Arthur C. Clarke Lectures

University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka 1987

Space Enough For All

John R. Pierce
Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics
Stanford University

It is a great honor to be in this wonderful country of Sri Lanka, and with Arthur Clarke on his seventieth birthday. Arthur has commented admirably on the technological challenges and problems that face the world, and conjectured wisely what may lie in our future. That is what this presentation is about, although it is not easy to even attempt to duplicate Arthur's wisdom.

For the thirty-five years of my sojourn at Bell Telephone Laboratories we worked, at one time or another, on vacuum tubes, microwave radio, guided waves (including optical fibers), switching, mathematic and statistics, behavioral research (including experimental psychology, speech and hearing), and economics. We became involved in a greater or lesser degree with all of these, including, of course, satellite communication through my work on Echo and Telstar. Though my chief interests have changed, one tries to keep in touch with many things that were once followed more closely. Serving as chief technologist at Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory from 1979 through 1982 kept me in touch with matters concerning space.

Today as a senior researcher at Stanford University's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, referred to as CCRMA, but pronounced karma, my work seems to have come full circle to a happy destiny of trying to interrelate complex thoughts and technologies.

My presence at CCRMA is no accident. In 1957, while at Bell Laboratories, Max Mathews first used the computer to produce complex musical sounds. This was fascinating to everyone at the Laboratories who followed these developments very closely, including myself. Today, work in "computer music" is pursued in hundreds of research laboratories, including Pierre Boulez's marvelous IRCAM in Paris, a part of the Centre Pompidou.

CCRMA is among the leading computer music research centers in the world and certainly one of the biggest. There are today at this Center eleven senior staff members, more than forty graduate students, and visitors from many lands.

Some of the inhabitants of CCRMA are musicians who compose music to be played by the computer or by conventional instruments or both. Some are electrical engineers or computer scientists who are interested in new methods of sound generation. Some are chiefly interested in various aspects of musical acoustics.

CCRMA's director, John Chowning, is a composer. He became aware of early work on computer music at Bell Laboratories. Since he founded CCRMA some fifteen years ago, he has contributed much both to musical acoustics and to digital sound generation. His invention of "fm synthesis" led to Yamaha's DX7 digital synthesizer and to the other excellent synthesizers and digital audio equipment that Yamaha produces.

Digital sound synthesis is of growing importance in a world in which traditional measures of musical activity are declining. The number of musicians working in American TV and films has declined in the last decade. The number of pianos sold has dropped even more precipitately. This does not mean less musical activity.

The number of digital keyboards sold in America rose from 400,000 in 1983 to 1,800,000 in 1986, and sales are growing. Digital synthesis enables a user to be at once composer, instrument maker and performer. While digital synthesis has not convincingly imitated an orchestra, it has produced varied and useful sounds, including many striking sounds that cannot be generated in any other way. Composers use synthesizers to produce effective music for films. Just listen to the scores of some recent American movies.

Although computer music is a fascinating technology, so too is the wondrous field of computers, space, and communication. There are indeed ways that these areas of study overlap and may some day reinforce one another in unexpected ways.

Space, computers, and communication also have a particular interest for me. Perhaps reading science fiction as a youth was in part responsible for this. Early writers of science fiction and a few present writers, including Arthur Clarke, have dealt, not with fantasy, but with advances which might be possible and with plausible effects of such advances on humans and their world.

Two persistent themes of such science fiction have been thinking machines, called robots or androids, and manned space flight.

The monster that Dr. Frankenstein created in Mary Shelley's novel was biological in structure. Today's biotechnology produces what may be the most complex man-made, or rather, man-tailored, systems. However, our biotechnology is far from synthesizing thinking creatures from chemical elements. Today's computers are the most complex machines that men have produced entirely from man-made components. Our complex computers are a long way from the robots of early science fiction. Nonetheless, researchers in artificial intelligence, commonly referred to as AI, have spent many years in trying to make computers imitate human performance. They make computers play human games, perceive and analyze simple pictures, recognize and interpret human speech, and do a host of other tasks in which human beings exercise their intelligence.

