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Engineering From Science Fiction
An anonymous reader writes "NASA's long planning horizon today details a history of science facts and their sci-fi roots. The study is based on a collaborative European Space Agency project, 'Innovative Technologies from Science Fiction for Space Applications.' More than 200 technical dossiers are described--from holodecks to terraforming comets--but one of the fundamental questions posed is: what is the best communication device to scale-up expert opinion itself? Other than some future, expert version of the internet itself, is that a a collaborative Matrix? Other such interesting collections are from: MIT Media Lab's ThinkCycle, Da Vinci Institute, and the unpretentious HalfBakery of ideas."
Which gadgets can unlock the next technological revolutions? What is the next big thing?
To propose answers to this question, the sixteen nations of the European Space Agency commissioned a project called "Innovative Technologies from Science Fiction for Space Applications" (ITSF). Their results were co-published with two supervisory foundations, the Swiss museum Maison d'Ailleurs and the astronautical society, or OURS Foundation. One aim was to discover what their study called the facts of 'hard science-fiction': literature that uses either established or carefully extrapolated science as its backbone.
As Caltech physicist, author and visiting scholar for NASA's Exobiology Center, David Brin, described in his PBS interview for the special, Closer To Truth: "perhaps an alternative name could have been 'speculative history' because [hard science-fiction authors] deal in different pasts, alternate presents, extension of the human drama into the future...Einstein used the word gedanken experiment and he coined it, he said that just sitting on a streetcar in Bern, leaving the clock tower and imagining he was riding on a beam of light, was 50% of the work [of relativity].
Augmented Science: Galileo's Ship
The history of drawing inspiration from speculative literature is deep with success stories.
As early as 1632, to advocate for his classical principle of relativity, Galileo used a fictional character called Salviati who while locked in a closed room below a ship deck, observes a small fish tank which remains quiescent and undisturbed unless the ship accelerates. In dialogue format, he answers all the common scientific arguments against the idea that the earth moves.
Predating lunar travel classics by H.G. Wells and Jules Verne were Cyrano de Bergerac's Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon (1656), space travel in Voltaire's Micromégas (1752), and alien cultures in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726). Even as the liquid-propelled rockets were first being tested by Robert Goddard in the 1920's, technical proposals had already appeared for planetary landers (1928) and aerodynamically-stabilized rocket fins (1929).
Perhaps the most detailed and famous publication was Sir Arthur C. Clarke's 1945 paper, "Can Rocket Stations Give World-wide Radio Coverage?", that laid down the principles of modern satellite communications and geostationary orbits [Wireless World, October 1945].
A half-century later, even a few hours of interruption in this global network today would seem catastrophic: crippled health care delivery, financial disruption including failed automated teller machines and credit card validations, grounded travellers for lack of airline weather tracking, and global TV blackouts. But in 1945, the idea of geostationary satellites had a different kind of reception, as Clarke wrote: "Many may consider the solution proposed [for extra-terrestrial relay services] too far-fetched to be taken seriously. Such an attitude is unreasonable, as everything envisaged here is a logical extension of developments in the last ten years..."
The rocks inside a crater on the Asteroid Eros. Numerous small impacts on the asteroid show brown boulders visible interior to the less exposed (white) lip of the crater. False-color for emphasis. Credit: NEAR Project, JHU APL, NASA
The European space study, appropriately timed for Clarke's "Space Odyssey" series, completed its first project phase in 2001. Altogether fifty fact sheets and technical dossiers were published to catalog the inventions that should be made real. In addition, more than two hundred technologies were outlined and graded for future feasibility studies. Ranging from astrobiology to propulsion, their complete 'what-if' list is available in broad categories online.
