5

Gerard O’Neill’s Technology Edge

On a Wednesday afternoon in May 1977, a few dozen scientists and engineers—and at least one artist—were waiting quietly in a lecture hall at Princeton University for a demonstration to start. A team set up a row of folding tables, about thirty feet long, at the front of the room. They stretched out a large segmented tube on top, and carefully clamped it to the tabletops. They hooked the device into the room’s electrical system and put a sign in front of it that said “DANGER: HIGH VOLTAGE”; then they started adding the liquid nitrogen. This was Mass Driver 1, a prototype for a machine that would, its designers hoped, someday enable cheap and easy launches into space from Earth and other planetary bodies. This mass driver was supposed to hurl a weighted payload across the Princeton room’s teaching area and into a large box, filled with layers of styrofoam and lead bricks. As recorded by the artist in attendance, space science illustrator Don Davis, it worked. The payload, Davis noted, accelerated to ninety miles per hour as it passed across the auditorium, propelled by electromagnets with over thirty times the force of Earth’s gravity. In a sketch he made of the event, it hits the soft and heavy landing box with a satisfying comic book sound effect: “WHOMP!”¹

This prototype device was a key part of a grand plan, led by visionary Princeton physicist Gerard O’Neill. O’Neill hoped that the mass driver, and other pieces of technology coming online over the following twenty years, would help create a future in which millions, or even billions, of people would live their lives in outer space. Eventually, O’Neill and his collaborators hoped, mass drivers like the one Davis sketched at Princeton would enable humans to mine materials from the Moon and the asteroids. They would throw raw ore out into free space, where workers could use it to build huge cities and landscapes in orbit, the largest being rotating “O’Neill cylinders,” the same size and shape as Arthur C. Clarke’s alien craft Rama. He later said that the core question he wanted to answer with his work was “Is the surface of a planet the right place for an expanding technological civilization?”² And his answer was “no.” But even though O’Neill’s scenarios were about a possible life in space that was independent from planets, he also hoped that his future would entail a rapid transformation of life on Earth.

O’Neill’s terms in that question—surfaces, planets, expansion, and technology—reveal a complete worldview: surfaces are for digging into or living on, while planets should be either taken apart into resources or stabilized as managed wildernesses. Expansion and technology were self-evidently desirable goals to O’Neill, from now until infinity. In O’Neill’s planetary imagination, places like the Moon, Mars, and the asteroid belt were not so much destinations to go to and stay on. Rather, other planets would be best used for raw materials, thanks to technologies like his mass driver. These resources, stripped from the surfaces of planetary bodies, would be used to build new surfaces: huge free-floating worlds in orbit, closed around themselves and spinning to simulate gravity, for thousands and millions of people to live and work in and on. This was meant to enable change that seemed increasingly unfeasible on the surface of Earth, where some engineers like O’Neill thought that progress had stalled. Rising population, greater access to energy, improved standards of living, and of course, new rounds of technological development would continue the cycles in space that had slowed on Earth. There, O’Neill hoped, all of this would continue indefinitely, unhampered by any of the constraints imposed by planetary existence. Freed from despoliation and pollution associated with industrial infrastructure and expanding population, Earth could become like a garden or a park.

If this sounds like utopian science fiction, that’s because O’Neill was heavily influenced by writers who bridged the nearly invisible gap between space science and speculative literature, like Clarke and Tsiolkovsky. In two of his most famous nonfiction books, The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space (1977) and 2081: A Hopeful View of the Human Future (1981), he bolsters his persuasive arguments and fact-based projections about the future with passages in the “travel narrative” format familiar to readers of utopian literature.³ Both books have fictional segments in which a curious visitor from outside a culture gets a tour of its many wondrous achievements with the help of obliging and well informed locals. The first is about a trip to a rotating city in space, while the second is an extended grand tour of towns and landscapes on a transformed Earth.

O’Neill’s utopianism is based on what he sees as a fundamental choice cultures have to make when technology affects their values and goals. In the first chapter of 2081 he asks, “Will the future approach a static condition (a ‘steady state’), or will change be never-ending?”⁴ He has an answer ready for this question, too; indeed, his work is an extended polemic advocating for constant change. As O’Neill argues here and elsewhere, steady-state societies rely on systems to limit freedom; and it is the perception of freedom that he values above all else, including prosperity and safety. And besides, in a steady-state world, things can always get worse. O’Neill’s work conjures the tendency, in the 1960s, ’70s, and part of the ’80s, for cultural conversations in North America and Europe to dwell on the downsides of technological change. His future scenario, first sketched in the ’70s, was part of a complex of ideas that became prominent over the next decade. O’Neill hoped that a post–Cold War fusion of two things—the collective high corporate modernist methods of Big Science, and the countercultural ideals of liberty and individuality—would bring about a society that could provide material plenty and social freedom for all.

