James Fallows

The journalism world is a scene of unending flux, but I was particularly sorry to hear of upheaval that affects two of my DC-based colleagues, Neal Conan and Timothy Noah.

Many world news agencies carried this wonderful map, via NKNews.org, of the strike plan Kim Jong Un is preparing so as to make good on his threat to engulf U.S. cities like Austin and Washington D.C. in "a sea of fire." Note the paths shown for missile-strike assaults on North American cities.This doesn't mean there's no reason to worry about current tensions on the Korean peninsula. But it might mean that Kim Jong Un has some "Hey, wait a minute... " questions to ask his strategic planners. Or perhaps he should buy them a globe. I should probably add that I didn't manage to get this posted before March 31 had ended and April 1 began, but it very definitely is not an April Fool's Day item. The straight-line map was real. Or "real."

To see this item in "classic" view, as I very much recommend you do, please click here.

As mentioned earlier this week, the Atlantic has introduced a new layout for its online "article pages." You get the new look if you click on any headline for a specific post or article, including the link in the previous sentence. For now you can see the old look if you click on names in what was previously the "Voices" column -- for instance, Alexis Madrigal's or Ta-Nehisi Coates's, or Derek Thompson's, mine, etc.

The new look has bigger fonts, more white space between lines ("leading"), wider margins on each side of the screen, and a narrower column of item-text in the middle. Together these changes mean that you see fewer words per line of text; fewer lines of text per viewable screen; and thus (fewer words x fewer lines) many fewer words on the screen at a time. The changes are meant to make any given passage of text seem more approachable and less encyclopedia-looking. Also, moving the author-bios from the top to the bottom of each post makes more space for words or pictures in the very first screenful. [Note: these old/new changes are much more apparent on desktop or laptop web-browser versions, rather than on mobile devices.]

The changes have two other effects I've been thinking about.

One, it seems, is to reduce the visual cueing as to what is "normal" text and what is a quoted or excerpted passage. Two days ago, I quoted a long note from a reader (in the "Bartleby the Scrivener Joins the Air Marshals" item). The overwhelming majority of people who wrote back to me missed the fact that it was a quote, rather than a story I was telling about myself. Ideally, excerpts would always stand out because of their background shading and indented margins. But enough people are now missing the cues to make me think I should add new signals. Rather, I should return to a signaling system I used before a previous redesign, when the same problem kept cropping up -- and people thought I was speaking for myself when I was quoting Dick Cheney, etc.

Thus, from now on I will signal the beginning and end of excerpted passages with double marks like this:  >> and <<.  And, to err on the side of clarity, I'll mark each new paragraph within an except with its own single > mark.  [Nah, on reflection that would be overkill.] I can work out a macro to handle this, and it's better than the risk of confusion. For instance, a reader writes about the new formatting:

>> I think confusion about who is speaking in your blog entries [may]... result from continuing formatting imperfections.  There may also be some difference in the clarity of formatting between the version that arrives via RSS feed and the version one sees when one gets to it by clicking on the link.
 
In any event, despite some improvements, it is still not always possible to tell with immediate certainty whose words one is reading.  Most often, in my case, it is the boundary between your words and those you are quoting that sometime seems unclear. <<

And on the other hand, another reader writes:

>>I too thought the "Bartleby" story was about you and your wife.  Looking at it again, you clearly introduced it as sent in by a reader, and it was offset in grey as well (I of course trust implicitly that you haven't subsequently edited in those elements).

I can't begin to comprehend why I and so many other people misread it that way; it's a fascinating little accidental psych experiment you happened to conduct there.<<

The other effect of the new-look presentation may be to make individual paragraphs seem more approachable -- but to make medium-length-or-longer posts seem less so, since it now takes many more screen-scrolls to get through them. I'll try to use this as discipline to make things shorter, more often -- and also to provide a link and reminder on longer posts to "Try reading this one in 'Classic' view."

OK, now for some closing info that bridges the purely procedural and the at-least-semi-substantive, here is one of the (several hundred!) replies that have arrived on the Bartleby-of-the-air question. I've set it off with the new coding. And you could consider looking at this in Classic view. A reader writes:

>>You must have been distracted by so many people mistaking you for your original correspondent, but the responses suggest a staggering inability to read.

