>> Amy Draves: Thank you for coming. I'm Amy Draves, and I'm here to
introduce Patrick McCray to the Microsoft Research Visiting Speakers Series.
Patrick is here today to discuss his book The Visioneers: How a Group of Elite
Scientists Pursued Space Colonies, Nanotechnologies, and a Limitless Future.
It's a tale of visionaries, improbable dreamers whose aspirations for a
transformative future helped create the world of today. Patrick McCray is a
professor of history at the UC Santa Barbara. He's also the author of Keep
Watching the Skies, the story of operation moon watch and the dawn of the
space age and giant telescopes.
Astronomical ambition in the promise of technology. Please join me in giving him
a very warm welcome.
[applause]
>> W. Patrick McCray: Thanks very much. I guess my mic is working. You all
can hear me in the back there? Super. Okay. Well, thank you all for coming
out. Thank you for coming out in the rain but I guess that's really nothing unusual
here.
So the talk I have for you today is to talk about different groups of scientists and
engineers and the activities that they were engaged in as they tried to shape their
ideas about what the future would be like and its technologies.
And the characters I'll be describing to you today were motivated by a number of
things. A desire to explore space, to manipulate atoms, to overcome their
inherent biological limits and to perhaps make a fortune along the way.
And the ideas that they had were ones they believed would offer threats to
planetary existential issues such as overpopulation and the overuse of
resources, things like that.
The talk that I have gives an overview of the story that is presented in the book.
And later on if we have some time in the Q&A I'll be happy to go over any of the
specifics and we can cover some of those if you'd like.
So my talk's 40 minutes long. I hope you're prepared for that. But it has lots of
visually rich material. So hopefully that will help carry us through the time we
have together.
So the book that I've written is about people who are interested in what the
technological future would be like. And these were people who also wanted to
play a role in helping shape it.
When I wrote this book, there wasn't a good term I was able to find that describes
the kind of person whose professional activities I was interested in, I wasn't able
to find a term to really define that.
So I developed this term visioneer as kind of a specific kind of actor. What do I
mean by this? First of all, I mean this is someone who has an expansive view of
the future.
The visioneers that I described in my book are people that imagine the
technologies they're promoting could help shape society in the broadest possible
sense, perhaps upsetting traditional economic models along the way. The plans
they had flirted with and sometimes embraced a certain form of technological
utopianism.
But the people I'm writing about also weren't just content to sit back and do arm
chair daydreaming, they carried out detailed extensive engineering and design
work in the hopes of seeing their ideas realized.
Many of them had advanced university training. They were professors at elite
institutions. Some even had tenure. But in all cases they had a talent for
exploratory engineering and design.
And third in addition this the expansive view of the future and willingness to apply
their technology knowledge to it. They worked to promote their ideas about the
future to a wider audience. This oftentimes required fundraising from some
unconventional sources. And sometimes visioneers successes attracted other
people who were eager to adopt or co-opt their ideas.
So it's sort of this neologism between visionary and engineer that I'll be talking
about.
To give you some sense of where these people are operating, this is kind of a
crude graph. At the bottom, these are the technologies that we have today or the
kinds of things that are more or less predictable, two or three years out. The
kinds of things that can be done with the tools we already have.
And at the top we have the forbidden zone. Things that the laws of science say
can't be done. So we're not talking about people who are advocating faster than
light travel.
They're instead operating in this middle space. Thinking about what the
technological future might be like 15, 20 years from now.
Working on that sort of horizon. And it's in these spaces of possibility that I'm
interested in exploring.
So the story I have in the book starts around 1970. This is an interesting time,
because this is around the same time that the future itself was becoming an
object of serious study. Economists scientists and sociologists were all
attempting to understand the future more scientifically, perhaps in order to
navigate society towards more desirable futures.
So Alvin Toffler's book shown here is one of the best examples of books that
came out at this time from this particular futurist genre. But it's these ideas about
the future that really got me interested in this project when I started to work on it
about five years ago.
And the future, of course, I'm a history professor. It's somewhat of an odd choice
of topics for historians, I'm supposed to be thinking about the past not the future.
But I was curious about what these past futures were like, and the thing I found
most interesting is that we can think about the future not as this neutral space
that we move into day by day, year by year. But rather to think about the future
as a politically constructed entity, this unstable place that we as engineers,
scientists, scholars, historians, construct through our texts and our activities while
at the same time marginalizing alternative futures. So not all futures are created
equal in other words. Nor is the future neutral.
And just two examples here from the red state, blue state idea to give a sense of
how politicians have used the future in their own rhetoric and activities.
So the characters in my book had a very optimistic view of the future. And this
was in marked contrast to what we would have found, say, among the general
populous around 1970 when the story starts.
This was a time of growing ambivalence and pessimsm about technology, hotly
debated topics such as what the effects of technology were on American society
debates that were heightened because of the Vietnam War and the escalating
nuclear arms race. The late 1960s, of course, was also a time of increased
environmental awareness. Popular books such as Paul Erlich's Population Bomb
presented fears about ecocatastrophism to the American public. And Erlich's
book warned of the dire effects of continued population growth in the third world.
