The ideas and imaginations of going to and building another human, animal, and plant-sustained civilization on a New Earth are no longer fantasies of science-fiction. These are not just achievable, they are now
It’s not the easiest question to answer when “sci-fi elements” permeate so many of the biggest blockbusters: thought-provoking genre concepts flattened into one-size-fits-all franchise fodder that make countless titles “feel” and, on occasion, even look the same. Yes, science fiction is...
Insurrection, Resurrection and Conflagration deal with a variety of science fiction themes, artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, advanced technology, alien life, and space travel but those are not the themes that most interest me (though I do love an awesome spaceship). What most captivates...
The lack of a theory hampers the Earthside search for extraterrestrial intelligence (ESETI) even more than it hampers ASETI. Here a widely accepted narrative stands in the place of a testable hypothesis. The following comments from respected sources enunciate thisSpaceship Narrative. ‘The energy r...
for the general science fiction fan, it suffers in comparison to the first because it mostly focuses on the period in which Asimov wrote very little SF, turning instead to writing mostly non-fiction (and mysteries). However, for the Asimov fan, this may be as important and it’s still in...
The illustration of the state of weightlessness reached in a single point of gravitational equilibrium. From Jules Verne (1865) science fiction novelFrom the Earth to the Moon Full size image In a certain similarity, those of our students today who explain the weightlessness of astronauts in satel...
5 So the film is fiction without the science. The same could be said of the 1986 film Aliens. In this film the crew saunter around the spaceship as if they were at home on earth – whereas they should be floating, in a gravity-free environment. The producers of Aliens would fail a ...
The Kardashev scale [66] was widely taken up in the science and science fiction communities. It presumed that because solar energy was limitless, so too could the growth of human economies. At the same time, other authors had a more optimistic outlook for the future. Barbara Ward [67] ...
If you the author make your standard spacecraft propulsion system powerful enough to reduce interplanetary travel times to a few weeks, you suddenly have to deal with the fact that any old tramp freighter spaceship can vaporize Texas. The classic science fiction example is the "Transporter" from...
U.S. economist Kenneth Boulding publishes The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth, the first explicit application of the law of conservation of matter to describe the physical limits to economic growth. 1971 IPAT Equation U.S. environmental scientists John Holdren and Paul Ehrlich described the...