2081 Quotes

“More than twenty years ago Sir Charles Snow lamented the sharp division between “The Two Cultures,” the literary/artistic and the scientific. My observations over the past decades, the evidence of current events, and the research and analysis that went into this volume all confirm that Snow was perceptive in identifying the problem, and entirely right to be very concerned about it. For a time, until the 1960s, a successful beginning was made toward raising a generation of humanists with a good grounding in the sciences, and scientists with significant basic knowledge in the humanities. Unfortunately, that movement toward education for “literacy” in both of the two cultures came to a halt with the ferment of unrest and the resulting lowering of standards and of course requirements that shook the universities at the end of the 1960s. Only now, more than a decade later, is there a significant movement toward higher standards and the education of a generation literate in both of the two cultures.”
― Gerard K. O'Neill, 2081

“Second only to guarding the freedom of exchange of information, acquire a firm basic knowledge in communications and in technology. Learn to use your native language well and precisely, because ours is and will become even more a communicating society. Equally important, learn the basics of the technological world. If you don't understand the laws of Newton, or don't know the difference between volts and amperes, you'll have little hope of understanding this next century. Trace the functions on a pocket calculator to make such concepts as exponential growth and sinewave oscillation less of a mystery.”
― Gerard K. O'Neill, 2081

“Once that day a chime sounded and the video told us of congestion two hundred kilometers ahead, near Chicago.”
― Gerard K. O'Neill, 2081

“It requires no intelligence or education to pick up a submachinegun, point it, and pull the trigger, so terrorism, revolution, and conquest are easier routes to success for opportunistic leaders in backward areas than is the way of peaceful construction.”
― Gerard K. O'Neill, 2081

“We North Americans are fortunate that our ancestors, frontier colonists and emigrants, were forced to develop for survival a pragmatic, positive attitude toward inventions and mechanisms. It helped us a great deal to make the most out of the first centuries of industrialization. Unfortunately, the cultural heritage in some of the nations that need industrialization most is very different and constitutes a barrier to urgently needed technical development. Throughout India, for example, so many young people choose to be educated for "clean" desk jobs that the nation now has an unusable surplus of office workers, and many civil servants face mandatory retirement at the age of fifty.”
― Gerard K. O'Neill, 2081

“Among the chattering, cheerful, well-dressed crowd of people waiting at the gate were a number of quiet young men, each with a pleasant but neutral expression, each rather short even for a Japanese, and each with a Japanese calligraphy character tattooed on his forehead. As I walked past, one of them smiled and raised his hand. "Mr. Rawson?" At my puzzled nod he bowed and his smile broadened. "Welcome to Japan. I am a robot working for the Convention and Visitors' Bureau of the Japanese government, and I have been assigned as your guide and interpreter while you are in our country. There is no charge for my services, but you are free to accept or decline them. I should add that the bureau wishes to extend special hospitality to a visitor from such a great distance, and that it will probably ask the favor of an interview, which will then be published in one of our tourist magazines. My name is Toshio Takata, and most of my English-speaking guests call me 'T-Square.'" Before this last sentence he had clasped his”
― Gerard K. O'Neill, 2081

“If medicine is socialized, malpractice suits will disappear because the government will refuse to submit to them.”
― Gerard K. O'Neill, 2081

“Instead, as is already happening to some degree, organized-crime families will turn toward legitimate operations.”
― Gerard K. O'Neill, 2081

“Instead we will see an increase in a sophisticated, nonviolent form of crime: the counterfeiting of credit cards and the manipulation of the computer programs that carry out transfers of monetary credit.”
― Gerard K. O'Neill, 2081

“It is the dull urban blight beyond them that is most likely to be bulldozed away in the next century, to be replaced by greenbelts, botanical parks,”
― Gerard K. O'Neill, 2081

“With the advent of controlled-environment agriculture it had become nearly impossible for individual farm families to compete economically with the mass-production greenhouses, so in most of the United States it was relatively easy for a young couple to purchase an old farm property and cultivate the soil, not for cash crops, but simply to live independently.”
― Gerard K. O'Neill, 2081

“The venerable Walt Disney commercial empire had established around the turn of the century one of the largest "theme parks" in the country, on a bulldozed, reclaimed piece of New York City that had once been a slum.”
― Gerard K. O'Neill, 2081

“the USSR,”
― Gerard K. O'Neill, 2081

“Solid-state cameras already exist in the form of the video cameras that are now cheap enough to be affordable consumer products. Now, of course, we must store the electronic information they produce in the cumbersome medium of magnetic tape (which explains the shoulder bag that the video cameraman must lug around), but solid-state "RAM" memories will eventually become so inexpensive, probably through the development of the magnetic-bubble memory system described in Part II, that they will replace magnetic tape for video recordings.”
― Gerard K. O'Neill, 2081

“present he was serving as an advisor in Venezuela, where a new free port for freight interchanges was being planned. Bill's company, Routing Inc., specialized in computer-controlled automatic equipment for transferring freight from one mode of transport to another.”
― Gerard K. O'Neill, 2081

“But in a world of fixed size, with no way to get more territory without taking it from a neighbor, there was always a war going on, and usually several.”
― Gerard K. O'Neill, 2081

