It’s not often that a F&SF writer can use one of his own books to show the shortcomings of statistics. However, as I write this, Solar Express has an “average” rating of three stars [3.2 stars, to be more exact], yet precisely one reader has given it a three star rating. Fifty-nine percent of the reader reviewers like it fairly well or a lot, and thirty-eight percent dislike it a little or a lot. So much for averages.

Yet as a society we tend to rely on statistics, all too often without really understanding what they mean. How often have you read a news item that states that eating something or using a certain product will increase the likelihood of getting cancer, or diabetes, or something else horrendous by ten or twenty or even a hundred percent? Yet do these statements ever point out the baseline risk?

For example, some advocates of using statin drugs [such as Lipitor] claim that use of statins reduces the incidence of heart disease by 50%. According to clinical studies over any five year period, roughly 2% of American males in the 50-60 age group will suffer a non-fatal myocardial infarction. Studies also show that statin use will reduce that rate to one percent. That is indeed a fifty percent reduction rate, but it’s only an actual risk reduction of one percent. Other studies showed that the decrease in mortality from fatal heart-related factors was offset almost completely in patients older than 70 by a corresponding increase in cancer deaths. But unless you or your doctor read the fine print in the studies, all you’re likely to hear is the fifty percent reduction in heart events. And if cancer runs in your family… well, you just might be better off not jumping at that “50% reduction.”

And take family income. In 2014 average [mean] family income was $72,641, but the median income [the amount where half the families make more and half make less] was only $51,939, or $20,702 – 40% less than the average. As a result, actually, about 67% of U.S. families make less than the “average.” Nor do such averages consider that one third of all American families live “paycheck to paycheck” and that 66% of those families are middle class with a median income of $41,000, well below the “average” family income.

Or take firearms. While there are 88 guns for every hundred Americans, all those firearms are actually in the hands of 43% of U.S. households.

Or… if you look at the Amazon stars, Solar Express is just an average book, despite the fact that only one person thought so.

Martin Shkreli has been arrested. The man who took over a generic drug selling for $13.50 a pill and who then raised the price to $750 a pill has been charged with fraud and other financial crimes, essentially defrauding those who had money to invest in his fraudulent and money-losing hedge funds.

Yet under our laws, he can’t possibly be charged with price-gouging those who needed Daraprim order to survive, although he even claimed that he made a “mistake” in setting the price at $750 a pill, because that was “too low” and that he was behaving altruistically because Daraprim was unprofitable at the old price. Even those with insurance coverage would have ended up paying $150 a pill. In his next move, Shkreli led an investor group to take control of KaloBios Pharmaceuticals, where Mr. Shkreli agreed to license the worldwide rights of a drug used to treat Chagas’ disease, a potentially deadly parasitic infection – but at a much higher price. And, of course, most of those infected won’t be able to pay that price, which will either result in more deaths… or in gouging the public health agencies that treat such infected individuals.

Shkreli’s acts and the way the law treats them are just another example of how U.S. justice has gone overboard in recent years in “protecting the market system” – the ultra-capitalistic market system. Now, I freely acknowledge that any workable economic system has to have a capitalistic/market basis, but when the ultra-rich pay a smaller percentage of their income in taxes than do middle-class wage earners, when basic health care becomes increasingly less affordable for tens of millions of Americans [and when the Republican response is essentially to declare that requiring healthcare insurance is the cause, rather than a symptom of an unnecessarily overpriced private health care bureaucracy], when maximizing profits at any cost, regardless of the social and environmental costs to everyone else, has become a “necessity” for executive survival in the corporate world, doesn’t it seem that a few changes in the legal, regulatory, and taxation structure might be a trace overdue?

And if those changes aren’t made…

When the laws protect only those who have money, and it doesn’t look like matters will change, it may not be all that long before those who don’t have massive wealth decide to take matters into their own hands… and bring the entire system down. Such events have occurred more than a few times before. And I’m sure that most of the Russian and French aristocracy felt that such an uprising was nothing to worry about.