The original report was clear. Your correspondent arrived early to the airport and had book the two seats, "but we checked in about two hours before the flight, and received our tickets. Two seats in the middle of the plane (I like that because in business the configuration is 2-2-2, and either of us can get up without disturbing the other) as we had booked."

I am more mystified by the responses,

1) "I get your desire to be together, but why should that trump the desire of someone else to sit where he selected?  Would it have been nice?  Sure.  But it was still his choice.  Not one that you are entitled to make for him." [JF note: these quoted passages are from a previous reader.] The alleged air marshall didn't reserve that seat, they did. A reservation is an entitlement.

2) "I like to get there early to get the seat I want, not only on an airplane, but a tour bus, or sightseeing excursion, or a table or stool at a bar. You'd be surprised at how often I am asked to inconvenience myself and move to a less desirable seat in order to accommodate some guy who wants to sit by his wife or vice versa. Sometimes I don't mind. But a lot of times it is a great inconvenience to have to hoist up all the bags et cetera just to accommodate some guy or his wife who may have come in late and feels entitled to preempt any lower person who is traveling alone." Agreed. The couple had a reservation and had arrived early. They in exactly the position of this female traveller. They are being asked to sit somewhere else for his convenience.

3) "But I always do so understanding that I'm asking a favor, and if they "prefer not to" -- for whatever reason, or for no reason at all -- then to me, that's that.  In my view, no one has any social obligation to trade seats." Exactly. The air marshall was not asking, but demanding a favor from them.

I could go on, but I think that those responding to the original article either are not reading the details correctly, or they are just being too obsequious to the air marshall and the airlines some-people-we-just-can't-move security theater.<<

And, from another reader:

>>I think the emails you posted yesterday miss the mark in a couple of ways.

1)The man and his wife purchased seats together, confirmed they were sitting together, and only didn't know the wouldn't be sitting together until they boarded the plan.  It's only at that point did they try to shuffle the seating in the cabin.  It's not like the had separate seats and started badgering other passengers so they could sit together.

2) While I certainly empathize with the woman who feels the pressure from the tyranny of couples, her shrill response misses a key point.  People (mates, friends, spouses, business companions) who travel together do so mostly because they want to be TOGETHER.These folks are trying to have a shared experience, and I think it's fair to ask a single traveler to move if there are other single seats available..  Single travelers certainly have the right to sit where they want, but understanding and empathy go a long way.<<

And why not, one more. Another reader writes:

>>First on air marshals:

 [My wife] and I heading to Seattle from PHL. Big Birthday trip. Booked months in advance. Paid up for first class. Selected good seats. She hates to fly. Sitting together helps with her fears. They are real to her.

We are boarding the plane, and we are pulled aside. "we are sorry but your seats have been reassigned and we have selected other seats for you". They weren't together. I raised quite a fuss. USair. They 'found' seats together.

The marshals slept the whole way back. WTF. They were off duty. No follow up questioning was replied to.

Second:

I travel for work: (GA 250 hrs+; 700 mile legs and less) and USairways 50k miles per year (long haul).   Almost every trip is for 'work' Why is it that when I am going to work I have to make way (while in the TSA line) for those who work at the airport/airlines? Frustrates the shit out of me (and most everyone around me). We are all going to work. As my kids emote: "just sayin".

P.S.  TSA Pre-check is wonderful, but when they randomly force you through the regular lines it costs 30 mins. So much for 'planned' time saving.<<

More to come.

A little over 10 years ago, George W. Bush fired his economic adviser, Lawrence Lindsey, for saying that the total cost of invading Iraq might come to as much as $200 billion. Bush instead stood by such advisers as Paul Wolfowitz, who said that the invasion would be largely "self-financing" via Iraq's oil, and Andrew Natsios, who told an incredulous Ted Koppel that the war's total cost to the American taxpayer would be no more than $1.7 billion.

Recently I mentioned a Baja California-brewed "Runaway IPA" whose label cheekily mocked the famous "immigrants crossing" sign on I-5 and other roads just north of the U.S.-Mexican border. A reader in Southern California says that the signs weren't really so preposterous:

I don't want to "harsh your mellow", as Charles Pierce is fond of saying, but having driven that stretch on and off (mostly on) for 15 years commuting to Santa Ana I've seen my share of people darting across the road, almost hitting one.  I also saw a man stretched out in the middle of the highway one night coming home from work who appeared dead when I passed by (he was already being attended to).  So yes, I laugh at the sign too but it was put there for a serious reason. 

