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ESA Scans SF Books For Ideas
cyberm writes: "The European Space Agency has started a project to scan science fiction books for new ideas and technologies. " I like this idea - and not just because I have a massive science fiction book collection. If you look at the past, science fiction authors have routinely come up with the inventions of tomorrow - Jules Verne is a great example of classical science fiction that did so, but today's hard science fiction authors, like Kim Stanley Robinson, or David Brin are building tomorrow, IMHO.
Few other stories have captivated me as much as Neuromancer
I think thats the problem. Neuromancer seemd to use upp all his remaining ideas. Anything before that was short stories (many of which were very good, but naturaly a novel will use up a lot more ideas)
anti-matter schpansy-panter, i wanna noe where i sign up to field test battlemechs.
Alright, so I wasn't clear, and didn't bother to look up complete information. :)
How about this: The equipment needed to recycle spent nuclear fuel for reuse in power plants can also be used for enriching Plutonium for use in nuclear weapons. Keeping this equipment out of non-military hands is one of the reasons the NRC requires that highly radioactive spent fuel (after one fuel cycle) be expensively stored rather than enriched and reburned until less radioactive.
The point was the NRC regulation, not the military potential of the recycled fuel.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
From http://itsf.spaceart.net/information/index.shtml:
...
The main objective of the ITSF Study is to review past and present SF literature, artwork and films
My
And of course Clarke didn't quite get the satellite right either. IIRC he wrote about the idea for geosynchronous orbits before the invention of the transistor - his satellites would have to be manned because someone would have to change the tubes when they burned out ;)
(yes, yes, tubes rock and all that)
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
John W. Campbell: "Ted, ninety percent of the stuff that's called science fiction is crap."
Theodore Sturgeon: "John, ninety percent of everything is crap."
Thus we have Sturgeon's Law, "Ninety percent of everything is crap". (Theodore Sturgeon was a science fiction author of some note, and John W. Campbell was both an author and long-time editor of Amazing Stories, which is now Analog, the hardest of the hard-SF available in a monthly magazine. Ironically, JWC was one of the people taken in by the Dean Drive hoax.)
--
This post made from 100% post-consumer recycled magnetic
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
for every one good idead that might have come from one good SF book, there are approximately a gillion bad ones
The commonly accepted ratio is stated by Sturgeon's law: "90% of all science-fiction is crap".
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
perhaps they can implement it using RFC 2795
Seriously, this is not something that warrants actual spending of tax dollars. God knows those poor bastards in europe pay enough already. Not that the 1% of science^H^H^H^H^H^Hpeculative fiction which is based on real science doesn't have merit; there are thousands upon thousands of good, feasable ideas IMAO. For example Jack Vance suggests selling human pelts. A completely untapped market. Akkad Pseudoman (EF Northrup -yes, that one) suggested electromagnetic launch in a 1937 book entitled "Zero to Eighty". Intel ads have maglev material handling systems. There is Heinlien's oft mentioned 'waldo' of "Waldo and Magic Inc.". And John Christopher suggests electrical 'caps' to bend human minds to your every whim. Tell me thats not a good idea! All good ideas. But not worth spending tax money on.
Isn't it amazing how many of my sentences begin with contractions?
Very good. "Friday" was the first Heinlein I ever read (that I know of anyway). Starship Troopers was still kind of kid-oriented, Friday definitely is not. Still, I personally would recommend it down to around 13/14.
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One story I remember was about the engineers who maintained control of the huge central nuclear power plant (which ran all of the rolling road cities) going insane because of the pressure they were under; they eventually decided to put the power station in space. On the Moon, if I recall correctly. The thesis was that if the reactor melted down, the entire planet would be destroyed, and that was why we had not made contact with any alien civilizations: By the time a race became advanced enough to have space travel, they developed nuclear power and blew themselves up. Of course it sounds silly now that we know what the real dangers are from nuclear power, but in ~1941 no one really knew wat to expect. And putting power stations in orbit is a great idea that will make traditional issues like smog pollution and gasoline shortages obsolete.
Also I thought the fictional society in which the law was "An Eye for an Eye" was pretty interesting. It was one of the later "nomadic refugee" books, probably either "Job" or "Number of the Beast". The specific example I remember was a guy being run over repeatedly by a truck because he crippled someone while DUI.
I think this was also the same society that killed all of the lawyers... a common Heinlein theme as well.
Rev Neh
... and there is no doubt, that one day he will be
where the eye of his telescope has already been
If you can run a research reactor, you can breed fissile U-233 from Thorium-232. You don't need more than a chemistry lab to separate the two. If you have gas centrifuges, you don't need to breed anything; you can separate bomb-grade U-235 from natural uranium. The ban on reprocessing may have been politically expedient (because it plays well to an ignorant public), but it has next to zero scientific foundation.
--
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Indeed a nice idea, and they go for the right
books.
I wonder what might be next: 1984 has scared me
and many others for years, but i am surprised
how fast public video control takes over.
Then came 'Truman show' and today, whole
Germany seems addicted to a show called
'Big Brother' with an obvious concept.
Is this just me or a trend towards 1984?
-- dune73
As far as I'm concerned Vernor Vinge was the author that created cyberpunk. Gibson just repeated him a few years later.
We need to start 'seeding' the ESA with the *right* kind of SF.
Step one - force them all to watch 'Barbarella' - a future filled with Fonderesque babes in revealing spacesuits is a time I want to live in. Ditto the Orgasmatron tech. from 'Sleeper'.
Step two - Two Words...BIG FUCKING SPACESHIPS. Feed them Iain M Banks, wid a quickness.
Step three - Any SF which has Immortality./life extension as a theme. Make sure they read some of the 'Monkey's Paw' type stuff as well to help them iron out the bugs.
Step four - Make Neal Stephenson head of their computing R&D department.
Step five - Stop them from reading/seeing any Robert Heinlein/Jerry Pournelle stuff. If I want o live in an extremist right-wing future populated by smug patriarchs I'll move to the US. (joke!)
Step six - Try to persuade them to set up a division reading Fantasy novels as well. Given that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, I may end up with that magic carpet I have been after for years, after all.
Just my 2 Zorkmids.
-- Stu
if they want to work on something, i hope they work on a Light Sabre. i want one so bad.... not one of those mock-ups, mind you, but the real thing
Just another computer geek....
When politicians are involved, everyone loses.
If you're gonna start with Adams, i vote for a real life Marvin, complete with dodgy Diode in the left arm.
Then again, waking up on the seafront at Southend could be a cool experience, just as long as the infinate monkeys stay away...
Syllable : It's an Operating System
This reminds me of the (book\movie) "(Six\Three) Days of the Condor" from the late 70's.
The protagonist worked for clandestine CIA branch and did nothing but read spy novels all day to either gather technique or uncover surreptitious intellegence hidden in the plot lines, I can't quite remember which, and I think it changed between the book and the movie. In the end something goes wrong and everyone but him in his office is murdered by another renegade agency branch (he happens to be out to lunch at the time.) He ends up running and hiding from the killers, using the techniques that he has picked up from reading the spy novels to fend them off.
Pretty good book, pretty good movie, wierd plot device. Truth may be stranger than fiction, but it appears in this case, fiction got a 20+ year jump on truth.
Not necessarily. Depending on what exactly was being done with this, it might just be an imitation of reality. The point about virtual reality is to visualize completely abstract stuff (like a database) in a way so that you can interact with it "naturally".
In any case, I doubt Gibson came up with THAT either. Johnny Mnemonic is the only movie that I've preferred (as dumb as it was) to the story.
You really, really dont like Gibsons work, eh? Cant see why, though.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
Ok folks, lets think about this:
Most SF authors really do not have a good grasp
on science. Most however do have a firm grasp on authentic sounding technobabble,
which is different from science alltogether!
Yes. It is true that some technologies were predicted by SF authors, but they really do
not become practical until the required
technological infrastructure exists to support such ideas.
Using SF ideas to drive basic science research
is a silly idea, as most SF has no basis
in reality. Using SF to drive technology on the other hand may be feasable, but for any ``cool'' idea, it becomes realistically implementable only after there is enough infrastructure to support them.
(e.g. a single computer is a nice toy, (e.g. ENIAC) but multiple computers on a world wide network, now that kicks ass! Second example: The Chinese were probably the first to invent rockets. But it took until the 20th century to actually develop it into useful forms, such as the jet engine and orbit capable rockets. Both only became useful after there were enough support, such as lots OF airplanes and airports for the former, and the
substantial industrial capacity required to build and maintain such rockets.)
Giving credit to where credit is due is of course
a noble concept, but we also have to think of
the uncountable hours the actual engineers spent on designing/building the inventions and the supporting infrastructure to make them useful!!
So who deserves more credit? The real scientists
and engineers who actually DEVELOPED an idea
into a realistic form? or the person who
had an idea/dream and did nothing with it?
Hey, if the NSA comes knocking at your door, I'm sure they'd listen to Reason.
