Asimov, Isaac The Roving Mind

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.What difference will space settlements make?Consider that the "unbridgeable gulfs" I mentioned are unbridgeable chiefly for psychological reasons.We can surely build machines that will endure in the relativelybenign environment of space for years.(Our probes, untended by careful human hands while in progress, manage to survive.) We can also devise life-support systemsthat will sustain human beings for that length of time.The chief difficulty will probably lie in the inability of human beings to endure confined quarters for so long a time or to adjust to an environment so different fromanything they are accustomed to.As soon as we imagine space settlements to be in existence, however, and human settlers to be living out their lives on them, the situation changes.298 The Future of ExplorationTo the space settlers, dwelling in their small worlds in lunar orbit, space travel will be something familiar, not exotic as it is to earth-people.Even if the space settlementis as earthlike as it can be made, most of the settlers will be working part-time on the moon, on the construction of other objects in space, or on import-export throughspace.Within the space settlement, the settler will be accustomed to a gravitationlike pull that changes in intensity from place to place, to living on the inside of a small world,to being part of a tightly cycled system of air, water, and food.To all these things earth-people are not accustomed and yet they are the precise characteristics of thespace-travel environment.Then, too, large space-liners can be assembled in space much more economically than on the earth's surface and, on taking off, will not have to escape the full pull ofearth's gravity.The true spaceships of the future will surely be space-built by space-settlers.What it all amounts to is that space-liners will not be very different from the space settlements themselves.The space-liners will be smaller and will hold fewer people,but they will be very much like home to the space-settler crew.It would seem almost certain, then, that the space explorers of the future will not be earth-people, but space-settlers.It will be those settlers, emerging from theirartificial homes in orbit about the earth, who will be the great navigators of the ocean of space the Phoenicians, Polynesians, and Vikings of the future.They will find no psychological obstacles to long journeys in space, and they will be the first to land on Mars and, perhaps, to build a permanent settlement there.Beyond Mars will be the real bonanza of the solar system the asteroid belt.There they will find 100,000 worlds with diameters of one kilometer and up.There will bemetal asteroids, rocky ones, and icy ones, and each variety will have its own sort of usable resources.The asteroids will be the mines of the future, the industrial basefor the civilization that will span the inner solar-system and lay the foundation for the still more magnificent ships that will carry man through the much vaster spaces ofthe outer solar-system.And, eventually, the newer, larger settlements that will be circling the sun in the asteroid belt and beyond, carrying tens and hundreds of millions of human beings insocieties that are in carefully designed ecological balance, may break away altogether.They may leave the solar system and set off on an endless trek throughinterstellar space, building their own lives for generations and millennia and, every once in a long while, passing new planetary systems within which they may renewtheir resources and upon which they may set up new habitations, buds and shoots of the old.Most exciting of all, perhaps, they may encounter other forms of intelligent life.299 The Future of ExplorationIf, then, we use the present reach of exploration properly, there need be no ultimate horizon for ages to come and humanity can expand virtually endlessly through thevirtually illimitable universe.53 Homo Obsoletus?I am constantly being asked to peer into the future in this direction or that, and frequently I am asked to consider the future of computers.I am glad to do this and am quite capable of talking very rapidly on the subject, but sooner or later (usually sooner) I am interrupted in my course of glowing optimismand am asked, "But do you think that human beings may be replaced by the computer? That human beings may become obsolete?"Do I? Let's consider the matter in orderly progression.1.Ought the question to be considered at all or is it just a very human fear and distrust of change, particularly technological change?One can imagine the anger, for instance, of early builders when the equivalent of the yardstick came into use.One can almost hear them mutter, "Of what value then is the keen eye and the cool judgment of the experienced carpenter if any fool can tell whether a piece of timberwill stretch across a doorway by measuring it with that inanimate marked stick? Brains will decay and the human being will become extinct, replaced by wood."And surely the bards of old must have been horrified at the invention of writing, of a code of markings that eliminated the need for memory.A child of ten, havinglearned to read, could then recite the Iliad, though he had never seen it before, simply by following the markings.How the mind would degenerate!A Spartan monarch, on seeing a demonstration of a catapult hurling its heavy rock, cried out, "Oh, Heracles, the valor of man is at an end."He equated martial valor with hand-to-hand thumping, you see; but if so, he was too late by some thousands of years, for such a cry must have rung out with theinvention of the bow and arrow.300301 Homo Obsoletus?A Spartan monarch, on seeing a demonstration of a catapult hurling its heavy rock, cried out, "Oh, Heracles, the valor of man is at an end."He equated martial valor with hand-to-hand thumping, you see; but if so, he was too late by some thousands of years, for such a cry must have rung out with theinvention of the bow and arrow.300301 Homo Obsoletus?These fears were wrong every time.The use of inanimate aids to judgment and memory did not destroy judgment and memory [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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