Actually, once they built the fence down the middle median most of the pedestrian crossing attempts stopped.  I think the major reason for the crossings was when drivers, seeing the Border Patrol checkpoint open ahead, stopped to kick out their passengers. ...

That wasn't the only dangerous behavior I witnessed over the years.  Once getting off the Amtrak in Santa Ana, I saw two men standing on the outside ladder rungs between two cars.  This was during a period when the Border Patrol would board in Oceanside and check passengers as we headed north.

Offered for the record.

 I agree with your correspondent [above].  I did my grad work at Irvine in the late 80s and then lived in San Diego for a couple of years in the early 90s. I had a good friend in SD so I drove I-5 with some frequency.  At this point, I can't say how many deaths there were in that period, but certainly more than a few, and between he possibility for setting off a chain of accidents in reaction to people dashing out into traffic (which I certainly did see more than once) and the trauma of running someone over, even if it's not your fault, the warning was reasonable.

 

The image, on the other hand, is something I'd like to see explained.

1) We've had another of the periodic refreshes of our web design. You can see the old look if you click on the name of one of our writers -- for instance, the Ta-Nehisi Coates author site. You can see the new look if you click on the headline of any particular item or posting, like this (wonderful) one about Ta-Nehisi's experiences on arrival in France.

• Click on his name, at the very top of the item, to get a newest-first stream of all his postings, in "classic look" smaller-font layout;
• Just read them that way; or 
• Scroll to the item just before or after the one you were previously reading, and then click on that item's title. Repeat as needed.

Now you know.

I just renewed my mail subscription to the Atlantic. [JF reply: Thank you.]

So it occurred to me: what if you had a comments section (even if just on some posts) limited to verified subscribers?  You might sell a lot of subs!  Would be a smart discussion too, I bet.

This is the first comments strategy that has some appeal from my point of view. Probably technically too complex to implement, but an interesting thought experiment. For why I prefer to quote reader messages, rather than enabling comments, see here and here.

3) Speaking of subscribing, on the flight from DC to Los Angeles several days ago I sat next to a woman who had bought our latest issue at the airport newsstand. After she finished a few hours' work on her computer in first part of the flight, she pulled out the magazine and read it carefully cover to cover. I sat there, discreetly watching, and beaming positive thoughts in her direction. When she reached the last page she pulled out the (hated by everyone, but effective) blow-in subscription card and put it in her purse.

As the plane headed in for a landing I dared ask her how she'd liked the magazine, and explained why I was asking. "That is a great issue," she said. And she was right. While of course I love all issues of our magazine, I think this one really is exceptionally strong from very beginning to very end -- in range, surprise, execution, and refreshed look. Please do check it out.

Bonus incentive: in this issue you'll see the answer to my version of the Andrew Sullivan "View from your window" contest, which I posted in January.

At the wonderful CaCao "Mexicatessen" in Eagle Rock, near Occidental College where my wife and I are based this week, I have my first experience tonight with the products of Cucapá Beer, from Baja. What gets my attention, apart from the idea of this kind of craft beer coming from Mexico, is the label on their impressive "Runaway IPA":

As I've written repeatedly in this space, journalism is fleeting, and so too is the renown and influence of nearly all its practitioners. Thus it is possible that, even though Anthony Lewis was a powerful twice-weekly presence on the New York Times's op-ed page for more than 30 years, many of today's readers may not recognize his name or, on the occasion of his death at age 85, fully appreciate what he brought to journalism and public life. (CPJ photo.) He deserves to be remembered.

I first learned about and followed Tony Lewis's work when I was a college student, during the late Vietnam War years, when through his NYT column he was a leading critic of the LBJ and Nixon approaches to the war. Then I learned about his book Gideon's Trumpet, which (as Andrew Cohen has very eloquently explained) had a profound effect on prevailing understanding of the law itself, of the Supreme Court's role in interpreting the law, and on the potential of truly literary journalism to improve the law and civic life more generally.