It makes complete sense to scan books for ideas simply due to the fact that most ideas presented in s.f. are not exactly impossible, many of those ideas are just hard to implement. Example: space travel was in s.f. since the days of Jules Verne as well as submarines (Summary of 20000 Leagues Under the Sea) well (I am not saying he was the first but that he wrote about it and it was s.f. but it's a simple fact of life today).
Of-course scientists will not find anything in these books that they did not know already, however it maybe an interesting experiment to see whether we are missing something, maybe there are certain things that can be useful and implemented today and until now only seen in s.f.
You can't handle the truth.
> ..that the ESA has the cash to spend on this sort of effort. Well they have no manned space crafts. ESA is just developing new space crafts for cargo and ariane space is launching them (very often). So they should have so money left for strange things. :) however they get less money from european counties than NASA does from US government.
FDR thought up that one in the thirties, it's called TVA.
Although I dig Gibson's work, he really gets quite a lot of credit for ideas that predate his work. While he may have 'created' cyberpunk, the elements were already present in the works of Vernor Vinge (True Names), Sam Delany (Personally, I think Babble 17 is the first cyberpunk book), John Varley (most of his work), and many others.
Doesn't NASA have an advisory board that includes SF authors? I seem to remember Jerry Pournelle being an advisor to NASA.
Insanity is the last line of defence for the master diplomat. But you have to lay the groundwork early.
Greg Egan is dangerous ;-)
once you've read all his books you'll have trouble beleiving you exist much less anything else.
He's the only author i've seen so far that has done good "what if's" with nanotech and gen. eng. from a point of view of bad things hapening.
no, it was an outer limits
episode, but they gave him either
"based on", "concept by", or
"original story by" credits, which means
they weren't
ripping him off,
and instead were paying him
for the use of the plot.
plus, it was one of the better episodes, IMHO.
------- Oh damn.... the Sigfile escaped... -Great OM
You seem to claim to
1. read every SF book that comes out
2. know all technologies of the future.
Color me sceptic...
In 1984, NSF, EEC DG-XIII and MITI started a joint project on technologies for organic production of electricity and virtual reality.
In 1992, they started implementing it.
It is currently running in full capacity. An estimated number of 6 billion people are involved.
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
The logics of the story are connected to a global data bank. The story deals with issues of access to that information - what happens when someone wants to use that knowledge to, say, plan the perfect bank heist? It's quite relevent to issues of net censorship today.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Hmm. The first one sounds a lot like an idea Doc E.E. Smith had in the Skylark of Space series, space craft engines that affected every molecule inside the craft so their was no apparent internal acceleration no matter how hard the ships accelerated.
I sent in a question to ask slashdot to see if there were any such projects going, or to see if anyone would want to start one. For every one of these startup tech companies grabbing headlines with their "genius ideas," there is a sci-fi writer who came up with the idea 20-50 years ago.
It's about time the men and women who came up with the ideas got credit for them.
...in Niven/Pournelle's Footfall.
:>
For those who haven't read it, what do you do when faced with alien invasion? Call on those who have actually considered the problem before - SF writers. And, of course, they saved the world
-hk
Therapy is expensive. Bubble wrap is cheap. You choose.
I don't really see Gibson's view of virtual reality ever coming to light. It almost seems like if Microsoft took over VR. You'd have every moron and his brother jacked in pretending they know what they're doing while the people that do know what they're doing end up with less and less potential to do it because all the corperations bump up their security standards to keep the morons from accidently breaking in. Sound familiar? I would have to say that a lot of the ideas that Arthur C Clarke proposed would be extremely interesting. His proposals of using ultra-thin crystal strands as wire for suspension and repelling and manmade rings that circumnavigate the Earth were very interesting (sort of a massive scale difference there). I think what they need to sort out is not what author is more credible, because if the scientists can make it work, it becomes credible. What's important is what is achievable with the resources we have right now? I still think that it's funny that after all these years someone has finally realized that science fiction authors have done almost as much to come up with new inventions as scientists themselves.
The Internet, one place where if you're not right, someone else will set you straight... maybe.
In that movie, IIRC, a group of bookish CIA researchers spent their time reading spy novels to see if they could locate ideas worth suggesting to their bosses.
BTW, I tried italicizing the movie's title in my subject line...did you guys know that italic tags don't work there?
"How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->
Starship Troopers was still kind of kid-oriented, Friday definitely is not.
:)
I dunno, Starship Troopers did have some pretty interesting moments, IIRC. Though I read the back of a copy of Friday once (I didn't have any money or I would have bought it) and I'll agree with your second statement. < g >
Still, I personally would recommend it down to around 13/14.
Yeah, I was reading Anne Rice and all kinds of strange horror stuff around that age and it didn't damage me (insert chorus of people I know yelling "Yes it did!")
All the more impressive since he apparently had no clue of how computers actually work.
Along that line, it could be argued that "hard" science fiction is the wrong target for such a project: If someone has no idea if what can be done and what cant, they're much more likely to come up with an idea thats worth changing what can be done for.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
I'm surprised that True Names and Other Dangers is out of print. It also features Run, Bookworm, Run!, Long Shot, and a few other stories. Find it if you can.
According to Amazon.com, True Names: And the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier
is coming soon to a bookstore near you. (Publication date is supposed to be April 2000, but it's not available yet.)I checked Amazon for info, but since they're patent abusing bastards who should be first against the wall when the revolution comes I'll probably buy from Fatbrain or my local bookstore.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
I don't know if it's the university you're referring to, but Ohio's Miami University continues this practice.
Perhaps someone has to think it up before it can become reality?
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Now this would have been a great help indeed
in the Microsoft-trials... Connect it to an
electric chair, place Bill Gates on it, and interrogate him thoroughly. He'd probably die
answering the very first question, though
("Do you swear to tell the whole truth, nothing
but the truth..." (Well, I know that's not the
exact wording, sorry!))
This certainly has some intriguing possibilities, though their mention of people "achieving teleportation" is a little wacky, since quantum teleportation isn't true matter teleportation. I wonder if they'll do any work on stratosphere elevators.
However, that's neither here nor there. Clearly we need to band together and donate money for them to work on a Ringworld.
Sargent
Wouldn't this be Pierre Boulle's idea?
First of all: good plan! Second: I want a total immersion video game console, as used in Red Dwarf, including helmet, gloves and groin-socket!
How to make a sig
without having an idea
...yep, if we're ever going to travel REAL fast in space, we need them inertial dampeners I keep hearing about every Wed. night on Voyager...or else, when the ship decelerated, we'd all go splat on the forward walls of the ship...either that, or (if we were strapped in), our internal organs would do the same thing on the insides of our bodies.
lots of good ideas can be found in science fiction...lets hope some of them can become reality
And boy what a fun job! Read sci-fi books all day and take notes on the coolest technologies.
an eccentric frequenter of the tech-savvy news discussion site, slashdot.org, has obtained a government grant to build the worlds first synthetic human. working in isolation, the inventor designed the synthetic human, affectionately named, syntha-port, from the ground up.
"i had a pretty good idea about what functionality i was after here. i watched every natalie portman film i could get my hands on, including appearances on david letterman and entertainment tonight. the only thing i still have to work out is the hot-young-actress mind control rays that natalie shoots out from her big brown eyes and pouting teen breasts."
thank you
John Brunner's The Shockwave Rider is a classic example of early cyberpunk and was written years (at least a decade? not got research material with me here) before Gibson started. Maybe predates the Vinge?
It has the internet (OK - the tech is out, they used sequences on a phone keypad rather than a computer, but it is a large interconnected electronic communications network which is the internet in all but name) and even viruses! The hero puts a worm into the network... Before the internet worm incident happened.
Classic book, I just wish I could write more intelligently about it but it's been a while since I last read it and I don't have it, or any research material (such as the Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction) to hand.
"Information wants to be paid"
Uhm... _Three Days of the Condor_? I think it was based on a novel called _Five Days of the Condor_.
-carl
. We've got computers, we're tapping phone lines, you know that ain't allowed - Talking Heads, "Life During Wartime"
This is a sweeping generalization, and therefore automatically wrong. "Science Fiction" is in fact not really a genre at all, and certainly not a subgenre of pulp. In fact, it could be argued that it sheds a limitation that all other fiction adhers to - writing about the present or the past.
I think we do ourselves a tremendous misdeed when we consider a story interesting just because it happens on mars or in the future.
And how is considering a story uninteresting for the same reasons not stupid.
In regards to quality, science fiction is not at all different from other literature. Sturgeons Law applies, as always.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
The ESA may be on to something it is cheaper to pay their scientists to read SF about launching things into space than it is to use the NASA approach of actually launching scrap metal at another planet
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
The major problem here that for every one good
idead that might have come from one good SF book, there are approximately a gillion bad ones. You can't say that SF writers are he real genius of science, when they just run the whole gambit of new ideas. Even a blind squirrel finds a nut every once and a while.
Plus, there's a HUGE difference between thinking something might be cool and writing a story about how people handle it, and exploring the unknown to actually invent that thing. Let's leave the credit right where it belongs, with the scientists.
PKD had some great ideas, like galactic pot healing, and mechanical frogs. Not to mention the world where time ran backwards (i.e. people grew younger each day, regurgitated their food at dinner).
