In This Issue
future times Archive
From the Desk of the President
(Global futures studies)
Chapter News and Events
Age-Appropriate Futuring
(Personal long-range planning for a lifetime)
Carbon Capture & Storage
(Is carbon capture and storage (CCS) really the technology
to save the planet?)
Cosmic Visions of the Future
(The point of science fiction is trying to figure out the meaning of our
lives.)
From the Desk
of the President
Well, the Annual Conference is almost upon us, and
the Society as usual is a beehive of activity (although that may no
longer be a useful metaphor with the widespread onset of Colony Collapse
Disorder). The trip to Korea was an enormous success, in the sense that
the Society is very well thought of there and the presentations on
global cultural futures were well received. In addition to print and
television coverage, a number of futurists were asked to participate in
a televised management training series run by Samsung Electronics.
Meetings with the Korean Academy of Sciences, the
National Ministry of Education, the Korean National Assembly and Semyung
University were all very productive. In addition, conversations with the
organizers of the Seoul Digital Forum, where Steven Ballmer, the CEO of
Microsoft, gave the keynote last year, suggested that WFS will be
increasingly involved in what has become one of the leading technology
trends meetings in the world.
As a capstone to the trip, an agreement was reached
to translate a version of THE FUTURIST magazine into Korean on a regular
basis. While this project is still in its early stages, the first issue
is in production and we await our first Asian edition with anticipation.
Ed Cornish’s book, Futuring: The Exploration of the Future has
already been translated into Korean (and Mongolian and Arabic as well)
and so the magazine project is a logical next step.
Finally, you might have noticed the new title for
this publication. With an eye to producing our online publications in a
slightly more timely fashion, we are testing a combined approached,
which would include news from WFS and the chapters (as Future Times
has done in the past) and also articles from members and others on a
range of topics of interest (such as Learning Tomorrow has done).
Hence the highly creative (or not) combination name of Future Times:
Learning for Tomorrow (love those colons!)
Anyway, this will hopefully be a way to get useful
information, columns and shorter articles out to our readers, so please
keep sending them along to us for inclusion. As well, let us know how
you like this format. I can be reached at
tmack@wfs.org.
Chapter News and Events
Return to top
FUTUREtakes,
a publication of the National Capital Area chapter of WFS is soon going
to be issuing a special thematic issue, entitled “International and
Cross-Cultural Perspectives on the Future.” This special issue is
designed to accomplish the following:
- Reinforces the
lessons that various nations, peoples, and cultures can offer to
meet the challenges of the future – lessons that might otherwise be
lost to deculturation and increasing cultural hegemony,
- Highlights the
cultural values and alternative lifestyles of diverse nations,
peoples, and cultures – values and lifestyles that can impact the
way that we live, work, and think,
- Challenges
hidden culture-based assumptions, including values and everyday
lifestyles taken for granted (for example, the alarm clock – commute
– caffeine syndrome, or notions of prosperity or identity), that may
hamper futurist thinking and constructive solutions,
- Furthers
interdisciplinary education, and cross-cultural learning among
students of diverse backgrounds, and
- Extends
constructive dialog on the future to those cultures that are often
marginalized, thereby giving a voice to those who otherwise have
none.
But there is much
more that we could do together. In addition to the authors featured in
this issue, there are others authors who had planned to contribute
articles but who did not have the time or opportunity to do so. For
this reason, we are pleased to announce a second special issue – same
theme – to be published in May 2008. As for this issue, planned
distribution includes embassies, selected educational institutions and
international think tanks, and various other international, ethnic, and
cultural organizations. —David Stein
Watch for additional
details that will be posted on our Web page,
www.futuretakes.org. Share your perspectives on the world stage! Send
your aticles to
futuretakes@cs.com.♦
Age-Appropriate Futuring:
Personal Long-range Planning for a Lifetime
by Lane Jennings
"As a child, I was certain that clocks tell the time;
That meter don't matter if verse has a rhyme;
That a house has a roof which rests on a wall—
And, knowing these things, I of course knew it all."
