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Sci-Fi Authors and Scientists Predict an Optimistic Future
An anonymous reader writes: A few years ago, author Neal Stephenson argued that sci-fi had forgotten how to inspire people to do great things. Indeed, much of recent science fiction has been pessimistic and skeptical, focusing on all the ways our inventions could go wrong, and how hostile the universe is to humankind. Now, a group of scientists, engineers, and authors (including Stephenson himself) is trying to change that. Arizona State University recently launched Project Hieroglyph, a hub for ideas that will influence science fiction to be more optimistic and accurate, and to focus on the great things humanity is capable of doing.
For example, in the development of a short story, Stephenson wanted to know if it's possible to build a tower that's 20 kilometers tall. Keith Hjelmsad, an expert in structural stability and computational mechanics, wrote a detailed response about the challenge involved in building such a tower. Other authors are contributing questions as well, and researchers are chiming in with fascinating, science-based replies. Roboticist Srikanth Saripalli makes this interesting point: "If the government has to decide what to fund and what not to fund, they are going to get their ideas and decisions mostly from science fiction rather than what's being published in technical papers."
For example, in the development of a short story, Stephenson wanted to know if it's possible to build a tower that's 20 kilometers tall. Keith Hjelmsad, an expert in structural stability and computational mechanics, wrote a detailed response about the challenge involved in building such a tower. Other authors are contributing questions as well, and researchers are chiming in with fascinating, science-based replies. Roboticist Srikanth Saripalli makes this interesting point: "If the government has to decide what to fund and what not to fund, they are going to get their ideas and decisions mostly from science fiction rather than what's being published in technical papers."
'You don't take the idea from Jules Verne, you just take the Nazi scientist and let him build a rocket to the fucking Moon.'
BTW, here you can order a print from that day.
http://store.theonion.com/p-47...
you beat me to it, here's an excerpt.
"Holy Shit! Man Walks On Fucking Moon
From Our Dumb Century
Neil Armstrong's Historic First Words On Moon: 'Holy Living Fuck'
July 21, 1969: The distant, lonely, mysterious satellite that has fascinated mankind since the dawn of time is distant and lonely no more. At 4:17 p.m. on July 20, 1969, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin E. Aldrin Jr. touched down on the Sea of Tranquility in the lunar module Eagle and radioed back to Earth the historic report: "Jesus fucking Christ, Houston. We're on the fucking moon."
your basicly funding a program to make people stop talking about today's problems by berating them, and encouraging people to look at the situation in a more positive white washing light. Your expected to apologize for, instead of demand change from the system.
That is scary, and orwellian. You might as well call your group the ministry of truth
Clearly you've never heard of Star Trek.
correction: You hire the engineer who read Jules Verne as a child.
I try to give an explanation here: http://whyislifefullofupsanddowns.com/2014/08/19/why-is-life-full-of-ups-and-downs/
Exactly, 'Leadership Through Fiction' should not become the new 'Leading from (the) Behind' any more than nuclear power was ever capable of providing cheap unlimited electricity without the largest and longest Tragedy of the Commons in history. What's up with this newly minted Capt. Kirk needs to lead the STEM bullcrap, anyway? Where is this coming from, the new office of wishful thinking or has the NSF finally adopted the politics of religion?
According to the structural engineer, yes a 20 km tower is probably possible. There's nothing in material science preventing it. The detailed engineering to figure out how to build and assemble the largest structural members in the base have not been worked out, but at least in theory, it can be done.
Presumably Neal Stephenson will finish a story telling us what the hell it's for.
Used to. No more.
Sci-fi writers of yesteryears used to ask pertinent questions, something like - Can robot dreams?
Nowadays we have the so-called 'sci-fi-writer-wannabes' who produce crappy stories, crappy plots, crappy concepts, craps such as 'twenty-mile-high-buildings"
The current crop of sci-fi-writer-wannabes just ain't got the imagination to inspire
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
This is the difference between Canadian Sci-Fi and US Sci-Fi.
Canadian Sci-Fi has always been about hope. plain and simple.
US Sci-Fi comes from Hollywood and they don't understand the difference between Sci-Fi and horror.
and by logging on, sell your future.
