Arthur C. Clarke Lectures

University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka 1986

Technology and Development

Dr. John L. McLucas
Chairman of the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation of the United States

The first lecture, sponsored by the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation of the United States will, for the most part, not break new ground. Rather, it will deal with some of the issues which are always with us. One of the largest issues demanding our attention is how to use modern technology for the benefit of people everywhere on earth. As technology continues to advance, the need for answers to such a question becomes more urgent, especially because technology is having a larger impact on more and more people every day.

Modern technology, especially that technology related to space and telecommunications has affected us all -- sometimes positively and sometimes negatively. The key is to find how we might make better use of that technology so that its effects are more to our liking.

Whether we live in the countries which are most advanced technologically or whether we live in what we in the West call Lesser Developed Countries (LDC's) or Third World countries, it is a fact that technology has had an important impact on our lives. For many, if not most, people on the earth, the effects have been dramatic. Perhaps the most basic changes have affected the food supply. Granted, in most countries there are still people who are farming or herding cattle in ways little changed for a thousand years, but in essentially all of those countries, the eating habits and ways of producing food for most of the population have undergone very marked change in the last 40-50 years. Farming has become more productive through the use of new varieties of old crops, shifting to new crops, use of artificial fertilizers, growing more crops per year, reducing blight and insect damage, and various other techniques.

World War II is perhaps as good as any dividing line between earlier times and today. There has been a gradual spread of technology over the last 40 years. World War II itself had a lot to do with the change of pace of technological advance. The principal countries engaged in that war made maximum efforts to exploit technology to gain an edge over their enemies. Although we wish it were otherwise, the unpleasant fact is that almost all technologies over the centuries have seen their most dramatic growth and expression in military applications.

The Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, all brought significant improvements in military hardware. The chariot, the stirrup and the crossbow were major advances in military equipment, but like many modern technologies, mankind has found ways to use these basic technologies for peaceful purposes. Beating swords into plow-shares has been our perennial desire, and we have had remarkable success in doing so, even though our history is filled with a dismaying number of examples of using our best ideas to kill each other more efficiently.

What were the most significant results of the World War II technological push? Everyone has their own list but some items will probably appear on all lists. Certainly most would acknowledge the big four. First, there is radar and the communications systems which enabled its use. Secondly, there was the jet engine and the mass production of transport aircraft. Third, there was the development of pilotless airplanes and missiles. Finally, there is, of course, nuclear weapons. I do not mean to discount certain important chemical and pharmaceutical items which were certainly important. The war saw the development of synthetic rubber, liquid and gas fuels from coal, and the widespread use of sulfa drugs to save the wounded. Improvements in metallurgy and production machines and techniques are worthy of mention. Many would say that the art of the management of technological development itself had its origins in this time as well. Certainly, knowing how to conduct these large projects is a significant factor in itself.

Accompanying the major developments mentioned above was the deployment of millions of people from one part of the world to another. Military operations led to thousands of ships and thousands of airplanes loaded with troops and support personnel who were seeing new parts of the world for the first time. While most of these people returned home after the war, the pattern of movement thus begun would change the expectations and habits of a major fraction of those who had been exposed to it. The world thus produced a generation of people who developed a global perspective and whose thoughts would forever after be conditioned by knowledge of cultures beyond their native soil. The most obvious manifestation of this new world view is provided by a visit to a modern international airport. There you will see airplanes bearing the insignia of a hundred airlines from a hundred countries. In less than 24 hours time, you can fly from any one of those countries to any other country on the globe.

The technology which has made such travel possible is, perhaps surprisingly, telecommunications. Telecommunications' early impact on radar, in which Arthur C. Clarke played an important role, brought us the ability to measure time to a millionth of a second and to detect electrical signals at power levels of millionths of watts. Communications research also led to the transistor which has made possible the ubiquitous transistor radio, communications satellites, desk-top computers of immense capabilities, solar-powered microwave links, remote-controlled TVs, garage door openers and a thousand other devices of more or less importance. It has led to navigation systems which permit our jet airplanes to fly for thousands of miles with pinpoint accuracy and, if necessary, make automatic landings on fog-shrouded airports.

Aerospace research has led to the development of airplanes which can fly 8,000 miles on one tank of fuel, to engines which can operate for thousands of hours and millions of miles before needing an overhaul . It has led to rockets which can lift satellites to geosynchronous orbit 22,230 miles above the earth and guidance systems which can position them in that orbit to an accuracy of a mile or so. Arthur Clarke, who first wrote about the feasibility of worldwide communications through three stationary satellites above the earth's equator, could expect it would be a long time before we could support people in space to repair those satellites when their transmitters, receivers and power supplies failed. He could expect it would take at least as long to develop rockets powerful enough to lift massive satellites so high in the sky. But only 3 years after he wrote about his magnificent idea, scientists at Bell Telephone Laboratories invented the transistor.

