Robert Heinlein - Expanded Universe

Is space travel dead? No, because the United States is not the only nation on this planet. Today both Japan and Germany seem to be good bets - countries aware that endless wealth is out there for the taking. USSR seems to be concentrating on the military aspects rather than on space travel, and the People's Republic of China does not as yet appear to have the means to spare - but don't count out either nation; the potential is there, in both cases.

And don't count out the United States! Today most of our citizens regard the space program as a boondoggle (totally unaware that it is one of the very few Federal programs that paid for themselves, manyfold). But we are talking about twenty years from now, 2000 AD. Let's see it in perspective. Exactly thirty years ago George Pal and Irving Pichel and I - and ca. 200 others - were making the motion picture DESTINATION MOON. I remember sharply that most of the people working on that film started out thinking that it was a silly fantasy, an impossibility. I had my nose rubbed in it again and again, especially if the speaker was unaware that I had written it. (Correction: written the first version of it. By the time it was filmed, even the banker's wife was writing dialog.)

As for the general public - A trip to the Moon? Nonsense!

That was thirty years ago, late 1949.

Nineteen years and ten months later Apollo 11 landed on the Moon.

Look again at the curves on page 322. With respect to space travel (and industry, power, and colonization) we have dropped to that feeble curve #1 - but we could shift back to curve #4 overnight if our President and/or Congress got it through their heads that not one but all of our crisis problems can be solved by exploiting space. Employment, inflation, pollution, population, energy, running out of nonrenewable resources - there is pie in the sky for the U.S.A. and for the entire planet including the impoverished "Third World."

I won't try to prove it here. See THE THIRD INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION by G. Harry Stine, 1979, Ace Books, 51 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10010, and see A STEP FARTHER OUT by Dr. Jerry Pournelle, also Ace Books 1979 - and accept my assurance that I have known both authors well for twenty - odd years, know that each has years of experience in aerospace, and that each has both the formal education and the continuing study - and the horse sense! - to be true experts in this matter.

From almost total disbelief about space travel (99.9% +)to a landing on the Moon in twenty years from President Kennedy's announcement of intention to that Lunar landing in only seven years ... and still twenty years to go until the year 2000 - we can still shift to curve #4 (and get rich) almost overnight. By 2000 A.D. we could have O'Neill colonies, self - supporting and exporting power to Earth, at both Lagrange - 4 and Lagrange - 5, transfer stations in orbit about Earth and around Luna, a permanent base on Luna equipped with an electric catapult - and a geriatrics retirement home.

However, I am not commissioned to predict what we could do but to predict (guess) what is most likely to happen by 2000 A.D.

Our national loss of nerve, our escalating anti - intellectualism, our almost total disinterest in anything that does not directly and immediately profit us, the shambles of public education throughout most of our nation (especially in New York and California) cause me to predict that our space program will continue to dwindle. It would not surprise me (but would distress me mightily!) to see the Space Shuttle canceled.

In the meantime some other nation or group will start exploiting space - industry, power, perhaps Lagrange - point colonies - and suddenly we will wake up to the fact that we have been left at the post. That happened to us in '57; we came up from behind and passed the competition. Possibly we will do it again. Possibly - But I am making no cash bets.

2. 1950 Contraception and control of disease is revising relations between the sexes to an extent that will change our entire social and economic structure.

1965 This trend is so much more evident now than it was fifteen years ago that I am tempted to call it a fulfilled prophecy. Vast changes in sex relations are evident all around us - with the oldsters calling it "moral decay" and the youngsters ignoring them and taking it for granted. Surface signs: books such as Sex and the Single Girl are smash hits; the formerly taboo four - letter words are now seen both in novels and popular magazines; the neologism "swinger" has come into the language; courts are conceding that nudity and semi - nudity are now parts of the cultural mores. But the end is not yet; this revolution will go much farther and is now barely started.

The most difficult speculation for a science fiction writer to undertake is to imagine correctly the secondary implications of a new factor. Many people correctly anticipated the coming of the horseless carriage; some were bold enough to predict that everyone would use them and the horse would virtually disappear. But I know of no writer, fiction or nonfiction, who saw ahead of time the vast change in the courting and mating habits of Americans which would result primarily from the automobile - a change which the diaphragm and the oral contraceptive merely con - firmed. So far as I know, no one even dreamed of the change in sex habits the automobile would set off.

There is some new gadget in existence today which will prove to be equally revolutionary in some other way equally unexpected. You and I both know of this gadget, by name and by function - but we don't know which one it is nor what its unexpected effect will be. This is why science fiction is not prophecy - and why fictional speculation can be so much fun both to read and to write.

1980 (No, I still don't know what that revolutionary gadget is - unless it is the computer chip.) The sexual revolution: it continues apace - FemLib, GayLib, single women with progeny and never a lifted eyebrow, staid old universities and colleges that permit unmarried couples to room together on campus, group marriages, "open" marriages, miles and miles of "liberated" beaches. Most of this can be covered by one sentence: What used to be concealed is now done openly. But sexual attitudes are in flux; the new ones not yet cultural mores.

But I think I see a trend, one that might jell by 2000 A.D. The racial biological function of "family" is the protection of children and pregnant women. To accomplish that, family organization must be rewarding to men as well .. . and I do not mean copulation. There is a cynical old adage covering that: "Why keep a cow when milk is so cheap?" A marriage must offer its members emotional, spiritual, and physical comforts superior to those to be found in living alone if that prime function is to be accomplished.

(Stipulated: there are individuals, both sexes, who prefer to live alone. This is racially self - correcting.)

The American core family (father, mother, two or three children) has ceased to be emotionally satisfying - if it ever was. It is a creation of our times: mobility, birth control, easy divorce. Early in this century the core family was mother, father, four to eight children.. . and was itself a unit in an extended family of grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins living near enough (if not in the same house) to be mutually supportive. If a child was ill, Aunt Cora came over to help while Aunt Abby took the other kids into her home. See Mauve Decade fiction.

With increased mobility and fewer children this undefined extended - family pattern disappeared almost without its disappearance being noticed. To the extent to which it was noticed there was often glee at being free of the nuisance of in - laws and kinfolk. It took considerably longer to realize that the advantages had also disappeared.

We will not get a return of the extended family of the sort that characterized the 19th century and the early 20th ... but the current flux of swingers' clubs, group marriages, spouse swapping, etc., is, in my opinion, fumbling and almost unconscious attempts to regain the pleasure, emotional comfort, and mutual security once found in the extended family of two or more generations back.