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Space Science

ESA Scans SF Books For Ideas 230

Posted by Hemos from the recognize-the-skillz dept.
cyberm writes: "The European Space Agency has started a project to scan science fiction books for new ideas and technologies. " I like this idea - and not just because I have a massive science fiction book collection. If you look at the past, science fiction authors have routinely come up with the inventions of tomorrow - Jules Verne is a great example of classical science fiction that did so, but today's hard science fiction authors, like Kim Stanley Robinson, or David Brin are building tomorrow, IMHO.
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ESA Scans SF Books For Ideas More

ESA Scans SF Books For Ideas

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  • Few other stories have captivated me as much as Neuromancer

    I think thats the problem. Neuromancer seemd to use upp all his remaining ideas. Anything before that was short stories (many of which were very good, but naturaly a novel will use up a lot more ideas)
  • anti-matter schpansy-panter, i wanna noe where i sign up to field test battlemechs.
  • Alright, so I wasn't clear, and didn't bother to look up complete information. :)

    How about this: The equipment needed to recycle spent nuclear fuel for reuse in power plants can also be used for enriching Plutonium for use in nuclear weapons. Keeping this equipment out of non-military hands is one of the reasons the NRC requires that highly radioactive spent fuel (after one fuel cycle) be expensively stored rather than enriched and reburned until less radioactive.

    The point was the NRC regulation, not the military potential of the recycled fuel.
  • From http://itsf.spaceart.net/information/index.shtml [spaceart.net]:

    The main objective of the ITSF Study is to review past and present SF literature, artwork and films ...
  • And of course Clarke didn't quite get the satellite right either. IIRC he wrote about the idea for geosynchronous orbits before the invention of the transistor - his satellites would have to be manned because someone would have to change the tubes when they burned out ;)

    (yes, yes, tubes rock and all that)
  • Science Fiction is usually (with few exceptions - Samuel Delany comes to mind) no better than other forms of pulp and is only accepted because of its subject.
    Many, many years ago, a famous duo was conversing over... something. (You know this was many years ago because both of the participants are dead, likely before you were born.) The exchange was related to go something like this:

    John W. Campbell: "Ted, ninety percent of the stuff that's called science fiction is crap."

    Theodore Sturgeon: "John, ninety percent of everything is crap."

    Thus we have Sturgeon's Law, "Ninety percent of everything is crap". (Theodore Sturgeon was a science fiction author of some note, and John W. Campbell was both an author and long-time editor of Amazing Stories, which is now Analog, the hardest of the hard-SF available in a monthly magazine. Ironically, JWC was one of the people taken in by the Dean Drive hoax.)
    --
    This post made from 100% post-consumer recycled magnetic

  • for every one good idead that might have come from one good SF book, there are approximately a gillion bad ones

    The commonly accepted ratio is stated by Sturgeon's law: "90% of all science-fiction is crap".
    __
  • perhaps they can implement it using RFC 2795 [isi.edu]
    Seriously, this is not something that warrants actual spending of tax dollars. God knows those poor bastards in europe pay enough already. Not that the 1% of science^H^H^H^H^H^Hpeculative fiction which is based on real science doesn't have merit; there are thousands upon thousands of good, feasable ideas IMAO. For example Jack Vance suggests selling human pelts. A completely untapped market. Akkad Pseudoman (EF Northrup -yes, that one) suggested electromagnetic launch in a 1937 book entitled "Zero to Eighty". Intel ads have maglev material handling systems. There is Heinlien's oft mentioned 'waldo' of "Waldo and Magic Inc.". And John Christopher suggests electrical 'caps' to bend human minds to your every whim. Tell me thats not a good idea! All good ideas. But not worth spending tax money on.

    Isn't it amazing how many of my sentences begin with contractions?
  • Very good. "Friday" was the first Heinlein I ever read (that I know of anyway). Starship Troopers was still kind of kid-oriented, Friday definitely is not. Still, I personally would recommend it down to around 13/14.
    --
    Have Exchange users? Want to run Linux? Can't afford OpenMail?
  • One story I remember was about the engineers who maintained control of the huge central nuclear power plant (which ran all of the rolling road cities) going insane because of the pressure they were under; they eventually decided to put the power station in space. On the Moon, if I recall correctly. The thesis was that if the reactor melted down, the entire planet would be destroyed, and that was why we had not made contact with any alien civilizations: By the time a race became advanced enough to have space travel, they developed nuclear power and blew themselves up. Of course it sounds silly now that we know what the real dangers are from nuclear power, but in ~1941 no one really knew wat to expect. And putting power stations in orbit is a great idea that will make traditional issues like smog pollution and gasoline shortages obsolete.

    Also I thought the fictional society in which the law was "An Eye for an Eye" was pretty interesting. It was one of the later "nomadic refugee" books, probably either "Job" or "Number of the Beast". The specific example I remember was a guy being run over repeatedly by a truck because he crippled someone while DUI.

    I think this was also the same society that killed all of the lawyers... a common Heinlein theme as well.

    Rev Neh
  • How about this: The equipment needed to recycle spent nuclear fuel for reuse in power plants can also be used for enriching Plutonium for use in nuclear weapons.
    That doesn't explain why private companies in the USA (where the NRC can verify that nothing untoward is going on) are forbidden from reprocessing spent nuclear fuel, period.

    If you can run a research reactor, you can breed fissile U-233 from Thorium-232. You don't need more than a chemistry lab to separate the two. If you have gas centrifuges, you don't need to breed anything; you can separate bomb-grade U-235 from natural uranium. The ban on reprocessing may have been politically expedient (because it plays well to an ignorant public), but it has next to zero scientific foundation.
    --
    This post made from 100% post-consumer recycled magnetic

  • Indeed a nice idea, and they go for the right
    books.

    I wonder what might be next: 1984 has scared me
    and many others for years, but i am surprised
    how fast public video control takes over.

    Then came 'Truman show' and today, whole
    Germany seems addicted to a show called
    'Big Brother' with an obvious concept.

    Is this just me or a trend towards 1984?

    -- dune73
  • As far as I'm concerned Vernor Vinge was the author that created cyberpunk. Gibson just repeated him a few years later.

  • Prioritise, prioritise, prioritise (Score:3)

    by stu ( 3749 ) on Wednesday May 10, 2000 @04:44AM (#1081272)
    We need to start 'seeding' the ESA with the *right* kind of SF.