The transistor is one of the most important inventions in world history. The microcircuits which have grown out of it have brought us into the Information Age and we are still only 40 years away from that first enabling invention. The transistor permitted the development of a communications satellite so small that it could be lifted into orbit by the rockets available shortly after the end of World War II. The transistor made the satellite so reliable that it could operate for years without repair and thus it became economically feasible to build a worldwide communications system based on such satellites.

Hundreds of satellites have been launched in the last 30 years. Their lives have been stretched from about 1 year to an average closer to 15 years. Their capacities have grown from handling about a hundred conversations simultaneously through a satellite weighing about a hundred pounds to handling about a hundred thousand simultaneous conversations through a satellite weighing about 2 tons. The satellite and its launch now costs about 10 times as much but has a thousand times more capacity than its early ancestors. Since it lives much longer it is overall more than one thousand times more cost-effective.

As an indication of how pervasive satellite technology has become and how accessible it is on a worldwide basis, a recollection of an event we held at COMSAT way back in 1985 is instructive. That was the 20th anniversary of the beginning of INTELSAT's commercial satellite service through the Early Bird satellite (and the 40th anniversary of Arthur Clarke's first paper on geostationary satellites). For this occasion, we assembled a worldwide cast of participants. In addition to congratulatory messages brought in by satellite from heads of government in Washington, London, Rome and Bern, we had Arthur on line from Colombo, Sri Lanka, and Jacques Cousteau from Paris and questions from audiences assembled in Bonn, Stockholm and Madrid. This was a graphic and broad-scale use of video conferencing expanded to a dimension not employed up to that time, but which today is commonplace. It was just one more example of worldwide communications which INTELSAT now engages in every day and, in fact, provides a level that is perhaps a hundred times more complex when it supports the distribution of video programming for the Olympics so that 3-billion people can watch in over 100 countries.

How important is this technology? In economic terms, it involves hundreds of billions of dollars per year, but since it is impossible to draw adequate demarcation lines around it, it is impossible to measure accurately. But it is possible to describe its effects on society. Not all its effects are positive, but it is our responsibility to devise proper ways to use technology. The technology itself has no moral content.

The technology I have been concerned with here is used to move tangible and intangible things. High value items can be moved by aircraft over long distances as well as short distances. As we all know, it is not economical to move heavy material by air. Things like food, fuel, fertilizer, and most raw materials like textile fibers, lumber, steel, etc., are moved by ship or barge, by rail or truck. Only things like pharmaceuticals, instruments express mail or packages can afford to go by air. In other words, hi-tech products can afford hi-tech transportation. People also need transportation and fortunately, hi-tech transportation for people is affordable because it is productive. Travel by air is typically cheaper than any other means if the journey is several thousand miles long, and if the person's time is considered to have value. One of the highest value items in the United States is express mail. In addition to the U.S. Post Office which handles a good deal of mail of this type, there are several private companies which share a multi-billion dollar annual market by promising overnight delivery anywhere in the continental U.S.A.

The electronic equivalent of mail delivery is the telephone / data / fax / telex / radio / TV system. Here high value communications information is instantaneously transmitted and processed as necessary to suit the users' needs or desires. This information is moved by a system of satellites, microwave links, coaxial and fiber optic cable and broadcast stations. Let's particularly focus on communications satellites.

As we all know, satellite communications developed in an unusual way. First we spanned the oceans and created the worldwide INTELSAT network in time to bring pictures of man walking on the moon to 6 continents. Only a few penguins and Antarctic explorers were denied the possibility of seeing this historic accomplishment. After that, we explored the applications of satellites to domestic communications. It may seem backwards to the normal order of development but the higher value service was at the international level and the stifled demand for telecommunications, particularly television relay, was clearly across the oceans.

In the early seventies, four satellite systems came into being for domestic use, three in the U.S. and one in Canada. The Canadian need was obvious in that Canada has vast reaches of territory that are under-populated with no roads, telephones, etc. A satellite is the only economic way to contact many such users and communities. In the U.S., we at COMSAT put up a system and rented it to AT&T and GTE. Although they had very little use for it initially, they still paid the rent. RCA and Western Union hoped for message services to occupy their capacity, but they both lost millions until something new developed unexpectedly. Cable television, which began by providing a half dozen local TV channels, began to offer their viewers pictures from everywhere. Suddenly, people wanted to have access to everything. Satellites were soon overloaded with traffic which had not been anticipated. Now the typical cable company, of which there were about 4,000, provides its subscribers with from 36 to 100 channels, most of which are brought in by satellite. This example illustrates yet again the inability of planners to foresee the future - if indeed any example is needed.

