regular interplanetary (at least) spaceflight, comparable to the regularity of airflight in the twentieth century;
computers connected around the world;
the unexpected, which I looked forward to greeting as it occurred.
A lesser possibility was survival in a nuclear wasteland.
The twenty first century became the expected setting for stories about interplanetary travel. It was a surprise when one Philip K. Dick story (title forgotten) with an interplanetary background was set in the 1990s but that was still decades in our future. In that story, TV space operas were called "captainkirks."
Poul Anderson was one of many contributors to the "space age" vision of the future. In "The Game of Glory," Dominic Flandry operated on an interstellar scale. In Twilight World, post-nuclear mutants traveled to Mars and, in the Epilogue, their remote descendants had colonized the outer satellites. Anderson found ways to combine the space travel and post-nuclear survival options.
My changed expectation remains Andersonian. Now I see the shadow of God the Hunter across the end of this century. Apart from the climate, someone has just shown me a graph of the rate of profit consistently declining from 40% in 1869 to 20% in 2007. I no longer look forward to greeting the unexpected.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I only wish we had regular interplanetary space flight by now! With ships going back and forth from Earth, Luna, Mars, the asteroid belt, the moons of Jupiter, etc. It's my hope entrepreneurs like Elon Musk will finally inaugurate such an age.
At least we now have computer networks linked together all around the world.
Pat Frank's ALAS, BABYLON is a classic novel exploring how people might survive a nuclear war. As is, of course, Poul Anderson's TWILIGHT WORLD.
And the way to escape a grim Malthusian future of the kind Anderson speculated about in "Welcome" and "Murphy's Hall" is to get OFF this rock! To explore and develop the resources and possibilities of the Solar System.
Ad astra! Sean
Actually you can generally get the -real- rate of profit/return on capital by taking standard interest rates and applying an adjustible multiplier for risk premium.
Rates of profit weren't really 40% in 1869: if they had been, it would have been impossible to sell Indian railway bonds with 5% yields -- which was what they were fetching in that year, by the way.
40% profits are a sign of some very new area with special characteristics. Likewise, 20% would be excellent now -- I'm delighted when I get 11% on my investments.
Risk premiums are lower now than in the 19th century; for example, in the 1820's many millions of pounds of British investors went into Latin American mining stock and bonds of the new governments in the area after the fall of the Spanish Empire, and virtually every penny of that was lost. The only people who made any money out of it were the ones who sold out quickly.
Prices (including returns on capital) tend to equalize as markets work better, which in turn depends on the volume and speed of information flows.
Eg., you can get bids worldwide on goods and services via the Internet now, in hours or days, which would have taken weeks or months or been absolutely impossible only a few decades ago.
We'll probably have large interplanetary spaceships this decade; within the next couple of years, in fact. They're under construction in Florida and Texas even as we speak.
Thank you. I follow explanations of economic processes with interest but limited comprehension. I so hope that you are right about spaceships.
Post a Comment