Twelve years before Sputnik, the late science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke wrote a 1945 story in
Wireless World magazine describing a ring of geostationary satellites orbiting Earth, all part of a system that relayed communications anywhere on the planet.
Clarke, who died in March at the age of 90, considered patenting the idea, but a lawyer dissuaded him, arguing that the notion was so far out there that it would not be taken seriously.
Bad advice. Communications satellites now support everything from radio and TV to cell phones with GPS.
Clarke's tale is frequently cited as the paradigm of how science fiction can become science fact, but it's hardly unique. There are examples galore, many even predating the term “science fiction,” which was popularized in the 1920s by Hugo Gernsback, who published the first science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories.
For example, French sci-fi pioneer Jules Verne (1828-1905) described submarines and helicopters decades before reality could match his imagination. British writer H.G. Wells (1866-1946) foresaw atomic bombs and air conditioning.
“Anything a man can imagine, another man can create,” Verne once said.
Indeed, in his 1865 novel “From the Earth to the Moon,” Verne described a space effort remarkably similar to the 1961-1975 Apollo program. He imagined a a spacecraft with three astronauts, set his launch site in Florida and called for a splash landing.
“I'm sure we would not have had men on the moon if it had not been for Wells and Verne,” Clarke said.
To be sure, sci-fi pioneers like Wells and Verne weren't always spot-on. Wells envisioned aerial dogfights long before World War I but thought the planes would fly by flapping their wings. Verne's spacecraft was launched out of a giant cannon.
And we're still waiting for cool things like warp drive, teleportation and time travel, all of which may be possible in theory but impossible in practice.
Take teleportation. In the television and movie series “Star Trek,” characters are routinely teleported from one place to another. Actually doing so, however, would require precisely copying the quantum state of every particle in a person's body – about 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms, according to one calculation, or more than the estimated number of stars in the universe. The particles would then have to be exactly reassembled somewhere else – without a single error.
That's just the physical challenge. The process also means destroying the original, meaning every teleported person would be, technically speaking, a clone.
Clones exist, of course, though not yet in human form. Human cloning for reproductive purposes is not only beyond contemporary science but also broadly banned.
Even so, the list of real-world achievements first imagined by science fiction and fantasy writers is mind-blowing.
In his Foundation novels, written in the 1950s, Isaac Asimov (1920-1992) talked about a grandiose “Encyclopedia Galactica” containing all knowledge and wisdom. Not unlike Wikipedia, perhaps, or the Internet as a whole. The “Encyclopedia of Life” (eol.org) is an ongoing effort to create a multimedia Web site that describes all life on Earth: 1.8 million species and counting.
Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988) is often cited as one of the three greatest writers of modern science-based fiction. (Asimov and Clarke are the others.) In dozens of novels, Heinlein prophesied scores of future inventions, some profound, others mundane. In the 1950s, for example, he predicted genetically engineered and synthetic foods. He also imagined the modern water bed, 26 years before it actually debuted in 1968.
Sci-fi publisher Gernsback was also a novelist. In his 1925 novel “Ralph 124C 41 +,” set in the year 2660, Gernsback anticipates television, videophones, transcontinental air service, automatic sliding doors, photos transmitted by radio waves, synthetic cloth and tape recorders. If anything, reality has progressed faster than Gernsback imagined.
The Web site technovelgy.com cites more than 1,645 ideas and inventions inspired by science fiction. In their new book, “You Call This the Future?” authors Nick Sagan, Mark Frary and Andy Walker illustrate some of those inventions – and others that remain on the drawing boards. To wit:
Duke University researchers have developed a theoretical blueprint for an invisibility cloak that employs exotic composite substances called metamaterials.
“The cloak would act like you've opened up a hole in space,” said David R. Smith, a professor of electrical and computer engineering. “All light or other electromagnetic waves are swept around the area, guided by the metamaterial to emerge on the other side as if they had passed through an empty volume of space.”
Of course, nobody expects anything like Harry Potter's invisibility cloak anytime soon. We're still waiting for those promised jet packs to whoosh us off to school or work.
It could still happen. As Clarke once wrote, “If we have learned one thing from the history of invention and discovery, it is that, in the long run – and often in the short one – the most daring prophesies seem laughably conservative.”
HI, ROBOT
The word “robot” (from
robota, Czech for “forced labor”) was introduced in Karel Capek's “R.U.R.” (Rossum's Universal Robots), a 1921 play about machines serving humans.
