Visioneering’s Value

This chapter argues that regardless of the reasons that compelled them, people such as Drexler and O'Neill, by combining their broad views of the future with technical skills, experience, and research, took speculative ideas out of the hands of sci-fi writers and technological forecasters and put them on firmer ground. Although visioneers' ideas may sit outside the mainstream and require considerable work to establish their legitimacy, their work toward that end secures a beachhead where exploratory notions can exist while entrepreneurial scientists and engineers mobilize and push things one way or the other. By inspiring (or provoking) people, visioneering helps reveal the future as something other than some neutral space that people move into without friction. Instead, it is a terrain made rough by politics, ethics, and economics as well as people's hopes and anxieties.

California Dreaming

This chapter considers the “existential crisis” faced by nanotechnology. A few years after nanotechnology blossomed into a global research initiative that consumed billions of government and corporate dollars, questions began to emerge over about what nanotechnology was and who was a nanotechnologist. Fundamentally, nanotechnology's own history was the catalyst for its existential angst. Vastly different interpretations of nanotechnology, both as a research program and as a vision for the future, emerged between Drexler's early publications and the launching of a major national initiative in the United States two decades later. To complicate things further, just as enthusiasts co-opted Gerard O'Neill's ideas, Drexler's visioneering took on a life of its own.

Omnificent

This chapter discusses the resurgence of interest in science and technology in the 1970s. Magazines like Omni helped shift public interest and attention to impressive developments happening, not in outer space, but at the levels of the gene, the molecule, and the microcircuit. This eventually helped foster ambitions for a new technological future to be realized by controlling and manipulating matter at the level of billionths of a meter—the nanoscale. To be sure, O'Neill and his space-oriented visioneering did not suddenly fade away. O'Neill-inspired groups like the L5 Society had started by diligently advocating space as a place that adventurous citizens might one day inhabit. But, by the early 1980s, this goal began to seem more unattainable than ever, and many initial enthusiasts abandoned their utopian aspirations.

Confirmation, Benediction, and Inquisition

In the late 1980s, at least two different nanotechnologies emerged and then matured, sometimes in tandem but often in opposition, through the Clinton era. One was based on Drexler's vision of biomolecular machines; the other was rooted much more in chemistry, physics, and materials. By 2003, these two nanotechnologies had diverged from each other in a messy divorce. This left Drexler a pariah among some mainstream researchers who found his popularizing suspect and his ideas questionable. This chapter explores the interdependent relationship between these two technologies, peeling away some of the camouflage that obscures connections, common ground, and conflicts. It starts by looking is at some of the principal accomplishments that mainstream researchers claimed for the field they increasingly came to call nanotechnology.

The Inspiration of Limits

This chapter details Gerard O'Neill's fascination with exploration. He maintained a lifelong enthusiasm for what were the cutting-edge technologies of his youth such as radio and airplanes. As an adult, he avidly read and watched science fiction in which space settlements were depicted in exciting yet believable terms. The real-life successes of the Apollo program nurtured his interest in space. This may have especially been the case when he first started thinking seriously about space settlements. He treated the entire topic as a rational and detailed engineering problem. But, once satisfied with the plausibility of his concepts, he did not simply toss his tablets of sums and sketches into a desk drawer and go back to the physics research that he had built his career on. Instead, he steadfastly improved his designs and, just as importantly, promoted his vision for the future to colleagues and members of the public.

Visioneering Technological Futures

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, which is to explores how and why a select group of scientists and engineers developed their broad and expansive visions of how the future could be made radically different through as-yet-undeveloped technologies. It looks at how their visions for these technological futures were promoted, embraced, and rejected. The book focuses on two particular visions of the future and the ensembles of technologies seen as critical to achieving them. One of these is Gerard O'Neill's ideas for settlements and factories in space, technologies he saw as an alternative to terrestrial limits, lifestyles, and manufacturing. The other is K. Eric Drexler's plans for lunar factories, solar sails, and methods to mine asteroids for mineral resources.

Could Small Be Beautiful?

This chapter discusses the growing interest in nanotechnology. As the excitement of the space program waned, new technological frontiers were found not beyond our planet but with the manipulation of matter at the smallest scales. Instead of imagining a future that started with settlements floating in the inky vacuum of space, this new future derived from manipulations of the cell's interior machinery and the integrated circuit's crystalline architecture. Scientists and engineers combined their increasing abilities to engineer organisms and devices with an interactive and interventionist approach to modifying the physical world in new and unexpected ways. Biotechnology and microelectronics provided a core foundation for activities that Drexler initially called “molecular engineering,” which later acquired the “nanotechnology” moniker.

Building Castles in the Sky

In the mid-1970s, Gerard O'Neill's ideas and designs for human settlements in space began to secure a beachhead in American popular culture. This chapter shows how he extended the engineering-oriented foundation for his visioneering to a wider base of enthusiasts. Through conferences, workshops, and the accretion of new ideas, O'Neill continued to describe a future in which space-based settlements remained plausible, at least in technical terms, and desirable. At the same time, his “humanization of space” idea mutated as journalists, politicians, writers, college students, and counterculture figures embraced or opposed it. This inherently messy process reflected a decade marked by social confusion, political realignment, and economic uncertainty.

Utopia or Oblivion for Spaceship Earth?

This chapter details Americans' conversion from unabashed enthusiasm for technology to ambivalence and hostility in the 1960s. This change did not occur suddenly, nor can it be traced to a single cause. Some Americans, for example, were concerned about the mortal dangers of the escalating arms race, while others worried about the pollution of the country's skies and waterways or questioned societal values that prized conformity, consumerism, and planned obsolescence. For others, the “plastic fantastic” futures depicted in corporate advertising were not just banal and boring but appeared threatening. Whatever the direct cause, Americans' overall attitudes toward science and technology became more complex and questioning.