PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

PROLOGUE
Two years earlier, in 1972, a book appeared under the title, The Limits
to Growth, published by the Club of Rome, an informal international
association with about seventy members of twenty-five nationalities. 1
Scientists, educators, economists, humanists, industrialists, they were all
united by their conviction that the major problems of mankind today are
too complex to be tackled by traditional institutions and policies. Their
book drew alarming conclusions concerning earth’s rampant overpopulation
and the depletion of raw materials and primary energy sources. Its
message delivered a shock and contributed to the “think small” cultural
wave of the 1970s.
Marchetti had persistently refused to join the Club of Rome on
grounds of “self respect,” implying that it had failed to stay close to the
fundamentals of science. His response to The Limits to Growth was an
article titled “On 10 12 : A Check on Earth Carrying Capacity for Man”,
written for his “friends of the Club of Rome.” 2 In this article he provided
calculations demonstrating that it is possible to sustain one trillion
people on the earth without exhausting any basic resource, including the
environment! It served as one more brush stroke in his self-portrait as a
maverick.
In 1985 I arrived at Laxenburg, seeking Marchetti at IIASA. He received
me in his office buried behind piles of paper. Later I discovered
that most of the documents contained numbers, the data sources serving
him very much like sketchbooks serve artists. He welcomed me warmly,
we uncovered a chair for me, and I went straight to the point. I showed
him my first attempts at determining the life cycles of computers. I had
dozens of questions. He answered laconically, simply indicating the direction
in which I should go to search for my own conclusions. “Look at
all computers together,” he said. “Small and big ones are all competing
together. They are filling the same niche. You must study how they substitute
for one another. I’ve seen cars, trains, and other human creations
go through this process.”
What he said produced an echo in me. People can only spend their
money once, on one computer or on another one. Bringing a new computer
model to market depresses the sales of an older model. Also, one
can only type on one keyboard at a time. A new keyboard with ergonomic
design will eventually replace all flat keyboards in use. This
process of substitution is a phenomenon similar to the growth of an ani-
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