Robert A Heinlein - The Future Revisited

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GUEST OF HONOR SPEECH

AT THE XIXth WORLD

SCIENCE FICTION CONVENTION

SEATTLE, 1961

THE FUTURE REVISITED

Madame Chairman, Banquet Chairman, members of the World Science

Fiction Convention, friends—protocol now requires that I make a speech.

I don’t know why this is so. I’m quite sure that nothing I can say tonight

can compete with the entertainment offered last night.

There will be a question period. But right now, under a precedent

established at the First World Science Fiction Convention, I am expected to

produce some Big Thoughts giving clear evidence of a Deep Thinker.

It has been just twenty years since the last time I did this. A good

interval, I think—it gives time for a new generation of fans to grow up and

thereby reduces the likelihood that discrepancies between the Deep

Thoughts on the first occasion and the Deep Thoughts on the next occasion

will show up—it lets me speak freely.

Is there anyone here tonight who was at the Denver Convention in

1941? Do you recall what I said on that occasion?

You see? That shows you what one gets for deep

thoughts. My subject twenty years ago was THE DISCOVERY OF THE

FUTURE. My subject tonight is THE FUTURE REVISITED—and we’ll check

up a little, not too closely, on whether what I said twenty years ago still

makes sense.

If you all will be so gracious as to invite me again, twenty years from

tonight, I’ll be happy to accept. 1981, that will be—I can’t accept for 1984; Big

Brother will be watching.

We might hold the 1981 convention on the Moon, at Luna City. I

understand that there are very few conventions on the Moon—and these

affairs have been growing more and more unconventional over the years—so

we should call it Looneycon.

My subject in 1981 will be—obviously—THE FUTURE. . . WHATEVER

BECAME OF IT?

But it may be more practical—more in accordance with the wishes of

the authorities—for us to hold the 1981 Convention in some small garden city

of the future located on the Arctic Ocean in the far north of Siberia.

We can call it the SlaveCon.

I went back and reread that speech of twenty years ago in order to see

just what slips I would have to cover up or explain away tonight.

I found that it was not going to be necessary to cover up—largely

because I had been too cagey to make very many specific predictions.

However, I did make two hard-nosed predictions.

I predicted that the years immediately following 1941 would be a period

of great and radical change

change so great that most people would not be able to understand it,

assimilate it, cope with it—and that the whole world would start behaving

irrationally—crazy.

Does anyone want to dispute that it has? If so, I won’t argue—I’ll simply

refer them to the headlines in tonight’s paper.

I also said that science fiction fans, because they were interested in the

future and believed in change, would

not be so shocked by these drastic changes we have

seen these past twenly years and thereby stood a better chance of not going

crazy when the rest of the world did.

I can’t prove that I was correct in this prediction—or pious hope—by

referring you to the headlines. But—I can’t see -that science fiction fans are

one whit crazier than they were twenty years ago.

The second firm prediction I made in 1941 was a dead cinch, no harder than

predicting tomorrow’s sunrise—at least it seems that easy, looking back

instead of forward. I said that the series of wars the world was in would go on

for five, ten, twenty, possibly fifty years— Now look at the damned thing,

twenty years later!

Anybody here with a transistor radio? Will you keep it tuned to Coneirad,

please?

Let’s update that prediction tonight. Things are even worse tonight than

they looked in 1941, with World War II already raging and Pearl Harbor only

weeks away. 1941 looks like the Good Old Days now— There is no peace in

the future for any of us. . . even the youngest here.

In .propiiesying tonight I am going to be less cagey, more specific, than

I was in 1941—although not so specific as to try to guess tomorrow’s

headlines. In the:

wisely cynical words of L. Sprague de Camp: “It does not pay a prophet to be

too specific.”

But, as William Lindsay Gresham said, “You’ll never get rich

prophesying gloom.” But I’m not trying to get rich tonight; I’m trying to make

some hard-headed predictions—and I’m sorry to say that my crystal ball does

not have very many nice things in it—not for the rest of this century.

So, for any of you who don’t want to hear bad- news, this.is a good time

to slide out the side door.

Wishful thinking—it would be so much pleasanter to indulge in wishful

thinking. Do you remember a story, in Astounding I think, three or four years

ago—”The Cold Equations”? One of the most nearly perfect science

fiction stories ever written—and oóe of the most bloodcurdling.

Remember it? A sweet- young girl, stowed away on a spaceship. Lots

of stories have started this way. . . and they usually end with a romance

between the pilot and the sweet young stowaway, with a lavish ration of cops

and robbers in between before he gets her.

This one didn’t. No cops and robbers, no romance. The Cold

Equations—the laws of nature—said that she had to be jettisoned—killed—to

permit that spaceship to land. - -

And she was killed. There wasn’t any other possible answer.