Examples Pushing the Envelope
One mission that has been described in the ESA study is soon to become closer to fact: a fantastic mission to a comet. Seventeen years ago, astrobiologist David Brin's "Heart of the Comet" [1
But this seems pretty stupid to me. I've never really understood the idea of science fiction authors as inventors. Asimov no more invented humanoid robots or neural networks than Da Vinci did helicopters. The job of science fiction writers is to speculate about what might happen and write an interesting story which supposes that it does. The job of inventors is to find useful things that no one has yet made but which are possible with current technology. It may sometimes happen that a science fiction writer imagines something and twenty years later an inventor creates it, but trying to make this process a matter of policy seems like foolishness of the highest kind.
lysergically yours
Perish the thought.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Has anyone read this book? The author describes a plan to colonise the oceans, space, the moon, mars, the Kuyper belt,... All this in a way that sounds 'doable'. An interesting read, I wonder if they read it and what they thought of it.
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
Its amazing just how many gadgets that are invented in the minds of science fiction writers actually make it to the real world, hovercraft and mobile phones being just two examples that I can think of. Perhaps the next big one will be francium as a construction material.
Although it has long been known that Francium would make an ideal lightweight building material most scientists had given up on it because it was simply far too expensive to isolate. In the 60s series Space: Above and Beyond, however, we saw a world were Francium was abundent. Lightweight buildings 3 miles high could be built and personal helicopters were easy to produce with this new leightweight material.
Now obviously we're not at that stage yet but Ford has just started trials of its new Hybrid car which uses a Francium spaceframe. Unlike Aluminium it does not easily oxidise and rust, although there have been some other issues when it has been exposed to water. More importantly the weight saved means the car is over 4 times as efficient as a typical SUV.
All that glitters has a high refractive index.
But in all seriousness, i think the future of the 'net' is going to be something like Tad Williams's "Otherworld". The quality of your experience will be limited by your hardware, and sprouting 'netboys' will lose all contact with whats real. The future will be good, except for the bad parts OC!
I want 2D games back.
So heres a silly question. If I'm a sci-fi writer, and I describe a non-existant device in such away that it CAN Be engineered from my description, could that count as prior art in a patent dispute?
.It's too early in the morning.
I mean, I know it seems silly. But if a sci-fi writer did come up with the idea first, should NASA get all the glory for making it real?
I don't know. . . Maybe that's a dumb thought. .
More importantly the weight saved means the car is over 4 times as efficient as a typical SUV.
I though even regular cars were that efficient compared to suv.
Just mention the word Matrix, and it's all a great new revolutionary idea! Doesn't matter if the actors in the film have 'real' problems, if it's just fiction with zero fact etc.. just drop the buzzword Matrix! and Hey Presto! - it's new stuff.
Remember the SCO matrix?
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If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Or at least technology imitating art. It has always been the case. You need real free thinkers to come up with some ideas. These people are best not knowing the technical "boundaries" of the current state of the art. If the worried about these boundaries techology would never move on.
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ROFL. Oh man, I wish I had mod points. ACs get them every second sunday I hear.
i assume imagination is the most important thing via sf (ie. some kind of fiction) is able to give new ideas to sience. by imagination i dont mean to invent new things out of the blue but to make people look at things on a new and motivating way. this is always the hardest thing: to change your point of view concerning already known facts, models and so on.
Aure entuluva!
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
You mean to tell me all of those billions of dollars over the past 30 years have gone to nothing more than unimaginative uses of existing techology?
Sad, but true. All the imaginative uses have been bought by SCO, and we're left with nothing but Service Packs.
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If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Dreamers do suck at doing but doers are "dreamers" that do stuff.
Look at Thomas Edison or Einstein all the best inventors and scientists were major dreamers.
The problem with this kind of thinking, where you look back at the body of scifi and pick out the present-day technology that mimics what was imagined therein is that you are ignoring all the shit that was just plain wrong. This is the same logic that John Edwards, Sylvia Browne, and your local carnival psychic depend on. They vomit fifteen tons of guesses on you and the credulous are amazed that there are a few chunks mixed in.
Somebody go back and tally up, per author, perhaps, all the predictions and see which have become feasible.
