The lost worlds of 2001

Arthur C. Clarke

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is one of the most representative science-fiction films in the world of cinema. Its script, which took several years to develop, was elaborated jointly by Arthur C. Clarke, a renowned science-fiction writer during the golden age of this genre, and Stanley Kubrick, a famous film director. While he was working on the script, Clarke wrote a book with the same title as the film, which was published after the film’s release.

In 1972 Arthur C. Clarke published a book entitled The Lost Worlds of 2001, where he mixes reminiscences about the elaboration of the script with discarded chapters from the book. By reading this book, we can follow the process of the construction of the film by Clarke and Kubrick and the successive stages of the plot. I agree with them that the final script was much better than the intermediate versions. Reading this book has led me to the following two comments:

The prehistory of scientific popularization

Being interested in the world, being curious to find out the causes of natural phenomena, is as old as man, but in the strict sense one cannot speak of science until the invention of writing, as the knowledge communicated through oral transmission was disorganized, imprecise, and fragmentary. For science to appear, the body of knowledge must constitute a coherent and ordered whole, which was practically impossible before more permanent means of storing information than human memory could be used.

As soon as writing systems appeared in the Middle East, India, China and America, sciences began to develop. The first three were medicine, mathematics, and astrology. They arose for practical reasons: to cure diseases; for the good management of the economy; to predict natural phenomena related to the cycle of the seasons. The natural sciences (physics, chemistry, biology, and geology) were less necessary for early human societies, so they did not emerge until the Greek civilization.

Predictions by Arthur C. Clarke until 2020 (and beyond)

Arthur C. Clarke

In a previous post I pointed out that short-term predictions are dangerous, because the expected date does not take long to arrive, and the "prophet" runs the risk that someone (like me) takes a note of the predictions and checks if they really took place.

In this post I am going to apply the same principle to long-term forecasts, where the effect is even more dramatic. Of course, it is more difficult that those predictions are remembered, but there is always someone (like me) who keeps press clippings from 1963 and can check if they were fulfilled.

Scientific predictions for 2020

Arthur C. Clarke

It is well known that future forecasts are all the more risky the further in time they go. Readers of my blog know that I love keeping scientific forecasts to use in the future, so as to check them when the corresponding dates arrive. Sometimes I have waited for half a century to perform these checks, which in general prove that the forecasts tend to be unsuccessful, generally due to too much optimism, although sometimes they are correct. In this previous post, I checked some of the predictions made by such distinguished popularizers as Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov.

The three predictions I’m going to check today were made for the year 2020, with less time to go: 25 years in the first, just 10 years or a little above in the other two. Let’s look at them:

What is a good scientific popularization?

Isaac Asimov

This news was published on November 20, 2007 in the Spanish major newspaper ABC:

Jugene, the most powerful and ecological civilian computer in the world, is German. [In the] Rhinelandic town of Jülich [was installed] Jugene (Jülicher Blue Gene), whose 167,000 million basic operations (teraflops) per second make it the world's first computer for civilian use...

Actually, the most powerful computers at the time could run at a few hundred teraflops. This news exaggerated the speed of the computer by nine orders of magnitude. This error has not been corrected. It’s still in the web.

Heard on a Radio broadcast on May 30, 2008: Fishermen complain about the rising price of diesel. Five years ago it cost them 320% less. In other words, five years ago they were paid to fill the tank.

Let's look at another example of a wrong headline published on 2/18/2020. The headline says: New green technology generates electricity "out of thin air." The text clarifies that it is generated from the humidity of the air acting on a protein.

These errors, so frequent in the media (I could contribute many more), have led me to formulate the following golden rule of scientific popularization:

Any statement you assert must be correct and contrastable.

Everything one says must be carefully checked to ensure that it is not a mistake, hasty or misrepresented news, or in the worst case, fake news.

Another typical error of scientific popularization in the media is showing as already done news that are really nothing but predictions about the future. This usually happens in headlines, which are usually reduced to the minimum, while keeping maximum impact. For instance, in a recent news published on 2/12/2020, the headline is: Mars was also beaten and for a long time. The text, however, is much less conclusive. What the headline gives as certain, becomes just possible: The red planet could have formed in a longer time scale than previously thought.

Statistics are prone to many manipulations, sometimes with unexpected consequences:

In 1995, one study showed that the contraceptive pill increases the risk of thrombus embolism by 100%. The press published it with great headlines. Thousands of women stopped taking the pill. It is estimated that, as a result, 10,000 more abortions took place, only in Great Britain.

What had really happened? What did that study discover?

Risk of thrombo-embolism in women who do not take the pill: 1 in 14,000. Risk of thrombus embolism in women taking the pill: 2 in 14,000.

In this case, the news was not incorrect. What was wrong was the way of making it public. It’s true, the risk increased by 100% (from 0.00007 to 0.00014). But expressed in that way, it could cause a panic, and it did.

I have given more examples in two old posts in this blog: this one and this one.