As described by A. C. Clarke (Fountains of paradise), Kim Stanley Robinson in the mars trilogy,
Seriously tho, we could start building one whithin our life times (~next 60 years), assuming we'll have nanotech cabable of makeing diamonds in the next 20 years.
(We can start moving the asteroid into position before we have the tech to make the cable).
Why does nobody talk about uplifting elephants? At http://www.biol.tsukuba.ac.jp/~macer/bll/bll6.html :
Erratum: whales are mammals, and have larger brains than elephants.Elephants don't presently do much we regard as intelligent, and the absence of hands with opposable thumbs obviously doesn't help. Our understanding of their vocalizations is pretty minimal. Like whales, they may be conveying a lot of information that we are missing. There might be a good distributed.net project in there somewhere.
If somebody invented guns and radios that could be carried and operated by elephants, it would be interesting to see what armed, coordinated elephants would do to poachers. If there were elephant-operable construction machinery, they might build dwellings for themselves. Or maybe they'd have philosophical reasons for not doing these things. It would be interesting to know.
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
Don't forget to read also bad SF, poor selling sf or whatever you call it. Good stories generally are good not because they painted the most probably reachable future technical innovation or how to use a in-theory possible feature of the universe, they are good because how they talk about people, and how they live/adapt/take advantage in that new environment/situation, even if it is based in totally imposible things.
In that way, one can write a perfectly technically possible sf novel with bad plot, not taking care of people, etc, that will be cataloged as unreadable, but with ideas that in a near (?) future can see the ligth.
Oh, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying Starship Troopers was no good. Quite the opposite. I'm just contrasting ST general wholesomeness to Friday's...errrr....less than wholesomeness.
Of course, the ST movie wasn't for kids either...
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... I just read Freeware on the way home from a gaming convention last month (a 6.5 hr drive from Buffalo to NYC took 11 hours because I couldn't put the thing down).. Absolutely bizarre, wonderful stuff, and I was a bit lost not having read the first 2 books in the series, but I enjoyed the ideas all the same.
;)
Hey, they can fund their work with semiconscious sex toys
Your Working Boy,
On the other hand, if the Cat in the Hat described the PC, perhaps he would say--- If a packet hits a pocket on a socket on a port, And the bus is interrupted as a very last resort, And the address of the memory makes your floppy disk abort, Then the socket packet pocket has an error to report! If your cursor finds a menu item followed by a dash, And the double-clicking icon puts your window in the trash, And your data is corrupted 'cause the index doesn't hash, Then your situation's hopeless, and your system's gonna crash! If the label on the cable on the table at your house, Says the network is connected to the button on your mouse, But your packets want to tunnel on another protocol, That's repeatedly rejected by the printer down the hall, And your screen is all distorted by the side effects of gauss So your icons in the window are as wavy as a souse, Then you may as well reboot and go out with a bang, 'Cause as sure as I'm a poet, the sucker's gonna hang! When the copy of your floppy's getting sloppy on the disk, And the microcode instructions cause unnecessary risc, Then you have to flash your memory and you'll want to RAM your ROM. Quickly turn off the computer and be sure to tell your mom!
Finally, it doesn't even remotely fit most of Gibson's short stories.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
If you come with some science-fiction idea and you want to enter a contest, try the UPC Science Fiction Award, "the most important science fiction award in Europe" (Brian W. Aldiss).
;) )
Languages are EN, FR, ES and CT.
Prizes are up to 1,000,000 ESP (~= 6,010 EUR) and publishing. (Gimme 1% if you win
You have until September.
__
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Well, that would solve the question of telecommuting once and for all! I'd work in Austin and go home to Irmo, SC each evening.
"How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->
Not generally, so far as we know. Bonobos in small numbers and in adequate environments are peaceful and get along reasonably well. Overcrowd them, though, and you have a repeat of the Monkey Hill mess of the 1920s/1930s (I forget exactly when it was, and whether bonobos were the apes involved).
Does our intelligence give us the tools to rise above the Holocausts, the Lockerbies, the Kosovos and the Columbines?
Yes. At the same time, it gives us the tools to perpetrate those acts. Intelligence is and always will be a two-edged sword: use it well, and everyone benefits. Use it poorly, and...well, we have only to look at history to see the results.
[...]and that our technological society is based on the urge to kill.
Most inventions came about from three drives:
1. Necessity.
2. Laziness.
3. The desire to kill.
Okay, so the last is a bit of a dummy. I can kill someone with my bare hands, a rock, or the latest and greatest sniper rifle. It's just that for most circumstances, the rifle makes it easier. Hence, the last is a more specific instance of laziness.
This seems pretty reasonable to me, except that in my view intelligence and self-awareness adds a potential new dimension to violence: depravity.
I agree wholeheartedly. Animals kill because they have to. People kill for a number of reasons, but few of them have to do with survival.
In Ender's Game, Ender kills Stilson and Bonzo to survive, but in Stilson's case, he kills (albeit unintentionally) with great violence because he thinks it's the only way to make sure that none of Stilson's comrades will do the same to him. In Bonzo's case, he kills (again unintentionally, but realizing right away what he did) because it was the only answer to a there-and-now problem.
The difference between the two is not the degree of violence employed (as they were roughly equal incidents). The difference is the motivation. Ender killed Stilson to ensure his future safety more so than his present safety. After all, Stilson would probably never have killed him; at most, he would have beaten him up, probably badly. Ender killed Bonzo in pure there-and-then self-defense.
On the other hand, as we have seen countless times in human history, people can and do kill purely because they want to. In that case, killing becomes a crime of power, a way to demonstrate that the killer is more powerful than his victim. It is also the ultimate violation of anything that might be considered a human right. By killing another, you have robbed that person of anything that they would have enjoyed for the rest of their natural lives.
I don't think any other species does that with the sort of abandon that humans do. Even chimps, when they kill out of rage or out of a desire to preserve or rise within a hierarchy, don't kill so liberally.
www.alarmist.org
Maybe.
Animals seem to exhibit some of these traits in varying degrees, perhaps in proportion with intelligence. A spider isn't very paranoid and doesn't seem to be grouchy or dissatisfied (not that we can tell, anyway). Cats often seem grouchy and dissatisfied. Monkeys are on occasion all three.
But....
Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C Clarke asked a similar question in 2001 -- is intelligence somewhow linked to violence.
IMO, no. Any organism smart enough to survive more than a few seconds has the potential for violence. Certain species of ants live almost solely by conquering and enslaving other species; primates (chimpanzees, for instance) can and do murder and rape each other.
Nature is not all tranquil pastoral settings. Behind the scenes and around the bend often lurks incredible violence. Intelligence has nothing to do with it (although it can lead to more refined forms of violence). Violence is a part of life.
www.alarmist.org
The cake is a pie
I'm kind of spooked that governments are paying attention to sf. Not that I think Asimovian psychohistorical prediction and control is possible - I am quite certain it is wholly impossible - but I think there are many ideas and tools in science fiction that governments might use inappropriately.
But, then, that's just an anti-government reflex, I suppose. I'm glad that people making decisions are recogizing science fiction as the hotbed of innovation and insight its fans have long recognized it as.
A. Keiper
The Center for the Study of Technology and Society
Washington, D.C.
We want the moon missions from Stephen Baxter's Moonseed. Send people to the moon for less than the cost of a B2 bomber, and terraform the bugger with a nuke and the water from the craters at the south pole.
(I also like the part where they land a Soyuz on the moon using harenodynamics. Wild, but someone has posited it could be done!)
"Information wants to be paid"
Here's an entire Gibson novel:
Uncommonly smart but undereducated street urchin finds "McGuffin" (see Hitchcock if you don't recognize this term). Said McGuffin has the power to "transform the world". McGuffin falls into the wrong hands and is accidentally triggered. World is transformed. Urchin remains unshowered.
Now throw in a few keywords (enviro-, cyber- and techno- seem to work) and character development (underage smoking, uncomprehending and/or used-to-be rebel parental figure and music groups [names only] are common) and you've got yourself another novel!
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If any SF author "invented" virtual reality, I'd say it was probably either Vernor Vinge (who wrote the VR-hacker story "True Names" years before Gibson wrote "Burning Chrome" or Neuromancer) or possibly Ben Bova (who wrote a story about a "dueling room" which may have been the root inspiration for the holodeck).
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On a more realistic level, I wonder how come nobody has yet come up with a popular VR file manager like the one show in Disclosure. That must be trivial for a game programmer.
Read "Friday" by Heinlein.
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No, the norm in politics is to tout the wrong thing as a solution to The Problem. This makes certain that The Problem will not be solved, and the organizations funded to address The Problem will not have to worry about working themselves out of jobs, nor will the constituencies built around The Problem have to find something else to do with their lives. It becomes a nice little pork-barrel project, creating a bunch of nice little sinecures which return support to the pol in a positive feedback loop.
Examples abound. Welfare subsidies were touted as a way to get rid of poverty (they didn't, and arguably created more); gun control is still touted as a way to get rid of crime (yet there have been surges in crime after every major gun-control measure); morals laws are touted as a way to get rid of prostitution (yet there are still prostitutes, and arguably the problem is worse with the twin scourges of crack cocaine and HIV).