Meanwhile, I'm still waiting for my spacesuit so I can travel.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
After reading entries like "Fatser-than-light communications" and seeing a number of misspelled words ("socendly"), I'd say the one technology they desperately need is a spellchecker!
I'll say it right now - yes, probably some kind of thought->thought enviroment, over an FTL link. Figure something like the matrix which uses gravity as the transmission medium.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
The patent for waterbeds was turned down because of one of his books.
I like how sometimes popular science fiction can change the direction of where science is headed, or at least influence the design of futuristic devices. I really cannot wait until we have computers like the ones in (the movie) Minority Report, or the "docking scene" in the Matrix... and I'm sure Steve Jobs is salviating at the mouth do be able to do those clear glass screens too =)
[SIG] It's like putting a moose in the blender -- a recipe for disaster!
A collaborative Matrix, eh?
Dr. Boydston: And with this coefficient, the wave function collapses.
Dr. Mannheim: Ah, but you've neglected the least-squares product, here.
Dr. Boydston: Oh yeah? [bullet-time leap-and-kick]
Dr. Mannheim: [high-speed parry]
Dr. Boydston: [firing-dual-automatic-weapons]
Dr. Mannheim: [dodging-like-an-agent]
Dr. Boydston: Just because your girlfriend wears PVC don't think I'm going go easy on you!
Yeah. Real collaborative.
I suggest reading the book Aristoi by Walter Jon Williams. Full of nanotech and all that, but one of the big technologies in his world is a fairly perfected virtual world.
so when am I going to get my lightsabre!!!
-- Karma Karma Karma Karma, Karma Chameleon - Boy George
At least according to the link in the technical dossiers...
I think anyone who has worked in the NASA environment (myself included) will agree with me that probably 95% of all employees and contractors at that agency love Sci Fi Novels and Movies. The study points out that NASA doesn't necessarily rule out far fetched ideas (Planet Colonization, Space Stations or Nuclear Interplanetary Vehicles) if they can forseeably become a reality when the technology and budget allows it. I think the US Space and Science Programs regardless of the criticism by the press and public is still one of the few places today where Science Fiction can become reality only if far reaching creativity and goal setting is allowed to flourish. There will be some mistakes along the way and all those participating in the various projects and missions realize that risk and accept those odds. To Err is Human.
The sleeper has awaken!
Did anyone read that one? While not completely related to the article, it is a story about a group of people who have a vehicle with the ability to hop between universes-- and interestingly enough they start hopping into universes that are actually based on the old stories they read... Oz, the world of John Carter, the warlord of Mars, etc. In the book it turns out the all these great universes either were created by the author who though them up, or the author that though that they had thought them up somehow "knew" about them without ever visting them.
In the end they ended up hooking up with Lazarus Long and his cohorts from Methuselah's Children.
If some scientist comes up with the device they came up with, think about how cool it would be-- Although I'm not sure if I would want to visit the Spawn universe, or a couple of the other nastier ones...
"Look! There! Evil, pure and simple from the Eighth Dimension!" --Buckaroo Banzai
This still persists? Look up "Hermann Potocnik", "Hermann Oberth" or even "Willy Ley".
Clarke may have publicized it more, but the ideas are not his.
The ESA is going to spend money and time reading science fiction and talking about the neat stuff they do in it, and then they're gonna write a paper on it?
Why don't they develop a heavy lift booster? Or technologies that will help us live on the Martian surface? Or a project to sample the water ice that's been found under the soil on Mars and see what kind of volatile chemicals are present?
Looks like the ESA is gonna end up like NASA; bloated and going nowhere fast.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
What about force fields?
Basically, the effect of quantum teleportation can be observed instantaneously, but in order to decode the effect into useful information, some more information must be transmitted via non-teleportation means.
This means, there are non-local (FTL) effects, but information is not one of them.