It is impossible to estimate the value of the services on the world's communications' systems except to say that it exceeds several hundred billion dollars per year. These systems have become so ubiquitous that they have changed the way people live their lives. Millions of people in the U.S. make their living operating such systems. Hundreds of millions of people interact with these systems for several hours each day. Their impact cannot even be comprehended, much less measured accurately.

The effects of such systems on people's lives are profound. In more and more countries, most of what people know is based on what they see on television. This means that whole populations can be made wise -- or misled - by what they are exposed to by relatively small numbers of people in key positions in a few TV studios. In the U.S., there is no government management of TV or radio, so there is essentially no control other than marketplace control of what is transmitted. There are several thousand radio stations and a somewhat smaller number of TV stations. Much of the programming originates from about 10 or so networks. Perhaps 80-90 percent of what is broadcast is of the nature of entertainment. The rest has some news or educational value. In addition to commercial radio and TV, there are about 300 public radio stations and another 300 public TV stations. Public radio and public television have a higher educational content. They attract perhaps 10 percent of the typical audience. These stations are all fed by satellite and these networks exchange programs among themselves. They have developed a good reputation for providing educational material of excellent quality, some of which is produced originally in other countries.

While the electronic media and data processing systems contribute greatly to the economy and to the efficiency of business in general, there has not been anything approaching a corresponding increase in the utility of these systems for raising the educational level of the general population. Perhaps this is an area of use where the Third World can show the West how the electronic media can be used to fulfill its true potential. Bringing this about requires a large increase in motivation - perhaps by application of both the carrot and the stick. How do you get people to want to learn from the radio or the TV screen? Motivation can be supplied if we can show a connection between learning and one's job progression, or higher pay or self-satisfaction. It can be supplied by TV being a passport to new opportunities and the opening of new vistas.

The possibilities are actually almost limitless. Even if one examines just the Asia-Pacific region there are dozens or rich examples from which to choose.

The INSAT satellite which was designed by the Indian Space Research Organization and built in the U.S. by Ford Aerospace (now Loral) for India had a high educational rationale behind it. India first experimented nearly twenty years ago with a NASA experimental satellite, ATS-6, which was moved into position near India and was used to feed certain educational material under a program called Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE) to rural audiences. It was judged such a success that India established a permanent program of satellite education of which the INSAT satellite is the first component. INSAT has in many ways exceeded its own expectations. Yet it has developed in very different ways than originally intended, especially when compared to the SITE experiment. The INSAT satellite is a multipurpose device which handles communications (telephones) and television broadcasts as well as weather surveillance. Originally it was assumed that the system would be used also to broadcast educational TV. As it has developed, television covers its own costs through commercial advertising and generates a profit for the television authority, DOORDARSHAN. Business use of the telephone capacity has also grown markedly, and so the economic objectives of INSAT have been quickly surpassed. What will take a number of years more to answer is whether it can fill its educational role for the most remote Indian villages.

At a conference held in New York City in 1986 on the subject of Telecommunications for Development, which was sponsored by INTELSAT and New York University. Bella Mody of Michigan State University, talked about INSAT. She is a native of India who did early preparatory work on INSAT.

Space agency pioneers, according to Ms. Mody, were not able to foresee how their concept of a satellite-based education system would be affected by political and economic forces in the country, since the technology has been employed for causes quite distinct from their original purposes. Seventy percent of the country now has access to INSAT and thus is exposed to political and commercial ideas propagated events network. India's film industry is now producing video material for television. The classroom material produced for the primary school enrichment programs is transmitted in the morning school house. University programs are not yet available in any quantity since India wants to develop its own indigenous programs. Programs from U.S. public television have been made available through the India-U.S. Subcommittee on Education and Culture. We will all be interested to see how far the INSAT system will go in achieving its original educational goals for both primary and advanced classes.

In general, INSAT should be very happy about its success. Delays in developing educational material which will inspire school children are not unexpected. We in the U.S. have had similar disappointments. University level material is easier to come by because university students provide their own motivation. They are watching the TV screen because they want to improve themselves. Such programs in the U.S. have at least two decades of success behind them. India can find thousands of examples of good material either in the U.S., the U.K., or elsewhere although, admittedly, it is better to use material showing local teachers in action as was the case when the SITE program was conducted in 1975. Perhaps INSAT's major success has been the unusual speed with which the Indians have developed a wide television distribution and telephone system. INSAT has been further exploited by the Indian scientific defense and official telephony because of difference in the terrestrial telephone network. India has come to recognize that INSAT is now only an important educational tool but a major development instrument for the whole country. Regular nationwide news and entertainment are advancing several national goals, including getting all regions of the country to use and understand the Hindi language.