Over the years I came to understand a part of his influence that most of the public wouldn't have known about but that is being noted in many of the appreciations of him, including Andrew Cohen's. Tony Lewis was a remarkably generous, patient, and good-humored mentor and sponsor to young people trying to make their way across the often-discouraging and always-uncertain terrains of journalism and the law. I benefited from his taking time to offer counsel at several tricky times when I was in my 20s -- and he didn't have any particular reason to be helpful to me. I have heard enough similar stories to believe that he just assumed he should make time for young people, and be of use. All this was at a period in his own life and eminence when he could instead easily have considered himself too busy, too important, or too intent on extending his own influence to make space for other people.

David Halberstam was a very different sort of person, writer about the Civil Rights and Vietnam eras, and journalistic standard-setter from Lewis. But on the news of his death in a car crash six years ago, I was struck by a similar point: how often he had been willing to go out of his way to listen to, take under his wing, and help people from the next generation. J. Anthony Lukas, author of the monumental Common Ground and many other works (and a contemporary, friend, and rival of Halberstam's), lived the same message. You would never have described any of these people as "easy-going" or "uncomplicated," but they made time for others. Now these three writers are gone, and the newspaper journalism through which they originally made their names is, like all journalism, perishable. Each of them wrote books that may last; but I think an even more important legacy may be their example of making time to help and encourage.

I figure I might as well go all-in on this topic. Previous entries here and here. Today, two more reader dispatches concerning which parts of your data you can and can't retrieve if a cloud service you'd relied on is turned off -- as Google has recently done with Reader and many of its other services.

1) Making backups of Gmail. I mentioned yesterday that, to Google's credit, "It has been a leader in making sure you could make your own copies, or extract, any of your info that was in its part of the cloud." A reader writes:

There is a notable exception: Gmail. You can download all your mail via POP3 or IMAP but Google throttles the download speed:

http://www.dataliberation.org/google/gmail

http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1071518

I decided to create a local backup of my mails at Gmail a few weeks ago and have managed to download around 100,000 mails so far, i.e., the throttling is probably more restrictive than Google mentions. In the best case according to the information provided by Google, it would still take me around a week to download all my mail from Gmail via IMAP. There is therefore no efficient way to migrate your Gmail account to another mail provider. And if you want to keep all your mails and all your labels, you get each mail at least twice ('all mails' or 'sent' plus label).

I am still happy that the Google Data Liberation Front shows new signs of life after it had looked abandoned for years. At least for Gmail, however, it is not that useful. And I hope in any case that I do not have to migrate away from Gmail (or Google Apps for Business in my case)

I have made piecemeal IMAP archives of my Gmail cloud archives over the years (via Thunderbird and also Apple Mail), rather than trying to do it at one go, so I had not noticed the restrictions the reader mentions. But they're worth bearing in mind. Of course, Gmail is so central a part of Google's offerings, and of its burgeoning for-pay business apps, that it is hard to imagine Gmail ever being turned off as a conscious business decision. Still, I feel better having my own backups, just in case.

2. 'BOOOOOOOO!' for Downstream Effects. A reader in the tech biz writes:

I think the move to paid services is ultimately probably wise for all of us info junkies, except that the inclusion of RSS functionality on any given site may be hampered by the lack of Google's huge availability. Why code for it, or more to the point, provide it at all if even the dismissing eyeballs that reader provided are no longer there?

One other side effect that has been under-discussed but that tails off of the google data liberation front (what a stellar name, it should be a not-quite-ready-for-prime time Brooklyn band name):  the history of pages you've already read is stored in reader but I don't believe it exports with your feeds.

I can, today, search in reader for a lifehacker article about a shelving system that I thought about building during a bout of DIYness. That resource will be gone to me. Or a homegrown revolution post about a wild-cherry growing system that is self-sustaining. Or a Sullivan post that I have been meaning to email him about for two plus years. Or a Fallows post on civil aviation and comparisons to ask the pilot posts from four years ago before salon ruined their RSS feed system and I stopped reading salon.

Come to think of it, that's the biggest fear. When salon ruined their RSS feeds I went from 9 individual feeds i cleared daily to zero (RIP How the World Works, one of my favorite blogs of all time). Ditto for wonkette recently when they went to teaser RSS posts instead of full entries - I can't open posts calling John McCain "walnuts" and accusing him of senility at work! This angle is the Iran-news-access-by-proxy service google was providing through reader (not to compare my circumstances to those of the oppressed in Iran).

As we say in App Dev, the downstream effects and the lack of even a frozen "legacy system" for historical purposes are severe and, worse, not clear.

