What Happened to the Future?

Anthropology Now ISSN: 1942-8200 (Print) 1949-2901 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/uann20 What Happened to the Future? David Valentine To cite this article: David Valentine (2015) What Happened to the Future?, Anthropology Now, 7:1, 110-120 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19492901.2015.11728312 Published online: 19 Apr 2016. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 7 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=uann20 Download by: [Claremont Colleges Library] Date: 21 August 2016, At: 12:14 books and arts dernity’s key narrative of progressive temporal stages—characterized by dates, events, charismatic individuals, growth, technologi- What Happened to cal innovations and movements toward the the Future? future. For these scholars, the mode of social analysis is spatial rather than temporal, David Valentine critiquing capitalism’s rapaciousness and resulting social, political and economic in- equalities by drawing attention to the simul- taneity of global events and arrangements. W. Patrick McCray. 2013. The Visioneers: How a And so the end of history is also the end of Group of Elite Scientists Pursued Space Colonies, Nanotechnologies, and a Limitless Future. Princ- the future. eton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 368 pages. Yet the 1970s was also the period when “the future”—dystopian or utopian, fixed Erik Seedhouse. 2013. SpaceX: Making Com- by forecasts but open to technological ma- mercial Spaceflight a Reality. New York: Springer- nipulation—seemed to most fully capture Praxis. 244 pages. the imaginations of the lay public, politicians, policy makers and forecasters, in- Over the past few decades, critical theorists cluding some anthropologists. The 1972 have increasingly moved away from time as publication of the Club of Rome’s The Limits the privileged domain for explaining human to Growth—with its warnings of social col- experience and toward a geographical or lapse and the necessity of retrenching global spatial conceptualization of socio-political socioeconomic structures in order for hu- processes. For many critical theorists, his- mans to live within their ecological means— tory seems to have ended at some point be- catalyzed both dystopic visions of an immi- tween the conclusion of the 1960s and the nently doomed world and counter-visions beginning of the 1970s, for different if inter- of a prosperous and ever-expanding human related reasons. For Slavoj Žižek, it is 1968 future. This latter future would arguably be and the capture and then betrayal of the secured by technology and resources at the hopes of that radical year by Western states’ very large and very small scales of matter. embrace of free-market ideologies now re- Patrick McCray’s splendid Visioneers uses ferred to as “neoliberalism.” For Peter Sloter- Limits, and the responses to it, as the fulcrum dijk, it is 1974 with Portugal’s withdrawal of his history of the individuals and techno- from its overseas territories, bringing to an social movements that coalesced around end 500 years of European colonialism. plans for a future of space settlement at the And for Bruno Latour, it is more generally large scale and nanotechnology at the small, in the early 1970s with the acknowledgment just as the end of history had arrived. of the sustained ecological crisis resulting McCray coins the term visioneer to de- from the colonial-industrial age. The “end of scribe a person who combines three factors: history” thus marks the end of Western mo- a vision of a positive and expansive human 110 anthropology NOW Volume 7 • Number 1 • April 2015 future secured by technological develop- to massive and sustainable human space ments; actual research and engineering settlement. The question for many, though, which advances the vision; and the promo- was why? After all, the United States had tion of the vision to policy makers and the reached its Cold War goal of demonstrating public through media and activist networks technological (and thus ideological) superi- in the hope of advancing that future. The ority over the Soviet Union by sending hu- two men who are the visioneer-protagonists mans to the moon. Why should it continue of this book—Gerard K. O’Neill, a Princeton investing a large portion of its national bud- physicist, and Eric Drexler, one of O’Neill’s get in space? For O’Neill and proponents erstwhile students and an MIT graduate— of space settlement, the initial answer was imagined their futures at the two extremities ideological: humans need a frontier, and of scale: O’Neill’s plans for massive outer space is human destiny. The practical an- space settlements and Drexler’s promotion of swer, as McCray shows, came in the form technological development at the nanoscale of Peter Glaser’s contemporaneous propos- operate at spatial scales that challenged lim- als