    Step one - force them all to watch 'Barbarella' - a future filled with Fonderesque babes in revealing spacesuits is a time I want to live in. Ditto the Orgasmatron tech. from 'Sleeper'.

    Step two - Two Words...BIG FUCKING SPACESHIPS. Feed them Iain M Banks, wid a quickness.

    Step three - Any SF which has Immortality./life extension as a theme. Make sure they read some of the 'Monkey's Paw' type stuff as well to help them iron out the bugs.

    Step four - Make Neal Stephenson head of their computing R&D department.

    Step five - Stop them from reading/seeing any Robert Heinlein/Jerry Pournelle stuff. If I want o live in an extremist right-wing future populated by smug patriarchs I'll move to the US. (joke!)

    Step six - Try to persuade them to set up a division reading Fantasy novels as well. Given that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, I may end up with that magic carpet I have been after for years, after all.

    Just my 2 Zorkmids.

  • if they want to work on something, i hope they work on a Light Sabre. i want one so bad.... not one of those mock-ups, mind you, but the real thing

    Just another computer geek....
  • If you're gonna start with Adams, i vote for a real life Marvin, complete with dodgy Diode in the left arm.

    Then again, waking up on the seafront at Southend could be a cool experience, just as long as the infinate monkeys stay away...
  • This reminds me of the (book\movie) "(Six\Three) Days of the Condor" from the late 70's.

    The protagonist worked for clandestine CIA branch and did nothing but read spy novels all day to either gather technique or uncover surreptitious intellegence hidden in the plot lines, I can't quite remember which, and I think it changed between the book and the movie. In the end something goes wrong and everyone but him in his office is murdered by another renegade agency branch (he happens to be out to lunch at the time.) He ends up running and hiding from the killers, using the techniques that he has picked up from reading the spy novels to fend them off.

    Pretty good book, pretty good movie, wierd plot device. Truth may be stranger than fiction, but it appears in this case, fiction got a 20+ year jump on truth.
  • Huh? Mike (a computer) built a fully-realized, real-time, sight and sound presentation of a false reality. That's virtual reality, period.

    Not necessarily. Depending on what exactly was being done with this, it might just be an imitation of reality. The point about virtual reality is to visualize completely abstract stuff (like a database) in a way so that you can interact with it "naturally".

    In any case, I doubt Gibson came up with THAT either. Johnny Mnemonic is the only movie that I've preferred (as dumb as it was) to the story.

    You really, really dont like Gibsons work, eh? Cant see why, though.

  • Ok folks, lets think about this:

    Most SF authors really do not have a good grasp
    on science. Most however do have a firm grasp on authentic sounding technobabble,
    which is different from science alltogether!

    Yes. It is true that some technologies were predicted by SF authors, but they really do
    not become practical until the required
    technological infrastructure exists to support such ideas.

    Using SF ideas to drive basic science research
    is a silly idea, as most SF has no basis
    in reality.     Using SF to drive technology on the other hand may be feasable, but for any ``cool'' idea, it becomes realistically implementable only after there is enough infrastructure to support them.
    (e.g. a single computer is a nice toy, (e.g. ENIAC) but multiple computers on a world wide network, now that kicks ass! Second example: The Chinese were probably the first to invent rockets. But it took until the 20th century to actually develop it into useful forms, such as the jet engine and orbit capable rockets. Both only became useful after there were enough support, such as lots OF airplanes and airports for the former, and the
    substantial industrial capacity required to build and maintain such rockets.)

    Giving credit to where credit is due is of course
    a noble concept, but we also have to think of
    the uncountable hours the actual engineers spent on designing/building the inventions and the supporting infrastructure to make them useful!!

    So who deserves more credit? The real scientists
    and engineers who actually DEVELOPED an idea
    into a realistic form? or the person who
    had an idea/dream and did nothing with it?

  • Hey, if the NSA comes knocking at your door, I'm sure they'd listen to Reason.
  • It makes complete sense to scan books for ideas simply due to the fact that most ideas presented in s.f. are not exactly impossible, many of those ideas are just hard to implement. Example: space travel was in s.f. since the days of Jules Verne as well as submarines (Summary of 20000 Leagues Under the Sea) well (I am not saying he was the first but that he wrote about it and it was s.f. but it's a simple fact of life today).

    Of-course scientists will not find anything in these books that they did not know already, however it maybe an interesting experiment to see whether we are missing something, maybe there are certain things that can be useful and implemented today and until now only seen in s.f.
  • > ..that the ESA has the cash to spend on this sort of effort. Well they have no manned space crafts. ESA is just developing new space crafts for cargo and ariane space is launching them (very often). So they should have so money left for strange things. :) however they get less money from european counties than NASA does from US government.
  • "Specifically what comes to mind is the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority. A Federally controlled electrical power infrastructure."

    FDR thought up that one in the thirties, it's called TVA.

    Although I dig Gibson's work, he really gets quite a lot of credit for ideas that predate his work. While he may have 'created' cyberpunk, the elements were already present in the works of Vernor Vinge (True Names), Sam Delany (Personally, I think Babble 17 is the first cyberpunk book), John Varley (most of his work), and many others.

    Doesn't NASA have an advisory board that includes SF authors? I seem to remember Jerry Pournelle being an advisor to NASA.

  • Greg Egan is dangerous ;-)

    once you've read all his books you'll have trouble beleiving you exist much less anything else.

    He's the only author i've seen so far that has done good "what if's" with nanotech and gen. eng. from a point of view of bad things hapening.
  • no, it was an outer limits
    episode, but they gave him either
    "based on", "concept by", or
    "original story by" credits, which means
    they weren't
    ripping him off,
    and instead were paying him
    for the use of the plot.
    plus, it was one of the better episodes, IMHO.
  • You seem to claim to

    1. read every SF book that comes out
    2. know all technologies of the future.

    Color me sceptic...
  • In 1984, NSF, EEC DG-XIII and MITI started a joint project on technologies for organic production of electricity and virtual reality.

    In 1992, they started implementing it.

    It [imdb.com] is currently running in full capacity. An estimated number of 6 billion people are involved.
    __
  • Heinlein, like every other science fiction writer than I know of (and nearly every other engineer, computer scientist, etc.) failed to predict the truly profound change in computer technology. The personal computer.
    Try to find an anthology called War With the Robots, originally titled Machines that Think. It has a story from the 50's by Murry Leister(?) called "A Logic Named Joe" that not only features home computers - called "logics" in the story - but also the convergence of television, telephony, and computing.

