Beyond the Second Millenium

It’s the early part of the 21st century and a group of refugees have stolen Earth’s second interstellar vessel in order to escape from persecution at the hands of the government. The ship is designed to carry a large crew on a lifetime long voyage to a nearby star, but happily one of the refugees is the famous “slip-stick Libby”, a natural genius in physics and mathematics. Libby has cobbled together a faster-than-light drive from some spare parts and the ship is now diving into the sun. The reason for this is that the drive needs energy from the sun’s gravitational field. Naturally the calculations are delicate, but Libby is a genius with mental arithmetic. the name “slipstick” refers to Libby’s trusty slide rule, which he artfully uses to make the last minute calculations!

Now jump ahead 10,000 years to the planet Dune. The Atreides Family has just taken over the planet from which the mysterious “spice” is harvested. The spice provides a drug that permits interstellar voyaging by means of some sort of mental effect. The logistics of the takeover are under the control of a so-called “Mentat”, a human being who uses specially trained mental abilities to carry out complex calculations. Computers have long since been banned as being too threatening to the supremacy of humanity.

Both these scenarios are taken from still popular science-fiction novels written in the middle of the 20th century. The first describes a scene from Robert A. Heinlein’s “Methuselah’s Children”, the second is from the writer Frank Herbert’s series that started with the book “Dune.” They are both books that I read as a student and that helped shape my expectations for the future. My slide rule, purchased in my first year of engineering school, still sits in my desk drawer, but I only dimly recall how to use all of its features. Somewhat in the style of today’s computer software the manufacturers of these instruments competed on the bases of added features, most of which were seldom if ever used! An important design point was the matching of materials in order to prevent stick-slip friction as one moved the inner rule. Hence I could imagine the special features of Libby’s slide rule, which were achieved with the advanced star ship building technology of the 21st century. The story actually appeared in the magazine “Astounding Science Fiction” as part of Heinlein’s future history series. Today the magazine has morphed into the publication known as “Analog.” The book version, published in the 1950’s was fleshed out a bit, but the slide rules were left in. Both Heinlein and Herbert were professional writers of what is called hard core science fiction, or science fiction that promotes conceivable if not currently possible science and technology. Despite this they really didn’t come close to any conception of how we would be using computers fifty years later. Software like Matlab or Maple or the current Internet had no place in their fictional futures. The science fiction author Vernor Vinge, in a story called “True Names”, written in the late seventies did have something with the flavor of the modern internet, but as he is a professor of computer science in San Diego this is no big surprise.

What does this lack of insight into the future tell us about our present conceptions of how engineers and scientists will be using computers and carrying out their professional activities in the years ahead? In 2040 will Matlab Version 27 be anything like Matlab version 8? The view of Herbert in the Dune stories is that at some point the computers become dangerous and are outlawed. His future society requires computing power, but this is obtained by genetic manipulation and training of human beings. Since we are only at the beginning of developments such as cloning and genetic manipulation we may be surprised. The physicist Roger Penrose believes that human consciousness is a product of unknown physics at the level of quantum gravity. IN one of his books on this subject, “the Emperor’s New Mind”, he “proves” this by showing how our brains can in a sense arrive at results that cannot be calculated. While I find Penrose’s ideas unlikely, if they do turn out to be true we may find that genetically produced human computers, like Herbert talks about are quite able to outperform silicon-based machines. Just think how we are able to “know” things like how to catch a ball or even walk around without any apparent computation, and the difficulties of computing such dynamic problems in real time.

As an educator my job was to train students so they could both create the technology of the future and adapt to change. The conventional response to this problem is to emphasize basic science. This has a lot of merit, but it isn’t the whole story. I spent a number of years integrating the tool of computer algebra into my mechanics course. Eventually this led to a text book. I included with the text a number of software tools for using computer algebra to solve typical mechanics problems. It was a difficult choice as it implied that as computer algebra systems evolved my text would become obsolete. Also it would not be of much use to students who didn’t have the particular computer algebra system I used. In the end I really had no choice, even though I knew that my system would be eventually be as silly as Libby’s slide rule on an interstellar space craft. Todays engineering and science students will be living in an unpredictable future and our only choice is to provide the mindset of an ever changing world. Part of this is to show them how bad the predictions of fifty years ago have proven to be.

Cheers,
Marty

Note. This piece is a slightly altered version of a short article I wrote for the February 1998 issue of the in house magazine of the Stockholm based software firm Comsol, ComsolNews. Maple and Matlab are trademarks of Maple Software and The Math Works respectively.