Then there are the laws which merely support venality, like the forfeiture laws which allow the cops to keep whatever they take from you if they bust you for having certain controlled substances (whether you actually had any or not). But these don't actually increase the ill they purport to cure.
</cynical>
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Now how in the world would this be physically possible with our current understanding of physics? Not meant as a flame, I actually agree with your post, but isn't the ring being physically possible pushing it a little?
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
...for future technologies?
As far as I know, the good authors get those ideas by talking to working scientists.
Perhaps the ESA just needs to start paying more attention to the scientists already in their employ!
Perhaps I am unique in this, but there seems to be a profound difference in (ahem)..style between book-type fans and those who think that there has ever existed a "sci-fi" Television program in which realism*entertainment. There are two primary sub-genres of science fiction: 1.) "Hard" - The driving ideas are technological or natural. A large amount of understanding/creativity concerning physics, chemistry, astronomy, et. al. exonerates the author for less-than-blazingly-insightful depictions of human beings, especially if the world of the story is imaginatively constructed and well-formed. (i.e. Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov) 2.) "Soft" - Almost solely responsible for the "SPECULATIVE fiction, please" camp, this type of writing is driven by the immersion of the reader more into the characters than into the world surrounding them. An extensive grasp of hard science can be forgiven if powerful statements are made about the nature of human beings. (i.e. Orson Scott Card, Theodore Sturgeon) Thanks for listening. I say all that to say this: While it's perfectly alright to have areas of a story that are somewhat underdeveloped, there MUST be something else about the story that makes it worth being told. With a crap/total content ratio approaching unity, what passes for science fiction on television is and has always been the most unbelievable, uninspiring, tyrannically ridiculous waste of electrons that the world has ever seen. The _only_ exceptions I can think of are: Babylon 5: Neither the science nor the psychology got too far out of hand (thanks to Creative Consultant Harlan Ellison - damn fine writer.) Most importantly, NOT EVERYTHING IN THE UNIVERSE SPOKE AMERICAN IDIOMATIC ENGLISH! Star Wars: This is perpetually maligned because the driving force is so huge as to be difficult to see: It's mythology. MST3K: Because it treats crap LIKE crap - and is funny about it.
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Pay no attention to the errors in my post. I am the great and powerful Oz.
So maybe we should hire some people to read through what the monkeys are writing... We might even find out other things. So maybe it's better to just stick to SF writers.
I'll just be waiting for my Sonic Screwdriver and Dr Who's Tardis. The ultimate kick ass mobile home.
Of course, Buckaroo Banzai's car travelling through solid mass was pretty damn cool too..hmmm, so many goodies and so little time.
Unless of course they're reading HG Wells......
Search for "quantum teleportation" on your favorite search engine. (I found 2400 refs on Google.) Or search your local library for the past couple years of Scientific American, Nature, Science etc.
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
If you subscribe to Robert A. Heinlein's "world as myth" theory, then anything you write about has already happened in another universe. All we have to do is develop the technology to cross the dimensional borders and we can have any technology we can imagine.
Hey, maybe Hollywood will rip off "The Inconstant Moon" some time. I wanna see a Nova/Flare Disaster Movie. ;-)
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Then it was the CIA trawling thrillers for ideas (bullets made of ice and such). Result was a whole lot of people getting whacked. Do you reckon ESA has a hit squad?
It's an idea that runs around occasionally. Bob Forward gave a speech to a 1981 conference I attended about his contract with NASA to investigate partly baked ideas.
The Niven/Pournelle book "footfall" included a government think-tank including barely-disguised versions of Bob and Ginny Heinlein, Niven & Pournelle themselves, and a few others that were familiar to me while reading it (Anderson? Poul? Forward? Bova? McCaffrey?).
no need to worry about dangerous technologies when you can always trust the motives of those working on it
Probably you have omitted a lot from that plot. Even if you can know that somebody is doing something in good faith, you can't trust it to be good. People may be wrong and self-deceived.
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
It's now thousand monkeys on a thousuand word processing programs.
Remeber the voice activated typerwriter in one of the original Start Trek episodes?
The idea behind the review of the books is to get ideas. Sometimes when you work in an area, you see the logical progressions, but you don't take jumps.
Back in 1983, I saw a 10mb r/w magneto/optical prototype written up in EE times. I told my boss about an idea of sticking one of these things in the trunk of a car. Put up all the local maps on the drive and have the car tell you where to turn. An idea that I got from Knight Rider.
Fight Spammers!
Actually, I think that there is huge promise for Space in nuclear power. Currently, the biggest supply of electricity for the Space Station is supposed to be solar. Great if it's adequate, but putting a Trident reactor on a detachable pylon, on a remote part of the station... Attaching an SRB to it to send the thing into the sun (should it malfunction)..
:)
What about Mars? As I think of it, if a sub can stay self-sustaining for months, then this is promising technology for extended, remote space missions. We'd need water, but no need to carry too much of it. It can probably be dug up from the crust, or maybe snagged from orbit.
NASA would (and HAS I'm sure) learn a great deal from the submarine experience. Not just in the power generation and recycling departments, but also in the sociological ones. So many people, confined in a cramped space for a long time - sounds a lot like a trip to Mars to me.
Yeah, there's problems in all this, but the computing power on my desktop put Man on the Moon a few decades ago. That says that problems can be solved, once we put our collective mind to them.
As for the issue of the government controlling nuclear power; your points are well taken. It could not simply be a transplantation of military mentality. But, there are enough civil programs in place to make for an interesting hybrid - especially with the TVA now in history books.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
It is true that SF is frequently -- even usually -- very badly written. It's not something we should be proud of. But this is not what attracts us to SF, it is the ideas and concepts, not the writing. If it was the writing, then "fiction" stories (the same old plots every time, in-depth explorations of the same emotions, endless iterations on the theme of "feelings" and "turmoil") set in a futuristic setting would not do well. This is why
(a) true geeks are frequently disappointed by supposed "sci-fi" movies, because they are just romance/cops-and-robbers/whatever stories rehashed in a futuristic/foreign environment, and
(b) why real SF is hugely popular with us, even when set in (moderately) mundane settings. Take the Matrix for example: 95% a standard action movie, but the concepts made it a huge geek favourite. That, and, in my particular case, the sight of Keanu in tight leather pants
It's not the writing, it's the ideas behind the writing that keeps us hooked. We wish the writing were better, but it's not essential.
There are two responses to this:
1: In the past, SF authors have been trying to predict what the rest of the world, running largely independently of them, will do. This involves some scientific extrapolation, but much more sociology, economics, politics, and so forth. The sheer number of disciplines involved makes it clear why the track record is pretty dismal. What a project like ITSF is doing is looking at SF for things the world might do and actively trying to implement them.
2: The flights of SF do not stop at technology. Science Fiction is largely about using technology to free stories from modern pragmatic constraints -- or about telling stories dealing with what may happen when those constraints are gone. The Diamond Age was not interesting because of its descriptions of nanotech per se, but because it showed us a society which had transformed itself for a nanotech age. Stephenson isn't going to teach the ESA how to pull diamond out of the air, but once we learn to do so he might be a good place to look to predict what people will value and how they'll live and think. Maybe we'll get free public compilers a decade early because he thought of it ahead of time.
Now that I've defended the general idea, I have to agree that I'm a bit discouraged by the ITSF project. Their introduction speaks of gleaning purely technological concepts, like rocket fins and orbital space stations. Details like this are historically not, and they need not be, the strength of SF. We should be looking to SF to figure out how to develop technology that's in the pipeline, to see how people currently understand it and how it might be used.
- Michael Cohn
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I'm not all that old, but nearly all my SF reading was from small libraries with old collections. So I'm very familiar with, say, 40's-70's and less familiar with 80's and 90's.
Which leads me to my point: A lot of the ideas people are remembering as being from recent writers ("virtual reality" from Gibson and "corps more powerful than gov'ts" from Robinson) have actually been around for a LONG time.
In fact, both of these have precursors from Heinlein. And, as much as I like Heinlein and as inventive as he clearly was, I doubt he made up all these ideas himself.
I hope these researchers treat this search in true scholarly fashion: Give credit to the first author to have written down a given idea. I'd hate to see, say, Gerrold get credit for inventing the time machine instead of Wells (or Twain, or ???).
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I'm not trying to cast a shadow on the writers, on the contrary. I think that they are to be commended for having the vision to see the need/possibility of such things so much sooner than the rest of us. But I think searching through sci-fi for ideas is a waste of money that could be put to better use doing some real science.
Maybe they are just having trouble finding things for grad students to do these days. :) --Ty
A friend of mine won a couple of free passes to Battlefield Earth. When it shows up on network TV, it will make great fodder for a MST3K party, but on no account pay money to see it.
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
It seems like 99% of science fiction ideas
are rehashes. However, the other 1% may be a gold mine. It might be nice to have a
comprhensive taxomony of the genre.
