Conference noted::sf

    Sorry, but I haven't got the faintest idea what you point is.
    
    --- jerry

    ok what i'm trying to say is that i believe many sf theme's of the future,
    will tend to have one or two fields of science stronger than others.
    i think the majority of these theme push the the hard physical sciences
    while other would see fast progress in biological sciences,( alot
    of say genetic engineering for an example). have other noticed the
    same where the author would stress a field.
    pete

    Re .0, .2 (Pete):
    
    This can't be helped.  The folk who write these things are more
    savvy in one field than another.  For instance, Doc Smith, who was
    a chemist, had a lot of fun with some of his people's stuff -- e.g.,
    the pentavalent nitrogen (or whatever) explosives in _The Spacehounds
    of I.P.C._, the ferral paste in the Lensman stories, etc.  But in
    the first version of _Skylark of Space_ (well, it _was_ written
    around 1918), he had his heroes navigating through interstellar
    space doing their calculations with a ten-place table of logarithms
    (_Vega's Handbook_; I have a copy somewherer myself).  One who made
    an attempt to "push" all the sciences was, of all people, A. E.
    van Vogt.  When he collected his various novelettes into a book,
    _The Voyage of the Space Beagle_, he made his central character
    Elliot Grosvenor, a "Nexialist," whose profession was a synthesis
    of physical and "soft" sciences.
    
    But that was a rarity.
    
    Steve Kallis, Jr.

Article        33794
From: minsky@media-lab.media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky)
Newsgroups: sci.space
Subject: Re: People with zero science.
Date: 27 Jul 91 00:10:26 GMT
Sender: news@news.media.mit.edu (USENET News System)
Organization: MIT Media Laboratory
 
In article <1991Jul26.163221.12162@zoo.toronto.edu>
henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) writes: 

>In article <1991Jul26.105354.1902@unvax.union.edu>
>marchana@unvax.union.edu (Andrew Marchant-Shapiro) writes: 
 ...
>>.... After all, Asimov had his
>>(quoting a friend) "greasy paw prints" all over Star Trek I...
>
>Ho ho ho.  Your friend has no idea how Hollywood works.  Influence, and
>the ability to apply greasy paw prints, varies directly with the
>amount of money you get paid.  Writers and science advisers do not get
>paid very much.
 
As an unpaid advisor, I have to confirm Henry's view.  Gene
Roddenberry is a very old friend of mine, and one of my public heroes
because of being one of the very few people to succeed in presenting
thoughtful technological issues to the "masses".  Occansionally,
however I was moved to complain about the inattention to "real"
science.  "Say, Gene, while you've got their attention, how about a
policy to sneak into each episode, just one little fragment of correct
science."  He thought about it for a moment.  "Umm, it's a nice idea
but I think its just too risky." 
 
On the other side, David Gerrold (author of "When Harlie was One" and
"The Trouble with Tribbles," had a job at Universal writing the TV
series Buck Rogers.  He hated it because the science was unbelievably
bad, but the money was good.  One day the producer insisted on having
them land on a planet located between Mars and Earth.  Despite the
money, he blew up and quit. 
 
At the absolute other extreme, I was (as usual, unpaid) advising
Kubrick about 2001.  Stanley was keeping the character HAL under his
hat, but he showed me the computer mockup and asked, "will computers
be like this in 2001?"  "That's beautiful," I gasped, overcome with
admiration of the gorgeously colored and labelled modules of various
forms.  "I know that," he stated, "but I want your honest opinion, is
that what they're likely to look like?"  "I'm afraid not.  More likely
they'll be little blocks or something, maybe without any labels at
all, because the computer will be able to tell what they are by
sending signals into them."  "That's what I was afraid of," he said,
and went over to the art department.  The next I saw of it was the
plain black boxes that appear in the movie.  He must have scrapped
quite a few thousand pounds of art work in order to get as much as
possible to be technologically plausibly. 
 
For all that, I'm afraid I have to opine that Gene Roddenberry has
done the most for expanding the public interest in space, science, and
even AI.  His health isn't too good these days, and it would be nice
for a few scientists to send him a note of appreciation.  Paramount
studios in L.A. 