This is inspiration incarnate. Now we can create any sort of wondrous future we desire and the main project heiroglyph page is all I needed to see for proof. It's marginally functional without javascript!!!!
Knowledge Brings Fear
Star Trek painted a very optimistic picture of humanity, of a few generations from now mankind not being focused on money, but instead ideas, and progress/wellbeing for all of humanity. About technology (foremost the replicators) really making the world a better place.
Contrast this to the reboot of Battlestar Galactica , which paints a very dreary portrait of advancement of science/artificial intelligence causing the downfall of humanity..
"If the government has to decide what to fund and what not to fund, they are going to get their ideas and decisions mostly from science fiction rather than what's being published in technical papers."
Shouldn't that read...
"If the government has to decide what to fund and what not to fund, they are going to get their ideas and decisions mostly from the Bible rather than anything remotely reasonable."
We need the populace to elect different folks before the dream of the former would be true.
Get off my lawn.
many people inspired Van Braun: http://history.msfc.nasa.gov/v...
The outer limits begs to differ, do your education. It might be your "Final Exam" :)
...the future is great.
I really enjoy science fiction, but science and technology has made my life equals parts convenient, and utterly miserable and I suspect this true for the rest of the unwashed masses.
The Consensus of Experts wins the day again!
Hooray for the the future! The more we try change nature, the better life will be!
No, but I did.
Very, very wrong. Clearly they have not considered out of how many civilizations in the universe, what percentage of them annihilate themselves with nuclear war/neutron bombs/etc before exploring space? I think that we continue to be our own greatest enemy. We should not lose sight of this.
Do you have *any* idea of the quantity of sci-fi written that *didn't* predict anything at all?
What nonsense!
You want leadership, well you'll need to talk about people like Vannevar Bush that *thought out* the Memex, or JCR Licklider who talked about gigabit computing possibilities in the *1960s* in engineering papers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J...
http://memex.org/licklider.pdf
He write any sci-fi? Nah.
Not some daydreamer writing some stories that half a century later get selected by hindsight as being "inspirational"! When it was the other way around; the thinkers inspired the writers!!!
Anyone remember the seventies pre-Star Wars? You couldn't produce an SF film unless it had a downer ending. The magazine of fantasy and science fiction was full of depressing dystopian stories. Dangerous Visions, Last Days of Man on Earth, Driftglass... The book stands were loaded with depressing scifi. It wasn't a particularly uplifting time. I remember wondering at the time whether the industry go through cycles, where to differentiate yourself you have to write depressing fiction, and then everyone follows along, and then to differentiate yourself you have to go with, I dunno, a happy ending, and everyone follows suit, back and forth. Or whether literature and media tend to track some manic-depressive cycle of society. Or drives it.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Demolition man was an optimistic future....doesn't mean you want to live in one.
Life does tend to imitate art, although the cycles are a few decades out of sync.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
How about this psycho stuff on that page: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
So psycho, and so feminine. She's pissed.
It's for Islamic extremists to bomb or fly future super heavy planes into, thereby killing 100,000+ people.
The bigger you are, the harder you fall.
There is already a sizable portion of the slashdot community which never leaves the basement in which it resides... ;-)
I see so many problems with the world and very little being done to work those problems out; one of the biggest (in my opinion) being the energy crisis and the dwindling supplies of fossil fuels. What the world needs is clean, cheap energy i.e. hydrogen fusion or something similar. You see articles in the science news every once in a while but many of them turn out to be frauds or nothing ever comes of them.
The thing about the extremes of positive and negative stories.. Dystopian = everything is rotten, yet there is some hope Utopian = everything seems perfect at first, yet these is something is deepely wrong in the background. Now what is the positive story? The reader decides to focus on positive or negative overall aspects. Take a utopian version of hunger games. The main character of hunger games. She grows up in the capital. There is welth and lots of great food, parties and everything. There is even a great yearly entertainment thing where less fortunate kids from the districts get the opertunity to show worrier skills and make themselves and their families rich. When she volentiers for a job to help these kids prepare (a job that can make you famous) the harsh reality becomes apparent. These kids and family are repressed and live awful lives just to make the life in the capital possible. When she tries to speak up she gets to feel just how awfull the powers in the can be, even her family and friends are punnished for her attempts to speak up. Same world other view. In the end what story is more positive?