*
The man who wrote these lines, my father, would be 95 today. He died 10
years ago; and yet, in many ways he never aged past 40.
He trained as a scientist, worked for hospitals, commercial labs, and
finally the federal government. He earned respect from colleagues and a
salary sufficient (under the sound management of his "stay-at-home" wife) to
live in modest comfort and to send a son through school and on to college.
He also played competitive chess, wrote poems, smoked heavily, and loved all
kinds of unsolved mysteries and puzzles.
Which of these men was the "real" Robert Jennings?
The worker? the father? the
puzzler? the poet? All of them by turns; and none exclusively. The
same goes for his son. I am many things part-time, including a futurist
writer.
Gifted men and women have devoted their entire professional lives to
futures study, developing tools and insights that are profitably used today
worldwide. But, however much we study, research, analyze, and plan for our
own good and that of others, none of us can truly claim to be a futurist
fulltime. Particularly in our personal lives, we all reach some decisions
only by careful reasoning, while others we make impulsively, with little or
no forethought. And a good thing, too!
The fully-scripted life, whose every incident is plotted out with nothing
left to chance, is as unlikely (and as unappealing) as a true surprise-free
future for a business firm or nation. Yet governments, organizations, and
individuals still keep hoping futurists will hand them predictions they can
absolutely guarantee. In much the same way, patients keep asking doctors to
"make them well," without any change or effort of their own.
Physicians, like futurists, make better guides and councilors than they
do magicians. The real benefit derived from time and effort spent in futures
studies is not a guaranteed prediction, but the resourcefulness acquired by
carefully exploring many options, choosing the most desirable, and framing
step-by-step proposals aimed at turning opportunities to outcomes.
Experience gained from unexpected outcomes and events is particularly
valuable. Sooner or later, all our plans go wrong in some way—big or small.
If all we have to guide us are minutely detailed blueprints, then the
slightest deviation from the norm becomes potentially disastrous. Success is
far more likely if we have a general plan (one with clear goals and limited
resources) plus an array of tested problem-solving tools and methods that
have proven effective for overcoming setbacks in the past.
Some technophiles and business boosters sound convinced that change not
only happens but must happen ever faster in the future. If their analysis is
right, and life from now on moves at the computer's pace, then we mere
humans have no more to hope for than to imitate the best machines—keep
running at full speed until we at last break down and are replaced.
I'm unconvinced. Instead of always grabbing for the latest, fastest,
smallest, most efficient, leading edge of anything, I stop to ask myself: "What's
wrong with what I've got?" "In this context what does `better' mean?"
and "If I choose not to `upgrade' now, what other choices are there?"
Learning to judge which kinds of change make sense for your condition and
desires in the present moment, can be a useful futures study tool. Rather
than reject the past and pin success entirely on getting up to speed with
new equipment and techniques, you may do well to temporize by strategy—use
your familiarity with established ways and means to "emulate" the better
outcomes promised by new methods and machines.
Occasionally an innovative change (penicillin, for example) is so
obviously superior that resistance is futile. More often, certain features
seem appealing, while others offer few immediate benefits for you. In these
cases, it makes sense to change in stages, finding work-arounds that let you
carry on with minimal disruption to yourself or inconvenience to others.
Selective procrastination—particularly involving new technology—can
sometimes let you skip one round of change entirely. Remember 8-track tapes,
stand-alone word processors, or quadraphonic stereo?
Finally, some changes make sense at one stage of life but not others.
"Selective futuring:" assessing where you are and where you want to go
before deciding to do something differently, is one way to keep your
personal pace of change acceptable lifelong— through youth, maturity, old
age...and after.
Futures Thinking for Beginners: Maximizing Options
As a youth, I learned Science tells time by the sun;
That a verse with a rhyme was an old-fashioned one;
That a solid foundation lends strength to a wall;
And, having learned this, I was sure I knew all.
