Actually, the more I read over Thiel’s essay, the more I question our ideas about the future at mid century. For example:
--How many of those predictions were based on the erroneous belief that communist states were also valiantly leading the charge of progress? We now know that half the world essentially squandered five decades of human progress.
--To what extent were they underestimating the technical challenges involved?
--How many misplaced ideas about society were there? Many ideas, like interplanetary colonization, seemed to spring from a belief that people would want to play Daniel Boone in space suits.
--How much of it was driven by the now commonly understood ability of media to twist scientific findings? The world seems very different when you think that physics just created infinite energy or psychologists had just discovered how to completely unravel the mind.
And, to me, most importantly:
--What was the cost of overactive imagination? I feel like there is a lot of cynicism driven by failed futures which were wildly implausible either technically or socially. I remember that old science fiction liked to speculate about interplanetary travel and living in spaceships in the 1990s. Rotting magazines laying around the garages of grandparents seemed to present these fantasies as a fact about the near future. The sort of cynicism bred by none of this happening because none of it was really plausible could be fatal. (I for one fell into cyberpunk, so I’ve been getting a good serving of future. :P)
--How many of those predictions were based on the erroneous belief that communist states were also valiantly leading the charge of progress? We now know that half the world essentially squandered five decades of human progress.
This seems like an interesting idea but it exaggerates things. First of all, I think that everyone thought that there was a large amount of overlap between research being done in the both the US and the USSR (look at the space programs for example). Second, the USSR did do a lot of very good research on their own (look for example how many Nobel and Fields medal they won as a very rough metric).
To what extent were they underestimating the technical challenges involved?
This seems to be the biggest issue. There seems to have been a massive underestimate of just how tough space travel and associated technologies are. People expected the expense to go down at a far faster rate than it did. On the other hand, some technologies that almost no one saw coming, such as personal computers and the internet have if anything become extremely ubiquitous.
How many misplaced ideas about society were there? Many ideas, like interplanetary colonization, seemed to spring from a belief that people would want to play Daniel Boone in space suits.
I think that this belief isn’t misplaced. The cost and tech issues seem to be more relevant. Being Daniel Boone in space is really expensive.
How much of it was driven by the now commonly understood ability of media to twist scientific findings?
Answering this is probably going to be difficult. But I think that even the people who were scientists were extremely optimistic. I don’t have the precise year but in I think either the late 1960s or early 1970s, Asimov wrote an essay for the World Book Encyclopedia in which he laid out what he thought was going to happen. There would be colonies on Mars and other planets, and humans engaging in missions to the upper atmosphere of Venus, and about nowish we were supposed to start preparing a generation ship. The optimism was not the fault of the media simply twisting the science.
So, overall, I think for many of these technologies the main issues were not realizing how tough they were along with general unjustified optimism.
This seems like an interesting idea but it exaggerates things. First of all, I think that everyone thought that there was a large amount of overlap between research being done in the both the US and the USSR (look at the space programs for example). Second, the USSR did do a lot of very good research on their own (look for example how many Nobel and Fields medal they won as a very rough metric).
A quick and dirty estimation: the US shows 331 Nobel Prizes, France shows 58, Germany shows 102; Russia shows 27. Russia is also notably larger than either France or Germany, which it trails badly, and would have been the great majority of people in the Soviet Union.
This table of Fields medal winners shows only 3 for the USSR and 18 for the USA over the period in which the Soviet Union existed.
I think that this belief isn’t misplaced. The cost and tech issues seem to be more relevant. Being Daniel Boone in space is really expensive.
The locus here is not “being” but “playing”; “playing Daniel Boone in space” conveys the notion of an unserious, wasteful endeavor. It turns out that people are not actually all that eager to waste those resources for the “thrill of adventure” or “to be pioneers” or the like; yet much of the popular science and science fiction seems to assume this motive, possibly because it was first vigorously marketed to young males at a time when Westerns were a dominant narrative mode.
Asimov wrote an essay for the World Book Encyclopedia in which he laid out what he thought was going to happen.
Asimov was, however, a biochemist and a writer. He wasn’t an aerospace engineer or an important physicist; he certainly wasn’t someone in a position or with expertise to actually know the feasibility of what he was discussing. In most respects, he was more a member of the media than a member of the sciences; he is certainly more remembered that way, no?
