The Future of Humanity: a Lecture by Isaac Asimov

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The following document is a transcript of a lecture given by Dr. Isaac Asimov. It is from an audio tape which I have had in my collection since 6th grade. It is not available anywhere, and please don't e-mail me requesting copies of it. I present it to the group as a tribute to a man who changed my way of thinking when I needed it the most.

I have made corrections to any misplaced words, eliminated any stutters, etc. These edits have in no way affected the intended content of the presentation. After listening to this for so many years, I thoroughly understand it.

As you read this, please keep in mind that the good doctor improvised many of his lectures. Generally, when he was asked to speak at a given function, he would ask what the topic desired was, and rarely if ever prepared anything for it. Most of what you read here is conversational English, and on paper may not look very elegant.

What you read here, though timeless, was a product of the time. 1973 saw the end of a lot of optimism carried over from the sixties, and the oil embargo was the first real inconvenience experienced by the baby-boomers of the USA on a nationwide scale. Many middle class families were now requiring two wage-earners, and the cost of living was on the rise.

Twenty-plus years have passed since the good doctor presented this, and yet the content holds as universal truth. Even if this is the only thing you ever read produced by the late Dr. Asimov, you will get a good idea as to the level of his wisdom. I sincerely doubt that this world will ever see another individual even close to his abilities ever again.

Please note that this material is NOT copyrighted, and I am placing it in the public domain.

B. Torre

June 8, 1995

INTRODUCTION: (unidentified person)

It is now my great pleasure to introduce to you a man who is probably the most prolific science fiction author in the world today. And, he's also a very learned man...and I'm not going to talk to you anymore because he's so much smarter than I am. I'm just going to...well that's not saying much, but...I'm just going to bring him right out here now. Uhhh...would you please welcome Dr. Isaac Asimov.

[applause]

Dr. Asimov's words:

Thank you, thank you. I have...can you hear me as I talk now, or do I have to lean into this?

[no response]

Can you hear me when I speak like this? Anyone?

[some of the group responds that they can understand him.]

OK.

I had a pretty exciting time coming to Newark.

[group laughs]

Because you see, my correspondence was from my office. Which is not where I live. And when I was told that I would be picked up I carefully wrote a very clear letter explaining exactly where I lived. Which made it inevitable that they send the people to my office.

[group laughs slightly]

As I stood there in the street, waiting for the car, listening to the minutes tick away, realizing I had to be up here at eight o'clock...I grew desperate. Finally on the intercom, I called my wife and said: "Would you call my office and ask if there are any jerks there looking for me".

[group laughs]

She did, and then she called back, and she said that's where they were, so I told them to come here. I said: "Why did you do that?" I said "It's four blocks. They'll never make it!"

[group laughs]

They almost didn't.

[group laughs]

I had to wait another ten minutes.

[group laughs mildly]

Then, but finally we got here with five minutes to spare. And we knocked at a locked door.

[group laughs mildly]

And a security guard opened it, and said: "You can't come in".

[group laughs heartily]

And the two young men who were with me, who looked like college students...very unsavory characters...

[group laughs mildly]

...said: "Well that's allright about us", he says, "But this is the lecturer". And the guard peered at me, and he said: "that's the lecturer?" And they said yes. "I happen to know that the lecturer is upstairs"

[group laughs very heartily]

So we went through another door where there wasn't any guard.

[group laughs]

And here I am. Now this other lecturer isn't going to say a word to you, but I'll bet he collects the fee.

[group laughs]

Ahhh... But anyway, now you see why I hate to travel. My discussion on the future of man applies very, very well to what has just happened to me as you will shortly see. Let me explain.

I once, when I was not quite nineteen, wrote a story called "Trends". It was the first story I ever sold to John Campbell of the old "Astounding Science Fiction". It appeared in the July 1939 issue.

And in it I dealt with the first flight around the Moon and back. I had it placed in the 1970's. The first attempt, which was a failure, was in 1973. And the second attempt, which was a success, was in 1978. The actual flight took place in 1968, so I was ten years conservative. In addition, my flight was all there was, whereas in real life the flight around the Moon was preceded by all kinds of orbital and sub-orbital flights, and dockings, and mid-course-corrections, and communication satellites, and navigation satellites...everything under the sun.

So you can see how wrong I was. In fact I was even wronger than that because when I wrote my story back in 1939...38, it was printed in 39...When I wrote that story, I had definite ideas on how the space flight was to take place.

First place, I had my inventor build a spaceship in his back yard.

[group laughs slightly]

In the second place, I took the attitude that any man who good enough to build a spaceship was good enough to fly the spaceship.

[group laughs slightly]

I mean the inventor was the astronaut; a great saving in time and labor.

[group laughs slightly]

Furthermore, I didn't bother establishing any computer banks anywhere...especially not in Texas. Because to this day, to be perfectly honest with you, and that's what I would like to be, perfectly honest. To be perfectly honest with you, I don't really see what the big deal is about getting to the Moon with the computers and the mid-course-corrections. I know you are a bunch of engineers, and you know better than I do, but I ask you...once you get there beyond the atmosphere, do you or do you not see the Moon?

[group laughs, and then applauds]

And if you see the moon steer for it, right?