Long-range plans for children are first made by others on their behalf.
If that job should come your way, make sure to plan for many kinds of
future, not only those that you yourself most expect or fear.
The future children face is both longer and less certain than any they
will face again. Their guardian or advisor's challenge is to keep them from
rashly throwing future options away by taking chances too extreme, yet also
understand and tolerate their need to test all limits. Allowing children
gradually more and more choice in short-term matters (clothes, play
activities, friends, etc.), especially allowing them to make bad choices,
and then live with the results, helps train them to make wise decisions
later on in long-term matters (college courses, career goals, life-mates,
etc). Since there is no failsafe future, young futurists must somehow learn
how to fail safely and move on.
New tech holds little terror for the young. Around the world, young
people rush to own and master the latest fads in electronic games,
computers, cell phones, music players, and the like. Whatever they do not
yet understand they experiment with until they find an answer. In their
view, mistakes don't matter so long as the end result is cool. This makes
good sense at a stage in life when the future looms long, and there is not
much in the way of past experience to draw on for comparison or lean on from
habit.
It is their elders who suffer technophobia, and frequently find fault
with new machines whose lure eludes them, and whose practical applications
they may not yet comprehend. For example, parents and teachers often
complain about the time kids spend on e-games and computer-mediated
interaction with each other and the world. Certainly obsessions have their
downsides; but there is another factor to consider: Earth's future may be
much more like the games kids play today than like the realworld environment
around them now.
In youth, the long-range goals most worthwhile planning for are gaining
skills and gathering resources that may possibly be used someday. If
educators and advisors truly knew what kinds of jobs the world would need
done by the time today's kids joined the workforce, they could steer them
into comfortable niches early on. But even their best guesses luckily
include enough uncertainty to make the term "education" still mean something
more than "training". Learning to collect, compare, evaluate and apply raw
information from varied sources, and to share ideas across barriers of many
kinds, may be among the few essential skills teachers and parents can be
confident will not grow obsolete.
Using computers comfortably seems likely to be part of most future
occupations. So using computers now to play at war and crime-fighting,
search for sexy pinups, download the latest tunes, or keep in touch with
age-mates anywhere on Earth may be more educational than time spent
memorizing answers for a multiple choice quiz. Likewise, holding impromptu
late-night teleconferences with a hundred phone-pals, or assembling text
messages from the fewest possible keystrokes may be better preparation for
tomorrow's communication modes than penmanship practice, spelling drills, or
essay writing.
Personally, I wish this wasn't so. I shudder at the prospect of a future
where pen and ink are obsolete, and where the power to devise and decode
text resides entirely inside some software program or wired circuit that
shapes syntax, chooses words, selects type fonts and/or speaks every message
to its target audience in your choice of languages and simulated voices. But
if high speed and low cost set the only standards of utility in human
communication, what else can we expect?
Mid Life Futuring—Grace Under Pressure
As a man, I discovered that clocks can be wrong;
That sense is no asset at all to a song;
That beauty alone may be asked of a wall—
And men bowed before me, because I knew all
Personal futures thinking in mid-life is a necessity—or should be. With
maturity come burdens, some sought-after, others possibly unwelcome but none
easy to escape. And most are easier to bear when approached with a long-term
perspective.
If youth is the time to pick up wide-ranging skills and potentially
useful tools, maturity is when we put what we have gathered into practice,
testing through experience how much is truly useful and what needs to be
reviewed, updated, augmented, or dropped. Mid-life planning emphasizes
scheduling to juggle multiple, sometimes conflicting, obligations, and
setting benchmarks to judge your own performance fairly.
The future in midlife is more real than potential. The 25-40 years
immediately ahead are likely to concern us most. This is the time in which
one's children will leave home and start making futures independently; the
time when one's professional career will peak and one's life work will be
assessed by our peers and successors. In short: performance counts now as
never before.
