Profiling the future: science predictions of a bygone age

I recently heard a joke along the lines of: "Question: What would a scientist from one hundred years ago find most disconcerting about current technology? Answer: whilst there are cheap, mass-produced, pocket-sized devices that can hold a large proportion of mankind's knowledge, they are mostly used for viewing humorous videos of cats!" The obvious point to make (apart from all the missed potential) is that the future is likely to be far more unpredictable than even the best-informed science fiction writer is capable of formulating. But if SF authors are unlikely to make accurate predictions, what are the chances that trained scientists will be any good at prognostication either?

As a child I read with breathless wonder various examples of mainstream science prediction delineating the early Twenty-first Century: flying cars, underwater cities, domestic robots and enormous space colonies; after all, I did grow up in the 1970s! Unfortunately I wasn't to know that these grandiose visions were already fading by the time Apollo 11 touched down on the moon. Yet if this was caused by a decline in the Victorian ideal of progress (or should that be Progress) why didn't the authors of these volumes know about it?

Despite the apparent decline in mega-budget projects over the past forty years - Large Hadron Collider and International Space Station excepted - popular science and technology exposition continued to promote wild, wonderful and occasionally downright wacky ideas into the 1980s. One of the best known examples of the genre is Arthur C. Clarke's Profiles of the Future, originally published in 1962 but with updated editions appearing in 1973, 1983 and 1999. As a leading SF writer and 'Godfather of the Communications Satellite' Clarke seemed better placed than most to make accurate predictions, and thus making him a suitable example with which to explore this theme. Indeed, the first edition of Profiles… contains what was to become his First Law, a direct reference to one of the dangers of prophesizing developments in science and technology: "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong." Unfortunately, by always following this notion Clarke's prognostications frequently appear overly optimistic, utilising a schoolboy enthusiasm for advancement that downplays the interactions between science and society.

Interestingly, this optimism appears in exact opposition to earlier generations, wherein scientists and pioneer SF writers were frequently pessimistic as to the impact that new science and technology would have on civilisation. Whilst some of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells' fictional predictions have been realised their most negative visions have yet to occur, unless you consider the West's current obsession with witless celebrities and consumerism as a veritable precursor of Wells' post-human Eloi. (Note: if you enjoy watching TV shows such as Celebrity Chefs' Pets' Got Talent you should probably read Wells' The Time Machine as soon as possible…)

While the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century equivalents of Michael Crichton were raising the possibility of technologically-led dystopias, their scientific contemporaries frequently abided by a philosophy antithetical to Clarke's First Law. The likes of Lord Kelvin, Ernest Rutherford and even Albert Einstein opposed theories now part and parcel of the scientific canon, ranging from black holes, meteorite impacts on Earth and quantum electrodynamics to the ensuing development of heavier-than-air flight, atomic bombs and even commercial radio transmission. Given how quickly advances in science and technology occurred during Clarke's first fifty years, perhaps he and his fellow prophets could be forgiven for thinking progress would remain on a steady, upward path. After all, in terms of astronautics alone, the quarter century from the V-2 to Apollo 11 vindicated many of their ideas and at the same time proved that some of the finest scientific minds of the early Twentieth Century - Rutherford, J.B.S. Haldane, various Astronomer Royals, et al - had been completely wrong.

However, even brief analysis of recent history, say the post-Apollo era, shows that scientific developments are subject to the complicated interactions of culture, economics and leadership; and of course, simple serendipity. The first edition of Profiles of the Future stated that the Ground Effect Machine (A.K.A. hovercraft) would soon become a prominent form of land transport. In the context of the time - the SR.N1 having only made its first 'flight' three years earlier - this would seem to be a reasonable proposition, but once you stop to consider the invested interests in the established transport sector it is readily apparent that such a new kid on the block could not get established without overcoming major obstacles (of a non-technical variety). As Stephen Jay Gould was fond of pointing out, it is exceedingly difficult to replace even suboptimal technology once it has become established, the QWERTY keyboard layout being a prominent example.

As a converse, pioneers such as British jet engine inventor Frank Whittle found themselves snubbed by an establishment that failed to see the advantages of disturbing the status quo. Another issue concerns how theories can easily get lost and only later rediscovered, such as the work of genetics pioneer Gregor Mendel. By failing to take enough notice of these issues, Clarke's generation watched their predictions fall out of synchronisation after what appeared to be a promising start. In contrast, futurists with a keen interest in the sociological implications of new technology, Alvin Toffler perhaps being the best known, have long noted that progress can be non-linear and subject to the vagaries of the society in which it develops.