for a space-based solar-power satellite its of possibility, investment and credibility. system. Arising out of the same complex of But they also operated at a temporal scale space exploration and space technology, that required massively coordinated action Glaser offered a response to the gloom of in the present to secure the dynamic and ex- Limits by proposing a massive space infra- pansive future they envisioned. In the end, structure that would beam solar power from as McCray shows, both spatial and temporal orbiting solar collectors, solving the loom- scales morphed their projects in very differ- ing energy crisis, reducing carbon-fuel pol- ent ways—and the lesson might be indeed lution, and boosting the global economy by that history is over. significantly reducing the costs of power. In A respected and tenured professor at a space-based solar power, O’Neill and his leading research university, O’Neill is, as Mc- supporters found the political-economic Cray points out, an unlikely figure to appear rationale for space settlement: residents of in the guise of a visioneer. Beginning with his space colonies would manufacture and a physics seminar at Princeton organized manage solar power satellites from space re- around the possibilities of human space set- sources. This would, in turn, resolve Earth’s tlements in the fall of 1969—just after the ecological crises, and the “virtuous cycle” first Apollo moon landing—O’Neill became increasingly convinced that space settlement was the answer to the conclusions of This tension between the Limits. With the brief Apollo era concluded seriousness of purpose ... and the by 1972, both NASA and space proponents kookiness of the whole thing ... were turning their attention to the idea of follows all modernist projects of space stations and establishing routine human presence in low Earth orbit (LEO), pre- radical futures. cursors (it was hoped by space proponents) David Valentine What Happened to the Future? 111 of growth and expansion into the cosmos expensive; they required a leap of vision would be achieved naturally. into the future that politicians and the public McCray insists that it was the actual work were increasingly unwilling to take. And the O’Neill and his collaborators did—design- buy-in of politicians and policy makers was ing, costing and even building early demon- essential, for the idea of private enterprise stration hardware—that in part makes him taking on the risk and expense of develop- worthy of the title “visioneer.” But O’Neill ing space infrastructure was outlandish. For recognized that combating the inherent gig- McCray, O’Neill’s commitment to a state- gle factor of the space settlement movement led space colonization effort—tied to an un- was essential to advancing the movement’s derstanding of the collective social good of goals where it counted: in Congress and the space settlement—underpinned his politics. White House. To this end, in 1974 O’Neill This is one of the few false notes in Mc- established the Space Studies Institute (SSI) Cray’s otherwise insightful book. As he in Princeton, an event featured in a front- demonstrates in several places, “space” pro- page article in The New York Times, and he duces strange bedfellows. Space-settlement actively promoted his plans in the media proponents and enthusiasts scatter across and to policy makers. This public promo- the conventional left/right arrangements of tion is McCray’s third criterion for qualify- the politics that, in the early 1970s, were ing as a visioneer. He devotes a fair amount about to become even more polarized in of space to a discussion of the O’Neill-in- US political life. McCray implies that from spired L5 Society, a grassroots space-advo- the 1970s to the 2010s, to which he jumps cacy group—named for one of the points in his final chapter, the ideological under- of gravitational stability between Earth and pinnings of the space-settlement movement the moon—and to Omni Magazine, a key shifted from a leftist commitment to a soci- venue for the popularization of the space etal project of a new commons in space to a settlement movement in the 1970s and early rightist and privatized individualistic mode. 1980s. This tension between the seriousness My own reading of O’Neill leads me, rather, of purpose (the tenured and respected physi- to hold onto McCray’s broader observation cist, the hardware, the solid numbers, the about the capacity of the promise of space clear plans) and the kookiness of the whole to send terrestrial political alignments into thing (UFOlogy alongside space settlements disarray. It is not so much that O’Neill clung in the pages of Omni, the outlandish enthu- to a communalist view of the future. It was siasms of some amateur supporters) follows inconceivable in the 1970s that a private all modernist projects of radical futures.

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