Arthur C. Clarke died earlier this year aged 90. Known as “the colossus of science fiction”, Arthur became famous for his vision about futuristic communication satellites, the moon landings he foresaw, and much else.

I collided with his world in the late 1960s when still at school, seeing his “2001, a Space Odyssey”. After that things went quiet for me.

I only got to read Arthur seriously this year, over sixty years after he had started to write his stuff. That’s an unfair advantage, as 1980 sounds as far off from 1958, as 2030 does from 2008. Yet we are awe-stricken by such distances in time when they lie ahead of us.

They allow us to imagine things, for anything seems possible in the ‘distant’ future. Yet when that future has arrived, and we look back the same distance in time, be it two decades or five, things can look a lot more mundane.

Besides the advantage of hindsight the other advantage of reading Arthur late is being an economist, by definition economical with choice and resource allocation.

The really great things about Arthur were that he combined great imagination with a deep, indeed marvelous understanding of science. Reading his stuff invariably turns into an exercise of remaining marooned within the possible that science and applied technology can offer over time.

This is important. Although I have yet to read Arthur’s entire oeuvre, rarely if ever did he apparently transgress the boundaries of the known and likely.

This is important to what I am about to say, and has struck me every minute of the way while reading him. Arthur specialized in understanding science and projecting its possibilities. Although his timing wasn’t always correct, his intuition was awesome.

But what nags me is the economics of his science fiction. It presumes something that we latecomers should have no difficulty in understanding and projecting a few decades, if not centuries, either.

Arthur presumed that if the scientific knowledge was there, it would become translated into fact. And much of it has been. But not all of it.

Only rarely does one encounter Arthur doing back-of-the-envelope cost-accounting of what certain ideas would cost to fully implement, although there were such instances (costs of payloads, and how many payloads it would take to put something up there).

His space romps, however, were nearly always staged within feasible, economic ranges. Crises invariably absorbed a lot of earthly wealth, which with some grumping was invariably given up for the noble common purpose.

I suppose the massive examples of WW1, and especially WW2 were his models. The point is that Arthur didn’t allow a lack of resources or national agreement to get between him and a good story. The bigger the crisis, the more certain was the assumed unity of global purpose. Considering most operational and political detail as read, presuming the national effort could be mobilized in true Churchill mould, the futuristic story could be unfolded.

But why then, in 2008, aren’t we back again on the Moon, or already on Mars? Why are we still stuck with space shuttles and an ageing space station? Why is most space exploration done by robotics, and then frugally so, with perhaps a mission here, and a mission there, but certainly no blizzard of such activities overwhelming us, despite overwhelming technology becoming available?

By the way, the US promise of getting man to Mars by 2030 may be just that, mostly only a Bush promise.

A matter of earthly priorities

Well, it is a matter of earthly priorities, something that may have been Arthur’s blindside, given his livelong passion for things scientific and space.

Mankind’s general priorities these past sixty years have been radically different from Arthur’s. To have chosen and funded Arthur’s path to the future would have required a revolutionary different choice of earthly resource allocation.

That this didn’t happen says much about Mankind, and the likely futures that lie ahead, rather than imagined ones.

It turns out that we have had two insatiable earthly desires, namely consumption, and delayed consumption. No mention of space here (yet).

After WW2 reconstruction was mostly completed, the richer countries were mainly driven by everyday consumption, be they groceries, clothes, entertainment, durable goods such as cars and ever bigger housing. Luxuries and symbolic trophies of earthly success. It has always been thus, a crucial constant for what follows.

The privileged slice of mankind so endowed these past six decades has actually been very small, less than a billion strong. The other 80-90 percent of mankind have throughout been miserably poor, yet eager to also attain higher living standards.

The poor have in recent decades been focusing on supplying the rich with goodies, saving up income and investing it in new industralisation and urbanization of their own, in close imitation of the rich. In many cases, theirs is a catch-up story after a dormant Millennium.

We didn’t have time, energy or resources to built new moon bases and prepare for Mars and places in between. Instead, we built earthbound hamburger stands, satanic steel mills, and developed property the world over.

Arthur’s world would have required Mankind to use its savings from its growing income differently, investing it in science, applied technology and space exploration. This would have enabled the same kind of growth as we have experienced to date, only its composition would have been radically different, with much less going into ordinary consumption and of late into large-scale Asian industralisation.

