Back to the Future

The Future was so cool! We’d be flying around like the Jetsons, with instant communications, while big computers would keep things rolling. You could vacation on one of the huge, rotating space stations, or could even go off and pioneer Mars. Everyone would be rich, or at least upper middle class, would live to a hundred-fifty, and everyone would have all the techy toys they could ask for.

That was the deal, right? Alas, not quite, and yet… The first ‘flying car never made it commercially and the latest ‘first flying car’ has only just been introduced. A big reason it never ‘took off’ was that it just takes a lot of energy to get something airborne, but maybe they’ve got that handled now.

Our computers are both vastly more powerful than anything Sci Fi up to 1990 projected, and (mercifully) much less lethal. We have a decent sized space station now, a Mars mission has at least been officially called for, techy toys are plentiful, and cell phones outperform Star Trek communicators on all particulars, but I, for one, am not yet rich…

So what? All that ‘gee whiz’ stuff can’t be taken seriously, right? Well, someone’s got to. You see, 20th Century America was great at many things, and one of them was exclaiming to a world mostly still caught in tradition that the Future had real potential, that we could make it better, and that science and the technologies it engendered would lead us there. Powerful stuff, and our spectacular material success in the pre-energy-crisis world proved it to all observers. They got it. They wanted it. As halting and inconsistent as progress is, everyone pretty much pictured what the goal was and they're going for it.

But there’s the problem: those rosy visions were set in an infantile world of infinite, cheap energy and inexhaustible resources. Haven’t seen much of that lately, huh? It’s been calculated that to extend the American standard of material wealth to everyone would take at least three Earths’ resources, but there is only one Earth, and that defines what we’re facing. The massive advance of scientific knowledge has deferred a Malthusian crash so far, but it cannot do so forever. There are unavoidable physical limits. We’re overspending our ‘earth account’ badly, and this kind of deficit can be fatal.

Anyone who argues for constant growth in any literal sense as the definition of a good, healthy economy is on the wrong side of physics, logic, and medical science. Medical science? The human body has cells which vigorously pursue a strategy of unending growth. We call them ‘cancer’.

Stare too long at the situation and you might despair. But, back to the high-tech future we thought we’d have. We can still have it! In fact, the higher our technology goes the more likely we’ll be able to get ourselves there. Take cell phones. A Third World country which wants to modernize and provide phone and data service nationwide doesn’t have to recapitulate the history of telephony. Instead of installing thousands of miles of expensive wires, poles, switching stations, and all the rest, they can skip all that and put in a new cell phone system at a fraction of the cost, use very little resources, have better service, and leapfrog directly into the twenty-first century! It is, in fact, called a ‘leapfrog’ technology for that reason.

Many technologies are getting smaller and smaller, less expensive, more efficient in material and energy, better able to replace older, less efficient technologies. Their effects are strongest in the developing world simply because they represent such a huge improvement over what was there before. Sometimes they even get the good stuff first, because the industrialized world already has such a large investment in the previous system that they are reluctant to install something which would render all that infrastructure obsolete. Indeed, we saw a little leapfrogging here. We called it ‘Cash For Clunkers’, and it got a lot of inefficient vehicles off the road and replaced with much better machines very quickly by removing some of that investment inertia.

Computers are dramatically better than anyone imagined they’d be back in the sixties or seventies and make almost everything more efficient to design, produce, and operate. Today’s cars put out a small percent of the toxic emissions of their counterparts of forty years ago- 2.24% of nitrous oxide (NOx) for cars, 2.24% of NOx for light trucks, .7% for heavier trucks and SUVs, thanks to the regulations which drove technological innovation. New LED lights will outperform even compact fluorescents easily. Tankless water heaters save huge amounts of water and energy.

New tech is not without cost. Recycling newly-obsolescent computers, for instance, is a big problem and we still haven’t gotten to ‘life cycle design’ for consumer products (accounting for reduction of material and packaging, reuse or recycling in the initial design), but these can be solved!

We here have made an excellent start and are more advanced than most communities. We need to look at our own design and ensure it produces the best, and most vital, most transgenerational city we can- a denser, more self-sufficient, more supportive place our great-grandchildren will be proud to live in. Pay good attention to the planning work Shoreline and Lake Forest Park are doing, because concerned citizens are the fuel that keeps the whole enterprise going.