This is a list of 24 famous popularizers:

Michael Faraday

Galileo Galilei, Michael Faraday, Jean Martin Charcot, Camille Flammarion, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Josep Comas and Solà, Gregorio Marañón, George Gamow, Willy Ley, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Konrad Lorenz, Stephen Jay Gould, Martin Gardner, Félix Rodríguez de la Fuente, Douglas Hofstadter, Ian Stewart, Raymond Smullyan, Steven Weinberg, Richard Feynman, Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, Roger Penrose and Paul Davies.

Santiago Ramón y Cajal

Most of them were scientists, distributed among the following fields: 3 mathematicians; 12 physicists, chemists and astronomers; 3 biologists; 4 doctors in medicine; and an engineer. The exception is Martin Gardner, who graduated in philosophy, although he later specialized in philosophy of mathematics. Some of them worked on several disciplines, or kept up to date with them, at least from the informative point of view.

Many of the popularizers mentioned above also addressed the other way of popularizing science: by means of fiction. Some of the names indicated are also famous as authors of science fiction novels, or just fiction, with some scientific stroke: Asimov, Clarke, Gamow, Sagan, Davies, Ramón y Cajal, and Marañón wrote novels, some of which are considered among the best in the genre.

Are popularizers born or made? Surely both things at once. The best definition of a popularizer was given by Willy Ley, when one of his teachers asked the students to write a composition developing the following question: which profession do I want to practice when I’ll be grown up, and why? Willy Ley replied: I want to be an explorer. The teacher did not like the answer, and said there was nothing left to explore. Obviously, the teacher was wrong.

The same post in Spanish
Thematic Thread on Popularization of Science: Previous Next

Manuel Alfonseca
Happy summer holidays. See you by mid-August

The three laws of Robotics

Isaac Asimov

Isaac Asimov was a prolific science fiction and popular science writer who published in the 40s a series of stories about robots, later compiled in the I, Robot collection. In these stories he invented a word that has become a part of the technological vocabulary, as the name of a discipline: Robotics. He also formulated the three famous laws of Robotics, which in his opinion should be implemented in every robot to make secure our interactions with these machines that, when Asimov formulated the laws, were simple future forecasts.

The three laws of Robotics are the following:

First Law: A robot may not harm a human being, or through inaction allow a human being to come to harm.

Second Law: A robot must obey any order given by a human being, except those that conflict with the first law.

Third Law: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the first two laws.

The 25 science fiction stories I most liked

Isaac Asimov

In the United States fiction is classified depending on the length of the work, with four subsequent stages:

1. Novel, any work that has more than 40,000 words.
2. Novella, a work between 17,500 and 40,000 words.
3. Novelette, between 7,500 and 17,500 words.
4. Short Story, less than 7,500 words.

Naturally, the limits are not strict, and in practice they depend on who classifies each book. In Spanish, however, we have fewer categories:

1. Novel.
2. Short novel, which applies to works of intermediate length.
3. Story, with few characters and a simple plot.

Extraterrestrials in literature

Extraterrestrials can only appear in two types of literary works: in essays, or in novels, and in the latter only in the genre of science fiction. If an extraterrestrial appears in any novel, the novel automatically becomes science fiction.

Science fiction literature shows very many types of extraterrestrials:

• Fully humanoid, such as the red men in the Mars series by Edgar Rice Burroughs, who are so humanoid that they are even fertile when mating with terrestrials, as shown by the two sons of John Carter and Dejah Thoris, despite the fact that Martian women are oviparous (!!!) To this group also belong the aliens of The People series by Zenna Henderson, who are only different from us by their mental abilities, and those of Perelandra by C.S.Lewis, also titled Voyage to Venus.
• Partially humanoid, such as those in Star Ways by Poul Anderson, whose women are also capable of falling in love with terrestrials. This novel develops a typical Anderson argument: extraterrestrials who differ culturally from us in their ecological view of the world, but who are fated to be defeated when confronting terrestrials, who are much more active and aggressive than they are.

The best 40 science fiction novels I have read

Blade Runner poster

Lists of favorite books have always existed, and with the rise of the Internet they have proliferated. That’s why I decided to make a new list (in case there were not enough). But what I’m showing here is not just the list of my favorite books in this genre, but something a little more complex.

To build the list, I started with four lists made by others, sometimes individually, sometimes collectively. For example, one of those lists has been created in Goodreads, the social network for books, is called Best Science Fiction and contains over 2,000 books. In order to build this list, the members of Goodreads vote (almost 1000 people have voted for at least one book), together with the book’s score and the number of people who have read it (in some cases several million).

To form my new list I used the following criteria:

1. It just contains books that I have read.
2. It does not contain books that I have read, but did not like at all (i.e. those I would assign one star in the Goodreads or Amazon ratings). As an example of these books I will mention Do androids dream with electric sheep? by Philip K. Dick. Its argument is based on an interesting idea, but the way it has been developed in the form of a novel is deplorable, sometimes absurd. This is one of the rare cases where the film based on a book (Blade Runner) turned out to be far superior to the original work.
3. Therefore, if one of your favorite books is not listed here, it may be for three reasons: because I have not read it, because I did not like it at all, or because it didn’t come among the top 40 in the average of the lists I have used to build mine.
4. It only contains science fiction books. The Lord of the Rings, for example, has not been included, although it is on one of these lists, because I don’t consider it science fiction.