Most SF authors really do not have a good grasp on science. Most however do have a firm grasp on authentic sounding technobabble, which is different from science alltogether!
If what we're talking about if hard SF then you're completely wrong. A lot of the authors are either working in the field themselves or have at least degree level educations in it, and they definitely know what they're talking about. And if you look at the credits in most hard SF books you'll see a list of scientists that have looked over the ideas in the book and given the author more feedback on their veracity.
Maybe you should read some of the SF that's come out in recent years before shooting your mouth off. There's plenty of excellent novels with great ideas being talked about in this article, go and read them.
AFAIK none of them came up with the idea of DNA before it was discovered either. The whole idea of genetic engineering was completely missed out upon by the early sci-fi writers.
Typically you don't need to scan for ideas, the ideas are brought to market by the implementors reading the books initially. The implementors that have the proper mindset will seek these book out on thier own. That's one of the reasons I like reading hard/technical science fiction. It does make sense since it gives you a large number of "concept" people that aren't limited by formal training. I do agree that it really is strange that they would fund a program to explicitly do this since the typical engineers in these programs are of the type that would read it anyway. Maybe it's just a perk that they wanted to fund people's libraries 8^)
Don't forget Axiomatic, Quarantine and his new book Teranesia. There is also his first book, An Unusual Angle, but it isn't as hardcore sci-fi as the rest. Some of the older books are out of print so try the library.
I have an idea. We should build a really big, really smart computer (maybe using a beowulf cluster?). Then we let that computer have total control of all space expeditions we send out. I think it would work very well.
Phobos - Greek word for fear or flight
I'm only halfway through it now, but one of the threads in the story is about a group called the Anthropocosmoloigsts who hold this belief. They are waiting for scientists to come up with a valid theory of everything in order to complete the Universe and its structure. And it's a good read so far :)
Though we haven't quite reached Gibson's level
yet, it looks to be a good fraction of world's
economy eventually.
And I could sure use a Cherry 3000...
You know, there are lots of really, really bad ideas floating around in science fiction. Let's definitely keep them away from The Man in the High Castle, especially the Germans... Come to think of it, given their laws against Nazi literature in Germany, is Man in the High Castle (or Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream) even legal to publish there?
They also need to stay clear of David Bunch's Moderan, Barry Malzberg's Beyond Apollo, Larry Niven's Jigsaw Man, Gene Wolfe's Fifth Head of Cerberus, and Walter Miller's A Canticle for Liebowitz.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Anyway, interesting trivia about this. The character of Mike was built after Heinlein read a Scientific American special issue on computer technology and its future. Much of the computing described there (including some howlers, if you pay close attention) come straight of of the articles in that magazine.
It also shows how hard it is to really predict the future. Mike is a huge mainframe just like they had in the sixties. Heinlein, like every other science fiction writer than I know of (and nearly every other engineer, computer scientist, etc.) failed to predict the truly profound change in computer technology. The personal computer.
(Though Fritz Leiber did write a story predicting something like a palm pilot, but that's another story.)
The cake is a pie
Have the ESA got their satellite up yet ?
no sig
I think that computers are really not THAT significant in the general picture. Sure, they are a very usefull tool, but positronic or not, they are just that. Yeah, some vast artificial intelligence would make a good character for a book, but its size probably doesn't matter in the general picture for a sci fi novel. Besides, man got to the moon without much computing power so see, it's not really that important. The internet may have changed the world by allowing instant communication and access to data, but in the sci fi books I've read people usually have something similar. Also, the internet is bound by the speed of light, and this is not much use for a novel talking about interstellar travel.
you could actually go so far as to say that Niven and Pournelle predicted this. in the book Footfall, the Earth is invaded by aliens and the president gathers together top science fiction authors as a team of specialists. they put together a lot of the best sci fi ideas to help save the world. very good book...except the aliens looked like baby elephants.
another thing that science fiction writers deal with is predicting how the public will react to new technologies. they often have true insight.
"patriotism is a virtue of the vicious."
"disobedience was the original virtue."
- There's no such thing as a "logical next step", as you think of it, in science. Most science gets done by looking at something that nobody's looked at before. The only "logical next steps" involve cross-checking and confirming that you really have what you think you have.
- Someone without a scientific background is going to be unable to spot the mistakes which permanently place a concept in the realm of utter fantasy... or at least until someone discovers exceptions to certain laws of physics or reduces magic to engineering-level practicality.
- "Totally ridiculous to a scientist" means that the idea violates one or more of the laws of conservation of energy, momentum, angular momentum, charge, baryon number, or the like. If it doesn't try breaking one of those, and it looks like it can be done with existing materials, you might have something.
- "Revolutionary enough to be worth trying to implement anyway", like employing a bunch of people sitting in a bunker focussing their thoughts trying to psychically ferret their way into the minds of the nation's strategic enemies? Oops, we actually did try that. It was another one of the things that had no basis in known physics, and guess what... it didn't work!
The true scientist, the person who knows the constraints imposed by natural law, is always going to have the advantage when rating these wild-assed guesses, and even more of an advantage when trying to come up with new ones. The ignoramus is usually going to come up with schemes on the order of "If we made flying pigs, we could have them poop on our enemies and defeat them"; never mind that no flying animal has ever been as heavy as a full-grown pig. The thinker with the solid grounding in science knows the limitations, and by implication, the places where they don't apply. Genetically engineering English sparrows to poop like pigs upon our enemies, and thus defeat them, isn't forbidden by physical law.This is borne out by history. The Dean Drive, an "inertialess propulsion" system based on reciprocating masses, was a complete failure. None of the various "free energy" concepts making the rounds has ever had a successful test under controlled conditions. On the other hand, there are ion engines, photon sails, and other ideas which are based firmly on the existing physical laws as they are currently understood, and mirabile dictu - they work!
Go ahead and try to dream up some miracle space-flight device. Spend all of your life on it, if you like. If you don't bother to get a good understanding of the physics which rules the regime in which your device must operate, you have a 99.9999% chance of completely wasting your time... and also the time of anyone who listens to you talk about it. And that's why scientists usually blow off the "miracle" schemes of the ignorant: it wastes their time, which they could use to make progress on something that will actually work. There are so many ignoramuses out there with unworkable "miracle" ideas that if scientists gave their ears to a significant number of them, science itself would grind to a halt.
So do the whole world a favor. Get yourself a physics textbook and don't bother posting on a topic like this until you understand all the material forwards and backwards. I mean, know it cold. All the laws of statics, kinetics, electromagnetics, thermodynamics... all of it. Then you'll see where your errors were. You'll also be in a really good position to contribute to real progress.
See you in ten years?
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
I didn't mean no harm, honest...
Would it help if I told you my lisence plate says "SERVO"? I can recognize crap, all I wanted to know was why they were ONLY looking at SF literature and not all of speculative SF, which would include tv/movies...the previous reply kinda took care of that, thanks.
The Divine Creatrix in a Mortal Shell that stays Crunchy in Milk
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
The cake is a pie
It's not that simple. I've had cats who killed mice and left them on my doorstep whenever I came back from a vacation. Individual cats play with mice because they enjoy it. Cats have evolved to enjoy playing with mice because doing so is useful. Behaviors exist because they were more functional than disfunctional in their original context. That's all.
The meme that we're the only ones to kill for sport is fun to say, and appeals to us enough that it's as widespread as the ideas that lemmings drown themselves and Craig Shergold wants you to send him a get-well card. Brutalization is useful in certain contexts for control and status. I doubt we're the only ones doing it.
Even if some people employ it when it's not specifically helpful, that hardly sets us apart. Press the lever and get a reward, not because pressing a lever is good now, but because pressing it under similar conditions in the evolutionary environment helped more than it hurt. Animals will get fat if you give them access to their favorite foods.
What sets us apart is that we're better at learning and communicating than other animals. That makes better able to build on the work of prior generations and so eventually dominate our environment, and it also means we're better equipped to supplement or override our hardwired tendencies, for better or worse.
Maybe Europe's money would be better spent improving science education. Inventing new devices is great, but we'd also benefit from better dissemination of what we already know, and in the long run, that might lead to more technology than a direct investment.
This is a bummer you can't find the Ringworld books. Actually (ahem, okay, this will date me) I did all my early science fiction reading in ye olde publicke library, but I bought the first two RW books when they came out. Anyway, check the libraries if the UB stores are no good.
I am quite civilized, and I should be brought a beer immediately. -- Bruce Sterling
90% of science fiction suck, because 90% of everything sucks- Ted Stergeon, paraphrased
( Dont know if I spelt it right but you prpbably know what i am talking about )
The SESS Glasses sound like A must have for working with windows, no more GPF's!!!!
A SEP ( somebody else's problem ) field would be nice to put around Photocopiers, telephones and other household devices. I am a network engineer not a F-King electrician, I don't know how to fix peoples toasters so if i dont know they exist it might stop people from asking me to do it.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
I am quite civilized, and I should be brought a beer immediately. -- Bruce Sterling
What really interests me are the inventions that Science Fiction didn't predict. I've never seen any evidence that any author foresaw the development of the personal computer, much less its implications. The computers of classic SF were usually planet-sized sentient ENIACs, bulky calculators (less power than out modern graphing calcs, but the size of a laptop), or "positronic brains" which had to be embodied in a humanoid robot. If anyone can point me to an SF story with a computer as powerful and as small as those in common use today, written before the invention of the Altair, I'd love to hear about it.
