My Future Life, and Yours

From FutureLife March 14, 2012

Several days ago, I finished reading the final article in the final issue of a long-dead magazine, Future Life. It was the culmination of an off-and-on effort over several years to read the entire 31-issue run of the magazine.

It’s an achievement of dubious status, I realize.

Some things have changed since I began the effort to read every issue of the magazine. My original intention had been to come up with a business plan for a similar magazine. But over the next several years, I realized that there already were a number of publications that served the market for science-interested people who also love science fiction. None of them were the same as Future Life, naturally, but they covered more than enough of the same topics that there would not have been room for a new magazine in the same market space.

And yet, I continued reading, partly out of a self-induced urge to complete what I’d started, and partly because I was learning a lot about publishing by reading these 30-year-old magazines. I’ve been in the editorial business long enough to be able to tell when a short news article is nothing more than a warmed-over press release; I have a pretty good sense of when an article is published basically as a favor to someone; I know enough about paper weights, page counts, and coatings to be able to gauge the financial health of a publication.

I was also learning other things, though; perhaps it is better to say I was being reminded of other things. Future Life published its last issue in late 1981 (the cover date is December 1981, so it was actually released in late October of that year). Its entire life spanned only four years of eight annual issues. But the articles it contained reminded me of the public mood at the time and how it changed dramatically over the next decade. In the late 1970s, despite all of the country’s economic problems, the expectation was that we would keep exploring space, building permanent orbiting space colonies by the end of the century. The feature interview in Future Life #31 was with James Beggs, the Reagan administration’s newly installed administrator of NASA. The interview is largely devoted to him explaining all of the economic restraints that were being placed on the space agency. Basically: We’d like to do A, B, and C; but budget director David Stockman is only going to allow us to do A, and we’ll have to scale that down, too.

From FutureLife March 14, 2012

Naturally, NASA didn’t get to do much of squat, other than limp along with the already-outdated space shuttle, and colonization plans – commercial or private – simply receded from memory as the deep economic recession of the early 1980s took hold. It was a time when Americans went through something the British have gone through numerous times in the postwar years: austerity. We didn’t like it then any more than we like it now.

The country would come roaring out of that recession, its economy partially Reaganized (the full Reaganization would really take place under successors Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama) and its priorities much more refocused on the ground in front of us. But the futures dreamed of and written about by Future Life’s staff were largely forgotten. In that four-year period, those futures included everything from galactic civilization to farming the seabeds to floating cities to life extension to ion drives to orbiting space junk to space warfare to overpopulation to laser art and on and on.

To its credit and unlike competitor Omni magazine, Future Life always remained refreshingly skeptical about UFOs. If Future Life had an obsession, though, it was scientist Gerard K. O’Neill’s “high frontier” concept of orbiting space colonies, and many articles, columns, space art, and news briefs were taken up with working out the practical steps of such a plan. What would be the economics (and the economy) of colonies? How would you transport people and cargo to them? How would you exercise in zero-g?

From FutureLife March 14, 2012

Future Life was a mixture of science and science fiction (films, books, paintings, etc.), and I think the magazine was an attempt to take the energy that the science fiction fan often burns off on daydreaming and self-absorption, and expend it instead on solving real problems and setting the fan’s sights on how to put their ideals to real-world uses. That, too, is an approach that I think has been lost. It might have been the particular interests of Future Life’s publishers and editors at that point in time, or it might have been a marriage between their efforts and the huge influx of new fans inspired by Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and the Star Trek movie, but after Future Life died, science fiction media coverage elsewhere tended to grow ever-more narrowly focused on feeding fanboy obsessions, without introducing any higher expectations for that fan.

I had only begun reading Future Life magazine a couple issues before it stopped newsstand circulation and became a largely subscription-only publication. By the time my eighth-grade self was able to scrape together enough money to pay for a subscription, the magazine ceased publication altogether. It would be almost three decades before I cobbled together a complete collection of the magazine and begin reading what I’d missed. That’s how I came to see what we’ve all missed out on these past few decades.

From FutureLife March 14, 2012

• For my issue-by-issue description of Future Life, see my main website.

Dr. Michio Kaku Coming to The Commonwealth Club in Silicon Valley

Dr. Michio Kaku will be coming to The Commonwealth Club of California in Silicon Valley later this month, and I'm pleased to say that I will have the honor and pleasure of moderating the program.

