Quotes from Gerard K. O'Neill

Don't regard yourself as a guardian of freedom unless you respect and preserve the rights of people you disagree with.

Here is my advice as we begin the century that will lead to 2081. First, guard the freedom of ideas at all costs. Be alert that dictators have always played on the natural human tendency to blame others and to oversimplify. And don't regard yourself as a guardian of freedom unless you respect and preserve the rights of people you disagree with to free, public, unhampered expression.

Yet all the projections confirm that SSPS plants built at a space manufacturing facility out of nonterrestrial materials should be able to undersell electricity produced by any alternative source here on Earth.

In a few moments the sign changed to the personal radio nickname of the car owner, and a little later it switched to a political slogan advocating the election of a candidate.

She showed me the controls for the stereo, the video, and the lights, and added that if I just spoke in a normal tone in any room the house computer would hear me and carry out my instructions. I wasn't at all sure I liked the idea that every word I spoke was being listened to, but it seemed to be the price of perfect service.

We grow avocados and papayas in our own garden and never need to use insecticide sprays. Of course we like being able to get a suntan without ever being bitten by a mosquito. To be free of those pests, it's worth it to go through the inspections before getting aboard the shuttle from Earth.

In areas of California, once regarded as highly desirable, overcrowding has become so bad that in a recent survey about a third of the Californians said they'd rather be living in some other state.

Each passenger was given a boarding card that was also a radio receiver, and all the announcements about particular shuttle or spaceship flights were made only to those passengers who had the corresponding receiver-cards.

During the past few years many nations have introduced population-control measures, enforced either by economic bribery (as in India, where the payment to a young man for undergoing an irreversible vasectomy is typically a quarter of a year's salary) or by social and governmental pressure (as in China, where early marriage is forbidden and where a third child is barred from receiving governmental welfare benefits).

it is clear that the early settlers in space will be exciting people: restless, inquiring, independent; quite possibly more hard-driving and possessed by more "creative discontent" than their kin in the Old World.

The venerable Walt Disney commercial empire had established around the turn of the century one of the largest "theme parks" in the country, on a bulldozed, reclaimed piece of New York City that had once been a slum.

With the advent of controlled-environment agriculture it had become nearly impossible for individual farm families to compete economically with the mass-production greenhouses, so in most of the United States it was relatively easy for a young couple to purchase an old farm property and cultivate the soil, not for cash crops, but simply to live independently.

It would be quite feasible to project materials from the Moon's surface down to Earth by means of electrically powered catapults or launching tracks," he wrote.

we'll have weather control by 2015,

But we do not yet have a computer and a program for it that together can interpret speech correctly, without uncertainties, when it is spoken at a normal rate.

At the present rate of technical development, electronic mail is probably no more than one or two decades away, so in the Tehaneys' world of 2081 it will have been taken for granted long since.

In NEWSPEAK, words like honor, justice, morality, democracy, science, and religion are eliminated entirely, being replaced by a single new word, CRIMETHINK,

It is the dull urban blight beyond them that is most likely to be bulldozed away in the next century, to be replaced by greenbelts, botanical parks,

At the other extreme, and far less threatening, will be the "house computer" of 2081. It will store all the information from all the books, musical recordings, and reminder notes that are now to be found in a well stocked home, and in addition, will filter the deluge of spoken, musical, and video information that will arrive every day at a typical home in that year, selecting and storing for later recall the information of interest to its owners.

Next my guide explained that we would travel to Erie on an underground high-speed vehicle called a "floater," which ran in vacuum through a tunnel, supporting itself on magnetic fields

At that moment a short, broad figure emerged from the house, looking absurdly like a giant panda dressed in a butler's black suit with a white shirt and black tie. Its round panda face had a spotlight for a nose, two eye lenses, large ears, and a speaker for a mouth.

All of the homes, shops, and office buildings in Waterford are linked by an underground package-transfer network that uses the "floater" technology. It takes approximately thirty seconds to send a package from any one place in Waterford to any other, as long as the package is within the dimensions of a typical large supermarket item

It requires no intelligence or education to pick up a submachinegun, point it, and pull the trigger, so terrorism, revolution, and conquest are easier routes to success for opportunistic leaders in backward areas than is the way of peaceful construction.

Once that day a chime sounded and the video told us of congestion two hundred kilometers ahead, near Chicago.