science fiction becoming science fact

In My Humble Opinion
1

Putting humans on the moon used to be considered science fiction. It has been science fact for 30 years now.

What things that are currently considered science fiction, do you sincerely believe will become science fact, within say the next 100 years?

My WAG is finding a way for humankind to literally enter cyberspace via means yet undetermined. The Matrix and The Lawnmower Man are concept films that come to mind, as well as Star Trek’s holodeck technology.

I also would hope that hover-cars ala Back to the Future, and The Fifth Element, may become a reality.

2

Small wormholes are theoretically possible and there’s talk of harnessing them for communications.

I too would love to see flying cars but time will tell if governments allow them (I was told recently that there are working prototypes but safety concerns have slowed further progress).

The next major challenges are bioengineering, terraforming and sustained life in space.

3

I think asteroid mining has a chance of happening within the next 100 years (at an exploratory level if not a profitable one).

Long-term near-earth-orbit stations are likely as well.

4

The one piece of technology I’ve been keeping a sharp eye out for is anti-gravity (call it “repulsorlift”, call it “hovertron”, call it whatever). Basically, a tool for manipulating gravity fields. Such a device would render Earth to orbit travel inexpensive and simple (in theory), which, in turn, would render all manner of space travel inexpensive and easy (after all, the hard part is getting outside the atmosphere in one piece).

I also look forward to the genetic engineering progress that will result in a cat that NEVER lands on its feet.

5

I wanna see Nuclear Fusion power plants; those would kick ass. And people colonizing and terraforming Mars.

6

First of all, science fiction has a terrible record of predicting the future. Sure we got to the moon, but not in the way science fiction predicted, and we just went there a couple of times and haven’t been back.

I suspect that very little in SF will actually come true. What does “come true” will do so on such a limited level that it will have no direct effect on most people.

7

To say that science fiction has a terrible track record because a LOT of predictions are made and few come true isn’t really fair. What’s impressive is to look at the work of the few very good sf writers who have a consistent track record of “getting it right”.

Good example: Jules Verne. At the beginning of this thread they taslked about how they got going to the moon wrong. But at the time of the Apollo landings there were a lot of articles on how Verne got it right. I assume – as do most Verne fans – that he deliberately overlooked the absurd vlocity of a “space gun” because he wanted a device to get his crew into space. But many of the other details Verne used in From the Earth to the Moon and its sequel Around the Moon are, indeed, quite correct, right down to the Florida launch point for the vehicle.

Verne did a LOT of research for his books and got an amazing amount “right”. In his “Robur the Conqueror” his Nemo-like aeronaut builds a heavier-than-air craft. But it’s not made of metal – it’s built of composites. In “Tribulations of a Chinaman” (Never heard of THAT one, did you?) he has survivors of a shipwreck kept alive by high-tech rubber survival suits.In two of his books he uses a television/picture phone. His "Barsac Mission/City in the Sahara was the first story in which the heroes radio for help. And so on.
Murrat Leinster (Will F. Jenkins) was another accurate predictor of the future. His stories are well worth he reading, if you can find them. (Look for “The Best of Murray Leinster” from Ballantine/Del Rey). In “A Logic Named Joe”, written in the mid-forties (but published at the end of them) he prediced, with uncanny accuracy, the Internet. When the Censorship circuits go awry, people begin downloading how to murder people, how to break into banks, and kids start downloading porn. It’s a good read.

8

Transportation will finally become much more efficient in the future.

A computer with the power of the 1Ghz Althion will be the size of your thumbnail.

9

Let’s take a look at Star Trek as an example:

Communicators used by Kirk and his buddies are now being carried by a great number of people in the way of cel phones. Motorola’s original flip phone was modelled from the early Star Trek communicator.

A couple of Canadian inventors just got the rights to market a Tri-Corder. Vital Technologies manufactures a device that measures temperature, barometric pressure, EM radiation, incident light intensity and scans colour. It weighs ten ounces and can be held comfortably in one hand. It’s applications should be in physics, science, and agriculture.

Hyposprays used in the series are now reality.

Science fiction gets people thinking about what is possible, Asimov predicted the existance of computers and robots.

Science fiction writers must be amazed when the products of their fertile imagination become reality…

10

“I also would hope that hover-cars ala Back to the Future, and The Fifth Element, may become a reality.”