    The logics of the story are connected to a global data bank. The story deals with issues of access to that information - what happens when someone wants to use that knowledge to, say, plan the perfect bank heist? It's quite relevent to issues of net censorship today.

  • Hmm. The first one sounds a lot like an idea Doc E.E. Smith had in the Skylark of Space series, space craft engines that affected every molecule inside the craft so their was no apparent internal acceleration no matter how hard the ships accelerated.
  • I sent in a question to ask slashdot to see if there were any such projects going, or to see if anyone would want to start one. For every one of these startup tech companies grabbing headlines with their "genius ideas," there is a sci-fi writer who came up with the idea 20-50 years ago.

    It's about time the men and women who came up with the ideas got credit for them.
  • ... would be William Gibson's "invention" of virtual reality.

    All the more impressive since he apparently had no clue of how computers actually work.

    Along that line, it could be argued that "hard" science fiction is the wrong target for such a project: If someone has no idea if what can be done and what cant, they're much more likely to come up with an idea thats worth changing what can be done for.

  • I'd comment more about Vinge, but I haven't found a copy of True Names yet.

    I'm surprised that True Names and Other Dangers is out of print. It also features Run, Bookworm, Run!, Long Shot, and a few other stories. Find it if you can.

    According to Amazon.com, True Names: And the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier

    A study of True Names, Vernor Vinge's critically acclaimed novella that invented the concept of cyberspace, features that complete text of the novella, as well as articles by Richard Stallman, John Markoff, Hans Moravec, Patricia Maes, Timothy May, and other cyberspace pioneers.
    is coming soon to a bookstore near you. (Publication date is supposed to be April 2000, but it's not available yet.)

    I checked Amazon for info, but since they're patent abusing bastards who should be first against the wall when the revolution comes I'll probably buy from Fatbrain [fatbrain.com] or my local bookstore.

  • Uplifted Chimpanzee and/or Dolphins, as created by David Brin. It's high time mankind created some companions instead of just exterminating wildlife

    Wouldn't this be Pierre Boulle's idea?

  • PKD had some great ideas, like galactic pot healing, and mechanical frogs. Not to mention the world where time ran backwards (i.e. people grew younger each day, regurgitated their food at dinner).
  • ... I just read Freeware on the way home from a gaming convention last month (a 6.5 hr drive from Buffalo to NYC took 11 hours because I couldn't put the thing down).. Absolutely bizarre, wonderful stuff, and I was a bit lost not having read the first 2 books in the series, but I enjoyed the ideas all the same.

    Hey, they can fund their work with semiconscious sex toys ;)

    Your Working Boy,
  • No, the resemblances to Neuromancer are rather slim. Case doesn't find anything, he's picked deliberately. That something isn't "accidentally triggered"; in fact everything works out as planned by Neuromancer, and the end result is that nothing cahnges for the time being. I also don't remember any buzzwords, parental figures or music groups.

    Finally, it doesn't even remotely fit most of Gibson's short stories.

  • If you come with some science-fiction idea and you want to enter a contest, try the UPC Science Fiction Award [inopia.upc.es], "the most important science fiction award in Europe" (Brian W. Aldiss).

    Languages are EN, FR, ES and CT.
    Prizes are up to 1,000,000 ESP (~= 6,010 EUR) and publishing. (Gimme 1% if you win ;) )

    You have until September.
    __
  • Somebody should have told Dark Helmet that.
  • He got it from Dyson and then after the first book, discovered that it was inherently unstable, and so had to write a whole bunch of stuff describing how it was kept in orbing in The Ringworld Engineers.

  • Science fiction writers are so much more than mere futurologists - they are the heirs of the great ancient philosophers. In an era, like ours, when academic "philosophy" is bogged down in esoterica and arcana (and general post-modernist, post-structuralist, post-interesting cant and crapola), science fiction writers have been wrangling over the greatest eternal philosophical questions to puzzle and provoke the human mind: What would a good society be like? What about a bad society? The "perfect" society? How do we get there from here?

    I'm kind of spooked that governments are paying attention to sf. Not that I think Asimovian psychohistorical prediction and control is possible - I am quite certain it is wholly impossible - but I think there are many ideas and tools in science fiction that governments might use inappropriately.

    But, then, that's just an anti-government reflex, I suppose. I'm glad that people making decisions are recogizing science fiction as the hotbed of innovation and insight its fans have long recognized it as.

    A. Keiper
    The Center for the Study of Technology and Society [tecsoc.org]
    Washington, D.C.

  • If any SF author "invented" virtual reality, I'd say it was probably either Vernor Vinge (who wrote the VR-hacker story "True Names" years before Gibson wrote "Burning Chrome" or Neuromancer) or possibly Ben Bova (who wrote a story about a "dueling room" which may have been the root inspiration for the holodeck).
    --
  • So who deserves more credit? The real scientists and engineers who actually DEVELOPED an idea into a realistic form? or the person who had an idea/dream and did nothing with it?

    But this is not about credit, its about ideas to begin with!

    In a way, a scientific background can be a limitation. It forces you to always do the logical next step. Someone without a scientific background on the other hand, might come up with an idea thats totally ridiculous at first to any scientist, but thats revolutionary enough to be worth trying to implement anyway.

  • even the Ring

    Now how in the world would this be physically possible with our current understanding of physics? Not meant as a flame, I actually agree with your post, but isn't the ring being physically possible pushing it a little?

  • Read The Shockwave Rider (1973) from John Brunner. *He* foresaw the rise of a Net -- complete with worms!

  • Re:And you know this how...? (Score:3)

    by Kintanon ( 65528 ) on Wednesday May 10, 2000 @06:39AM (#1081341) Homepage Journal
    From much of the conversation, I gather many people don't read science fiction older than circa 1980. Grab a few science fiction magazines of the fifties and read those. Even stories by the the grand masters, Heinlein, Clarke, Asimov. What you'll find is a whole heap of stuff that seems utterly ridiculous, obviously silly and never would have happened, with maybe one or two things that are close to somewhat right. Everyone talks about Clarke's prediction of the satellite, forgetting that he wrote a whole hell of a lot, and that's about the sum total of accurate predictions. This is no offense to those guys. They wrote great stuff still worth reading. But it wasn't particularly predictive, nor was it meant to be.