IGY: 1957
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I... Sputnik: 1957
Vostok 1: 1961
Vostok 6: 1963
Mariner 3 & 4:1964
Venera 3:1966
Star Trek: 1966
Yeah, sure, sci-fi "inspires". Fuck off.
I don't want a big tower. I want trivially cheap food replicators. Or trivially cheap energy production and distribution. Or some other game-changer that can elevate the status of the world's teeming masses of indigents to something equivalent to at least the lower end of middle class.
Clearly they are ignoring the evidence. If government can choose what to fund, they will choose the option that benefits rich and powerful over the option that would benefit all of us. Thats how its always been...
So im suprised if human civilization exists as we know it now in hundred years... Rate of environmental destruction in name of greed, lack of basic empathy to fellow human, etc..
Yes. I have an extremely accurate estimation of the amount of sci-fi written that didn't predict anything at all: absolutely none. I don't need to make an argument, it's true by definition.
Really?
It seems that we are going to have to fight off aliens for our survival. Given that any aliens that come here are going to be more advanced than us, I wouldn't say thats optimistic.
.
And even if we don't come across intelligent aliens, the (human) Galactic Empire will become corrupt and collapse, witth whole planets wiped out.
>Optimistic.
>Accurate
Pick one.
Roboticist Srikanth Saripalli makes this interesting point: "If the government has to decide what to fund and what not to fund, they are going to get their ideas and decisions mostly from science fiction rather than what's being published in technical papers."
Because at NIH indeed you are placed on a grant review board because of your techical knowledge of the matter. On top of that, the applications are all supported by citations in technical (and peer-reviewed) papers.
As best I understand funding at DOE and NSF works much the same way; your odds of getting funded are astronomically better if you have good primary literature to support the experiment you propose. Now, if your funding plans revolve around convincing your favorite congress-critter to write in a line (or a full bill) to get you some money, that might work too but it generally isn't the most reliable way to establish a career path.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
The pessimism and dystopia in sci-fi doesn't come from a lack of research resources on engineering and science. It mainly comes from literary fashion.
If the fashion with editors is bleak, pessimistic, dystopian stories, then that's what readers will see on the bookshelves and in the magazines, and authors who want to see their work in print will color their stories accordingly. If you want to see more stories with a can-do, optimistic spirit, then you need to start a magazine or publisher with a policy of favoring such manuscripts. If there's an audience for such stories it's bound to be feasible. There a thousand serious sci-fi writers for every published one; most of them dreadful it is true, but there are sure to be a handful who write the good old stuff, and write it reasonably well.
A secondary problem is that misery provides many things that a writer needs in a story. Tolstoy once famously wrote, "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." I actually Tolstoy had it backwards; there are many kinds of happy families. Dysfunctions on the other hand tends to fall into a small number of depressingly recognizable patterns. The problem with functional families from an author's standpoint is that they don't automatically provide something that he needs for his stories: conflict. Similarly a dystopian society is a rich source of conflicts, obstacles and color, as the author of Snow Crash must surely realize. Miserable people in a miserable setting are simply easier to write about.
I recently went on a reading jag of sci-fi from the 30s and 40s, and when I happened to watch a screwball comedy movie ("His Girl Friday") from the same era, I had an epiphany: the worlds of the sci-fi story and the 1940s comedy were more like each other than they were like our present world. The role of women and men; the prevalence of religious belief, the kinds of jobs people did, what they did in their spare time, the future of 1940 looked an awful lot like 1940.
When we write about the future, we don't write about a *plausible* future. We write about a future world which is like the present or some familiar historical epoch (e.g. Roman Empire), with conscious additions and deletions. I think a third reason may be our pessimism about our present and cynicism about the past. Which brings us right back to literary fashion.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
"...of ideas for use of the tower, and therein lies the case for building it."
Yes! We must build a tower so high it reaches "into the heavens"! Babylon Tower 2.0!
I find it weird how people looking for the epitome of a "progressive scientific" symbolic project, so frequently come up with something that seems explicitly intended to contrary to some religion--when the scientific rationale apart from the religion is very marginal compared to alternative projects. Or the rationale is currently nonexistent, as explicitly (and ironically) stated in the TFA.