“Would anyone consider Einstein merely a ‘successful scientist’?” I don’t remember who said or wrote words to that effect, but that question has stuck with me for years. And it’s even more relevant today, I believe, than ever. Just what is success?

The first two dictionary definitions I came across were: “a favorable or desired outcome from something attempted” and “attainment of wealth and fame.”

A favorable or desired outcome. That sounds so milquetoastish…almost pedestrian. It’s not exactly soul-inspiring, and what does being rich and famous have to do with real accomplishment? Is “success” just settling for comfort, as opposed to striving for something more?

Is the United States too focused on success, especially as opposed to greatness? When I was young, people had dreams of great achievements, of being President, or a doctor or astronaut, of writing the great American novel, or coming up with a cure for a horrendous disease. I can’t recall anyone who just wanted to be rich or famous. Or of being merely a successful doctor or dentist or teacher or whatever.

Then again, world-class achievement is getting a bit harder to accomplish. Everest has been conquered, and now it’s just another mountain that hundreds if not thousands have climbed. Astronauts have walked on the moon, but not for more than thirty years, and exceeding the speed of sound in an aircraft is so passe that we’ve abandoned the only supersonic passenger jet because it was too expensive, just as manned space exploration has been put on the far back burner for the same reason – despite all the hoopla about The Martian and the record-breaking opening weekend gross of the latest Star Wars movie. Even the New Horizons mission that recently reached Pluto and sent back breath-taking images was launched over nine years ago, and I’m not aware of anything that ambitious in the works in even the unmanned exploration programs. And given that the comparatively low-budget New Horizons mission was begun roughly fifteen years ago, that suggests no “great” achievements in space exploration are likely or even possible for 20-30 years, despite a series of “successful” smaller missions.

Once upon a time, composers were truly celebrated for their works, but today in the music world great success doesn’t mean great musical work; it means great financial returns, and works that show musical excellence seldom are those that generate enormous financial returns. In pharmaceuticals, success isn’t measured so much by discovering drugs that “cure diseases,” but in finding blockbuster drugs that yield billion-dollar returns. In business, success isn’t building an outstanding product, but building one that makes billions, and whether it’s outstanding is very much secondary. In politics, success is getting and holding office, not what one accomplishes through that office.

In short, today’s “success” seldom, if ever, reflects great or lasting achievements, and I find that sad and worrisome.

Much has been said about “living in the moment,” and there is in fact some truth to the need to live in the moment, simply because we cannot undo what has happened in the past, nor can we do much about the future, except prepare for it, and there is such a thing as over-preparing for a future that may never come, or a future that bears little resemblance to what we’ve predicted or imagined.

Unfortunately, as many wise individuals have declared, the past and history have a tendency to repeat themselves, or at least rhyme, as Mark Twain put it, and the saddest and truest rhymes are those based on human failings. This unhappy truth has a great bearing on one of the greatest weaknesses in current U.S. culture and education – the lack of knowledge and understanding about past U.S. culture and history by younger Americans, and an almost total ignorance of even recent past world history. The failing is compounded by a great lack of knowledge of basic economics and politics and an over-emphasis on present-day culture and instant satisfaction, supplied in large measure electronically.

What most young Americans know about Hitler, for example, is that he killed a great many Jews [and some even doubt that] and started World War II. Most cannot explain either World War I or World War II. Nor do they know anything about the student protests surrounding the Vietnam War. They don’t know and can’t explain the factors underlying the Russian Revolution, and the Great Depression is essentially two meaningless words to them. Oh, they may be able to cite various dates and events, but understanding is almost nil – and irrelevant to them.

On the other hand, most can recite from memory an incredible array of present-day trivia. They’re glued, if not welded, to their smartphones. Most of them are against any form of discrimination, which wouldn’t be so bad if so many of them didn’t confuse unpleasant facts and honest discussion of difficult ethnic and racial issues with hate speech. They don’t, in general, like learning facts and situations contrary to their beliefs and hopes, and they avoid doing so as much as possible. And to make matters worse, far too many educators are indulging this incredibly childish view of the world.

