Science Fact From Fiction

Embedded Geek writes "The European Space Agency maintains an ongoing project called Innovative Technologies from Science Fiction for Space Applications (ITSF) (Cliquetez ici pour la version française). Its goal is "to review past and present SF literature, artwork and films in order to identify and assess innovative technologies and concepts described which could be possibly developed further for space applications." While I had known about Clarke first envisioning the geostationary satellite, the site also lists some other interesting ideas first pitched in SF: planetary landers, rocket fins, and space stations assembled in orbit. Visitors to the site are encouraged to submit technologies from SF works, although they should look at the master keyword list to avoid duplication first. Also of interest is a spiffy little brochure and a writing contest. Even if it never results in any new technology actually being developed, the site is a nice resource for science educators and science fiction fans."

Comments

Nasa

[D4Vr4nt]

I wonder if Nasa's budget getting larger is part of the science-fiction to be tracked and logged. heh.

Are we ever gonna get to Mars or what? I remember reading back in "Science et Vie" about populating and building an atmosphere by 2020 or something silly. Seemed believable then..

What about other fields?

[GothChip]

This is a great idea. I always thought that other fields should pay more attention to turning science fiction ideas into reality.

The two inventions I'm looking forward to are credsticks to replace cash (like in Shadowrun) and reactalight contact lenses to reduce glare from the sun.

Re:What about other fields?

[Chep]

Well, here (in France) people routinely use their CB/Visa cards (it's mostly direct or monthly debit, though credit cards proper are also widely available. People call both kinds "cartes de crédit" anyway). It's simple, safe, "secure" (well, there is an encryption chip which more or less works; I need to rely on magstrip+signature+insurance scheme only abroad), and just everyone uses it. It costs ~30 a year, and then there is zero transaction cost, Euroland-wide (some banks only recently and very cautiously started to charge 1/withdrawal done outside of their ATM network if this happens more than a half dozen times a month, but that's pretty much all you have to pay besides foreign exchange rates).

In Belgium (and the Netherlands IIRC), they have Proton cards (in addition to Visa || EC), which claim to be equivalent to pocket change cash (if they don't do like the French supposedly equivalent scheme, Moneo, this is both electronic and privacy preserving. Moneo is expensive and 1984ish as hell). It seems to be very hot there.

Don't assume that just because some elderly people in the Bayern area of Germany are still using cash even for large (10K+ reportedly) transactions that the whole of Europe is arrierated(sp).

Re:What about other fields?

[swillden]

That's not necessarily true. It could be implemented that way, but there's no technological reason for it. You just need a way to ensure that one value token can only be decrypted by one owner at a time, and we can do that easily with key-pairs and signatures, so long as there's a TTP to actually issue the cash.

Yes and no.

In theory, perfectly anonymous digital cash that can flow from person to person is feasible. Many cryptographers have proposed schemes that have various strengths and weaknesses, but most of them are pretty solid, theoretically.

In practice, we run into the fact that there really isn't any place we can store private keys with adequate security and mobility. The obvious answer is auditability: if the technology can make counterfeiting moderately difficult and we can establish a solid audit trail that tracks every penny, then anyone who does crack the technological barriers wil have to risk exposing themselves in order to spend their counterfeit cash.

Of course, auditability is pretty much the opposite of anonymity, although there are various compromise positions that can offer a reasonable solution.

Mondex goes the route of complete anonymity, and even allows person-to-person exchange of value, through an arbitrarily long chain, with no records. The result is that Mondex is highly vulnerable to counterfeiting, since it depends almost entirely on the security of the electronic tokens (smart cards) carried by the end-user. I say "almost entirely" because the Mondex scheme also includes some mathematical models of cashflow which theoretically allow the scheme operators to obtain an estimate of the amount of electronic cash which is in circulation. If this estimate turns out to be significantly larger then the amount that has been issued, then the system may need to be shut down.