Sure, once they had been introduced to the idea of small, commonly available computers, SF authors ran with it, forseeing many of the enhancements that we now take for granted. But somehow, no one appears to have made the initial speculative breakthrough.
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DoH! Yep, Niven, for sure. Of course the Ringworld idea was not strictly Niven's, he got it from the works of Freeman Dyson. But that takes nothing away from him as a great source of ideas. And he should really sue Hollywood's ass off for all of those copycat asteroid movies. ;) Remember that scene in Lucifer's Hammer with the surfer in Santa Monica Bay riding the tsunami, up until he smacked into the Barrington Towers apartments? My wife used to live right on that block. I got the willies thinking about it. Of course the thought of LA being wiped out by a tsunami is comforting, means there's hope...
I am quite civilized, and I should be brought a beer immediately. -- Bruce Sterling
Let 'em work on making that machine from "The Cat in the Hat" a reality. No more housecleaning, just switch the thing on and let it go to work...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Recipe for cyberpunk:
1 part Dystopian society
1 part utopian technology (good fast AND cheap)
1 part glamorous writing style
I've read plenty of VR-type stories, including the "if you die in VR, you die in the real world" cliche, dating from the 50's and 60's.
I'd classify William F. Nolan's LOGAN'S RUN books as cyberpunk, and they came out long before Gibson or Vinge.
To give credit where it's due, Gibson did a great deal to POPULARISE cyberpunk. I'd also like to add Walter Jon Williams as a writer who did cyberpunk really well.
I'd comment more about Vinge, but I haven't found a copy of True Names yet.
Jon
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
Both types of Sci-fi have something to offer humanity. Speculation about what technologies may be in our future and how they will impact our lives, and introspection into the human psyche. This second one may be even more important since the layer of abstraction provived when the reader "suspends his or her disbelief" and maybe sees things through the eyes of another. Even a subconscious prejudice may be revealed. Since one can have empathy/sympathy for a green-skinned, pointy eared alien, maybe we can come to some understanding aout life for the stranger living around the corner.
I want the Lazy Gun from Against a Dark Background.
nal 11
They should closely study "Repent, Harlequin, Said the Tick-Tock Man" by Harlan Ellison. 100,000 jelly beans in the escalator has always struck me as innovative.
NASA, on the other hand, should ponder Ellison's book "Approaching Oblivion." Cynical, but they're due for a little of that.
I'll put in a vote for the MIT Science Fiction
Society. Must be about a half century old.
There have been sporadic attempts at indexing
there.
Permutation city, Distress and Diaspora are all worth reading along with his short stories.
Yeah, I've read them all, and enjoyed all of them. Some really out there ideas in all of his books. If you like Greg Egan, read Vacuum Diagrams by Stephen Baxter. It's a series of short stories set in his Xeelee sequence universe, and has some great science ideas and concepts, including a story about a life form make from mathematical postulates!
Y'know, Adams raises a pretty interesting point about AI.
Maybe the potential for things like grouchiness, dissatisfaction and paranoia are somehow linked to intelligence itsef. Even more so given the limited scope we would want our robots to use their intelligence (like the intelligent elevators that took an impertinent interest in which floor you wanted to go to).
Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C Clarke asked a similar question in 2001 -- is intelligence somewhow linked to violence. This was more than the usual killer robot thing, because they applied that question to humanity as well. The first thing the ape-man did when he got souped up intelligence was to brain the other ape-men at the water hole.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Remember that scene in Lucifer's Hammer with the surfer in Santa Monica Bay riding the tsunami, up until he smacked into the Barrington Towers apartments?
That was probably my favorite scene in the book. Have you read Inferno? Niven and Pournelle did a remake of Dante, weird and strange.
I really want to read the Ringworld series: I've never been able to find copies in used bookstores.
Unicenter TNG ?
Jack me in...
Actually, I DO beleive that a lot of cheesy SciFi (like "Tom Corbet! Space Cadet!", Buck Rogers, etc) of the 50's were very instrumental in growing the public momentum towards the US space program in the 60's, altho it was a combination of many things incl. the cold war/sputnik/space race, Werner Von Braun (also SciFi influenced), commitment by President and congress, etc, etc...
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
First I've heard of it, but I'm grateful for the reference.
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Almost everyone missed personal/distributed
computing. Look at the kinds of computers
in 2001:Space Odessey. Asimov has a story about
a society dependent on PDAs.
The quick rise of InterNet was also missed.
Remember, the concept of communications satellites came from Arthur C. Clarke. There is much technology that may be extracted from science fiction, but we have to remember that actual laws of physics must apply in this universe, and not movie physics. =]
Don't you mean Hedonist?
Oh... wait... Sorry.
Arthur C Clarke is the ultimate example for this argument. His paper on Extra-terrestrial Relays in 1945 described the modern-day satellite. This paper actually inspired a whole new technology.
The ESA launcher family Ariane is the leading commercial launcher by far. And it didn't get developed on a shoestring budget.
The ESA is an extremly successful agency, especially considering its origins as a transnational body for a group of nations not know for their large spending on Space affairs.
-----------------------------
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If you can't blind them with brilliance, baffle them with bull.
If we start with the A's, then we'll have all the Douglas Adams ideas first. The infinite improbability drive is considerably more useful than anything invented by HG Wells. (Apart from gravity opaque paint, and time machines)
His Hyperion series was bloody gorgeous, and he wrote about a (much more physical) "Web" back in the late 80's before the WWW was a mote in Tim's eye.
On the other hand, the first thing they should do is find out the skill of SF writers' forecasts. You need to weight Clarke's or Robinson's or Brin's (well maybe not Brin's but definitely Clarke's) ideas higher than, well, I won't name names. You get the idea.
I am quite civilized, and I should be brought a beer immediately. -- Bruce Sterling
> today's hard sciene fiction authors, like Kim
> Stanley Robinson, or David Brin are
> building tomorrow, IMHO.
As long as it's not a certain L. Ron. H....
-- jaf
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Just thinking off the top of my head I already came up with "prior art" for virtual reality: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
Remember how Mike presented a false image of himself and the "room" he was in? I'm sure other people can come up with other examples, possibly even pre-dating mine.
AFAIC, Gibson couldn't write himself out of a paper bag, let alone invent anything novel.
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Anyhoo, see the Dyson Sphere FAQ for more.
The real Captain Avatar is a fictional character, so I suppose he doesn't mind if I impersonate him.
I thought it was pu-235 that was of interest for nuclear warfare.
That would be U-235. I haven't heard of Pu-235.
Hey there :) I hope I'm not being to cynical, but sci-fi isn't the be all and end all of future visions, if you ask me(MyOpinion (TM)). I mean, look at the sheer volume of what's available. Of course SOMEONE will stumble upon the great advance of the 21st century. Hell, think abut IBM, and even NASA. The stuff they're researching now will go into production decades from now. Anybody who reads up and has their sources can predict pretty accurately what basic inventions will be available(bar the great, society-changing ones). Anyways, put a thousand NASA workers reading a thousand Sci-Fi books from a thousand different authors, and they'll come up with some great inventions :)
:)
Dave
P.S.: I am an avid sci-fi reader. The number of Sci-Fi books I have is more than most people have in any genre.
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Maybe we will be able to convince other authorities to do this as well? Traffic could be a lot better than now if some of the ideas out of "Utopia" can be realised.
:-)
Of course... i would also like it if they watched more movies and SF-series... would like to travel with the help of a transporterroom and it sure as hell would improve my cooking if i had a replicator...
Sounds like a job of a lifetime. Reading Bear, Assimov, Clarke, Gibson and Stephenson and get paid for it.
It's just you. Sorry. ;)
My
jabber wrote:
We've all seen nuclear power fail,
What are you referring to?
The reason there is a bad reputation in the nuke industry is cost-cutting, pure and simple.
The nuke industry has the best safety record of the entire American power industry.
Running equipment to the point of failure, minimal staffing, letting inspections slide...
?!?
with a set of nuclear anchors bolstering the grid in times of peak demand - and selling the power abroad in low demand.
You're, um, going to ship the excess power out of the country? Wouldn't that be kind of expensive? Since nuclear is a base power technology, how about if we build just enough plants to cover the base demand and use gas turbines and solid oxide fuel cells (they convert natural gas directly to electricity) for medium and peak power.
Here are a couple of excellent resources for learning about nuclear power:
The nuclear energy option : an alternative for the 90s Bernard L. Cohen
(used to be called Before its too late : a scientist's case for nuclear energy)
The war against the atom Samuel McCracken
Recycling spent fuel from PWR's, with their typical burnup of 40,000 to 50,000 megawatt-days per ton, yields a fair amount of plutonium. Problem for the weapons business is, all Pu is not created equal. The isotope of interest is Pu-239, which is both fissile and has a reasonably low rate of spontaneous fissions. (Too high a rate of SF's, and you can't assemble a supercritical mass before it disassembles itself; once it's expanded past the point where it is prompt-supercritical it stops yielding energy, even if it's only given you the equivalent of a few kg of TNT. To get that supercritical mass, you have to delay the onset of the chain reaction until the fissile material is sufficiently compressed to give a good yield. ONE spontaneous fission in the mean time....)