BOOOOOOOOOOO!

I'm not going to bother with a paraphrasing of these posts for readers not involved in the computer world, since people most affected by these changes are likely to understand the arguments as presented above. I will say that what must have seemed to Google a simple, clear-cut business choice -- let's stop messing around with the "interesting" little diversions and concentrate on our mainstream products -- is having more complex "downstream effects" than most people might have foreseen.

Early yesterday I mentioned that while Google's new Keep application, a nascent all-purpose notetaker, looked very interesting, I wasn't going to waste time getting used to it. That is because of the company's now-established track record of killing off products that prove to have niche rather than sufficiently mass appeal.

This could be a sane business strategy for Google -- network TV, for instance, is also in the mass rather than niche business. But since my own software tastes often lead in the early-adopter niche direction, I've decided I should stick with companies whose business model is aimed at users like me. When it comes to TV, this means that I watch a lot more things on cable than on the main networks (except sports). When it comes to note-taking software, it means sticking with Evernote, rather than risking that what Google did to Reader, Notebook, Desktop, Health, and other services I used and liked it would eventually do to Keep.

I raise the point again because, since the time I wrote that item (and after I spent all day today in transit), I have seen a quite surprising critical mass of comments in a similar vein. For instance:

• Ezra Klein in the Washington Post, on the dawning awareness that niche enthusiasts like him (and me) have tastes that really don't match Google's business model, as we're now coming to understand it. Eg, "Together, the Gmail experience, the death of Google Reader, and the closure of Picnik all have me questioning whether I want to keep investing time and energy in 'free' Google products or whether I need to start looking for paid services that are explicitly making money off the thing I am paying them to do."
  
  
• Kevin Drum, in Mother Jones, on why the inability to rely on Google services is more disruptive than the familiar pre-cloud experience of having favorite programs get orphaned. My example is Lotus Agenda: it has officially been dead for nearly 20 years, but I can still use it (if I want, in a DOS session under the VMware Fusion Windows emulator on my Macs. Talk about layered legacy systems!). When a cloud program goes away, as Google Reader has done, it's gone. There is no way you can keep using your own "legacy" copy, as you could with previous orphaned software.
  
  
• An Economist item that offers an even harsher judgment. Eg, "Translated into economese, Google has failed to consider the Lucas Critique: adoption behaviour for newly offered services will change in response to Google's observed penchant for cancelling beloved products.... If a particular Google experiment isn't cutting it in that category, then Google may feel justified in axing it.
  
  "But that makes it increasingly difficult for Google to have success with new services. Why commit to using and coming to rely on something new if it might be yanked away at some future date? This is especially problematic for 'social' apps that rely on network effects."
  
  
• A note from Brian Glucroft, a veteran of UX (user experience) work at Microsoft and elsewhere:
  "I've been pondering about broader UX implications and whether Google has hurt its reputation as 'organizer of all the worlds information.' The latter is part of what I have found so appealing about Google. But, I think the shutdown of Google Reader changes it to 'organizer of all the world's information, if it can be sufficiently profitable".
  
  "Of course Google is a business, but I think people expected it to 'error' in terms of being the best organizer even if it might make a tiny cut in profits. If nothing else, that rep of being the ultimate organizer has a value. And it's been hurt.
  
  "I feel bad for the folks on the Google Keep team. That's life and all, but geez, I'd be banging my head against the wall."
  
  
• A statistical analysis from the Guardian, estimating (half-seriously) that based on past performance we can expect Google Keep to survive until 2017.
  

I am about as pro-Google a person as you're going to find in the media. I've had friends at all levels of the company since its founding, and still do now. I've admired what Google has done in China; I live my info-life within the Gmail / Google Drive universe; and I am predisposed to take Google's side in most controversies, whether against Microsoft or the French. Including when it comes to its influence on the battered journalistic business model it has helped to overturn! But even I think it has done something brand-damaging.

Now, two notes on the positive side -- each of which is a reminder of what we have liked about Google.

1) Google has often orphaned services, but it has never "disappeared" data. (I am using "to disappear" in the transitive-verb sense familiar from Latin American politics.) It has been a leader in making sure you could make your own copies, or extract, any of your info that was in its part of the cloud. A reader writes:

One bit of the risk analysis of using Keep or any other new Google product is their commitment to letting you get back your data. As you know, the Google Data Liberation Front is dedicated to helping people get their data out of Google in a standard format. Over time, it's been clear that this is an initiative Google takes seriously.

