Where would we be without Science Fiction

[Cinisajoy]

A post in another thread got me to thinking about this.
How many things today can be traced back to science fiction?
Just off the top of my head:
Nuclear powered submarines: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
Alexa, Siri, and Ok Google can all be traced back to HAL from 2001:A Space Odyssey
The shuttle was originally in a comic strip back in the 50's.
Cell phones can be traced back to Star Trek. So can ereaders, their library had small screens for reading all books ever written.

Now we may not yet have a Rosie but we do have a Roomba.
It is also possible to wake up to a breakfast of oatmeal, homemade bread and coffee.
Now you do have to put the ingredients in the crockpot, bread machine and coffee maker and set the timers. But we are getting close to food replicators.

So what else can you think of that was originally Science Fiction but is now fact?

[arjaybe]

From Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, we have an abundance of material goods and the discouragement of critical thinking. We're also getting close to "feelies."

[cromag]

IIRC, one of the characters in Isaac Asimov's Foundation series (from the 1940s) used a hand held electronic calculator. I believe it even had glowing red digits -- like the red LEDs in the first calculators that came out in the early 70s.

To obscure the origin of the cell phone a little:

From the Dick Tracy comic strip as early as 1946:



Of course who could forget that later additions to Dick Tracy of Moon Maid [first appeared on 12/29/1963]. Of course that hasn't happened and won't, but there was the space coup



Of course in the non-SF forerunner there were 1950s mobile phones. Well car phones that could be used just as a landline could be.



I'm sure that the Nautilus [20,000 Leagues Under the Sea submarine] was not nuclear powered, but was electrically powered. Real submarines date back to the early 17th Century, but Americans used one in 1776 in an attempt to sink a British war ship.

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-h...bmarine-attack

[Cinisajoy]

Originally Posted by Hamlet53

To obscure the origin of the cell phone a little:

From the Dick Tracy comic strip as early as 1946:



Of course who could forget that later additions to Dick Tracy of Moon Maid [first appeared on 12/29/1963]. Of course that hasn't happened and won't, but there was the space coup



Of course in the non-SF forerunner there were 1950s mobile phones. Well car phones that could be used just as a landline could be.



I'm sure that the Nautilus [20,000 Leagues Under the Sea submarine] was not nuclear powered, but was electrically powered. Real submarines date back to the early 17th Century, but Americans used one in 1776 in an attempt to sink a British war ship.

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-h...bmarine-attack

Having read 20,000 Leagues, it doesn't say what kind of power but it is a small generator plant not electricity.

Why I specified a nuclear powered submarine.

Thanks on the cell and mobile phone strips.

[meeera]

The internet, videocalls, wearable tech, government surveillance, and near-ubiquitous cashless transactions. (Some of these things are connected...) Even more terrifyingly, military robots.

But I still don't have a flying car or a holo-TV.

[dwig]

Networked computers (specifically networked computers run amok) from "A Logic Named Joe" by Murray Leinster in 1946.

Autonomous security drones (OK, we don't quite have these yet) from "Watchbird" by Robert Sheckley in 1953. This is a "must read" for anyone interested in this tech.

[drjd]

Quote from a Michio Kaku Book:

In 1863, the great novelist Jules Verne undertook perhaps his most ambitious project. He wrote a prophetic novel, called Paris in the Twentieth Century, in which he applied the full power of his enormous talents to forecast the coming century. Unfortunately, the manuscript was lost in the mist of time, until his great-grandson accidentally stumbled upon it lying in a safe where it had been carefully locked away for almost 130 years. Realizing what a treasure he had found, he arranged to have it published in 1994, and it became a best seller.

Back in 1863, kings and emperors still ruled ancient empires, with impoverished peasants performing backbreaking work toiling in the fields. The United States was consumed by a ruinous civil war that would almost tear the country apart, and steam power was just beginning to revolutionize the world. But Verne predicted that Paris in 1960 would have glass skyscrapers, air conditioning, TV, elevators, high-speed trains, gasoline-powered automobiles, fax machines, and even something resembling the Internet. With uncanny accuracy, Verne depicted life in modern Paris.

This was not a fluke, because just a few years later he made another spectacular prediction. In 1865, he wrote From the Earth to the Moon, in which he predicted the details of the mission that sent our astronauts to the moon more than 100 years later in 1969. He accurately predicted the size of the space capsule to within a few percent, the location of the launch site in Florida not far from Cape Canaveral, the number of astronauts on the mission, the length of time the voyage would last, the weightlessness that the astronauts would experience, and the final splashdown in the ocean. (The only major mistake was that he used gunpowder, rather than rocket fuel, to take his astronauts to the moon. But liquid-fueled rockets How was Jules Verne able to predict 100 years into the future with such breathtaking accuracy?

