ESA Scans SF Books For Ideas

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.

Prioritise, prioritise, prioritise

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.

Re:And you know this how...?

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

Re:A thousand monkeys on a thousand typewriters ..

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!!

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.

I'm truly amazed...

...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$

> 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....

A thousand monkeys on a thousand typewriters ...

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. :)

Power infrastructure wasn't either.

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

Except: isn't 99% of everthing crap?

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.

Oh Golly

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....

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

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?

Talk about selective memory...

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

What about Niven?

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.

Some great ideas to be found in hard SF

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 :)

Absolutely true!

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...