AIAA San Francisco Section Newsletter February 1993 "Dateline: Space 2012" Brenda Forman Recently, a colleague asked me what I thought we'd be doing in space ten or twenty years hence. Good question! But let's get real folks. The honest answer is, we don't really know! Aside from Leonardo da Vinci and Jules Verne, nearly all predictions of the technological future have been dead wrong, and sometime laughably so. (Remember the British Royal Astronomer in the 1950s who proclaimed that "Space travel is bunk"?) Still, it's an irresistibly intriguing question. So I took a stab at it as follows. (So it ain't Robert Heinlein. So sue me!) The "global village" is going to get ever smaller, as space-based platforms cause communications of all types to proliferate. Some thirty years ago, Marshall ("The Medium Is The Message") McLuhan called our attention to the profound impact of communications technology (notably television) upon society. Since then, the communications explosion has proceeded exponentially and I for one don't expect it to slow down one whit in the future. McLuhan's insight will prove more compelling by the year. Within the next decade, instantaneous telephoning is going to become routine to and from any point in the world -- with implications both cheerful and dubious. It is a typically American illusion that increased communication means people will automatically get along better. Yeah, sometimes they do. But sometimes when you really do get to know that SOB better, you discover he really is the crumb-bum you had him figured for. In short, the steadily shrinking global village created by the continuously accelerating information explosion will offer as much opportunity for the universal telephone solicitor and the political propagandist as for greater people-to-people understanding. None of which should surprise anybody. Every new technology is a two- edged sword whose ultimate impact depends on how it is wielded, and typically, each is wielded for both better and worse. Remote-site education made possible by space-based technology (and also made necessary by the mounting financial difficulties pressuring every major university) will spread the best available instruction far beyond the walls of elite academic institutions. The Yalies and Harvard types of the future may never set eyes on New Haven or Cambridge. They may instead attend such schools from the further reaches of Greenland or Patagonia. This will produce a very different graduate than in the past. Oh sure, these young people will presumably absorb the intellectual content of a remote-site elite education, but they will not emerge with the social ties, in-group consciousness and cultural outlook that such an education currently implants. That's not necessarily bad -- it's just very different from the impact of an elite university education on its graduates today. Those graduates may continue to rise to the top of both their professions and the nation's leadership -- but their outlooks will differ in subtle, profound ways from previous generations of such alumni. Thus does technology change us and our society at the deepest levels. Our knowledge of the planet will expand exponentially as remote sensing application multiply. Right now, we're just scratching the surface. But when it is possible to see -- in minute detail -- everything that is happening not only on but beneath the earth's land and ocean surfaces, then uses -- both benign and otherwise -- will be found for that information. As our observational capability intensifies, we will even face new and unprecedented privacy questions. (Human being being the incurably litigious lot they are, one result will be that space lawyering will become a growth profession.) Inevitably, satellite reconnaissance will find a role in new coverage. Right now, a satellite can't be deployed at will over a chosen hot spot but just as projects like Motorola's Iridium will spread a net of instantaneous voice communication around the world, other satellite networks will in time do the same for visual communication while radically better resolution will allow close-up views of world events from space in real time. This may make us all fell better informed, but how we'll feel about it remains to be seen. Vietnam was the first war fought on evening TV and the political repercussions live with us still. They may be only the beginning. And once we get the cost-per-pound-to-orbit down to something that ordinary mortals can afford, then the real frontiersmen and women will got out. And nobody knows what they will end up doing. Only then will space become a TRUE frontier, where individual goals, ideals and ambitions are given free rein to invent a world different from the settled areas left behind. Humans who strike out for a frontier are a breed unto themselves. I don't know how to imagine what they will do in space, any more than Isabella could have imagined Davy Crockett. But once we make it possible for them to get there, they will go. And after that, the future is anybody's guess.