In this new worldview, not only outer space, but other hostile environments on Earth, like the polar regions and the deep ocean, would be occupied and turned to human benefit. New transportation systems and energy infrastructure would link up all of this abundance and multiply self-determination and independence for a happy and fulfilled population. On the basis of these imaginaries, O’Neill’s work became highly influential in the late ’70s and early ’80s. His scenario time-line—which builds from expanded space launch capacity to resource extraction and utilization, in order to bootstrap very large scale, space-based construction to eventually house millions—is still the template that many of the private “NewSpace” entrepreneurs follow in the early twenty-first century, as we’ll see in chapter 7. But even as O’Neill was answering other work from his era, and contributing to these more optimistic scenarios, his own speculations became the subject of later critical writing in science fiction and space science. In another current that runs through the ’70s and into the ’80s and ’90s, dark and dystopian futures for Earth and space became dominant again, and they relied on the techno-optimism of O’Neill and his followers for settings and scenarios that foregrounded the disruptive and exploitive aspects of both never-ending technological change and steady-state control.

Logan’s Silent Green Runnings

In the UK, The Usborne Book of the Future (1979) illustrated O’Neill’s space habitat and mass driver designs alongside high-speed trains in vacuum tunnels, floating towns with ocean farming, and domed cities.⁵ Mixed in with all of this big and high tech, though, there were smaller-scale interventions whose interest had been recuperated by countercultural movements of the previous decade, like solar panels, domestic windmills, compost gardens, and abundant bicycles. In the United States, The Kids’ Whole Future Catalog (1982) presented a similar array of urban and domestic technological wonders, freely mixing Big Science artifacts and post-hippie lifestyles.⁶ According to these books, the house of the future would have computers, lasers, and domestic robots, but it would also be a place that invites “different kinds of families” to live in it. Intentional communes of friend groups, same-sex couples, single parents, and blended families could all live together happily and sustainably in “a city in tune with nature.” Sometimes, in the stories presented in these books, those cities might even expand to become super-dense fusions of architecture and managed ecology: “arcologies.” They might be contained entirely within domes, as Buckminster Fuller imagined might happen to midtown Manhattan in one famous rendering reproduced in the Future Catalog, or housed in mile-high single buildings like those designed by architects Paolo Soleri and Glen Small.⁷ This tendency toward enclosure, and toward the reproduction of an artificially maintained nature within a new, omnipresent interior, was—like in the work of Tsiolkovsky—an adaptation of capabilities designed to enable life away from the home planet, now brought back to ground.

The accessible optimism of these speculations represented a change in outlook. In the early ’70s, popular culture and popular science were haunted with anxiety about the human future. In 1972 the private think tank Club of Rome published a best-selling book, Limits to Growth, predicting that technological civilization was rapidly running out of room and resources, and that it would collapse within the next century if measures were not taken to curb its expansion.⁸ The only antidote, in their analysis, to the damage that constant change had wrought was to deliberately engineer exactly the kind of steady-state world to which O’Neill saw himself fighting to find an alternative. This book, along with dozens like it in the media landscape at the time, helped create a feedback loop in science fiction, reinforcing the dystopic turn.

This critique of the constant expansion that had characterized Wernher von Braun’s era of high modernism—the bombastic optimism that “man” would “conquer space soon,” on and off of Earth—arrived at the same time as the bill for all that was coming due. The oil crisis of 1972–74 showed that energy costs would not keep going down forever, and the ecology and environmental movements were revealing the high toll that constant change and growth was taking on the planet. This gloomy attitude about technology was what O’Neill wanted to address head-on. In an appearance before Congress in the summer of 1975, he testified that to accept such limits and stasis would be un-American, and that his space settlement scheme was an essential part of any plan to get out from under them.⁹ The subsequent popularity of the utopian scenarios in the Usborne books and in the The Kids’ Whole Future Catalog (itself modeled after Stewart Brand’s how-tobe-a-hippie manual, The Whole Earth Catalog) showed that O’Neill’s optimism was contagious. Life in the future could include all of the above: asteroid mining in space, aquaculture in the sea, and home composting on Earth.

The high-tech aspects of these scenarios were not new to culture or science fiction. The utopias imagined by both Clarke and the Strugatsky brothers had vacuum bullet trains, space settlement, and ocean farming, as seen in Imperial Earth and Noon: 22nd Century, respectively. What was happening here was the reascendance of the field between science and science fiction, offering legitimacy to speculation. This field has and had many names. In the post–World War II period, the term of art was “futurism.” But this descriptor, along with “futurist,” is largely deprecated by those who practice it in the early twenty-first century, due to its association with the quasi-fascist Italian art and aesthetic movement of the same name, which emerged around the same time as Russian cosmism in the early twentieth century. A hundred years later, consultants and researchers whose work involves medium- or long-term projection of technological and social trends are more likely to describe themselves as practicing “future studies,” or “foresight.” Whatever the term, this is what Tsiolkovsky was doing in his later work, like The Future of Earth and Mankind, and also what J.D. Bernal was attempting to do in The World, the Flesh, and the Devil.