Some people might say "We provide the satellite system to others to decide what use to make of it." That is the position which we, the technicians of the space age, frequently take. We like to think that what we have wrought is at worst benign, at best of untold value. Those of us in satellite communications speak of its value in creating the global village, in bringing mankind closer together in mutual understanding, common knowledge and awareness of our common heritage as citizens of Planet Earth. Arthur Clarke has called this result, the global family.

But the utopia of world-understanding is not yet with us. The political boundaries which are not visible from space are all too apparent on earth. Try as we will to understand each other better, we still find large numbers of people who are easy to hate. If you're a pessimist, there is much to be pessimistic about. But if you're an optimist, it is best to make improved communications a vehicle for better relations among men, knowing that good communication is essential to economic well being, to educational development and to medical treatment and health. There are thousands of examples of advanced communications systems helping in the fields of education and health. Let's examine a few of the most revealing cases.

Recently a medical colleague requested advice on how to connect a doctor in Pakistan to medical experts in the U.S. on cardiac problems. X-ray pictures and cardiograms from Pakistan were to be analyzed by U.S. specialists in the shortest possible time. I was able to put them in touch with people at INTELSAT and PSSC (Public Service Satellite Consortium) who had already had experience with this exact problem. The technology is relatively easy; the bureaucratic issues may be more of a challenge.

I am sure that INTELSAT is one of the best known names around the world, so I'd like to mention the INTELSAT Project SHARE.

Working with the International Institute of Communications in London, INTELSAT has recently set up Project SHARE (Satellites for Health and Rural Education) to stimulate the use of satellites. INTELSAT is providing free satellite time to dozens of users for pilot projects around the world, including teleconferences where doctors in Miami are linked to 3,500 physicians in Latin America for lectures on pediatrics. Another example has involved diagnosis in Canada for heart patients in Uganda and Kenya for 7 hours a day and then the operation is shifted to connect Canada with the Caribbean region. The experiment has been so popular that it is being continued for a third year.

Project SHARE has also had a hand in bringing the advantages of satellite photography or remote sensing to people around the world.

Landsat data have been collected over much of the globe for the last 15 years. Landsat was an experimental program of NASA to see what use could be made of photographs of the earth taken from 500 miles up. Over a period of time, many useful examples of its value were accumulated, including:

1. Studies of snow buildup in the Rocky Mountains enabling predictions of water volume to be expected in the Spring thaw;
2. Mineral prospecting by studying outcroppings in mountainous areas, including oil prospecting;
3. Urban development and demographic buildup;
4. Water pollution;
5. Crop growth and insect/blight damage; and many others.

Many of these uses, while valuable, lead to benefits which are hard to measure in dollars, or which may provide benefit to a smaller group of users than desired. Having spent about $100 million per year for 15 years, the U.S. government has declared the experiment a success and ready for commercial exploitation. It turned the program over to the Department of Commerce to administer, which in turn is paying a company called FOSAT millions of dollars to make Landsat a commercial success. Each year, Congress has appropriated money at the last minute to keep Landsat going, indicating that there is lack of confidence that it can ever be a commercial success.

There is good reason for a lack of confidence about the U.S. program, especially now that the SPOT satellite has been put into operation by the French. This is a counterpart to the U.S. attempt at commercialization of this activity, called EOSAT, and this venture is called SPOT IMAGE. The two earth sensing systems are splitting what is already a small market. It seems likely that neither EOSAT nor SPOT IMAGE can make a commercial success in the next few years. They will both continue as long as the two governments provide sufficient subsidy to them. (Note: As of 1992 SPOT continues to operate on a global basis while the future operation of U.S. earth observation services is in doubt.)

Because of their value, at least one such system must survive, but the U.S. government is already impatient about continuing to fund Landsat. The same fate could overtake the French SPOT, although it probably has a few more years of grace.

The long-term solution may be to form an international consortium of national entities that will own and operate these systems. We have the successful examples of INTELSAT, INMARSAT, and EUTELSAT which were formed this way, to carry out tasks judged to be valuable by their founding members. They have all been successful. One reason they have succeeded is that their owners saw fit to use them and all owners were committed to success. Although EOSAT's and SPOT IMAGE's customers have some vested interest in their success, I doubt if it can be measured in dollars. If there were a hundred governments who saw it in their interest to have an international system succeed, it would succeed. Those governments would need to buy on the average of $1 million in visual and imaging products each year. Since the large ones would have legitimate needs of $5-10 million, many smaller countries could buy less than $1 million in products.

