Isaac Asimov's Vision Of The Future | Letterman

my next guest most recent published work is his 221st book I haven't written that many postcards uh the book is entitled enjoy still felt an autobiography welcome please Dr Isaac Asimov okay let's spend a minute here talking about the fact that you've written 220 21 books so far so far is that a compulsive Behavior do you think I enjoy it you know why not sure but I say to myself here I am a handsome writer I should know right yeah what kind of schedule do you put in to write that many books I get up

in the morning sit down and write when I finish writing go back to bed is uh is there one particular work that's a favorite for you out of all of those Publications well yes the one you've got right there is the second volume of my autobiography that in the first volume if you put them together is my favorite book because it's my favorite subject tell me a little bit about yourself what uh what uh what would we need to know about you well once you've said 221 books that's it what else is there I mean

if you sit down and write that you haven't got time for anything else uh what are you working on now several things right now I'm working on my monthly essay for the magazine of fantasy and science fiction and when I get done with that I will go back to one of the books some in the middle of is that your favorite topic area science and science fiction I suppose so though I also like to write Mysteries and I like to write limericks I like to write history books like to annotate like the Bible Shakespeare various

other things what exactly does that mean when you annotate the Bible oh well you simply you simply copy down all the all the verses in the Bible and you make little footnotes and and say whatever you please about each one and if you're if you do it right the annotations are longer than the thing you're annotating I've got a book coming out called in the beginning in which I annotate the first 11 chapters of Genesis you can get the first 11 chapters on Genesis and maybe 15 pages or so but the book is about 200

pages long counting my annotations um why do you think there is now uh a real interest in in science and uh like these space movies Star Wars The Empire Strikes Back Close Encounters oh well because the technology of the movie industry has reached the point where they can put in spectacular special effects and people enjoy watching those special effects did you enjoy those two movies I enjoyed Star Wars The Empire Strikes Back In fact I enjoyed the Empire Strikes Back so much that when they finished it I jumped up my seat and yelled start the

third part they have done that haven't they they're projected like nine and I figure that at the rate they're going they'll do the last few after I'm dead which doesn't strike me as Fair um you know what I feel uh is unfair at the height of the manned space projects you know that was great because everyone's attention was focused on that and I wish we had something else like that to shoot for now do you think we uh backed away from the manned space program at the wrong time no yes absolutely the reason for that

was that we had gone into space primarily to beat the Russians so when we got to the Moon we had and so it was true football fashion having scored the the touchdown we went home yeah but the Russians are keeping right on going and sooner or later they'll do something spectacular and we'll get back in the race what do you think that that would be what spectacular thing could we look for well I suppose if they build a really large space station or they put up their version of the shuttle and make it work while

we're still fussing around with ours then all of a sudden Congress will will pour a lot of money into it and we'll get going again yeah um what would be the next logical step after we put a man on the moon and say we wanted to continue putting men places where would we put our next man ah well we ought to stay here in the Earth Moon system for a while and get it really developed we have to ought to build space stations we have to build space settlements get some power stations in orbit build

some factories get a mining station on the moon and once we've got a real space civilization going then we can explore further from a good strong space space if that's speaking as a science fiction writer or a man who has studied the needs and what space can provide us no I think that's speaking as a real human being have you ever written about things and then seen them come true occasionally yes I described a spacewalk in 1952 and when they did it some years later it turned out to be exactly the way I described it

wasn't very difficult I described pocket computers in 1950 got the appearance exactly right I talked about space stations getting energy Down to Earth in 1940. and got that almost right I put the put it in Mercury's orbit instead of moon's orbit to get it closer to the Sun maybe someday we'll do that I predicted that the opposition to the space race and there was yeah so uh but these are little things I never tried to predict I just tried to write stories I would sell so I could pay my way through college that whole Phenomenon

with the Phenomenon with computers and digital stuff it used to be I could pretty well figure out any clock radio not so anymore it's all advanced to the point where you really have to sit down and read the lousy book to figure these things out now and it seems like things are getting more and more complex for just getting by day to day well it always happens that way things get more complex to do more than as the technology advances further it gets simpler again until the next Quantum jump and then it becomes complex again

