Why I like Asimov's Foundation Trilogy

Time, History, and the Future

First off, I like The Foundation Trilogy because it re-frames your perceptions about TIME, about HISTORY, and about THE FUTURE. Asimov presents 30,000 years as being a long time, but not beyond the range of planning and foresight. He presents 1,000 years as a short time -- a span of time short enough that individual actions at one end can have dramatic effects at the other.

I think that in America today we're dangerously disconnected from time. By and large we're rootless people -- people without extended families and without ties to the land, citizens of a government that's only a couple hundred years old. We've come to think of ten or twenty years as a long time. We make five-year plans, not fifty-year plans. We still think of the year 2000 as being the future, when in fact it has already become the present.

We have too little sense of the power of PROGRESS. In our day to day lives we act as if the world has always been the way it is. We don't sufficiently appreciate how incredibly, tremendously much the world has changed in the past 1,000 years, the last 100 years, the last 10 years.

The School Bus

And as bad as we are about history we still regard it as a respectable academic discipline, and every year we produce thousands of young PhDs in HISTORY. But how many PhDs in THE FUTURE do we produce? We regard the future as the domain of comic books and Honeywell engineers. Living in the world in the 1990s is like riding in a crowded school bus with weak brakes and wobbly steering -- there's no reason to think that the bus will crash, but it would be prudent to keep an eye on the road. Unfortunately, we're not keeping an eye on the road -- we've got all our PhD's at the back of the bus looking out at where we've come from, writing treatises about how curvy the road was a mile back. Meanwhile no one is driving the bus. I want desperately for someone to be driving the bus.

The Bus Driver

I like The Foundation Trilogy because it glorifies the role of bus driver. Asimov portrays Seldon as brilliant, compassionate, honest, realistic, competent, dedicated, calculating, and passionately concerned about the welfare of people who won't be born for thousands of years. We need more of this kind of role model, and we need more role models who work to prevent emergencies rather than recover from them. We need more role models who work to leave the world improved, not just unharmed.

So I like how Asimov re-frames time, and I like how he changes your perceptions, ambitions, and expectations. I like the fact that Seldon is competent and confident and successfully changes the course of history. I like the idea that we are in control of our destiny -- that we can create tremendous plans and then see them executed. I like the fact that Seldon plays an active, personal role in the lives of his successors for centuries to come -- that he doesn't die when he dies.

Here's a John Adams quote that does many of the same things for me:

I must study war and politics
so that my children shall be free to study
commerce, agriculture and other practicalities, <-- you are here
so that their children can study painting,
poetry and other fine things.
-- John Adams

Quantitative Models

Thirdly, I like the way Asimov portrays the power of applying quantitative modeling, mathematical reasoning, and predictive analysis to the field of sociology. A powerful idea. I believe that quantitative modeling is an important and under-exploited tool. A lot of the future is pretty easy to predict. I can tell you with a good degree of certainty that the population of the world in 2002 will be 6.4 billion. I'm confident enough of it to put money on it. What if I had a sophisticated computer model that incorporated terabytes of detailed information about trends and ratios? What if we used Crays to check for correlations between seemingly unrelated information? Of course we'll never achieve the sort of accuracy that Seldon does, but what might we accomplish if we spent 10 or 20 million dollars a year on such a project? I think it would pay for itself even if it only served to bring us a sharper, more focused image of where we are, where we've been, and where, nominally, we would be headed if we didn't deviate from business as usually.

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