100 Centuries Ahead

According to the Club of Rome's highly pessimistic and widely quoted report, The Limits to Growth, mankind faces worldwide famine, pollution and fuel shortages within the next century. More recently, less apocalyptic prophets like Economist Robert Heilbroner have taken a dim view of man's future. To British Science Writer Adrian Berry, tomorrow is not all that bleak. In a forthcoming book, The Next Ten Thousand Years (Saturday Review Press/E.P. Button; $8.95), Berry boldly predicts that technology will confound the prophets of doomsday. What is more, he says, mankind will eventually reach out to tap the resources of the entire solar system and, ultimately, the far reaches of the galaxy.

For Berry, the Apollo moon landings and the Skylab missions are only the first small steps. He predicts that by the next century, attempts will be made to establish lunar bases--perhaps as astronomical observatories unhampered by the earth's obscuring atmosphere. Mining and other industrial activities will soon follow. Eventually there may be "low-gravity" lunar hospitals, where ailing limbs and organs would be under less strain than on the earth.

Colonizing Venus. But mankind's increasing needs will soon take him beyond the moon to the nearby planets. Even Venus, with a surface temperature of nearly 1,000DEG F. and a thick atmosphere consisting largely of carbon dioxide, will not, says Berry, intimidate 21st century scientists. He notes that there is already a proposal to inject into the atmosphere of Venus hardy algae that feed on carbon dioxide. This would liberate oxygen, let heat escape from the planet's surface, and cause condensed water vapor to fall as rain. Oceans would form, plants could take root and grow, and Venus would be ready for colonizers from earth.

Later, before Venus becomes too crowded, earthlings might begin to build space cities--at first in orbit around the earth, then around the sun, perhaps using the minerals of the asteroid belt. But soon, even these resources will be exhausted, and the solution may well be to dismantle the giant planet Jupiter. How? Berry recalls a mind-boggling scheme to speed up Jupiter's rotation enough to tear off chunks of the planet; they would then be assembled in a thick band in orbit around the sun. The debris would reflect useful solar energy back toward earth and could also be used for human settlement.

For every problem he foresees, Berry has a glib but imaginative solution. He is convinced that if Homo sapiens could travel the long road from the first primitive experiments with agriculture to industrialization and space travel in less than 10,000 years, a comparable advance can surely be made during the next 100 centuries.

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