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

Maybe I just don't have a sense of fun

[Transient0]

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.