It was actually completed in 2020, but by a strange confluence of cheesy plot lines and poor animation everyone on Sealab quickly went insane. By 2021, some 30 years later, the writers and animators, now fresh out of college and still stoned silly, dredged fresh material out of stale '70s teary-eyed 'Native American' uber-environmentalism. Thus we see a new, if psychotic, televised life for our old friends at Sealab. Ahhhhhhhhhh!!!!
The communities with the most valuable comments are those which enable moderation by peers. Slashdot readers are obviously very familiar with how this can work, and how discussions are enriched by the rating system. Good comments which help the discussion are more visible, driven by the collective reviews of many people. It's actually fairly rare that wrong information is allowed to exist in a slashdot comment thread at a high rating, as people are always keen to spot the trolls or crackpots. There are a couple of trolls in this thread already, and the system has worked perfectly to mod them down and recognise the comments that have exposed them as such.
:) The community even has abbreviations such as 'WTCTTISITMWIBNIIWR - "Wasn't that cool, that thing I saw in the movie? Wouldn't it be neat if it were real?"' to quickly reject dumb comments before people waste time discussing them. The positive/negative ratings are nice but often find quirky or funny ideas rather than truly useful ones, which can be a little sad.
The Halfbakery is pretty cool although the amount of dupes and repeated ideas would do the slashdot editors proud
Even common BB software like vbulletin has the ability to rate threads, giving them cachet which makes more people likely to view them and comment. A sufficiently high threshold of votes before a rating is active weeds out the really dumb votes. You can get some truly outstanding informative threads on some forums - or 'just' funny stuff.
The main problems with all these communities are:
1) People leave the subject of the discussion. Not always a bad thing if the new direction is interesting or an improvement, but it can be frustrating. Whether an early comment is influential in dragging everything off course, or just the transparent interference of current events, politics and 'debate theory', oftentimes the threads seem like the answers to an essay written by someone who hasn't read the question.
2) Cliques. Quite prevalent at the halfbakery and practically every discussion board around. A lot of people with the same views and time on their hands can destroy any discussion they don't agree with, or use their moderating influence to hide ideas. The solution is to have a large readership from a wide spectrum of viewpoints and social/educational variety. Otherwise you get a lot of...
3) Prejudice. Wider than cliques, the readership of a whole site might hate some ideas. Perhaps their society or morals abhor the idea, or they feel some duty to an opposing point of view. Either way, they blindly attack/defend without true impartiality.
4) Fast movement. Pretty bad on Slashdot, if you're a day or a few hours late, you've often missed the discussion, especially if it's not very popular! Happens on all boards, things drop out of the front page spotlights and sink gradually down. Some forums allow these threads to be brought to the top again, others just let them go. One plus is that fast turnover aids quality of discussion. People have a short time to reply so they try to make it good and heartfelt. For a global discussion medium this problem is made worse when half the world is asleep when the comments are being written.
Slashdot is pretty close to a leader in the community moderation arena - will NASA be interested or instead rely on the media, a few well-to-do figureheads on a panel and a couple of paltry outsourced focus groups?
Anyone who thinks the Matrix is new and interesting must go read Plato's cave allegory. It's an idea 2,500 years old. And where Plato took a few pages to do it, these guys take FIVE MOVIES, and they're geniuses?
Hmm, so I should take these dossier seriously? One (I'll let y'all guess) cites Paramount Pictures as a source. It also puts all "science" terms in quotes. You know why? Because it is not science, it is fiction! The only word you can throw in front of "fiction" to make it real is "non-" and it's only a prefix. These dossiers are jokes. Let's forget our worm holes and 4" light sabers and get back to work.
"Life's funny sometimes." "And sometimes it isn't." --Cat's Cradle
LOL! Don't you know that if you mention Iraq, you get modded down? You shoot yourself in the foot! LOL! LOL!
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This is just my sig.
I liked this idea, from one of the sites mentioned in the original story submission:
"Register your premium-rate number. Get a minimum wage job as a night-time office cleaner. Call your premium rate number from about 500 phones at the large office you're cleaning, leaving the handsets off all night. Repeat, every night (The office workers will come in in the morning and think "Hmm - the cleaner's left my phone off the hook", and put it back).
