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Crazy Ideas [Editorial]Crazy Ideas [Editorial] Ben Bova ========== During the

height of the American involvement in Vietnam, when President Lyndon Johnson

had sent half a million American troops to South Vietnam and enough bombs

were being dropped to make that whole nation resemble the bottom of a

shake-and-bake bag, Senator Barry Goldwater reminded an audience of his

ill-fated 1964 campaign. “Remember me?” he asked his listeners. “I’m the nut

who wanted to send the Army into Southeast Asia and bomb Hanoi.” Ideas that

are first considered eccentric, unacceptable, or even crazy have a way of

becoming commonplace, sooner or later. One of the causes of Future Shock is

that nowadays, the crazy ideas become Standard Operating Procedure sooner,

rather than later. Back when I was a lad (a sure sign of advancing, age, that

phrase) nothing was crazier than wanting to fly to the MOON. Well, maybe

there were a few things crazier than that: atomic power, death rays,

artificial hearts, thinking machines, airplanes that could fly as fast as

four hundred miles per hour. Now they’re all as normal and as American as

pizza pie. Science fiction, abounds with crazy ideas. Not too long ago, in

Analog, Wade Curtis suggested that coastal cities could have plenty of fresh

water practically free, if they would just arrange to have an iceberg towed

to their shorelines. The average iceberg represents enough fresh water to

last a fair-sized city for months. Crazy idea. But the US Army’s Cold Regions

Research and Engineering Laboratory, in New Hampshire, in harness with the US

Geological Survey’s Ic£ Dynamics Project at the University of Puget Sound,

Washington, has produced a report that shows maybe it isn’t so crazy after

all. The two authors of the study are Wilford F. Weeks, Army, and William J.

Campbell, USGS. They concluded that a ship with approximately two-thirds the

propulsive power of the carrier Enterprise could tow from Antarctica to

Australia or southern South America an iceberg thai would be big enough to

irrigate six thousand square miles of land. Such an iceberg would be worth

more than one billion dollars. The cost of water from a large, modern

desalination plant is estimated to be about 19 cents per cubic meter (264.2

gallons). The price of fresh water from the melting iceberg would be 0.8

cents, they calculated. Crazy idea. And, of course, it is only in

science-fiction stories that you find spacecraft that go faster than light,

that utilize crazy things like space warps to get around the light-speed

barrier. It’s also the science-fiction “nuts” who talk about alternate

universes and other dimensions of space/time as if they really

existed. ========== Well now… astrophysicists have gone ga-ga over black

holes, the potholes in space left when very massive stars or whole galaxies

collapse. Theorists have speculated that the collapsing star might actually

dig a “wormhole” through space/time and emerge else-where/elsewhen in the

universe as a white hole—and perhaps that’s what the quasars are. Sounds

suspiciously like a space warp to me! Those wormhole tunnels might be just

the thing for starships to use as shortcuts from one part of the universe to

another. And, in fact, we’ve already had science-fiction stories in which

“collapsar” space warps are purposely made by human scientists and engineers,

who can’t poke around looking for natural wormholes when they’re in a hurry

to take a shortcut to Betelgeuse. And the theoretiker physicists are also

muttering to each other, not about the possibility of alternate universes,

but about the absolute necessity of postulating them, in order to save the

foundations of physical theory! Seems that the uncertainty principles of

modern physics lead to an unpleasant paradox. Theoretical considerations tell

us that for any given decision-point in the universe—say, whether or not

you’ll blink your eyes before you finish this phrase—there’s a fifty-fifty

chance for the decision to go either way. Yet in our real world, you either

go a hundred percent one way or a hundred percent the other. You either blink

your eyes or you don’t. There must be, the theoreticians conclude, a universe

in which the other decision holds true. For every decision-point in this

universe, there is an alternate universe in which the decision went the other

way. There must be googols of universes! Some exactly like ours, right up

until a moment ago; others that branched off ages ago, when the dinosaurs

became intelligent (for example). Crazy. The stuff of science fiction. Except

that it’s been discussed in the highest circles of theoretical

physics. Science-fiction writers come up with all sorts of weird ideas. Many

of them—such as the negative income tax—they borrow from the “straight”

world. Others, such as an international struggle over the natural resources

of the oceans, they make up out of whole cloth-only to have the “straight”

