On November 8, 1974, Isaac Asimov visited the Newark College of Engineering. At that time, he was already considered one of the most prolific science fiction writers in history, and he was invited to speak about the shape that the future of humanity would take. Almost 45 years have passed since that day, and thanks to a transcript of the conference, we can see how good Asimov was at trying to guess the future.
Isaac Asimov was born on January 2, 1920 in Belarus, but spent almost his entire life in the United States, a country he arrived to with his family when he was three years old. He was an exceptionally prolific writer (and biochemist), having published hundreds of books. His work is divided between science fiction, history, and scientific divulgation. Everyone remembers him for his Three Laws of Robotics or his novels, although his work as a scientific communicator was also exceptional. He died on April 6, 1992, at age 72, due to complications from AIDS, a disease he contracted during a bypass operation in 1982.
The Future According to Asimov
In November 1974, Isaac Asimov visited the Newark College of Engineering. He was a person who had a phobia of airplanes – he only flew twice in his life – but he frequently traveled by land to visit educational institutions where he presented his points of view. In this case, one of those present recorded the audio of the conference in Newark and in 1995 published its transcript. Reading it, one can quickly recognize the sharp humor that runs through almost his entire work. The central theme of his lecture was "The Future of Humanity" and in it one can see what the future that the popular writer imagined looked like.
As was his custom, even in the prologues of his books, Asimov begins by talking about how some of his works became successful. Many have seen traces of pedantry in that attitude, but it is possible that it was just a trick to relax and speak comfortably to his audience. Be that as it may, a few minutes later he was into the central theme of his lecture. About 30 years had passed since World War II, and humanity was in a period of significant growth.
"We have just gone through a period of thirty years of maximum prosperity for humanity as a whole. We eat better, we live better, we have had a higher standard of living than we have ever had before. That has caused humanity to incorporate 1.5 billion more individuals in just three decades. But we have not yet realized that this is only something temporary," he told his audience.
Asimov was very aware of everything that was happening in the world; after all, he needed that knowledge to develop his work as a scientific communicator and so that his novels had a realistic technological background. That is why he points out to his audience that such a demographic explosion recorded at that time was not a coincidence.
"For one thing, we have had a very good food supply, thanks to the benign climate of the last 30 years. Some experts assure that the last few decades had the best climate of the last thousand years." Asimov explains that this fact, added to the use of modern agricultural machinery, irrigation equipment, and new insecticides and pesticides, has allowed feeding a large number of people.
"What ultimately makes that growth possible is that we have industrialized the world. But our industry produces dust. Today the Earth's atmosphere has more suspended particles than ever before, except for periods when a volcanic eruption has occurred. This means that the Earth's albedo — the percentage of sunlight that is reflected into space before it hits the planet — has increased. Slightly, but enough to be measurable. The Earth's temperature has been declining since 1940. We don't notice it yet, because this drop in temperature is around one degree. But it is enough to reduce crop yields in the north."
One can see how a renowned scientist was already worried about climate change. Asimov, with the data available at the time, assumed that in our days we would have problems obtaining food for humanity because of planetary cooling. Obviously, he was completely wrong, because he could not know that the increase in dust in the atmosphere would not be enough to counteract the enormous amounts of greenhouse gases – with an opposite behavior – that would end up heating our planet. It is possible that in the future we cannot produce the amount of food needed for everyone, but precisely because of the opposite problem.
The depletion of natural reserves was also a cause of concern for Asimov. In a part of his lecture in Newark, he points out that "energy is much more expensive than it used to be; oil prices are rising. That also means that fertilizers will be more expensive, and that extracting water for irrigation will be more difficult. Everything seems to conspire to reduce the food supply. One might think," Isaac continues, "that if humanity has managed for millennia to live without these things, it can continue to do so now. But it is a mistake: we simply cannot return to the simple life of the pre-technological era."
Asimov's reasoning was devastating: a civilization that did not have abundant and cheap energy sources would be impossible to keep feeding billions of people. "The problem is those fifteen hundred million people have been added to the Earth's population. If we abandon technology, we also have to give up that number of people. And there are going to be very few volunteers for that."
The solution, for Asimov, was to reduce the birth rate. "Throughout the history of life on Earth, there have been periods when a particular species, for one reason or another, temporarily increases its numbers. It has always come back down, and always in the same way: through an increase in the death rate. As food decreases for each individual, some die from disease or at the hands of predators. And the same will happen to humanity, don't worry. The death rate will rise, we will die in wars, diseases, or famine."
However, the writer assumed that humanity had an ace up its sleeve. "We have something that other species don't have, we have the brain. We can foresee. We can plan. And there is a solution we can resort to: reduce the birth rate." One cannot deny the logic of his argument. "The birth rate will have to be lower than the death rate, and the death rate, we hope, will be low," he concludes.
In the 21st century, women will occupy scientific, technical, and business positions on par with men, since their primary function for the human race will have ceased to be having children. For Asimov, the reduction of the birth rate would allow women to develop more fully, as they would not need to spend a large part of their lives caring for their numerous children.
Strangely, until almost the end of the lecture, the most prolific science fiction writer in history had not touched on the topic of space travel. However, before saying goodbye, he referred to the subject, assuring that "we are going to return to the Moon, only this time we will go to stay. We will establish a colony, and we will have a group of people living on the Moon, from where flights will depart to other points of the solar system."
https://old.neoteo.com/como-colonizar-la-luna/