In distinction to speculative work that appears in “pulpy” science fiction, which is sometimes debased, future studies seeks to be grounded in “hard” scientific or historiographic methods that give its practitioners more legitimacy. The Club of Rome was doing this too: their work relied on early computer modeling, and it was presented in the form of graphs and charts that looked irrefutable, as if they were pulled straight out of the digital printer by a man in thick glasses and tweed, in a well air-conditioned, brightly lit server room. O’Neill wanted to tap into this lineage, especially in The High Frontier and 2081, which includes an inventory of utopian future studies work to date. In his refutations of the Club’s calibrated scientific gloom, he brought along his own institutional tokens of credibility: physics, engineering, Princeton, Stanford, and NASA. Despite his parallel reliance on science fiction as a precedent and as a literary form, he always insisted that the scenarios he was predicting were not fiction. This future, O’Neill was often at pains to point out, was rather plausible and possible, within the bounds of existing 1970s technology.

And so, the domes on the Moon, in Manhattan, and at the poles, the farms in the ocean and in other hostile environments, the windmills and solar panels—all of these ways out from under limits—were newly science-washed via popular media like the Usborne and Catalog books in Europe and North America. Magazines like Popular Science and Popular Mechanics took up these banners too, just as Tekhnika Molodezhi did in the Soviet Union. But the seeming computerized plausibility of doom predicted by the Club of Rome, and also by biologist Paul Ehrlich (with Anne Ehrlich) in The Population Bomb (1968), and self-proclaimed futurist Alvin Toffler (with Adelaide Farrell) in Future Shock (1970), hadn’t gone away.¹⁰ A generation’s worth of science fiction films had absorbed the pessimism in the air. And they had even preemptively anticipated the objections, in popular foresight, of O’Neill and his followers that humans had only to expand agriculture, technology, and life into hostile environments in order buy themselves access to near-infinite time and space. For media verging on pulp status, lacking the hard credibility of scientific method, their critiques of dystopian and utopian thinking, and of false binaries drawn between constant change and steady-state status, were surprisingly nuanced and effective.

In the 1972 film Silent Running, directed by Douglas Trumbull (previously a special effects supervisor on Clarke and Kubrick’s 2001), the question of mitigating environmental collapse on Earth by expanding to space is addressed head-on. The film takes place after an ecosystem apocalypse scenario has left Earth barren of all vegetation and agriculture. All remaining resources have been turned toward the industrialization of everything, even food. To preserve the last remaining samples of ecosystems and biomes, a fleet of repurposed space haulers (operated by Pan-Am with prominent branding stenciled on the ships by Trumbull’s team) maintains miniature biomes in orbit around Saturn. In an inversion of the domed city plans that are common in science fiction and future studies, these are gigantic domed greenhouse wildernesses, tended by botanists and their robot assistants. However, the technological civilization in this story has not stopped expanding, and its attitude toward the instrumentalization of technology overrules its impulse to preserve environments in space.

When the freighters are needed again for their industrial capacity, the crews are ordered to scrap their greenhouse domes and get back to regular work. One scientist, played by Bruce Dern, rebels and hijacks his ship, killing his crewmates and eventually destroying everything left, including himself, but for one dome. He has stocked this last environment with resources and energy, and trained the last lonely robot to take care of the plants and animals there, while it heads (presumably) out of the solar system.

This movie and the 1973 film Soylent Green could almost have taken place in the same universe—indeed, one directly based on the Club of Rome’s predictions. In Silent Runnings, all of the action takes place in space; the despoiled Earth never appears onscreen. But in Soylent Green, we are neck deep in it. Population explosion, overcrowding, pollution, global warming, and the collapse of agriculture have all left the planet in ruins. The poor and middle class fill the streets, lobbies, and stairwells of a New York City grown to house 40 million people, while the wealthy live in supertall skyscrapers above them. Industrial food production allows for the mass distribution of various colors of “soylent” food blocks to the hungry people. The new variety, Soylent Green, is the most popular, and is advertised as the product of ocean farming, made from plankton. The protagonists discover, though, that suppressed reports on ocean biology had previously shown that technique to be unviable. Soylent Green must be made from another raw material source, which is eventually revealed to be the human dead.

The 1976 film Logan’s Run depicts a future world with a different solution to environmental collapse, summed up neatly in the film’s opening text:

Sometime in the 23rd Century … the survivors of war, over-population and pollution are living in a great domed city, sealed away from the forgotten world outside. Here, in an ecologically balanced world, mankind lives only for pleasure, freed by the servo-mechanisms which provide everything. There’s just one catch: Life must end at thirty unless reborn in the fiery ritual of carrousel.¹¹

Although most of the city’s population steps willingly into carrousel, a few go rogue and become “runners,” fleeing the city’s all-knowing computerized brain and its agents, in hopes of finding a mythical resistance movement and a home outside the city in “Sanctuary.” Runners are pursued by “Sandmen,” special police with a license to kill. The film sets up an ongoing dialectic between societies based on constant change and those rooted in a steady-state system. The culture inside the domed city is based on a “renewal,” organized and managed, like all aspects of this world, by a central computer. In the end, the hope for personal rebirth turns out to be mythical. But even though the outside world has been despoiled by constant change and expansionism, it has itself renewed, or so the protagonists find when they escape. This natural renewal is underscored by the figure of the old man they find there among the cities reclaimed by nature—the first person over the age of thirty they’ve ever seen. Growth and expansion are possible after all, the movie seems to say, while steady-state societies lead inherently to decadence and immorality.

