Gerard K. O'Neill > Quotes

“Yet all the projections confirm that SSPS plants built at a space manufacturing facility out of nonterrestrial materials should be able to undersell electricity produced by any alternative source here on Earth.”
― Gerard K. O'Neill, The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space

“A nonindustrial Earth with a population of perhaps one billion people could be far more beautiful than it is now.  Tourism from space could be a major industry, and would serve as a strong incentive to enlarge existing parks, create new ones, and restore historical sights.  The tourists, coming from a nearly pollution-free environment, would be rather intolerant of Earth's dirt and noise, and that too would encourage cleaning up the remaining sources of pollutants here.  Similar forces have had a strong beneficial effect on tourist centers in Europe and the United States during the past twenty years.  The vision of an industry free, pastoral Earth, with many of its spectacular scenic areas reverting to wilderness, with bird and animal populations increasing in number, and with a relatively small, affluent human population, is far more attractive to me than the alternative of a rigidly controlled world whose people tread precariously the narrow path of a steady-state society.  If the humanization of space occurs, the vision could be made real.”
― Gerard K. O'Neill, The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space

“Although the total volume of the asteroids is far smaller than Earth's, it is a volume much more accessible than the depths of our planet.  On Earth only a thin skin of material is available to us without deep mining under high pressures and intense heat.  Even if we were to excavate the entire land area of Earth to a depth of a half-mile, and to honeycomb the terrain to remove a tenth of all its total volume, we would obtain only 1 percent of the materials contained in just the three largest asteroids.  A striking contrast: we would have to disfigure the entire Earth to obtain only a hundredth of the material contained in three now-useless, lifeless asteroids; and there are thousands of those minor planets.”
― Gerard K. O'Neill, The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space

“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

“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

“we'll have weather control by 2015,”
― 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

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

“But we do not yet have a computer and a program for it that together can interpret speech correctly, without uncertainties, when it is spoken at a normal rate.”
― 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 principal centers for these studies have been the U.S. Naval Medical Center at Pensacola, Florida, and the Soviet space program’s ORBIT centrifuge facility in the U.S.S.R.”
― Gerard K. O'Neill, The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space

“If medicine is socialized, malpractice suits will disappear because the government will refuse to submit to them.”
― 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

“it is clear that the early settlers in space will be exciting people: restless, inquiring, independent; quite possibly more hard-driving and possessed by more "creative discontent" than their kin in the Old World.”
― Gerard K. O'Neill, The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space

“In areas of California, once regarded as highly desirable, overcrowding has become so bad that in a recent survey about a third of the Californians said they'd rather be living in some other state.”
― Gerard K. O'Neill, The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space

“We is still banned in the USSR.”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“Man will not always stay on Earth; the pursuit of light and space will lead him to penetrate the bounds of the atmosphere, timidly at first, but in the end to conquer the whole of solar space.”
― Gerard K. O'Neill, The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space

“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

“For some years there's been intense controversy over a pilot-plant "fast breeder" reactor, which was built to transmute the commonly occurring isotope U238 into the fissionable isotope P239 of the element plutonium. The controversy has raged because fast breeder reactors are much trickier and more dangerous than ordinary fission reactors, and because P239 is a suitable material for making atomic bombs as well as for fueling reactors. Critics have attacked fast breeder reactors both for the dangers of their operation and for the risk that in an all-nuclear economy there would be so much P239 being”
― Gerard K. O'Neill, 2081

“At the other extreme, and far less threatening, will be the "house computer" of 2081. It will store all the information from all the books, musical recordings, and reminder notes that are now to be found in a well stocked home, and in addition, will filter the deluge of spoken, musical, and video information that will arrive every day at a typical home in that year, selecting and storing for later recall the information of interest to its owners.”
― Gerard K. O'Neill, 2081

“Our goal is to find ways in which all of humanity can share in the benefits that have come from the rapid expansion of human knowledge, and yet prevent the material aspects of that expansion from fouling the worldwide nest in which we live.  Necessarily, many of the concerns of this book are materialistic, but more than material survival is at stake.  The most soaring achievements of mankind in the arts, music and literature could never have occurred without a certain amount of leisure and wealth; we should not be ashamed to search for ways in which all of humankind can enjoy that wealth.”
― Gerard K. O'Neill, The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space

“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

“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

“This is the place to dispel the "solar myth." The United States is a relatively sunlit nation of low population density, a particularly favorable place for solar energy. Yet even in the United States the numbers don't work out for it. In 1971 the average United States energy use was 0.3 watts per square meter. Staying with those units, the use rate will be 4.4 a century from now, even at the very modest growth rate of 2.5 percent per year overall (including population increase). Windpower, tidepower, photosynthesis, and hydroelectric power are all forms of solar energy. If”
― 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