His biographers have noted that, although Verne was not a scientist himself, he constantly sought out scientists, peppering them with questions about their visions of the future. He amassed a vast archive summarizing the great scientific discoveries of his time. Verne, more than others, realized that science was the engine shaking the foundations of civilization, ion and profound insights was his grasp of the power of science to revolutionize society.

[Luffy]

In the short story collection The Sentinel, Arthur C. Clarke posits about the human race before meeting any specimen. His alien character, seeing the earthen infrastructure, wonders whether the humans are just incredibly great engineers or whether they had room for art and spectacle.

Had we been wired differently, us humans might have achieved all these inventions by ourselves. It's just that we happen to have room for dreaming and inventing stories. Some of the designs of devices are simply life imitating art.

[crich70]

Star Trek gave a glimpse of some of the things we have today. Cell Phones, 3.5" computer disks, Medical monitors, P.A.D.D. (Personal Access Display Device) which we now know as a tablet computer and etc. Of course Gene Roddenberry and the others who made the original show asked scientists what they thought was coming in the near future. Also I understand that H.G. Wells had in mind a machine that could provide any knowledge desired. Sort of a computer in a way but using microfilm. And there were stories about inter connected computers way back. "A logic named Joe" I believe features that.

[GeeCrow]

Originally Posted by Cinisajoy

... Cell phones can be traced back to Star Trek. So can ereaders, their library had small screens for reading all books ever written...

You've already mentioned it, but I plan on keeping my flip phone as long as possible. I have my 2 tablets for all of the other stuff everybody does with smartphones. I just like having something in common with the crew of the original Star Trek.

"Waldoes" or robotic hands were originally concocted in a story called "Waldo" by Robert A. Heinlein.

The concept of geosynchronous satellites, used by satellite tv re-broadcasters & satellite phone providers, was developed by Arthur C. Clarke.

Today's dreams are tomorrow's realities, albeit some of the dreams out there are pretty scary.

Although Arthur C. Clark was quite imaginative and had some scientific knowledge, I doubt he ever developed any of his ideas into working projects. It was long known by scientist that geosync sats were possible once the rocket technology was advanced enough to carry it out. Clark merely took those existing scientific understandings and incorporated them into his writings. It is one thing to imagine what might be able to exist in the future, and something totally different to actually engineer that system. Same thing can be said about Star Trek writers/creators. They were very imaginative in many cases, but they certainly cannot be called the inventors of smartphones, tablets, warp drives (which are still non-existent), etc. And as far as Star Trek goes, they often borrowed heavily from SciFi movies from the 1950s like Forbidden Planet which featured wireless communicators a decade before Star Trek even aired. And BTW, communicators were far preceded by walkie talkies that have existed well before even the 1950s. It is not a quantum leap to imagine what today's technology will bring us in the future. That is only imagination, not invention. But it can also provide inspiration to future inventors and designers.

[Graham]

I'd be 8 inches closer to the walls of my study.

Graham

[GeeCrow]

Originally Posted by jswinden

Although Arthur C. Clark was quite imaginative and had some scientific knowledge, I doubt he ever developed any of his ideas into working projects...

Hmmm.... How SURE are you of this material you're posting, Jack?

Originally Posted by GeeCrow

Hmmm.... How SURE are you of this material you're posting, Jack?

I have NOT studied the complete history of Arthur C. Clark, but I seriously doubt he engineered the ability to launch into orbit, maintain orbit, and synchronize a set of satellites at 30,000+ km above the earth. that would take a large operation of many engineers and scientists. It is very different to say one day we will be able to have geosynch satellites and describe the general concept, and quite another to actually make that happen. Today the courts are filled with patent infringement suits brought by people who 30 years ago drew out a concept in crayon that they thought might someday be possible. Those idiots had no clue about how to make that concept work. But because they dreamed about it and the US Patent Office was stupid enough to issue a patent on a dream, they often get large settlements. The guy who dreamed up the flying astro-car in a briefcase that George Jetson flew on his work commute was just dreaming. No one has ever built one yet, even half of a century later. But if they did build one would the credit for the invention of same go to the cartoonist or the actual inventor? IMO the credit should go to the actual inventor.