The movie reveals a reactionary agenda when it directly critiques the kinds of “different families” that were supported by the cities in the Kids’ Whole Future Catalog. The culture in the book exists without marriage, and its inhabitants engage in free love that crosses gender boundaries, a fact that surprises and repulses the old man outside. In an almost-deliberate nod to the kinds of future that the film exists to critique, the heroes encounter a parallel to the old man, a robot that manages the city’s frozen food infrastructure, deep underground. “Food, food from the sea! Fresh fish, and plankton! From the sea!” the robot, named Box, chants. But, just as in Soylent Green, here they find out that the food it has been preparing is not from ocean farming after all. The malfunctioning robot has been killing other runners and storing them in the deep freeze.

The film version of Logan’s Run doesn’t mention traveling to space, but in the book that it’s based on, Sanctuary is a space station. Sustainable ocean agriculture, steady-state sustainable existence, a turn away from heteronormative nuclear families, and the total organization and control of society with computers, are all presented here as a set of illusions, false hopes, just like the possibility of living in space. Expansion and change is still possible here, in the world of Logan’s Run, but only after you let everything go to hell, then start all over again.

If this is an unintentional set of sequels, all set in the same future timeline, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner would make it a quadrilogy. Released last, in 1982, Blade Runner nevertheless seems to take place in the middle of the sequence. Somewhere between the beginnings of the collapse on Earth seen in Soylent Green, the industrial utilization of space travel in Silent Runnings, and the far future aftermath and renewal of Logan’s Run, the world of Blade Runner is miserable and sublime. It seems simultaneously crowded and empty, lonely and overwhelming. Famously, there is the possibility here of a “new life” that “awaits you on the off-world colonies.” Much of the heavy industrial work on Earth and elsewhere is done by artificially engineered humanoid “replicants.” And—whether they were once used for food or not—there is a sense in this movie that there are huge numbers of human corpses somewhere just off-screen.

Blade Runner recalls the arcologies from The Kids’ Whole Future Catalog, in a Los Angeles that has been rebuilt at the scale of the mile-high buildings designed by Glen Small. But here, even though they are the home to the massive international corporations that dominate this world, they are weirdly empty and echoing, bereft of human, animal, and plant life. The film’s world also has the space “colonies” from O’Neill’s The High Frontier, but here they are dependent on slave labor. These enslaved, genetically engineered replicants, driven not a little mad by the conditions in which they find themselves, supporting and preserving a corporate and human population that sees them as mere “skinjobs,” are the natural heirs to Silent Runnings’ robot helpers. Like the “Sandmen” in Logan’s Run, this film’s titular “blade runners” are a special caste of killers licensed to hunt down and assassinate any of the nowdebased inhuman rebels who reject the framework of the world they’ve inherited. The replicants can also be read as the ancestors of Box, who is caught between his programmed imperative to serve humans and a rage that makes him want to kill them.

As if to underscore these future lineages and future critiques, the erstwhile protagonist of the film, the blade runner Rick Deckard, is reading a newspaper when we first see him. The headlines pointing at the camera read “Farming the Moon, the Oceans, and Antarctica.” The subhead seems to be a direct reference to Logan’s Run, and perhaps to the situation we find ourselves in today, by way of Usborne and company: “Worldwide Computer Linkup Planned.”¹² When Scott began planning Blade Runner, he approached the legendary visual futurist Syd Mead for work on production design. “We’re going to make a film about the future,” Mead later recalled Scott telling him, “and don’t even think about Logan’s Run.”¹³

Less Human than Human Is Our Motto

In spite of Scott’s insistence to the contrary, there are endless parallels between Logan’s Run and Blade Runner, and they underscore the latter film’s critiques of the former. In Logan’s Run, the life purpose of the under-thirty population is to spend their time consuming and enjoying as much as possible. On this dimension, it is no coincidence that much of the film was shot in a Texas shopping mall. When people are no longer useful for serving these hedonistic purposes, they are either eliminated voluntarily in carrousel, or are hunted down and “terminated” by the Sandmen. And their deliberate avoidance of the word “kill” is telling; as one Sandman remarks, “I’ve never killed anyone in my life, Sandmen terminate runners.” A runner, being past the age of thirty, is no longer human, so they can’t technically be murdered. The replicants Deckard hunts in Blade Runner have a similar set of problems: their systems begin to shut down automatically after their four-year lifespan. The collapsing infrastructure on Earth and in space depends on their labor, and their existence is predicated on their utility. Once they try to live their brief lives on their own terms, they are forfeit. The blade runners do not kill their replicant prey, either; they “retire” them. One of the film’s most famous lines of dialogue—“Have you ever retired a human by mistake?”—spotlights the implied contradiction: maybe it is the people, the ones who have organized and enforced the existence of this obscene social structure in the first place, who have truly lost their humanity.

