Posted on 03/27/2007 8:15:39 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
Man will never fly. Wrong. Well, OK, but man will never break the sound barrier. Wrong. You can’t invent a vaccine against smallpox. Against measles. Against polio. Wrong, wrong, wrong... "We shall never be able by any means to study [the stars’] chemical composition," he wrote. Wrong... Now it’s time for another dire prediction: We will never be able to tell if there are planets orbiting around other stars. Wrong... Are there other Earth out there? Never say never. Now what about the science-fictiony idea of traveling faster than light? If we ever expect to visit those planets circling other stars, we’ll either have to spend hundreds or thousand of years in transit, or find a way to move our spacecraft faster than light. Einstein’s relatively states that no material object can travel faster than light. At 186,000 miles per second, light is the universe’s speed champion – and its ultimate speed limit. So starships are creations of fiction. You can never travel faster than light. Wrong? Wait and see.
(Excerpt) Read more at naplesnews.com ...
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I grew up reading (and greatly enjoying) the speculative fiction of Bova, Asimov, Heinlein, Bradbury, et al. It is truly amazing to see how many ideas that these writers invented, that have been invented as products later on by others.
Their fiction has truly carried the torch of technology, and led the way in so many cases. Where will it all end? Who knows, who knows...
It is truly amazing to see how many ideas that these writers invented, that have been invented as products later on by others.Such as?
Thanks, but I can't make it. :')
The current pace of technology has caused something of a crisis in "hard" SF - you really can't make it up anymore before someone is already doing it. It was only about a decade between Gibson's Neuromancer and the Internet that made it seem dated. It's gotten worse since.
"One man’s “magic” is another man’s engineering. “Supernatural” is a null word."
-- Robert A. Heinlein
Well, Dr. Bova has a short list on his site:
http://www.benbova.com/predict.htm
There are many others. Right off the top of my head, Isaac Asimov predicted quite a bit of the technology of robotics, some of which is just now being actually achieved.
RAH invented the water bed, something like 20 years before it was commercialized.
Just gotta figure out a loophole in the law.
:')
Interesting list. I don't buy any of it though. Sci-fi writers are science fans and cheerleaders, and read a lot of nonfiction. Also, I've never seen anything in any sci-fi story (when I was reading such things years ago in my misguided youth) which literally come true after the story was written. There were rockets before sci-fi writers started writing about them, in China, during the Middle Ages, before Tsiolkovski or Jules Verne.
Arthur C. Clarke always took credit for (and generally is given credit for) invention of geostationary satellites for communication, but I doubt that he so much as soldered a wire on anything ever launched. Edmund Spenser, writing "The Faerie Queen" in the 16th century, "invented" Talus, a robot warrior sidekick for one of the characters, and for that matter, Baum "invented" The Tin Man. :')
http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=23
Waldo: A telefactoring device; also known as the Waldo F. Jones Synchronous Reduplicating Pantograph
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