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."

Comments

Re:The Millennial Project

[EvilTwinSkippy]

Kind or like a project I had up on Auxons (machines that can build copies of themselves.) It's a great Idea, now where do you get the capital outlay, engineering knowhow, and government permits.

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...

Re:The Millennial Project

[Nefrayu]

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...

imagination

[vargul]

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.

Re:imagination

[EvilTwinSkippy]

Don't mix science fiction and pulp fiction. True science fiction uses fancy devises to tell a story about people. Pulp use people to tell a story about fancy devices.

What made Asimov's stuff great (IMHO) was not that it was about robots, it was about how robots affect people. The entire Foundation series was ALL about people (granted there were a lot of really cool devices.)

Arthur C. Clarke's 2001 was so compelling because of the interaction between the crew of the Discovery and the ship (embodied as HAL). Lem Stanislaw's Solaris has humans trying to understand a completely foriegn intelligence. Even Heinlein's Starship Troopers was more a book about humans in war than about the technology they battled with. And while we all thought the Simulator was cool in Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game, the story was really about Ender Wiggins and his experiences growing up as a genious.