• In the year 2525,
• If man is still alive,
• If woman can survive,
• They may find....
• —"In the Year 2525", Zager & Evans, 1969

They may find...what? What might America's Finest City be like in the year, say, 2994 - 1000 years from now? If you shrug and say "Who knows?" then you are in the company of even the most informed speculators. If you say "Who cares?" the answer is scientists, futurologists, and science fiction writers. If it's possible to predict what life in these parts will be like 300,000 days from now, give or take 50,000, we might begin by consulting with those San Diegans who are well paid to dream about just such things: David Brin, Vernor Vinge, Phillip Harris, and Mark O. Martin, to name a few.

Forty-two-year-old David Brin is one the most famous writers in the science fiction world. Multiple winner of the field's highest honors, the Hugo and the Nebula awards, Brin also has a Ph.D. in physics from USCD. His bestselling novels include Sundiver, Startide Rising, The Uplift War, The Postman, and most recently Glory Season, a novel set in the distant future, some 1000 years from now.

"The first thing you should always do," Brin says by phone from his hoe near Rancho Santa Fe, "when talking about the future is look at history. That gives us perspective on where we've been so that we can begin to talk about where we're going and hope to make sense.

"What was San Diego like in the year 994? It was a somewhat dry land occupied by native American people who in their wildest dreams couldn't have imagined what the landscape would look like in 1000 years. This is not to disparage the dreams of native peoples, which can be extremely vivid and profoundly meaningful. It's just that our dreams are based upon what we know. It's very difficult, speaking as a science fiction author, to spin fantasies and dreams about the complete unknown. Generally we deal with things that at least have some metaphorical basis in what we've seen.

"This is not to say that science fiction never discusses vast time scales like 1000 years. My novel Glory Season is set well over 1000 years from now. We can come up with all sorts of possibilities, but all of them will be bases on the premise that humanity has done a large fraction of what can be done. We now know a large percentage of the things that have to be known. It that's true, then 1000 years from now, things may be the way you see them in some science fiction stories of Asimov and Clarke: glitzier, faster, more high-tech, but recognizably, the same sort of society."

At this point I mention Clarke's famous observation that any sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic. "In other words, if we already know most of what we're going to know as a species, would the technology of 1000 years from now be recognizable as technology and not a surreal or magical reality?"

"Well," Brin pauses for a long moment. "Recognizable to whom?"

"To us. Someone alive today."

"That's my point. Some people contend that we have learned a substantial fraction of the laws of nature. Evidence indicates that they are right. And that there are limits to how much more power and leverage we can acquire. It appears we have reached at least a plateau in physics, for instance. Our knowledge of physics is burgeoning, but we seem to have a high percentage of the facts now. The discoveries in physics of the '20's, '30's and '40's is driving our current high-tech boom. But there is reason to believe that these discoveries are not going to continue flowing at anywhere near the same rate for the simple reason that we know, now, how the world works."

"Really?" I have to ask. "We do?"

"Yes." Brin answers evenly. "That is not to say that I would not be thrilled to be surprised. The science that is undergoing a fantastic boom today, opening up possibilities that stretch beyond the imagination, is biology. Which is why, despite my physics background, most of my fiction deals with biological themes.

"It is in biology and to a very large extent in San Diego County that latter-day Plancks and Einsteins are establishing the basis for the science that will drive our economy in the next century.

"I try to imaging biology offering our lives as much leverage, for good or ill, as physics did earlier in the century through the gasoline engine, the airplane, electronics, and the atomic bomb. It's in biology that I expect the future not to resemble the past."

"What," I venture "about nanotechnology? Or is that still too much like magic to discuss seriously?"

Brin pauses again, sighs; possibly it is a groan. "Well, in fact the most profound uses of nanotechnology will be in biology. Nanotechnology is, basically, the use of ultra-small machinery to accomplish human goals. Electronics today is changing all the rules of human existence, and it only deals with the shuttling around of electrons in the form of information. What nanotechnology promises is the ability to make machines that make copies of themselves and proceed to, en masse, labor at our command.

"The short-term possibilities are machines we might set loose in our bloodstreams to clear away arteriosclerotic plaque."

"Would these be machines, literally, or really organisms?"