    That's what these people are doing. They are taking the non-predictive Sci-Fi and looking at it to find ideas about what they might want to try to work on. We don't have personal Anti-Grav, right? Well, damnit that's one hell of a great idea though! Why don't we start work to figure that out? We don't have matter replicators, but dmanit, that's one hell of a great idea though!
    See? The whole point is not to say 'Sci-Fi writers predicted we would come up with this' but to say 'This Sci-Fi writer thought of this, let's see if we can make it happen.'

    Kintanon
  • Can somebody elaborate on this?

    Search for "quantum teleportation" on your favorite search engine. (I found 2400 refs on Google.) Or search your local library for the past couple years of Scientific American, Nature, Science etc.

  • Sam Delaney used a virtual reality type device (controlled by computers) in The Towers of Toron way back in the early sixties. And P.K. Dick wrote many things involving VR type worlds, though not involving computers, even earlier. The short story that was mutalited into Total Recall (We Can Remember It For You Wholesale) was written in the early fifties.

  • What's a typerwriter?

    It's now thousand monkeys on a thousuand word processing programs.

    Remeber the voice activated typerwriter in one of the original Start Trek episodes?

    The idea behind the review of the books is to get ideas. Sometimes when you work in an area, you see the logical progressions, but you don't take jumps.

    Back in 1983, I saw a 10mb r/w magneto/optical prototype written up in EE times. I told my boss about an idea of sticking one of these things in the trunk of a car. Put up all the local maps on the drive and have the car tell you where to turn. An idea that I got from Knight Rider.

  • There are two responses to this:

    1: In the past, SF authors have been trying to predict what the rest of the world, running largely independently of them, will do. This involves some scientific extrapolation, but much more sociology, economics, politics, and so forth. The sheer number of disciplines involved makes it clear why the track record is pretty dismal. What a project like ITSF is doing is looking at SF for things the world might do and actively trying to implement them.

    2: The flights of SF do not stop at technology. Science Fiction is largely about using technology to free stories from modern pragmatic constraints -- or about telling stories dealing with what may happen when those constraints are gone. The Diamond Age was not interesting because of its descriptions of nanotech per se, but because it showed us a society which had transformed itself for a nanotech age. Stephenson isn't going to teach the ESA how to pull diamond out of the air, but once we learn to do so he might be a good place to look to predict what people will value and how they'll live and think. Maybe we'll get free public compilers a decade early because he thought of it ahead of time.

    Now that I've defended the general idea, I have to agree that I'm a bit discouraged by the ITSF project. Their introduction [spaceart.net] speaks of gleaning purely technological concepts, like rocket fins and orbital space stations. Details like this are historically not, and they need not be, the strength of SF. We should be looking to SF to figure out how to develop technology that's in the pipeline, to see how people currently understand it and how it might be used.

    - Michael Cohn

  • Re:This is not necessarily a good idea!! (Score:3)

    by hey! ( 33014 ) on Wednesday May 10, 2000 @05:03AM (#1081359) Homepage Journal
    Actually, I think this is a productive and profoundly healthy idea.

    Our stories embody our human aspirations and fears. Mining stories for ideas is not about taking designs, so much as these aspirations and fears and seeing if they could feasibly be addressed.

    To use your example, if nobody had ever dreamed of going to the moon or flying to touch the stars, it is unlikely that rocketry would have progressed beyond fireworks. The infrastructure for sattelite communications, GPS, and remote sensing didn't exist, until somebody tried to fulfill a dream.

    Of course, the real question is whether you need a program to encourage people to do this. If you don't have people who like to imagine on their own, perhaps you need different people.

  • AFAIK none of them came up with the idea of DNA before it was discovered either. The whole idea of genetic engineering was completely missed out upon by the early sci-fi writers.

  • Typically you don't need to scan for ideas, the ideas are brought to market by the implementors reading the books initially. The implementors that have the proper mindset will seek these book out on thier own. That's one of the reasons I like reading hard/technical science fiction. It does make sense since it gives you a large number of "concept" people that aren't limited by formal training. I do agree that it really is strange that they would fund a program to explicitly do this since the typical engineers in these programs are of the type that would read it anyway. Maybe it's just a perk that they wanted to fund people's libraries 8^)
  • And I could sure use a Cherry 3000...
  • It makes complete sense to scan books for ideas simply due to the fact that most ideas presented in s.f. are not exactly impossible, many of those ideas are just hard to implement.

    Agreed, but I think there's value in contemplating an impossible fantasy, wishing that it were possible and struggling to find if it is really impossible.

    Motivation is very important to creativity. For example I think the desire for some form of immortality underlies the quest to understand what the universe will look like far into the future. One of the questions that people always seem to ask is, can life be supported in a universe where the stars have exhausted all the thermonuclear fuel? Why do people think about such things, and why does society pay them to? I believe it boils down to how you live with the fantasy of physical immortality you know will not become personally true. Some people might want to find a loophole, and others might feel more comfortable closing off the very possiblility of immortality.

    FTL travel is another rubbish idea that nonetheless inspires people to understand more.

  • You know, there are lots of really, really bad ideas floating around in science fiction. Let's definitely keep them away from The Man in the High Castle, especially the Germans... Come to think of it, given their laws against Nazi literature in Germany, is Man in the High Castle (or Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream) even legal to publish there?

    They also need to stay clear of David Bunch's Moderan, Barry Malzberg's Beyond Apollo, Larry Niven's Jigsaw Man, Gene Wolfe's Fifth Head of Cerberus, and Walter Miller's A Canticle for Liebowitz.

    Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net

  • Watson and Crick discovered the chemical that allowed genes to work. They did not discover that idea of the gene. That was implied in Darwinian evolution and proved by Mendel, both in the 19th century.

  • I thought Inferno was a gas. Especially at the beginning when Asimov walks in the room and he falls out the window, nobody notices...

    This is a bummer you can't find the Ringworld books. Actually (ahem, okay, this will date me) I did all my early science fiction reading in ye olde publicke library, but I bought the first two RW books when they came out. Anyway, check the libraries if the UB stores are no good.

  • I only read Dyson's paper once and I think it was a transcription (i.e. abstracted in a different volume), but I believe he mentioned that the sphere would take a really large amount of matter and that a ring might be easier at least to start. Dyson never populated his ideas with a great imagined world as Niven did, though. Again, takes nothing away from Niven.

