Dispatches from Yesterday’s Future–Epilogue

So, Tom, what DID you learn from Robert A. Heinlein?

1) Competence

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.” –Time Enough for Love, RAH, 1973

I was twenty-one years old when I first read those words. I had found that college was boring and that, with the draft ended, I would actually have a chance to drop out without fear of being the last poor sonuvabitch to die in Vietnam.

Read the words closely. Within this single paragraph is the essence of what a human should be able to do during a workday. Like nearly everyone else, there are a couple of the jobs mentioned that I have never been able to master. Pitching manure was the job at which I was so facile that I fled the farm before I was eighteen to avoid further instruction. I have known a very few people who have come close to mastering them all.

Velma (a redhead right off of a 1940s Heinlein cover) asked me at dinner last night how to find sane people to marry. At the time, I cobbled together an answer that spoke about devising practical methods within a city to contact and identify like-minded individuals. Sitting here in the ManCave now, I realize that there was a much better question to ask:

“How do I find competent people to marry?” In a family, you can put up with a lot more insanity or eccentricity than you can incompetence.

Velma, if you want a marriage to work, look for a family who can do ten or more of the things listed above. If you want a life in which every day is an adventure, look for one where they can do fifteen. If you ever, ever find someone who can do all twenty-one, call me immediately, we can always find a new house.

2) Freedom

Now of course, it’s obvious that I’m a libertarian. I talk about it in nearly every post that I do on this blog. That ideal kind of personal freedom and responsibility is in every one of Heinlein’s books and stories.

However, I think that now, for the human race to survive the next fifty years, we’re going to be needing a new kind of freedom–the freedom for the prison of old paradigms.

Jason, another redhead, (they were coming out of the woodwork everywhere last night–I was looking over my shoulder for Gay Deceiver from Number of the Beast) was describing an experimental community in San Francisco in which he had lived for six weeks or so.

This community was interested in the question, “What would happen if decisions were made using strictly intuition, not logic?” The methodology, which could be questioned, involved limiting decision-making within the community of fifty to strictly the female members with the stipulation that no explanation ever need be given for their decisions.

“So,” I asked, “how often were the decisions the right ones?”

“Well, about half of them were right, ” Jason replied in his slow, West Texas drawl, “but the thing was, a hundred percent of them were DIFFERENT.”

A lot of the problems that are causing the world grief at the moment are very, very old ones. Perhaps the reason that they’re still here is that we’ve not yet found the methodology to work the solutions. We need the freedom to think differently in order to find that methodology.

3) Paying It Forward

Robert Heinlein had an extremely rare blood type. Had it not been for the generosity of a half-dozen strangers, he would have died about twenty years before his time. The rest of his life, he led, participated in and otherwise shilled for blood drives. At the convention this weekend, over 12% of the attendees gave blood–five times the national average.

During the course of my lifetime, I have had a set of mentors that have shown me different ways of proceeding. My father taught me the virtue of proceeding against any odds when the cause was just. From my Uncle Harry, I obtained a love of the eccentric, knowing that it was all right to be different as long as you were good at it.

I learned from Steve Errede, physicist extraordinaire, that genius was useless unless it was directed, but when it was, it was a force that could define the universe itself.

And lastly, from my husband, Sean, I learned that sometimes you could communicate better with silence and affection than you could with all of the words in Bartlett’s.

Over the past twenty-five years, I’ve seen it as my duty to apprentice young people that I have encountered in the course of my life. I’m going to have a party at the end of my tenure at the university and invite them to my house so they’ll, for once, get to meet each other and find out that the stories are all true, despite their doubts.

They’ve gone on to successful careers. With any luck at all, they left my tutelage possessing the freedom of thought that I described above, and using that, will be able to make a mark on the world, perhaps diverting it from its course toward perdition.

One of them writes here on a regular basis.–Augur, I am proud of you every day. You’ve exceeded my expectations so far, and I have no doubt that you’ll far outshine me someday. I am overjoyed that you’re reading the Heinlein book that helped to define my spirituality. As a matter of fact, you might find me in it (at least in my dreams.) The old fellow’s introduced as he’s sitting alongside his pool dictating a story to his secretary. I’m sure you’ll recognize the person that I’ve always wanted to be.–Let me know how I’ve done, all right?

4) Optimism

Saturday night, I listened as Peter Diamandis told us that his business plan would, if it worked, result in his people on the Moon, having been there three years, waving to NASA when they finally arrived.

We’re at probably the most critical point in the history of the human race since the glaciers receded and large-scale agriculture became possible. Moore’s Law, the doubling of computing power every eighteen months, leads us to the conclusion that without slowing (and that is very unlikely, since the intervals between doublings is decreasing) a one-thousand dollar laptop in 2027 will have the number of computations per second of a human brain.

This vast increase in the speed of computation, combined with an unlocking of the human genome and nanotechnology, (all of which were discussed at the conference this weekend) will give individuals in only twenty years access to power that currently is held by small nations.

The problem will then not be that Kim Jong-Il has access to the ability to build weapons of mass destruction, but that Joe Six-Pack does. Since September 11, I’ve been watching humanity riding in a racing car heading for a cliff without any visible way out. I had, for all practical purposes despaired of our making it as a race.

I don’t feel that way any more. I had folks sitting down seriously and discussing my theories of family dynamics and brainstorming ways to extend them to differing forms of human relationships. (I was also asked for an autograph out in the hallway by people I didn’t know, which downright freaked me out.)

There was a slide up on the screen Saturday night describing the amount of platinum in a nickel-iron asteroid and jokes were told about buying precious metal futures to finance the trip.

A young woman who had had the kind of childhood that no person should ever have to live through showed me that despite that, she had faith that human beings were good and loving and that we were going to make it through this time and the children of men would play among the stars.

We’re going to make it, folks. We’re going to make it. These things I believe with all my heart.

Tom

Final Note:

I want to thank everyone that talked to us at the conference and everyone who made it possible. I wish that I had had time to see everyone there. I also wanted to include a special thanks to:

John Barnstead–your quiet contribution to The Stardance Project, I believe, has been essential to it making it this far. It’s going to happen, and the world will hold its collective breath.

Mike Taht–I meant it when I said that your project was beautiful. Yours is the kind of effort that illustrates my point about different, innovative approaches making a brighter future.

Dick and Ann–providing a little taste of home when it was needed most.

Jay and Alan–great friends, companions and the masters of table talk. Jay took what was possibly the worst photo of me ever.

Charlie, mad scientist extraordinaire–just the right amount of perspective and a man who has the same problem with mist at certain times.

Jason, Alexa and Velma–you’ve restored my belief that good can come from the Bay Area. Sometimes that is hard to grasp from out here in the Midwest.

Colin–your city could rise again, like Venus from the foam. You can be a prime mover in what it becomes.

And Kate, words once again fail me. Thanks.

Come to kittencon, all of you, if you can.