Brin answers quickly, "At first, the question would have an easy answer. It would be machines. But as time goes on, we would find it advantageous to give them more and more of the attributes of living organisms. And that's where some of the frightening stories, the dire warnings in recent science fiction come in. Even those who pooh-pooh the dire warnings are glad to hear them if they are wise. Dire warnings are how we avoid our worst mistakes. The most powerful form of science fiction has always been the self-preventing prophecy. If we avoid destroying the ozone layer or falling into a ruinous greenhouse effect, part of the credit will go to scientists and wise leaders and part to those who have spun scary stories about what the world might be like if we remain complacent."

Brin is well known for his optimism, but he himself finds this "bizarre, because I don't consider myself an optimist. People paint me with that broad brush just because I happen to believe there's a 60 percent chance that our descendants will inherit a glorious civilization in 100 years or so. That's not optimistic, because I believe there is a 40 percent chance that we will leave them hell on earth. To me, that's horrifying. To me, those 60-40 odds are just barely enough to make it worthwhile having kids."

As for San Diego, specifically, it seems there are at least a couple of things we could know for sure. "What about the constellations? Would the configuration of stars in our night sky look substantially different 1000 years from now?"

"Well, the earth's rotational axis shifts every 20,000 years or so in a circular pattern called nutation. You remember the song, `This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius'? Well, about 2000 years ago there was a great deal of hysteria in the northern Mediterranean concerning the shift of the sun's ecliptic, the shift of the vernal equinox from one constellation to another. This gave rise to certain cults, among them the cult of Mithras. The Emperor Constantine was a devoted follower. The so-called Age of Aquarius is the first of these next astrological shifts. It happens slowly, there is no one year when this happens.

"Don't get the wrong idea, I'm an astronomer, not an astrologer - but 1000 years isn't enough for the next shift. It takes about 2000 years [for the sun's ecliptic] to shift from one constellation to another. As far as the actual shape of the constellations go? No, no, no. There won't be any appreciable difference.

"Getting back to your original question, I would state it this way; If we are still human in a recognizable way, what will our city be like? First off, you must ask Vernor Vinge about his theory of The Singularity, which is basically, a point in time when all rules change. We are approaching a point where either we will become gods or be the parents of gods in the form of our machines.

"Other than that, there is very little of importance or significance that will take place, and we have very little choice in the matter. Our powers of computation, modeling, and productivity will make San Diego in the future as impossible for us to imagine today as it would have been 1000 years ago. One could picture a landscape where floating castles and unicorns are mere toys and playthings for the very young. A world where spaceships or starships and mile-high skyscrapers are the sorts of things played with by those who are impoverished of imagination, those who wish to slum in the poor metaphors of their ancestors.

"At the opposite extreme, we could see a San Diego that looks very much like it did 1000 years ago. A dry, sunny wasteland crawled upon by primitive tribes scratching among the stumps of their ancestor's towers.

"There's something very interesting that Joseph Campbell never pointed out in his famous conversations with Bill Moyers, and that is that every civilization except ours seems to have had a central myth about a Golden Age in the past. A past where people were better, closer to the gods, were more knowledgeable and ethical, and that we fell from grace because of hubris, our arrogance. It's an almost universal myth, and we now understand the reason for this myth, based upon human psychology, the imposter syndrome. Our grandparents never ceased to repeat to us how much better things were in the old days.

"The irony is that there is absolutely no evidence in the archaeological record that such a Golden Age ever existed. [The myth} appears to have emerged in every culture in response to human psychology. Ours is the first such civilization that does not have such a myth. To us, we did not fall from grace. To us, if there is a grace to be found, it is in the future. If there is utopia, it is not to be found in the past, but as a product of our hard labors and the benefit is for our grandchildren. We are unique in this way; we are the only people with a forward-looking world view."

When Brin says "we," who is he speaking of, specifically? "I'm talking about `we' as in Western civilization and specifically California. I sometimes call it California Culture, because California is the distillation of this world view."

"Timothy Leary would agree with you," I suggest.

"Of course he would. Now here is the ultimate irony. A thousand years from now, people will have myths of a Golden Age, and they will be thinking of us. Our descendants may well inherit a time of license, beauty, wonder, sanity, and wisdom. They will think back on a time when the world's fate hung in the balance, and good men and women made a difference at a critical moment. They will look back on us as having made that crucial, excruciating leap from selfish, high-tech savages to being true planetary caretakers. They might look back on us with wonder, far greater wonder than we look back on, say, Michelangelo's Florence.

