So far this is a familiar story. According to its script the third wave, the information age, is upon us, the golden dawn upon the economic horizon. However, it takes a little more imagination to see that the same thing will happen to the information industries, currently ascendant, that happened to the farms and factories. There is no reason why the technologies of data storage, management, and retrieval should not perfect and miniaturize and cheapen and streamline themselves almost out of existence like their predecessors. If the historical analogy holds, employment, investment, and cultural commitment in the information industries will rise to about 90 percent of the given resources. At first huge fortunes will be made; then, as the labor demand rises, economic equality will increase; there will follow the predictable collapse of the labor market as the information industries become more and more cost efficient, smaller and smaller on the world's horizon, less and less labor intensive, and finally less capital hungry and less profitable, leaving a few cash cows providing all the world's needs.
Eventually their operation will take up 2 percent of our money and our people. Hordes of information workers will be turned out on the streets, asking the employed if they can spare a dime. Moreover all this will happen much faster than the rise and decline of manufacturing, just as the manufacturing age happened faster than the agricultural age. Everything is getting faster and faster. Information resources will be virtually invisible, at our mental fingertips, perhaps even wired into us by neural/cybernetic interfaces, activated by an unconscious movement of the will as are our own brains--as natural, cheap, and convenient as a hammer. Will we then create clunky antique data devices, requiring programming and the memorization of command codes, for the leisured and the nostalgic?
But for those who believe we should become a spacefaring civilization, the great question that arises from this review of economic succession must surely be: Which of these economic paradigms will best support space travel? The agricultural model, despite such appealing visions as Robert Heinlein's hardy wagon-train pioneers, is clearly by itself insufficient. Oddly enough, the human race does not need more cultivatable land; in countries where farm production is rising the most, the proportion of land given over to it is decreasing.
The industrial paradigm is not much more promising. A space program based on an industrial manufacturing model will be a bigger and bigger fish, and a hungrier and hungrier one, in a pond that is shrinking and drying up. We may never build the gigantic space hangars, with their banks of tiny windows and huge, half-obliterated identification numbers, the enormous space-cruisers with their turrets and flying bridges, that we see in our science fiction movies--the iconography of the foundry and the drill rig and the aircraft carrier transferred to space.
Two hundred years from now such images may seem as quaint as Edward Bellamy's science fiction cities of the 19th century, with their skies packed with airships sporting baroque gondolas full of men in top hats and ladies in crinolines. Our spaceships may actually look like inside-out trees or jellyfish. Or we may not even use spaceships as such to get from one place in the universe to another, but something more like a photographic studio or an X-ray machine. There is no reason why we will need huge edifices made out of riveted plates of metal. If we are essentially growing our machines and appliances ad hoc as we need them, and re-dissolving them when we want them out of the way, and if their shapes are customized perfectly to the task at hand and to human aesthetics, our devices will probably look like plants or animals or exquisite little works of art. If, as is already happening, much of the technology comes to be in the hands of individuals rather than vast state organizations or centralized corporations, our collective works may be more like hives or coral reefs or village markets than like the totalitarian one-vision, one-use monuments of the Bauhaus and the Capitol. And all of this is not in the remote future, but just around the corner.
For a while a space program based on the information industries--one in which we go into space to hunt out valuable data or in pursuit of the raw materials of hardware and software--will flourish, but its possibilities are strictly limited. The largest pool of important information in the known universe is right here on our planet; it is thus no coincidence that by far the largest commitment in our space program is to devices designed to look at, or direct messages to and from, the Earth. If we, and our living companions, were to go to other parts of the universe, then they would become valuable as information. But we have to get there first, and we can't afford to; the cash flow and amortization problems would be insoluble.
Of course, if we discover alien civilizations, then everything changes. We would then need centuries of highly lucrative scholarship and cybernetics to process the gigantic wealth of knowledge that would flow from such a discovery, and the information industries would be in the delightful situation of having simultaneously a glut of raw materials and an endless consumer demand. Space travel might flourish, on a pay-as-you-go basis. But the last few years of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence have presented us with a single massively important and dispiriting piece of negative information: Against all our expectations, the galaxy seems to be silent of technological civilization, at least of anything that might use electromagnetic waves for communication. Closer to home, within our own solar system, we are almost certainly alone. There is more going on in a single earthly forest or village than on the whole of Mercury or Venus--more surprises, more unprecedented and unpredictable events, more emerging structures of information. The information-industry model of wealth creation will not take us into space, any more than the manufacturing model will.