In short, most of today’s younger generations are largely living in the moment, shutting out the lessons of the past and ignoring the future ramifications of what is happening now. Oh, a significant percentage of the top ten percent of students and young Americans, perhaps half, don’t fall into this categorization, but, as history shows, five percent isn’t enough to save a nation against the ignorance, the indifference, and the self-centered anger of the remainder, or to stand against a revolution of the disappointed when the satisfactions of the “moment” vanish, possibly for generations.

I ran across an interesting blog analyzing/critiquing my recently released hard SF novel – Solar Express. The blog used the intriguing construct of a discussion of the book between a futurist, a science fiction reader, and a UFO researcher… and none of them were particularly pleased with the book. I’m likely simplifying, but the bottom line was that the book portrayed a future a hundred years hence that was far too much like the present, and that I’d failed to show massive social changes, or any of the potential new scientific advances predicted by SF fans and futurists.

And all three of these presumably fictional characters were generally right. I didn’t, and I didn’t because most of them won’t happen, and most certainly won’t happen in a hundred years. Now, I’m not saying that there won’t be changes, some of them dramatic, over the next hundred years, because there will be, but very few will be of the nature postulated by those three characters, or by most futurists or science fiction writers.

Why? Because, despite all the rhetoric, hype, and hope to the contrary, we’re entering the Age of Limits. I’ve touched on this before, but it’s true nonetheless. We now have, on this planet, instantaneous communications. The limitation now is our ability to process and act upon those communications, and even if we replaced our biological circuitry with instant/electric capabilities and cyborged bodies, the physical speed of effective reaction couldn’t be that much faster. Nor would most human beings, even in that state, assuming we as a planet could afford it, which we can’t, think and comprehend that much faster.

We aren’t going to see superfast interplanetary or interstellar travel either. While there are some intriguing theoretical possibilities, using those possibilities would require massive amounts of energy,and for interstellar travel that would mean harnessing energy at the level contained in small black holes, and using that much energy near any planetary body or surface would have devastating impacts.

We now have ebooks, the instantly available electronic texts on every subject… and it doesn’t appear that they have markedly increased literacy or learning [and may have decreased reading longer works among the younger population], which is scarcely surprising, given that learning is limited by the individual’s biological and cultural cognitive development. Technology itself doesn’t automatically improve cognition.

It’s very possible that we’ll see solar voltaic films with much higher power generation efficiency than anything so far developed, and I’d be surprised if we don’t see that, but to use that energy requires supporting technological devices, and while 3-D printers can do a lot of that on an individual basis, where will all the raw material come from, because not everything can be printed solely out of carbon-based feedstocks?

We’re seeing incredible advances in medical technology, but those increases have come with equally incredible price tags, so that the real limitation on the implementation of some of these technologies wouldn’t be the technology, but the resources with which to pay for them. Greater and greater percentages of even the citizens in developed countries are either unable to afford or are precluded from obtaining cutting edge medical treatments, and using those technologies to extend and save lives only increases a society’s energy and resource requirements. Add to that the fact that population is still increasing and is projected to exceed 11 billion by a century from now. That means a greater demand on resources.

The bottom line is that the universe has physical limits, and human societies do as well. We have to make choices about how to allocate the application of effort and resources, because we can’t do everything we theoretically could do for everyone. And that’s why any halfway realistic portrayal of the near future is going to incorporate many factors and limitations of the present. They just don’t vanish because it’s the future.

Does this mean that Solar Express is a total “downer”? I scarcely think so. The greatness of human beings, I believe, lies not so much in exceeding limits, but in the struggle for meaning and greatness against those limits. That’s why, as an author, I’ve struggled against portraying unrealistically great and soaring achievements, and why my characters usually pay very high prices for their achievements – because struggling against the limits of the universe – any universe – is costly.

But recognizing this is hard for most people to accept, and that’s another reason for the proliferation and success of mighty heroic, and totally impossible, comic book heroes in movies and books these days. And why some people who call themselves futurists really aren’t at all, because the future our children and grandchildren will live in will be based, like it or not, or aspects of the present-day reality.