharp contrast between the cleanly stencilled base furniture and the unruly plants, pictures, and post-it notes which have accumulated.

Corporate worlds

The base computer, ‘GERTY’, which (like HAL) appears to be the name of its maker, is solicitous and attentive, as when Sam scalds himself early on. As the story continues, it’s clear that it also has its loyalties to Lunar Industries Inc, which owns the base. Having studied some industrial sociology, I was delighted to see Sam indulge in some old-fashioned industrial sabotage to circumvent a restriction imposed by the computer. There’s a fine corporate moment later, when Sam appears to be about to leave the base for home, when a corporate videogram pops up to thank him for helping to keep Lunar Industries as the leading global provider of clean energy.

In fact, without giving too much away, the corporate model turns out to be more sinister and quite a lot more cost-effective. Overall, it seems to be a plausible and coherent view of a future in which the Moon is harvested to deal with energy shortages on Earth, even if some of the the technical details are left blank (How does the helium reach earth? It’s not a doctorate, it’s a film).

With one caveat: in this plausible and coherent future, it is much more likely that the technicians pulling shifts on the moon will be Chinese, not American. China has a more ambitious space programme than the United States, and China is already buying farmland and other production resources outside of its boundaries. Lunar Industries will most likely be a Chinese company as well.

Finally, without giving away any of the plot, the film turns into a smart reflection on identity and memory. And (in terms of film trends) I liked the fact that the lunar landscape shots owe much more to models than to CGI.

In his post, Stross (who writes science fiction for a living) described the landing as a ‘stunt’ – among lots of (disputed) technical analysis about the power-to-weight ratios of rocket launches.

Wernher von Braun and his colleagues didn’t see it as a stunt, of course. They saw it as a stepping-stone, a valuable intermediate step in establishing a metaphorical beachhead in space. … Unfortunately, the real goal of the rocketry pioneers called for something a bit bigger than an ICBM. … Think about it. The real mission wasn’t to go to the moon; it was to bring two astronauts and 100Kg of moon rocks back from the lunar surface and into lunar orbit (to rendezvous with the CSM stack for the journey home) — and it took a 3000 ton behemoth to accomplish this. Launching a bigger, more useful LEM (one that could carry 3 or 4 astronauts to the lunar surface, along with a decent-sized rover and supplies for a couple of weeks) would have added tonnes to the LEM payload … and hundreds, if not thousands of tons to the launch stack.

I’ve posted before on the way this particular bit of futures turned away from popular expectations of space colonisation, and one of the comments [43] to Stross’ post points out the length of time between Amundsen and Scott reaching the South Pole and the establishment of the research stations there.

Once the flags of Britain, Norway, etc. had been planted at the south pole, national prestige was satisfied. Afterwards, nobody bothered much with Antarctica for about another half century, until the first international geophysical year (1959?). Since then, the continent has been studded with permanently manned scientific bases and weather stations. But nobody has bothered to try to colonize Antarctica on a large scale. … If history is any guide, about a half century after the Apollo program (within the next ten to twenty years) look for permanently manned stations in orbit, on the moon and maybe on Mars.

In my earlier post, I suggested that the end of the space adventure was down to cost – the resources went into the arms race instead – and also because of a shift in the public mood from expansionist optimism to more protective pessimism. Looking at the picture of the flag on the moon, I also wonder if the notion that a shared national endeavour was possible, or desirable, had crumbled (“We choose to go to the moon in this decade” said Kennedy, in his famous speech, “… because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills”). Flags were burning in protest against the Vietnam war, and a month after the moon landing Hendrix assailed the Star Spangled Banner at Woodstock. Gil Scott-Heron’s song “Whitey’s on the moon” came out the following year:

I can’t pay no doctor bill.
(but Whitey’s on the moon)
Ten years from now I’ll be payin’ still.
(while Whitey’s on the moon).

Is it too late to re-energise the idea of manned space exploration? It might be. Even if the money was there, or the political will, the engineers with the skills and knowledge to design, build and launch rockets can no longer be taken for granted. Charlie Stross again:

We used to have them, but some time in the past 40 years they all retired. We’ve got the institutions and the data and the better technology, but we don’t have the experience those early pioneers had. And I’m betting that the process of rebuilding all that institutional competence is going to run over budget.