Some more ramblings about sciences in SF:

Some of this reflects what we might call the "academic pecking order" of the
sciences.  That is, we go from the most theoretical (physics, chemistry, ...)
to the softest ( ..., psychology, sociology), and the stories, while containing
elements of each, may reflect that caste system.  To a lesser extent, getting
people from "here" to "there" usually requires some sort of mechanism, which
tends to be "physical."  This does not mean, however, that _all_ stories
follow this rule (e.g., Stapledon's _The Star Maker_, Weinbaum's "The Adaptive
Ultimate, or Sturgeon's _The Dreaming Jewels_).

A second is the time of writing.  When, say, Jules Verne wrote his story, few of
his readers knew the details of the then-extant technology, so, for the story
to proceed, it had to be explained.  This, of course, culminated in the Hugo
Gernsback school of writing where stories were laced with footnotes and
citations.  Later, the "pure explanation" took a right-hand seat [in the U.S.]
to the story, but still was fairly obvious.  Whether it was something like
Heinlein's _Sixth Column_  or Leinster's _The Last Spaceship_, it seemed
essential to spell out in some detail just what made it possible for the char-
acters to do what they did.  Later stories muted the explanations, though
they were there, and some have become conventions (e.g., "hyperspace jumps" for
interstellar travel).

Steve Kallis, Jr.

    One thing I've noticed about science in SF is its absence in the
    foreground.  It's used to paint the background -- alien planets and
    organisms, nifty gadgets and techniques -- but there's seldom anyone in
    the story actually doing science that is crucial to the plot.
    
    I suppose that's natural enough.  It's rather hard to wring drama out
    of doing science, especially if the genre is mostly action-adventure.
    
    Also, and probably for the same reason, there's not much sense of
    science history.  The physics that lets you flit about the galaxy
    faster than light is almost certainly different from the physics we now
    use, just as our physics differs from that of 1900 or 1500.  But very
    rarely do we hear about how Schmedrick's Theory of Exponential
    Obscurity replaced the physics of Einstein and Bohr and opened the
    galaxy to us.
    
    And there's even less about paradigm shifts in sciences besides
    physics.  Oddly enough, I think the science with the most SFish history
    to it is sociology -- thanks largely to Asimov's "psychohistory" from
    the Foundation series, and its immitations.
    
    Now, realistically, I'd imagine that comparing the independently
    evolved life of several dozen planets would have electrifying effects
    on the science of biology.
    
    Earl Wajenberg

    A lot of Asimov's stories revolve around people actually 'doing'
    science. Hardly surprising, since Asimov himself was a real-life
    scientist at the time of writing much of his earlier stuff.
    
    "The Billiard Ball", for instance, is a short story revolving entirely
    around 'doing' science.
    
    
    Dave Hazel

    Another obvious example would be Benford's TIMESCAPE. Or James Hogan's
    THE GENESIS MACHINE.
    
    --- jerry

    Or Hogan's "Thrice Upon a Time."  These stories exist, but I think
    they're relatively rare.
    
    One piece of true scientific attitude that is a personal favorite of
    mine appears in E. E. Smith's "Skylark of Space."  Our heroes have
    discovered a new motive principle and apply it to a spaceship of their
    own invention.  They are startled to discover, when they put the pedal
    to the metal, that they are going faster than light.  "But the theory
    of relativity says you can't go faster than light," says one hero. 
    "Well, that was a nice theory while it lasted," says the other.
    
    Earl Wajenberg

Gee, does Earl's definition make "The Prize" (the movie
about Nobel wanna-be Paul Newman spying behind the iron curtain)
a science fiction film?
The point is interesting, but I think the historical definition
of science fiction has been that science is in the background, defining
the environment, not (necessarily) the protagonists.
Science fiction protagonists are, to some measure, the same type 
of protagonists that exist in other classes of fiction: police, 
storekeepers, warriors, sexual deviants, children, taxi drivers,
scuba divers, etc.

All in all, this is why I think we should be calling SF "speculative fiction"
and call out science as just another area of speculation.

- tom]

    Re .10:  I didn't offer any definitions.

Re .9 (Earl):

Well, Doc told me at the time he wrote _The Skylark of Space_ he hadn't figured
a means of legitimate FTL travel, so he said for the sake of the story, he'd
ignore the relativistic restriction.  He toldf me (and has written) that he
never considered the Sktylark stories science fiction.  That it bothered him
can be seen by reading his essay in _Of Worlds Beyond_ where he scoured the
scientific literature for a legitimate [read "not in opposition to current 
scientific understanding"] means of achieving FTL travel.  He achieved this with
the Bergenholm approach (neutralization of inertia).  The Lensman Series he
considered SF.

