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| H.G. Wells |
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Halfway between the 19th and 20th centuries, the British H.G. Wells also practiced the literature of scientific prediction, although his predictions are usually longer-term than Verne's, more remote from the technique of his time, so very few have come to be carried out. We still don't have The Time Machine and can't see it anywhere near. We cannot make artificial men by vivisecting animals (The Island of Doctor Moreau). Nor can we make ourselves invisible (The invisible man). And fortunately the Martians have not invaded us (The War of the Worlds). In 1938, a radio dramatization of this novel by Orson Welles caused a mass panic in the United States. Despite the boom in science fiction at the time, the public was still as credulous as when it had been fooled a century earlier by the articles in the Sun.
Wells also wrote (of course) about a trip to the moon and populated our satellite with intelligent giant ants, although the procedure to make the trip is more imaginative than, and as impractical as Verne's. But his great scientific foresight success is the novel The World set free (1913), which not only anticipated the atomic bomb, but also influenced its practical realization, stimulating Leo Szilard's research on the neutron chain reaction. Although Wells also made a tremendous mistake in this novel, by predicting in 1913 that the First World War would start in 1956. But as he said a few years later: [I have] always been... a rather slow prophet. You can also see my review of this book in Goodreads.
During the 20th century,
science fiction has often influenced science. Let's look at a few examples:
-
One of the key themes of science fiction (the conquest of
the solar system) still influences space exploration programs,
especially the possible sending of manned spacecraft to planet Mars, which
seems to be finally approaching, albeit very slowly and with continuous delays.
In this context, it must be remembered that Arthur C. Clarke's novels on the
colonization of space (Prelude to Space, Islands in the Sky) correctly
foresaw communications satellites, space stations and the flooding of
artificial satellites we already suffer. Of course, Clarke was an engineer as
well as a writer, and he won the Franklin Institute gold medal for his 1945 detailed
planning of the world's satellite communications system.
- The problem of interstellar travel has always fascinated
science fiction writers, who have proposed imaginative solutions: a)
Traveling through an unknown dimension (called with suggestive names as hyperspace, subspace, and the like). b)
Traveling at speeds very close to the speed of light or even higher,
passing through the
world of tachyons. c) Use shortcuts (wormholes), which I described
in another
post in this blog. All this is not science, but many scientists are currently
dedicated to studying whether any of these methods is mathematically
possible, and although they are doing science fiction rather than science,
at least it is exceptionally hard science fiction, as it usually comes
with equations and formulas that very few are able to understand.
- Another of the fundamental themes of science fiction is contact
with extraterrestrial intelligences. From a scientific
point of view, we are no more advanced here than fifty years ago, but it's
worth wondering if all the efforts dedicated to SETI and similar programs
would have been carried out without the impulse of science fiction.
Although it's also legitimate to ask whether, after all, those efforts won't
end up being a useless waste.
- Strong artificial intelligence is one of the issues where science fiction has always been ahead of science. We still don't know whether this type of artificial intelligence is even possible, but the influence of the novels on the science is clearly reflected in the scientific and technical language: the word robot (which in Czech means work) appeared for the first time in the play R.U.R. (1920), by the Czech writer Karel Capek. And the name Robotics, applied to a branch of technology, did not come from a scientific publication, but from a collection of stories (I, robot, 1950) by the American writer Isaac Asimov.
- The concept of the multiverse (the hypothetical existence of
other universes) did not come first from science, but from science
fiction. To my knowledge, its first appearance was in Clifford Simak's
novel Cosmic
Engineers (1950), which develops a 1939 short story by the
same author. And conversely, Hugh Everett III's idea of the quantum
multiverse, formulated in 1957, was soon applied in science
fiction (Fred Hoyle's October the first is too late, 1966).
- Sometimes science fiction does not pose possible situations in the
future, but speculations on specific mathematical questions. The most
outstanding example of this sub-genre is Edmund Abbot's Flatland,
a novel written in 1884 to analyze what a two-dimensional world inhabited
by intelligent beings would be like. The book was imitated almost a
century later by A.K. Dewdney, who in The Planiverse posed the question in
another way, making it more comprehensive and understandable.
I won't go here into
other classic topics, such as time travel or matter transfer at a distance
(especially human beings), because it's quite possible that they aren't
scientifically feasible, although this also applies to strong artificial
intelligence.
Finally, it should be
mentioned that one of the most important purposes of science fiction, rather
than predicting future scientific advances, is analyzing their effects on
society. I'll talk about that in my next post.
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