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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.
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.
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.
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..
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.
Yes.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
"The current crop of sci-fi-writer-wannabes just ain't got the imagination to inspire"
I'm not sure there's even really a market for science fiction. 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'm willing to bet not many these days would have the patience to site through 2001: A Space Odyssey, let alone the original Solaris.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
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.
If your English wasn't so atrocious
weren't.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
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
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.