That's quite interesting, and not all that far fetched really. In fact it would have been more accurate if we hadn't spent so much time loafing around and neglecting the space program.
I noticed that they predicted the oil crisis, and the ensuing electric cars for 2000, not too bad. If the big car manufacturers would have started developing electrical cars earlier....
I was thinking maybe it was just a cheap cash-in to make money off boys and girls dazzled by the world of Star Wars and Buck Rogers etc. All the 1970's tv and movie sci-fi stock had similar design concepts which this book also carries. Star Wars was a relatively standard plot dressed up in an outer space theme but was more concerned with various marketing tie-ins (McDonalds drink cups and toys etc) than a unique, profound sci-fi story. The best part of the movie I think was the conceptual world it creates in the viewer's mind. The realism. This book continues those themes, but ties them in as a realistic probable future to our own time. In reality it is just product for the workers, no more no less. As long as those with the reigns of power continue to live like spoiled monarchs there's probably not much sense in hoping for a more high-tech society. It'll be a dystopia rather than what we see in the pages of this book. I thought reaganomics was to blame, but that appears to be a smaller part of the entire world's economic policies in the 1980's. Too much social spending and a collapsing economy gave way to less restricitions on business and this became corporate greed and more individual lifestyles as opposed to a unifying collective progressive vision. Also, I think that since the ruling classes are basically corrupt, they have a condescending attitude towards the little people, they sell us low culture, to reassure themselves that we are unworthy of a more beautiful planet.
I enjoyed reading your post, Spudmatic, at least in terms of content. In terms of readability, please divide your next reply into paragraphs - it will be better for everyone all around. Welcome, and enjoy your stay. Now, as for my reply: I fail to see what Buck Rogers and Star Wars had to do with bland consumerism. In case you failed to notice, both suited the tastes of the era - people tended to like epic Space Operas. They were popular, hence they were successful. You forged that Star Wars was initially seen as a low-budged failure, only funded by the studio to satisfy a niche marked - that it somehow become incredibly popular was surprising to many. Buck Rogers... Buck Rogers, in fact, comes from a much earlier era. The setting and characters were resurrected for a TV series because it became apparent that it would be successful, rather than some kind of manipulative "cheap plot" conspiracy. I mean, do I really have to go into the sci-fi trends of the time, from Star Trek, to Larry Niven? The 70's and the 80's were a very popular time for space operas. Did some of the above become very profitable franchises? Yes, so they did. And that means... It means they were popular enough that the theme was seen as a profitable venture for investors, who in turn supported writers, actors, directors... You seem to base your narrative far too much on socialist theorems and, to some extent, prelude chapters to "inevitable" class warfare with overt focus on economic elites, and far too little on other factors within society. The working class? The working class was hardly the chief consumer of science-fiction, space-operasque or otherwise. And our "elites", corrupt or otherwise, often build themselves in the image we want them to occupy, rather than the other way round. Especially if they thrive on popularity, be it that of the voting booth or of TV ratings. Unified purpose? When has humanity *ever* had a unified purpose? And why should it? We're not a single organism, were a myriad of opinions, cultures, religions, and lifestyles that stretches far and wide. Shove humanity into a single-set pattern, and we'll stagnate rather than grow. We'll sooner have a viable space program from national and economic competition than we will from idealism. Much sooner. In fact, I'd say much depends on the moon. Plans for permanent lunar bases are numerous and span the entire world, nation-wise. All seem to converge on the 2020-30 period. To spark off further reasearch, development, and construction for space programmes, they have to have some kind of *purpose*... and, quite frankly, while curiosity is a powerful human drive, that isn't what's going to give us a stepping stone to our own solar system, if beyond. For space exploration to truly advance, it will have to prove itself to have some practical results - something sorely lacking so far. We'll get our better world and our technological advances - the Usborne Book of the Future isn't all that far from what we're getting to, truth to be told, though really... A microware power beam, from a space solar power station? A *power plant* that is just as likely to power a city as it is to fry it? I never did gather why the concept was seen as so popular three decades ago. We'll get orbital factories though, just as soon as more viable results comes from the zero-gravity research occuring today... What we need is products that have *proven* profitable results, transport costs to and from Earth included. We'll get our space mining, and other advances. They're natural steps forward *if* leaving Earth's gravity becomes an investment that can repay itself - so far, it has only become thus through the effort of those pesky "elites" of ours, who go on merry bouts of space tourism... We'll get *somewhere* eventually. We won't get the idyllic green cities, though. Nor will we get the dystopian reality of a dying planet. We'll oscillate between the two, like children with ADHD, more often than not.