Such a system would have many intangible benefits such as establishing regional centers for training local people in the use of the data, building in-country receiving stations and allowing the development of small businesses to market the data to specialized customers.

Perhaps the Arthur Clarke Center can play a key role in seeing that the advantages of remote sensing systems such as Landsat continue to be available through some sort of international arrangement. A system such as Landsat could lead to confidence-building between neighboring states as they shared data on crops, droughts, infestations, and even military threats. In time, the system could be an important factor in promoting world peace.

Recently here was a conference in Washington, D.C. sponsored by The Office of Technology Assessment, a unit of the U.S. Congress. This conference was on the role of satellites in newsgathering. Today we are accustomed to seeing interviews with reporters and newsmakers in far-off lands, all of this relayed via satellite by INTELSAT.

We are not accustomed, however, to seeing images taken by satellite of the news event itself. The conference was sparked by the use of both Landsat and SPOT to look at the damaged nuclear reactor at Chernobyl. The Soviets for their own reasons were slow in revealing the extent of the damage and whether the fires were still raging in the thousand-ton reactor graphite core. Some useful data were obtained by satellite. The access by satellite probably also encouraged the Soviets to release additional information, since it became obvious that they could not indefinitely delay our access to news of what was taking place.

The conference reached the conclusion that it would be a long time before news organizations could afford to put up and manage their own news-gathering satellites, but it was also our opinion that there would be an increasing role for satellites in news gathering in the next few years, especially if such satellites develop the ability to take higher quality pictures. Since the military already has access to data at least an order of magnitude better than what we saw from SPOT and Landsat, it is likely that such technology will gradually feed into civil systems. This could be one more benefit of space technology.

In addition to the major benefits which we receive from satellite communications, space technology also gives us accurate navigation systems, views of world-wide weather developments, the many examples cited under Landsat above, close-up views of planets and comets of our solar system, and new information about sources of energy beyond our solar system. Space systems also give us warning of military buildups in unfriendly places.

Another topic that intrigues me very much is the International Space Year (ISY). In 1986, the Congress passed and the President and NASA endorsed a proposal to designate 1992 (the 500th anniversary of Columbus' first voyage to America) as International Space Year or ISY - to be patterned after the IGY (International Geophysical Year of 35 years ago). We can expect the ISY to attract considerably more attention than the very successful IGY because there is already a large and articulate space community. COSPAR< ICSU and IAF and other scientific organizations have already established ISY committees. ISY promises to be an exciting and extraordinary development and many joint international projects are already taking shape. We expect that ISY can form a framework within which many international projects such as the exploration of Mars, in which both the Soviet Union and the United States have major exploratory projects, can engage in significant data exchange. Each such project will include contributions by many nations. It is expected that all space-funding nations, especially the U.S. and U.S.S.R. will gain much from these basic projects and from the data exchanges which ISY will encourage.

Another international effort that deserves support from us all is called Global Change. The term refers to what is happening worldwide because of the population growth and depletion of natural resources. Dramatic changes in the earth's atmosphere are cause for concern. Decreases in parts of the ozone layer, increases in carbon monoxide, methane and nitrous oxide are all important and potentially disastrous for people everywhere. The only reasonable way to measure these effects is from space by satellite, supplemented of course by measurements from the ground. We must mount a full-scale effort to follow what is happening to our environment. We must put the world's scientific talent and our knowledge to work to explore the complexities of Earth and find a way to maintain the health of the planet. This is a major international challenge in which we all have a large stake.

The U.S. National Academy of Sciences is now participating in the broader efforts of the International Council of Scientific Unions, along with similar organizations elsewhere.

Space activities can be a great force for peace, bringing together nations to save the world rather than to split it apart. Perhaps the Arthur Clarke Center can also find a role involving coordination of ISY projects in various countries in the Indian Ocean Region.

Clearly there are a number of ways that space and communications technology can have practical consequences not only in the industrialized countries but everywhere.

Just as satellite communications can end the isolation of countries one from another, so can space activities lead to an appreciation of the interdependence of us all. No one who went to the moon during the Apollo days came back unchanged. All who saw the beautiful blue sphere Earth hanging alone in space had a mystical experience. In the book of Genesis, in the story of Creation, we read "And God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day."

The astronauts concluded from their vantage point in space "that what was made" was indeed good. Space technology offers us a golden opportunity to understand our world infinitely better. How we use our mastery of technology will determine the value of our legacy to the generations that follow us. Let us use our knowledge to their advantage and to ours as well.

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