But perhaps there is another model, one that will succeed the knowledge industries. An economic wave or paradigm loses its hold on a civilization not because of inefficiency but because of efficiency. Earlier waves of economic activity are not suppressed by succeeding waves. The reason there are so few farmers in the United States and so little money tied up in farming, when once 90 percent of the nation was agrarian, is not the failure of farming but its astonishing success: Farming now needs only a tiny fraction of the country's human and economic resources to supply more than enough foodstuffs and raw materials.
Finally, we will be left with the irreducibly labor- and capital-intensive human industries of what we might call "charm": tourism, education, entertainment, adventure, religion, sport, fashion, art, history, movies, ritual, personal development, politics, the eternal soap opera of relationships. Once the world's wages have leveled up to those of the developed countries, a process already well in train, the service industries will begin to starve for labor, and be forced to raise their pay scales. At the same time the job descriptions, and the actual content, of service employment will begin to approximate those of artists, entertainers, educators, and sports professionals. One can already see this process at work in the restaurant industry in such wealthy cities as Dallas, New York, Phoenix, or Los Angeles: Good waiters, sommeliers, and cooks are wooed and tempted by rival establishments, and each evening is conceived as a little work of art.
Given a cheap and effortless supply of materials, manufactures, and information, which will be on hand in a few decades if this scenario of economic evolution is plausible, the chief natural resources required for these new charm industries will be empty space and empty time. The rich, who since the Renaissance have lived as the rest of the world will try to live a few decades later, and are thus the harbingers of the future, have always valued empty space and empty time. That is why they buy land and build mansions in the country, and why they hire managers and secretaries to handle their deadlines. Often they are quite frugal in their consumption habits, not out of affectation but in the pursuit of a more refined joy in the experience of life.
The arts and pleasures of the charm industries take up time and space; they also paradoxically increase both time and space by their magical powers of illusion, delay, inner articulation, and concentrated attention. But time and space, with the present buildup of physical, temporal, and cultural waste product on our planet, are becoming increasingly scarce and increasingly at a premium. We are swamped by mountains of junk information, junk production, junk cultural overflow. We will be prepared to pay top dollar for silence, horizons, the threat and presence of death, the strange and mystical experience of uneventful time. Japanese Heian princes, with all the resources of a rich civilization open to them, sought the exquisite boredom of glacially slow Noh drama and court music. American and European millionaires outfit one-man ocean-going yachts and, on the fine edge of loneliness, terror, and tedium, sail round the world. Our civilization as a whole will seek out the ultraviolet-ravaged red wastes of Mars, the voiceless empty grandeur of the Jovian moons.
New planetary habitats obviously offer enormous amounts of empty space. Less obviously, they also offer huge quantities of empty time. Outer space has an inexhaustible resource, which is temporal separation from the home planet. Nobody on Mars can have a phone conversation with anyone on Earth, because the light that carries the message takes time to get from place to place, and even a one-minute time lag puts a gap between two people almost as great as the grave: Mars is at least three minutes away, and sometimes as much as 20. The times of Mars and Ganymede are empty of Earthly chatter and Earthly information overload. The relativistic time-separation from Earth of even the closest planets imposes an impenetrable barrier of privacy, and creates huge unexploited temporal niches for the coming charm industries. The tragic existential choices that faced emigrants to the New World, and that made possible their creation of new societies and new alternatives for the human race, will once again be possible.
The other worlds of space offer empty time in another sense. When you are sailing, or horseback riding, or gardening, or training an animal (as my friend Steven Bodio points out), you must adapt to the rhythms of the rest of nature. Survival tasks take a lot of time, but most of that time is spent attentively waiting. If you try to hurry a boat, a horse, or a plant, you will come to grief. Human beings, however, especially when armed with timesaving devices like fax machines, telephones, e-mail, copiers, and computers, can, it seems, hurry each other up without limit, to the point of catastrophic stress. The planets offer us places to slow down, precisely because the processes we will require to stay alive--and to transform those hostile environments into Arcadia--take so much empty time.
But emptiness is not enough. What the dream of ecopoiesis and terraforming also offers is a project whose grandeur equals or surpasses every previous aspiration of the human species. The combination will eventually be irresistible. It will be the last reliable source of economic wealth.
Tourism is already the world's largest industry, but tourism is only a pale shadow of what its seekers desire: the chance to make history, to be true explorers, naturalists in a new world, anthropologists of a never-before-encountered civilization. More epoch-making than the first winged flight would be the first created planetary atmosphere where human beings might fly under their own power. More splendid than any ocean voyage is the colossal task of filling a new ocean. More scientifically bold than any naturalist's exploration is the creation of a new ecosystem. More daring than any big game hunt is the introduction of genetically adapted wildlife where once no life existed.
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