A quick and dirty estimation: the US shows 331 Nobel Prizes, France shows 58, Germany shows 102; Russia shows 27. Russia is also notably larger than either France or Germany, which it trails badly, and would have been the great majority of people in the Soviet Union
Ok. Wow. I knew there was a discrepancy. I didn’t realize that the differences were that massive, That’s um… wow. Phrased that way I now have to wonder how more people didn’t during the Cold War realize how much the USSR was being hobbled by its own problems. This undermines my claim quite a lot.
The locus here is not “being” but “playing”; “playing Daniel Boone in space” conveys the notion of an unserious, wasteful endeavor.
This still seems to be a function of the resource level involved and how much technology is required. If playing Daniel Boone in space took only a few hundred thousand dollars I suspect that a lot of people would jump at it.
As to Asimov, yes that’s a valid point. He was writing far outside his field. He’s not however the only example of this, merely the most prominent. Sagan was also in that hybrid zone of science and media but a bit closer (having actually worked on probes and aerospace ideas including a military proposal to detonate a nuke on the moon) and he made similar comments.But, you make a good point. It seems that the rank and file engineers were not nearly as optimistic. So the media point seems stronger than I stated.
Ok. Wow. I knew there was a discrepancy. I didn’t realize that the differences were that massive, That’s um… wow. Phrased that way I now have to wonder how more people didn’t during the Cold War realize how much the USSR was being hobbled by its own problems.
Do we have reason to think the Nobel process was really non-political enough to take those numbers at face value?
As an example, I’ve read that in the early 20th century the Nobel physics committee deliberately decided to focus on awarding prizes for developments in atomic & nuclear physics instead of other fields like astrophysics or atmospheric physics. I can’t remember why; I want to say it’s because Sweden happened to be particularly strong in atomic physics at the time, but I’m much less sure of that. (I’m annoyed that I can’t find a reference to double check this now.)
It’s hard to make a comprehensive selection of relevant extracts, but here are some bits & pieces, since the article’s paywalled:
I shall argue that the subsequent restriction of the scope of the physics prize stemmed from a determined effort within the Swedish physics discipline. Not surprisingly, Nobel Prize deliberations became enmeshed in the process by which various factions within the Swedish physical science community attempted to define and to legitimize their particular notions of physics: its objects, methods and goals.
[During the debate over awarding Einstein the Physics Prize], three of the committee’s five members belonged to the Uppsala tradition of experimental physics — B. Hasselberg, G. Granqvist, and A. Gullstrand. The others were S. Arrhenius (physical chemistry) and V. Carlheim-Gyllensköld (mathematical and cosmical physics). The committee’s strong experimentalist bias proved significant from the start in determining Nobel Prize decisions and for interpreting the statutes.
Debates on the role of mathematics and theory in physics that had begun in the 1890s carried over into deliberations on the prize. Hence, even in the case of a world-wide campaign for Henri Poincaré, in which his mathematical physics qua physics was delineated from his purely mathematical accomplishments, the committee did not see fit to recommend him for the prize⁸. In a protest note, Carlheim-Gyllensköld pointed out the committee’s general unwillingness and inability during the first ten years to evaluate nominations in mathematical physics such as those of Boltzmann, Heaviside, Kelvin and Poynting⁹. Arrhenius had commented that Uppsala physicists consider “spectral analysis...the only part of physics worth pursuing”¹⁰. Indeed, Hasselberg did “all in my power to procure the prize” (1907) for A. A. Michelson, who had received but two nominations, not for his role in the aether-drift experiment but, rather, primarily for his work in precision spectroscopy and metrology¹¹.