And the same time we saw the continued use and popularization of metaphors
like spaceship earth ideas that were made real in photos sent back by the Apollo
eight mission on Christmas Eve 1968 showing a fragile blue planet rising above
the desolate lunar landscape and at the same time there were thoughts how
should the spaceship earth be managed. Maybe there was a need for tighter
controls and restrictions. Perhaps earth itself should be run like some sort of
actual spaceship.
And these fears about the future were articulated in 1972 in a most sensational
fashion when a group of MIT researchers presented a report called Limits to
Growth. This was a best selling book and translated into some two dozen
languages and sold millions of copies around the planet.
It predicted the collapse of global society sometime in the 21st century.
Sometime right about now. And the report said that this collapse was inevitable
unless governments and economies made a transition from a focus on growth
and expansion to some sort of economic and ecological equilibrium.
And although scientists and economists roundly criticized its methodology, the
limits report stimulated a fierce global debate about the need to adopt a steady
state economy to regulate population growth and perhaps even curtail individual
freedoms.
During the 1970s, the idea of limits, limits to technology, resources, energy,
political power, became a staple theme among journalists and academics and
these were also picked up among popular culture venues as well such as moves
like Soil and Green and Logan's Run perhaps some of you saw in the theaters
when it came out and reruns on television, what have you.
But there were some people, however, who refused to accept the concept of
limits. Technological or otherwise. So response to these scenarios of future
crises, technological enthusiasts the people I'm talking about today proposed
alternative radical solutions to this idea of limits.
Now, one of these people was a physicist at Princeton University named Gerardo
O'Neal. Born in 1927. Served in the U.S. military in the Pacific during World War
II. And then after getting out of the military went to Cornell University and got his
Ph.D. in physics before taking a nice plumb job at Princeton. Now O'Neal's
specialty was large-scale high energy physics projects similar to the large hedron
collider you heard so much about this last year.
O'Neal's contribution to this field was reengineering in the way in which particle
accelerators were designed. He was very successful at this. But in mid 1960s
O'Neal was dissatisfied with where his career was going. He had just gotten
divorced looking for a new path for himself. He tried to make the cut as an
astronaut for the Apollo program. And when that didn't work out he began to look
for alternative ways to achieve his dream of exploring space.
And O'Neal, starting around 1970, working first with his undergraduate students
at Princeton, began to make a case for what he called the humanistation of
space. And by this he meant seeing outer space not as a government-run
program, but rather as a place. A place in which exploring would not be the
province of elite astronauts but something in which average citizens in the not so
distant future would be able to do.
O'Neal saw the human expansion in this space as a response to the impending
threats described in reports like limits to growth and the threats of impending
environmental collapse.
So O'Neal believed space could be a place for extensive human habitation.
However, we're previous visionaries and there's a whole raft of people who
talked about space settlement and space exploration, things like that, this is very
much staple futurist talk. But where previous visionaries had offered only arm
waving speculations, O'Neal went beyond these fanciful descriptions. He
deployed rigorous calculations and formed extrapolations of existing technologies
and developed very detailed designs for his orbiting settlements in space.
He backed up his vision of the future, in other words, with extensive physics and
engineering calculations such as examples shown here.
His personal papers which are still in his basement at Princeton, are full of all
sorts of calculations and sketches like this.
Later on O'Neal led a series of NASA sponsored studies that worked out the
details of his ideas even further, in which he considered everything from
structural engineering issues to the ecological ways in which you would build a
closed system habitat to the psychological effects of what living for a long time in
space might be like.
So one of the models that O'Neal proposed, for example, is a pair of giant
rotating paired cylinders in space, about 600 feet long. They would rotate around
their long axis, to create an artificial earth-like gravity.
By having strips of both soil and windows you would have space for agriculture
and growing things as well as windows to let sunlight in.
What O'Neal was in fact designing were miniature space ship earths and
microcosms earth bound ecological systems. O'Neal having spent a lot of time in
the Bay Area was a huge fan of coastal California. You can see some of his
fondness for that coming out in the drawings and sketches and later the artistic
work here, the sort of miniature version of San Francisco, if you will, in space.
But one of the technical questions he struggled with was where is hypothetical
space colonies should be built. He already ruled out the surface of the moon or
some other planet. Too much gravity while an orbit around the earth wouldn't
provide the necessary gravitational stability.
Instead he opted for a place in space known as the Lagrangian point. There's
five of these in the earth moon sun system and O'Neal chose the one known as
L5. Located about a quarter million miles of earth, gravitationally stable. Gets
lots of free and abundant solar energy.
And O'Neal estimated that if the U.S. government put sufficient resources into it,
in about a decade or so the first models of his free floating space settlements
could be occupied and the costs for the whole project O'Neal estimated to be
around somewhere around $30 billion. Now, again this is in 1975 money. So it's
a considerable chunk of change. But it's important and one of the things this is
where historians do so well is to put it into context. The large mega projects of
the 1970s were also running at about this cost level. Things like the Alaskan
pipeline. The space shuttle. Various nuclear weapon systems like the MX
missile, were all in the ten to $50 billion price range.
