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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."
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
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
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. .
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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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.
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.
What do you mean by "thought->thought"? Do you mean the transfer medium? My thoughts are your thoughts simultaneously, sort of thing? I was pretty sure that we used thought->thought communication already. I put my thoughts into speech or writing (of some sort) and you read them. You provide me with your thoughts about my thoughts using a similar process.
The human will always be a bottleneck in information processing as we cannot perceive faster than light. Supposing we could transmit the information faster than light directly to our brains and make the necessary patterns, we could only recall them and process them at the "speed of thought". Which is much slower than light.
To know is to have knowledge....to understand is to be enlightened.