But this need not mean that all planning should be short-term. New skills
acquired now will likely focus on immediate needs in life and work; but
professional expertise, and street smarts allow the mid-life futurist to
speculate intelligently on topics far removed from daily concerns. We can
now extrapolate outcomes based on personal knowledge and balance this with
different perspectives from contacts with people representing many other
specialties, worldviews and backgrounds. Network participation may be the
most useful instrument for mid-life futures thinking.
Even in mid-life, many activities and interests do not need to be planned
in detail. Whatever does not obviously stop you meeting your
responsibilities to others can be left to whim or chance. Sports, hobbies,
travel, arts and entertainment—all can be enjoyed spontaneously. The key
limits are your time and health. Because you have commitments, it is
irresponsible to risk your life impulsively and thereby put other people's
futures in jeopardy.
If youth is when we sample new experiences widely, maturity offers the
chance to savor things we like already. Learn by comparing what you find the
best in any area of interest. If you like music, skiing, beer, mystery
novels, seek out different examples and become a connoisseur of quality. Who
cares what other people think? So long as you continue meeting the
responsibilities you've chosen, plus the ones life throws at you unasked,
you are successful. And a successful person can afford to be eccentric in
the world's eyes. Respect, not popularity is what matters.
Endgame Futuring—Remembrance of Things to Come
Now, time is a river of moments of dew
Which leaches false verse, leaving only the true.
As a ghost, I've no notion at all of a wall—
And, knowing these few things, I wish I knew all.
You know you are growing past maturity and into age when you find
yourself more and more often envisioning a future world that doesn't include
you. It may be a world of dangers and discomforts you don't wish to face, or
one where values you hold strongly are no longer dominant or even respected.
It may just be that life takes more effort and provides less fun than you
remember it once did.
So does this mean its time to retire from the future—give up ambitions
and responsibilities? Hardly. You may be getting ready to leave the world,
but much of what you learned and gathered while alive will stay here, and,
with forethought, can have a future of its own.
Just as it is hard to know what school subjects will be useful to young
people later in their lives, so older people cannot easily judge how much of
what they own or know will be prized by future generations. The rich try to
guard their fortunes against being squandered or taxed. Property owners and
entrepreneurs hope their heirs share the same commitments and enthusiasms
that drove them. But what can futurists, per se, do to assure a useful
legacy?
Taking inventory helps. What books and reference sources have you
gathered; and, of these, which might be hard to find elsewhere? Setting
these together on a labeled shelf or boxed with a note can help make sure
unique and prized resources will be promptly found and passed to the
colleague or institution likeliest to use them.
Next, collect and organize what you have published; or jotted down as
notes but never finalized; or thought about but not recorded till now. Tying
up loose ends, even just reviewing and archiving materials from abandoned
ventures may inspire someone years later, and thereby give new life to a
project you began but whose time had not yet come.
Finally, write memoirs. Anything from a brief "to whom it may concern"
note to a multi-volume diary could be a treasure trove to future scholars.
The everyday events and private feelings of an individual life are the very
details most quickly lost to later generations and the hardest for
historians to reconstruct unaided. Memoirs that focus on professional
accomplishments may have more immediate value for those in your field. But
don't let modesty or shame prevent you from recording more intimate details
as well—the doubts, distractions and dilemmas that shaped your career behind
the scenes. You can afford to be honest with the future, and the future will
thank you for it.
Conclusion
These suggestions for how to apply futures thinking in your life at
different stages are deliberately couched in very general terms. They are
not intended to exactly match anyone's life calendar. We've all, I hope,
known children "wise beyond their years," "grownups" who fail to meet their
responsibilities, and "old folks" with astonishing verve and energy. What I
consider "age-appropriate" futuring you may not. Certainly, I'm not
prescribing limits, only wondering in print if it might make sense to focus
the limited time and resources available for long-range planning at
different times of life toward different objects.
