Chris Glock
We’ve all read a science fiction story and thought about how great it would be if some of these inventions existed. The genre of science fiction is full of unbelievable seemingly impossible inventions that would make everyday life so much easier. Sometimes these inventions actually turn out to be feasible; many of our gadgets today were once just part of someone’s imaginary future world in a story.
Part of the reason science fiction has so many fantastical inventions is because of the freedom of imagination the genre has. In the future in a different world anything is possible, allowing for authors to imagine endless amounts of devices and gizmos. With all of these inventions, though, it’s only a matter of time before some of them are implemented in real life, right? Well, some already have been. Older novels have been predicting our current technology for years.
Earbuds, a common part of everyday life. Earbuds are an invention used so often people rarely think about their complexity. Even though they had bulkier headphones, earbuds weren’t around in 1953 and wouldn’t be for roughly half a century. But when Ray Bradbury published his dystopian classic Fahrenheit 451, he was able to conceive such an invention. Though he did not go into great depth, the “little Seashells in her ears, the thimble radios tamped tight, and an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk” are unmistakably an idea of our modern earbuds.
Arthur C. Clarke predicted using geostationary satellites for telecommunications, namely television signals, 20 years before the first commercial satellite was launched. He mentioned this in the magazine Wireless World in 1945. At the time, geostationary satellites were already being widely talked about as potential for radio communications. A geostationary satellite is “a satellite in an equatorial circular orbit at a distance of approximately 42,164 km from the center of the Earth, i.e., approximately 35,787 km (22,237 miles) above mean sea level [at] a period equal to the Earth’s rotation on its axis (Sidereal Day=23h56m) and would remain geostationary over the same point on the Earth’s equator.”
Not impressed? Well, Jules Verne predicted the moon landing a full century before it happened. In his story From Earth to the Moon, he tells about the journey of three men completing the first manned space flight to the moon. While parts of it are pretty far off, such as the vessel being launched from a cannon, other details are uncannily close. For example in Verne’s novel the launch from Florida predates the Kennedy launch site by more than a century. While his science was obviously flawed, many of his calculations referring to outer space travel are surprisingly close.
While it isn’t “literature,” Star Trek predicted many inventions we have today. While ours isn’t quite as advanced, our modern 3-D printers are similar to the replicator used in Star Trek. And our iPads are almost identical to the PADD (Personal Access Display Device), and the virtual display used by the Dominion bears a striking resemblance to Google Glass.
With the growing number of science fiction works and increasing dependence upon technology, it’s inevitable some authors would have gotten some stuff right. They’ll probably continue to predict stuff correctly as well. And while there are many of these predictions that came true, there is an even greater amount that didn’t. However, we’re still progressing and may one day see teleportation or the hoverboards promised to us by Back to the Future.
Redeeming Pandora 