Kaku is a very well-known physicist (the co-founder of string field theory, no less), futurist, bestselling author, television personality, and all-around extremely smart guy. I've had the pleasure of twice seeing him live on stage, both times about a decade ago when I lived in Manhattan. One of the events involved him talking science and science fiction, an intertwining of topics he took to new heights in his 12-episode Science Channel TV program Sci Fi Science: Physics of the Impossible. His books include the brand new Physics of the Future, Hyperspace, Physics of the Impossible, and others.

He also hosts a radio program, Science Fantastic, on about 90 radio stations across the country, and another radio program called Explorations. And you are likely to see him show up frequently on Fox News and other programs as an expert on many topics (lately he has been offering his scientific expertise on the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear tragedies in Japan). How he finds the time to do all of that, plus make public appearances at The Commonwealth Club, I don't know, but I'm glad he does because I can guarantee he's worth seeing in person.

Kaku, who was born in San Jose, will speak to The Commonwealth Club in Palo Alto, California, on Monday, March 28, at 7 p.m. If you're in the area, please join us for the program.

China's New Super-Bus. Or, Why Isn't America Building the Future Anymore?

In her landmark science-fiction novel China Mountain Zhang, writer Maureen F. McHugh takes her young hero to China, where he rides a fantastic public bus that assembles and disassembles its separated cars depending on their individual destinations. When they're all together as one, they make up a large, multi-car, double-decker bus, but each car will go soaring off on its own route, or will join up with the rest of the bus as their routes merge.

From my sloppy description, that might be hard to imagine. I heartily recommend McHugh's very good book to you if you want to get her idea in better form. But the key point is that in the book, China has become the leading power in the world, the United States reduced to a near vassal-like status. All of the innovation and energy in the world comes from China.

I think it would be overstating things to say that that's becoming the situation today. But when I heard about proposals for a Chinese super-bus that would coast over other vehicles on the road, I thought, Isn't that the kind of so-crazy-it-might-work futuristic idea that America is supposed to create? Or Germany created before it went kablooey last century?

When I lived in Chicago a decade ago, the city buses were being fitted with technology that would let them prolong a green light if they were approaching an intersection. This was expected to speed up bus service, where buses were averaging something like a mere 13 mph in city traffic.

Now watch the video below for an illustration of the Chinese concept for speeding up urban transportation. The video is in Chinese, but even those of us who don't know Mandarin or Cantonese can still get the gist of the idea from the video. (If the embedded video doesn't work, you can watch it here.)



China Mountain Zhang aside, China's ascendancy to the pinnacle of world power is not likely in the near future, but it is rapidly ascending to the height of economic power. This year it became the number-one user of energy on the planet, outdoing even us profligate energy-wasters in America. Last year it overtook Germany as the world's third-largest economy, and this year it is claiming to have supplanted Japan as the world's second-largest economy, though many people are disputing that claim. (Not a big deal if it's wrong, because it'll be true soon enough.)

I'm not afraid of a wealthy and powerful China. I would prefer it be a democratic and free China, rather than the authoritarian and sometimes brutal China that it is. But it is no longer a Maoist China, thank god, and its rise – along with India's – will help counterbalance the threat of violent extremism in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Also, China is unlikely to supplant America as the world's most influential and powerful nation any time soon. Or possibly any time. China faces incredible internal pressures from economic dislocations, income disparities that surpass an American Republican's wildest dreams, and widespread corrupt officials, and it's surrounded by often pliant but also nervous neighboring nations. No country rises so far without tremendous disruptions. The United States tore itself in two with its civil war.  England went through horrific civil wars and persecutions. France invented modern state terror and marauded across Europe. Germany lost control of its crazies and thereby lost control of its civilization. Japan turned itself over to brutal imperialist leaders who left mass murder in their wake. And the list goes on. I hate to say it, because I'd much rather see eternal peace and freedom and prosperity, but China is just as likely to hit the wall of its internal contradictions at some point. We can only hope it comes out of it freer and more peaceful than it came out of the horrors of the Maoist period.

But until that happens, we've got the possibility of giant buses soaring along Chinese streets. America should be building those, or dreaming those dreams. Instead, we're busy entertaining our populist crazies, we're spending ourselves into long-term oblivion (and no, I don't mean the stimulus spending, that's a different, temporary, and necessary profligacy), and we're fighting wars we should be handling differently.

I want the buses.