So what O'Neal was proposing was both technically possible and not so
economically expensive as to be completely outlandish. Which is not the same
thing as saying it was either politically or socially viable.
So I want to always reiterate a key point I made. What was novel about O'Neal's
conception of this technological future was something he backed up with these
detailed designs. But visioneers also translate their ideas into actual things.
Sometimes you have to set aside the sketch pad and pick up the welding torch in
other words. For example, O'Neal worked long and hard to design what he
called a mass driver. Basically an electromagnetic catapult that could hurl
buckets of lunar raw materials from the surface of the moon out into space where
they would be caught, processed into silicon and glass and the other raw
materials necessary to build a space colony.
O'Neal got small grants from NASA to support these ideas. He worked with a
group of students at MIT. And actually built a working prototype that was
featured on the television show Nova in 1978.
Visioneers also build communities. So, for example, in the mid 1970s devotees
of O'Neal's ideas started something called the L 5 society. The name naturally
came from the celestial location that O'Neal proposed for his space settlements.
L 5ers gave talks at science fiction conventions. They were part of a growing
grassroots pro space movement that claimed several of tens of thousands of
members by about 1980. Interestingly enough they wove interesting
environmental themes into their proselytizing as well the idea that if you were
truly environmentalists you would get off the planet altogether and move the
polluting overpopulating human societies out into space, leaving the earth behind
as sort of a gigantic nature reserve if you will.
Now, O'Neal wanted to get his ideas out before a larger audience. But it took
him more than two years of revisions and rejections before he finally managed to
get an article published in the magazine Physics Today in 1974.
That same year O'Neal organized a conference on space colonies at Princeton
which got international attention. One of the articles in the New York Times that
covered it as shown here. And all of a sudden O'Neal found himself with a large
audience, and a very eager audience for his visioneering ideas. Now, eventually
he assembled his designs, his vision for the future, his imagineings about what
the future would be like into a book that was published in 1977 called the High
Frontier. It was written for a popular audience. It was translated into eight
languages, and sold very, very well. In fact it won phi beta kappa's award for the
best science book of 1977 and inspired a whole mini genre of books about space
colonies and space settlements.
But O'Neal also wanted to have a voice in policy-related discussions. So he
frequently testified before Congress about what the U.S.'s future plans for space
should be like, how solar energy brought back by satellites beamed down to
earth in the form of microwaves could help make the U.S. more energy
dependent. Things like that.
And again it is important to put this in historical context. O'Neal's doing this only
a few years after the Apollo program had just ended. The last Apollo astronauts
went to the moon in 1972 and NASA was looking for the next big mission, the
next big thing it was going to do. And it's not as if Congress or NASA were
prepared to fund O'Neal's ideas to the tune of the 30 or $40 billion that he
wanted, but NASA did recognize the public enthusiasm that O'Neal's ideas
generated.
And as a result of the publicity that he received, the visibility that he acquired in
Washington D C, the fact that he was esteemed Princeton professor, O'Neal
eventually became a minor celebrity. The stack of articles about him in the
Princeton archives is about three inches thick. So I mean he was regularly
featured in all sorts of magazines, newspapers around the world.
Made appearances on the Johnny Carson show, the Merv Griffin show, 60
Minutes. Millions of Americans at least for a brief period of time were aware of
his ideas for what the possibilities for space exploration might be. In the process
this sparked a whole range of debate and discussion.
To some, the ideas of living in space seemed a logical extension of the 1960s
counter culture lifestyle that wanted to trade urban environments for rural
communes. Other people believed O'Neal's visioneering offered pragmatic
solutions to social environmental issues. Other supporters were attracted to
fantasies of escapism and the possibility for social experimentation with no
authoritarian oversight. For those who favored a small is beautiful philosophy
advocated by people like EF Schumacher, space colonies provoked horror and
outrage. Opponents saw O'Neal's ideas as simply an extension of the military
industrial complex out into the final frontier and the antithesis of environmental
responsibility technology. The spectrum of sentiments is captured nicely here in
a series of drawings that appeared in a book edited by the publisher the whole
earth catalog Stewart Brand. On one page we have an illustration of an O'Neal
style space colony and happy members of colony are saying goodbye earth and
paired with this is a 19 century photograph of a Native American couple, one of
them saying goodbye, good luck, and the other person saying good riddance.
Capturing the polarized extreme views that people had towards O'Neal's ideas.
Now, one of the dangers of being a visioneer is that once your ideas are out
there and freely circulating, they can be adopted and co-opted by other people.