The large company this happened to didn't prosecute the cleaner to save their embarassment."
Sounds urban legendish.
Before doers become doers and inventors become inventors they go through a lot. The read and see a lot. How many of the people who become inventors do so at least in part because something throttled their imagination in a movie, or ignited it in a book or story.
Neither inventors nor writers do their work in a vacuum(well, some inventors do, but... gah, you get the point). Many science fiction writers are those are those without either the ability or the wherewithal to actually build or solve the things they write about themselves, so no, they don't getfull marks on invention. But they often have a hand in it. To ignore the impact upon science that science fiction has also seems like foolishness of the highest kind.
*honk*
This is my sig. It's prescription, I swear. I need it for reading things... on the other side of things
No one has come up with a more effective mechanism. The reason is that any new knowledge or better evaluation scheme can rapidly profit on a market from the less knowledgeable traders.
Markets do have failure modes (eg, need a level of liquidity to function well, things which aren't being traded tend to become invisible, market psychology can be irrational, etc), but these flaws are pretty well understood.
OTOH, flaws of other expert systems like peer-reviewed research can be very hard to determine. For example, the math describing black holes came almost immediately after general relativity (which predicts them) became usable. Ie, the key general relativity paper was published in 1916 by Einstein and Scharzschild (who died in the First World War) discovered the black hole singularity a few months later. But it wasn't till the 1950's that scientists as a group seriously considered whether these singularities existed in nature. What went wrong? We're not talking accepting that black holes exist, but merely that general relativity is put forth as a theory to describe the physical world, and that black hole singularities are a prediction of that theory.
There are many cases of fraudulent or flawed science that takes years (if not decades) to evaluate and reject. For example, Lamarck's theory of evolution as espoused by Lysenko (the man who destroyed 20th century Russian genetics research), polywater, cold fusion, and the repressed memories therapy movement. However, these theories make real predictions that can be tested.
If a betting market was created to determine if a particular test would be successful by time X, then one could determine how credible the theory was in that timeframe. That gives you a much more effective way to allocate your resources.
For example, a reputation-based betting market, the Foresight Exchange (of which I happen to be a contributing member) trades on an esoteric mix of claims about science, politics, business, etc. Here's a selection of space-based claims. The odds of people living continuously in space till 2025 is 33-34%. The odds that someone makes a serious argument for the presence of alien artifacts in the Cydonia region of Mars (eg, where the Mars "face" is located) is 5-6%. Extraterrestrial life has a 78-80% chance of being discovered by 2050, but intelligent extraterrestrial life has only a 31-33% of being discovered in the same time frame.
Cease!
Of course, the problem with that novel is that while they have full molecular nanotechnology, the main characters walk around as meat bags.
I agree, that kind of physical manifestation is pretty incongruous in a distant-future setting, and it's a mistake that virtually all SF books and films make to some degree. I think there might be some "restrict humanity" meme going around in SF publishing circles, possibly fueled by the "otherwise readers won't relate to it" argument. Pretty pathetic.
However, I don't think the novel was really intended to be any kind of hardcore SF adventure with well-designed physicals that mattered. Aristoi is about people harnessing their daimones (internal autonomous intelligent agents, for those that haven't read it), and it does a really good job of that. It's a great read, even funny in the stereotyped focuses of some of those daimones as they work together.
Aristoi is one of my favourite books, and it's certainly on my recommendations list. The "walk around as meat bags" thing doesn't detract much from it at all, maybe because nearly all SF authors fall into the same trap.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
*gets broom* Nice troll, but francium has a half life of about 18 minutes.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
The positive/negative ratings are nice but often find quirky or funny ideas rather than truly useful ones, which can be a little sad.>
:-)
We have the same problem here, arising from funny comments being much easier to make than carefully researched and thought out responses.
Yes, it is a problem, and it tends to bias forums away from being as informative as they might otherwise be. Hard to know what to do about it though --- you can't ban humor.
