FROM THE FORTHCOMING BOOK TO BENEFIT THE NON-PROFIT INSTITUTE OF SPACE COMMERCE

STEP FURTHER OUT!

When a ship “leans” to one side or the other, it’s called “listing.”

A ship that is out of balance (due to shifting cargo, for example) will list to one side.

As Panj says, to “right” the ship is to balance the ship back out so that sits perfectly upright in the water.

High Technology Rights Foreign Trade Balances

by Jerry Pournelle

 

Until a decade or so ago, the U.S. had a positive balance of payments. Our largest export was high technology. Now our major export is agricultural products…

We had technology for export because we invested in technology. The Space Program paid for itself nine times over. It’s fashionable to denigrate the technology fallouts from space. NASA’s most remarkable achievement may have been to make mankind’s greatest achievement look dull. “Teflon frying pans,” the scoffers say; but in the real world we got computers, firefighting methods, medical instruments, communications systems, techniques for fabricating large glass fiber structures, automated quality control procedures, computer simulations, and a host of other things now taken for granted. And perhaps most important of all: a methodology for managing the most complex task in human history. Before Apollo, D-Day held that record.

Good high technology research does not cost money. You always get your money back. Usually you make a large profit.

In 1871 France lay prostrate, as Bismarck erected his new German Empire across the corpses of French dreams. It would be hard to exaggerate the depth of French despair. Then, in 1889, Alexandre-Gustav Eiffel built the tallest structure in the world; and France had pride again. The Eiffel tower wasn’t useful, and at the time it certainly wasn’t thought pretty; but nothing remotely like it had ever been done. Twice as high as St. Peter’s or the Great Pyramid, built with almost contemptuous ease, it stood as a monument to the new France, and remained as the tallest building in the world until the completion of the Chrysler Building in 1930.

In 1992 the United States does not lie prostrate, but many citizens are demoralized because we have no sense of national purpose. The American people have too often been told there is no solution to the problems facing us; that we must share the misery and equitably distribute the poverty, because we can do nothing else.

This is nonsense; yet there is a grain of truth in the counsels of despair. So long as we live on Only One Earth, we must inevitably come to the time when our non-renewable resources are gone. in a small closed system such as a single planet, we may not agree on the limits to growth-but we all must admit there are limits.

The Earth is just too small and fragile a basket for the human race to keep all its eggs in. Some day we will lose the Earth. Probably not soon. Cosmic disasters are inevitable, but the chances that one will happen in any give century are fairly small.[4]Over the long haul, though, we will lose the Earth: to a comet collision, or to the exploding Sun, or to a new Ice Age, or to any of a dozen other unlikely-sounding catastrophes. By that time we much be able to survive without Earth. History will bless the men and nation who took the first steps to give humanity a home other than “Only One Earth.”[5]

 

Introduction

In my columns and lectures I often tell of the marvels about to be poured forth from technology’s cornucopia. I describe a world of the future with colonies in space, minerals brought from the asteroids, a world-wide standard of living at least as high as what we in the United States enjoy now; and I am careful to say that I am not describing dreams. This is the world as it can be made, as we already know how to make it. We can do it, I say. And it doesn’t even cost much: a few more cents out of each tax dollar.

I gave that lecture once in Salt Lake City. (Salt Lake City is the only place I’ve ever visited where the words “wild life” refer exclusively to ecological phenomena.) After the question period I stood talking with some of my audience, and a young lady asked a very serious question. “You tell us about all the benefits technology can bring us, and you say you only need a little more money to accomplish all these marvels. I’m not an engineer. I don’t even understand about half of what you said in there. I’d like to believe you, but-how do I know you can do it if we give you the money?”

It was said in all sincerity. Most of my audience wasn’t technically trained, and indeed in this case weren’t even very familiar with science fiction, and though I’ve evidence they were entertained, I knew too that some of the things I’d talked about were unfamiliar. I could probably convince an engineer or mathematician or economist that my forecasts make sense; but how to prove to a bright young English teacher that I wasn’t just blowing smoke, that it wasn’t all just promises, promises?

I had to say something, and I heard myself saying this: “Of those who make you promises, which group has a better track record for keeping them: technologists or politicians?” She seemed satisfied; and later I reflected on just what I’d said. It makes more sense than I knew.

Remember thirty some years ago when the politicians and “social scientists” were saying (much as they’re saying again today with the Peace Dividend from the end of the Cold War) that if only they had as much money as the Defense Department, they would transform America into Paradise? Well, they’ve got what they asked for and a lot more. I can recall when Congress dared not bring in a budget larger than the “barrier” of $100 billion. Now there’s no obvious stopping point short of a trillion-and not much of the increase went to Defense. Do we live in Paradise?[6]

In 1958 some of us said that if we could have about 3% of the national budget we could put men on the Moon and go to the planets. We said that the nation would reap great benefits from communications and weather satellites, and that the ferment of high-technology enterprises generated by the space program would have unforeseeable effects of enormous benefit to all. Have those promises been kept?

In the 50’s advocates of “federal aid to education” were saying that if we merely shoveled a bit more money into education we’d not only see that every Johnny could read, but produce a generation fit to live in “the atomic age.” Well, education certainly can’t complain that it didn’t get far more than was asked for (asked for then; not as much as is wanted now, of course); but would anyone like seriously to argue that we have fewer problems with the schools now than we did then?

And no: I do not mean this as a condemnation of educators and politicians and social scientists; although they may well deserve it. I do not mean to imply that there may not be serious problems not foreseen by those forecasters of the 50’s. I do mean this: of those who have said they could produce certain results give certain investments, who has the best track record? And yes, I know about cost over-runs (back in my aerospace days I was mildly famous for Pournelle’s Law of Costs and Schedules, namely, “Everything takes longer and costs more,” a dictum discovered independently by myself and Poul Anderson.[7]

I could even tell you horror stories of my own. Some of them aren’t the engineers fault, though. Freeman Dyson told me about the laser target, the one placed on the Moon by Neil Armstrong: essentially a box full of glass cubes. They asked the instrument makers at Princeton what it would cost, and were told a couple thousand dollars at most; by the time the competitive bid process was done, the cost was about a quarter of a million. But sometimes the engineers and technology managers seriously underestimate their costs, and seriously overestimate the results.

Sometimes they build outright failures, bridges that fall down and airplanes that don’t fly very well. But be honest. How often have we been given an order of magnitude more money and failed to produce the promised result? Or any result at all?[8]And how many political programs do you know of that cost ten times as much as estimated (We won’t even mention the failed policies of Marxism which have devastated entire countries and generations with their failed experiments at untold costs.), are seemingly eternal in duration, and produce no measurable result at all?

Choose your own examples; I’d not like to pick on your favorite project for social improvement. I do recall Dr. Samuel Johnson on the subject.

Boswell: “Then, sir, you laugh at schemes for social improvement?”

Johnson: “Why, sir, most schemes for social improvement are very laughable things.”

And yet in my youth no one laughed when we were told that for $200 billion-not annually, but just $200 billion-we could transform the world, and they did indeed laugh when told that we could go to the Moon at any price whatever.

 

I rest my case.

– Jerry Pournelle