"On the other hand if we blow it, the few descendants we do have will be chasing each other across a blasted wasteland, cracking each other's skulls and sucking marrow out of bones around a campfire. They'll be telling each other stories about a Golden Age long ago when men and women flew through the sky, had lightening at their fingertips, knowledge of the universe, and the wisdom of gods - then blew it because of their arrogance."

• In the year 3535
• Ain't gonna need to tell the truth
• Ain't gonna tell no lies
• Everything you think, do or say
• Is in the pill you took today.

Mark O. Martin, a Ph.D. from Stanford University in biological sciences (specializing in molecular genetics), lives in Clairemont and has just completed a novella, sharing a byline with famous science fictioneer Gregory Benford. The novella, entitled A Darker Geometry, is due out from Baen Books in 1994. The microbiologist turned sci-fi writer takes an enthusiastic stab at the question of San Diego's future.

"A thousand years," muses Martin, well dressed, dark haired, mustached and bespectacled. He dips a tuna roll into soy sauce and wasabe in a Kearny Mesa noodle house. "That's what Benford would call a `deep time.' Well, look at what has happened in the past 1000 years. Whole religions have sprung up and died, industrial revolutions.... Take a person from 1893 and dump them down in Grand Central Station or put them in the middle of the Watts riot or explain the Watts Towers to him, for that matter. It would make no sense. Everything's changes in the space of 100 years.

"What most science fiction writers and futurists - which are really SF writers without a license - tend to do is take present trends and exaggerate them. An example is in Asimov's Foundation series. Now Asimov grew up in New York. I don't think he left Manhattan very much at all. His version of Trantor, a fictional planet in that series, was a world completely covered with metal. Even he knew it was impossible to cover a world with pavement and metal, but that was kind of an inflamed version of his own world.

"On the other side you've got George Stewart's 1950's novel Earth Abides, where a plague has destroyed civilization. There is a wonderful scene where the protagonist is watching these people, only 25 years after the onset of the plague, in this bucolic, noble savage lifestyle - and they're pounding pennies into arrowheads, which is a lovely image.

"I think the other thing you have to keep in mind, too, when you're talking about a cityscape is that archaeologists have learned a lot about the past by digging just a very few feet. People tend to rebuild upon the old city. A thousand years? There are cities that have been inhabited for that long and we've learned a lot from studying them.

"The important point I want to bring up here is that 1000 years from now, you've got your choice. Either it's going to be fairly utopian or it will be an absolute dystopia. I really don't think there's going to be anything in between unless civilization crashes and burns and builds itself back up again.

"I think a lot about this. One of my favorite images is... wouldn't it be wild? - a couple million years from now, some archaeologist with 14 fingers and eyes on stalks finds, like, fossilized flashbulbs and fossilized Kotex applicators. He'd probably write a whole thesis on what a tampon applicator is; its religious significance with a re-creation of the altar where it was used...hey, seriously!"

What about the changes David Brin spoke of that will be brought about by biological sciences?

"Prior to 1900 we had — you can call it the Century of Physics, but it was really the Century of Physics, but it was really the Century of Mechanics. The idea of the Industrial Revolution, which was not complicated, was a matter of precise machine tools. Then we had a certain degree of chemistry where we would actually use our knowledge to make fertilizer, the Haber process; a big deal. Remember, that's what the Germans were also using to make nerve gases in World War I. It completely changed the face of things, this emergence of an entire industry based on using chemistry to change one substance into another, Dyes, building materials, things of that nature.

Then in the '20s and '30s came the decades of physics. Nuclear power is the best example that changed the face of the world. The interesting thing is that writers, harking back to Willy Ley [rocket scientist] in the '50s — a visionary and unappreciated writer - along with, say, James Blish, talked about how biology could impact things.

"What I think is going to happen in the next century - you can call it the Green Century if you want — is, we're going to be harnessing biology to our will. What will prevent it are things essentially societal. For example, right now we can tell the sex of an unborn child, and it's getting to be quite a problem in India, where no one wants to have a girl child. That's real low-tech compared to what we're going to be able to do.