Although Arthur C. Clarke is remembered as a 'prophet of the space age' it is interesting to ask how original was he: inventive genius, smart extrapolator from the best of H.G. Wells (and numerous pulp SF writers) or just a superb mouth piece for the cutting edge technologists? The Saturn V architect Wernher von Braun for example wrote The Mars Project, a 1948 detailed study for a manned mission to Mars that showed parallels with Clarke's writings of the period. Bombarded as we are today by numerous examples of space travel in fact and fiction, it's hard to imagine a time when anyone discussing the possibility was deemed an eccentric. For instance Robert Goddard, the American pioneer of liquid-fuelled rockets during the 1920s and 30s, faced enormous criticism from those who considered his physics flawed. Only with the development of the V-2 rocket (again, involving von Braun) was there some science fact to back up the fiction and the start of the change in public perception of astronautics from crackpot to realisation. Ironically, the new advances also provided fuel for a moral opposition, C.S. Lewis being a prominent example, who argued that humans shouldn't develop space travel until their ethics had improved. Clarke may be known for his anti-nationalistic stance concerning space exploration, but during the late 1940s and early 1950s even he wrote both fact (The rocket and the future of warfare) and fiction (Earthlight) discussing its military potential.

Just because some of Clarke's ideas - in distinct opposition to all the naysayers - came to fairly rapid fruition doesn't make him a genius at prediction; in the broad sweep of developments he was frequently correct, but when it came to the details there are marked differences. His landmark 1945 paper on global communications from geosynchronous orbit also suggested that atomic-powered rockets would be commonplace by the mid-1960s, a topic elaborated on by his British Interplanetary Society (BIS) colleagues several years later. Whilst Project NERVA did test such systems during that decade, various factors put this line of development on indefinite hold. Clarke also thought the orbital communications system would consist of three, large manned stations rather than dozens of small, unmanned satellites. But then, the development of the microchip in 1959 led to a paradigm shift in miniaturisation largely unforeseen by any prognosticator. It's interesting that although Clarke was postulating remote-controlled war rockets by as early as 1946 he didn't discuss automated space probes until much later: is it possible that the fiction writer within him wanted to downplay the use of dramatically weak unmanned missions? Also, in an unusually modest statement, Clarke himself claimed that he had advanced the idea of orbital communications by approximately fifteen minutes!

So if the technological aspects of Profiles… are reasonably unimpeachable, the failure to consider the infinite complexities of human beings and the societies they build mean that many of Clarke's ideas remain unfulfilled or have been postponed indefinitely. Even for those examples that have been achieved such as the manned moon landings, albeit some years ahead of Clarke's most optimistic timeline, the primary motivations such as the Cold War overshadowed the scientific aspect. Clarke admitted in later years that Project Apollo bore an uncanny resemblance to the first South Polar expedition, the latter being largely motivated by national pride. Indeed, Amundsen's 1911 expedition was not followed up for almost half a century. Clarke even suggested that had he and his BIS armchair astronaut colleagues known the true costs of a lunar landing mission they would probably have given up their feasibility studies in the 1930s! So when as late as 1956 the then Astronomer Royal Richard van der Riet Woolley stated that such an expedition was impractical on grounds of cost alone, he was not far from the truth. As it was, even with a 'minor war'-sized budget an enormous amount of largely unpaid overtime - and resulting divorce rate within project staff - were key to achieving President Kennedy's goal.

Unfortunately, it was a long time before Clarke admitted that non-technical incentives play a key role and he seems to have never fully reconciled himself to this. Although he occasionally promoted and inspired practical, achievable near-future goals such as educational broadcasting via satellite to rural communities in the developing world, his imagination was often looking into deep space and equally deep time. Yet his prominent profile meant that the ethos behind Profiles of the Future was frequently copied in glossy expositions by lesser authors and editors. When in his later years Clarke delineated specific forecasts using his standard criteria, they almost entirely failed to hit the mark: his 1999 speculative, if in places tongue-in-cheek, timeline for the Twenty-first Century has to date failed all of its predictions, with some unlikely to transpire for some decades or possibly even centuries to come. That's not to say that we couldn't do with some of his prophecies coming true sooner rather later: even relatively small advances such as the paperless office would of enormous benefit, but how that could be achieved is anyone's guess!