You are absolutely correct. It can be slow, inaccurate, and in most cases is certainly subject to interpretation (relative to how well-formed the communication is). I would argue however that so are memories (thoughts). Studies have shown that memories degrade or can change over time.
There are many questions to be answered before we can begin to consider direct thought transfer. Here are some that immediately come to my mind, you might think of more.
Currently, our sensory organs provide us our input into working memory which can be transferred into declarative memory by the hippocampus. Would we bypass the hippocampus altogether in transfering memory to the declarative memory components or would we "trigger" the hippocampus with artificial stimulus? The risk with bypassing the hippocampus (and this is purely hypothetical) might be that our brain does not understand how to recall the memory patterns we transfer to declarative memory without using our own hippocampus. It is possible that my hippocampus transfers working memory using protocol x, for example, and your hippocampus transfers working memory using protocol y. It might be true that we all use one "protocol" but it might be true that we all use our own "protocol" and all other possible protocols would not be available to our hippocampus. Would the transfered memory patterns then be the logical equivalence of brain damage? Even if we were able to trigger the hippocampus to transfer the memory, would we need some sort of "middleware" to convert between what how your hippocampus stored the memory pattern and how my hippocampus would store my memory pattern? That would introduce another point of possible error.
The error correction of the input data is most likely performed by the part of the limbic system that handles working memory. Maybe that is the cortex, we think that is the case. Some examples of such error correction would be how you can "see" missing letters in common words , "deduce" the correct version of a word that has been misused (there instead of their), and how your mind "fills in" the gaps in your memory of an event. This would be similar to a content validation. How would we validate the completeness of the transfer? What would be an acceptable tolerance for "perceptional difference" in the same memory transfered between different individuals?
How do we prevent our transfer of thoughts between individuals from creating a "bad record" or unusable memory? Would that be brain damage? How do we prevent people from pulling thoughts from our minds and writing them to a database?
I definitely and whole heartedly agree that our current modes of communication our sometimes inefficient, but I don't think we humans will be able to transfer thoughts between one another without going through the intermediate form of speech, written word, or imagery. Unless we miraculously evolve the mental facilities to do just that. At which point, we are a true "hive mind".
To know is to have knowledge....to understand is to be enlightened.
Thanks for the link. From a review of "entering space": What really shines through is his passion about humanity's potential. We could do so much, he argues, if we could just get beyond the petty fighting that bogs us down on earth.
It always boils down to this, doesn't it? Either we continue fighting until we destroy ourselves - or a meteor does it for us, OR we just stop fighting alltogether and focus that energy on space.
The root cause of this, i believe, is underpopulation, *gross* underpopulation. Based on the energy output of the sun and the population density of, say, Tokyo (crowded but quite livable), the Earth could house and feed somewhere between 10 and 30 trillion people. When you live in a huge, continuous population like that, it's much harder to have wars and it's much easier to spend money on other things (like finding some damn peace and quiet on the moon, for example). No need for defense when your neighbors know that setting fire to you would most likely end up setting it to them as well.
No, you don't need a working implementation. And if the writer describes the thing "in such away that it CAN Be engineered from my description" then clearly he _does_ have an idea how it could be implemented in practice.
rant
But if a sci-fi writer did come up with the idea first, should NASA get all the glory for making it real?
To the moment a Sci-Fi writer makes a story out of their idea, it has probably already came up to other people who just didn't bother putting it down on paper.
What would count is a working implementation or a viable design.
Lisp is the Tengwar of programming languages.
Cutting NASA's PR budget wouldn't be a bad idea, either.
A heavier atom does not always translate into a heavier material. It is important to consider density. Low-density helium gas is light and can float balloons and airships. But when compressed, to be more portable, into a small tank, it is dense enough to be heavy.
The brief half-life of Francium, however, is a much bigger challenge. Not only is it too unstable to be easily used, it poses a very real danger to those using it.