"Within the next 15 years, we will be able to cure many genetic diseases. If a parent was so inclined, unless the government prevents it from happening, we could even now give children a growth hormone to make your kids basketball players. Easy to do.

"What has always controlled technology is society. Science is not a separate, rampant entity. France's energy is 80 percent nuclear. The only thing preventing us from doing that is that we choose not to have it. So in a biological sense, we could be able to repair damage and select for traits... Right now, with what we already know, I could make dogs three times the size they normally are. I could make designer pets, but obviously the ASPCA would not let me do that.

"I could readily imagine taking insects - which are really kind of biological robots, very primitive in how they react and they're genetically controlled most of the time - like ants and genetically engineering them to harvest corn and defend the fields. This would be a very green technology. Obviously it's a lot better than pesticides.

"This kind of thing isn't new. Most of our crops are genetically engineered, but there are people who are still very Luddite in their attitude and think this is a bad thing."

While Martin finishes his sushi, I ask him, "If you were to take a wild guess, do you think San Diego would look very different physically 1000 years from now as a direct result of what we do in the biological sciences?"

"Yes," he nods. "You've got to keep in mind that San Diego doesn't look today the way it did 1000 years ago because of biology.: introduced plants and animals. But that was done unintentionally. We can repair or make modifications on any environment - if we want to. I'm sure there will be mistakes just as there normally are in nature."

What about nanotechnology and it's impact on biology — or the other way around?

"Nonotech is one of those bugaboos. I kind of get a kick out of it. Nanotechnology is the technology of devices that can move individual atoms around and construct new molecules. Now that is something that quite frankly, I don't think we can do. But if we do, all bets are off. We can do anything if we can do that. I can take this tabletop and make a sirloin steak out of it, okay?

"Have you talked with Vernor Vinge about his singularity theory? You really should. It fits in with all of this.

"Now the other form of what I call nanotech — you might want to call it microtech — is what individual enzymes do. Enzymes are the proteins that all organisms make. An example is photosynthesis. Photosynthesis is just a series of pigments that grab onto sunlight or any kind of light and transduce that energy to a protein that cleaves water into oxygen, then binds the hydrogen to a carbon to make a sugar. And that's a form of nanotechnology really, but one nature's been using for about four billion years. Nanotechnology will be much smaller than an organism - a bacterium or a virus, for example.

"I can see us having bacteria that are engineered to repair damage from a heart attack." Martin seems to echo Brin here. "And we'll be able to do this is 25, 30 years, but it won't be for everybody. It will be for the rich, okay? We'll be able to do a lot of things like that. So what you may end up with is something very much like what H.G. Wells wrote about in the The Time Machine, where you have this culture of people who have had things pretty much their way, living a life of ease and wonder - and everybody else doing the dirty work.

"We will have the capability in, say, 50 years - though we may not choose to exercise it - to make different types of people, people with gills, say. A thousand years from now the question could be, `What do you call human?' We could have people living in the ocean, people living in space - though the latter probably wouldn't have feet, maybe an extra set of hands..."

Martin now recites from one of the worst songs ever written, "In the Year 2525," "You pick your sons," Martin grins, "You pick your daughters too, from the bottom of a long glass tube... whoaoo whoaoo ... Remember that horrible song?"

• In the year 5555
• Your arms hang limp at your side
• Your legs got nothin' to do
• Some machine doin' that for you.

Phillip R. Harris, Ph.D., came to San Diego from New York in 1970 as a vice president of the Copley International Corporation. He is now president of his own consulting firm, Harris International, as well as a senior scientist for Netrologic, where he is a director for the Lunar/Solar Power System Coalition. A senior member of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, he is the author or editor of more than 30 books, the most famous being Managing Cultural Differences and Living and Working in Space. He has been both a NASA consultant and a faculty fellow at the California Space Institute.

"First of all, I think it's unrealistic to try to project 1000 years," he says. "Most professional futurists do forecasting for 10, 20, 30 years and sometimes 100 years. I think it would make more sense if you focus on the new millennium that begins in six years.

"The first point to make is that we are in the midst of a profound transition from the industrial work culture to a post-industrial work culture, what an AT&T study calls 'meta-industrial.' The shift if from production of things in factories and plants to the production of information and services. As we are affected more by layoffs and downsizing, we can see this profound shift to a new work culture locally, nationally, and internationally.