Seems rather like the anti-circumcision movement. Would you really work up this much energy around that in particular if it weren't a stance contradicting a religious norm? Fetal stem cells when they are a scientifically inferior source as well? Isn't that motivation rather... irrational?
Be very very pessimistic about scientific utopianism, and then have a good belly laugh.
Wow, which of the eight forms of schizophrenia do *you* have? Want some dressing with that word salad?
I'm a private contractor working at the NIH, and this is 100% true. The grant review process is so strict that when ARRA gave billions of dollars to the NIH to fund *new* research, the NIH had to go back to the President and say, "we have to be able to use some of this money to supplement *existing* research too ... we can't just start awarding grants to people who didn't make the cut because their *science* was bad."
There are a lot of M.D.s and Ph.D.s here, and they take that stuff *really* seriously. The NIH is trying to fund research to cure or treat conditions that affect us, our friends, our relatives, etc. They will terminate a grant early if they find reason to.
You don't get to screw around with the American taxpayer's money if you're getting it from here.
https://what-if.xkcd.com/94/
Conflict makes for interesting stories - which is why stuff like "Ghost in the Shell" with a future full of amazing things dishes up stories of people using them to commit crimes.
Nobody is going to read your wall of text.
Supporter of the +1 Over Dramatic mod option. In memory of apk.
Sure, Neal Stephenson's future looks bright. He has my money and I never got squat for it. Damn Kickstarter scams.
I don't think we're pessimistic because they wrote of dark futures. I think we're pessimistic because we see our society rotting and see no way to cut the rot out and rebuild.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Anyone remember the seventies pre-Star Wars? You couldn't produce an SF film unless it had a downer ending.
Rather than cyclical I'd suggest that it might be just the historical filter. The SciFi you remember looking back are the upbeat, wonderful future stories. It's similar to the filter that gets applied to modern music: it always seems to appear that things were better in the past because you forget the bad songs and only remember the good ones.
I'm not sure there's even really a market for science fiction
There is always a market for good scientific fiction, inspiring stories that will bring the readers towards a universe which they never experience before
What was that last Star Trek movie? I can't even remember the name of it now. It wasn't science fiction. It was an action flick with more explosions than ideas. It just happened to be set on a spaceship
I am totally with you on that flick --- the flick is a perfect example of how severely the lacking of the ability to imagine, on current crop of writers, has become!
I suspect that the current definition of "sci-fi" is no longer similar to what we are accustomed to. Nowadays the thinking is that if something happens on board of a space-ship it automatically qualifies as "sci-fi". Gone are the days that sci-fi offered the readers a glimpse of what could-be, thus inspiring the readers (many of them young) to strive to make the world that they read in sci-fi comes alive
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Everything's golden, we got a sphere. People overhead (you would call them alien) are good people and want to see us reach our full potential. They got the master sphere, so no bullshit.
i think you have described sci-fi in general. from it's earliest beginnings, it was meant to foster caution about technology or shine a light on the ills of society. the upbeat Star Trek, Star Wars, and Stargates were really anomalous blips.
Before the first rockets were ever built they were featured in scifi adventure stories.
i reached the conclusion a decade ago that all the world's problems could be softened if not solved if we had nearly free energy. in the past five years, i've realized i was wrong. imagine how people would act if energy was free. everything would be very cheap and disposable - even more so than now. imagine all the waste that would create. being largely free of material concerns for a while (because super-cheap energy decreases the cost of everything else), people would breed even faster than the rabbits and flies they currently out-breed.
pretend you are an ecologist from an advanced alien race studying Earth. look at everything that is happening in the world right now. wars upon wars. disease, pestilence, droughts, famines, poor and suffering masses...you would logically reach this conclusion: the human species is overpopulated. everything that is happening is a natural, universal law of nature that applies to everything in the universe. there are mechanisms in place in reality that strive to keep things balanced. the higher you build the tower, the more you tip the scales without crashing the system, the longer you put off the fall - the harder and further the fall will be.
tower of babel
flight of icarus
nations form treaties to ally themselves and deter war, leading to the first world war.
this world runs on blood, sweat, and tears. you can bleed, sweat, and cry one drop of blood, sweat, or tears a day and everything is fine. rob human fate of her daily wage and she will think of a way to slap you into yesteryear.
i need to clarify though. in a way, i am optimistic. i know life will be better once nature has put us back in our place - but the generation or two that has to live through the re-adjustment period will have it very bad. however, i'm also pessimistic. i believe the human race will keep finding ways of cheating fate of her daily wage until the accrued amount of debt is completely insurmountable. no deposit, no return.
we'll just keep running our programs and installing new ones with no reboots until we finally get the blue screen of death.