Other examples abound. Thus the proposal for the 1908 prize was sabotaged partly by those who believed it “unjust” to award a prize to a theoretician, M. Planck, without dividing the honour with an experimentalist.¹³
The Einstein deliberation came at a turning point in the development of Swedish physics and of the committee. By 1923, after the deaths of Hasselberg and Granqvist, Oseen was elected to the committee as a regular member and was joined by his Uppsala colleague, atomic physicist Manne Siegbahn. Together with Oseen’s friend, Gullstrand, the three Uppsala physicists commanded a majority on the committee [...] By promoting atomic physics, in which experiment and theory intimately progress together, he [Oseen] hoped to overcome traditional prejudices and to institutionalize a theoretical physics standing apart from abstract mathematical physics and mechanics. Yet, to be successful [...] they not only had to promote and legitimize their preferred research programmes, but would also have to eliminate what they considered insignificant specialties. Starting in the 1920s, the Uppsala group began a determined campaign to restrict the definition of physics within the Academy and with regard to the Nobel Prize.
in 1923, the new Uppsala group and Arrhenius attempted to eliminate astrophysics from the scope of the prize in physics. Arrhenius, who wrote the proposal, seems to have feared that the establishment of new Nobel institutions would threaten his own Nobel Institute for Physical Chemistry. [...] Previously, only Arrhenius’s institute had been supported in this way, but during the war Carlheim-Gyllensköld suggested a department for cosmical physics that was later followed by detailed plans for an astrophysics centre²⁹’³⁰.
It goes on. More briefly, Swedish physicists’ attempts to boost their own fields led to politicking within the Nobel Prize in Physics committee that shortchanged astrophysics, atmospheric physics, and physics that was too theoretical.
As to Asimov, yes that’s a valid point. He was writing far outside his field.
When Asimov wrote a book on anything, be it Shakespeare, the Bible, or physics, I expect him to have more of substance to say than most experts in the field. He wrote a series of books on physics that are still used today, and he was a biochemist.
I think I agree with you about Daniel Boone in space, that if the (personal) resource costs were more tolerable we’d start seeing it. What I’m missing originally is the number of people willing to pay even millions of dollars to simply skim the surface of our atmosphere, a healthy portion of which don’t seem primarily motivated by status. So yes, you’re coorect that we’d probably have had a lunar colony if it were feasible to deliver people at fairly low cost; in fact, if the cost is low enough, I can see this as highly likely both for Daniel Boones and high risk research.
It would not so much matter if an accident released a virus into the lunar vacuum or obliterated several square miles of lunar surface, but we might have found it useful to station researchers or at least maintenance there to carry this out without communications lag or other issues.
Actually, the more I read over Thiel’s essay, the more I question our ideas about the future at mid century. For example:
--How many of those predictions were based on the erroneous belief that communist states were also valiantly leading the charge of progress? We now know that half the world essentially squandered five decades of human progress.
--To what extent were they underestimating the technical challenges involved?
--How many misplaced ideas about society were there? Many ideas, like interplanetary colonization, seemed to spring from a belief that people would want to play Daniel Boone in space suits.
--How much of it was driven by the now commonly understood ability of media to twist scientific findings? The world seems very different when you think that physics just created infinite energy or psychologists had just discovered how to completely unravel the mind.
And, to me, most importantly:
--What was the cost of overactive imagination? I feel like there is a lot of cynicism driven by failed futures which were wildly implausible either technically or socially. I remember that old science fiction liked to speculate about interplanetary travel and living in spaceships in the 1990s. Rotting magazines laying around the garages of grandparents seemed to present these fantasies as a fact about the near future. The sort of cynicism bred by none of this happening because none of it was really plausible could be fatal. (I for one fell into cyberpunk, so I’ve been getting a good serving of future. :P)
This seems like an interesting idea but it exaggerates things. First of all, I think that everyone thought that there was a large amount of overlap between research being done in the both the US and the USSR (look at the space programs for example). Second, the USSR did do a lot of very good research on their own (look for example how many Nobel and Fields medal they won as a very rough metric).
This seems to be the biggest issue. There seems to have been a massive underestimate of just how tough space travel and associated technologies are. People expected the expense to go down at a far faster rate than it did. On the other hand, some technologies that almost no one saw coming, such as personal computers and the internet have if anything become extremely ubiquitous.
I think that this belief isn’t misplaced. The cost and tech issues seem to be more relevant. Being Daniel Boone in space is really expensive.
Answering this is probably going to be difficult. But I think that even the people who were scientists were extremely optimistic. I don’t have the precise year but in I think either the late 1960s or early 1970s, Asimov wrote an essay for the World Book Encyclopedia in which he laid out what he thought was going to happen. There would be colonies on Mars and other planets, and humans engaging in missions to the upper atmosphere of Venus, and about nowish we were supposed to start preparing a generation ship. The optimism was not the fault of the media simply twisting the science.