"I have identified about 10 characteristics of this new work culture. They include personnel with more autonomy as work units and also their subsidiaries. Also more communication and information resources; more participation by the workers and their supervisors in the process of running organizations; more informal, cooperative relationships among employees and associates; more creative, high-preforming norms and standards in the workplace; more automation and robotics... enhanced quality of work life...technical orientation...emphasis on research and development...a more entrepreneurial spirit.

"What I'm saying is that the workplace in San Diego is in transition, and these trends that I have identified will be very much evident and par for the course over the next 1000 years.

"The second thing I want to refer to is regionalism. Given the tax base, the constraints on budget, the restructuring that's going on in the public sector, we're finding that we can't afford the luxury of small government units that compete with one another. So you have this trend toward regionalism. Right now we have in its infancy here in San Diego something called SANDAG [San Diego Association of Governments], which is a kind of regional authority foe the various local governments and agencies. In this next period, I think it will be very evident that we're going to see San Diego city and county administration begin to be integrated. We can't really afford two forms of government that often compete and waste resources."

Harris is very active in working with regional governments and services, including POST (Police Officers Standards and Training) and the Heartland Commission for eight fire districts in this region, which is "primarily a communication authority to improve communication among the fire districts.

"The police have only honorary representation on this commission. Well, if you project into the future, I think you'll see this kind of commission emerging into something like a San Diego County Public Safety Commission or maybe Emergency Services Commission whereby all these public agencies within the county — police, fire, even lifeguards — would be sharing information, knowledge, and equipment. This is the way to go. That's one example of regionalization.

"Another arena of the future that I think we ought to recognize as emerging is that we are becoming here in San Diego, with Tijuana, a binational metropolitan center. We will become even more multicultural, which will be aided and abetted by this new NAFTA treaty. I suspect that as Mexico becomes more affluent and is freed from its Third World economic position into a First World economy, that we will have completely open borders like we do between the United States and Canada. We sometimes forget that Mexico is part of North America geographically, even though it is tied to Latin America culturally and languagewise.

"So I see North America, if you will, becoming an entity in terms of economic and social exchange, even though it may be operated politically by separate national governments. Now we don't know how long that will last. There have been future studies that have predicted the breakup of North American government systems as we now have it and see the West Coast government as one system, from Vancouver to Tijuana as one political entity. I don't have any strong observations on that, all I can sense is that we are going to have to become less provincial and less ethnocentric here in San Diego. More cosmopolitan, if you will, in our relations with Mexico in particular, but also other Pacific Rim countries.

"That brings me to my fourth prognosis, which is that San Diego will become a global health care, high-tech center particularly serving the Pacific Rim area. The direction at the moment is toward Los Angeles, but I think San Diego can be expected to play and increasingly important part in this larger role.

"When I came here in 1970, San Diego was described as a sleepy Navy town with very few corporate headquarters, and an expert was always somebody 50 miles away. This is certainly changing over the decades. The direction is clearly the internationalization of San Diego.

"The only other point I might mention is that our source of energy supply is going to change within the next 1000 years. Fossil fuels, of course, are not only running out, but they are causing too much harm in terms of the greenhouse effect and global warming. So we are going to definitely have to look for new alternative sources of energy, and we've already had some help from the State of California to look at windmills, solar power, etc.

"But there are some of us right here in San Diego who are examining the prospects for solar power from outer space. There are presently two systems. One is through orbiting satellites around the moon, which was developed by Peter Glaser of Cambridge, Massachusetts. And the other is lunar solar power.=, which would, through power beaming, bring solar energy from the moon to rectennas [rectifying antennas] on the earth or out in the ocean. That system was co-invented by two Californians, Robert Waldron and David Criswell. Dr Criswell and I were colleagues for a while at Cal State, and he is now in Houston, the director of Space Systems Operations. This alternative energy source has been determined to be feasible and financially viable. We have formed a Lunar/Solar Power System Coalition. It's an international coalition operated out of San Diego, and it has been undertaking an exchange with Russian energy scientists to engage in joint venture and research relevant to space-based energy.

"Just as San Diego in the early 20th Century became a leader in the aerospace industry, I predict that if its local people back the concept, we could become in the future the center for space-based energy."