Spudmatic, those were some interesting points to read. Don't be surprised when we take them and run. We're a board community that loves to debate. :smile: I was thinking, all the time, that I'd seen the book, as a scan, somewhere, and had even discussed it... Then I remembered where: I happen to live with a sociologist who is offering a seminar next semester that, for now, holds the working title of "Belief in science, distrust in science", and how those two changed over the last decades. This was considered as illustration material. Well, such it is no coincidence such things become popular, and when they do. I think I remember the success of the first Star Wars film was a surprise. If I remember correctly, though, Lucas had kept the merchandising rights to himself, was slightly mocked for it in the beginning, and later could congratulate himself to one of the first films where those rights actually payed out big style. But that's just a side note for me. What's more interesting in the 70ies science fiction boom is that it actually tied in with a mentality that was expecting all scientific progress to lift humanity to a next level, that it would help to solve all the world's problems in the long run, and that the possibilities were endless. Look at the distrust scientific progress is viewed with today, from nuclear power plants to stem cell research, from genetically improved crops and cloning, to pesticides. Back then, for many viewers and readers, as long as the intentions were good, and science was involved, the scenarios were bright. This view on what science enables us to do and create was very untainted and innocent, and that's what this book illustrates pretty well. Then came Tchernobyl and DDT overdoses, Thalidomide and other medicaments who did more harm than good, the Bhopal disaster, and so on. In a way they did to the belief in technical progress for everyones greater good what the Titanic did to the belief in technical progress in the 20ies. You'll notice a significant change in future scenarios - not so much movie scenarios, because stories thrive on conflicts - but illustrations like these could often be found in the 60ies and 70ies - but I'd like to see some from the late 80ies which aren't advertising material. Yet it gave birth to geekdom, which surely isn't rooted into the lower classes, more of a middle class phenomenon... using the terms due to a lack of better vocabulary. :wink: What I think is true is that in the 70ies, there still was a certain expectation that ultimately, technical progress had to work out for everyone's good. That's not exactly the case today. Not at all, actually. And as for the motivation of the corporations, if there is still money to be made from the old models, there is no other motivation for offering new models than making even more money. If new models enable us to actually safe money, there'll be less motivation to offer us the technically advanced model. So, we're still driving cars who need galleons of gas to drive, instead of money-and-gas-saving models that could have been developed in the last twenty years if it had had any priority. There needs to be a certain financial pressure in that direction in the system we're currently living in, and it being good for the environment and thus humanity is not enough. That's something a lot of those 70ies scenarios didn't predict in their relative positivism, and sometimes enthusiasm. I got it that that vision was somehow more prominent in the 70ies, and particularly in brochures like these, than it is these days. Only Spudmatic can clarify this, but the way I read his post, the world we got is not the unified and well off society this piece of literature foretold us to be. I think the thought of being assimilated into a single global culture is being viewed critically by almost everyone these days. Take languages, for example. A few decades back - and earlier, too - all of us humans speaking one single language was a positive vision, leading to the invention of Esperanto and a few other "global languages". Today, despite the fact that an actual living language has become the lingua franca of half the globe, every dying language is mourned, every extinct dialect is archived as good as possible, and every language or dialect that is in danger of disappearing has people who fight for it to be taught at schools and printed on local traffic signs. Somtimes, these measurements succed. Sometimes, not so much... But as a matter of fact, the visions have changed. Yet interestingly, just that as a drive is a popular motif in science fiction - humanity exploring space for no other reason than scientific and diplomatic interest, and that they can. :razz: We've grown up with some science fiction universes who worked based on that very canon. And for that, there's got to be a historical reason. It seems to have made sense to people at some time. The question is: If we'd erase these well know scenarios from our mind, and a science fiction writer came up with a world where this is humanity's purpose for travelling space in the very near future, would we buy (into) it? (Why?) Hasn't that happened by now? :neutral: To end the post with an illustration, I'll show you an ad from before the decline of what I for now shall call "belief in science". That doesn't mean that people believed science exists. They know it did, we know it does. But they believed into it being something that future humanity would use for the greater good more so (!) than we, today, expect that to happen. Said ad... Could you advertise this, or anything similar, today? A Union Carbide ad from the late 60ies. The "belief" in science was even more prominent then, what with the moon landing enthusiasm and all. I think we're way past that, and not only for good, honestly said. But still, some additional facts - that it's a Union Carbide ad makes this even scarier than it is already for us today. From Wikipedia: We researched pictures together, but decided they were a little too crass in many cases to be shown in the seminar. I recognized the one that was voted press picture of the year 1984 or something like that. After I'd seen it a few years ago it was stuck in my head for years... :neutral: Which I don't mention to make a certain point, it's more of a footnote. Vintage ads and vintage books like the one that this thread is based on tell us so much about where we come from. And my, am I glad we don't have a posting lenght limit. :bunny:
*nod* And yet, there's is one problem - most of these works assumed that humanity had already passed the point where it had a viable, affordable means of space travel, be it just within the solar system, or often - much beyond. In fact, many science-fiction writers were forced to bend, if not utterly break, the laws of physics as we know them, all in the service of giving humanity the power of space-travel in their works. We haven't crossed that threshold yet. Not by a long shot. I think the best parallel here would be the European Age of Exploration, itself pushed by economic factors of trade, or political factors of national expansion. At the forefront of it, of course, you had the people driven by curiosity and wanderlust - explorers, discoverers, diplomats and even traders. But for this to work, two factors had to be found - technology and financial backing. We currently lack both. In fact, not only do we lack ships that can cross the ocean, we also appear to be residing near a sheer cliff rather than the edge of a river. And the cliff appears to be going up rather than down, and it isn't just sheer - the blasted thing is hanging right over our heads at the wost angle possible. Oh, and the sea's boiling. Though that's the least of our concerns. Now, as silly as my parallel has become, you see where I'm getting here. What we have now is not an Age of Exploration, far from it. What we are living through at the moment is a somewhat prolonged path toward building hot-air balloons to reach the top of the cliff, and then having to design a completely new form of sailing the Boiling Oceans - without actually having seen, with our own eyes, what might be brought back from the other end of said oceans. Curiosity and a drive for exploration and expansion will take over once we can easily reach the stars, but to get to the stars... we really must see some results. Even if they're from an island that's very close to the shore, so to speak. Close. Very, very close. Due not as much to the limitations of our technological development but, rather, the apparent stupidity of certain individuals. Nuclear power is actually quite safe, *if* you put intelligent people at the helm. But a power source that will boil the air, and require pinpoint precision to not boil the nearby countryside and seas, towns and cities? That's not a power plant - that's a doomsday device.
