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  • The Visioneers: How a Group of Elite Scientists Pursued Space Colonies, Nanotechnologies, and Limitless Future by W. Patrick McCray
  • Brian Jirout
The Visioneers: How a Group of Elite Scientists Pursued Space Colonies, Nanotechnologies, and Limitless Future. By W. Patrick McCray. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013. 351pages. Hardcover, $29.95

As America moved into the 1970s, the idea of limits, whether they were economic, technological, or environmental, struck a chord with the scientific [End Page 455] community and the public. The notions of Spaceship Earth, finite natural resources, energy shortages, and especially the Club of Rome’s March 1972 report, The Limits to Growth (Donella H. Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth [New York: Universe Books, 1972]), all suggested that the future seemed rather bleak. While the public and scientific community either reluctantly embraced or angrily rejected the Rome report, Patrick McCray’s The Visioneers sheds light on several individuals who saw the scientific limits of the time as a challenge to be overcome. The author, a historian at the University of California at Santa Barbara, did not coin the term visioneer, a combination of visionary and engineer; McCray, however, is the first to employ it in a historical sense to describe someone who developed “a broad and comprehensive vision for how the future might be radically changed by technology,” through self-promotion as well as research and development (13). This powerful technological enthusiasm, the central theme of the book, influenced policymaking circles that supplied funding and publicity.

McCray’s brilliantly researched book argues that a few curious scientists, inspired by technological utopianism and human space flight, attempted to resolve social problems through nanotechnologies but ultimately failed to do so. From a more disciplinary perspective, the book contributes to the history of technology, demonstrating how “imagined futures were catalyzed by advocates’ belief that new technologies offered radical solutions that could defuse the threat of limits” (7). Yet McCray’s visioneering protagonists endured many steep setbacks that, in the end, resulted in failure—what the author calls “failed futures.” His introduction and eight following chapters allow the reader to follow several elite scientists through their scientific battles against perceived or assumed scientific and technological limits. The introduction and first chapter contextualize and define the limits the scientific community faced; these limits were directly related to the understanding that Earth’s carrying capacity, the biological term for a population limit, had been nearly reached, that natural resources could not support the global population, and that increasing pollution and reliance on technology was sending society spiraling towards a doomsdaylike “eco-catastrophe.” Scholarship and popular culture alike embraced these alarmist visions of the future. While audiences took in films and shows like A Clockwork Orange and Doomwatch and the United Nations held its Conference on the Human Environment, two scientists found inspiration amid such pessimism and developed their own vision for the future.

McCray formally introduces the reader to these two scientific protagonists: Gerard O’Neill, a professor of physics at Princeton University, and Eric Drexler, an engineer trained at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Both O’Neill and Drexler “harbored utopia-like visions of permanent, large-scale human settlements in space” that, despite public skepticism, were derived from concepts in physics, engineering, and biology, among other disciplines (52–53). [End Page 456] Drexler, an advocate of O’Neill’s space colony futurism, predicted in 1977 that he “probably won’t die on this planet” (147); he realized that in order to humanize space, key spaceflight technologies needed to shrink in size, so his work on technological miniaturization, which he called “molecular engineering,” became the foundation for research and development of nanotechnologies. McCray recounts the moves that Drexler and O’Neill made from the east coast to the San Francisco Bay area, which ultimately evolved into what is now Silicon Valley due to a strong presence of universities, entrepreneurship, and technology firms. Along the way, McCray introduces other highly trained scientists, such as economist Mark Hopkins of Harvard University and Mark Miller of Yale University. Technological enthusiasts Hopkins and Miller, among others, bought into and supported O’Neill and Drexler’s futuristic visions. By 2003, nanotechnology had grown in popularity, eventually...

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