It's very difficult to control the message in other words. And Gerard O'Neal saw
this happening with Timothy leery. In 1970s, the former LSD guru began to
promote something he called smile. An acronym leery devised to mean space
migration, intelligence increased through various psychotropic drugs and life
extension. There's a great story about leery at a space flight convention, leery
joking with reporters about being in favor of space migration about he and his
hippie friends had discovered the high frontier long before Gerard O'Neal had
done so. This image from a comic shows Leery's own takes on how space
colonies would help usher in the next phase of conscious human evolution and
another image showing Leery talking to college students the same demographic
that were also turning on to O'Neal's ideas.
Sort of an interesting historical irony, Timothy leery former Harvard professor,
new age guru and prison escapee took his final trip in April 1997 aboard a
55-foot rocket. After he passed away some of his ashes were shot into space.
Interesting enough that same rocket also carried some ashes from O'Neal who
had passed away in 1992, a few years earlier.
So despite their obvious differences about how one should perhaps go into
space, they were united at least in orbit for a certain period of time.
Okay. Back to the main story. Enthusiasm for O'Neal's ideas reflected a larger
shift that was taking place in the United States about technology. New
publications like Omni Magazine, who here remembers Omni Magazine?
>>: Didn't it stop?
>> W. Patrick McCray: It stopped in 1995. There's a story about that. Ask me in
the Q&A.
Magazines like Omni captured this sort of efflorescence of new enthusiasm,
ideas that people were having about technology around the time Ronald Reagan
was elected. Of all the topics that Omni presented the first few years, none
received more attention than space exploration. It was still the next frontier.
Almost every issue mentioned O'Neal, space colonies, the grassroots pro space
movement. Sentiments were captured nicely on this button that Omni discovered
that the meek will inherit the earth; the rest of us will go to the stars.
Now, of course the future turned out quite differently, of course. Omni's readers
didn't go into outer space instead they turned to new technological frontiers, and
that takes us to the second part of our story.
As I said, many college students were drawn to O'Neal's ideas for the
humanistation of space. And one of these was an MIT undergraduate named
Eric Drexler shown here in the audience in 1978 at the same time that O'Neal
was testifying before Congress.
A space enthusiast, Drexler soon turned his attentions to a new and different
technological frontier.
Drexler was born in 1954. So he's about three decades younger than O'Neal,
grew up in Corvallis, Oregon. At a young age displayed a strong affinity for
science and engineering.
And like O'Neal, the teenage Drexler responded sharply to the ideas of limits and
general pessimism about technology that pervaded the 1970s. Drexler goes to
MIT. He gets deeply involved in the pro space movement.
In fact, many of the people who first expressed interest in what eventually
becomes known as nanotechnology had some connection in some form to the
grassroots pro space movement of the 1970s. Anyway, Drexler stays on at MIT
after finishing his undergrad degree and begins to think about what might be
possible if you can manipulate materials at the molecular level and build
machines and other devices.
Now, he's not coming up with these ideas out of the blue. In fact, there are two
main technological developments that are influential on his thinking.
One of these you all are familiar with, the steady progress in miniaturization that
was happening in micro electronics in the computer industries throughout the
1970s. First PCs hit the market in the mid 1970s. About the same time that
journalists began talking about this thing called Moore's law.
The second influence on Drexler's thinking was the elements that were
happening in molecular biology. In the 1970s, science developed the capability
of splicing genes from one organism to another, what we now know as
recombinant DNA technology. And this ability stirred interest in the possibility of
designing new proteins and other bio molecules that weren't naturally found.
But things that could do useful tasks. So it was common for science writers and
scientists themselves to talk about bacteria and other bio molecules as tiny
factories which could churn out useful products.
And Drexler takes these two streams of thought and brings them together and he
publishes first expression of his ideas in 1981. Kind of gives a general overview
of his thoughts where he describes concepts for what he calls molecular
engineering, where he manages nano scale machines directed by computer
code. Much in the same way as RNA transmits instructions to our ribosomes to
make new proteins, Drexler described machines that could precisely put
molecules where engineers wanted and build up nano scale devices atom by
atom.
Drexler named these general purpose machines as assemblers. You all would
recognize this as a term for a program to convert code into the language that the
machine can understand.
And this is the kind of an important strain of thought because Drexler was
immersing himself deeply in artificial intelligence work that was being done at
MIT at the time. He became a prodigy of Martin Minski for a couple of years. He
imagined that his molecular machines would also be able to self-replicate much
in the same way that our cells do.
And biology provided inspiration as well as proof of concept for him. Now, there
was nothing in the scientific literature that said that building these things was
impossible. And Drexler became convinced that because these things could be
built, it was quite likely perhaps even inevitable that they would be built. So
instead of presenting his ideas as scientific research, he begins to describe them
using the term exploratory engineering. Much in the same was early rocket
pioneers in the 1920s designed engines on paper that could work in theory that
obeyed the laws of physics but that they couldn't quite yet build because they
didn't have the adequate materials.
In 1985, Drexler and his wife, Christine Peterson, a chemical engineer, pick up
stakes, leave Cambridge Massachusetts and reestablish at Silicon Valley. They
establish a nonprofit called the Forsythe Institute. The term nanotechnology
becomes something that Drexler begins to use increasingly in his talks and
articles around 1985.