So while it's a bummer that Reader is closing down, I can export my list of feeds in a standard format and use any of a hundred other RSS products. The same is true of all the other Google products I use.

Like you, I'm cautiously evaluating Keep. Whether I continue using it will depend on what the Drive integration looks like, specifically how easily I can export my Keep notes. [JF note: Also, whether there would be an iOS version, so I could sync it to my iPad. A plus of Evernote is that you can use it on just about any device or system.]

This is a key component of trusting cloud services, Google gets it at a ever deep level, and it's worth a mention.

2) I have relentlessly beat the drum for Google's "two-step" authentication systems for Gmail and other services, which radically reduce the likelihood that your account can be hacked from afar. Apple is only now playing catch-up with this feature.

To wrap this up: I am intrigued by Keep but unfortunately am not going to risk trying it. I admire and rely on Google and hope this recent stretch ultimately proves to have been a chastening rough patch rather than what we look back on as the beginning of a trend.

This animated graphic by T-Mobile is surprisingly interesting. What you see below is a static screen shot; the site itself says it offers a depiction of ongoing cyber-attacksUPDATE There is of course a reason why Chinese hacking has gotten more attention than intrusions from Russia, Nigeria, etc: of the intrusions from China appear to be government- or military-directed than from most other countries.

I trust the statistics are for attacks wherein there has been at least one complete exchange of packets with the purported source.  Eg the attacker has sent a packet, the destination has sent a packet in response, and something based on that response bas come from the purported attacker - such as happens with the TCP connection establishment handshake.   If it is based solely on the source IP address of a single inbound datagram it will be very vulnerable to IP address spoofing.  In that case, for all we know it could be the Duchy of Grand Fenwick spoofing IP addresses in their quest for Internet Domination (™).

Admirable/good: The Post's columnist David Ignatius (disclosure: a very long-time close friend) begins a column today forthrightly saying that he regrets having supported the invasion of Iraq ten years ago:

Ten years ago this week, I was covering the U.S. military as it began its assault on Iraq. As I read back now over my clips, I see a few useful warnings about the difficulties ahead. But I owe readers an apology for being wrong on the overriding question of whether the war made sense.

Invading Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein a decade ago was one of the biggest strategic errors in modern American history.

A crescent earth rises above the lunar horizon. (NASA/Reuters)

Our new issue — yes! subscribe! — contains a two-page Q&A I conducted with Eric C. Anderson. He has had  a variety of tech and entrepreneurial identities, but I was speaking to him in his role as chairman and co-founder of Space Adventures, which has made a business of sending customers into space. 

The subject of our discussion was the future of space travel. Below is an extended-play version of the interview, with extra questions and themes.

James Fallows: Space exploration seems to have lost its hold on the public imagination, compared with a generation ago.

Eric Anderson: I think absolutely they are right to feel a little bit disappointed. On April 12, 1961, the first human being, Yuri Gagarin, goes to space. Then, July 29, 1969: We're on the moon. If you and I were doing this interview on July 30, 1969 and you had asked me what space exploration would be like in the year 2013, I would've told you it would be far more advanced than it is now.

So I think the reality is that space was unnaturally accelerated by this Cold War conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union during the 1960s. Then, in the early part of the '70s, that sort of slowed down. The latter half of the '70s brought terrible economic trouble in the U.S., which really set the space program way back. In the '80s, it was the reverse. The Soviets basically ran out of money and then the Soviet Union collapsed. Then in the '90s we were sort of figuring out how to re-set ourselves in a post-Soviet world. It was in the mid-'90s that commercial revenues in space started to eclipse government revenues—that was mainly for communication satellites and things like that.

So that part of the industry has gone pretty well. Every day we use GPS and DirecTV and get the weather , and that sort of stuff. But human flight has just been totally crimped. The number of people going to space, and the missions they were doing, went down. The Space Shuttle was so much over budget that it just was impossible for us to really do any real exploration. That's a long-winded answer, but yes: There's every reason for people to be disappointed with where we are now, particularly with regard to human space flight.

JF: Why should people be excited about what lies ahead?