As a writer of both fact and fiction, Clarke's works have a complex interaction between the world that is and the world as it could be. Many space-orientated professionals, from NASA astronauts to Carl Sagan, claimed inspiration from him, whilst the various Spaceguard surveys of near-Earth objects are named after the prototype in Clarke's 1973 novel Rendezvous with Rama. One of his key ideas was that intellectual progress requires a widening of horizons, whereas a lot of contemporary technological advances are primarily inward-looking, such as electronic consumer goods. But as I have mentioned before, won't we require thought leaders to share something of Clarke's philosophy in order to limit or reverse environmental disasters in the near future? Stephen Hawking for one has stated his belief that the long-term survival of humanity relies on us becoming a multi-planet species sooner rather than later, as unforeseen natural or man-made disasters are a question of when rather than if. Naïve they may appear to be to our jaded, post-modern eyes, but as a visionary with realist tendencies Clarke had an enormous impact on succeeding generations of scientists, engineers and enthusiasts. But to see how Clarke's successors are faring in our relatively subdued times, you'll have to wait until the next post…

A very special relationship: NASA, BIS and the race to the moon

More years back than I care to remember I met a British satellite engineer who was part of a team investigating a loose component rattling around its latest project...which unfortunately was already in Earth orbit. By rolling the satellite via its attitude thrusters they hoped to discover the nature of the problematic item, which I glibly suggested might have been an absent-minded engineer's lunchbox. I don't believe my idea was followed up and as it was, I never did find out the outcome. Answers on a postcard, please!

The relevance of this anecdote is that as discussed in an earlier post on boffins, it's often been said that Britain stopped technologically trailblazing some decades back. Now, thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, newly-released material suggests the pipe-smoking 'backroom boys' might have played a more pivotal role in astronautics than has been generally made public. Some aviation experts consider the fabled TSR2 strike aircraft (envisioned in 1956 and cancelled a decade later) as the last project where Britain took the lead, but the most recently released FoI records offer tantalising evidence otherwise.

I realise this idea requires concrete evidence, but we have to remember that despite tiny budgets by American standards, Britain is the original home of numerous technological advances, from the Hawker Harrier 'jump' jet to the hovercraft. And never forget that the USA has never developed a supersonic airliner in the forty-plus years since Concorde first flew. One reason the UK has apparently failed to keep up could be that transatlantic politics have overridden the applied science. For example, the satellite engineer mentioned above also worked on the 1980's fiasco known as Project Zircon, a British military satellite that was cancelled allegedly due to skyrocketing costs (there's sort of a jest in there, if you look hard enough). But what if an additional, if not real primary reason, was pressure from the US Government? There have been hints over the years that the European Launch Development Organisation, a predecessor of the European Space Agency, was forced to cancel its remote-controlled space tug project as NASA (and therefore the White House) deemed it too advanced and therefore a potential competitor. So if post-war British technology has been deemed a commercial or security risk to the USA, might the latter have applied pressure to cancel the project or even take over the research, lock, stock and blueprint?

This might sound far-fetched, but many a former British security officer's memoirs have mentioned that the 'special relationship' between the two nations has led the UK to kowtow to the USA on numerous occasions. This ranges from automatically offering new military-biased technology such as signals intelligence software to the US, through to diverting national security listening resources to US-specified targets at the drop of a hat. So might it be possible that political pressure rather than rising costs and technological failures has caused the cancellation of advant-garde projects, or even that the US has unfairly appropriated British high-tech wizardry?

The main thrust of this post (pun on its way) concerns the Apollo/Saturn spacecraft and rocket system (geddit now?) and how the US apparently single-handedly managed to achieve a moon landing less than a decade after the start of manned spaceflight. After all, if you consider that the Saturn V was a completely reliable, purpose-built civilian launch vehicle, unlike earlier manned spacecraft which had relied on adapted ballistic missiles, and in addition was far larger and more powerful than any previous American rocket, it seems incredible how quickly the project came together. Also, one of the chief designers was Wernher von Braun, an idealistic dreamer whose primary life-long interest appears to have been a manned mission to Mars and who a decade before Apollo had been developing plans for 160-foot long rocket ships carrying crews of twenty astronauts! Even the doyen of technology prophets Arthur C. Clarke was sceptical that NASA could achieve President Kennedy's goal for a manned moon landing before 1970.

In which case, I hear you ask, how did Project Apollo succeed so magnificently, especially when the N1, the USSR's equivalent, pretty much failed to escape the launchpad? It wasn't with the help of alien technology, that's for sure. At this point it is worth going back into Clarke's past. In 1937 the Technical Committee of the British Interplanetary Society (BIS), of which Clarke was twice chairman, began a study for a manned moon landing mission. The launch vehicle was comparatively modest compared to Saturn V and the N1, utilising tiers of several thousand small solid-fuel rockets, each step being akin to the later real-life launch vehicle stages. Then in 1949, knowledge of the German V-2 rockets (in which Wernher von Braun had played a key role) led the BIS team to switch to liquid-fuelled engines.