The computer is very different from the human brain and nervous system in both structure and performance, just as a jet plane is different from a sparrow. The sparrow can do many things that a jet cannot, but a jet can fly faster and farther. The jet has had a tremendous impact on our world. Researchers in AI perhaps denigrate the computer when they try to make it perform tasks at which it is not very good. This is a little like asking that a jet plane land on the twig of a tree.

The computer has outperformed human beings from its very beginning. Indeed, that is what it was made to do. It adds, subtracts, multiplies and divides far faster and more accurately that a person can. This is both wonderful and useful.

Beyond carrying out numerical calculations, today's computers can manipulate complicated mathematical expressions. In performing a very long mathematical manipulation, a man is almost certain to make mistakes and arrive at a false result. The computer is both fast and accurate. It outperforms man.

In taking advantage of the speed and accuracy of computers, programmers have written computer code which embodies both scientific and engineering knowledge, and algorithms for arriving at answers based on such knowledge. Today there is computer code for designing structures, for solving problems in aerodynamics and in plasma physics. There is code useful for analyzing the results of experiments with genetic material and in exploring plausible genetic modifications.

Beyond this, a color-coded stereo display of an organic molecule enables a researcher to "see" the spatial structure of the molecule. Possible folded configurations or a long strand of a molecule can be summoned up, and possible sites for adding side chains can be visualized.

The power of the computer in visualizing and analyzing has also had a revolutionary affect in the design of a host of structures, including buildings, automobile bodies, machine tools, and bottles to hold soft drinks. The designer can store data describing a structure, and the computer can show drawings of the structure as seen from various directions. The computer can calculate weight and strength. In some cases the computer will generate instructions for computer-controlled processes, instructions that will result in the actual fabrication of the final design.

CAD /CAM, the acronym for computer design and manufacture, is not a dream. It is an industrial reality. Not all industrial processes involve the computer in every step, but computers are involved in many steps, including the control of simple-minded robots which carry auto parts to the proper positions along the assembly line, and robots that weld parts together, and robots that paint finished bodies.

Other computers are used in the clerical side of industry in ordering, in inventories, in sales, and in accounting. And, digital processors and memory, parts of computers, if you will, are used in consumer goods to monitor or control performance and sometimes to give synthetic voice warnings or messages to product users. Computers are an even more integral part of the communication networks that pass messages from person to person, or from person to computer, or from computer to computer.

All of this is very far from the imitation human beings of early science fiction. Fictional androids or robots were often inferior to human beings in performance, rather than superior to human beings, as our computers are. Such androids or robots were general-purpose devices. Even our "general purpose" computers are special-purpose devices, and some of our computers serve very special purposes indeed.

We use a computer to do something better than we can, or faster than we can. Sometimes we use a computer to do something that we cannot even hope to do, at least, not in any practical way. This may be responding to complicated stimuli faster than we can think. It may be solving a tremendously tedious mathematical problem faster than we can. It may be pointing the camera aboard an earth-observation satellite in a very precise way, avoiding the tremors to which the steadiest hand is subject, avoiding the tremors that any living thing aboard a satellite would cause in the satellite's attitude.

We see that the powerful computers that have become essential in our life are far different from the mechanical or biological or electrical models given to us by the writers of early science fiction. So, too, our exploitation of space has been far different from the manned exploration, or colonization, or war that most science fiction would have led us to expect.

The question thus is one of whether our actions or our dreams of the past set a precedent for what we will or should be in the future. Should we be guided in our exploitation of space by a past discovery here on earth of a "new world" in an unsuccessful search for the Indies? Should we be guided by the exploitation of the wealth of that world, or by its colonization and the exploitation of its inhabitants? Is even the manned exploration of polar regions a precedent for sending men into space?

