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taryneast comments on Rationality Quotes: June 2011 - Less Wrong
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Jules Verne
Verne is a fairly strong example. He was reasonably popular in his time, so he didn't become famous only because of correlation-in-hindsight. We might ask whether he's an outlier or just the tail of the bell curve, but I strongly suspect that what actually happened was that later engineers were consciously influenced by his fictional designs, much like with William Gibson and the modern Internet.
This suggests that fiction-future correlation is largely determined by technical plausibility, which in turn suggests that we may be able to predict in advance which science-fiction predictions are most likely to come true. However, it occurs to me that we do a lot of this last already on this website (cryonics, uploading, nanotech, AI, computronium, ...) so I'm not sure if this quite counts as an "advance" strength of the theory.
(Other predicted technologies I don't remember seeing so much around here: Dyson spheres, space elevators, ... hm. Not that many, actually. Augmented reality and bionic implants are likely only transitional, but will probably have at least a few years of massive popularity at some point.)
Dyson spheres are unlikely. They use too much physical matter to create. Ringworlds are slightly more likely.
Space elevators are awesome though. We should do that :)
Still waiting on the ability to grow nanotubes long enough, though... we're getting there. We can build them long enough to turn into thread - but proper long-filament nanotubes are the only thing (that we know of so far) that will be strong enough for the elevator ribbon.
'Dyson sphere' is a very broad term encompassing several distinct types of design, including very light ones.
Space elevator is awesome, but there exist much more clever alternative designs that have substantially lower requirements for material strength, as well as geographical positioning - this is also a huge issue with the original space elevator design. It is a beautiful idea, but that doesn't mean we should cling to it and ignore all other proposals :)
Any links to the research? I'd be interested in having a look :)
I started assembling links but then realized that Wikipedia is a good starting point, it has provides a nice summary of all the most notable designs: tethers, bolas, orbital rings, pneumatic towers, the Lofstrom Loop... Each has its own drawbacks, but the important thing is that they do not require nonexistent (even if theoretically possible) materials.
Clever ways to get to space are often covered at Next Big Future, including the author's own nuclear cannon proposal - this one actually literally follows Jules Verne :-)
Cool, thanks :)
The most feasible iteration of a Dyson sphere would probably be the least dense, which would have great influence on the ways they could be used, and that makes them less likely because they are less commercially useful. Still, it could happen.
Ok - I hadn't seen any info on that kind. Yes I agree, it could happen - though I suspect that by the time we get to the stage where we could - we'll probably have invented something even cooler/useful :)
Actually, +1 for William Gibson!
Ok... and just to head off the replies... I know there's always likely to be one in such a large field, and he also got tons of stuff wrong (centre of the earth et al) but still... as an example of one author that consistently got a lot of stuff right (mainly through thoroughly understanding science and extrapolating from there) - he's brilliant.
Arthur C. Clarke?