Bomb-grade material is not made in power reactors. It is (was, in the USA; we're not making any more) made in special reactors from depleted uranium (DU) rods, which are irradiated for a very short time and then processed to remove the plutonium. A short period of irradiation creates some Pu-239, but doesn't allow very much of the Pu-239 to be transmuted to the problematic (very high SF rate) isotopes of Pu-240 and Pu-241. In a power reactor you just plain don't care about the spontaneous fission rate, but for a bomb it is crucial. The spontaneous fission rate of the plutonium from power reactors is way beyond anything that a bomb designer would even think of using. And that's why commercial nuclear power is not a bomb-proliferation risk even with reprocessing (the political posturing over plutonium notwithstanding), and why story lines based on this are technically deficient. AAMOF, any story which treats this falsehood as a given should probably not be called science fiction.
--
This post made from 100% post-consumer recycled magnetic
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Think of the new ideas and concepts you might discover by creating a non-human culture; it's an easier way of doing it than meeting extraterrestrials.
We'd have to be careful not to create a mere mimic of our own society, of course, but if you read the Uplift novels you'll see Brin's conception of why that is unlikely to happen. As for the territorial instincts of chimps, humans are way more territorial than chimps. And I'm much more interested in the Uplift of dolphins than chimps, to tell you the truth... the difference between an aquatic species and our own would be far more interesting. Plus, uplifting an aquatic species would also remove any competition for territory: you guys get the ocean, we get the land.
How about:
There'd be more but I've got to go home now :)
I always liked James Blish's "invention" of the Spindizzy used in the "Cities in Flight" series. It had a few trivial pieces of math behind it, based on one of Dirac's equations. But the fact that it had ANY math at all behind it, based on ANY real physics at all, makes it more interesting than many Science Fiction propulsion schemes.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
I think a lot of us are missing the point of the project. Noone is going to glean new technologies out of SF. What they may find is ideas that they had not considered. Suppose you're reading Heinlein some years ago, and see his idea about 'waldos'. One might think "Hey, something like that could be pretty useful. Let's see how I can make it work". SF is rife with ideas for useful things that may not been invented yet simply because those those with the resources to do so simply haven't thought of it.
Hmmm.. let's hope they read "The Deus Machine" by Pierre Ouellette as well...
Sure would be scary if an AI computer links itself up to a genetics laboratory and starts designing lifeforms...
Gibson came up with some neat stuff, but the 'transparent' stuff of Neuromancer is what the future is made of.
Specifically what comes to mind is the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority. A Federally controlled electrical power infrastructure.
We've all seen nuclear power fail, when handled by private electrical companies; but the government has been making it work wonders in submarine and carrier applications for decades.
The reason there is radio-active waste is NRC regulation, since 'recycling' waste results in weapons-grade nuclear fuel.
The reason there is a bad reputation in the nuke industry is cost-cutting, pure and simple. Running equipment to the point of failure, minimal staffing, letting inspections slide... It's all been done to recoup some of the cost of building a plant, and to make a buck. The Fed thinks differently about these things, especially with a DoD presence involved.
Putting two and two together, giving the government control and responsibility for nuclear power accomplishes several things.
1. Spent fuel can be recycled and reburned until inert, since the DoD will be, in effect, in control of the weapons-grade producing technology.
2. It will be managed adequately. When was the last time the DoD/Fed cut corners on maintenance and beurocracy? Yeah, they screw the social programs and NASA, but they pay $400/USAF screw-driver.
3. A minimum level of power supply to the national grid will be guaranteed. Privatization of power can be relegated to conventional and 'natural' sources, with a set of nuclear anchors bolstering the grid in times of peak demand - and selling the power abroad in low demand.
So, Gibson seems to have seen that this is a viable idea. Yeah, there's issues. The government being in control of weapons manufacturing capability will cause international problems. But these can be mediated with observers, or the selling of power and goods, dropping of tariffs; economics speaks louder than bombs these days.
Cyberspace aside, there's all the bio-tech Gibson brought (arguably not the first to do so, remember Bester?) to the scene, the Kaibatsu (Is that right? It's been years) multi-national corporations, the Virtual Light goggles that are now in college R&D labs (Georgetown?), the Island nations serving as data havens (or at least top-level domain whores today)...
Maps pretty well.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
People forget the whole point of economics (and thus commerce) is to satisfy individual desires with limited resources (time, energy, tech, etc). Science fiction (and fantasy to a lesser extent) expands the range of possibilities (think of it as advanced speculative marketing) and if enough people are willing (usually measured by their pocket-book), their dreams are fufilled. For those fixated on OSS terminology, think of it as scratching new itches on a mass scale. If enough people think a trip to the moon is worthwhile (after calculating the energy expenditure from tossing a few hundred kilograms up a gravity well), then you can bet some crazy outfit will come up with a marketing and branding plan the next day before outsourcing the technical details to the Russians (well, you can't get much lower cost than a bunch of bankrupt space engineers :-)). It may seem unfair but the people who do tend to accumulate things in the past (kings, tycoons, entrepreneurs, etc) usually had enough power, wealth or accumum to indulge in individual fancies (think Hearst, think Carnegie, etc), leaving the rest of us legacies like crown jewels or art collections or possibly even a future space tourist industry. It takes a rare individual/situation to motivate an entire group to accomplish complex missions (e.g. US tax-payer funded space race). If they can get a leg up by trying to crystal-gaze popular sci-fi lit, then I hope they have luck in bringing a little more excitement into the world. However, it should be noted that often we are constrained by our own limited viewpoints as much as any pundit. I recall an analysis of what people expected the future shape of their city to look like back in last century and people could forsee the electric lights and better transport system, but they still expected low-rise buildings and missed completely the sky-scrapers skyline (the elevator is a rare invention that enabled large collection of humans to really be put in close proximity with each other). Who can accurately tell what new social forces and desires will arise?
... it does make you wonder about the human race though when more people believe in astrology (and pay for it) than they do in investing in funding astronomy.
Aside
LL
While there are a few science fiction writers who successfully predicted elements of the future, the vast majority of science fiction "visionaries" of the past devised futures that were, er, crap.
Flying cars and bridges which crossed the Atlantic are two of my favorite "visions" of the future which turned out to be bogus. Many other "futures" included inventions which are totally impractical in order to advance the plot line, or disregard the laws of physics in order to do something cool.
I suspect a full survey of all science fiction, rather than focusing on the stuff that was a "hit" in predicting the future, would show that science fiction writers got it right about as often as psychics in predicting the future.
Not really. For instance, most writers from the 50's thought we'd have much more space travel by now. Or take videophones, they've never taken off, yet the technology is fairly trivial.
It's hard to predict what's going to work, because in addition to technical issues, there are also economic, societal and simple ease-of-use, "do I really WANT this?" issues which effect whether ideas become successful.
Jon
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
I'm sorry, I cannot allow you to do that, PhoboS.
--
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
This has been mentioned by many others before...
In the short story "A Logic named Joe" by Murray Leinster in 1946? A Logic is described like this "It looks like a vision receiver used to, only it's got keys instead of dials and you punch the keys for what you wanna get.....an' it's hooked in with all the other tanks all over the country",
Which sounds like an internet connected PC. Although ont the whole, you're right. Not many authors could imagine small computers.
Next thing you know, NASA is going to start hiring videogame programmers to make shuttles more user-friendly, the IRS is going to hire Mafia representatives to get ideas about gathering more funds, and the White House is going to start watching porn flicks to look for potential...well....anyway....
Got Rhinos?
I'm surprised no one's mentioned James Halperin. He writes purely science fiction (as in characterization? What's that?). He has some startling ideas about future technology developments and the effects they could have on society.
One of his books is called "The Truth Machine", and it's essentially an infallible lie detector that becomes the basis of all legal proceedings. Privacy vanishes entirely as a result, which has the surprising effect of increasing the pace and daring of technological research and advancement (ie no need to worry about dangerous technologies when you can always trust the motives of those working on it).
First, make it work, then make it right, then make it fast, then, make it bloated!
Read "Friday" by Heinlein.
I've been thinking about reading that sometime... good? The only Heinlein I read was Starship Troopers, which I really liked. Course I probably want to finish off the Foundation Trilogy before that...
I want Tommy the Talking Shotgun from "Night of the Day of the Dawn of the Son of the Bride of the Evil Mutant Hellbound Flesh-Eating Zombies Part II."