    ... it makes my wife mad but whenever we watch Terminator 2 on vid I have to rewind and replay the 'LA Gets Nuked' scene again and again... that oughta take care of those pesky Dodgers once and for all... ;)

  • What really interests me are the inventions that Science Fiction didn't predict. I've never seen any evidence that any author foresaw the development of the personal computer, much less its implications. The computers of classic SF were usually planet-sized sentient ENIACs, bulky calculators (less power than out modern graphing calcs, but the size of a laptop), or "positronic brains" which had to be embodied in a humanoid robot. If anyone can point me to an SF story with a computer as powerful and as small as those in common use today, written before the invention of the Altair, I'd love to hear about it.

    Sure, once they had been introduced to the idea of small, commonly available computers, SF authors ran with it, forseeing many of the enhancements that we now take for granted. But somehow, no one appears to have made the initial speculative breakthrough.


    --
  • DoH! Yep, Niven, for sure. Of course the Ringworld idea was not strictly Niven's, he got it from the works of Freeman Dyson. But that takes nothing away from him as a great source of ideas. And he should really sue Hollywood's ass off for all of those copycat asteroid movies. ;) Remember that scene in Lucifer's Hammer with the surfer in Santa Monica Bay riding the tsunami, up until he smacked into the Barrington Towers apartments? My wife used to live right on that block. I got the willies thinking about it. Of course the thought of LA being wiped out by a tsunami is comforting, means there's hope...
  • Recipe for cyberpunk:

    1 part Dystopian society
    1 part utopian technology (good fast AND cheap)
    1 part glamorous writing style

    I've read plenty of VR-type stories, including the "if you die in VR, you die in the real world" cliche, dating from the 50's and 60's.

    I'd classify William F. Nolan's LOGAN'S RUN books as cyberpunk, and they came out long before Gibson or Vinge.

    To give credit where it's due, Gibson did a great deal to POPULARISE cyberpunk. I'd also like to add Walter Jon Williams as a writer who did cyberpunk really well.

    I'd comment more about Vinge, but I haven't found a copy of True Names yet.

    Jon
  • Well... let's enumerate just a couple of these good ideas that SF writers have come up with, and not seen a penny for:

    The Clarke Orbit, invented by Arthur C. Clarke back in his military servitude, IIRC - also known as geosync. Can you say Comsats, boys and girls? Is Hughes or Intelsat paying to use these orbits? (Note - a couple of years back, TRW PATENTED [ibm.com] one of the proposed Medium Earth Orbit comsat constellations and orbits - and you thought software patents were bad!)

    The waterbed, by Robert A. Heinlein - has his estate seen a penny from Water Bedroom Land?

    There are plenty more. Remember, there are quite a few actual scientists writing science fiction. Shouldn't they get some credit for writing down something so far ahead of its time that everyone considers it "sci-fi?"

  • Permutation city, Distress and Diaspora are all worth reading along with his short stories.

    Yeah, I've read them all, and enjoyed all of them. Some really out there ideas in all of his books. If you like Greg Egan, read Vacuum Diagrams by Stephen Baxter. It's a series of short stories set in his Xeelee sequence universe, and has some great science ideas and concepts, including a story about a life form make from mathematical postulates!

  • Y'know, Adams raises a pretty interesting point about AI.

    Maybe the potential for things like grouchiness, dissatisfaction and paranoia are somehow linked to intelligence itsef. Even more so given the limited scope we would want our robots to use their intelligence (like the intelligent elevators that took an impertinent interest in which floor you wanted to go to).

    Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C Clarke asked a similar question in 2001 -- is intelligence somewhow linked to violence. This was more than the usual killer robot thing, because they applied that question to humanity as well. The first thing the ape-man did when he got souped up intelligence was to brain the other ape-men at the water hole.

  • Yeah, but he might hastily dismiss a really good idea as unfeasible just because his knowledge of what is feasible isnt really all that complete. Since today most scientists are extremely specialized, thats not that unlikely a scenario.

    No, the whole idea of specialisation is that a scientist only has to concentrate on a single narrow area within which he can be up to date on pretty much the whole field. If an idea isn't within his field then he'll get someone else whose field it is to examine the idea. Of course no one scientists is going to be able to judge every single idea presented to them.

  • Unicenter TNG [cai.com] ?

    Jack me in...

    Actually, I DO beleive that a lot of cheesy SciFi (like "Tom Corbet! Space Cadet!", Buck Rogers, etc) of the 50's were very instrumental in growing the public momentum towards the US space program in the 60's, altho it was a combination of many things incl. the cold war/sputnik/space race, Werner Von Braun [nasa.gov] (also SciFi influenced), commitment by President and congress, etc, etc...
  • Almost everyone missed personal/distributed
    computing. Look at the kinds of computers
    in 2001:Space Odessey. Asimov has a story about
    a society dependent on PDAs.

    The quick rise of InterNet was also missed.
  • Arthur C Clarke is the ultimate example for this argument. His paper on Extra-terrestrial Relays in 1945 described the modern-day satellite. This paper actually inspired a whole new technology.

  • I'm truly amazed... (Score:4)

    by zorgon ( 66258 ) on Wednesday May 10, 2000 @04:26AM (#1081412) Homepage Journal
    ...that the ESA has the cash to spend on this sort of effort. Makes me mad when NASA keeps taking it in the shorts from Congress all the way down to Slashdot -- all that sniping does is give arms to those who want to slash NASA's budget, keeping out any possibility of funding for loony - but - fun - and - possibly - fruitful ideas like this one (as well as more immediately useful ones!).

    On the other hand, the first thing they should do is find out the skill of SF writers' forecasts. You need to weight Clarke's or Robinson's or Brin's (well maybe not Brin's but definitely Clarke's) ideas higher than, well, I won't name names. You get the idea.

  • Co$ (Score:3)

    by jaf ( 121858 ) on Wednesday May 10, 2000 @04:27AM (#1081414) Journal
    > today's hard sciene fiction authors, like Kim
    > Stanley Robinson, or David Brin are
    > building tomorrow, IMHO.

    As long as it's not a certain L. Ron. H....


  • Remember that flying probe thing that Luke practiced against with his light sabre? Nasa's
    got it going on [dhs.org]!



    Seth
  • One of the stories in there talked about nuclear reactors in space, that were in geosyncronous orbit, transmitting power down to the planet's surface. (via microwave or some such) (Of course, the whole thing went down due to the fact that someone accidently hit it with the service craft.)

    Given the plot, I don't know if you can say that Heinlein considered it a good idea...

    But anyway, the really interesting predictions are in an article in the Expanded Universe collection, written in the fifties, then updated in the sixties and 1980, that attempts to predict what the year 2000 will be like. (With interesting commentary on the real predictive value of SF.) Fascinating stuff. My favorite part was the way he predicts the fall of communism in 1950 and then retracts the prediction in 1965!