Whether we prepare for them or not, we all have futures. How we prepare
can either limit what that future holds, or broaden it. Change is a force in
all our lives, like wind passing through a forest. But, unlike the trees,
humans can choose when to bend, when to stand firm, and when to duck in out
of the weather.
Futures studies cannot build a wall that will keep the pesky ghost of
change out of our lives. But it does offer temporary shelter to decide when
it is enough to simply glance out the window at change, and not always be
rushing to throw wide the door.♦
Lane Jennings is research editor of THE FUTURIST and
production editor of Future Survey.
*
This and subsequent
verses at the section heads make up the poem "Some Lines from an Ouija
Board" by Robert Kimmel Jennings, first published in 1948.
Is Carbon Capture & Storage (CCS) Really The Technology
To Save the Planet?
By Gioietta Kuo, PhD
I am dismayed by the direction in which the current debate on
climate change is going, especially in Europe. In particular, I am weary
of the utterances by politicians who are in high echelons of governments
when it comes to deciding how to mitigate global warming for all of us
world citizens.1
There are two flaws in the current debate:
1. Too much hype on renewable energies—wind and solar.
When most of the environmentalists tout renewable energy sources, the
tendency is to mislead the public, whether intentional or out of sheer
ignorance, by implying that wind/solar alone can solve completely the
world's energy problems. This is patently untrue and very few people
mention the fact that wind does not blow nor sun shine all the time.
Therefore a steady stable source of electricity has to exist to provide
for the national grid which the wind/solar electricity can plug into.2
Take for example the European Community, there was an important
debate on EU’s future energy policy in March 2007. With so many
knowledgeable people in the great body of the European Union, all the
politicians could come up with was to reduce CO2 emission by 20%
by 2020 by building more wind/solar farms.3
2. Too much glib talk about CCS.
The present world energy situation is indeed dire, fuelled by the
increase in demand of energy of 70% by 2030. It is an established
fact that many countries in the world, especially developing world, or
even some developed countries like GB,4 are in the process of
planning or building a large number of coal power stations. Over the
next 2 decades, China will build 600 coal-fired power stations (ref
1). Faced with this deluge, what do the environmentalists say?
Since it is offensive to them to even think of the numerous coal power
stations springing up, which they are totally powerless to prevent, so
they come up with the mantra:
"Using coal for generating electricity is O.
K. so long as they use Carbon Capture and Storage"
Before we hail CCS as the technology to save the planet,1 we owe
it to ourselves to at least look into the basic technological, economic
and time scale of CCS and do some back of envelope calculations to
assure ourselves that the technology is indeed realizable in the
immediate future. For a reference, we need go no further than the IPCC Feb 2007 report entitled "IPCC Report on Carbon Dioxide
Capture And Storage, Feb 2007. "5
I summarize here the salient features in the report which are relevant
to our debate. Wherever a sentence is in quotes, " ",
it is a direct quotation from the IPCC report.
In 2005, the world emission for CO2 was 27 Gigatons( 10^9 tons). After liquefaction the volume of CO2 becomes: 56.6 x 10^9 meter
cubed, ( meter^3) or a volume: 2.4 miles x2.4 miles x 2.4 miles.
To visualize just how big a volume is, imagine 2500
Canadian football fields grouped together with a fence around the
whole area, then extend the fence skyward for 2.4 miles.
This volume has to be annually transported from the site of capture
to some pipes driven thousand of feet or more down to some
geological layer which they would hopefully stay for at least a 100
years. We should compare this with the world’s total
extraction of crude oil in 2005 which is only 4 Gigatons or
equivalently 5 Giga meter^3 (ref 6)—that is 9 % (
5/56.6) of what we propose to put liquid CO2 underground in a year.
We should bear in mind the fact that the infrastructure of world oil
extraction have been put in place over a century of development.