There was a story in the papers and on the radio about a year ago that some company had produced a prototype flying car. (The fact that we haven’t heard or read anything about it since should be a good indication of how successful – or unsuccessful – they really were.) My father’s immediate response on hearing a radio story about it was IMHO totally on point:

  1. Driver (pilot?) ability. Driving at 60 or 70mph on a freeway already requires considerable attentiveness and good reflexes. What percentage of the population has the vision, reflexes, and attentiveness to fly at 100mph or more? There are a lot of licensed pilots in the US, but they are still a mere fraction of the population. And if flying cars are relatively common, there WILL be unlicensed and unqualified people buying and operating them (as there are now with motor vehicles) at a much higher proportion than unlicensed and unqualified people pilot planes today.

  2. Visibility. Driving is hard enough having to look in all directions in a two-dimensional plane. Adding having to keep a lookout above and below you will make it a real bear, to say the least. The neck pain from everyone having to swivel their necks around so much would keep chiropractors very busy. :slight_smile: And what method do you use for drivers to see above and below them? Video screens, which are distracting? “Heads-up” projections onto the windshield as with fighter planes now, which can be confusing? Or something simple like plexiglass car roofs and floors, which could be nauseating? :slight_smile:

  3. The consequences of a breakdown. If my car runs out of gas, I coast to a stop and listen to my SO complain about us having to walk two miles to buy gas and why didn’t I fuel up at the last station we passed. :slight_smile: If one of my tires is punctured, I may get into an accident as I temporarily lose control of the vehicle, but I might not either. But what happens if the batteries of my flying car go dead, or the hovering system fails, at 1000 feet?

  4. How do you do traffic control? The attraction of the flying car is the freedom from fixed roadways, the ability to travel “as the crow flies”. But people surely won’t be allowed to just fly in any random direction over cities (thus one of the basic benefits of a flying car is reduced). By what means does the responsible government agency* indicate the designated flying routes? Lane markers, directional signs, and traffic signals that float in the sky?

Admittedly, (3) and (4) are at least partly technical issues that could be resolved by technology. But the first two stem from the human operator, and IMHO are very difficult, if not impossible, to resolve. The bottom line is that, assuming such a thing as the flying car were invented, they would never become as common as the flying cars in some movies.
*This isn’t one of my father’s questions, but it’s an important one: which level(s) of government WOULD be responsible for flying cars?

  1. The FAA in charge of all aspects because flying is aviation?
  2. Divided up like with motor vehicles today?
    a) licensing of operators and vehicles by the states;
    b) traffic policing by state, county, and municipal police; and
    c) creation and maintenance of the flying “roads” by the transportation/highway/street departments of the federal, state, county, and municipal governments.
11

Science fiction has a worse prediction record than Nostradamus (who was purely hit and miss – mostly miss). That’s OK, since SF isn’t about prediction. The few things that SF supposedly predicted were only superficially similar to what eventually happened. Even in cases where they were supposedly right, they got the details wrong (since SF has a very poor record in one essential science – economics).

It’s the same as claiming astrology is good at prediction. There are some coincidences, but very few accurate predictions.

12

Yeah, Reality Chuck is baiting us.

Sturgeon’s law keeps from from disagreeing with him too much – if you consider sf as a whole, you have to realize that you have been stuck with “Galaxy 666” and the other works f Pel Torro, you have “The Null-Frequency Impulser” and Philip K. Dick’s “Galactic Pot Healer” and you’ve got “Cataclysm” and everything published by Laser Books. There’s no way I can defend all of that. It’s bad, and it can’t predict anything worth a damn.

On top f that a lot of sf is allegory or pure entertainment that isn’t really trying to accurately predict the future.

hat said, what’s left over when you subtrac the above tuff still has a far from perfect record, I’ll grant you. Almost everybody got TV wrong – they saw it as a communication edium, rather than entertainment. Even “Lewis Padgett” got it wrong in “The Proud Robot” – everyone watched TV by going into big halls, like movie theaters. H.G. Wells’ vision of the future in “When the Sleeper Wakes” was wrong all over the place. Robert Heinlein had moon rockets being controlled by mechanical cams. Jules Verne built a submarine with no periscope or torpedoes.

But when writers make a real effort to predict the future they are often surprisingly right. I realize that they can be right purely by chance – make a lot of guesses and you can’t help but be right sometimes. That’s why, in my earlier post I noted how some athors are consistently right. So Edward Everett Hale (and a long string of imitators) gave us artificial satellites used as navigational aids. He even had it sheathed in brick to protect against atmospheric friction (“The Brick Moon”, written circa 1870, IIRC). So Edgar Allen Poe gives a correct explanation for Olbers’ paradox, long before anyone else. Arthur C. Clarke gives us Communications atelites.