EA: In the next generation or two—say the next 30 to 60 years—there will be an irreversible human migration to a permanent space colony. Some people will tell you that this new colony will be on the moon, or an asteroid—in my opinion asteroids are a great place to go, but mostly for mining. I think the location is likely to be Mars. This Mars colony will start off with a few thousand people, and then it may grow over 100 years to a few million people, but it will be there permanently. That should be really exciting, to be alive during that stage of humanity's history.

JF: I have to ask—really? This will really happen?

EA: I really do believe it will. First of all, the key to making it happen is to reduce the cost of transportation into space. My colleague Elon Musk is aiming to get the cost of a flight to Mars down to half a million dollars a person. I think that even if it costs maybe a few million dollars a person to launch to Mars, a colony could be feasible. To me the question is, does it happen in the next 30 years, or does it happen in the next 60 to 70 years? There's no question it's going to happen in this century, and that's a pretty exciting thing.

JF: Apart from the cost of transport, what are the challenges in making that a reality? Are they cost and engineering challenges, or are they basic science problems?

EA: I think it's all about the economics. There is no technological or engineering challenge.

One key to making all this happen is that we need to use the resources of space to help us colonize space. It would have been pretty tough for the settlers who went to California if they'd had to bring every supply they would ever need along with them from the East Coast.

That's why Planetary Resources exists. The near-Earth asteroids, which are very, very close to the Earth, are filled with resources that would be useful for people wanting to go to Mars, or anywhere else in the solar system. They contain precious resources like water, rocket fuel, strategic metals. So first there needs to be a reduction in the cost of getting off the Earth's surface, and then there needs to be the ability to "live off the land" by using the resources in space.

JF: Again—really? To the general public, asteroid mining just has a fantastic-slash-wacky connotation. How practical is this?

EA: When [co-founder] Peter Diamandis and I conceived of the company, we knew it would be a multi-decade effort. From history, we knew that frontiers are opened by access to resources. We would like to see a future where humans are expanding the sphere of influence of humanity into space.

To make asteroid mining viable, we need spacecraft that can launch and operate in space considerably less expensively than has traditionally been the case. If we are able to do that, then asteroid mining can be profitable—very much so. When you ask "Is it viable?," I'll be the first one to tell you how risky this proposition is, and how there is a significant possibility that we could fail in a particular mission or technology, or fall short of our goals.

But we have found ways to reduce the cost of space exploration already. For example, our prospecting mission to a set of targeted asteroids will use the Arkyd line of spacecraft. The first of that series, the Arkyd-100, would have cost $100 million, minimum, in the traditional aerospace way of business and operation. But with the engineering talent we have, and by using commercially available parts and allowing ourselves to take appropriate risks, we've been able to bring that cost down to $4 or $5 million dollars.

In 10 years or so, what we'd really like to do is get robotic exploration of space in line with Moore's Law [the tech-world maxim that the price for computing power falls by half every 18 months]. Remember, asteroid mining doesn't involve people. We want to transition space exploration from a linear technology into an exponential one, and create an industry that can flourish off of exponential technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Our first missions, for asteroid reconnaissance, will be launching in the next two to three years. For these missions, we're going to launch small swarms of spacecraft. When I say small, I mean we'll send three or four spacecraft, and each one of those spacecraft may weigh only 30 pounds. But they will have optical sensors that are better than any camera available today. They will send back imagery, they'll map the gravity field, they'll use telescopic remote sensing and spectroscopy to tell us exactly what materials are in the asteroid. It will be possible to know more about an ore body that's 10 million miles away from us in space than it would be to know about an ore body 10 miles below the Earth's surface.

We're really not talking about if; we're talking about when.

JF: Apart from the practicalities of asteroid mining, what is it going to mean in spiritual and philosophical ways for people to leave the Earth? I guess this is taking us back to the science fiction of the '50s and '60s, but what do you think?

EA: I've thought a lot about that. The interesting thing will be to see why the people who go to Mars, or to a colony on the moon, or to an asteroid, decide to go there. Will they go there because they're escaping something? Will they go there because they're curious? Will they go to make money?

Throughout history, most of the frontiers that we have had on the Earth have been opened up because people were seeking land—new hunting grounds, or fertile locations for cattle—or mining for gold or precious metals. But occasionally they would go somewhere new because they were seeking religious freedom or some other kind of freedom.

