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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...
Clearly you've never heard of Star Trek.
Yep, Robert Heinlein meets Barney.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
correction: You hire the engineer who read Jules Verne as a child.
Wow, you kids with your high uids.
I'll give you that it does take a bit of talent to take something fairly pure and wholesome, and twist it like you did into something dark and oppressive. A tip though: substituting 'your' for 'you're' blows you out of the water as a 12 year old. Just letting you know.
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 !
If your English wasn't so atrocious I might upvote you.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
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..
This kettle is calling your pot out. I'm a noob.
you're really going to use their UID against them? Seriously? I mean fark, this is isn't even my first account here (dated by the mixed case, which was popular at the time). Does that mean everything I say is wise, reflexively?
"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.
many people inspired Van Braun: http://history.msfc.nasa.gov/v...
Yes.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
The Consensus of Experts wins the day again!
Hooray for the the future! The more we try change nature, the better life will be!
Yeah, the climate has changed, does that mean the future must be all 'doom and gloom'? No, it means more real estate will begin to open up, while others flood out, and the people will move to different areas. Change is necessary. The future is bright, despite the always on information we receive via the internet. Through the internet connected new world, it is now a time of great learning. The newer generations will take that ball and run with it, and life will continue to go on. Humans will just adapt to any climate change. Adapting is what we are best at.
Science fiction isn't really about the future, it's always about right now. That's why we have the spectacle of Star Trek and 007 "reboots" that deal with urban terrorism. That's why the last Captain America looks like a Snowden fever dream. That's why Star Wars 7 will focus on the melting of the glaciers of Hoth and the "war on women" by remnants of the Old Empire.
No, but I did.
We are great at adapting, that however, is by no means going to be easy. Many many people will likely die unnecessarily. It's a bit like seeing tire wear on your car. You don't know why it is wearing out early but you know you need to change it out and because you bought a Veyron it ain't gonna be cheap. Unfortunately if you don't change it out you'll experience a blowout at 190mph and if you're luckily you'll live to tell the next guy to buy new damn tires before pushing the limits.
I don't understand how we accepted that factories in Ohio were causing acid rain in Upstate New York and Vermont but somehow think humanity isn't capable of causing damage by massively changing our environment. Like the whole argument about climate change, its a natural cycle and its going to get hotter but do we really need to be pushing it to happen a whole lot sooner and much more severely?
> substituting 'your' for 'you're' blows you out of the water as a 12 year old.
your being pendatic about spelling blows you out of the water as not having a real argument.
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.
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.
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.
The sci-fi question here is: Are we smart enough to survive ourselves?"
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?
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.
"If the government has to decide what to fund and what not to fund"
then we have communism. What a great, positive future, everyone holding hands and singing kumbayah!
No, the government doesn't have to decide what to fund and what not to fund.
I thought the government was subservient to the people, and subservient to the Constitution. Guess I am just
not smiling hard enough.
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.
That's why Star Wars 7 will focus on the melting of the glaciers of Hoth and the "war on women" by remnants of the Old Empire.
And with a clever bit of licensing, will be co-marketed alongside the inspirational and dramatic family comedy: We Bought a Tauntaun Zoo
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
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.
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 !
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.
...were written by alastair reynolds. Any recommendations what else is worthwhile?
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.
If your English wasn't so atrocious
weren't.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
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.
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.
"'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.
Well, you certainly bumped up the IQ in this thread.
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.
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