Man's dreams of the past have been a stimulus in the conquest of space. Wehrner von Braun and his colleagues,. Hearts set on sending men into space, devised a new and powerful weapon, the guided missile. They could scarcely have foreseen its hazard when coupled with nuclear weapons.

Arthur Clarke has noted that the launching of humans and their artifacts into space came sooner than he expected. He has suggested that in some sense it may have come prematurely, before we had a technology capable of realizing at a reasonable cost what people had expected of space flight. May it not be that we expected the wrong things? Does not new technological conquest bring new goals?

Just at the time when space flight became practical, the computer and sensing and control technologies became more competent than people for many tasks. A person may be better than a computer for driving through traffic, but a computer is better for guiding and operating a spacecraft - to meet our purpose, of course. The rocket was necessary for the exploration of space. The solid-state technology which developed almost simultaneously - a little later, perhaps - has vastly extended what we can make an unmanned spacecraft do.

The old dream of exploration was realized magnificently through the Apollo program. Astronauts set foot on the Moon. They walked and rode over its surface. They brought samples of its substance back to Earth.

Apollo was certainly worthwhile. We learned much from Apollo, including the prodigious cost of launching spacecraft that can take humans into space and provide for their needs. We have learned much also from unmanned exploration and utilization of space.

One thing that we have learned is the hostility of space to man. This is not merely a matter of providing breathable air, avoiding radiation, supplying edible food, and disposing of their wastes.

In some science fiction stories, old but wealthy people migrate to space in order to lengthen their lives by freeing themselves from the ill-effects of gravity. Actual gravity-free experience appears to lead to circulatory problems, bone loss, atrophy of muscles, space anemia, and motion sickness. All of these could be avoided through centrifugal force in the Orbiter Hilton, but not in most of the designs for manned space stations and manned space vehicles that are planned today.

Earth is in general more hostile to machines than to men. By using what we now consider low technology, men have survived in the polar north and the hot equatorial regions of our planet, on land and on sea. Space has proven a benign environment for machines. Serious damage to spacecraft is rare. The radiation damage done in 1962 to some electronic circuits in the Telstar satellite was caused by an American high-altitude nuclear test.

On Earth, machines are adversely affected by wind, rain, and dust. The salt of the sea corrodes man-made materials. Complicated computer installations operate reliably only when protected from undue heat or cold. Electrical power installations and complex electronics can be damaged by lightning.

In space, well-designed communication satellites last so long that most are obsolete in terms of capacity before they become inoperative. In 1986, 9 years after its launch in 1977, Voyager II sent back marvelous photographs of Uranus, and in 1989 in its encounter with Neptune it performed even more spectacularly. We now will have an instrumental and photographic report on that far planet which seemed just a few decades ago to be an unattainable distance away.

In order to produce adequate photographs of Uranus, its rings, and its moons, the computers of Voyager II had to be "repaired" in space. Some cells in the electronic memory had become inoperative and were bypassed. A new mode of picture taking was programmed into the computer, so that the spaceship rotated a little to keep the image steady during long exposures in the dim light of the distant sun.

This is not the only example of changing an unmanned spacecraft after launching it. The two Viking spacecraft, launched in 1975, reached Mars in 1976. The Viking orbiters circled that planet, taking pictures, and the Viking landers took extensive pictures and made extensive tests of a limited part of the surface of Mars.

The Viking orbiters represent human space exploration activities at its best. During the 90-day schedule of intense lander activity, a thousand-man team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory controlled the orbiters as well as the landers. This flight team dropped to 450 for an extended mission, originally to terminate in February 1979. There were further drops in personnel, to 170 for a Viking continuation mission, to l00, ultimately, to less than 25 people. Yet, the operation of the orbiters improved. In all, they sent back over 50,000 photographs and mapped 97 percent of the surface of Mars.

The response to drastic drops in manpower was to construct the first robot ever built in space. Responses to exploratory signals sent from Earth showed that the orbiter circuits that sent various "housekeeping" data to earth could be made to send this data to the on-board computer. The computer was programmed from earth to process these signals and control the orbiter's attitude, switch between star-tracking and inertial guidance, recover from tracking false light sources, turn some instruments off to maintain essential operations where the solar panels were in the shadow of Mars, and control the charging of the batteries by the solar panels.

