And speaking of criticizing, in Brute Orbits, you explored the possible future of the penal system.

Yes. And everything in that book, the punches are all pulled. The reality of the history of the penal system from, say, 1700 to the present is 100 times worse than even I showed there or referred to.

What are your thoughts about Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib?

Yes. They had a thing in the 19th Century called The Galley. Ships that they couldn't use for anything else, they converted into prisons. So in the book, what they have is a situation where they mined out these asteroids. And what do we do? Let's put these prisoners on them. And we don't want to really be looking in on them too much, so let's send them on an orbit. Hey, why don't we just have those orbits not come back? Or come back late? Let's not worry about whether we get it accurate or not. So it's kind of a Swiftean "Modest Proposal."

But a lot of people take it seriously. And I began to take it more seriously when I read a book by Lawrence Friedman called Crime and Punishment in American History. There's an afterward to Brute Orbits which you should read which tells you some pretty scary things. For example, in the 1720s, our utopian democracy, the most expensive building they make — are you ready for it? — is a prison. And then their idea of enlightened punishment is to put someone into those cells and try to isolate them without any light. And people started going crazy. And people started going nuts. In fact, the first two people in that prison, which is in Philadelphia. You can go visit it.

Eastern State Penitentiary?

That's the prison that was built in 1720.

That place? That has some serious bad juju in it. You walk in, and you just feel it.

You have been in there? Well, that's a remarkable place. But the first two people who went in there was a boy that stole a loaf of bread and a woman who ran away from her husband.

And then when they saw that the prisoners who were isolated were going crazy, and they couldn't deal with them because they were insane, they then mitigated that and gave them carpentry and work. And inside of 10 years, the prisoners earned so much money at the carpentry business they owned the prison, they owned the warden, all bribery. And all the original ideas were gone. You know, it became utterly corrupt. In 1940, Al Capone had himself put in there to escape the federal government on a lesser charge. And if you go there, you'll see his cell.

It is so ingrained in human nature, and it's always the kind of constraints of the real world that I try to bring to my most optimistic views. And that's really the issue, isn't it? How optimistic can we be; how creative can we be? Can we really make things better, or is it all going around in a circle? And so far, it looks like it's going around in a circle.

So what we're talking about here, in addition to science, is that current events, too, are influential on your writing?

Of course. And of course, because you have to ask yourself all of the possibilities that exist within a species in terms of its knowledge and its science and applied science, technology. Why aren't we further along? Why have we not solved a lot of problems, when all of them could be solved, with the wealth and the talent that exists? We could solve every problem that we have. And the answer, of course, is that people in power don't wish to be disempowered. And changes that would make that their world would throw them out, the fossil families, oil, gas, and coal.

In the book, Skylife, that I'd done with Gregory Benford, we made the point that a true opening of the Solar System was space faring, so we become a space faring culture. And what it would produce is a global rearrangement of political power on the surface of the earth. So why aren't we back on the moon? Why don't we have space faring, to put it that way? It's because it threatens a lot of things that they want to remain the way it is. They tell themselves, "We'll go to the better technology energy generation when we've got the last of the oil that we can get." We'll be choking to death by then.

I mean, the only hope you've got is if the ecological models for global warming are wrong and that we'll really last out the fossil era and then they'll be forced to bring in things that will not choke us to death or warm us to death or whatever. But it's there.

There's a thing called the New York Times Science Times every Tuesday. Last week, they reported that in Tibet, the glaciers are turning into rivers. And in Alaska, the permafrost, which has been there for hundreds of thousands of years, the frozen ground, has melted. There is no permafrost now there. A Canadian scientist sees changes: Greenland is green again. And why don't we hear about it every single day? We don't. And it's just remarkable how this is happening around us and yet there are people still questioning it.

Or the worst case of all, which I couldn't believe the other day nobody brought up in this call-in science program I was just featured on on PBS, several nations in the Pacific have petitioned the New Zealand and the Australian government to emigrate en masse. Small nations, you know, some of them maybe 100 people. Because their little island countries are all about to be submerged. All they need is, like, a foot or two of sea water coming up to end it. I mean, what more evidence do you need that it's catastrophic?

And this is not even talking about, you know, the warming of the earth that will produce shifts in the plate tectonics or bring up bacteria life in the frost that we haven't had on the surface for a long time that we're not resistant to. You know, 90 percent of all life on the earth are these bacterial mats that exist hundreds of feet below the ground, which have been there and which by weight are most of the life on the planet. By weight. And if this stuff starts coming up, bringing viruses and bacteria that we're not adapted to, and can't deal with, what will that do?

And of course, global warming will destroy agriculture in the Midwest, turn it into a desert. And just the dryness that will happen. Things will evaporate more quickly, and that cycle will quicken the various ocean currents, would change distributed heat differently. And they don't care. You know what Mr. Bush said about history, how will history judge us? You know what he said? He said, "Well, we'll all be dead."

I say all this to show you that there is a considerable amount of reality behind most good science fiction. And that it's not just me.