Another failed prediction

As you know, I love to point out the mistakes made by those who make future predictions. Since I was little more than a teenager, I have been saving clippings from the press and scientific journals that make more or less reasonable forecasts about the evolution of science and technology. In an earlier article I have pointed out that such predictions are seldom met, even when made by people who are both scientists and visionary, famous science fiction authors such as Arthur C. Clarke or Isaac Asimov.

I just unearthed an article published by Alexander Kusko in the IEEE Spectrum magazine in April 1968, with the following title:

A prediction of power system development, 1968 to 2030

And the following subtitle:

By predicting the trend of future power system design some 60 years hence, we should be better equipped to solve some of the technical and sociological problems that the industry faces today.

The assumptions on which Kusko's predictions were based were the following:

1. The population will triple. What did actually happen? The world’s population in 1968, according to UN data, was about 3.5 billion people. The world population in 2015 was 7.35 billion. According to UN estimates, the world population in 2030 will amount to between 8.2 and 8.8 billion people. Far from the 10.5 billion estimated by Kusko.

Disappointment in the face of unreasonable optimistic forecasts

Arthur C. Clarke

The future is unpredictable. The information revolution that began in the 80s with the personal computer, followed in the 90s with the global expansion of the Internet, and continued in the first decade of this century with the smartphones, came as a surprise for many futurists. Half a century ago, all predictions agreed that future computers would be larger. In fact, they became smaller. By 1965, something like Internet seemed a prediction for the next century (see the story by Arthur C. Clarke, Dial F for Frankenstein). Looking back, many of the scientific advances of the twentieth century were surprising. Why then do we insist on making predictions, if they are almost never met?

The March 2016 issue of the Spanish version of the journal Scientific American includes an article entitled Neuroscience: how to avoid disappointment, by Professor Alfredo Marcos, which reviews some of the modern predictions about research on the human brain, which he considers far too optimistic. If these forecasts are not met, as can be expected, the disappointment of the public and the governments that sponsor and fund these scientific efforts could lead to a wave of excessive skepticism. These are a few of his words:

However much we learn about the brain, we must not expect that it will provide us with the immediate healing of all our medical and social ills, from Alzheimer's to violence; much less with the keys to human existence.

Predicting social future: political correctness

2001, A Space Odyssey

As I discussed in a previous post, scientists are often wrong when they predict the future of science. Science fiction writers make mistakes too, especially when they are trying to predict technical advances. Consider the film 2001, A Space Odyssey, which got wrong almost all the developments proposed for that year. Fourteen years after the date in the title, we still don’t have a base on the moon, manned spaceships to Jupiter, artificial intelligence, or humans in hibernation.

We should remember Asimov’s third law of futurics, which states that predicting the social consequences of future scientific progress is more important than accurately predicting that progress. A SF story predicting cars, but not the parking problem, would not have been a good SF story.

In 1941, before Asimov formulated this law, Robert Heinlein correctly applied it in his short story Solution Unsatisfactory, which predicted the Manhattan Project, the atomic bomb, its use to end World War II and the subsequent nuclear stalemate between the great powers. Not bad, as an example of what you can do in a well-built science fiction story.

Predicting the scientific future

Man likes making predictions about the future. Scientists are human beings, therefore they make predictions about the progress to be expected in various fields of research during the coming years, decades and even centuries. These predictions are widely publicized by the media.

Are scientific predictions more likely to be satisfied than other predictions of the future? We might think so, since science is the most rational branch of human knowledge. What should we do to confirm or disconfirm this surmise? We should apply the scientific method to the predictions, i.e. wait until the scheduled time has come and check whether the predictions were fulfilled or not. Such studies are not usually done. Everyone is prepared to predict or to listen to predictions, but few bother to check if those anticipations actually came to happen.

There are a few egregious cases that many people remember. In 1956, the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, where the term Artificial Intelligence was coined, predicted that in less than ten years we would have computer programs capable of beating the world chess champion, or seamlessly translating between any two human languages. The total failure of this prediction is obvious: the first target came true 41 years later rather than 10, while the second has not been achieved after almost 60 years. As a result of this failure, research in artificial intelligence stopped for more than a decade and was not revived until expert systems reawakened interest in the discipline.

Are we about to become immortal?

Arthur C. Clarke

In 1965 Arthur C. Clarke published a short story, titled Dial F for Frankenstein, later published in the collection The wind from the sun: stories of the space age. In that story Clarke proposed the following scenario:

When all global telephone systems are connected via geostationary satellites, the number of components of the global system will exceed those in the human brain. As such a system will have access to the information in all the computers connected to the network, we’ll have a very complex system with an extremely high amount of information. If conscience arises automatically from such a system, the computer network, connected by telephone, should be conscious and, being far superior to any human brain, will take control of the Earth.