This robot operation of the orbiters not only decreased the number of Earth personnel needed for continued operation, the robot operation proved to be far better than controlling the orbiters from Earth. Because of the leaking gas valve, Orbiter 2 failed on July 25, 1978 - almost three years after launch. Orbiter 1 ran out of gas on August 1, 1980, five years after launch and over four years after first orbiting Mars.

New technologies may give humans prolonged and healthful access to space both for exploration and exploitation of its resources. In meantime, before this new technology arrives, much can be gained through unmanned exploration and exploitation. The cost of exploration is certainly not prohibitive. Exploitation may pay for itself, as in satellite communication. Or, it may be an acceptable social cost, like mapping the nation or of gathering weather data.

What is holding back exploration? In the United States and many other countries as well, two major barriers exist: lack of launch vehicles, and lack of funds.

In 1981 a knowledgeable scientist and engineer predicted that in "five years there will be no lack of vehicles." Even great prophets can be wrong. Through governmental, or perhaps political, intent, the American Space Shuttle became the country's only launching resource. After the Challenger disaster, there were a few leftover expendable launch vehicles.

Today, American scientific satellites simply wait on the ground, missing launch windows and deteriorating with time. The American government reneged entirely on its commitment to launch communication satellites, and launches must be largely carried out on the Ariane, or on Soviet or Chinese boosters. Today "commercial versions" of old or modified U.S. military vehicles are becoming available but this is in many ways a matter of too little and too late.

It is only recently that there has been any acknowledgment that the Shuttle had proven to be a costly vehicle for launching unmanned spacecraft. It could operate only by subsidy and in the absence of competition. The competition was easily eliminated, because expendable launch vehicles were funded by the same government that insisted that the Shuttle displace expendable launchers.

Those whose launches had come to depend on the Shuttle were loath to criticize it publicly. The news media had come to identify the Space Transportation System with Man in Space. The challenger disaster was treated largely as an opportunity for investigation and finger pointing, rather than as an instance of mistaken policy. Many still believe that NASA can receive adequate funding only through the glamour of putting astronauts in space. Perhaps in the United States this belief is justified. If that is true, the next few decades of space exploration will come largely through other nations, or perhaps from American military exploitation of space.

My direct association with space has been chiefly through communication satellites. Talks on space given shortly after World War II were drawn largely from science fiction sources. Dreaming of space did not mean one had to take "real" space exploration very seriously.

At that time the Bell Laboratories was a part of the Bell or AT&T System. The Bell System provided almost all telephone service in the United States, and Video and Teletype and other communication services as well. In those days the mission of the Research Department was to provide for a great nation the telecommunications of the future. This involved looking far ahead in many recondite fields of mathematics, physics, chemistry, and materials, as well as in other fields. All this was aimed at some very long-range stuff. We tried to devise, conceive, and support some guessed-at or hoped-for future telecommunications. We thought very farsightedly for both the United States and for the rest of the world. We did think as far as the Orbiter Hilton since we relied on Arthur C. Clarke for the truly visionary.

In connection with the production of 2001, Arthur Clarke asked for help in outfitting the Orbiter Hilton with Bell logos and equipment. The public relations department of AT&T was immediately consulted on the thought that they would jump at this opportunity. They didn't. They said, maybe when 2001 finally rolls around things won't turn out just as Clarke and Kubrick predicted. Won't that make the Bell System look foolish? It turned out not to be a problem. Long before 2001, and in fact in 1984, the U.S. Federal Court abolished the Bell System and its mission of providing a national telecommunications service.

Incidentally, Arthur received at least some of the things he needed. But, AT&T always took itself very seriously in those days. At the Princeton section of the Institute of Radio Engineers in 1954, my topic was about the future potential of unmanned communication satellites, which seemed to have a real relevance to the Bell Laboratories, the Bell System, and to its mission of providing telecommunications in the future. Colleagues questioned whether this was perhaps space fantasy rather than space science and suggested that less controversial subjects would be more appropriate.

