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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
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
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. .
Such as? Occasional tendency to explode and / or disintegrate?
Over 4 times as efficient as a typical SUV??? I find it difficult to think of many things that are less than 4 times as efficient as a typical SUV.
Who modded this interesting? It's a troll.
Francium is heavyer than aluminium, it is extreamly reactive with water (as in selfignition reactive), and it is extreamly reactive with air. To add to the point, its melting temp is 27.2C, so it is definatly not a building material...
In short, nice one P.E...
The oxide of aluminium that forms when it oxidises in air is the same size as the aluminium metal and so forms a protective layer. So Aluminium doesn't exactly rust like iron alloys. See here for more details...
I'd guess that it's Francium's very light weight to strength ratio that you're talking about, but I don't think it is light, according to this:
Francium does not have any stable isotopes. There is at most one ounce of francium in the whole earth at any given time as a result of the decay of other radioactive elements. It is the most unstable of the first 103 elements in the periodic table. Its longest lived isotope has a half life of 22 minutes.
Despite its radioactive complications, francium is the heaviest simple atom.
And on the Ford website a result for searching from Francium:
Search Results
Results for: francium
Sorry no matches were found.
Was this a joke, or can you provide us with more information on how Ford used the most unstable and heavy element in some magical light (or strong) alloy?
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
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 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
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!
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.
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
Heh. Countless? No, not really. There's only been a few authors who've used it.
If you find some that you don't see mentioned on the Ansible page on Wikipedia, then please be sure to add them!