SciFi

I’ve been reading some old science fiction recently, and it got me thinking about how the world is now versus how people in the 1950s-1970s thought it would be, and why many predictions have not met expectations.  It has also made me realize how far our knowledge of biology and physics has come (or not come, as the case may be).

Back when much of the “classic” science fiction (Asimov, Bradbury, Dick . . .) was written, we were in the Cold War, with nuclear attacks imminent.  We were also making huge strides in understanding fundamental physics, with new particles and elements created regularly.  It was the beginning of the study of biology at the molecular level, with the structure and function of DNA recently having been deduced.  Since then, little truly new knowledge in fundamental physics has been gained – the standard model, developed in the 1960s-70s has held firm, grand unification has not happened, and the main discovery has been that the universe is not only expanding but is actually accelerating in expansion.

According to the literature of the time, by now we should have colonized Mars and possibly extrasolar planets, thanks to improvements in rocket technology and abilities to overcome special relativistic limitations.  Such new physics has not emerged yet, so of course no new technology has emerged either.  This may also help explain why no alien species has yet visited us.  If new physics exists, it must be at higher energies (unattainable yet with our most powerful colliders), and any civilization would spend exorbitant amounts of energy in that discovery – and requiring even more energy to power any technology utilizing the new physics.  This, plus the great distances to travel, plus not knowing where you would want to go, makes alien encounters near impossible.

The other theme that appears in many works is that of robotics.  We should have walking, talking, nearly indistinguishable from humans robots either to serve us, decrease loneliness, or to uprise and try to kill us.  While raw computational power has increased (possibly more so than predicted), artificial intelligence has not.  We just recently had a chatbot “pass” the Turing test (though in many opinions, looking at some chat transcripts, the judges must be fools), but most judges were clearly not fooled.  Siri and the Jeopardy-playing Watson can understand key words but have not mastered true conversational speech.  We do not yet have self-driving cars, due to the difficulty of machine learning – the auto driver must learn certain things and discard others and deciding which information to discard is difficult.  The human brain does it automatically – and this just shows how far we are from knowing how the human brain processes and retains information.  The old science fiction writers thought we would have figured that out by now, and would have mood-altering and memory erasing/implanting technologies available.  Once we know how the human brain works, designing artificial ones would be simple – and we are slowly moving in that direction.  However, the artificial brains in science fiction always have imperfections, either intentional or not, so that one can distinguish real humans from the artificial ones, even if the artificial ones are biological in nature.  Much (though not all) old science fiction still retained the notion that humans are special in some way – they can have empathy, or feel love, or otherwise have emotions beyond simple biochemical processes in a way that artificial life can not, though there is very little scientific basis for that construct.

This brings us to the treatment of “life” in the past.  When I was in school, “life” was defined as something that uses energy, grows, reproduces.  Now, the definition of “life” is controversial, e.g. are self-replicating molecules “alive?”  Alien life in most old science fiction was also. Compatible with terrestrial life.  We shared the same biochemistry, could contract the same diseases, could even reproduce together in some stories.  Modern information shows that this is unlikely to be true.  Even if alien life is carbon based, there is almost no way that we would share the same biochemical processes, such a use of ATP as an energy currency, the same genetic code, the same amino acids, or even the same chirality of biomolecules.  All this would make an alien encounter useless – neither set of species could use the other set for food, reproduction, or anything besides raw chemical fuel – completely unlike what is portrayed in any alien encounter science fiction of which I am aware.  Part of the explanation may be that these realizations are recent – the next generation of writers may include such caveats.  It may also be that stories where aliens arrive, and just die from oxygen exposure, are not interesting.  But we do know better now, and criticisms should reflect that fact.

There may or may not be a place for 1960s-style, interplanetary, alien encounter science fiction these days.  I do not know. Certainly they can make for interesting fiction, and can delve into philosophical questions about what make us “human.”  Stories about robots might be more realistic but will need to be set farther in the future than anyone 50 years ago could predict.  Again, these stories can make for good, interesting fiction that can address some philosophical questions about life.  Continued reading and writing of fiction, combined with facts of modern science, will continue to improve our minds and provide interesting insights.