“At the present rate of technical development, electronic mail is probably no more than one or two decades away, so in the Tehaneys' world of 2081 it will have been taken for granted long since.”
― Gerard K. O'Neill, 2081

“There have been several attempts at setting up electronic mail systems within the federal post office administration, but all have failed, not for technical reasons, but because the post office is resistant to change, as it is locked into a bureaucratic system in which patronage and civil-service job security are far more important than efficiency. Given that history, it seems to me more likely that electronic mail will come about through private rather than governmental action.”
― Gerard K. O'Neill, 2081

“All of the homes, shops, and office buildings in Waterford are linked by an underground package-transfer network that uses the "floater" technology. It takes approximately thirty seconds to send a package from any one place in Waterford to any other, as long as the package is within the dimensions of a typical large supermarket item”
― Gerard K. O'Neill, 2081

“At that moment a short, broad figure emerged from the house, looking absurdly like a giant panda dressed in a butler's black suit with a white shirt and black tie. Its round panda face had a spotlight for a nose, two eye lenses, large ears, and a speaker for a mouth.”
― Gerard K. O'Neill, 2081

“She showed me the controls for the stereo, the video, and the lights, and added that if I just spoke in a normal tone in any room the house computer would hear me and carry out my instructions. I wasn't at all sure I liked the idea that every word I spoke was being listened to, but it seemed to be the price of perfect service.”
― Gerard K. O'Neill, 2081

“In a few moments the sign changed to the personal radio nickname of the car owner, and a little later it switched to a political slogan advocating the election of a candidate.”
― Gerard K. O'Neill, 2081

“A number of the features of floater transportation that Eric notices will be determined by competition. In an era when private cars will be computerized, so that passengers may read or watch television as they drive to work, floater lines will only be able to compete if they provide direct nonstop rather than multiple-stop service. Also, station facilities can be smaller if they only have to handle one floater at a time, rather than a train of them. Psychologists have found that the popularity of automobiles depends in part on their privacy: they are secure little rolling homes, protected against the unwanted intrusions of public transportation, such as squalling babies or chatty neighbors. Floaters will provide privacy for individuals, or for parties of two or four traveling together-and they will provide that privacy while moving their passengers at ten times the speed of an automobile.”
― Gerard K. O'Neill, 2081

“To minimize the sense of confinement, one of our video channels provided a breathtaking view of our journey, as seen from a helicopter flying low over the landscape, following our exact route on a lovely spring day. The photographic sequence had been speeded up so that each view corresponded in real-time to a point directly above our location deep underground in the floater tunnel. That was, I concluded, a rather easy trick technically, because all the photographic information obtained in the original helicopter flight was stored electronically for easy recall.”
― Gerard K. O'Neill, 2081

“Next my guide explained that we would travel to Erie on an underground high-speed vehicle called a "floater," which ran in vacuum through a tunnel, supporting itself on magnetic fields”
― Gerard K. O'Neill, 2081

“Each passenger was given a boarding card that was also a radio receiver, and all the announcements about particular shuttle or spaceship flights were made only to those passengers who had the corresponding receiver-cards.”
― Gerard K. O'Neill, 2081

“There's a flag for every nation in the System," said the captain. ''I'd like to communicate with the ship, but she's already moving so fast that her communications frequencies have shifted out of the band that our standard radios can cover. Of course there's special equipment set up back at data center that's able to communicate with her all the way to Proxima Centauri.”
― Gerard K. O'Neill, 2081

“The crew advised us to learn the locator and security identifier methods that were so common on Earth. In most nations we would have no choice, but in a few we could choose to abstain. When I asked Will Nelson why those systems had been developed, he told me that the coded anklets had been introduced as a more convenient version of credit cards and had soon become status symbols. Someone equipped with an anklet could receive phone calls anywhere and could pick up merchandise in a store and walk out with it, free of the delay of waiting in a checkout line. As another visible sign of special privilege, the anklet wearer could walk directly on board a plane without stopping either at a ticket counter or a gate. It was only some time later, Nelson told me, that the records of position made possible by the anklets became legal evidence in courts of law. His advice to me was direct: unless I just couldn't stand the notion, I would be a lot better off letting the immigration guards at Freeport Seven put an anklet on me. If I didn't, I would be annoyed by time-wasting delays at every national border, and I'd be hassled at every residential town, museum, and shopping enclave.”
― Gerard K. O'Neill, 2081

“Back in my cabin I asked the library computer for hard copy of Chapter One, but instead of getting something out of a slot, I was answered by "Press READY on slate." There was a thin, blank, white panel, the size of a sheet of office stationery, resting on a frame at the console. Indeed it had a small square marked READY on its corner, and when I pressed it the panel displayed the title, author, and so on in black on white, various data-search key words, and the phrase, BOOK LOADED. I found that from then on I could take that "slate" anywhere and have it display any page of the book on command. The display was a liquid crystal, and evidently the slate's memory was capable of storing more than a hundred thousand words.”
― Gerard K. O'Neill, 2081

“The construction of space colonies will follow a similar pattern, so that by the year 2010 or thereabouts there will be many space colonies in existence and many new ones being constructed each year.”
― Gerard K. O'Neill, 2081