Premature prophets: the lost tomorrows of space colonies and nanotech.

• Author: Doherty, Brian
• Position: 'The Visioneers: How a Group of Elite Scientists Pursued Space Colonies, Nanotechnologies, and a Limitless Future' - Book review

The Visioneers: How a Group of Elite Scientists Pursued Space Colonies, Nanotechnologies, and a Limitless Future, by W. Patrick McCray, Princeton University Press, 351 pages, $29.95

REMEMBER THE DREAMS of the late 20th century? Orbiting solar panels would beam down the planet's power supply. Machines on the moon would grind out raw materials and spit them into space to build space colonies and zero-gravity factories. Everything we wanted would be manufactured molecule by molecule, via contraptions smaller than the smallest objects we previously knew.

In The Visioneers, University of California at Santa Barbara historian W. Patrick McCray convincingly posits that the movements to plan and promote space colonization (which peaked in the late 1970s) and nanotechnology (biggest in the 1990s) were reactions to a cultural pall emanating from the elite Club of Rome and its notorious 1972 report The Limits to Growth. In that document, a gang of solons from MIT and the United Nations, funded by big corporate foundation bucks, got severe with us: Time to settle for less, folks. Fewer people, fewer resources, less growth, less excitement--a wrenching shift to a steady-state, gray world of knowing our place and keeping to it, tidying Earth in the process. Frontiers were out; boundaries were in.

Screw that, said the stars of McCray's tale. We can live, work, manufacture, and obtain power in space, and we can reshape the world from the atom up without fouling our nests.

McCray defines visioneers as people who not only imagine an exciting future but use "their training in science and engineering to undertake detailed designs and engineering studies" of that future. They "built communities and networks that connected their ideas to interested citizens, writers, politicians, and business leaders" The two key visioneers of his tale are Gerard O'Neill and Eric Drexler.

O'Neill, a physicist who had done innovative work with particle accelerators in the early 1960s, was a science fiction fan. By the end of the decade, he had become enamored with space and tried, but failed, to get a job at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Unencumbered by official space bureaucracy, O'Neill instead became a freelance astro-visionary while still teaching physics at Princeton. He began drawing up rigorous designs of orbiting space cities and hyping them in university lectures.

By 1974 O'Neill convinced the journal Physics Today to run a cover story on "colonies in space" and got Princeton to host a small conference on the topic (partly subsidized by the Point Foundation, which arose from Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog empire). That meeting got front-page New York Times coverage. Soon O'Neill was everywhere from 60 Minutes to...