Harris sees the role of nuclear , fission and fusion, which he finds promising, as taking place mostly in outer space. "Helium 3 can be mined on the moon and used in the nuclear fusion process. Nuclear fuel will probably power interplanetary travel just as we now use that power in nuclear submarines."

It is, then, certainly thinkable that San Diegans in the year 2994, whether in a utopia or dystopia, will look up at the very same constellations visible today. The only difference in the night sky might be the glow of photovoltaic array systems on the moon's surface or orbital reflectors in stationary, geosynchronous orbit around the earth - midway between luna and terra. Whether savages or gods, what else might be said for certain about what our children's children's grandchildren may find?

Geologists can take a fairly educated guess as to what our coastline will be like 1000 years from now. A millennium is less than the blink of an eye or a yawn in geological time, and the answer to that one is: Unless we insist on it, our coastline will look much the same as it does now. With the San Andres Fault moving us a few centimeters north every year, we may be ten feet farther from the equator than we are now, but that's about it.

One real difference, according to Douglas L. Inman, professor of oceanography and founding director of the Center for Coastal studies, is that for San Diegans within the next century, life may no longer be a beach. But that is pretty much up to us. By phone, Inamn speaks of "sea level rise. A thousand years from now, even at the present rate of sea level rise, we'll have two more meters of sea. Under normal conditions, the cliffs would retreat and the beaches would retreat with them. But with man's intervention, you have another problem. With all the property owners and so forth, all the people who live on these cliffs are going to try to hold the position.

"Well, if you hold the position - and it's possible, but not practical - then you lose all the beaches. You can't have a beach in two meters of water. In other words, if we try to hold the cliffs from retreating with deep sea walls and all the rest of it, we won't have beaches. So what's going to happen, of course," Inman chuckles at the thought. "is that there's going to be a range war between the property owners and the people who want beaches. You can't have both. I don't know what's going to happen, but that's what we're faced with."

If after the range wars of 2209 to 2211 have died down and no resultant devastation has occurred east of I-5, it seems worth asking, "What will San Diego's skyline look like 1000 years from now?" Will the term skyline have any meaning any longer? Will anything like a series of high, centrally situated structures still exist? Would anyone alive today recognize Old 'Dago?

Michael Stepner, assistant to the city manager for civic development and former official architect for the City of San Diego, says, "This is something I've given a lot of thought to. It's an interesting question. You can break it down to a 50-year time frame, 100 years, even 1000 years. If you look back on cities that exist today that also existed 1000 years ago, especially some European cities, and compare them to now, they've grown they've changed, but you still know what they were 1000 years ago. If you look at Rome today, you can still see the buildings of the Renaissance, the pre-Renaissance, the established street patterns that have established the basic character of Rome. Yet you have a lot of new development.

"On the other hand, if you look at cities like Singapore, you get that existing character that's been there, it seems like forever, but a lot of it now looks like - I don't know - Houston.

"I guess what I'm saying is we'll see new stuff and more intense development, but I still think you'll recognize the basic framework , the flavor, texture and fabric of what is here now."

Stepner mentions the film Blade Runner, set Los Angelos roughly 50 years in th future, but many science fiction fans and writers that i know if, "cyberpunks" one might loosely term them, do not consider the grimy, neon, high-tech chaos depicted in that film to be a futuristic projection at all. To them, it is a stylized snapshot of the present.

Ineluctably returning to the precincts of science fiction, it is time to follow both Brin's and Martin's advice and consult San Diego's own Vernor Vinge, professor of mathematics at San Diego State University and author of such speculative fiction milestones as The Witling, True Names and Other Dangers, The Peace War, Marooned in Real Time, and his 1992 Hugo Award-winning A Fire Upon the Deep.

When asked to describe his Theory of Singularity, Vinge is happy to oblige.

"The short version is that many science fiction writers and futurologists who are talking about 1000 or 3000 years in the future are really talking about things that will happen in the next 100 years or 50 years.

"For me, the only way the 1000-year scenario could be understandable would be if there were some rather mundane and unpleasant disasters that had occurred. It's easy to write science fiction stories where we've messed things up so badly or we've been messed up so badly that in the year 2994 you have some fairly interesting things that are intelligible going on. A Canticle for Leibowitz [famous 1959 science fiction novel by Walter M. Miller] has that kind of timescope. The world after such disasters — ecological, nuclear, plagues — actually might be interesting in various ways, but the optimistic — hah-hah — alternative is that technology continues to accelerate.

