Future of Humanity-Essay

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The Future of Humanity: a Lecture by Isaac Asimov

Topic: The Future of Humanity

Place: Newark College of Engineering

Date: November 8, 1974

The following document is a transcript of a lecture given by Dr. Isaac Asimov. It is from an

audio tape which I have had in my collection since 6th grade. It is not available anywhere, and

please don't e-mail me requesting copies of it. I present it to the group as a tribute to a man who

changed my way of thinking when I needed it the most.

I have made corrections to any misplaced words, eliminated any stutters, etc. These edits have in

no way affected the intended content of the presentation. After listening to this for so many

years, I thoroughly understand it.

As you read this, please keep in mind that the good doctor improvised many of his lectures.

Generally, when he was asked to speak at a given function, he would ask what the topic desired

was, and rarely if ever prepared anything for it. Most of what you read here is conversational

English, and on paper may not look very elegant.

What you read here, though timeless, was a product of the time. 1973 saw the end of a lot of

optimism carried over from the sixties, and the oil embargo was the first real inconvenience

experienced by the baby-boomers of the USA on a nationwide scale. Many middle class families

were now requiring two wage-earners, and the cost of living was on the rise.

Twenty-plus years have passed since the good doctor presented this, and yet the content holds as

universal truth. Even if this is the only thing you ever read produced by the late Dr. Asimov, you

will get a good idea as to the level of his wisdom. I sincerely doubt that this world will ever see

another individual even close to his abilities ever again.

Please note that this material is NOT copyrighted, and I am placing it in the public domain.

Bennett Torre btorre@ix.netcom.com

June 8, 1995

INTRODUCTION: (unidentified person)

It is now my great pleasure to introduce to you a man who is probably the most prolific science

fiction author in the world today. And, he's also a very learned man...and I'm not going to talk to

you anymore because he's so much smarter than I am. I'm just going to...well that's not saying

much, but...I'm just going to bring him right out here now. Uhhh...would you please welcome Dr.

Isaac Asimov.

[applause]

Dr. Asimov's words:

Thank you, thank you. I have...can you hear me as I talk now, or do I have to lean into this?

[no response]

Can you hear me when I speak like this? Anyone?

[some of the group responds that they can understand him.]

OK.

I had a pretty exciting time coming to Newark.

[group laughs]

Because you see, my correspondence was from my office. Which is not where I live. And when I

was told that I would be picked up I carefully wrote a very clear letter explaining exactly where I

lived. Which made it inevitable that they send the people to my office.

[group laughs slightly]

As I stood there in the street, waiting for the car, listening to the minutes tick away, realizing I

had to be up here at eight o'clock...I grew desperate. Finally on the intercom, I called my wife

and said: "Would you call my office and ask if there are any jerks there looking for me".

[group laughs]

She did, and then she called back, and she said that's where they were, so I told them to come

here. I said: "Why did you do that?" I said "It's four blocks. They'll never make it!"

[group laughs]

They almost didn't.

[group laughs]

I had to wait another ten minutes.

[group laughs mildly]

Then, but finally we got here with five minutes to spare. And we knocked at a locked door.

[group laughs mildly]

And a security guard opened it, and said: "You can't come in".

[group laughs heartily]

And the two young men who were with me, who looked like college students...very unsavory

characters...

[group laughs mildly]

...said: "Well that's allright about us", he says, "But this is the lecturer". And the guard peered at

me, and he said: "that's the lecturer?" And they said yes. "I happen to know that the lecturer is

upstairs"

[group laughs very heartily]

So we went through another door where there wasn't any guard.

[group laughs]

And here I am. Now this other lecturer isn't going to say a word to you, but I'll bet he collects the

fee.

[group laughs]

Ahhh... But anyway, now you see why I hate to travel. My discussion on the future of man

applies very, very well to what has just happened to me as you will shortly see. Let me explain.

I once, when I was not quite nineteen, wrote a story called "Trends". It was the first story I ever

sold to John Campbell of the old "Astounding Science Fiction". It appeared in the July 1939

issue.

And in it I dealt with the first flight around the Moon and back. I had it placed in the 1970's. The

first attempt, which was a failure, was in 1973. And the second attempt, which was a success,

was in 1978. The actual flight took place in 1968, so I was ten years conservative. In addition,

my flight was all there was, whereas in real life the flight around the Moon was preceded by all

kinds of orbital and sub-orbital flights, and dockings, and mid-course-corrections, and

communication satellites, and navigation satellites...everything under the sun.

So you can see how wrong I was. In fact I was even wronger than that because when I wrote my

story back in 1939...38, it was printed in 39...When I wrote that story, I had definite ideas on how

the space flight was to take place.

First place, I had my inventor build a spaceship in his back yard.

[group laughs slightly]

In the second place, I took the attitude that any man who good enough to build a spaceship was

good enough to fly the spaceship.

[group laughs slightly]

I mean the inventor was the astronaut; a great saving in time and labor.

[group laughs slightly]

Furthermore, I didn't bother establishing any computer banks anywhere...especially not in Texas.

Because to this day, to be perfectly honest with you, and that's what I would like to be, perfectly

honest. To be perfectly honest with you, I don't really see what the big deal is about getting to the

Moon with the computers and the mid-course-corrections. I know you are a bunch of engineers,

and you know better than I do, but I ask you...once you get there beyond the atmosphere, do you

or do you not see the Moon?

[group laughs, and then applauds]

And if you see the moon steer for it, right?

[group laughs heartily]

In fact the only thing that bugged me...the only thing that bugged me in that story is where you

launch the spaceship from. I lived in Brooklyn all my life, and I looking around Brooklyn I could

see there was no place you could safely launch a spaceship...

