Not so - miniature vacuum tubes were very much a thing in the 50s. Some instrumentation amplifiers (like 1AD4) had low voltage filaments and in line base pins. For mil-aero there were tiny, ruggedized tubes with a 3/8" circular pin ring.
In a hundred years, people may complain about how Sci Fi writers of today didn’t make use of analog quantum computers, as that’s what everyone is using now, and quantum logic gates had been invented more than a decade ago, and full quantum computers have been in development nearly as long. Anyone should be able to predict that when we built asteroid colonies and started interstellar colonization, we would not be using transistors.
But, if a contemporary Sci Fi writer used quantum computers, they sound a bit hand wavey, putting quantum in front of something in order to give it the properties necessary for the plot.
Not that there are not examples of contemporary Sci Fi writers using quantum computers to handwave something in order to give it properties necessary for the plot, but future readers will likely find those to be humorous in how wrong they were on their properties and capabilities.
Yeah, and some future computers may be sealed in evacuated glass tubes, as they are today in down hole applications. Severe environments may indeed have vacuum tube computers.
Wouldn’t it be easier to genetically engineer the guys and then clone them ?
It was an Avatar type situation. The scientists had genetically engineered a creature that could survive in the harsh environment of Jupiter. They dropped it to Jupiter’s surface and then used a machine to telepathically link a human back at the base to the creature. The plan was to produce and send copies of the original creature to eventually create a permanent base of them on Jupiter.
Are you saying you wouldn’t have a problem if you were reading a science fiction story and the author (with no humorous intent) described a starship stopping so it could fill up its gas tank?
I have to admit it would bother me. I don’t know what kind of fuel system a starship would use but I don’t think it would be gasoline. And so if an author described gasoline powered starships in his story (presumably because gasoline is a fuel he is familiar with and he didn’t bother to make up something like dilithium crystals or melange) I would see it as a sign he has poor writing skills.
If you’re an author who’s writing a story that’s set five hundred years, you want the reader to believe the story he’s reading is taking place in the future. So throwing in current technology that will obviously be obsolete in five hundred years is a mistake.
Are any current spaceships fueled with gas?
If so, I wouldn’t have an issue with an SF story that had such, even if it was set in the future.
If there are no such current spaceships (and to the best of my knowledge, there are not), I may have an issue with it. May because I wouldn’t have an issue with it if it was a deliberate anachronism used for effect (see: steampunk).
Right now, we use chemical reactions for our rockets. And there are still tons of SF stories (set in the future no less) that use spaceships primarily driven by non-exotic chemical reactions that occasionally need to stop at space stations to re-fuel - so, it really isn’t far off the mark to speak of SF stories where starships stop to fill up their gas tanks. At the moment, many such stories are set in our own outer solar system with ships using normal chemical reactions to get their ships between asteroids.
And most people don’t really object that surely there would be a better method developed in the future that the authors should have employed instead.
Hey, read Fallen Angels by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Michael Flynn. The spaceship is indirectly fueled by gasoline, being powered by fuel that is itself generated by petroleum.
The comic version:
My sister still uses vacuum tubes. She has an organ we moved from a church. Dozens of tubes in the back and in each amplifier. Probably heats the house as well.
It’s called RP-1.
Ok, fine. So they top off with diesel
There was a classic Art Clarke story, Superiority, about an interstellar arms race that involved some very creative weapons concepts, one of which was a large computer known as a 3-dimensional battle analyzer. It was a useful and powerful tool but it contained billions of vacuum tubes, requiring large amounts of juice and elaborate cooling, so it was kind of impractical to deploy and very much a problem if it got hit.
Heh, I’m not sure if vacuum tubes was even close to the worst offender in all of that.
And in that situation, tubes may actually still be better than transistors. Not that I know how to amplify an esprojector, but tubes are still used in place of transistors in some amplification applications as their analog function can give a more accurate reproduction than a digital one does, at least according to various audiophiles who claim that they can tell a difference.
If by “gas” you mean oxygen and methane or other combinations of oxidizer and fuel, then no, not at all.
Even if, as the reader in the future makes fun of the Sci Fi writer not talking about refilling the xenon tank for its ion drive, or dueritium for its fusion torch.
It would be a little odd, and would indicate that the author knew nothing at all about rockets, past, future, or present, as he is not talking about rockets as anyone who is familiar with rockets would know them to be, but a completely different rocket design that has never existed (outside of some possible experimental projects that he wouldn’t know of either.)
That’s not a matter of them using something that is current state of the art that is going obsolete, like vacuum tubes were for your example, that’s a matter of the author not having the slightest clue what they are talking about.
I have little reason to believe that any far future that involves space has unmodified meat bags like us banging around inside of tin cans. This humanoid form that we inhabit will be very obsolete in five hundred years. Hard to tell a story though, if there is nothing familiar about not only the setting, but the characters as well.
And five hundred years out in predictions is a bit much to ask of a sci fi writer. By then, not only may fusion be obsolete as we transitioned to anti-matter, but anti-matter may be obsolete as we have transitioned to powering off of dark matter.
As I’ve mentioned in other threads, I have noticed that futuristic computers in sci-fi shows almost always look like computers from the time the show was made, only more capable. In the original Star Trek computers looked like big boxes with a lot of flashing lights on them. In TNG, that console on Picard’s desk looked a lot like a 1980s laptop, with a laughably small screen by today’s standards. In The Expanse everyone uses devices that look like thin, transparent smartphones.
I always assumed that the writers want something just futuristic enough to make the audience go “gee whiz”, but still familiar enough for the audience to be able to recognize it as a computer.
“Avatar” was a “Call Me Joe” situation…
I believe that was a control panel from an IBM SAGE computer
There are some situations in which vacuum tubes are better than semiconductor electronics. They’re supposedly resistant to the kind of damage that an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) weapon generates, so they won’t be knocked out even if they haven’t been consciously grounded the same way.
Ages ago in 1976, when a Soviet pilot defected with a MiG s5 and Western analysts could look at it, they were surprised to find it using vacuum tube technology
I still recall a scene from Babylon 5, where Sheridan and Delenn are in line to get their issue of Universe Today, and they mention that they can set their preferences as to what kind of news articles that they get.
And then it prints out a paper copy for them to pick up out of a dispenser.
Even when I saw that in its original run, it seemed a bit dated to me.
Rad-hardened semiconductors are a thing, of course. They go through extensive testing to verify their “hardness.”
But yea, vacuum tubes are still used in certain circumstances. There’s even some legacy military equipment, still in use, that uses vacuum tubes.