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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.
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
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?
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.
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
Wouldn't this be Pierre Boulle's idea?
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).
... 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,
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
Somebody should have told Dark Helmet that.
--The basis of all love is respect
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.
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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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.
From much of the conversation, I gather many people don't read science fiction older than circa 1980. Grab a few science fiction magazines of the fifties and read those. Even stories by the the grand masters, Heinlein, Clarke, Asimov. What you'll find is a whole heap of stuff that seems utterly ridiculous, obviously silly and never would have happened, with maybe one or two things that are close to somewhat right. Everyone talks about Clarke's prediction of the satellite, forgetting that he wrote a whole hell of a lot, and that's about the sum total of accurate predictions. This is no offense to those guys. They wrote great stuff still worth reading. But it wasn't particularly predictive, nor was it meant to be.
That's what these people are doing. They are taking the non-predictive Sci-Fi and looking at it to find ideas about what they might want to try to work on. We don't have personal Anti-Grav, right? Well, damnit that's one hell of a great idea though! Why don't we start work to figure that out? We don't have matter replicators, but dmanit, that's one hell of a great idea though!
See? The whole point is not to say 'Sci-Fi writers predicted we would come up with this' but to say 'This Sci-Fi writer thought of this, let's see if we can make it happen.'
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
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.
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.
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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
-----
Go ahead, blame me... I voted for Nader!
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^)
And I could sure use a Cherry 3000...
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.
Agreed, but I think there's value in contemplating an impossible fantasy, wishing that it were possible and struggling to find if it is really impossible.
Motivation is very important to creativity. For example I think the desire for some form of immortality underlies the quest to understand what the universe will look like far into the future. One of the questions that people always seem to ask is, can life be supported in a universe where the stars have exhausted all the thermonuclear fuel? Why do people think about such things, and why does society pay them to? I believe it boils down to how you live with the fantasy of physical immortality you know will not become personally true. Some people might want to find a loophole, and others might feel more comfortable closing off the very possiblility of immortality.
FTL travel is another rubbish idea that nonetheless inspires people to understand more.
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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
The cake is a pie
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
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
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.
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.
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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); }
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.
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.
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!
Given the plot, I don't know if you can say that Heinlein considered it a good idea...
But anyway, the really interesting predictions are in an article in the Expanded Universe collection, written in the fifties, then updated in the sixties and 1980, that attempts to predict what the year 2000 will be like. (With interesting commentary on the real predictive value of SF.) Fascinating stuff. My favorite part was the way he predicts the fall of communism in 1950 and then retracts the prediction in 1965!
The cake is a pie
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.)
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.
The perspective you take is an interesting one. However I don't think it likely that your cat is depraved. Predators enjoy killing for the same reason they enjoy sex -- enjoyment of these activities is necessary.
Struggles for dominance are the common stuff of TV nature shows. Usually they are quite restrained in the animal world, but there are exceptions, such as when small animals in the litter crowd out the weaker ones. For that matter the American coot normally has more offspring than it can manage and routinely drives them off or kills them.
However, as cruel as these acts are, they are not depraved. I don't think killing for status, or sport, or survival are necessarily depraved.
The capacity for depravity is purely a function of intelligence, because it requires an ability to grasp the the state of mind of the victim. This is a capacity only humans and possibly the higher apes do. This capacity to understand suffering, to envision both oneself and one's victim as an ongoing entity, means that violence among humans and possibly some apes is qualitatively different.
Humans, uniquely as far as I know, perform violence to induce mental states in their victims.
My point is the view of the relationship between intelligence and violence, or malice if you will, is probably naive; however intelligence adds qualitative dimensions to violence
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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.
Whereas bonobos, our nearest genetic relatives, don't do this kind of thing. In fact, various forms of sex acts seem to take the place of violence we see in chimp communities.
As you point out, it's pretty clear that violence can exist without intelligence, but can intelligence exist without violence? That's an important human problem. Does our intelligence give us the tools to rise above the Holocausts, the Lockerbies, the Kosovos and the Columbines? Kubrick suggests not only that the answer is no, but that intelligence itself may be bound up with the urge to kill, and that our technological society is based on the urge to kill. Not only does ape-man kill his water hole rivals as soon as he gets some brains, but HAL kills his colleagues. Clarke's view, as expressed in later books, is yes, it does give us tools to transcend primitive violence. It is not intelligence that kills, it is a kind of logical malfunction that comes from living a falsehood.
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.
Your position seems to be in between Kubrick and Clarke; intelligence is not in any particular way bound up with violence, nor is violence something that can be overcome. This seems pretty reasonable to me, except that in my view intelligence and self-awareness adds a potential new dimension to violence: depravity. Animals (or plants for that matter) that kill do so purely functionally. Even cats play with mice to teach their young hunting skills. It is humans that humiliate and torture each other and seek to inflict emotional pain on victims and their families.
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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.
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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!
Gay Deceiver (and the gyro drive) are my favorite parts of NotB.
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
Now how in the world would this be physically possible with our current understanding of physics?
It's just a big, spinning loop of cosmic string isn't it? Okay the scale of it is enormous, but that's an engineering problem rather than a physics one. And IIRC the Kerr metric for a rotating black hole does allow for a naked singularity given those kinds of extreme conditions.
Whether or not it produces a black hole/white hole kind of interface between universes is an open question, but the rest of it is plausible enough.
P.s. try to avoid sounding like a rabid advocate.
Fair enough, but I think we're both guilty of sounding a bit over the top :) I don't think many things in Stephen Baxter's stories are theoretically impossible, even the Ring, but actually working out a way to do them is the challenge, and most of the technology in his books is definitely 500 years+ down the line at least...
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
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Can somebody elaborate on this?
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
You can check that they're following the safety rules and that they aren't planning to cut corners or intentionally cause harm. Terrorists are immediately ruled out. As are those who are lazy or who want to cut costs.
Of course, part of the point is that, once we have the ability to accurately censor, it most likely will be put into practice, because when it comes down to it, we, as a people, prefer security to freedom. If it can be guaranteed that you can catch all the criminals before they do their crime, people will give up their right to their private thoughts and submit to periodic examinations. That's what's scary, and it's probably what's coming.
First, make it work, then make it right, then make it fast, then, make it bloated!
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 :)
Didn't look at it that way. Thanks. I was thinking more in fabric terms.
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
Other inventions we could use that come from recent SF:
Any other suggestions? These are just the first ones to pop into my head...