  • A thousand monkeys on a thousand typewriters ... (Score:3)

    by dbarclay10 ( 70443 ) on Wednesday May 10, 2000 @04:30AM (#1081421)
    Hey there :) I hope I'm not being to cynical, but sci-fi isn't the be all and end all of future visions, if you ask me(MyOpinion (TM)). I mean, look at the sheer volume of what's available. Of course SOMEONE will stumble upon the great advance of the 21st century. Hell, think abut IBM, and even NASA. The stuff they're researching now will go into production decades from now. Anybody who reads up and has their sources can predict pretty accurately what basic inventions will be available(bar the great, society-changing ones). Anyways, put a thousand NASA workers reading a thousand Sci-Fi books from a thousand different authors, and they'll come up with some great inventions :)

    Dave

    P.S.: I am an avid sci-fi reader. The number of Sci-Fi books I have is more than most people have in any genre. :)

  • The meme that we're the only ones to kill for sport is fun to say, and appeals to us enough that it's as
    widespread as the ideas that lemmings drown themselves and Craig Shergold wants you to send him a get-well
    card. Brutalization is useful in certain contexts for control and status. I doubt we're the only ones doing it.


    The perspective you take is an interesting one. However I don't think it likely that your cat is depraved. Predators enjoy killing for the same reason they enjoy sex -- enjoyment of these activities is necessary.

    Struggles for dominance are the common stuff of TV nature shows. Usually they are quite restrained in the animal world, but there are exceptions, such as when small animals in the litter crowd out the weaker ones. For that matter the American coot normally has more offspring than it can manage and routinely drives them off or kills them.

    However, as cruel as these acts are, they are not depraved. I don't think killing for status, or sport, or survival are necessarily depraved.

    The capacity for depravity is purely a function of intelligence, because it requires an ability to grasp the the state of mind of the victim. This is a capacity only humans and possibly the higher apes do. This capacity to understand suffering, to envision both oneself and one's victim as an ongoing entity, means that violence among humans and possibly some apes is qualitatively different.

    Humans, uniquely as far as I know, perform violence to induce mental states in their victims.

    My point is the view of the relationship between intelligence and violence, or malice if you will, is probably naive; however intelligence adds qualitative dimensions to violence
  • IMO, no. Any organism smart enough to survive more than a few seconds has the potential for violence. Certain species of ants live almost solely by conquering and enslaving other species; primates (chimpanzees, for instance) can and do murder and rape each other.

    Whereas bonobos, our nearest genetic relatives, don't do this kind of thing. In fact, various forms of sex acts seem to take the place of violence we see in chimp communities.

    As you point out, it's pretty clear that violence can exist without intelligence, but can intelligence exist without violence? That's an important human problem. Does our intelligence give us the tools to rise above the Holocausts, the Lockerbies, the Kosovos and the Columbines? Kubrick suggests not only that the answer is no, but that intelligence itself may be bound up with the urge to kill, and that our technological society is based on the urge to kill. Not only does ape-man kill his water hole rivals as soon as he gets some brains, but HAL kills his colleagues. Clarke's view, as expressed in later books, is yes, it does give us tools to transcend primitive violence. It is not intelligence that kills, it is a kind of logical malfunction that comes from living a falsehood.

    Nature is not all tranquil pastoral settings. Behind the scenes and around the bend often lurks incredible violence. Intelligence has nothing to do with it (although it can lead to more refined forms of violence). Violence is a part of life.

    Your position seems to be in between Kubrick and Clarke; intelligence is not in any particular way bound up with violence, nor is violence something that can be overcome. This seems pretty reasonable to me, except that in my view intelligence and self-awareness adds a potential new dimension to violence: depravity. Animals (or plants for that matter) that kill do so purely functionally. Even cats play with mice to teach their young hunting skills. It is humans that humiliate and torture each other and seek to inflict emotional pain on victims and their families.

  • Power infrastructure wasn't either. (Score:3)

    by Tau Zero ( 75868 ) on Wednesday May 10, 2000 @07:25AM (#1081430) Journal
    The reason there is radio-active waste is NRC regulation, since 'recycling' waste results in weapons-grade nuclear fuel.
    No, it doesn't.

    Recycling spent fuel from PWR's, with their typical burnup of 40,000 to 50,000 megawatt-days per ton, yields a fair amount of plutonium. Problem for the weapons business is, all Pu is not created equal. The isotope of interest is Pu-239, which is both fissile and has a reasonably low rate of spontaneous fissions. (Too high a rate of SF's, and you can't assemble a supercritical mass before it disassembles itself; once it's expanded past the point where it is prompt-supercritical it stops yielding energy, even if it's only given you the equivalent of a few kg of TNT. To get that supercritical mass, you have to delay the onset of the chain reaction until the fissile material is sufficiently compressed to give a good yield. ONE spontaneous fission in the mean time....)

    Bomb-grade material is not made in power reactors. It is (was, in the USA; we're not making any more) made in special reactors from depleted uranium (DU) rods, which are irradiated for a very short time and then processed to remove the plutonium. A short period of irradiation creates some Pu-239, but doesn't allow very much of the Pu-239 to be transmuted to the problematic (very high SF rate) isotopes of Pu-240 and Pu-241. In a power reactor you just plain don't care about the spontaneous fission rate, but for a bomb it is crucial. The spontaneous fission rate of the plutonium from power reactors is way beyond anything that a bomb designer would even think of using. And that's why commercial nuclear power is not a bomb-proliferation risk even with reprocessing (the political posturing over plutonium notwithstanding), and why story lines based on this are technically deficient. AAMOF, any story which treats this falsehood as a given should probably not be called science fiction.
    --
    This post made from 100% post-consumer recycled magnetic

  • How about:

    • Volumetric field from Greg Bear's Queen of Angels which actually guide every molecule in your body to allow for period of 1000G acceleration.
    • Direct energy to matter conversion - Xeelee starflowers from Stephen Baxter's Xeelee sequence.
    • Ships which fly using domain walls (2-D versions of cosmic strings i.e. spacetime discontinuities) - Xeelee nightships from same place as above.