But if the rocket seems highly impractical to modern eyes*, the manned component of the BIS scheme was remarkable for its similarity to NASA hardware, being a combination of the Apollo CMS and LM craft. Many of its features are fundamentally identical to the real thing, from carbon dioxide scrubbers to landing parachutes. Even the EVA suits bear a striking similarity to the NASA design, albeit using less advanced materials. The only big difference I can see was the lack of an onboard computer in the BIS design: hardly surprising, considering the first programmable electronic computer, the room-sized Colossus at Bletchley Park, didn't become operational until 1944 (beat that, ENIAC!) I assume the poor navigator would be stuck with a slide rule instead, provision having been made in the ship's larder for coffee to keep them awake.

*Since then, real launch vehicles have used the modular approach, including the private company OTRAG in the 1970s and '80s and even the Saturn V's predecessors, Saturn 1 and 1B, which used a cluster of eight boosters around the core of the first stage.

But the moon landing project wasn't totally restricted to paper: several instruments were actually built, including an inertial altimeter and a coelostat that was demonstrated at the Science Museum in London. The competence of the Technical Committee members shouldn't be underestimated, as in addition to Arthur C. Clarke they included A.V. Cleaver (another sometime BIS chairman) and R.A. Smith, both of whom later worked on British military rocket and missile projects.

The British boffin's ultimate pipe dream

It might not appear convincing that these British speculations could have been converted into NASA blueprints, but a combination of carrot and stick during the dark, paranoid days of the Cold War might have been enough to silence the BIS team's complaints at the appropriation of their work. After all, the project generated a lot of attention even before the Second World War, with coverage in Time Magazine and a visit from a presumed Nazi agent in 1939.

What's more, by the early 1950s Clarke was communicating with now US-based ex-V-2 rocketeers von Braun and Hermann Oberth, whilst R.A. Smith's son later worked for NASA on the Apollo programme! There is even an intriguing suggestion that the very idea of launching early satellites on adapted military missiles (a technique utilised by both the USA and USSR) was promoted in the former country by Alexander Satin, then chief engineer of the Air Branch of the Office of Naval Research, US Navy, after he witnessed a satellite project at the 1951 Second Astronautical Congress in London. And of course, that project's team included Clarke and Cleaver; the space community in those days must have been rather on the small side.

Despite the organisation's name, there have been many American BIS members over the decades, including senior NASA figures such as Dr. Kurt Debus, Director of the John F. Kennedy Space Center during the 1960s; and Gerald Griffin, a Lead Flight Director during the Apollo programme. NASA's primary contractors for Apollo were equally staffed with BIS members, including Grumman's project manager for the Lunar Module (LM), Joseph Gavin Jr. I'm not suggesting that every blivet and gubbins (to use Clarkian terms) on the BIS lunar ship was directly translated into NASA hardware, but the speed with which Project Apollo succeeded, especially compared to the USSR's failure despite its' initial head start, smacks of outside assistance. For an example of how rapidly NASA contractors appear to have cobbled together their designs, Thomas Kelly, Grumman's LM Chief Design Engineer, admitted he was one of only two employees working on LM designs for several years leading up to the NASA-awarded contract in 1962.

In addition to the BIS material, there are X-Files style hints that the British Government was making strides of a more nuts-and-bolts nature with its own lunar landing programme. In 1959 the UK's rocket launch site in Woomera, Australia, appears to have begun construction of a launch pad capable of handling the two- and three-stage man-rated rockets then under development by various British aerospace consortiums, the most prominent of which included winged orbiters akin to more recent NASA lifting body designs. (Incidentally, five UK companies at the time were involved in spacesuit development, with the final Apollo EVA suit owing a lot to the undergarment cooling system developed in the UK.)

Just to put a spanner in the works, one negative piece of evidence for my technology censorship hypothesis is that NASA clearly took no notice of the BIS crew menu. Even after Apollo 11 large strides in technology continued to be made, but the work of the food technologists was not amongst them: all Apollo astronauts lost weight and suffered electrolyte imbalance, which clearly would not have happened if they had stuck to the wholesome fare - ham and cheese sandwiches, porridge, and the like - envisioned by the British boffins. It's a shame that their health temporarily suffered, but at least Neil Armstrong and co. could take music cassettes of everyone from Dvorak to the Beatles on their journeys; imagine being stuck in a small cabin with scratchy recordings of Flanagan and Allen or Vera Lynn...