Visa Cash goes the route of complete auditability at a device level, as opposed to a user level. Every transaction that loads value onto a device is archived and most transactions that spend value from a device are also reported back. If the value spent by a given card ever exceeds the value placed onto that card, then that card has been compromised, and actions can be taken to (a) disable that card and (b) attempt to aprehend the criminal. To allow users to divorce their own identity from that of the card, Visa got the idea of providing vending machines that would sell preloaded cards, unassociated with any particular user. Unfortunately, you must use some form of payment to buy the anonymized card and most payment mechanisms require you to identify yourself, thus re-establishing the identity link. The exception, of course, is cash. But why would you want to use paper cash to buy electronic cash?

Also, Visa permits member banks to choose whether or not they will reimburse cardholders for lost card value. Since transactions are fully auditable, the bank can know how much money is on a given card. So, if you have an identity-tagged card, the value can be replaced if you lose it. Convenience, but no anonymity.

Many other approaches have been recommended that take a middle path, and achieve security by moving the keys out of the public's hands and into bank vaults where they can be protected. Perhaps the most promising of these a few years back was David Chaum's "DigiCash", which had a number of appealing properties. First, it was truly and completely anonymous if and only if you never tried to "double spend" a digital coin. If you did spend the same money twice, there was a very high probability (Chaum suggested (2^32 -1)/(2^32), but it could be made arbitrarily high) that your identity would be revealed. Second, it was partially auditable, in that after you received an electronic payment, you could not use that money to pay someone else, you had to deposit the "coins" you received in the bank. You could then withdraw spendable "coins" from the bank. The result is that while it's not possible to know where or how you spend money, or who you receive money from, the bank does know exactly how much money flows through your hands. Governments like this feature.

Other approaches address some of the "limitations" (the scare quotes are because some don't see them as limitations) of DigiCash, allowing respending, and deferring auditing while retaining the essential "anonymous unless you double spend" character. Most of these proposals are horrendously complex, so much so that it's hard to verify their properties analytically, much less build a secure implementation. Every one that I've looked at is impractical as well, although advances in hardware may change that, eventually.

So, no, I don't think we can "easily" implement a secure and untraceable electronic cash system. The answer depends heavily upon your definitions of "secure" and "untraceable", of course.

Arthur C. Clarkes Geostationary satellites

[91degrees]

Has anyone actually read this report? While the concept was quite clever, it was clearly written long before anyone had got into space.

His proposal was to build no more than 3 comsats. These were huge beasts that would be constructed in space, and manned permanently. Each comsat would deal with communication over 120 degrees across the earth.

This is a far cry from dozens of highly specialised and semi disposable comsats that we actually use. I don;t mean to be too hard on Arthur C. Clarke, but people really ought to remember how wrong he was with a few gems of being right.

Not space related but...

[idletask]

Jules Vernes has led the way to modern submarines with its "twenty thousands leagues under the sea" novel. Remember Captain Nemo? :)

Interesting things from Sci-Fi in Real Life

[dWhisper]

I'd be curious to see if they extend the study outside of just Sci-Fi, and see how many of the things that have appeared in Sci-Fi end up, or have ended up, in real life.

Some examples I know of are the Sick Bay beds and displays from Star Trek, which appeared in hospitals shortly thereafter. On those same lines, a hypospry always looked like it would beat a shot or pills.

My personal thing I'd like to see is a holodeck, though I'd assume that that's just a tad bit off. But Quake in one of those would rule. Or be messy and dangerous. Or all above! It'd just give politions and parents something more to whine about.

And I'd just love a hoverboard, compliments Back to the Future. Or a self-drying jacket, autolace shoes, flat-tvs that play the scenery channel, and pizzas the size of my palm that come out fresh. It had to be Sci-Fi, pizza hut pizza is far greasier than that.

Re:Wait...

[hplasm]

Well, what do all the sci-fi writers who hang around NASA do? (Pournelle, etc) Surely they aren't there to get autographs? Or to sign them?

NASA has regular brainstorming sessions with authors in many fields and spends a lot of cash in (often criticised) research into 'alternative technologies' -Sci-Fi propulsion etc.

'In the USA, you believe what you want'- facts get in the way? Just carry on regardless.

been done before

[Anonymous Coward]

Both the CIA and KGB used to send agents to watch each new James Bond movie. Notes would be taken of the device ideas, and some of them would be produced for actual spying. (Someone from the CIA admitted this.)