    There'd be more but I've got to go home now :)

  • I always liked James Blish's "invention" of the Spindizzy used in the "Cities in Flight" series. It had a few trivial pieces of math behind it, based on one of Dirac's equations. But the fact that it had ANY math at all behind it, based on ANY real physics at all, makes it more interesting than many Science Fiction propulsion schemes.
  • I think a lot of us are missing the point of the project. Noone is going to glean new technologies out of SF. What they may find is ideas that they had not considered. Suppose you're reading Heinlein some years ago, and see his idea about 'waldos'. One might think "Hey, something like that could be pretty useful. Let's see how I can make it work". SF is rife with ideas for useful things that may not been invented yet simply because those those with the resources to do so simply haven't thought of it.
  • Gibson came up with some neat stuff, but the 'transparent' stuff of Neuromancer is what the future is made of.

    Specifically what comes to mind is the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority. A Federally controlled electrical power infrastructure.

    We've all seen nuclear power fail, when handled by private electrical companies; but the government has been making it work wonders in submarine and carrier applications for decades.

    The reason there is radio-active waste is NRC regulation, since 'recycling' waste results in weapons-grade nuclear fuel.

    The reason there is a bad reputation in the nuke industry is cost-cutting, pure and simple. Running equipment to the point of failure, minimal staffing, letting inspections slide... It's all been done to recoup some of the cost of building a plant, and to make a buck. The Fed thinks differently about these things, especially with a DoD presence involved.

    Putting two and two together, giving the government control and responsibility for nuclear power accomplishes several things.

    1. Spent fuel can be recycled and reburned until inert, since the DoD will be, in effect, in control of the weapons-grade producing technology.

    2. It will be managed adequately. When was the last time the DoD/Fed cut corners on maintenance and beurocracy? Yeah, they screw the social programs and NASA, but they pay $400/USAF screw-driver.

    3. A minimum level of power supply to the national grid will be guaranteed. Privatization of power can be relegated to conventional and 'natural' sources, with a set of nuclear anchors bolstering the grid in times of peak demand - and selling the power abroad in low demand.

    So, Gibson seems to have seen that this is a viable idea. Yeah, there's issues. The government being in control of weapons manufacturing capability will cause international problems. But these can be mediated with observers, or the selling of power and goods, dropping of tariffs; economics speaks louder than bombs these days.

    Cyberspace aside, there's all the bio-tech Gibson brought (arguably not the first to do so, remember Bester?) to the scene, the Kaibatsu (Is that right? It's been years) multi-national corporations, the Virtual Light goggles that are now in college R&D labs (Georgetown?), the Island nations serving as data havens (or at least top-level domain whores today)...

    Maps pretty well.

  • Except: isn't 99% of everthing crap? (Score:3)

    by w3woody ( 44457 ) on Wednesday May 10, 2000 @05:39AM (#1081438) Homepage
    While there are a few science fiction writers who successfully predicted elements of the future, the vast majority of science fiction "visionaries" of the past devised futures that were, er, crap.

    Flying cars and bridges which crossed the Atlantic are two of my favorite "visions" of the future which turned out to be bogus. Many other "futures" included inventions which are totally impractical in order to advance the plot line, or disregard the laws of physics in order to do something cool.

    I suspect a full survey of all science fiction, rather than focusing on the stuff that was a "hit" in predicting the future, would show that science fiction writers got it right about as often as psychics in predicting the future.
  • Anybody who reads up and has their sources can predict pretty accurately what basic inventions will be available(bar the great, society-changing ones).


    Not really. For instance, most writers from the 50's thought we'd have much more space travel by now. Or take videophones, they've never taken off, yet the technology is fairly trivial.

    It's hard to predict what's going to work, because in addition to technical issues, there are also economic, societal and simple ease-of-use, "do I really WANT this?" issues which effect whether ideas become successful.

    Jon

  • Oh Golly (Score:3)

    by zpengo ( 99887 ) on Wednesday May 10, 2000 @05:40AM (#1081442) Homepage
    Next thing you know, NASA is going to start hiring videogame programmers to make shuttles more user-friendly, the IRS is going to hire Mafia representatives to get ideas about gathering more funds, and the White House is going to start watching porn flicks to look for potential...well....anyway....

  • James Halperin.... (Score:3)

    by speek ( 53416 ) on Wednesday May 10, 2000 @05:42AM (#1081444)
    I'm surprised no one's mentioned James Halperin. He writes purely science fiction (as in characterization? What's that?). He has some startling ideas about future technology developments and the effects they could have on society.
    One of his books is called "The Truth Machine", and it's essentially an infallible lie detector that becomes the basis of all legal proceedings. Privacy vanishes entirely as a result, which has the surprising effect of increasing the pace and daring of technological research and advancement (ie no need to worry about dangerous technologies when you can always trust the motives of those working on it).

  • I LOVE novel ideas (Score:3)

    by mcmoebius ( 148299 ) on Wednesday May 10, 2000 @05:43AM (#1081448)
    I think this is WONDERFUL idea. I'm surprised this approach hasn't been used before.

    It reminds me of a medical biologist that was looking for new drugs. So, what did he do? He went into the Amazon and observed apes and chimps and noted what they used for medicines when they felt ill. He's discovered more than 10 new compounds from the plants the apes and chimps used.

    Here's another neat solution to a common problem. Didn't you always hate how college campuses and other big complexes pour their sidewalks in 90 degree angles and such? Well, a University back in the 1900s [smile] decided to NOT pour concrete the first year after their campus' construction. Instead, they waited the first year, saw what paths the students had worn out, and paved those paths. Pretty cool, eh?
  • Awwwyeah.

    Heh. oh yeah. dyson. ;) I don't think about dyson spheres much because like.. uh. their infeasibilty when the ringworld is much more practical. :)

    I agree with LA too :)

  • Talk about selective memory... (Score:3)

    by Rombuu ( 22914 ) on Wednesday May 10, 2000 @04:32AM (#1081452)
    What an odd idea... I mean there are thousands of SF books published each year, and only 3 or 4 have ideas that ever come to pass or are even possible. I guess no one remembers the ones that don't work out.

    On the upside, I guess "reversing the polarity of the neutron flow" will fix everything in the future, just like on most episodes of Star Trek / Dr. Who
  • The "An Eye for an Eye" society was definitly in "Number of the Beast" (I read it enough times:). I can't remember that much of "Job", but I don't think Heinlein went into as much detail for the societies in "Job", he was too busy with the other aspects of the book. Also, I'm pretty sure the "AEfaE" society was the one that hung the lawyers.

    Gay Deceiver (and the gyro drive) are my favorite parts of NotB.

  • Now how in the world would this be physically possible with our current understanding of physics?