In both cases, these human beings are reduced to their utility as part of a system of technology. Scott’s world could just as well be based, point for point, on Gerard O’Neill’s most mainstream work in the future studies genre. Even the titles resonate with one another. The Technology Edge was O’Neill’s last book, published in 1983, by which time he had left academia for the corporate world, founding a satellite company named GeoStar to capitalize on some patents he had developed. This book is a close look at the global state of the art with regard to various technologies the physicist thought would define the near and midterm human future. The chapter headings for the central portion of the book tell the story: “Microengineering” (very small scale manufacturing that we now call nanotechnology, especially of computer chips), “Robots—The New Breed” (O’Neill predicted that the defining aspect of future robotics would be self-replication), “Genetic Hardware” (basic engineering of organisms, including humans, at the genetic level), “Magnetic Flight” (a new generation of maglev train technology gliding through vacuum in evacuated tunnels), “The 340-mph Limousine” (a kind of personal private airplane that acts like a flying car), and of course, “El Dorado in Orbit” (mining the asteroids and the Moon to develop industrial capacity in, and large-scale human occupation of, outer space).

Even though the book was published a year after Blade Runner was released, O’Neill had been writing about these themes for years; indeed, all of them show up in the science fictional 2081. The Technology Edge was simply his nonfiction attempt to synthesize them for a corporate audience. Such a system of maglev vacuum train tunnels was also described by another engineer trying their hand at science fiction—Wernher von Braun. Von Braun had described their potential uses on the red planet in his 1948 Project Mars, and O’Neill saw it as a close cousin to his magnetic mass driver. There are no levitating vacuum tube trains onscreen in Blade Runner, but the film directly addresses nanotechnology, robotics, genetic engineering, and flying cars, along with the “off-world colonies,” almost as if Scott were going through O’Neill’s table of contents with a red pencil, marking down everything that could possibly go wrong with all of this.

Most especially, it is the focus on the corporate individual as the beneficiary of technology, rather than the human subject, that informs Scott’s critique of this world here. In Blade Runner, access to flying cars, massive arcologies, and artificial workers designed down to the scale of their cells and DNA, was limited to the corporations and those who served, led, or—as in the case of the blade runners themselves—protected the servants and leaders, enforcing their rules. Another of the film’s most famous lines is delivered by Deckard’s boss: “You know the deal, Deck. If you’re not cop, you’re little people.”

The opening image of The Technology Edge is a recollection of O’Neill’s that could have come straight out of Blade Runner or another of its close relatives in the emerging subgenre of science fiction known as cyberpunk, William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer.¹⁴ Like the technician and genetic designer J.F. Sebastian, who goes to visit the head of the Tyrell Corporation in the film, O’Neill has just taken an elevator to the top floor of a towering corporate headquarters. O’Neill is here to interview the cofounder of Sony in Tokyo, and he describes his first impressions: “I was startled by three almost identical, very pretty secretaries, all in a line, all dressed in uniform blazer and skirt, bowing in unison.”¹⁵ From a viewpoint in the twenty-first century, the presentation of Orientalist stereotypes here is striking. Cyberpunk itself is no stranger to critique for its tendency to draw on anonymous, sexualized, intimidating, or disquieting Orientalist character tropes; and they are certainly present in Blade Runner and Neuromancer. But seen in the light of this genre’s mode in general, as a partial critique of future studies work from the late 1970s and early 1980s, the seeming Orientalism of cyberpunk is a part of a bigger picture.

A basic component of O’Neill’s worldview—his planetary imagination—regarded the ongoing conflict and competition between different societies and cultures. And this is the factor that informed his tendency to exoticize, fear, and admire societies like Japan. In the impending post–Cold War environment, O’Neill and others working in future studies from this era imagined that national power would give way to power wielded by multinational corporations, but that before this, state power and corporate power would be nearly indistinguishable. O’Neill traveled to Japan a little apprehensively, but he did so to learn from the cofounder of Sony and others, in order to synthesize lessons to take back to the entrepreneurial cultures in the United States, especially to Silicon Valley.