Drexler saw himself not as an advocate for nanotech but rather someone who
was trying to promote a greater understanding of it both in terms of what it could
do but also in terms of any perils that it might pose.
And drawing upon connections that he built up in the Bay Area, Drexler and
Peterson began to expand Forsythe's membership. Now, coming back to the
point I made earlier, visioneers build things, but when it came to nanotech,
Drexler's design and construction took place inside a computer. He and his
associates used various computer modeling tools that were available in the
late '80s, early '90s.
Different software programs to design molecular machines in sill co-that in theory
obeyed the laws of chemical bonding and physics. They weren't things that
chemists could actually build yet but they were things that at least in theory
seemed possible to build.
Now, this approach to nanotechnology was not appreciated by all scientists. This
wasn't real chemistry or real physics. And here we see an interesting tension
beginning to develop between the chemist's view of what can we do in the lab
today and how does this work, sort of a probing of nature versus Drexler's
exploratory engineering which asked what might we be able to build tomorrow.
But, again, recall Drexler isn't presenting himself as a scientist. He's not
interested in understanding nature as it exists today or the today back then. But,
rather, as someone who is exploring the boundaries of engineering, probing what
might be possible.
And then throughout the late 1980s, Drexler's ideas get increasingly, increasing
amounts of international attention. He publishes a book called engines of
creation in 1986, which articulates these ideas. Written not for a community of
scientist but for a popular audience. Engines of creation offers a very expansive
view of the technological future. Talking about all the interesting things that
might be possible in the future when we have increased artificial intelligence,
self-replicating machines, future space exploration plans so on and so forth.
And it sells very well. About 100,000 copies are sold internationally. Translated
into many languages. So these ideas are out there circulating rather widely
about 1990.
But it's interesting to ask who are some of the people who were first interested in
this early form of nanotechnology? Now, a key group of supporters actually
came from the computer science and software program community as well as the
entrepreneurs who become rich in those industries during some of the boom
years of the 1980s and 1990s.
Now, of course cybernetics artificial intelligence and direct computer control all
figure prominently in the Drexlerian vision of nanotechnology.
And also early nanotechnology at least from an organizational point of view was
being done in the same garage culture style that we associate with Silicon Valley
entrepreneurship. But this wasn't about building new products. Instead, it was
about promoting a particular vision of what the future would be like.
So one of the explanations for why people from the comp psi community were
interested in the Drexlerian vision was stated in an interview I did with Christine
Peterson a few years ago, basically saying that computer engineers were people
who are quite comfortable about manipulating digital bits, quite comfortable
working in that scale, and it wasn't difficult for them to imagine transferring the
controllability to work at that scale and the particular philosophy about how
technology would change into actual material objects.
Recall that these are people with a business model based on discontinuous
technological change. Predictions about nanotechnology seem to follow the
success dictated by Moore's law where every so often a new development would
come along out of the computer science community and shatter the prevailing
technological paradigm. So sort of interesting to see that just as Drexler's own
ideas are heavily based on computer modeling simulation, the support that he's
initially getting both in terms of the people who come to meetings, who join the
Forsythe institute but also the people who are giving money to support his
activities are largely coming out of the computer engineering and software
community. Not the chemistry community.
Now, if you weren't a computer programmer or a software engineer, one of the
ways that you would have heard about Drexler's ideas would be through popular
science magazines, things like Omni, for example. Which in 1986 ran the first
sort of full length article that described early ideas for nanotechnology.
This Drexlerian vision of the nano future got considerable attention. Some might
say got too much attention. Scores of articles that followed on this
nanotechnology also became a regular feature of dozens and dozens of science
fiction television shows, novels things like that. So, for example, Star Trek in
1989 features nanotechnology sort of a key plot device, for example.
So by the mid 1990s, nanotechnology, this term that was originally promoted and
popularized by Drexler begins to attract increasing interest from the scientific
mainstream. Nanotechnology also started to gain currency among policymakers
in Washington D.C.. now, one of the reasons for this attraction was the fact that
the Cold War was coming to an end. And there were hopes among policymakers
that nanotechnology might become an overarching area of scientific research
that could bring funding back to areas of science, areas like physics and
chemistry and computer science that had been left behind as government
support was directed more towards the life sciences and biomedical research in
the 1990s.
Also at the end of the Cold War economic competitiveness rather than competing
with the Soviets had become a much more central concern. Nanotechnology
was imagined as a stimulant for the 21st century economy much in the same way
as IT had spurred the U.S. economy of the 1990s. Experts estimated, for
example, that nanotech would mean millions of new jobs in this country and
would form the basis for a trillion dollar sector activity global economy by the
early 21st century.
But the problem, however, is that by the time we get to the mid 1990s, there are
two different flavors of nanotechnology, which nanotech are they actually talking
about? Was it the kind of research marked by discovery such as new forms of
carbon like bucky balls or nano tubes as well as new instrumentation that allowed
scientists to move atoms around one by one, work that was done, for example, at
IBM's Almaden Laboratory in San Jose to take scanning microscopes and move
xenon atoms around and spell the IBM logo, for example.