[group laughs heartily]

In fact the only thing that bugged me...the only thing that bugged me in that story is where you launch the spaceship from. I lived in Brooklyn all my life, and I looking around Brooklyn I could see there was no place you could safely launch a spaceship...

[group laughs]

...without arousing the anger of the citizenry.

And so I thought that I had better launch it outside Brooklyn somewhere. And that sort of promptly got me into trouble because I wasn't sure, for certain, that there was any place outside Brooklyn.

[group laughs]

I mean I heard rumors to that effect, but I'm a pretty difficult fellow to fool. I like definite evidence. But I realized that I have to do something, so I launched the ship...the spaceship...from the farthest limits of the known world. To wit, in Jersey City.

[group very heartily laughs]

I'm not kidding. Really did. And yet I sold this story.

[group laughs]

Not only sold this story, but its been reprinted five times. The last time, in 1973. By which time I suspect that most people had a pretty good idea that the details in my story were wrong.

[group laughs mildly]

Well why was this do you suppose? I'll tell you. The story was not printed because of any of the engineering details...you should excuse the expression. It was published because I had something in it that the editor had never seen before. I had postulated resistance to space flight. There was a whole organization of people on earth who were sore as anything at the people who were trying to get out into space. They thought people should stay on earth and mind their own business. And this had never been postulated before. Never!

Up till that moment in time, the only way in which space travel was treated was either by having the hero go out to Deneb or someplace, and fight the oyster men there,

[group laughs mildly]

...and marry the beautiful princess who lays eggs,

[group laughs mildly]

...without any reference whatsoever to earth or the people thereof. On the other hand, the other way of handling space flight was to have the hero land on the Moon, or on some other place thereto akin, and then come back and receive a ticker tape parade with everyone being very pleased at this heroic action.

It never occurred to anybody that there might actually be resistance to the whole notion; people might think it was a rotten idea and a waste of money.

After I wrote the story, again, nobody had the idea. I don't think another story ever appeared in which there was any hint of opposition to space flight. I mean, on principle. Until such time as the opposition did develop.

And so you are entitled to ask how is it possible that an eighteen year old boy, very unsophisticated an naive, who literally and honestly was dubious as to whether there was anyplace outside Brooklyn. How it was possible that he could see something clearly that older and thicker heads failed to see?

And it goes against the grain to have to explain this to you because I would much prefer to have you think I was very smart, and had some kind of key to the wisdom of the universe. I mean, that's a great thing to be able to impress you with. But instead I'm going to have to tell you the truth, and you're going to see how disgustingly simple the whole thing was.

I was going to Columbia University at the time, and as I don't need to tell any of you here, the tuition rates were something appalling. I mean, as I recall it was three hundred and sixty-five dollars a semester.

[mild laugh from crowd]

And I couldn't afford it. And so I looked about for all kinds of things to do in order to eke out the tuition.And one of the things I did was to join the NYA, National Youth Administration, which was a kind of relief for deserving students. They gave you little sinecure jobs, and paid you the munificent sum of fifteen dollars a month. And this enabled you to get through your tuition.

And the job I got was to serve as a kind of secretary to a sociologist who was preparing a book entitled "The Social Resistance to Technological Change". And what I was supposed to do was as follows: I had to go to the library with a list of references from him, and ask for the books. Turn to the pages where I was to find the reference, copy them out longhand...because this was the days before Xerox. Luckily too, otherwise I would have starved. Copied them out longhand, took them home, typed them up. Now, it was impossible for me to copy them out and type them up without reading them.

[mild laughter]

As a result, I read perhaps ninety percent of the book. Because you must understand how learned books are written in case you ever want to write a learned book. First thing you do is get a thousand references, chosen at random...

[group laughs]

You then put them into the book, in the order you reach them...

[group laughs mildly]

And stick two or three lines of your own between each of them to act as mortar...

[group laughs mildly]

And you're all set.

Well, when I read all of these references I discovered, to my amazement, that all through history there had been resistance...and bitter, exaggerated, last-stitch resistance...to every significant technological change that had taken place on earth. Usually the resistance came from those groups who stood to lose influence, status, money...as a result of the change. Although they never advanced this as their reason for resisting it. It was always the good of humanity that rested upon their hearts.

For instance, when the stagecoaches came into England, the canal owners objected. Not that they would lose money, although they would, but they feared for humanity. Because as the stagecoaches tore along at fifteen miles an hour, the air whipping past the nostrils of the people on board, would by Bernoulli's Principle, suck all the air out of the lungs.

[group laughs]

You know, when I tell this story to a non-engineering audience I can't mention Bernoulli's Principle, which is what gives it that real taste.

[group laughs]

Well naturally the stagecoach people laughed heartily, and all they had to do was run a stagecoach at fifteen miles an hour with people inside and show them there's no harm. But they memorized the argument...for when the railroads came in.

[group laughs mildly]

Well then, reading all this, and this was over a period of months...I read it, and read it...I said to myself: "Hey, you know I can make a syllogism out of this" because I had taken up liberal arts and the humanities, and they taught me about syllogisms.

I don't know if you guys know about syllogisms. It's... The units of a syllogism is one Aristotle.

[group laughs]

Well, see, that's...to put it in engineering terms: One Aristotle per second is a fast syllogism.

[group laughs mildly]