[group laughs]

...without arousing the anger of the citizenry.

And so I thought that I had better launch it outside Brooklyn somewhere. And that sort of

promptly got me into trouble because I wasn't sure, for certain, that there was any place outside

Brooklyn.

[group laughs]

I mean I heard rumors to that effect, but I'm a pretty difficult fellow to fool. I like definite

evidence. But I realized that I have to do something, so I launched the ship...the spaceship...from

the farthest limits of the known world. To wit, in Jersey City.

[group very heartily laughs]

I'm not kidding. Really did. And yet I sold this story.

[group laughs]

Not only sold this story, but its been reprinted five times. The last time, in 1973. By which time I

suspect that most people had a pretty good idea that the details in my story were wrong.

[group laughs mildly]

Well why was this do you suppose? I'll tell you. The story was not printed because of any of the

engineering details...you should excuse the expression. It was published because I had something

in it that the editor had never seen before. I had postulated resistance to space flight. There was a

whole organization of people on earth who were sore as anything at the people who were trying

to get out into space. They thought people should stay on earth and mind their own business.

And this had never been postulated before. Never!

Up till that moment in time, the only way in which space travel was treated was either by having

the hero go out to Deneb or someplace, and fight the oyster men there,

[group laughs mildly]

...and marry the beautiful princess who lays eggs,

[group laughs mildly]

...without any reference whatsoever to earth or the people thereof. On the other hand, the other

way of handling space flight was to have the hero land on the Moon, or on some other place

thereto akin, and then come back and receive a ticker tape parade with everyone being very

pleased at this heroic action.

It never occurred to anybody that there might actually be resistance to the whole notion; people

might think it was a rotten idea and a waste of money.

After I wrote the story, again, nobody had the idea. I don't think another story ever appeared in

which there was any hint of opposition to space flight. I mean, on principle. Until such time as

the opposition did develop.

And so you are entitled to ask how is it possible that an eighteen year old boy, very

unsophisticated an naive, who literally and honestly was dubious as to whether there was

anyplace outside Brooklyn. How it was possible that he could see something clearly that older

and thicker heads failed to see?

And it goes against the grain to have to explain this to you because I would much prefer to have

you think I was very smart, and had some kind of key to the wisdom of the universe. I mean,

that's a great thing to be able to impress you with. But instead I'm going to have to tell you the

truth, and you're going to see how disgustingly simple the whole thing was.

I was going to Columbia University at the time, and as I don't need to tell any of you here, the

tuition rates were something appalling. I mean, as I recall it was three hundred and sixty-five

dollars a semester.

[mild laugh from crowd]

And I couldn't afford it. And so I looked about for all kinds of things to do in order to eke out the

tuition.And one of the things I did was to join the NYA, National Youth Administration, which

was a kind of relief for deserving students. They gave you little sinecure jobs, and paid you the

munificent sum of fifteen dollars a month. And this enabled you to get through your tuition.

And the job I got was to serve as a kind of secretary to a sociologist who was preparing a book

entitled "The Social Resistance to Technological Change". And what I was supposed to do was

as follows: I had to go to the library with a list of references from him, and ask for the books.

Turn to the pages where I was to find the reference, copy them out longhand...because this was

the days before Xerox. Luckily too, otherwise I would have starved. Copied them out longhand,

took them home, typed them up. Now, it was impossible for me to copy them out and type them

up without reading them.

[mild laughter]

As a result, I read perhaps ninety percent of the book. Because you must understand how learned

books are written in case you ever want to write a learned book. First thing you do is get a

thousand references, chosen at random...

[group laughs]

You then put them into the book, in the order you reach them...

[group laughs mildly]

And stick two or three lines of your own between each of them to act as mortar...

[group laughs mildly]

And you're all set.

Well, when I read all of these references I discovered, to my amazement, that all through history

there had been resistance...and bitter, exaggerated, last-stitch resistance...to every significant

technological change that had taken place on earth. Usually the resistance came from those

groups who stood to lose influence, status, money...as a result of the change. Although they

never advanced this as their reason for resisting it. It was always the good of humanity that rested

upon their hearts.

For instance, when the stagecoaches came into England, the canal owners objected. Not that they

would lose money, although they would, but they feared for humanity. Because as the

stagecoaches tore along at fifteen miles an hour, the air whipping past the nostrils of the people

on board, would by Bernoulli's Principle, suck all the air out of the lungs.

[group laughs]

You know, when I tell this story to a non-engineering audience I can't mention Bernoulli's

Principle, which is what gives it that real taste.

[group laughs]

Well naturally the stagecoach people laughed heartily, and all they had to do was run a

stagecoach at fifteen miles an hour with people inside and show them there's no harm. But they

memorized the argument...for when the railroads came in.

[group laughs mildly]

Well then, reading all this, and this was over a period of months...I read it, and read it...I said to

myself: "Hey, you know I can make a syllogism out of this" because I had taken up liberal arts

and the humanities, and they taught me about syllogisms.

I don't know if you guys know about syllogisms. It's... The units of a syllogism is one Aristotle.

[group laughs]

Well, see, that's...to put it in engineering terms: One Aristotle per second is a fast syllogism.

[group laughs mildly]

It goes this way: Major premise: All technological changes meet resistance. Minor Premise:

Space travel represents a technological change. Conclusion:

[group laughs]

This is the tricky one!

[group laughs]

There will be resistance to space travel.

And I said "Gee!". And I wrote the story and sold it. My first story, it's Astounding, and they

printed it. And here I am, a genius at having foreseen this.

But now, the question is, if it's that simple you can understand how a dumb kid of eighteen could

think of it. The question now arises, how was it all that everyone else didn't see it?

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