Does Science Fiction Give Us Unrealistic Expectations?
Late last year I was privileged to be part of The Wheeler Centre’s Interrobang Festival, where I appeared on a panel with Cory Doctorow and Maggie Ryan-Sanford, “Does science fiction give us an unrealistic expectation that we can effectively inhabit Mars? Questions on discovery, imagination and progress.”
I’ve been pondering this question ever since. Few things are as fun as speculating on possible futures based on what we already know, and on what we imagine it to be. Science fiction is full of invented worlds: techno utopias, planets that are conscious entities, civilisations that are semi-mythic and hypertechnologrical; bizarre life forms: science fiction is sometimes more mystical than scientific — often science flavoured fantasy. Can we have light sabres? Will we have made it to Mars? Can we make it to Mars, or are we just fooling ourselves? Can we build a Death Star? Can we travel through wormholes?
As one of the most popular and enduring science fiction series, Star Wars presents us with a world that is both oddly mystrical and hypertechnological. Travelling at light speed is par for the course, the galaxy is well populated and moving between planets is as commonplace as commuting to work. Robotic help is a part of life and have their own languages and protocols and moon and planet-size weapons are conceived and built without concern for physical limitations. For decades now, scientists and the public have used Star Wars, and science fiction generally, as a stepping stone for real life technologies. Research is informed largely by a quest for knowledge but we ar also inspired by stories of imagined worlds with novel technologies. We are nowhere near to being able to produce a light sabre, but a very small tractor beam effect has been produced. We can’t teleport a human but we have actually managed to teleport an electron. It will take a lot more work to teleport a human; if it is at all possible since teleportation involves the transfer of information. As far as travelling to other planets through wormholes, as in the wonderful Interstellar, that’s also a while off. However, wormholes have actually been detected in space.
The Martian set off a flurry of excitement in this era of renewed space exploration. As NASA and the ESA have returned to planetary (and cometary) exploration with a vengeance and private firms like Space X are vying to make space flight accessible and Mars colonisation possible, we have begun asking why the futures promised to us by Arthur C Clarke — Imperial Earth, 2001:A Space Odyssey — of a space faring civilisation with regular Pan-Am trips to the moon, is still not apparent. What happened to our zest for space travel? The Challenger and Columbia disasters cast a pall on the Shuttle program, funding cuts and a realisation that space is very, very hard halted it in its tracks. Everything is really far away. The othr planets are far away in human terms, let alone other stars and flitting across an entire galaxy. But while we still don’t make holiday trips to the moon or have vast space stations as depicted by NASA concept art, we have an International Space Station that has been continuously inhabited for for 18 years and recently produced the first space flowers. The Martian suggests a template for the colonisation of Mars based on what we know about the planet, but leaves out the tricky parts of travelling to Mars, which is a two year journey. That is a blank for scientists to fill. If, as Kim Stanley Robinson, that first chronicler of a fictional Earth colonisation of Mars, says we can’t make it to space, are we simply dreaming of that which cannot be?
Robinson contends, in a recent essay comissioned by Boing Boing, that we cannot make it out of bounds of Earth’s atmosphere for too long, as we are intimately, biologically linked to it. To leave would require that we take elements of the biomass of the Earth, because the Earth is really just the one organism. So while we can grow flowers in space now, we may have to think about our expansion into the solar system first as building entire ecosystems, stretching outwards bit by bit from the Earth to the Moon, to perhaps an intermediate base, to Mars and beyond. We will have to build mini-Earths, or evolve, or engineer ecologies and humans to be able to travel through the interstellar medium. And this isn’t even counting the sophisticated ships we will need. But humans are fond of looking at an impossible problem and finding a solution for it. If we can now detect gravitational waves, then space travel is simply a goal that will take more than a couple of generations.
While science fiction can give us goals to reach, it also provides us with the opportunity to explore worlds we cannot have access to; worlds completely unlike our own, entirely made up. For this reason, science fiction is mostly fantasy with a scientific flavour about it. Existing human societies are transplanted into exotic locations and sophisticated space faring civilisations. worlds cross from th scientific to the mystical: advanced tchonology and advanced myticism. Apocalyptic scenarios, evil beings conquering planetary systems and even galaxies. Some of it is well written, some of it less so. It’s regarded as fringe, genre. The line between the mystical and scientific becomes blurredThe same social and racial structures seem transplanted across to more exotic worlds that provide tension for thse plots. It sems strange that this is what happens: it’s less common to see succesful racially harmonious Utopias; it can be either/or: humans purely good or purely evil. Kim Stanley Robinson’s work on Mars taks trrestrial geopolitics seems tame. It’s a whole other essay to think of other species being so comon that ordinary terrestrial racism is irrelvant. As more non-white writers write about these worlds and fanstasies that appeal to them, science fiction is changing as well as well.
It’s only in recent times that we have been able to detect other planets; something we thought impossible before, but now we have discovered over 700 planets and even better, discovered their compisitions. The universe is full of planets of bizarre composition: made of diamond, raining silica. Our own local planets have their own exotic geography and geology: methane seas, lava fields, endless storms, hexagonal aurorae. What civilistions might arise on such planets? What kinds of life forms? Can we visit them?
While science fiction, like high fantasy, allows us to explore human questions in different settings, they often transplant existing social structures to thse planes of worlds. Le Guin’s work is different in that respect. Her words, writing, are strictly literary. Carved, considered, dense with ideas; le Guin challenges Earth’s social structures with exotic settings.
Science fiction can be predictive as Arthur C Clarke’ work shows. He predicted satellite communication, imagined an Imperial Earth, foresaw iPads and iPhones. But the most fun part of science fiction crosses into speculative fiction. Imagning the possibilities of life on other planets and other civilisations, based on plantray morphology — a fact that we can now incorpota from actual data is on of the more enjoyable parts of science fition. In this form, science fiction is pure gedankenexperiment. Can this physical, social, cultural reality come true? What will happen if it does? Can we build a technology to take us through a black hole? Can we use it to imagine what kind of life forms totally alien to ours might exist and how we might therefore detect them? All science fiction is gedankenexperiment, some more effective than others, but its does provide an idea to pursue or a means to understand some thing we have just discoverd . It can inform technology or predict it. It can predict life forms or the utilisation of those properties in nanotchnology. It gives us something to aspire to. So sometimes, perhaps, science fiction gives us unrealistic ideas, but exploring those ideas is most of the fun.