By 1980 a solid world government, guaranteeing permanent peace and

civil liberty to all, even to the citizens of those nations that choose to remain

socialistic, a concerted effort by all nations to control population and raise

living standards for all. Cancer conquered, and all the diseases of poverty

and filth being brought under control as we devote the effort to world public

health that we now devote to armaments and war, a thriving colony on the

Moon, and a base on Mars, cheap and easy space travel. . . plenty to eat for

everybody—that is what I would like to predict tonight. How I would love to

live in such a worLd!

The Cold Equations say No.

I’ll never see such a world. I’ll be doing well to stay alive to my natural

span.

And so will you.

Because one-third of us here in this room will die in the near future. -

H-bombs? Probably not H-bombs. But there are lots of other ways to

die besides H-bombs, some of them much nastier than blast or radiation

burns. Such as being waylaid and killed by your next door neighbor because

you have food. Or he thinks you have.

Or starving slowly -in a slave camp. Oh, it can happen! There was a

member of my family -who was’ a wealthy

woman in 1941—in 1942 she was in a concentration camp. She’s dead now,

the camp killed her—very slowly. Her husband is dead, too, but not the same

way. He was a military P.O.W.—they took him out and lined him up along

with eight hundred others and machine-gunned them.

Oh, yes, there are some things worse than H-bombs and fallout—and

some of us here tonight are going to getintimately acquainted with them.. . in

the near future.

How near? Probably not this week. The logic of war today is such that it

is most exceedingly unlikely to break out in the middle of a crisis. In this new

sort of war the real crisis never stops—and the poorest time to start the hot

war is in the middle of a cooked-up crisis such as the one we are in tonight.

The hot war is much more likely to break out—if it ever does break out, which

is not the likeliest alternative—after a period of sweetness and light, of

“peaceful coexistence,” with no hint of warning.

So, if you want to make a trip around the world, even visit Berlin, or

Moscow, go right ahead and don’t worry. You’ll, be at least as safe as you

are at home. So do it—live it up! Have fun.

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may

Old Time is yet a-flying

For while we’re all still here today

Some morrow weW be dying.

Of all the possible futures ahead of us for the rest of this century most

of them encompass the destruction of the United States of America as the

political entity we know and with the death of at least 50- or 60,000,000 of her

citizens. Our country destroyed and one-third of us dead—you—and you get

it—so long, Ted—honey, you’re too young to die!

Well, I’ve lived a full life—and the Cold Equations apply to me as much

as to anyone. With any luck-I’ll be

the first man on my block to glow in the dark—but with bad luck I’ll have to go

the hard way.

The secret of correct prediction is to shun wishful thinking and coldly

believe the Cold Equations. Shun pessimistic thinking, too—as I am doing

and as I shall presently prove to you. Treat the world the way a research

scientist treats a problem—examine the data, try to organize, try to predict

coldly and logically. Not what you -want to have happen—but what can

happen and what is most likely to happen—and then, and only then, what

you yourself can do about it, to make things easier or better or safer for you

and your kids.

You don’t cope with a cancer by forgetting it, and hoping it will go away.

You don’t avoid a traffic accident by closing your eyes. Ninety percent

of the possible futures ahead of us fall into two groups, none of them good.

All other possibilities—call it ten percent, I simply mean some small and

unlikely fraction of the things that can happen to us; the remaining

possibilities represented by this arbitrary ten percent are such wild chances

as the sun going nova soon, or flying saucers landing on the White House

lawn and in Red Square followed by the Galactic Overlords taking us under

their benevolent wings

—God, how many times have I read that story! Read it?—I’ve written it!

Or Nikita Khrushchev suddenly being converted to Christianity and

volunteering for Mr. Kennedy’s Peace Corps.

All you can say for those possibilities is that they are, none of them,

physically impossible—but don’t stay awake waiting for them. -

The remaining nine chances out of ten, the probable futures, break into

two parts. The first part—I won’t say “first half”; there is no way to estimate

the percentages

—the first part is the blowup, the catastrophe, the one most science fiction

stories have been written about or assumed as a condition, present or past,

for the sixteen

years since Hiroshima—I mean World War III, all-out and with all the

trimmings, from H-bombs on Seattle and New York and fifty other targets to

bio1ogicaI warfare and any other nastiness your imagination cares to

contrive—and you can be sure that if your imagination picked the wrong

choices, what will happen will be, still nastier.

This first part, World War III, splits logically into two subdivisions: one in

which we win, one in which we lose. Some people like to add a third case

here, in which both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. are so crippled that neither one

wins—but that is not truly a third situation—because in

- that case China wins.