world borrow it from them. One science-fiction idea that seems definitely on

its way to reality is the universal credit card, and the eventual elimination

of cash money. However, anyone who’s tried to argue with a computer-smug

credit card organization can testify that the day of the credit-card-economy

won’t dawn until both the machines and the people get a lot smarter. It’s

chilling to hear a pleasant-voiced young lady ask, over the phone, for your

card number so that she can check out the discrepancy in your bill that

you’re complaining about, and then have her come back saying, “Ah yes, here’s

your file, Mr. Pagropoulis…” In fact, one of the more frightening predictions

of science fiction‘ is that our society is moving toward more centralization,

more bureaucracy, more impersonal machine-dictated handling of my

life. There’s no fundamental reason why this should be so, except perhaps some

of the ramifications of Parkinson’s Law. ========== Parkinson’s Law, simply

put, is: Work expands to fill the time allowed for it. And one of the subtler

results of this universal law is the burgeoning of bureaucracies. If one man

decides he can only get a raise by becoming the boss of two other men, he

will scheme and wheedle and cajole until he gets a couple of men to do the

work he originally did alone. His time will be spent “supervising” his two

assistants. And since they are now sharing the work their boss formerly did,

it stands to reason that neither of them can be as productive as their

boss. This kind of frightening built-in mediocrity can be found in .business

firms, government agencies, universities, even churches: wherever large

numbers of people gather to work together. The fact, that they are frequently

working against each other helps to explain why the output of bureaucracies

is so low. What can be done about this? A science-fictionist’s , answer might

be deceptively simple: replace the bureaucrats with computers, and leave only

a few brilliant and dedicated men and women at the top of the organization to

run the computers. After all, the archetypical bureaucrat is simply a person

who “goes by the book” at all times—that is, he follows his original

programming. And he resists, with every ounce of passion he can muster, any

attempt to change the programming. “A computer can follow the program better

than a human, and it can be reprogrammed rather simply. At worst, you’d have

to pull out some circuit boards and interior wiring, which is done much more

easily to a machine than to a human being. But this kind of simplistic cure

is one of those crazy ideas for which the world is not yet ready. For one

thing, the bureaucrats themselves would never allow it. Unless, of course,

things were arranged so that the number of computer routines a bureaucrat had

cognizance over was just as important—or more so—than the number of

assistants he or she could pile up. But bureaucracies are, by virtually every

test, a form of living organism. They eat, grow, breed, resist change. It may

well be that “the first—and only!—immortal creature on this planet is the.

bureaucracy that began in the ancient Roman Republic and survives today

within the Catholic Church. The only way a bureaucracy can continue to exist,

though, is if there is no way to measure its performance. How many souls has

the Catholic Church brought salvation to? There is no way to tell; the Church

may be doing a splendid job. But no one on this side of heaven can

objectively state that this is so. So—perhaps the only way to change a

moribund bureaucracy into a dynamic force for human achievement is to find

some way to measure objectively the bureaucracy’s performance. How do you

know if your local school board is doing an effective job? It should be

possible to test the students on their reading skills, and compare the

results to the national average or some other agreed-upon standard of

excellence. If the kids don’t measure up, then neither do the members of the

board. Get rid of ‘em! How can a corporation president tell if his public

relations department is performing adequately? One way would be to give the

whole department a six-month vacation with pay, and see what happens to

profits. In most corporations, profits will rise slightly, because the

day-to-day costs of expense-account lunches and typewriter ribbons will not

be incurred for six months. ========== A modicum of thought will show myriads

of ways in which even the most impenetrable bureaucracy can be thrown into

the cold light of objective, rational examination. Perhaps the biggest and

most dangerous bureaucracies are the political ones—the government agencies

that consume tax money and produce little but aggravation. These are more

firmly entrenched than most bureaucracies, thanks to the Civil Service

regulations that were originally set up to safeguard honest workers against

the rampant politics of the spoils system. “The place to start reforming the

political machinery is at the top— with the politicians themselves. The basic

problem with most politicians is that they are convinced that the most

important thing in life is for them to be re-elected. So we must dissuade

them of that belief. We have already dissuaded the occupant of the White

House from believing that he has a chance to be re-elected more than once.

The Twenty-second Amendment to the Constitution limits the President to no

more than two terms in office. Might it not be a reasonable idea to extend

this concept throughout the root and branch of our political system? Why

should anyone-serve twenty terms in the Congress? Is, this nation so poor in

talent that“ certain men must grow into their dotage in political office? Why

not make it mandatory that no officeholder can serve more than two

terms? This is bound to produce a “get up or get out” syndrome among

politicians. Instead of working for re-election to the same office, they’ll

be struggling manfully (or womanfully, as the case may be) to get elected to

a higher office. There’s more prestige, it pays better, and the opportunities

for graft will be larger—if’that’s the kind of politician we’re talking

about. But this motivating force might work out to the benefit of the

taxpayer. The politician might actually have to accomplish something that

pleases the voters before he can seriously consider himself a candidate for

higher office. After all, there are four hundred and thirty-five Congressmen

in the US House of Representatives, and only a hundred Senators in the Upper

Chamber. If a Representative were limited to two terms and wanted to move up

to a Senator’s seat, he just might be tempted to be an effective

Representative. Crazy idea, of course. It would never work. But if it were

tried, it would have to be installed in parallel with another, even crazier

idea: universal public service. The root problem of American politics is that

most Americans don’t work at it. Most of us vote, and we don’t even do that

as intelligently as we should—particularly in local elections. But if we are

ever to break up the governmental bureaucracies that surround us at the

local, state, and Federal levels, then we must all of us be willing to put a

few years of our lives into public service. Everyone in the nation could be

drafted at age eighteen, man or woman, no exceptions except physical or

mental incapacity. This would provide an army of workers who would serve in

the governmental agencies for two years each. Everyone in the nation could be

drafted again at age forty, with more lenient exemptions (possibly) to

provide a corps of leaders for the youngsters. Many Americans are finding

that they want to change their life-style at about age forty; a year or so in

public service would be a good chance to review their lives, see where

they’ve been and where they’d like to go. And it would be good for the

community, the state, the nation. When each of us realizes that he or she is

going to devote a few years of service to the community, then we might begin

to demand higher standards of performance from our governmental agencies and

our elected representatives. It’s only when the inner workings of the

organization are laid bare that we can reasonably understand what can and

cannot be accomplished. But that’s just one of those crazy science-fictional

ideas. It’ll never work. It’s just as silly as expecting a President as

“hard” on Communism as Richard Nixon to visit Peking. THE EDITOR

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