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FORECAST

                                    December 12, 2003      

My forecast is for another several decades of 
stormy discussions about Robert A. Heinlein.


The nature of Heinlein?

A wildcat.  Dozens of useless, crazy notions, but with an
occasional insight that stabs deep in a direction no one
else would've thought to go.

In _Expanded Universe_ he reels
off a half dozen ideas about              (That's in the discussion
alternate ways democracies could          of _Starship Troopers_)
be set up.

His early career, focusing on the dream
of space exploration probably did much                   
to develop public interest in the idea,  (After which it        
culminating with the Apollo program.     unfortunately lost     
                                         that interest.)        
                                                                
In his later career, when he wasn't                             
indulging in the empty absurdities                             
like "The World as Myth", he was
playing with fantasies of alternate
sexual relationships...

                                They rarely seem much             (Dec 8, 2017) 
                                more than just fantasies.     But I gather the  
                                                              younger Heinlein  
                                            (Nov 11, 2005)    got around a bit  
                                   But strangely enough,      on the West Coast.
                                   many people interested                         
                                   in "Polyamory" seem to                         
                                   have first encountered                         
  This is a fairly young           the idea in Heinlein.                            
  culture, with many gaps in                                                    
  our customs and institutions.        I need to see the                            
                                       film "The Lifestyle"                         
  Could a healthier,                   some time, to see if                          
  longer-lived Heinlein                they name drop                                
  have helped fill in                  Heinlein somewhere...                        
  some of the gaps?                                                                 
                                           STYLE_IMPAIRED                     
                                                                                   
                 I once attended a talk                                        
                 by Thomas Gold, where                                        
                 he was discussing some                                  
                 of the ideas published
                 in "Deep Hot Biosphere".    GOLD

                 He was making the point that forecasts
                 about future natural gas supplies have
                 been strikingly wrong: expert opinon
                 regularly predicts a drop off in the near
                 future.  He showed a graph with a series
                 of expert predictions, all showing sudden
                 cliffs that we never went over, with a
                 curve representing the actual natural gas
                 supply going across the top of the graph,
                 bouncing around a bit, but remarkably
                 level.

                 But there was one additional projection
                 on the graph that matched the actual
                 results fairly closely: a smooth line
                 extrapolated from the existing trend that
                 matched future trends, because it was
                 uncontaminated by any pre-conceptions
                 about the limited nature of "fossil"
                 fuels.

                    Gold said nothing
                    about this one line,
                    but it was clearly
                    labeled: "RAH".





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