• "Several hundred to thousands of C02
capture systems would need to be
installed over the coming half century, each capturing
some 1-5 megatons of
CO2 per year." This means that to capture all of
the CO2 projected for 2050,
the date when CCS would be available, would require
32,000 capture
systems or pipes underground worldwide.
• "There are many potential barriers that could inhibit
deployment in developing
countries, even of technologies that are mature in
industrialized countries.
Addressing these barriers and creating conditions that would
facilitate
diffusion of the technology in developing countries would be
a major issue for
the adoption of CCS worldwide".
• "A power plant equipped with CCS system ( with access
to geological or
ocean storage) would need roughly 10-40% more energy that a
plant with
equivalent output without CCS"
• "Most analyses indicate that notwithstanding
significant penetration of CCS
systems by 2050, the majority of CCS deployment will occur in
the second
half of this century".
In short the CCS card has been played by politicians and
environmentalists alike as a bromide to blot out the unpalatable and
unstoppable fact that the world is going towards coal use, for which
there is no apparent solution. Invoking CCS is nothing but a
delusion which detracts us from a serious debate, which is long
overdue, on the practical and realizable options open to us.
Instead of paying too much attention to renewables which can
at best supply us only a fraction of our energy needs—most likely
20 %, we should concentrate on the remaining 80% which is the
national grid. Where can that come from?
Unfortunately there are only two options: nuclear or coal.
The reality is we have no choice but to go nuclear.
The most disappointing aspect of the IPCC report is the
fact that even with unlimited funding—the project will be
expensive -, CCS will not be available until after 2050 and this
only in the industrialized countries. This time gap of 43
years has been all but ignored by the politicians and
environmentalists alike when they propose CCS as an immediate
solution to our energy problems. In the mean time,
the reality of the world is pointing to an expansion of the
use of coal. If we are to wait for CCS to come on line by
2050, will we not have, in the mean time, been already smoked out of
our existence by all the coal plants in the developing countries?
References:
1. " CCS has become the great hope of
politicians and environmentalists wrestling with the threat of
global warming, It is seen as the only solution to a phenomena
that will give climate change enormous boost—the economic
explosion in the developing countries" British Chancellor of
Exchequer, Gordon Brown. M McCarthy, Independent, March 22
2007
2. "What future holds for world energy and climate change"
Gioietta Kuo, to appear in "Hope and Vision for the 21st
Century", Conference volume for World Future Society,
www.wfs.org.
3. ‘Energy for a changing world’ www.europa.eu.int
4. "CO2 emission targets at risk by ‘the roll to coal‘ "
M. McCarthy, Independent, March 28 2007
5. " IPCC special report on carbon dioxide capture and
storage" Feb 2007 http://www.mnp.nl/ipcc/pages_media/SRCCS-final/ccsspm.pdf
6. Vaclav Smil, talk at Paris energy conference, 2006 http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~vsmil
Gioietta Kuo PhD is Former Fellow of St. Hilda's
College, Oxford University, UK.; Former Research Scientist, Plasma
Physics Lab, Princeton University. US Senior Fellow, American Center
for International Policy Studies: http://www.amcips.