...were written by alastair reynolds. Any recommendations what else is worthwhile?
Why limit yourself to just one?
What I said may be awkward English, and it may be totally wrong, but it's not gibberish. I suspect you understood me perfectly.
Really? I'd love to see scifi adventure stories written before 1730, when Colonel C. F. von Geissler introduced them into the German military... and thats not even the earliest use of rockets if you want to go as far back as the Chinese.
Also, now they might kill my ass with a sudden heart attack or liver disease, or whatever, just so it looks like a natural death, without a political cause. Damn, I hate to die in waste.
Yours truly, &c,
Slashdot user sillybilly
Sci-Fi Authors and Scientists pollyannaishly forget about the ultimate, unstoppable evil: Corporations and their politician lapdogs.
Science fiction writers make up all kinds of stuff and expect their readers to suspend reality, that's the way the game is played. But to make real progress in science or engineering your ideas and decisions have to be based on reality.
More unsubstantiated geek horseshit. Are you idiots really that stupid?
If the government wants to use Sci-Fi, we really need another Issac Asimov to make sure the Science part is real.
Thousands of tons of ice on such a tower would take it down pretty quickly. If nature cannot send up granite spires that high, man's inventions will not get that high either, or at least for very long.
And while you live for others, one of the best ways to do it is to take care of ya own business, so you don't drag others into it or down with it. Such as managing your own finances and staying within your own means. You are responsible to manage yourself, your own affairs, at least as the very basics of caring about others. Such as figuring out how to get your own food, clothing and shelter, in a way where you can come up with excess, that you can turn to other things. I have a million ways I could spend extra dollars, other than housing, insurance, taxes, and government demolition costs..
Yours truly, &c,
Slashdot user sillybilly
There are some people living within the borders of the US, who have jobs of at least minimum wage, yet their monthly housing cost is less than $50, in the for the of property tax. Most of them live either in the hood or in the sticks, none in the high property tax suburbs. I wanna be one of them, but it's like a crime to have under $50/mo housing cost, and they'll kill me over it, and I will die. Fuck all the "owner" who do nothing, and just wanna sit back and collect blackmailing others housing cost. Rent. Fuck rent. Rent if you need a car for one day. Or you go away to college for a couple years. But being forced to rent throughout your life, or pay quasi-rent mortgage interest, is absolute bullshit. And just how forced insurance purchases mandated by the oppressive government from private parties regardless of price, being able to deduct mortgage interest going directly into the pockets of private parties, that's absolute bullshit too. The government has right to collect taxes for military, roads, and elderly support, also space research, or fundamental science advancements that no private parties are interested in paying for, because there is no short term return to their quarterly bottom line, but it should not get involved involved in driving the housing market tulip mania prices even higher up through the blue sky. Everyone involved drives the prices higher - realtors, owners, the government, and even landlords that charge so much that instead of paying rent it's better to gamble on a mortgage for 30 years and have a chance of not getting fired from your job before 30 years is up, and be able to pay it off. Only the consumer who lost his $25/hr union jobs stuck at $8 minimum wage, of whom there is a whole lot of, suffers. But what else is new? History of humanity is all about how the few can subdue and control the many, and just collect through "owning" or "reigning, ruling", and live off of their work, instead of having to do work themselves, or the kind of work they do is bullshit, sit in an office and chitchat all day in meetings with retarded presentations coming up with nonsense "initiatives", and call it a job. Every ship needs a captain, and a chain of command. But what I see everywhere is like 200 captains bullshitting in the offices, and 25 people who actually do any work. That's too much fucking overhead.
Yours truly, &c
Slashdot user sillybilly
... a number of Scientists have told Me They got into the field in order to better understand the "Mind of G-d". Funny that.