O’Neill’s approach, as someone working in future studies, was based on his invocation of objectivity and realism. In the first section of 2081, before moving into fictional narratives, he sets up his argument. Change must happen, he says, because clearly things needed to improve. Writing from 1981, he points out that famine, resource and energy scarcity, and pollution were not going away under current conditions. He doesn’t invoke them until later in the book (where he calls the Club of Rome book Limits to Growth a “tract”), but he is pointing at the same trends that the Club had been studying. How to address these issues? Right away, he dismisses “virtue” as irrelevant to the realism on which he wants to base his argument. This is where he introduces his binary choice: a “steady-state” condition, or “never ending” change, driven by the technological utilization of new resources. His implication is that a steady-state society would doom future generations to the endless perpetuation of the conditions of the world’s poorest. And here he sets up his working priorities: first comes “individual freedom,” then peace, or at least “the search for peace”; after that, at unspecified lower positions in this hierarchy of needs, are “wealth” and safety, or as he puts it “the absence of risk.”¹⁶

When O’Neill writes about never-ending change, he means it. Like the curved trajectory of the rocket in Tsiolkovsky’s Monument to the Conquerors of Space, O’Neill sees the movement off of Earth as just the beginning. In the fictional narrative portions of 2081, Earth is a garden wilderness, with a stable population of safe, wealthy humans, closely monitored by computer control. The High Frontier of his earlier book’s title has already begun to settle down, too. There are thriving communities in his huge orbiting, rotating habitats. Millions of people living in space have access to new kinds of personal and individual freedoms, as different habitats cater to different cultures and different lifestyles inside them.

In a televised 1975 conversation with biochemist and science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, O’Neill lays out an earlier version of his hopes for these aspects of space settlement. Asimov is excited about the possibilities that this extra-terrestial ecumenicism might present for cultural conflict. Asimov speculates about how an “Israel in space, a Palestine in space … a Northern Ireland in space” might allow different peoples to coexist without fighting over territory or resources.¹⁷ Never mind how that might be achieved practically, or whether or not it meets O’Neill’s criteria for “realism.” In the title year of 2081, that “peace” (O’Neill’s second priority) has left some inhabitants of this future unsatisfied still. Their search for even more “individual freedom” (O’Neill’s first priority) has given them impetus to launch the first interstellar spacecraft, taking the decades-long journey to another solar system.

Even as others in the 1970s were already critiquing this language, O’Neill fully embraces the terms “colony” and “frontier” to describe his project. His friend Stewart Brand, the countercultural icon who was another proponent of frontiers and personal freedom, wondered if this scheme might be seen as a kind of colonization with all of the upside and none of the down. After all, Brand pointed out, there were no “space natives” to steal territory or resources from.¹⁸ O’Neill admitted, in a conversation with Brand, that he possessed a deep suspicion of the utility of government investment. Despite that suspicion, he had hoped to show Congress that a massive government investment in his space settlement plans would realize positive returns by the end of the twentieth century. O’Neill hinted that those returns could continue to expand indefinitely, positioning his project as the natural continuation of Manifest Destiny. Nevertheless, the federal government declined to write him a direct check.

Economists have a term of art to describe the curve on aspirational graphs like the one O’Neill showed the House of Representatives subcommittee during his testimony: “up and to the right.” Also known as a “hockey stick curve,” this kind of graph is frequently shown to investors in the hopes that early funding rounds could generate tremendous amounts of wealth returns at an exponential rate. These are the same kinds of curves that describe the rapid accumulation of pollution, the hungry needs for more resources and energy that a rapidly growing population demands, or the expansion of that population itself, whether human or viral. The Club of Rome had shown a different kind of graph in the 1972 report Limits to Growth—one that started to rise slowly, then accelerated to an almost-vertical growth rate, before turning a corner and leveling off gently. This is the kind of graph that characterizes their advocacy for the “steady-state” society that O’Neill scorned. Theirs was no utopia, though: O’Neill correctly pointed out that the Club’s recommendations depended on methods of social control, especially birth control, that he feared verged on unacceptable totalitarianism. They were definitely anathema to his prioritization of personal freedom above all else. Nevertheless, O’Neill acknowledges the utility of this kind of curve in 2081. The “S-curve,” as he calls it, is one he finds useful to describe the inception, proliferation, and normalization of various kinds of biological and technological growth.

Yet when it comes to some of his own earlier arguments and assumptions, O’Neill finds the S-curve has less descriptive power. If things are bad now, he reasons, that doesn’t necessitate the immediate imposition of a steady-state society that should maintain current conditions indefinitely. Things could get better than they are now, after a period of difficulty. The climb up that steep slope—whether the change is never-ending, or headed toward a horizon of future stability—is a painful one. In this sense, Brand’s reduction of colonization to displacement fails to capture the whole picture. The frontiers and colonies are not fun places to be for everyone, in space or on Earth. As films like Blade Runner underscore, they are especially horrific for those whose humanity is subject to question, like the old, the enslaved, and those who are no longer useful to the culture within which they exist. Colonization always seems to depend on the decision that certain groups of people, displaced natives or not, are no longer fully human.

The movies discussed above are all mappable to various points on similar curves, and all can be seen as critiques of the harm that can happen when these processes of technological growth and colonization aren’t managed with justice, or with the “virtue” that O’Neill excludes from his realism. The damage that is possible in O’Neill’s embrace, in his later work, of the corporate subject as the potential path to human freedom, first via the state, is laid especially bare in Blade Runner. But O’Neill, too, draws out plans, in The Technology Edge, for state investment in entrepreneurial culture in places like Silicon Valley—which, perhaps without irony, has since embraced exponential growth as central to its modus operandi.