This is the kind of work that Thomas Coon and the structure of scientific
revolution describe as normal science, day to day laboratory activities. Or maybe
nanotechnology meant this radical view of the technological future that would be
enabled by these nano scale machines that Drexler and his growing community
of supporters proposed.
The problem for mainstream scientists was that reporters often conflated these
two things and presented this radical view of nanotechnology to the public as
what the future was going to be.
In other words, when the average technology enthusiast or politician thought of
nanotech, they thought of self-replicating nano scale assemblers. This was a far
cry from the normal day-to-day research that was being done in labs at
universities and corporations all around the world.
And this identity crisis was made all the more urgent by the fact that
nanotechnology was developing in the minds of many scientists a public image
problem. Drexler's visioneering, despite his professed intent was having a
profound impact on shaping the public perception of nanotech. Couple of
examples shown here Bill joy's famous 2000 article in Wired Magazine called
why the future doesn't need us, proposes actual moratorium on nanotechnology
research out of fears that self-replicating nano bots would escape their laboratory
confines and get out into the ecosystem and wreak havoc. We see in 2002 the
publication of Michael Creighton's best selling book Prey, which is based on the
distopian future where nano bots escape a corporate/government run laboratory
and again wreak havoc. And interestingly we have this image also from the
same period in the middle that was proliferated widely and copied and oftentimes
reproduced in articles about nanotechnology. It's not quite sure what's
happening here. Is this nano bot saving the red blood cell by injecting some sort
of healing medication into it or is it attacking and killing it. It's ambiguous, it's
hard to say.
Again if the average person is imagining nanotech, it's this that they're starting to
think about.
And the result is that mainstream scientists worked very, very hard in the late
1990s to disentangle their research from these Drexlerian ideas for
nanotechnology. They worked assiduously to marginalize Drexler to marginalize
people who were advocating his ideas and to really set up boundaries between
what was being done in the laboratories here and now versus what might be
possible in the future.
Such that in December of 2003, when President George Bush signs the 21st
century nanotech R & D act which results in billions of federal dollars poring into
nano research, if we look at the people who are standing behind Bush, we see a
cabinet member. We see a Nobel Prize winner. We see a venture capitalist.
We see a couple of senators here and there. But what we don't see is the
person, the economist labeled the godfather of nanotechnology, Eric Drexler. By
the time the federal government has fully gotten on board the nano bandwagon is
investing last time I checked I think the budget for nanotech research this year is
about $1.8 billion. Drexler had been effectively marginalized. By 2003, nanotech
had become the next big thing. But it was being done very differently than
Drexler and his supporters had advocated and imagined.
So some concluding thoughts. Now, a cynic might say that all this history is
interesting. But ultimately pointless. After all, we don't have space colonies now.
We don't have nano bots. In other words, these visioneers and their projections
of the future were failures. I don't entirely agree with that. I think it's important
for people to come forward with big ideas. And visioneers help define the outer
edge of what's possible.
Their ideas help push people's thinking about what the future might be like and
what its technologies might be like. So sure the future didn't unfold as Drexler or
O'Neal had imagined. But their visions did capture and shape public imagination
and stimulated lots of productive dialogue between politicians and scientists and
business leaders.
At the very least, their engineering got people interested in talking about and
debating the technological future and in fact portraying their visioneering as
failures because their futures went unrealized, underestimates what their
visioneering did accomplish.
We can find, for example, examples of Drexler's influence in some mainstream
nanotechnology work today. Now, recall that his initial vision was very biological
in nature. It started with designing protein machines that would be able to
manipulate groups of atoms and form the basis for other nano scale devices.
I was intrigued to see just a few weeks ago an article in nature in which a team of
British researchers announced they had done a series of research that was
inspired by biological ribosomes and they had built in their laboratory nano
machines, their term, not mine, which can pluck amino acids and move it down
the axle of their machine and basically assemble a brand new peptide polymer.
According to nature these molecular machines are inspired by biology and will
eventually enable chemists to build materials with a very specific sequence of
molecules. Again a very Drexlarian vision of research, although not framed in
quite the same way as he had framed it 30 years ago.
Or another place we might see the influence of these ideas is in what today we
call sort of Alt space or space exploration 2.0. Recall that O'Neal imagined
space not as massive run government program but as a place. And part of this
meant access to space for people other than astronauts. This meant also
encouraging the creation of smaller and more agile firms that would take people
in cargo into space. And I think we're seeing this today in some of the activities
of some of the space start-up companies, companies like space X first like that.
At the same time, though, there are some flaws in visioneers thinking.
Oftentimes they're looking for the single get-out-of-jail-free card that will allow
them to circumvent all limits sort of the one-size-fits-all technological solution to a
variety of societal problems. Sort of an attempt to get a grand slam home run
rather than chipping away at the problem by hitting a bunch of singles and
sacrifice flies.
