How Science Fiction has Became Reality?
Automatic doors, aren’t they crazy? We got to see them in Star Trek….what do we use them for? Supermarkets….Science fiction and science innovations are connected together since the origins of Sci-FI.
Facts sometimes seem surreal, but what about when fiction turns real? Sci-Fi has truly been the beauty of human imagination, a dreaming side of Science which puts science in terms of human context. Sci-fi literature and media inspired many of our advancements that are mundane in our current daily life ranging from smartphones to self-driving cars to Space Satellites. Science Fiction has changed our perception of science & technology and inspired us for the boundless prospects of the future, ensuing in the breakthrough from Sci-Fi to Reality.
Sci-Fi literature has inspired and predicted real life scientific innovation and also explored the moral dilemma of future technologies. Modern Sci-Fi started booming during the industrial revolution, the period when the potential of engineering started expanding, taking existing technology a step ahead of reality.
Did you know? Frankenstein inspired the invention of the Pacemaker, a small device that’s implanted in the chest to help control the heartbeat. Let’s go lower back to the late 1700s when electrical energy used to be a topic of fascination and scientists were experimenting its effects on humans. Luigi Galvani found in the 1780s that electric current caused lifeless frog’s legs to twitch. In 1803, Galvani’s nephew Giovanni Aldini performed experiments on the corpses of criminals in which a jolt of electrical energy caused their body to resuscitate. Mary Shelley heard about these experiments from her affiliation with author and scientist pals influencing her novel Frankenstein about an obsessed researcher with the secret of life. Dr. Victor Frankenstein constructs a body and makes use of a jolt of electrical energy and resurrects it as a monster. “Frankenstein” novel was published in 1818 and has been viewed as a masterpiece of gothic horror and early science fiction culture. A film starring Boris Karloff premiered in 1931 and it stimulated a younger Earl Bakken to work with electricity and medicine. In 1957, Earl Bakken invented the first wearable, battery-powered Pacemaker. (1)
Jule Verne, a French sci-fi pioneer, attempted to calculate the requirements for launching a vehicle to the moon in his 1865 book “From the Earth to the Moon”. Members of the shooting club launched themselves into a projectile from a cannon to the moon because, why not? Verne was surprisingly accurate, with striking similarities to NASA’s Apollo 11 command module. His fictional shell was hollow, mostly made of aliminium, and was crewed by three men. After Verne’s book came H.G. Wells, who wrote “The First Men in the Moon’’ around the beginning of the twentieth century, and French filmmaker Georges Méliès, whose 1902 silent film “A Trip to the Moon” is frequently referred to as the First Science-fiction film. These works encouraged real-life engineers and scientists to continue to work on the challenges of space travel by the 1950s, the United States and the USSR were engaged in a space race, and the USSR launched the first earth satellite, Sputnik-1 marking a huge leap for mankind and starting a journey of influencing advancements in technology, giving birth to multiple technologies surrounding communication, mapping, weather predictions, etc. (2) From Frankenstein’s makeshift body to precisely measured moon landing conceptual theory. Sci-Fi has been evident of its potential. Arthur C. Clarke worked on radar technology for The Royal Air Force before he started to write fiction. He published a paper in 1945 called “Extra-terrestrial Relays” that both predicted and laid out the framework for our current network of geostationary communications satellites. The “Clarke Orbit” — the particular point in space where those satellites are located — is still in use today. (3)
Isaac Asimov, one of the most prominent Sci-Fi writers predicted that in 2014, we would have some robots, but they wouldn’t be very advanced, that nuclear and solar power would replace fossil fuels, that we would have self-driving cars, that there would be unmanned missions to Mars. This was 50 years ago, at the 1964 World’s Fair, which is pretty accurate. (4)
Philip K. Dick whose stories have inspired movies like Blade Runner predicted the future with a decidedly more abysmal viewpoint, maybe he was . . . RIGHT. Maybe everything isn’t so fun and games out there. Although, todays’ artificial intelligence is capable of winning jeopardy, yet nobody has yet died from it….I believe .Some have compared the “Precogs” from Minority Report to current initiatives to apply neuroscience in courtrooms. Although brain-to-brain neural connection is not entirely fictitious, Total Recall-level memory implantation is not even close to being real. However, mouse observations support this hypothesis. While “A Scanner Darkly” anticipated a level of high-tech governmental surveillance that I think we all WISH was fiction, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’ anticipates a world full of bio-inspired engineering and human-like artificial intelligence. (5)
Even while science fiction frequently gets things wrong and isn’t always brilliant at foreseeing the future, you have to agree that some of these predictions are so accurate that you might think these authors are time-travellers. One correct prediction in a body of work would be lucky, but this many correct responses cannot be due to luck. There’s no doubt that these people are exceptional. Many of the greatest science fiction authors have had extensive scientific expertise. Isaac Asimov earned his doctorate in biochemistry. Arthur C. Clarke studied Math and physics. Biology was HG Wells’ field of study. Of course, spending time with somebody like Carl Sagan was also beneficial.(6)
Good science must serve as the foundation of good science fiction. The greatest science fiction writers tend to be the most prolific, despite the fact that this seems apparent. When it comes to future predictions, they are frequently accurate. How far into the future can we see? Depending on what we’re trying to find. According to Isaac Asimov, when we observe stars, galaxies, or DNA, we are observing simple objects that adhere to well-organised rules and equations. However, human history is turbulent, unpredictable, and has a narrow scope in our eyes. Science reduces complexity to simplicity, which is how we understand chaos. Science fiction is where we record what we observe while science is how we view further. What do you guys think? What makes science fiction so good in predicting the future and what awesome SCi-Fi examples did I miss?