During the next few years there was little practical to be done about satellites. The launching of Sputnik in 1957 changed this. When asked for reactions about the launching of Sputnik, I said I felt like a writer of murder mysteries who went home and found a corpse in his living room.

Soon there was an American satellite. Friends at Bell Labs quickly rallied to satellite communication. Hence, Bell Laboratories gave birth to Echo's role as a passive communications device in 1960, and Telstar in 1962. Echo was NASA's satellite. Bell Labs built the east-coast Earth station at Andover, Maine. The echo satellite would not have been launched by NASA if my Bell Labs had not pushed for it. Telstar was entirely a Bell System undertaking, except for the launch vehicle, and the Bell System paid for that.

In 1962, the Bell System was legislated out of international satellite communications except as a minority stock holder when the U.S. Congress formed Comsat. The Hughes Aircraft Company, almost in parallel with AT&T, at the instigation of Harold Rosen, built Syncom the first synchronous communication satellite. After one misfire, NASA launched Syncom II in 1963. Then in 1965, Early Bird, or Intelsat I, which, closely resembling its Syncom prototype, was launched, and commercial satellite communication became a reality - as a part of international telecommunications.

Arthur Clarke has described the impact of satellite communication far more eloquently than anyone else. To me, satellites are one part of a global network. In countries such as the United States, their market share in long-distance telephony has risen and fallen. They are ideal for distributing one signal to many locations, as in TV and publishing. For much of the world, and especially for areas of low population density and for nations made up of many islands, they are the only practical means of national communication.

Satellite communication advanced much more rapidly than had expected, but mobile satellite communication has come more slowly than initially expected. INMARSAT now links ships. Satellite links to aircraft, and even to automobiles are beginning to be planned and implemented but more slowly than some had forecast. It is not clear what is delaying mobile satellite service, whether it is lack of attention, lack of funds and research, or fundamental problems. New low orbit satellite systems give great promise to the future in this area.

Clarke speaks of satellites as creating a global village, where anyone on our planet can communicate with anyone else. For this, we will need fiber optics as well as satellites. The traffic within areas such as Europe, Japan, and the United States cannot be handled by satellites alone. And, the faster transmission of Earthbound or undersea light guides without some 270 milliseconds of transmission delay is a definite advantage in some uses including voice and computer networking.

The true question, however, is the following: If free universal person-to-person communications were available today, would we live in a global village? Would the economic, social, cultural, language, and political barriers go away just because communications at no cost were available? What would people have to say to one another who had little in common?

Clarke's own world is very close to a global village, for he knows people everywhere, and satellites and other means of communication enable him to talk to them by telephone. In truth, only a limited number of "villagers" know a large number of people afar. Most people who live in a developed country and have international business connections limit their outreach to some international calls across the continent and use electronic mail to send text over that distance. These occasional uses of international telecommunications are still a very long way from reaching out to a "global village" through electronic technology.

What of people who don't know any others in foreign lands? How are they to become part of a global village? Sometimes, contacts can be made through memberships in international societies and clubs. Sometimes even random meetings with tourists will lead to increased interconnectedness. A number will even want very particular information concerning a particular field of study or line of business or even knowledge about a certain environment. These will be rare. Further, the small group who would like to reach out and learn from other people and societies may lack the skill to know how to connect. The concept of a global village is very appealing but it is still far away. This is not due to our technologies but because of the gaps in knowledge, culture and language that separate us.

Some information is particular and well organized in our advance electronic culture. Businesses have communication networks that span large portions of the globe. They not only talk with people in other countries; they transmit records and data from company files. International airlines are only one example.

There are thousands of computer-accessible data bases in a host of fields, legal, technical and other. In principle, a great deal of data is available to anyone in the United States or to anyone in the world who has the skills and financial resources to access it. Does this mean that any person with any terminal can access all of this computer-accessible data? The answer is obviously no.