So I'd like to end with two analogies. One of them is that today business
executives commonly use ecological terms to describe the places where
innovation happens. Regional ecosystems like Seattle or ecosystems centered
around particular products. And these ecosystems are home to familiar species.
Companies, universities, researchers such as yourselves, entrepreneurs, funding
agencies.
Visioneers are also part of that ecosystem and their influence at times was
disproportionate to the numbers and resources that they had. In big and small
ways visioneers have helped alter the ecosystem. This isn't to say that we
wouldn't have tens of thousands of scientists today working on nanotechnology if
Eric Drexler had never been born.
But I think it would be called something different, perhaps. Its history would
certainly be different and it might exist as a more fragmented research agenda.
Drexler's visioneering helped give it shape and form, at least for a period of time.
Now, to be sure, visioneers ideas display the utopian streak, but historically
utopian movements have always been a source of radical new ideas and vision
nears are no different. Their ideas about the future are rarely adopted as a
complete package, but the ensemble they present is something that can be
unpacked and pulled apart, examined more closely so that scientists, engineers,
the public and policymakers can selectively sample and choose from them.
One of the ways I like to think about the vision nears is that they're sort of a form
of dark matter surrounding a more visible galaxy of research that's done by
mainstream scientists and engineers. Their research and promotion existing
often on the threshold of outright respectability and academic visibility still exerts
a certain gravitational pull on the public's imagination of what the future would be
like.
So I started my talk back in 1972 with the limits to growth report. And in 1972
and today many similarities. Planetary threats from climate change. Threats
from overpopulation. These all resemble the same existential dangers that limits
to growth warned us about four decades ago. In fact, my story starts actually in
the book with Jerry Brown as governor of California and hey Jerry Brown. He's
again governor of California. It's a nice symmetry.
So at the same time today we have advocates of geo engineering, synthetic
biology and other emerging technologies that have their designs for the future.
So I think it's important to pay attention to visioneers then, why and how their
activities succeeded and when and how they did it.
Because the future, after all, is where we're going to spend the rest of our lives.
And technologies are the tools that we use to consciously construct this future.
And ultimately the choice between the future we want and the one we make is
ours. Thanks very much. [applause].
>> W. Patrick McCray: I don't know how you all do things here. Just fire
questions or whatever works for you. Yeah.
>>: What happened to Omni?
>> W. Patrick McCray: Okay. Omni Magazine was started by Bob Guccione and
Kathy Keaton. Bob Guccione and Kathy made their money from the soft core
pornography magazine Penthouse. They did well from that. They were keenly
interested in the technology future, all things technology and para normal like.
That's where the money for Omni came from. Bob Guccione also had a very
expensive art hobby, collected millions of dollars worth of art and something
called the Internet happened and that pretty much put Penthouse out of business
because why pay for porn when you can -- I think you see where I'm going with
that. The end result was the funding that was being used to support Omni
magazine dried up and the print edition went away in the mid-1990s. They tried
an online version for a while. Didn't do very well. They didn't keep pace with the
times. If you looked at an issue from 1979 and one from 1992, it's sort of like
they didn't realize that the world had changed. It was the same font. It was the
same style. It was the same kind of cartoons and stuff.
And they just didn't really oddly enough move with the future. Hi.
>>: You didn't mechanics Drexler's other key influence. I mean I read
inspiration -- the group -- there's always room at the bottom was one of his
things, too.
>> W. Patrick McCray: Yeah.
>>: Rather important, actually.
>>: Because his claim was actually not impossible where it came from.
>> W. Patrick McCray: I didn't mention it for time limits. But you're right.
Richard Feynman's 1959 paper there's plenty of room at the bottom, you know, a
talk that Feynman gives in 1959 makes a splash when it first comes out gets
buried in the literature. You never hear of it again until it's rediscovered around
1980 in part by Drexler, and then it's really rediscovered in the 1990s by
policymakers because as they're promoting nanotech what better rhetorical
source to draw upon than a Nobel laureate Richard Feynman iconoclastic
physicist who is also dead by this point. He could be used in any sorts of variety
of ways and he wasn't actually there to argue to say no that's not actually what I
meant. I wouldn't put Feynman in the same category as my visioneers. In part
because while Feynman proposes these ideas he doesn't do anything with them.
He gets the Noble Prize on quantum dynamics. He doesn't do any nanotech
work. He lays out a vision but he doesn't then follow up with it in the same ways.
>>: I wouldn't call him an engineer, he was key to Drexler, enabling Drexler.
>> W. Patrick McCray: Absolutely. I completely agree. Hi.
>>: Have you spent any time thinking back centuries to visioneers potentially
centuries ago? You started off with an author, I think.
>> W. Patrick McCray: I haven't gone back centuries. I've gone back maybe -how about two centuries, how about that? So who are other people I would put
in this category. Nick Latessa. Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, Vernon Von
Brown, pre-Nazi days. Von Brown sort of caught up in the German space flight
movement of the 1920s and 1930s, before it gets militarized, had very expansive
visions what our future in space would be like. Other people have shown Eli
Musk.