So I don't actually know why people will go. Will the Earth be so ravaged by war, or catastrophic climate change, or whatever else, that people will want to leave?

JF: In addition to the forces you mentioned, over the last half millennium or more, the search for new territory has been powerfully driven by national rivalries. The French, the English, the Spanish and others were seeking new territory in which to spread their influence. Do you imagine the national rivalries on Earth being soothed by space exploration? Or rather being aggravated by space exploration, the way the exploration of the New World was?

EA: I think it's an excellent question, and I think it's inevitable. The Outer Space Treaty, which was signed in 1967, basically says that no nation can claim a celestial body for its own sovereignty. And it also says that anything that is launched from a particular nation, that nation is responsible for, if it crashes into another nation or something like that. But I don't see the Outer Space Treaty living another 100 years.

I think that history repeats itself, and all the same things that happened in our history over the last thousand years will happen in one form or another in the next thousand years. Nowadays things are accelerated, it won't take as long for those cycles of history to happen—because we have faster means of communication, faster democracies, faster governments. The consequences of action, of economic and political and social drivers, can be felt and reacted to faster than they have been in the past.

But those same things will happen. If the first colonists going to Mars are all American, what kind of system do you think they're going to want to set up on Mars? And how are other countries going to feel about that? And at what point will the Americans just pull out of the Outer Space Treaty? Or maybe it'll be the Chinese—the Chinese could get to Mars long before us. Who knows? But being there is 99 percent of it and I think that when the dam breaks and it's possible to travel at a reasonable cost in space outside the Earth's very-near vicinity, all sorts of things are going to change.

And one of the other tenets of the Outer Space Treaty is that space will not be weaponized. I hope that lasts for a long, long, long time, but I mean, who knows, it seems like a pipe dream to think that would last forever.

JF: About the environment: Are you thinking space could be not just an escape from a ravaged Earth but a way to save the Earth?

EA: There's a huge environmental cost to mining on Earth. But there are lots of strategic materials and metals that we can get in space and that will be necessary for us if we want to create abundance and prosperity generations from now on Earth. We sort of had a freebie over the past couple hundred years—we figured out that you can burn coal and fossil fuels and give all the economies of the world a big boost. But that's about to end. Not only do we have to transition to a new form of energy, we also have to transition to a new form of resources. And the resources of the nearest asteroids make the resources on Earth pale by comparison. There are enough resources in the nearest asteroids to support human society and civilization for thousands of years.

I'm not suggesting that we're going to start using resources from space next year. But over the next 20 years, resources in space will most likely be used to explore our solar system. And eventually we'll start bringing them back to Earth. Wouldn't it be great if one day, all of the heavy industries of the Earth—mining and energy production and manufacturing—were done somewhere else, and the Earth could be used for living, keeping it as it should be, which is a bright-blue planet with lots of green?

JF: Here's my last question. When I was a kid in the Baby Boom era, there was a genuine national excitement about space. Do you think that mood in the United States needs to be recreated for the populace as a whole? With an overall national excitement or sense of mission about space exploration, like in the 1960s? Or, on the contrary, is this something that should and can be left to people who see a business or scientific opportunity?

EA: If you look at polls, about half the population says that if it were at a price they could afford, and it were safe, they would go to space themselves. They would love to see the Earth from space. I don't know what that means in terms of gauging support. But clearly the more people are interested in and supportive of space exploration, the faster the industry will grow.

I think spending a half a percent of GDP on space, on space exploration, would be a very wise investment, whether that investment comes from the government itself or from just private industry. There are few things that inspire human engineering, human ingenuity, and the human spirit more than space exploration. Kids love space, and they love dinosaurs, and they love all those fantastical things that can happen when you push the boundaries. It's the same reason that, when my little one crawls out of her crib at night, she peeks around the corner to see what's there. This is curiosity.

We have enough perspective on ourselves and the universe to know that we just inhabit this tiny little corner of the universe. Humans are curious; so to say that we're not interested in space would put us [at odds with] the very core of our being as humans, in a world where we've defined a limit that we can never go beyond.

We obviously have huge problems on Earth, and nobody's saying that we should try to go develop space in lieu of solving our problems on Earth. But the fact of the matter is that we should always be doing things that inspire our youth and ourselves, and try to bring out the best parts of human nature.

James Fallows talks with space entrepreneur Eric Anderson about the next wave of space exploration.