yeah I remember when radios first came out so you're too young for that when radios first came out it was next to impossible to tune them uh now you just turn them on I remember when television first came out you had to have a live-in television repairman now you just turn it on if anything goes wrong with it it means you buy a new set yeah when when the uh the radios did come out they were like the size of a of a Buick in some cases and now I'm you can get them just about

that big it's uh unless you want to walk down the street playing at the top of the range then it's back to the Buick yeah that's right that's a whole different situation here in New York City talking about among other things is prolific work as a writer this represents 221 books published what uh what kind of Hardware do you have in your home to keep this thing uh moving various typewriters yeah that's about all you just get up and Wander from room to room type a little and then type a little and type a little

no there's just one typewriter and the other three just sit there in case something happens to the one I can grab one or the other three is it possible to write more than one book at a time well not simultaneously but I've got three different books in various stages that's what I mean do you ever how do you keep everything straight well as long as it's non-fiction there's no trouble you just or at least for me there's no trouble if it were fiction I'd have to work on one book I I don't think I could

manage two fiction books I'd get confused in the plots yeah uh I want to get back to talking about your feelings about new developments in certain areas for example uh in the next five to ten to fifteen years in medicine why it seems to me that the important discoveries will be how to fiddle around with genes so as to perhaps correct some of the diseases we that are congenital maybe instead of treating diabetes with insulin we can fix up a gene so that you make your own maybe perhaps we can get rid of some other

conditions like that how would that be administered do you do you get like an inoculation at Birth or the parents get it or how would that happen well I suppose that eventually we'll reach the stage where children as born will have a genetic analysis and that you could then try to do something like that graft the necessary genes into the pancreas for instance and hope that they'll do sufficient work to prevent the eventual development of the diabetes that's a very risky area to be uh experimenting with isn't it yes and presumably they'll do their best

with animals before they try anything on human beings you could you could alter or add to or detract from any characteristic of a human that way couldn't you well in theory yes but you know you have to work up the technology to a high pitch of excellence and we're just at the beginning of that now yeah uh and what what signals the beginning what have we done so far well we've been working mostly with bacteria that's how far we are and we've managed to engineer bacteria so to speak so that uh particular bacteria can form

chemicals that they themselves naturally wouldn't make but we insert the genes for it so that we can now have bacteria making human insulin diabetics now take insulin obtained from domestic as slaughtered domestic animals which is not exactly like human insulin it does the work but you could you could get allergic to it and now we have human ensure which we can get from bacteria and have I heard correctly about a synthetic insulin or is that what you're speaking of or well in a sense it's synthetic in that it's manufactured as a result of human agency

but it's exactly like human insulin and the body can't tell the difference uh what about cancer research any breakthroughs there well Heaven Only Knows we've been waiting for one for 30 years at least maybe 50 and we can never we can never tell when it'll come but it isn't here yet um what about the weapons race well now they keep talking about space weapons about using about using laser beams or ion beams things like that against satellites and you'll have either killer satellites doing the job or stations on Earth and uh as long as the

satellites are unmanned I suppose it doesn't do any harm to shoot them down but I figure that the best weapons researchers no weapons research yeah you don't foresee that happening though I guess huh oh well I imagine that uh I imagine that in 30 years we'll have a situation in which there won't be any wars either that or there won't be any us let's get to the matter of communications developments uh we were unable to place a call here to Missouri on a fairly sophisticated piece of equipment um you see any Monumental breakthroughs in the

area of communications well there are Monumental breakthroughs that are underway now in terms of communication satellites and Optical fibers and I imagine that more and more we'll be using laser beams for communicating rather than either electrical currents or radio waves and it will then be possible to have millions literary minions of times as many messages carried on a on a wire or on a beam as we now can so that everyone can possibly have their own television channel the way we all now have our own telephone numbers and uh closed circuit television will become the

great thing and everything from education to research will be done by by way of communication communication devices the book is called enjoy still felt which is part two of your autobiography correct right part one was in memory at Green it had a autobiography of Isaac asthma of 1920 to 1954 with a black border made my wife very nervous you hadn't even met me in 1954 she kept saying who's this imposter right Dr Isaac Asimov thank you very much doctor for being with us we're going to pause for an NBC news update [Applause]