    It's just a big, spinning loop of cosmic string isn't it? Okay the scale of it is enormous, but that's an engineering problem rather than a physics one. And IIRC the Kerr metric for a rotating black hole does allow for a naked singularity given those kinds of extreme conditions.

    Whether or not it produces a black hole/white hole kind of interface between universes is an open question, but the rest of it is plausible enough.

  • P.s. try to avoid sounding like a rabid advocate.

    Fair enough, but I think we're both guilty of sounding a bit over the top :) I don't think many things in Stephen Baxter's stories are theoretically impossible, even the Ring, but actually working out a way to do them is the challenge, and most of the technology in his books is definitely 500 years+ down the line at least...

  • He invented the communications satellite and predicted ice and possible deep sea vents on Europa, among other things. His work predicting Europa is particularly interesting. 10 years after he made these predictions (prior to the launch of Galileo), NASA found evidence that he was exactly right. In fact, NASA now considers Europa to me the most likely location of life in our solar system, exactly as Clarke thought.

    Don't forget Adams either. I want an infinite improbability drive.... (Actually, there is a theory that describes the possibility of such a means of transportation.)
  • From the project page:
    It has also been reported in the press that scientists working independently in the USA, Europe as well as Australia have carried out some form of teleportation.


    !!
    Can somebody elaborate on this?
    __
  • You can check that they're following the safety rules and that they aren't planning to cut corners or intentionally cause harm. Terrorists are immediately ruled out. As are those who are lazy or who want to cut costs.

    Of course, part of the point is that, once we have the ability to accurately censor, it most likely will be put into practice, because when it comes down to it, we, as a people, prefer security to freedom. If it can be guaranteed that you can catch all the criminals before they do their crime, people will give up their right to their private thoughts and submit to periodic examinations. That's what's scary, and it's probably what's coming.

  • What about Niven? (Score:3)

    by dieman ( 4814 ) on Wednesday May 10, 2000 @04:38AM (#1081478) Homepage
    Ya know, the guy who came up with ringworld and has more ideas about first contact with other species than you can shake a stick at? Him and Pournelle have both packed out so much great texts before their time (look at lucifers hammer sometime) and yet, some of the things they have books on allready are 'new concepts' (read: it became pop).

    Aggg.
  • Are you related to Jon Katz, by any chance?

    Hah!

    I was wondering when somebody would notice this.

    The answer is no, and I'm a bona fide propeller-head to boot. The airbag syndrome you are referring to is what you get when you apply the geek mentality to non-technical subjects like literature. ESR is the prime example.

  • I was really surprised by the great lengths that were taken by Charlie Rose in his interview with Travolta yesterday to emphasize that the movie was not about Scientology and that they weren't going to talk about that. It was just strange, because the whole thing sounded defensive, and I've never heard Charlie qualify an interview like that before.

    It would be almost like if he were to interview John Rocker and say, "This has nothing to do with anything that might of been said that might have offended anyone, we're just going to talk about baseball."

    Needless to say, even with no connection made to Scientology, I failed to see any redeeming qualities in the movie clips that would make me buy a ticket to see this. Apparently this was Travolta's pet project, and it took him 20 years to get enough "clout" in hollywood to get it made. The fact that he had to mention three or four times that George Lucas liked it didn't help either. I'm pretty sure this will be the flop of the summer. With all the qualifying and shameless plugging, it was not one of Charlie's usually outstanding interviews.

    "What I cannot create, I do not understand."

  • Some great ideas to be found in hard SF (Score:3)

    by spiralx ( 97066 ) on Wednesday May 10, 2000 @04:39AM (#1081481)

    This does sort of seem like a joke at first, but for anyone who's read a lot of hard science fiction it does have a point - a lot of it is written by people with physics and science degrees and a technical background, and they are carefully researched - often by asking scientists working in the relevant fields for their input.

    Apart from the obvious example of satellites in geostationary orbit coming from Arthur C Clarke, the other main example I can think of is stable wormholes. They were considered to be impossible for a long time since there was no way to prevent the entrances from collapsing and sealing the wormhole off. But when Carl Sagan was writing Contact he got in touch with Kip Thorne to see if a theoretically plausible mechanism for FTL travel was possible, and after some calculation and research he showed that you could build stable wormholes given "exotic" matter. Now there is a significant body of research into this phenomenon, all of which stemmed from Carl Sagan's quest for realism in his book.

    Since SF authors have to consider the whole of society in order to come up with a coherent setting for their stories their predictions, if based upon decent technological knowledge, are often more canny than most "futurologists". In the long term, a lot of the advances made will depend on how society adapts to them, and this is not always taken fully into account.

    I'm currently in the middle of reading Distress by Greg Egan (an author worth reading), and it's got a lot of great ideas about how society might evolve in the next fifty years, and a lot of plausible technology. Other authors worth reading for great ideas are Stephen Baxter, Gregory Benford, Peter F Hamilton and Greg Bear, but I'm sure I've left many more off that I've read and enjoyed :)

  • Didn't look at it that way. Thanks. I was thinking more in fabric terms.

  • Absolutely true! (Score:3)

    by seldolivaw ( 179178 ) <me&seldo,com> on Wednesday May 10, 2000 @04:41AM (#1081486) Homepage
    We could do a lot worse than colonise Mars according to the future K.S. Robinson mapped out in the Mars trilogy; we could avoid a lot of the pitfalls too. Robinson's ideas on multinational corporations becoming transnationals becoming metanationals, with equal power/more power than governments, is one getting frighteningly closer every day.

    Other inventions we could use that come from recent SF:

    • Vacuum Power / The Gravitic Engine, both essentially limitless energy sources created by Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov, respectively.
    • Uplifted Chimpanzee and/or Dolphins, as created by David Brin. It's high time mankind created some companions instead of just exterminating wildlife.
    • Neural nanonics! These are the greatest one, as created by Peter F. Hamilton in the Night's Dawn trilogy, a thoroughly scary series of books.
    • Habitats/the Edenist culture in general: also coming from Peter F. Hamilton, the social structure of Edenism is far superior to any human society currently existing.

    Any other suggestions? These are just the first ones to pop into my head...

  • How many science fiction books do you need to read before you come up with the idea "Launch some more satellites", anyway?

    ESA has no money to do anything other than a) develop probes with experiments in them and b) launch telecoms satellites to raise money to develop another probe. Whatever they discover, they aren't going to have the money to do anything else, ever.

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