"To my mind, the critical issue there is, what aspect of the acceleration is the improvement of something we've never improved before?... And that is our capacity for invention.

"Actually, we have had methodological improvements in our capacity for invention; in fact, that's really what the Renaissance was all about. But we're applying technology now in a much more direct way that is leading to our increased capacity to invent. In fact, that's what makes us different than the animals. It's what has caused progress to go from an evolutionary time scale to the time scale humans now are used to.

"Basically, if the buffalo gets too cold, it can either move to where things are warmer or it and most of it's brothers and sisters can die, but the ones that live might have a slightly better coat. Natural selection operates at a rate that after a few hundred years you'll have buffaloes with thicker coats. I should give you a better example because I know buffaloes already have evolved the ability to grow thicker coats in response to cold weather, but you get the idea. Evolution is moving at a speed that compared to a Neanderthal or compared to a modern human of 20,000 years ago — we are moving about 1000 times faster today. If a human gets cold, we go out and kill a buffalo.

"So the thing there is, what would a speed-up of a factor of 1000 over our present inventive abilities be like? the fundamental issue here is, we're looking at a form of progress unlike what we've had before because it will give rise to, probably, beings that are much more creative. At that point, all your previous rules about progress are out the window. The human race as we know it is no longer the favored player.

"An example I like to use is that a science fiction writer like Mark Twain could have predicted television — maybe he did, at that — but a fish could not have predicted television. In the same vein,you could bring somebody like Mark Twain to the present, chat with him for an afternoon, show him some television. I think he would marvel, but I would think he would understand as much as you or I do, and that's not true with a fish."

Vinge mentions a book by Gunther Stent, a microbiologist from MIT. "It's a great little book called The Coming Golden Age: The End of Progress. His argument is essentially that unless we get something as radical as superhuman intelligence, we are going to see a leveling off of progress. He actually regards that happily.

"In fact, with the development in various regions, especially computers, it's very plausible that one of the aspects of progress is that — and this is the crux of the `singularity' argument, all the rest is window dressing — if we can make superhumanly intelligent entities, then you have The Singularity. Superhumanly intelligent entities would be driving progress at a rate that is intrinsically higher than we can keep up with.

"The word singularity in math and physics means you have a model that describes reality, and in certain sorts of circumstances the model breaks down. Often this is represented in the mathematics of the model by the term 1 over x. Well, the x goes to zero and the modeled quantity gets to be enormous. In real life things don't blow up to infinity when you reach a singularity. What happens is, you need a new model for the reality.

"I hear lots of people talking about various things called 'the singularity,' including things that bother me, like these apocalyptic notions. But the basic driving thing in my angle on it is the creation of superhumanly intelligent ... devices? ...people? ...whatever you want to call them. This will change the ground rules for everything in the same way that the rules changed when humanity showed up.

"This has already had a substantial effect on some of the 'hard science' fiction writers. This who really, truly try and conservatively predict the future. Well, unless you have a good war or something. if you try and predict 30 years or more into the future, you're clean out of things to talk about. Except that now, actually several of us science fiction writers have been working very hard — and I can point to works by myself, Greg Benford, and Ian Banks — to get an angle to get around it. One is the `Roaches in the Wall' angle."

"This," I ask Vinge, "presumably means humanity as the roaches? The walls being the walls of the world dominated by superintelligent devices or beings?"

"Exactly. We'll still be around, we'll still have our adventures. Hah-Hah! It's not as bad as being extinct, but it's certainly humbling. There are other versions besides the roaches in the wall; there is the `Jobs for the Blind' analogy., humanity as food for animals or pets. But I think all of these miss the point. In my article in Whole Earth Review, I suggest that these superhuman entities would not be like people with big heads." Vinge seems to be suggesting that these creations of ours, whether more machine than organic or vice versa, would eventually come to view the concerns of humanity or even its existence as irrelevant to their own pursuits.

Obviously Vinge finds this singularity quite possible, but how likely does he feel it is?

"Actually, I collect reasons why it can't happen. Partly because it's an extreme of optimism that makes me uneasy and partly because I regard it as damn near inevitable."

• In the year 7510
• If God's a-comin'
• He oughtta make it by then....