O’Neill receives his map of investment patterns that will stimulate this growth from places like Japan, where funding in research and development had brought prosperity and change. His logic is one that we now recognize as describable by the fraught but useful term “neoliberal.” He makes arguments based on, first, the need for the expansion of personal freedoms, and secondarily, the desire to eliminate scarcity and want. But the best and only way to accomplish these goals, in his thinking, is to embrace expansionist models, to depend on a set of liberatory capabilities that is presumed to be inherent in technology. In O’Neill’s worlds, technological growth is dependent on corporate growth—up and to the right—so this is where government investment should go. Despite O’Neill’s misgiving about governments and freedom, his system is one where the state comes first, the corporation second, and, as we see in the many critiques of this worldview in science fiction, the individual human comes last. In effect, a strange kind of corporate cosmism defines O’Neill’s planetary imagination, in which new freedoms and possibilities for constant change depend on unleashing more power and capabilities for control, and it is the company, not the individual, that gets to live forever and travel to the stars.

Le Guin’s Rant

In a future proliferate with O’Neill “colonies,” each home to a different culture, free to choose its own way, where difference can exist without conflict, who guarantees that that this freedom extends downward to the individual? The replicants in Blade Runner are forbidden by law from returning to Earth; so would a Space Palestinian be allowed to visit Space Israel? O’Neill is silent on this kind of point, so we have to return again to science fiction.

In the speculative fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin, especially her Hainish Cycle, the S-curve and the hockey stick of possible human futures pulses and ebbs and flows like the sea. As opposed to the creators of the cyberpunk dystopias discussed above, Le Guin is counted among the most utopian of science fiction writers working in the 1960s and ’70s (and indeed, into the ’80s, ’90s, and ’00s). But Le Guin’s worlds are no paradises, and she offers no assurance that everything will be okay. Societies rise and fall; genocide, war, and personal tragedy are everywhere. And yet, somehow, this doesn’t read like a warning, but more like a friendly assurance that everything changes, sooner or later, and that we all have to make hard choices. The daughter of anthropologists, Le Guin knows better than to suggest that for humans, going out to live in space will mean an end to scarcity or conflict. And rather than show us a plausible graph predicting infinite prosperity, she’s as frank and honest about the trouble as she can be, sitting with us as we deal with it all together.

In her Hainish novels, an incomplete and—as she herself readily admits—inconsistent future history begins in the middle of things.¹⁹ Humans, or at least their ancestors and relatives, seem to have always lived in outer space. Millions of years ago, Earth and countless other planets were settled by the Hainish, in vast migrations reminiscent of the indefinite extension of human future in space that Gerard O’Neill advocated. Whatever expanding technological civilization those ancestors had, though, didn’t last. The people on Earth and elsewhere forgot their history and lost the capability of spaceflight, along with the rest of their “high” technology. Whether it was a gradual shift or a sudden collapse, Le Guin’s stories don’t specify, but any graph of their population, pollution, food production, or other factors, as charted by any prehistoric Club of Rome, would show the lines eventually going downward. Later in her timeline, after our actual present day, humans spread out into other solar systems again, only to find … other humans.

This ends up being, among many other things, an ideal setup for stories that critique deterministic future studies. O’Neill’s curve, up and to the right, is a trajectory away from worlds, one in which expanding technological civilizations leave planetary surfaces. Le Guin’s protagonists are instead always going toward worlds—down gravity wells, then deeper still. They embed themselves in the societies, biospheres, territories, and weather they find there, until they are indistinguishable from them. In this sense, “going native”—space native—is the overriding theme of the Hainish stories. The proliferation of originators on an equally indeterminate number of different worlds has allowed a thousand variations of humanlike existence to blossom, and the main characters in her stories often find themselves starting out as perplexed observers from outside, future anthropologists who get drawn in themselves.

The “Ekumen” or “League of all Worlds” celebrates difference, values noninterference, and allows for free travel and open encounters between peoples. And although Le Guin distanced herself from the series title Hainish Cycle, there are beats, pulses, and returns here. Earth itself ends up reverting to sparsely populated wilderness at least twice during the centuries of her future history, and there are hints that it all may happen again and again. Like Clarke’s Imperial Earth and O’Neill’s 2081, space travel does allow the flexibility to let the home planet go a bit feral now and then. But there is a strange paradox here: in Le Guin’s work, there is no single path from any kind of “primitive” existence to “civilization,” no overriding destiny or teleology—only tendencies. Le Guin’s planetary imagination depends on xenophilia, not xenophobia, and the never-ending differences between peoples that she makes everywhere depend, in turn, on the environments in which the different peoples find themselves.

For O’Neill, technology provides an edge—between different societies like the United States and Japan—but it also makes a wedge—between societies and their worlds, sending the people up and to the right. In the intermediate scenarios he advocates for, humans would eventually construct their own ideal new world entirely out of technology, wrapping it around themselves like a giant space suit, closing out the sky in the hollow rotating cylinders and spheres and tori. For O’Neill, technology is a spatula that scrapes humanity off the planetary surface and launches it into space, accelerated like the payload in the mass driver. In Le Guin, on the other hand, the people don’t make the worlds; the worlds make the people. Forest worlds, ice worlds, desert worlds, ocean worlds—in true anthropological fashion, the subject and the environment are intricately intertwined and inseparable.