That should be a sobering thought, the more so since our growth incentives might not have been equally strong, if it had had as main aim building space colonies rather than going into an enhanced consumer existence on earth for ourselves.

But then there is the great lament. Surely the modern state, that great collective capable of gathering together stupendous tax revenues annually, could like the ancient Pharaohs have built everlasting monuments to their greatness, in our times reaching for the stars?

Of course they could have, except that we are differently organized from ancient Egypt, with different priorities.

Firstly, the state has remained a major instrument for war. Arthur’s dad died from wounds acquired in WW1. He himself lived through WW2, the Korean conflict, Vietnam, the Balkans, and the modern Middle East. Today the US is spending $100bn annually in Iraq, and it isn’t even shown in its budget (it is funded separately by special votes).

Other than that, the modern state is an engine for redistribution, siphoning off income from the affluent and spreading it among the wider population. In some instances, like the US, this isn’t preventing inequality from steadily getting bigger.

The main point, though, is that the world has been mainly preoccupied with itself in a local context, with enormous wastage besides on military and bureaucratic needs.

This hasn’t stopped science from progressing. Indeed, one of our great sustaining abilities is our technical efforts in unraveling nature’s many secrets and harvesting this for Mankind’s benefit. But the way we have chosen to do so is by way of ordinary consumption and accelerated industrial development.

Arthur’s world, had it prevailed, would have meant a much greater slice of growing global income to have been consumed and invested differently, by way of other priorities, indeed other-worldly, always assuming that our incentives would have been as great as what they have been in feathering our own individual consumption cravings.

Yet such an overarching genius didn’t exist. Instead, space benefited for a while from geopolitical tensions and the competition it created, the Cold War, a space Olympics if you will, but that died out decades ago, and with it came a switch in interest back to mundane earthly pursuits.

The only surviving elements supporting Arthur’s visions have been those knowledge workers pushing the outer space boundaries of our knowledge. These fields of intellectual pursuit have kept the dreams alive, have succeeded in obtaining sufficient funding to keep acquiring greater insight and providing the building blocks for new applied technologies.

But it has all been only a fraction of the resource allocation needed to bring Arthur’s futures fully on stream within the time periods envisaged.

Could this still happen, if in the distant future?

It must be said that our local needs continue to look a little overwhelming this century.

The rich world is growing old very rapidly, and will be increasingly preoccupied with funding social welfare and medical needs of its ageing populations. Throughout there will probably be more war to be funded, as policeman of last resort to the planet.

The young poor world has a double dilemma

The young poor world has a double dilemma. It still wants to grow rich the old-fashioned way by accumulating as many earthly goodies as the rich world has done, it being the master model, and at the same time most of its populations will also face premature ageing and its many complications even before it has grown truly rich (China especially).

That will take care of an awful lot of resources.

And then, of all horrors, we seem to have overstayed our welcome, changing the planet sufficiently by our presence to be affecting the climate, although Mother Nature herself may be giving us a few unwanted surprises too.

Also, our modernity remains mired in the fossil age, an unstable proposition, while the progression to the hydrogen age will be costly and yet to begin seriously.

This is more in Arthur’s mould, having to mobilize for disaster, but it is mainly an earthbound disaster movie, such as rising sea levels, rising temperatures, changing rain patterns, increasingly costly commodity inputs and all that.

And truly complicating things could be our collective attitude. Will we globally cooperate or willfully compete to the point of going to war? Resource wars? Religious wars? New kinds of warfare yet to be named?

Our earthly preoccupations are many. Only a sliver of our annual resources are made available for science, and then only more limited so for space stuff.

This is the stuff of great lost opportunities, or rather opportunities postponed. For Mankind presumably will keep evolving and growing richer. As it achieves universally high and sustainable living standards, its growing annually income surpluses may increasingly become available for alternative applications.

It is when we run out of earthly challenges and preoccupations that we will probably lift off in a more general sense, benefiting from scientific progress which will not have ceased to take place.

But as a species we will probably be a good deal older than today, populating some future centuries. It is then that Arthur C. Clarke should really come into his own as the scientific prophet he was in his lifetime. But this awaits a set of Mankind priorities and associated resource allocation radically different from today.

Cees Bruggemans is chief economist of First National Bank.