Re topic:

The topic was science in SF.  I think that a discussion on different fiction
types, which has been done elsewhere, isn't what's central: the scientific
discipline mix is what seems more nearly central to the discussion.

Steve Kallis, Jr.

re: .12

>The topic was science in SF.  I think that a discussion on different fiction
>types, which has been done elsewhere, isn't what's central: the scientific
>discipline mix is what seems more nearly central to the discussion.

Maybe a more germane discussion would be "what's a science?"  Is it "just" a
field that attempts to replicate results using an experimental methodology?
Sociology and psychology may be considered "sciences" in some quarters, but
i'm not sure that everyone would agree with that on a day when they were
being honest.  On the other hand, parapsychology, which deals with a much
more bounded set of phenomena is considered a "pseudo-science" by some folks.

In many cases it's not "science" that makes a science fiction story such but
speculations about the effects of something that resembles a technology in
its effects on social institutions (often military), whether there's really
anything in current science that would make the assumed technology practical
or not (see FTL).
								paul

Re .13 (Paul):

There are gradations in SF, ranging from the "hard" SF stories to those best
described as "Sci-Fi."  Are the Lord D'Arcy sdtories SF?  If you accept the
premise that thaumaturgy has a basis in reality, and that ways have been found
to convert it to a technical discipline, then the answeer is "yes"; otherwise,
"no."  An excellent example of a borderline story is the novelized version
of _The Witches of Karres_, where the acceptance or rejection of Klatha is the
prime determinant.

One of the things about "real" SF as opposed to phony is that the technical
or technological conditions are pivotal to the story.  The movie, _Outland_, for
example, while entertaining, was hardly even "soft" SF because the technology
wasn't pivotal.  It was, in fact, _High Noon_ set on a Jovian moon.  With a few 
tweaks, it could have been set in any time period (note: this isn't a criticism
of the film, but of the categorization).  

Having said that, back to the subject of science:  SF _tends_ to feature as part
of the story a "technology" or what have you that is based on things that are
not contrary to scientific fact as we know it (with reservations, which I'll
touch upon momentarily).  Thus, while it was not uncommon for someone in the 1930s
to write an SF story based on a panthallasic Venus (i.e., one where the whole
planet's a rather wet jungly place), one could hardly do so today [unless there
were some very involved way it could be explained, such as a parallel "universe,"
a terraformed Venus set up that way, a time warp, etc.; and it would _have_
to be explained].  Hypothecating something _outside_ of known science (e.g.,
a hyperspace continuum to enable ships to traverse interstellar distances in 
reasonable times) is okay: when the Asimov "robot" stories started, Isaac 
developed something called a "platinum-iridium sponge" to act as the robot's
CPU.  The fact that computers are evolving differently (perhaps "carbon-silicon
domains"?) doesn't invalidate the Asimovian convention.  If something is
developed that performs a function analogous (but not equivalent) to a hyperspace
jump, then that some different merchanism is operational wouldn't invalidate
the use of a convention in the earlier stories.

However, this is all a digression.  The base note was speculating about
the concentration on certain classes of science.  And that is a consequence
of which sciences are considered the most prestegious, I guess.  There have
been SF stories based on botany, psychology, immunology, mathematics, chemistry,
and chemistry, but by contrast with the physics-based stories, these are in
the minority.

Steve Kallis, Jr.

    Re .14
    
    Steve's remarks about accepting or rejecting a premise (klatha,
    hyperspace, what-have-you), followed by the remark about a few SF
    stories based on sciences other than physics reminds me of "Extracts
    from the Journal of the Therolinguistic League" by Ursula K. LeGuin.
    
    There, the science is linguistics, or maybe linguistics plus ethology. 
    There is no hint of any technology better than contemporary.  But the
    premise is that breakthroughs in these two relatively "soft" sciences
    have enabled people to translate animal languages.  The story consists
    of three "articles":  one about scent-gland writings found in an
    ant-hill, one calling for an expedition to Antarctica to study the
    gesture-speech of incubating Emperor penguins, and an editorial
    speculating on the possibility of "phytolinguistics" and
    "petrolinguistics."
    