Such was the case with Robot in the 1960s TV series “Lost in Space” His mobility was limited, but he frequently displayed humanlike qualities, such as laughing at Dr. Smith (pictured here, played by Jonathan Harris).
Honda's ASIMO (short for Advanced Step in Innovative Mobility) looks decidedly more human. Since 1986, there have been 11 versions of ASIMO. The latest model stands 4-foot-3 and weigh 119 pounds. It can walk or run at speeds up to 4 miles per hour. Internal cameras and elaborate software programs allow it to recognize features in its surrounding environment, including faces and gestures.
PHONE HOME
Martin Cooper, a one-time project manager at Motorola, said watching Captain Kirk use his communicator on the 1960s TV show “Star Trek” inspired him to investigate the real-world possibilities of mobile phones.
It's not hard to make the connection.
Modern cell phones are much improved from Motorola's first model, the 2-pound Dyna-Tac in 1973, but they still can't match the abilities of Kirk's device, which provided real-time communication over vast distances, even though doing so violated the laws of physics.
STUNNING DEVELOPMENT
“Star Trek” highlighted lots of imaginary technologies, including the phaser rifle, held here by Captain Kirk. Like its more common cousin the hand-held phaser, the rifle sported multiple settings: stun, kill, heat, disrupt and dematerialize.
A real “PHaSR” gun has been tested by the Air Force Research Laboratory at its Kirkland base near Albuquerque, N.M. The Personnel Halting and Stimulation Response rifle projects a non-lethal laser beam that reportedly dazzles and discombobulates aggressors, giving the shooting side extra time to determine its next action.
AUTO PILOT
Imaginary flying cars have been around since, well, cars. But the idea really took off in the 1960s with George Jetson's cartoonish Spacion Wagon, and shifted into hyperdrive with Dr. Emmett L. Brown's DeLorean, which could fly back to the future.
Actual flying cars, though, remain grounded in reality. More than 70 patents have been filed with the U.S. Patent Office over the last century or so, but only a handful of the cars have ever been built, and none has been mass-produced.
Maybe the closest is the Moller M400 Skycar, designed by former University of California Davis engineering professor Paul Moller, who offered a partially tested prototype in the 2005 Nieman Marcus gift catalog. It went unsold.
Moller's company (moller.com) is currently taking deposits for future cars. As advertised, the M400 will be a four-seater capable of a maximum air speed of 375 mph and a 750-mile range, getting 20 miles per gallon of ethanol.
Moller has said the first M400s might start flying out of the showroom within a year or so, but don't start scanning the skies just yet. Moller has been working on versions of his flying car for more than 40 years.
MAN-MADE MAN
“Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to build the world's first bionic man. Steve Austin will be that man. Better than he was before. Better, stronger, faster.”
Or so Oscar Goldman claimed every week during the opening credits of “The Six Million Dollar Man,” which aired from 1974 to 1978.
In fact, there was nothing like Austin's bionic body parts in the 1970s. Nor Jaime Sommers' “Bionic Woman” (1976-1978). Even last year's abbreviated “Bionic Woman” remake, with Michelle Ryan (pictured), was beyond current technology.
But not as much. Prosthetic devices are in the midst of a radical transformation. Claudia Mitchell (pictured) is one of several amputees who have been fitted with artificial limbs that can be moved by thought alone. The device, designed at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, works by detecting movements of a muscle in Mitchell's chest that has been rewired to nerve stumps leading to her now-missing left arm (lost in a 2004 motorcycle accident).
Researchers at Johns Hopkins University hope to perfect an even more advanced version – an arm and hand that looks, acts and feels to users like original equipment – by 2009.
PERCEPTIBLE PROGRESS
The imagined power of invisibility dates back at least to Greek mythology. Perseus had a cap that made him disappear. And it has long been a staple of science fiction and fantasy, first appearing in H.G. Wells' 1897 novella “The Invisible Man,” then reappearing in other books, movies and TV shows, including the SciFi Channel's 2000 series “The Invisible Man” starring Darien Fawkes (pictured).
Real success in turning people – or just objects – invisible has been harder to see, but there has been progress. While it's not quite on par with Harry Potter's famous cloak of invisibility, researchers at Tokyo University have developed a raincoat of tiny reflective beads that bounce back images projected on them, creating the illusion of invisibility.
Meanwhile, Duke University scientists have crafted synthetic metamaterials that deflect microwave beams around them with virtually no distortion, making the covered object look like it's not there – at least to people (or devices) with microwave vision.