Robert wasn't as long on hard science as Clarke, but he was pretty damned good. Occasionally you also see him get credit for inventing the waterbed (this might fall into the urban legends category, but he definitely described one long before there ever was one). Also appearing first (that I can ever find) in his stories is a mass driver for lobbing things toward orbit. Niven and Clarke are also outstanding places to look for concepts (Clarke had ion propulsion long before I ever heard of NASA developing anything like that), but there are other places as well. Gregory Benford has some great stuff, as well as Robert Forward. Just because there's a lot of Sci-Fi (or Spec-Fic, depending on how Politically Correct you want to be) out there doesn't mean you can't prefilter a lot of it. Anything by L. Ron Hubbard, for instance, can automatically be discarded. What a hack that guy was. I can't friggin believe they are actually making a MOVIE of one of his pathetic excuses for fiction.
I think this is WONDERFUL idea. I'm surprised this approach hasn't been used before.
It reminds me of a medical biologist that was looking for new drugs. So, what did he do? He went into the Amazon and observed apes and chimps and noted what they used for medicines when they felt ill. He's discovered more than 10 new compounds from the plants the apes and chimps used.
Here's another neat solution to a common problem. Didn't you always hate how college campuses and other big complexes pour their sidewalks in 90 degree angles and such? Well, a University back in the 1900s [smile] decided to NOT pour concrete the first year after their campus' construction. Instead, they waited the first year, saw what paths the students had worn out, and paved those paths. Pretty cool, eh?
Awwwyeah.
;) I don't think about dyson spheres much because like.. uh. their infeasibilty when the ringworld is much more practical. :)
:)
Heh. oh yeah. dyson.
I agree with LA too
-- dieman - Scott Dier
What an odd idea... I mean there are thousands of SF books published each year, and only 3 or 4 have ideas that ever come to pass or are even possible. I guess no one remembers the ones that don't work out.
On the upside, I guess "reversing the polarity of the neutron flow" will fix everything in the future, just like on most episodes of Star Trek / Dr. Who
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
I notice they have e-mail and discussion forums on looking into technology from Science Fiction.
Our path is clear - we must all submit the concept:
"Lightsabres! Lightsabres! Lightsabres!"
and:
"We want lightsabres! Give us Lightsabres!"
_You_ can help Build a Better World.
Why are they only looking through Sci-Fi books, and not television/movies? (Well, with the obvious exception of Mission to Mars, hehe.)
I can think of a handful of Star Trek episodes that had far more plausible inventions than some of Asimov's stories...
The Divine Creatrix in a Mortal Shell that stays Crunchy in Milk
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
Let's hope they take a while to get to novels like "The Diamond Age" or "Snow Crash". I'm not sure I'm ready to be a working peasant in a nanotech world...
I want that gun named Reason from Snowcrash.
This post will probably get me in the computers of several governments
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
Just go to MechaPS
I say this with good reason. We can't even get current code to a completely "precise" state; i.e. that which it's behaviour can be completely predicted. What if that software was also "intelligent"? Who knows what it could do? We could have a HAL-like situation; possibly worse.
Software is an unpredictable beast. It's going to remain that way until the following are satisfied:
(a) we can guarantee a given piece of code,
(b) we can guarantee the compiler(s) used to build that code, and
(c) we can guarantee that the underlying processor is completely predictable in behaviour.
With current SE and MEE practices, that's going to be a darn long time off. Until then, my vote remains with the "stupid" software.
I guess Arthur C. Clarke was right in predicting HAL's behaviour; if a HAL did exist, "his" behaviour would probably be much like he predicted. I'm betting that when a HAL is produced, it will behave much like the HAL of 2001 fame, simply because humans in general are incapable of learning from their mistakes quickly enough.
Intel Inside: The world's most commonly-used warning label.
If you want a man with *ideas*, Greg Egan has 'em in spades... I still can't get over the wild uses he comes up for computers, nanotech, all manner of cool tech... plus he's got a CS degree. What more could you want? Try "Axiomatic" for a taste, then maybe "Diaspora". Mind you, I don't know what the ESA could take away from this...
So if they are at our level, then it's a question of equal rights. If they're not at our level, we have a responsibility to Uplift them: see below.
The problem is that nobody really wants to see chimps or dolphins that can communicate with any old human.
Um, so I'm nobody? The fact that there are still people who are xenophobic based on race is by no means an argument for aiding these species along the path to full sentience. Just because some idiots don't like it doesn't mean you don't do it: see the abolition of slavery, women's sufferage, and gay rights.
Forget it. It'd be impossible. What you would do is make your "elevated" chimps and dolphins miserable--condemned to live in a world where they can't enjoy the company of their fellows and can't fit in with the people who made them what they are. They'd always be circus freaks, outsiders, doomed to perpetual loneliness and isolation.
To quote Yoda, "I sense much fear in you."
Why can't they enjoy the company of their fellow chimps and dolphins? We are uplifting a species, not a few lonely specimens! They will all be intelligent. They will have their own society quite apart from our own (especially Dolphins). The only reason not to do it is xenophobia, which as I've explained, is no reason at all. Conquering fear of the unknown is what brought us all of mankind's greatest discoveries.
As for sentient machines, I am equally in favour of them, but more in terms of turning humans into them than inventing them separately; while we are busy uplifting Dolphins we can also bootstrap ourselves up to higher levels of existence, perhaps turning into 2001-esque space-roving machines/energy beings who do not need a planet -- which we can then leave to the chimps and dolphins.
He invented the communications satellite and predicted ice and possible deep sea vents on Europa, among other things. His work predicting Europa is particularly interesting. 10 years after he made these predictions (prior to the launch of Galileo), NASA found evidence that he was exactly right. In fact, NASA now considers Europa to me the most likely location of life in our solar system, exactly as Clarke thought.
Don't forget Adams either. I want an infinite improbability drive.... (Actually, there is a theory that describes the possibility of such a means of transportation.)
"I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy." -Richard Feynman
i seem to remenber a outerlimit's where they did a remake of 'inconstant moon'... or was it a tv movie?
nmarshall
#include "standard_disclaimer.h"
R.U. SIRIUS: THE ONLY POSSIBLE RESPONSE
nmarshall
The law is that which it boldly asserted and plausibly maintained..
--Colonel Burr 1783
In Frederick Pohls book "The age of the pussyfoot" he describes a device about the size / shape of a mace, which gives out information and advice. It was called a "joymaker" and was not only voice activated but "Linked through the Ether" to all other Joymakers.
Sounds like a small Internet Connected PC to me.
The only substantial difference was that the Joymaker could also function as a chemist/pharmacy/bar.
Actually that's not such a a bad idea....
Remember kids! Guns don't kill people - Americans kill people.
Ya know, the one idea that I don't think has gotten enough attention from SF is faster-than-light travel. Damn it, why aren't they spending my tax dollars are something worthwhile like this?
It must be a conspiracy. Why don't those dunderheads get off their butts and get it done. Heck, at least half of science fictions books must have FTL drives. If that many authors think it's a good idea, then it must be.
Come on guys, get it done!
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
!!
Can somebody elaborate on this?
__
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
I'd love to go to work by rocket pack!
-- Cisk for the Cisk God
Watson and Crick discovered DNA in 1952, or 1953.
Mutations have been around in science fiction for a long time, which imply the idea of genes.
Foundation and Empire had the Mule, a sterile mutant who could control minds, published in 1951.
By the mid 50's there were stories about genetically engineered critters, IIRC Call Me Joe by Poul Anderson was about a genetically engineered critter that was made to live on Jupiter.
But your point has validity, there wasn't much about genetic engineering in early sf.
George
Ya know, the guy who came up with ringworld and has more ideas about first contact with other species than you can shake a stick at? Him and Pournelle have both packed out so much great texts before their time (look at lucifers hammer sometime) and yet, some of the things they have books on allready are 'new concepts' (read: it became pop).
Aggg.
-- dieman - Scott Dier
This does sort of seem like a joke at first, but for anyone who's read a lot of hard science fiction it does have a point - a lot of it is written by people with physics and science degrees and a technical background, and they are carefully researched - often by asking scientists working in the relevant fields for their input.
Apart from the obvious example of satellites in geostationary orbit coming from Arthur C Clarke, the other main example I can think of is stable wormholes. They were considered to be impossible for a long time since there was no way to prevent the entrances from collapsing and sealing the wormhole off. But when Carl Sagan was writing Contact he got in touch with Kip Thorne to see if a theoretically plausible mechanism for FTL travel was possible, and after some calculation and research he showed that you could build stable wormholes given "exotic" matter. Now there is a significant body of research into this phenomenon, all of which stemmed from Carl Sagan's quest for realism in his book.
Since SF authors have to consider the whole of society in order to come up with a coherent setting for their stories their predictions, if based upon decent technological knowledge, are often more canny than most "futurologists". In the long term, a lot of the advances made will depend on how society adapts to them, and this is not always taken fully into account.
I'm currently in the middle of reading Distress by Greg Egan (an author worth reading), and it's got a lot of great ideas about how society might evolve in the next fifty years, and a lot of plausible technology. Other authors worth reading for great ideas are Stephen Baxter, Gregory Benford, Peter F Hamilton and Greg Bear, but I'm sure I've left many more off that I've read and enjoyed :)
Other inventions we could use that come from recent SF:
Any other suggestions? These are just the first ones to pop into my head...