All I want to point out at the moment is that something on the order of

one-third of us die, no matter who wins. Not one-third of the Russians—one-

third of us.

Or do we? Let me make a quick check. Will any of you here who have

already built and stocked a fallout shelter please hold up your-hands?

I expected it—I’ve asked this same question of a number of widely

varied audiences; very few Americans are prepared to stay ilive while the

fallout cools down. Nor am I criticizing, please note that my hand did not go

up. My wife and I have no fallout protection of any sort. I’m not proud of it, I’m

not ashamed of it—I’m simply in the same boat as almost everybody else

and have paid as little attention to the warnings.

I’m not preaching, I’m not urging you to hurry home and start filling

sand bags and bottling water. This is how it is. We are not now prepared to

live through a heavy attack—and those figures of a third or maybe a half of

us dead stand—unless we do prepare. If we do; and from what I’ve seen of

American temperament I doubt if we will prepare.

The other part that makes up the ninety percent of all of our possible

futures is simpler, slower—and just as deadly in the long run. In due course,

with no more than minor brush wars unfelt by any but the poor blokes who -

get killed in them, the United States will find itself in a situation where the

simplest, easiest, and safest thing to do will be to surrender. Maybe it won’t

be called surrender—maybe it will be called a “realistic accommodation” by

the editorial writers that year—or a “treaty of non-aggression with commercial

agreements for mutual trade”—or anything. The name doesn’t matter; the

idea is that the Kremlin will be giving the orders here rather than Washington.

Death then comes to many of us with that whimper rather than the big

bang and, of course, not nearly as quickly. But just as thoroughly. The

laddies who liquidated the trouble in the Ukraine, and used tanks on the

school boys of Budapest, won’t hesitate to liquidate the bourgeois mentality

here. You can ask yourself, most privately, whether or not you are of the

temperament to live through this—and I don’t want to know the answer! But

my own estimate of the average American Joe Blow is such that I expect the

long-term casualties if we surrender to be at least as high as the casualties in

all-out war. We’ve been free a longtime, we won’t take kindly to chains, a lot

of us; they will have to liquidate, one way or another, quite a large portion of

us before we will be docile.

But it will be slower and not nearly so spectacular. Just nastier— That’s

all. That fills up the entire ninety percent of probable futures for us. All the

other possibilities lie in that ten percent or less which are wildly unlikely.

“Now, wait a minute! There’s one more. If we can just manage to avoid

an all-out war—”

I can hear you saying it. I rather suspect that we will manage to avoid

an all-out war. That is our most probable future. The Kremlin doesn’t want

war—God knows the Russian people don’t want war although they won’t

have any choice, either way—and most Americans are most reluctant to face

the prospect of a real war— how many of you have built fallout shelters?—

that’s

proof. And I must admit that I am selfish enough to enjoy peace, such as it is,

as long as it lasts. It is possible, though not too probable, that I will die of

natural causes before this slower defeat overtakes us.

Let me define it. The remaining possibility is that, if we avoid an all-out

World War III, that in time thea Communist Axis would reform internally,

cease to be aggressive and imperialistic, cease to menace us and the rest of

the world, start being a peaceful, socialistic neighbor, something like

Sweden. Or that, if we just wait long enough and avoid war, the Russian

people them selves and the Chinese people will rise up, throw off their’

oppressors—and save us the headaches.

Okay, it’s physically possible, we must add it to the list.

But not in the- ninety percent.

This must be placed over in the fraction -of wildIy unlikely possibilities,

along with the Galactic Overlords and Nikita Khrushchev learning to sing

“Jesus, Lover of my Soul.” -

Anything else is wishful thinking at its sorriest.

Over and over again since my wife and I returned from the Soviet Union

lasvyear, people have said to us, almost:

pleadingly, “Don’t you think that, in time, as they get more consumer goods

and improve their standard of living, that the RuSSians will—”

No, I don’t think it!

The first and most important thing to learn about Communists is that

they behave like Communists.

Communism is a religion, an extremely moralistic and utterly

engrossing religion. Do you think that you could possibly wean a Catholic

priest away from his faith by offering him an improvement in his standard of

living?

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GUESTOFHONORSPEECHATTHEXIXthWORLDSCIENCEFICTIONCONVENTIONSEATTLE,1961THEFUTUREREVISITEDMadameChairman,BanquetChairman,membersoftheWorldScienceFictionConvention,friends—protocolnowrequiresthatImakeaspeech.Idon’tknowwhythisisso.I’mquitesurethatnothingIcansay onightcancompetewiththeentertainmentoffer...

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Robert A Heinlein - The Future Revisited

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