Slashdot Mirror
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."
Of course there is something to be said for the fact the dreamers suck at doing and doers suck at dreaming.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
We still haven't gotten a human out of this planet's orbit. The expendibles required for a space journey increase geometrically with the distance (or rather duration) of the journey. A moon colony is doable, arguably more doable than a space station, you can use local material. A mars colony is fantasy barring some radical new technology that provides abundant power in a small package, that doesn't require a large fuel tank. Okay, a conventional nuclear reactor would do it. Hey wait a minute...
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Yes I have read it. As an engineer, I can tell you that this guy has some pretty crazy ideas. Most of the author's ideas are based off of having many generators that use the temperature difference of the surface waters of the tropics and the water 40 feet below it. From this he proposes floating cities be created around the generators. While the generators are possible, he gives no thought to the havoc this will create with the weather patters or the life in the oceans themselves. To colonize space but destroy the Earth in the process really isn't something that I'd like to see done in the near future...
Friends help you move. Real friends help you move bodies.
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.
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!
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
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. Just imagine what Nasa could have done with the price tag of the War on Iraq!! Think of all the people dying of war, famine or aids in Africa, possible great scientists and engineers whose lives are lost forever! But then again, who cares?
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
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.
The technology does allow it. We can go to Mars using the same technology we went to the moon with. The budget allows it, too. If we bring NASA's budget up by 7% (from about $14 billion to $15 billion) and hold it there for ten years, they'll have enough to go to Mars four or five times.
It's not the funding or the technology that's the problem; it's Congress and the President who don't understand that space, while difficult, is worth it. It's more valuable than any war, and you get a much greater political legacy for having started the human exploration of Mars than having killed people.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
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?
I agree with you really. These acts of alleged prescience on the part of sci-fi writers are noted retrospectively, and in many cases the fit between the idea and reality is only very vague in most cases (as with most long-term predictions in general). You also have to remember how many cracks at guessing science fiction writers get; all those writers, all those books, all those pages. It shouldn't be surprising that occasionally, taken as a group, they guess right-ish. Furthermore, the vast majority of sci-fi writers aren't famous because they came up with clever ideas, but rather because they were good writers and tell an entertaining story. I'm not convinced they have some sort of intellectual credibility that the man in the street necessarily lacks; its just that you come to hear of their speculations, these thoughts are on-record for evermore, and obviously, if they are any good at writing, these speculations are put across in a compelling way. Any fool can come up with an idea, the difficult part is testing a hypothesis or implementing and bringing an invention to market. Edison and Einstein may have been "dreamers" but the important thing, sad as it may be for our dreams of what we may become if we just stumbled across the right thought in the shower, is that they put in the graft as well.
Plays violent online games as: Nerfherder76
Quite often, the doers and the dreamers are the same person. (Asimov, Brin, Benford, ect...)
We just see that there are some things we can't do right now.
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
OK, well they protagonists knew they were going into a dangerous situation, hence they carried guns.
But where's the powered, self-healing, body armor? Or how about some air cover? They were conduting a raid on a stronghold, riding in on horseback, IIRC. This was after their cover was blown, so there was no need to be subtle.
But walking into a dangerous situation as an unprotected meat bag is insane, given the level of technology available in the novel.
Many authors may try, but few fully appreciate the implications of nanotech, and how things will work in the future.
1/6 of the Earths gravity is plenty enough for mining.