Related post: Working on the moon

Clarke, of course, was one of the great evangelists of humankind’s future in space, a view that was deep in the heart of the cultural assumptions, at least in the rich world, throughout that post-war period. His collection of essays and articles, Voices From The Sky, published in the UK in 1966, was reprinted in 1969 with the sub-title, “Previews of the coming space age”.

The futurist Peter Bishop observed recently on an email list that one of the first public ‘Delphi‘ processes, in 1964, on the future of science and technology, was broadly accurate on a wide range of technologies, but “horribly wrong” on the future of space travel. According to Steven Schnaar’s book on forecasting, Megamistakes,

Most projections incorrectly assumed that the moon landing would be followed by space stations, manned trips to Mars, and other elaborate and expensive projects. Given that set of assumptions, forecasters foresaw permanent, manned lunar bases, space stations, commercial passenger rockets, and frequent visits to other planets, all in a setting where children wanted to grow up to be astronauts.

Schaars quotes from an example of some of the newspaper coverage of all this, a 1967 article in the Wall Street Journal headed ‘Manned Mars Landing, Moon Bases Are Seen As Likely Space Feats’. One expert was quote as saying it was ‘undoubted’ that we would have achieved these by the year 2000.

Such coverage only reflected the extent to which this space future was embedded in the culture. The recent ‘Space Age’ exhibition at London’s Museum of Childhood had examples of ‘space toys’ from Japan and the way the Oldsmobile car company used space motifs to enhance its car marketing. There are fine poems from the period by, for example, Alan Bold on seeing Sputnik over Edinburgh; Edwin Morgan’s witty poem on ‘The First Men on Mercury“, and WH Auden’s reflection on the “Moon Landing” [scroll down], published in the New Yorker in 1969, which in its own way made the same connection which is made in the famous bone/spacecraft cut in the film 2001: “from the moment/ the first flint was flaked this landing was merely/ a matter of time”.

Despite Clarke’s voluminous collection of factual articles, short stories and novels, 2001, based on one of his short stories and directed by Stanley Kubrick, released in the US in 1968 (1969 in the UK), undoubtedly had the most impact. It probably marks the high water mark of the cultural idea of space travel.

Schnaars is dismissive about why space travel disappeared from the cutural map; he puts it down to money. “The manned Mars mission alone would cost between $40 billion and $100 billion”. There would be technology issues as well. But it seems to me that it wasn’t just about the money. There’s ideology at play here, as well as a sprinkling of special interests. What happened was that the budget that might have gone into travelling beyond the moon, or building the imagined space stations, got diverted instead into the defence budgets that fuelled the Cold War: from the stars to the Star Wars programme. Far greater sums were spent on this than were imagined by the space programme. But by the time Clarke suggested, after the end of the Cold War, that the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ arrival in the Americas should be marked by an international manned expedition to Mars, the idea had disappeared so far to the fringes that it appeared quixotic.

And maybe there’s more to this than just ideology. The 50s and 60s were essentially optimistic decades, which may be why surveys show them consistently as the decades which people would like to live in. By the 70s, the mood had turned to pessimism, with the oil shocks and their accompanying recessions, and in the US the Vietnam defeat and the disgracing of Nixon. Space travel is a task for optimistic times.

A couple of footnotes: yes, I know that Richard Branson is talking about offering space tourism, flying from a specially built spaceport in New Mexico, but this seems to be more about upping the ante of the ‘experience economy‘ rather than a sign of deep cultural shift.

And in 2001 there’s a lingusitic moment which locates it firmly in its time. As (I think) Dr Floyd arrives at the space base, early on, he’s asked for his “Christian name”. Diversity and multi-culturalism had put paid to that sort of language long before 2001.

Update 16th April: The Paleofutures blog, which specialises in just this kind of ‘lost future’, has just posted a copy of the 1963 General Dynamics book about the world in 2003, published as a limited edition. As Paleofutures puts it in their summary of the content:

The book gives some great insight into the general sense of optimism that so typifies 1960s futurism. Space colonies? Sure! Martian life? Why not! Teleportation? Easier than commercial space flight!

Related posts: Arthur Clarke’s Three Laws