Here is the same thing with proper grammar. They keep editing it and bouncing my mouse pointer and cursor all over the place while I type.
There are some people living within the borders of the US, who have jobs of at least minimum wage, yet their monthly housing cost is less than $50, in the form of property tax. Most of them live either in the hood or in the sticks, none in the high property tax suburbs. I wanna be one of them, but it's like a crime to have under $50/mo housing cost, and they'll kill me over it, and I will die. Fuck all the "owners" who do nothing, and just wanna sit back and collect blackmailing others over housing cost. Rent. Fuck rent. Rent if you need a car for one day. Or you go away to college for a couple years. But being forced to rent throughout your life, or pay quasi-rent mortgage interest, is absolute bullshit. And just how forced insurance purchases mandated by the oppressive government from private parties regardless of price, being able to deduct mortgage interest going directly into the pockets of private parties, that's absolute bullshit too. The government has right to collect taxes for military, roads, and elderly support, also space research, or fundamental science advancements that no private parties are interested in paying for, because there is no short term return to their quarterly bottom line, but it should not get involved involved in driving the housing market tulip mania prices even higher up through the blue sky. Everyone involved drives the prices higher - realtors, owners, the government, and even landlords that charge so much that instead of paying rent it's better to gamble on a mortgage for 30 years and have a chance of not getting fired from your job before 30 years is up, and be able to pay it off. Only the consumer who lost his $25/hr union jobs stuck at $8 minimum wage, of whom there is a whole lot of, suffers. But what else is new? History of humanity is all about how the few can subdue and control the many, and just collect through "owning" or "reigning, ruling", and live off of their work, instead of having to do work themselves, or the kind of work they do is bullshit, sit in an office and chitchat all day in meetings with retarded presentations coming up with nonsense "initiatives", and call it a job. Every ship needs a captain, and a chain of command. But what I see everywhere is like 200 captains bullshitting in the offices, and 25 people who actually do any work. That's too much fucking overhead.
Yours truly, &c
Slashdot user sillybilly
Does anybody think the oil industry won't sit on or use patents to DELAY new technologies?
Sure they might allow it at some point but you know they'll really just want to maximize profits as long and as much as possible before letting something else take over.
I remember something about tech to handle larger NiMh batteries being owned by an oil company in the 90s which kept those from being used in cars.
"'Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department,' says Wernher von Braun." .
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
And, yes, I do remember Jon Katz.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Counter point: Star Trek needed a universe in which they could tell not just one dystopian story, but a new one every week, by visiting a planet that went off the rails in one of the same ways we might.
For the real world, eh? Let's see. Optimism will not stop Ebola in its tracks. Optimism will not unfan the flames across the middle east and other regions, nor will optimism lower food prices—optimism was doubtless not why Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire—or create the three or four or more new Saudi Arabias necessary to fuel the oil craze (of Americans in particular) for a few more years. Optimism will not make the fracking boom any less of a bubble, nor cause the Oil Majors to stop speaking of an "age of austerity"—per the US EIA, 127 oil and gas companies are all taking on debt or chucking assests to try to reach a profit—nor reverse the decline of their supergiant fields, nor cause cheap oil to magically materialize from the marginal, difficult, and expensive sources that are now being resorted to, given the global peak of conventional crude oil back in 2005. Optimism may make the steps outlined in the Hirsch report a little more palatable, though that report advises, given the 2005 oil peak, migration to some new technology in 1985 (or starting in 1995 in crunch mode). I believe Tom Murphy called this an energy trap on his do the math blog. Optimism might call nuclear too cheap to meter, but that tune was young 70 years ago. Optimism will not reverse the draw-down of aquifers, nor reverse the drought in California and the other sun-burnt states. Optimism will not allow a single working class salary to suddenly pay all its bills like it did a few decades ago, nor will it end job erosion due to offshoring and automation. Optimism will not clean up the coal spills, deep water oil taints, nor any of the many other superfund sites that modern culture has blessed us with. Time and hard effort might, but that Augean labor is a far cry from fluffy all-is-well optimism. One might be optimistic that the Highway Trust Fund might somehow remain solvent, or you could wonder just how much of that $500 billion Interstate system can really be maintained now that the oil required to build it is busy pricing itself out of the market. Hey hey! Speaking of optimism, here's an article—"Billionaire Richard Branson failed to deliver on $3 billion global warming pledge." Points for trying?