Cosmic Visions of the Future: The
Science Fiction of Stephen Baxter
By Tom Lombardo
"In my books, I deal with a whole set of futures. That’s
deliberate. I’d say the point of science fiction is trying to figure
out the meaning of our lives. What is the meaning for humanity of
this new understanding we have?" —Stephen Baxter
The seventeenth century philosopher Baruch Spinoza
argued that reality should be viewed "through the eyes of eternity." To
get a true picture of things, look at reality in the context of the big
cosmic picture. If we follow this line of thinking and apply it to the
future, then we should stand back from our local and relatively short
term ideas on the future, stretch our imaginative powers to the limits,
and attempt to envision the most all-encompassing panoramic visions of
the cosmos, both in space and time. We should also, following Spinoza,
ask and consider possible answers to the big questions of life in
pondering the meaning and significance of the future. In this spirit,
the philosopher and science fiction writer Olaf Stapledon, in his novels
The Last and First Men and Star Maker, speculated on the
entire future history of humanity, the evolution of intelligence and
mind within the universe until literally the end of time, the existence
and nature of God, the purpose and meaning of life, and the unending
quest for knowledge and enlightenment.1
Frequently compared with Stapledon, the contemporary
science fiction writer Stephen Baxter not only writes on a vast cosmic
scale that, in fact, exceeds Stapledon in scope, but also attempts to
address in his novels, as did Stapledon, the big philosophical questions
of existence. Like Stapledon, the world of ideas often takes precedence
over the characters in Baxter’s stories.2 Baxter is a highly
prolific writer and the reader is referred to a variety of websites that
list his numerous novels and short stories, along with reviews and
commentaries.3 In this article I am going to highlight two of
Baxter’s most mind-boggling and cosmic works: The novel Vacuum
Diagrams and the Manifold trilogy.
Vacuum Diagrams (1997) reaches out across the entire
universe and millions of years into the future, as well as billions of
years into the past.4 This novel, which is part of a series
of future history stories and other novels by Baxter, traces the future
destiny of humanity and describes the ultimate cosmic conflict between
the most powerful sentient forces of matter and anti-matter, the Xeelee
and the Photino Birds, and the eventual escape of both the Xeelee and
the last humans into another universe. The conflict and struggle between
the Xeelee and the Photino Birds begins twenty billion years ago and
ultimately defines the central drama of the entire history of the
universe—the saga of humanity is not in the center stage of the story of
the cosmos. The Xeelee are incomprehensively beyond human intelligence
and human civilization and they are inter-universe time travelers. They
alter the history of our universe and their own evolution by journeying
back to the beginnings of time and redirecting the future sequence of
historical events. In the far distant past—approximately five billion
years ago—they begin construction of an immense portal ("the most
massive single structure in the universe…hundreds of millions of light
years wide…") that eventually provides an escape route into another
universe four million years in the future. The fortunes of humanity rise
and fall through Baxter’s cosmic epic. At different times humans come
under the rule and control of different alien species (the "Qax" and the
"Squeem"—such strange, twangy, suggestive names); we aggressively expand
outward in galactic exploration, conquest, and colonization; and in an
ultimately foolhardy effort challenge the Xeelee for domination of the
universe, eventually being imprisoned by the Xeelee in a spatially
involuted world from which there seems to be no escape. Along the way,
various intelligent species (the "Silver Ghosts") attempt to create God
and predict the entire history of the universe. The story ends along two
parallel story lines – in one line, five hundred million years in the
future, one remaining human-like consciousness observes the heat death
of our universe—in the other line, in the year 5664 A.D.—the question is
raised but not answered, of whether the entire future saga of the
universe told in Vacuum Diagrams could, in fact, be changed.
Baxter is particularly adept at incorporating
contemporary theoretical science and technology, including quantum
theory, nanotechnology, cosmology, and artificial intelligence theory,
into his multifaceted speculations on the future. There is a great
variety of advanced technologies in Vacuum Diagrams that
transform or manipulate space, time, matter, and energy, the evolution
of life and intelligence, and the physical laws of the universe, all of
which Baxter explains in scientifically informed language. Vacuum
Diagrams won the Philip K. Dick Award for the best science fiction
novel of 2000.