But Le Guin is far from uninterested in technology. In one of her best-known nonfiction pieces, a 2004 post on her blog, she rolls her eyes at critics and other writers, especially in science fiction, whose imaginations seem limited when it comes to the subject. “A Rant about ‘Technology’ ” is hard hitting and funny, going directly to the point in a way that only internet writing can. Those who focus on the spaceships and the flying cars and the vacuum tunnel trains, she says, are missing the point. Technology isn’t just the hardware hockey stick of teleological expansionism, sometimes it is the social software that maintains the s-curve and helps prevent the collapse:

We have been so desensitized by a hundred and fifty years of ceaselessly expanding technical prowess that we think nothing less complex and showy than a computer or a jet bomber deserves to be called “technology” at all. As if linen were the same thing as flax—as if paper, ink, wheels, knives, clocks, chairs, aspirin pills, were natural objects, born with us like our teeth and fingers—as if steel saucepans with copper bottoms and fleece vests spun from recycled glass grew on trees, and we just picked them when they were ripe.²⁰

And, far from serving to separate people from planets, she points out that technology, especially all of this overlooked technology, is instead what binds us to them: “Technology is the active human interface with the material world.”

Famously, Le Guin’s Hainish universe includes starships whose movements are limited to the speed of light, but also a device, the ansible, that allows for instantaneous communication between planets light-years away. But she doesn’t do what Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Jules Verne and so many others do, by breaking up the plot to have an engineer type explain how they work. Instead, she lets technology do what the everyday things she lists in her rant do: quietly mediate between people and other people, and between people and their worlds. Her ansible device is a hugely influential concept, that allows immediate communication at a distance, but not travel. Dozens of other writers have made use of the idea, retaining her name for it in tribute, partly because it opens up so many intriguing world-building opportunities. What would you do if you could talk with people who were very far away, and very different, but you were unable to ever visit them? Instead of the desire for plausibility that obsesses so-called hard science fiction writers, and underlies O’Neill’s constant insistence that his space “colonies” could be built with 1970s technology, Le Guin is more interested in softer possibility. We don’t care about how the spaceship works; we care about the way it enables us to get lost in new worlds, and so we learn that even spacefaring people get lost.

One thing that Ursula K. Le Guin does with the vast array of worlds she makes (and she makes so many that she also admits to forgetting a few) is to use confrontations between societies and cultures to critique colonialist and exploitive frameworks. Le Guin’s lifelong attention to difference and culture led her to value justice and change. In one of her last speeches before she died, at the 2014 National Book Awards, she summed up this position neatly: “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.”²¹

As discussed above, in O’Neill’s universe, planets are surfaces to leave behind, or to dig into for resources, and even difference serves a utilitarian purpose. He hoped that his “space colonies” would allow for experimentation in lifestyle, culture, and politics that could inform human life generally, speculating that new ways of life that were successful in space could be imported back to Earth and spread around. But O’Neill failed to acknowledge that this was itself a kind of colonial paradigm, and one that would have deadly consequences. Experiments do happen in frontiers, but they don’t tend to end well for those who are experimented on. In this highest of frontiers, the stakes for survival are also raised. The export of risk outward to the “colonies,” with the hope of extracting value—even cultural value—back to the center, is not a new paradigm at all. This is “never-ending” change for thee, but a “steady state” for me.

O’Neill wrote that he valued freedom over safety. But his own planetary imagination had a very safe, suburban flavor to it. Working in the 1970s, an era of white and middle-class flight from North America’s urban centers, he doesn’t seem to be interested in cities at all. The paintings he commissioned for his project, in collaboration with NASA, show happy middle-class people in garden suburbs or at the edges of cultivated wildernesses in the largest habitats, sometimes with cities off in the distance. In 2081 there are the vacuum trains, and, like in Logan’s Run and on Tsiolkovsky’s future Earth, whole areas are under giant conservatory roofs that control the climate and keep out pests. But these are not dense cities; instead they are small towns and suburbs, where the residents spend their prosperity on bigger vehicles and larger houses. Like in Blade Runner, there are flying cars, which his protagonists use to visit urban centers for entertainment or novelty.

O’Neill’s is a familiar type of planetary imagination. He never shows the frontier at the intermediate stage of his growth curve; that’s left to others to experience, and to science fiction. But just like the replicants, this new type of existence, this new type of person, constructed for the exploitation of other worlds, ends up returning home. As astronomer Lucianne Walkowicz says, “What happens in space happens on Earth.”²² Gerard O’Neill’s particular combination of contradictions, his distrust in government (with occasional callbacks for funding), his instrumentalization of science fiction (but not when it functions as a means of critique), and his professed devotion to novelty and freedom (but only to support an existing status quo) may be his most influential and lasting legacy.