First, you have to find out what accessible databases exist. Various companies will sell you lists. Of course, there is usually a charge for use, besides the cost of transmitting the information. Beyond this, there are rules for addressing a particular data base, what you have to type on your keyboard, and details for searching the database, that differ from database to database.

For some areas of data, you can subscribe to a service that will search all pertinent databases available to it and send you a printout of the result. If you choose an unwise set of inclusions and exclusions in searching for relevant abstracts of technical papers, you may get either more or less than you want. Recently, a researcher at Stanford interested in tuning in the sense of "just or equal temperament" was deluged by abstracts concerning tuning pianos. He hadn't excluded piano in his search criteria.

We are far from that system of the future in which a Console will give access to all our world's information. Certainly a person who wishes to avoid being drowned in a sea of computer print-outs would not even wish such a thing. And, will all that one wants to know ever be stored in an accessible form? Is the equivalent of a Global Brain even a good idea?

In our day-to-day lives, we find that we need practical advice in choosing a doctor, or a place to eat, or in learning about municipal regulations concerning keeping pets, and about thousands of other such things. Further, what is practical advice? That depends on our wealth and expertise. Perhaps these will be more nearly uniform in the future - a boon to the designers of whatever the Consoles are ultimately called.

Data bases and data-base systems are woven more and more deeply and widely into government, industry and academia. They are an important but sometimes an uneasy part of our lives.

We cannot travel on data. Communication and transportation have revolutionized our world. Never before has it been so easy to keep in touch with one another. Never before has the first-hand knowledge that comes from travel been so widely dispersed among populations.

In part, there is more travel because air travel is cheap. Even more important, air travel is fast. People with short vacations that are too short to cross oceans by ship can fly to the corners of our world. They could not so fly unless they had fast and sure communication as well as sure navigation and airport traffic control. Here satellites may be as revolutionary as in communication.

At present, we have radio navigational aids and inertial guidance. At airports, traffic control makes use of radar and transponders. Would satellite systems such as Navstar be superior in air traffic control?

Suppose that Navstar (also called GPL, Global Positioning System) were fully implemented, going to a full complement of 24 satellites. Cheap receivers aboard airplanes could give their positions to within a few tens of meters, and their vector velocities as well. Air traffic control stations could interrogate equipment aboard planes, and find positions and vector velocities much more quickly and accurately than by radar.

This idea was proposed by a team headed by Bradford Parkinson in 1973. Is there something wrong with it? Or, does the sheer inertia of organized activities preclude it?

Although our primary topic of discussion was to have been space communication, space navigation has begun to intrude as well. We could also speak of other things, of satellites for gathering information, information about weather, about military installations, about crops, about urban areas, about the state of the seas. Along with computers and communication, satellites and space weave themselves into a host of the world's activities that affect us very directly.

Though favorable orbital positions for synchronous communication satellites are limited, space is huge, and mostly empty. There is space for unmanned exploration and for colonization, and these will be attempted some day. Technology and the funds and organization necessary for the exploration and exploitation of space will at times be limited, but not space itself. We need to understand that the combination of computer, electronics, and space applications are only beginning to be understood and that the synergy that we find in computer music can be found everywhere. The linkages of space communications with transportation, navigation, education, health, and commerce are rich and potentially exponential in their growth and development.

There is space enough for us all.

References:

Arthur C. Clarke, the works of. Particularly, The View from Serendip, Random House, 1967; 1984 Spring, Ballentine Books,1984; and Ascent to Orbit, John Wiley and Sons, 1984.

John R. Pierce, The Science of Musical Sound, Scientific Books, 1984.

Hiroshi Inose and John P. Pierce, Information Technology and Civilization, W. H. Freeman, 1984.

Edward Hutchings, Jr. The Autonomous Viking, SCIENCE, 18 Feb. 1983, vol. 219, pp 803-808.

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