Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Sci-fi meets Reality

Sci-fi, science fiction. Science as we think it might be in the future. Spaceships that travel faster than light, aliens, time travel … how much of this is real? How much of this is possible? Some of it we have already attained. Some we probably never will.

In the sixties, a TV show called Star Trek was popular. In it were these amazing things called automatic opening doors. Automatic doors had been seen earlier in a book by H.G. Wells. Some time in the sixties, some smart inventors got together and figured out how to make real ones. We now see them everywhere and we consider them a necessity of life.

We have a sort of teleportion. Although we cannot teleport actual matter, we can teleport information through computers and the Internet.

We have not mastered time travel – but scientists have been working on it. It would require extreme amounts of energy, though. We haven't met anyone claiming to come from the future, though, so chances are, it won't happen.

The modern submarine was very well described in the book, “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,” by Jules Verne The Atomic bomb was explained in a book by H.G. Wells. Both of these books were written well before the modern submarine or the atomic bomb. Indeed, if it hadn’t been for the book by H.G. Wells, WW2 would have ended very differently.

At one time, traveling around the world in eighty days was considered sci-fi, now it can be done in fact in 90 minutes!

We haven’t figured out how to achieve speeds greater than the speed of light, or warping, but we can go faster than sound. We can travel into outer space, just not with a cannon, as Jules Verne suggested we might. We have visited the moon, but found it lifeless. We haven’t visited Mars, but we have sent probes, and they have discovered it to be lifeless as well. We have discovered all of the planets to be lifeless, proof that God knew what he was doing when he put us on earth.

Telephones and intercoms have come to life out of science fiction, as have TVs. We have brought cell phones out of books - indeed, cell phones today are beyond what they were in the movies and books of yesteryear, and far less clunky.

We have computer generated voices that sound almost natural, and touch screens!

And the Internet! There is so much technology today, much of it at least partially foreseen. Much of it was inspired by science fiction. We aren’t driving to work in hovercars, or goofing of on hoverboards, and jet backpacks are yet to appear, but we do have cars that can “see.” Cars that can sense things happening on the road, and can compensate faster than the driver! It can even take into consideration the unpredictability of the driver.

A question to consider, had Jules Verne and H.G. Wells not done all of the writing they did, would we have ever developed all of the science we have? It is possible.

It’s also possible that we would not of.

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