Baxter excels again in his capacity to weave
cosmic-scale story telling with up-to-date scientific and technological
knowledge in his newer trilogy Manifold Time (2000), Manifold
Space (2001), and Manifold Origin (2002).5 In
Manifold Time, Baxter takes ideas from contemporary cosmologists Lee
Smolin, Fred Adams, and Greg Laughlin and sets sail across the
evolutionary history of the multi-verse, from the most simple to the
increasingly complex, from distant past to distant future—to many
distant futures—literally creating a manifold of "times" into which
human space explorers are thrown. Universes are born out of other
universes. Baxter takes the futurist idea of "possible futures" to the
extreme, creating a modern scientific, evolutionary version of Spinoza’s
naturalistic concept of God—of an infinite "substance" with infinite
attributes and modifications. And in the end, what does it all mean? To
what purpose and ultimate value?6
In Manifold Space, Baxter grapples with Fermi’s Paradox: Why are
there absolutely no indications of other forms of intelligent life or
technologically advanced civilizations in the observable universe? This
novel delves into the issue of communication across alien minds and
tells a tale of ultimate sacrifice to further the evolution of
consciousness in the universe. Perhaps the laws and dynamics of the
universe "conspire" against the ascension of intelligent life past a
certain level of development? Perhaps, intelligence will need to
redirect the natural evolution of the cosmos? Finally, in Manifold
Origin, Baxter speculates on the evolutionary history of humans and
provides an extremely realistic, graphic, and convincing depiction of
the minds and lives of our primitive ancestors, including Neanderthals,
Homo erectus, and Australopithecus. On an alternate and
mysterious "red earth," Baxter places all these different hominids,
along with contemporary humans, as well as giant "humans" who evolved on
a parallel different earth, and speculates on where the human family is
heading in the future.
Spinoza believed in an absolute determinism for all of
nature, for all human lives, and even for God. Everything is set—has its
place—within the "eyes of eternity." In Stapledon, human existence is
set in the context of the entire history and drama of the cosmos and our
significance is both dwarfed and made poignant through this panoramic
perspective. Informed by the mind-expanding new ideas of science and
cosmology, Baxter is able to speculate on an intellectual and
existential canvas that far exceeds in scope the universes envisioned by
Spinoza or Stapledon. Many of the same questions arise regarding our
real significance, if any, in the grand scheme of things. And Baxter
deals repeatedly with the issue of destiny and whether time is an
inexorable flow leading in one inevitable direction for humanity. But
Baxter brings to bear on this final question the possibilities of time
travel (thus altering the past, present, and future), multiple universes
(thus providing a manifold of different outcomes and realities),
cosmic-scale engineering (thus altering the universe and its very
evolution), and super-intelligent aliens and artificial intelligences
(thus opening the possibility of answers and mysteries that far exceed
our present capacities of understanding). Although in his novels, at one
level, the reader travels across the farthest reaches of space and time,
at a deeper level, the reader goes on a more penetrating journey into
the philosophical territory of the future and the scientifically
expanded arena of the human mind.
Notes:
1. Stapledon, Olaf Last and First Men and Star Maker. New York: Dover
Publications, 1931, 1937; Lombardo, Thomas Contemporary Futurist
Thought: Science Fiction, Future Studies, and Theories and Visions of
the Future in the Last Century. Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2006,
Pages 33-38.
2. Clute, John Science Fiction: The Illustrated Encyclopedia. London:
Doarling Kindersley, 1995, Pages 66, 122, 208.
3. Baxterium— http://www.baxterium.org.uk/;
Stephen Baxter: The Official Website—http://www.stephen-baxter.com/;
The Manifold: Stephen Baxter Fansite—http://www.themanifold.co.uk/
.
4. Baxter, Stephen Vacuum Diagrams. New York: Harper Collins Publishers,
1997.
5. Baxter, Stephen Manifold Time. New York: Ballantine, 2000; Baxter,
Stephen Manifold Space. New York: Ballantine, 2001; Baxter, Stephen
Manifold Origin. New York: Ballantine, 2002.
6. Smolin, Lee The Life of the Cosmos. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1997; Adams, Fred and Laughlin, Greg The Five Ages of the Universe:
Inside the Physics of Eternity. New York: The Free Press, 1999.
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Contributing Editors:
Timothy Mack, Susan
Echard
Production Editor:
Sarah Warner
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