Ray Kurzweil, certainly. Doug Englebart and his ideas for sort of the office of the
future, I think. Ted Nelson I think would also fit in this category of sort of imagine
anyone kind of the future of what hyper text would do. Although he had a very
idiosyncratic view of what that would be like as well.
>>: In general sounds like you would exclude just people that were authors, like
Jules Verne.
>> W. Patrick McCray: Yeah, I would, because I think -- and again this is a term
that I've created and I've kind of drawn my own box around it but I think it's
important as I'm thinking about it, to differentiate between the people who just
simply offered the speculations and the people who offered the vision of the
speculation but also roll up their sleeves and try to do something with it. And in
some ways sometimes those efforts didn't go anywhere. Sometimes in Drexler's
case they were just computer simulations. But it's sort of that willingness to apply
engineering and physical practices that sort of separate them from kind of the
arm waving futurist of oh it's going to be like the jet sons, et cetera, and so forth,
which we can say something about flying cars if you want but maybe that's a
topic for another thing. I have a great story about flying cars. Other thoughts?
>>: What would you say in today's world are some of the visionaries, visionaries
of the future, and especially in light of what you mentioned because the social,
there's so much access to technology and imagination through that.
>> W. Patrick McCray: Probably the person that fits my definition the best these
days is probably Eli Musk. And I know must can is a controversial character and
the whole slew of issues around that. But that's the person that comes to mind
the most for me.
But the flying car is interesting. Since I brought it up I feel I can't leave you out
there teasing with a story, I'll tell you a story about flying cars, about two months
ago, at UC Santa Barbara, we had a visitor from Silicon Valley.
Someone who works for the singularity university sort of technology sort of pundit
person. Gave this kind of very gee whiz this hand waving about what the future
would be like, referring to his iPhone, what can it do, things that we've all heard
before. And then he was sort of drawing upon that slide that I showed during his
own version of it. This one here, you know, sort of a snarky way of thinking
about this. We were promised flying cars but all we got was Twitter basically.
And my response to this was -- and I think this is a key point that the visioneers
in my story miss was the reality is we have flying cars. We've actually had flying
cars since the 1930s. I mean, the first ones flew in the 1930s. Henry Ford
invested a considerable amount of money to build flying cars.
The reason we don't have them is not because they're technically impossible.
We don't have them because of social reasons. We don't have them because of
laws and regulations and safety issues and those sorts of messy social and
political reasons. And I think this is a key point that the visioneers in my story
who are far from perfect, that they miss. That it's not enough to simply have a
good technical idea but you also need to consider the broader what the NSF
would like to call broader impacts and social implications aspect of it.
You just simply can't put these ideas out there and just because that they are
technically sound assume that they will be acted upon. That there's more
required to do it than that. The same with O'Neal. He designed bulletproof
designs for space colonies. They met all the necessary technical requirements.
But he never really addressed the pressing social and economic and political
issues. For example, how would you persuade the American government in the
wake of Vietnam, in the wake of a recession, in the wake of the oil crises of the
1970s to investment this much money. And the reality was and is if you truly are
concerned about overpopulation and overuse of resources on this planet, there
are better ways to address that than by building space colonies. There are laws
and regulations and policies that could be enacted but oftentimes like I said the
people in my story are kind of looking for the grand slam home run rather than
the small base hits that will move their agenda forward.
>>: Are there any [inaudible] vision nears around their extreme dedicated how
that might affect their personal lives?
>>: Around what?
>>: Extreme dedication or passion of an area?
>> W. Patrick McCray: That's a great question. The pattern that I've noticed,
and this is something that disturbs me a little bit, is the pattern that I see isn't so
much how it affects their personal life, but the pattern is that the people that I'm
writing about and the people who are attracted to their ideas are all very much
from a similar demographic. They are white male elite educated you can fill in
the blanks there. The women in my story are largely supporting characters.
They are the wives, the people who are helping bring these visions along. And I
don't have an explanation for that. I don't know why there aren't more people of
color who are doing these sorts of activities. It's something that I bring up in the
conclusion of the book, but it's a very unsatisfying thing for me because I don't
have the answer to that. It's just I can observe this. But maybe it's a function of
I'm primarily U.S. historian. I'm looking primarily within the borders of this
country. That might be part of it also. But I guess also what I find interesting is
that the appeal of O'Neal and Drexler's ideas, even though their books were
translated into many languages, I can still largely within this country. And I think
that probably says a great deal about American character in terms of how we
think about progress as a nation, how we think about technological enthusiasm in
this country and how we see technology and changes in technology as a path to
national betterment. I think that's probably a larger pattern. And it's not quite the
direction that you were headed in, but that's the thing that I notice.
>>: Also say that nano is showing up here in all kinds of little areas.
>> W. Patrick McCray: Yeah, no pun intended. Okay. I think I'm supposed to
wrap it up now I'm getting the hook. So thank you all very much for coming out. I
appreciate you taking the time out of your workday. Thanks a lot. [applause]