But you can’t predict everything, and one unseen fact can derail your entire prediction. Almost no one foesaw the capabilities of microchips and pcs. So a lot of scienc fiction becomes obsolete automatically – no “lipstick” Libby, because no one uses sliderules any more. No cams in our moon rockets. But the rest of Heinlein is still wonderfully accurate.

All of this stuff is still eminently readable – Verne and Poe and Wells and Clarke and Kuttner. ay Bradbury one said that “sf doesn’t predict the future, it prevents the future.”
And I notice one interesting trend – nobody seems to be predicting what will happen 100 years from now. Or 50. Or even 20. Until now such predictions of the future were the bread-and-butter of science fiction. But I haven’t seen any of those essays for years now. Maybe they’re all afraid that someone will ridicule them for being wrong. That, to my mind, is a miserable development. Better a battery of incorrect predictions than a cautious and cowardly lack of them.

13

How far from do-able today do these have to be to count?

  1. Stopping the aging process. It’s all in the telomeres.

  2. cars/vehicles that drive themselves

  3. Klingon cloaking technology (after all, invisibility
    is an information problem, and we’re in the information
    age).

14

John Bredin:
flying cars are, in fact, here, albeit in testing:
the company you probably heard of is called Moller–they’re building a VTOL “volantor” skycar–FAA certification is said to be about 4 years away, mass production not long after that.

the problems you raise with driving/flying have all been supposedly solved through redundant computerized autopilots. you punch in a destination, hit the go button, and sit back.

oh yeah, and they have parachutes, just in case.

meanwhile, the FAA and NASA are already developing the traffic control system for things like this, which i guess are seen as inevitable. i read something about multi-level flight corridors around the country reserved for such private skycar traffic. it made me think of the flight corridors you see on the screens of the spinner skycars in “blade runner”.

coincidence?

i agree with Feynn on this point:

what interests me is seeing how art/fiction and science influence and motivate each other on the short term, like in some improvisational dialogue.

e.g. teleportation:
apparently quantum “teleportation” is a reality–several labs have repeated the phenomenon. but i thought i remembered reading awhile back that one of the first scientists to propose this–at IBM–did so a few years ago as somewhat of a joke, prompted by the musings of the Science of Star Trek types.

i.e. similar to the development of these tri-corders?

anyway, did today’s engineers develop the cell phone and the pocket color tv because they grew up thinking that the dick tracy two-way wrist tv was just way too cool to live without?

it makes me wonder what other current, serious research has been prompted by science fiction.

15

Biotechnology seems pretty likely to fullfil a lot of science fiction predictions: cloning, vat grown organs for transplants, genetically perfect people.

The full potential of personal computers and the Internet is still coming. Once the bandwidth is there we may see things like full-immersion virtual reality and realtime remote telepresence.

16

We’re seven years from the millenium
That’s a science fiction fact.
Stanley Kubrick and his buddy HAL
Now don’t look that abstract.

Fruitcakes
Jimmy Buffett

17

Artificial intelligence and a practical use for nanotechnology should arrive in 100 years. I also think that the commercialization of extraorbital space should be economically feasible by the end of that period.

OTOH, some things I think we are likely to never see based on extrapolations of current science: Free energy, hyperspace drives, macro-scale teleportation, or any device that can basically read minds.

18

“Better than Life”, the highly-addictive virtual-reality game from “Red Dwarf”. In the book by Grant Naylor, the game is plugged directly into the users brain, and users generally die sooner or later. The problem is that they have to realize/remember that they are in a game and chose to exit. Doesn’t seem very far-fetched at all these days.

19

Maybe not read minds per se, but they’re starting to do amazing things with brain scan technology. They can now watch different areas of the brain activate as different mental tasks take place. Currently it’s more in the sense of the brain processing data rather than following abstract thought; but who knows? It’s now not that far fetched that a brain scanner could spot the act of deliberately concocting a lie.

20

The Moller Skycar has never flown, and has so many fundamental technical problems that I don’t believe it will EVER be mass produced. It’s been ‘ready to fly’ now for 15 years.

It’s technically possible that it will fly, but not that it will be safe, have any kind of range, cost less than a million bucks, be maintainable, etc.