So, overall, I think for many of these technologies the main issues were not realizing how tough they were along with general unjustified optimism.
A quick and dirty estimation: the US shows 331 Nobel Prizes, France shows 58, Germany shows 102; Russia shows 27. Russia is also notably larger than either France or Germany, which it trails badly, and would have been the great majority of people in the Soviet Union.
This table of Fields medal winners shows only 3 for the USSR and 18 for the USA over the period in which the Soviet Union existed.
The locus here is not “being” but “playing”; “playing Daniel Boone in space” conveys the notion of an unserious, wasteful endeavor. It turns out that people are not actually all that eager to waste those resources for the “thrill of adventure” or “to be pioneers” or the like; yet much of the popular science and science fiction seems to assume this motive, possibly because it was first vigorously marketed to young males at a time when Westerns were a dominant narrative mode.
Asimov was, however, a biochemist and a writer. He wasn’t an aerospace engineer or an important physicist; he certainly wasn’t someone in a position or with expertise to actually know the feasibility of what he was discussing. In most respects, he was more a member of the media than a member of the sciences; he is certainly more remembered that way, no?
Note that the Nobel prizes are awarded from Sweden, and Russia has traditionally been Sweden’s enemy.
Ok. Wow. I knew there was a discrepancy. I didn’t realize that the differences were that massive, That’s um… wow. Phrased that way I now have to wonder how more people didn’t during the Cold War realize how much the USSR was being hobbled by its own problems. This undermines my claim quite a lot.
This still seems to be a function of the resource level involved and how much technology is required. If playing Daniel Boone in space took only a few hundred thousand dollars I suspect that a lot of people would jump at it.
As to Asimov, yes that’s a valid point. He was writing far outside his field. He’s not however the only example of this, merely the most prominent. Sagan was also in that hybrid zone of science and media but a bit closer (having actually worked on probes and aerospace ideas including a military proposal to detonate a nuke on the moon) and he made similar comments.But, you make a good point. It seems that the rank and file engineers were not nearly as optimistic. So the media point seems stronger than I stated.
Do we have reason to think the Nobel process was really non-political enough to take those numbers at face value?
As an example, I’ve read that in the early 20th century the Nobel physics committee deliberately decided to focus on awarding prizes for developments in atomic & nuclear physics instead of other fields like astrophysics or atmospheric physics. I can’t remember why; I want to say it’s because Sweden happened to be particularly strong in atomic physics at the time, but I’m much less sure of that. (I’m annoyed that I can’t find a reference to double check this now.)
I just got lucky and found a reference in Harriet Zuckerman’s Scientific Elite: Nobel Laureates in the United States:
Robert Marc Friedman (1981). Nobel Physics Prize in perspective. Nature, 292, 793-798.
It’s hard to make a comprehensive selection of relevant extracts, but here are some bits & pieces, since the article’s paywalled:
It goes on. More briefly, Swedish physicists’ attempts to boost their own fields led to politicking within the Nobel Prize in Physics committee that shortchanged astrophysics, atmospheric physics, and physics that was too theoretical.
When Asimov wrote a book on anything, be it Shakespeare, the Bible, or physics, I expect him to have more of substance to say than most experts in the field. He wrote a series of books on physics that are still used today, and he was a biochemist.
I think I agree with you about Daniel Boone in space, that if the (personal) resource costs were more tolerable we’d start seeing it. What I’m missing originally is the number of people willing to pay even millions of dollars to simply skim the surface of our atmosphere, a healthy portion of which don’t seem primarily motivated by status. So yes, you’re coorect that we’d probably have had a lunar colony if it were feasible to deliver people at fairly low cost; in fact, if the cost is low enough, I can see this as highly likely both for Daniel Boones and high risk research.
It would not so much matter if an accident released a virus into the lunar vacuum or obliterated several square miles of lunar surface, but we might have found it useful to station researchers or at least maintenance there to carry this out without communications lag or other issues.
Oh, come on. Look at what’s REALLY important: Chess champions and Olympic gold medals!