Don't look to old Sci-Fi for anything other than action.
Continuum is a great new show that's based close enough to reality that you don't feel like coughing "BS" every 5 seconds.
I posted comments on several of the hieroglyph projects, and was truly enjoying the conversations... but I got marked as spam and kicked. my login stopped working. still don't know why. My comments were on target, scientifically sound, and had no links, and were't too short, too long, or too often... about once a week or so.
Um, no.
Good scifi has almost always been focused on the realities and potential downsides of scientific advancement as an attempt to ground our scientific ambitions. Older, optimistic, science fiction was founded in a fundamental misunderstanding or at least premature understanding of our universe - flying cars, flying robots, colonizing mars, robot maids, robot pets, flying cities, houses in the sky, nuclear powered everything, FTL travel, etc.
Star Trek isn't a good example, at all, of optimistic sci fi. You're talking about a story where we kill the bejesus out of each other with nukes, develop genetic engineering and then kill each other because of that, only so we can go into a dark age and within less than 100 years, magically begin a conversion into an utterly unrealistic socialist utopia. Meanwhile, the entire rest of the universe is either more advanced than us, hates us, and/or is just like we used to be. The different races in Trek were just projections of various human traits and behavior - there wasn't necessarily imagination involved.
By the way, people bitching about modern sci-fi, you're wrong. Science fiction doesn't immediately disqualify as such by having explosions and actions. The overwhelming majority of all scifi ever written is military action scifi or otherwise actioney scifi heavier on the fiction than on the science. That's the entire point of the genre. Classic sci-fi didn't have hard science behind it. Why should modern?
False. Both of your examples are people with actual solid science to their writing. Gigabit wasn't imagination - it was scientific prediction based on math. Really one of the only examples that fits your statement is Crichton, or Matthew Reilly.
That's patently false.
Canadian scifi:
Battlestar Galactica, Continuum, and a ton of other shows that aren't "About hope."
Not to mention there literally is no US scifi. All Scifi shows are filmed in Vancouver. Unless you're talking about movies, in which case you're also still full of shit: Elysium, Edge of Tomorrow, Oblivion, Star Trek, Lost, Stargate, Star Wars, and etc none of this is "horror."
Syfy is not scifi. They never were. So no, Sharknado and Megatyrannosaur and shit, that's not scifi, and the only people who ever said it was are the idiot executives.
Give credit where it's due. The quote is from one of Tom Lehrer's songs, I've forgotten the title and I don't have a record player for the albums, but I will be downloading them.
There's a TED talk relevant to this. Sorry I don't have the time to look it up.
in a nutshell, the role of sci-fi is to pierce the barrier between what we know and what we don't know. It shines a light into that darkness and says "Hey, there's something interesting here." But that's it. it's just a glimpse.
The scientists and engineers are the true explorers who hack a path into that void. But before they do it, they need a reason to go that particular direction, an inspiration. It also helps to have a framework of language and ideas. The frame may shift, may even be replaced, but it is the starting block upon which the original traction is made.
Sci-fi is not the only path into the unknown. Serendipity and raw curiosity play a part too. Maybe even a bigger part. But why limit ourselves? Let's use all the tools at our disposal. Everyone has their favorite. The world is full of more than just nails. We need wrenches and chisels in addition to our hammers.
But a nice hammer is a wonderful thing to hold. Bang bang Maxwell.
And teach a kid how too.
I think making authors to write something to achieve some social goals is a bit ... distracting...
All of them write about the fears of the future. About what can go wrong. That way we can be aware and try to avoid problems beforehand.
Being too optimistic about the future is unrealistic and can do more harm than good.
Sci-Fi can paint any picture it wants, but so far it has never asked, "Will people still be useful in the 21st Century?" Great question and the answer is likely no, and that answer in no way leads to Utopia in my opinion.
http://www.cnn.com/2014/09/17/...
Did you ever wake up in the morning, with a Zombie Woof behind your eyes? -- FZ