1968-1998: Yesterday's tomorrows 

Walter Truett Anderson; Ronald Bailey; Gregory Benford; K Eric Drexler; Et al 

1 December 1998
Reason 

30(7):46-57.

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Books that got the future right -and wrong 

K. Eric Drexler 

It was a great surprise when I realized that Robert Ettinger's The Prospect 
of Immortality (Doubleday, 1964) had actually made a sound argument. In the 
early 1970s I had heard of its thesis-- that low temperatures could 
stabilize otherwise hopeless patients for later repair-but this looked like 
a technical impossibility. Cells often revive after freezing, but never 
whole mammals. 

This observation, it turns out, is beside the point. By the late '70s, it 
had become clear that the onrush of molecular technologies would one day 
lead to thorough control of the structure of matter, including molecular 
machine systems able to examine and repair biological structures molecule by 
molecule. Suddenly Ettinger's case made sense. When I finally read his book, 
I found that he had anticipated molecular-level repair of the sort we now 
see how to develop. "Can mammals revive from freezing spontaneously?" is the 
wrong question, once molecular biorepair enters the picture. For us, the key 
question is instead, "Does freezing somehow erase the information content of 
the brain?"which it clearly doesn't. 

This idea of long-term, low-temperature first aid, a.k.a. biostasis, is 
catching on, especially among those who think of their minds as information 
processes. Watch for those medical bracelets (freely translated, "In case of 
system crash, do not discard; call...."), especially up here in Silicon 
Valley. The San Jose Mercury News has called this a "Silicon Valley trend." 

Soon after realizing that biostasis would work, I came across an 
impressively false work of prediction: Entropy, by Jeremy Rifkin (Viking, 
1980). It explains that our world is doomed and that human action must be 
severely limited, due to the inevitable "dissipation of matter" described by 
the Fourth Law of Thermodynamics. Senators, academics, and futurists 
endorsed the book, but it turns out that this "Fourth Law" isn't in the 
textbooks and is simply false, making the work an edifice of the purest 
piffle. Rifkin later fuzzed his justifications, but his call for salvation 
through oppression stays clear. 

In their discussions on the future of technology, authors Chris Peterson and 
Gayle Pergamit observe: "If a thirty-year projection `sounds like science 
fiction,' it may be wrong. But if it doesn't sound like science fiction, 
then it's definitely wrong." 

Keep that in mind when you read Marc Stiegler's forthcoming Earthweb (Baen 
Books, April 1999), a novel that plausibly portrays a key part of the 
future. Stiegler sketches what the Web can become when it grows up-a fast, 
flexible marketplace of ideas and reputations. He combines the "idea 
futures" work of Robin Hanson with the "information markets" work of Phil 
Salin to depict a new and productive spontaneous order. The infoworld 
Stiegler describes may arrive in the next 10 years, soon enough to shape 
much of the next 30. 

Imagine what the world might be like if good ideas more consistently won and 
bad ideas more consistently lost. Better media and incentives can help. 

K. Eric Drexler (inform@foresight.org) is chairman of the Foresight 
Institute (www.foresight.org) and author of Engines of Creation (Doubleday) 
and Nanosystems (Wiley). 

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