    Earl Wajenberg

Re .15 (Earl):

Linguistics!  I almost forgot _The Languages of Pao_ by Jack Vance!

Steve Kallis, Jr.

    And then there's the case of Richard McKenna to consider. McKenna
    wrote about a dozen (excellent) short stories for the science fiction
    magazines in the late 50's and early 60's. About half of them are
    collected in the unfortunately out-of-print but definitely worth
    hunting for collection CASEY AGONISTES AND OTHER STORIES.
    
    Anyway, his major claim to fame was for his single novel, which by
    most working definitions, would not be considered science fiction:
    THE SAND PEBBLES. However, McKenna is reputed to have said that *he*
    considered the novel to fall very much within the field, and that
    the "science" he was extrapolating from was sociology.
    
    --- jerry

    The mention of linguistics reminds me of Samuel R. Delaney's
    Babel-17 -- I'd love to see this book turned into a film.
    
    					andrew

    Perhaps one reason why the science in SF is so bad and banal these
    days is that science itself is having less effect on our lives. 
    Think of the really revolutionary things that science has done to
    everyday life:
    
    - The annihilation of night through electric light.  
    - The annihilation of distance through the telephone, the
    railroad, and the airplane.
    - The annihilation of the foreign through radio and TV.
    - The annihilation of disease through public water
    supplies and antibiotics.

    The trouble is that all these changes happened long ago. Most
    happened before WW II (some before 1900), and even the revolutions
    of TV and jet planes were in place by the sixties.  Everyday life
    today is not all that different from what it was thirty years ago. 
    Don't believe me?  Watch the Dick Van Dyke show.  His 
    suburban house of 1962 isn't that different from what you would find
    in 1992.

    Technical progress just doesn't have the personal effect that
    it used to.  No wonder the old themes of SF: star travel, time
    travel, AI; are still clogging up the racks.  No wonder a
    fifties-style novel like Bujold's "The Vor Game" wins the Hugo. 
    If everyday life has been static, why should we expect more of SF?
    
    Unless, that is, you expect SF to connect with real science and
    be concerned about real extrapolation.  If so, you'll be
    disappointed by what's on the racks today.
    
    /jlr

    Re. .19:
    
    In what way do you mean that science is having less effect on our
    lives? Surely, it's science which produced most of the things which you
    list as revolutionising our lives?
    
    If science is making less of an appearance in literature and arts, I
    suspect that the reason is that the majority of people cannot relate to
    it. In order for any story or artform to mean anything to the average
    person, it has to be understandable to them. Very few writers can put
    science over in a way which makes it both understandable and
    entertaining.
    
    
    Dave Hazel

    I agree with .19.
    
    In MANY ways our lives are not very different from the 60's.  Jet
    planes, automobiles, etc.
    
    Sure science and technology are advancing, but the EFFECT of that
    advance on our lives has not been full exploited.
    
    Computers and biotech are still in their infancy.  In 20 years, our
    world will be vastly different, but revolutionary changes take time to
    permeat through society.  
    
    Let us just look at computers for one minute.  Right now the rage is
    'systems integration'.  Bascially, systems integration is tying
    togeather islands of computerization.  We have been automating existing
    proceedures.  Now we are beginning to see how we can coordinate these
    proceedures.  When we are able to look at how things can best be done
    with the technology we have, the effect will become more pervasive.
    
    Tony

    Re .20 re 19:
    
    I think .19's point was that, yes those things WERE revolutionary, but
    they're OLD.  There are few people left in the western world who
    remember a time without cars, radio, or electric light.
    
    Re 19 on stasis:
    
    I do see one theme growing in pace with a rising science -- biotech. 
    Cyberpunk is/was a fashion in SF exploiting that, and there will
    probably be others.  Cherryh's Cyteen trilogy comes to mind.
    
    Earl Wajenberg

	I for one would like to see more SF written closer to our
	own timeline.  There is so much interesting technology
	available that simply hasn't been put to much practical
	use yet for various reasons (political, funding, moral,,,).

	I'd like to see SF writers hypothesize some creative 
	applications of technology into near-future "plausible"
	stories, that for some of us might eventually become reality.
	"Coma" is a favorite example that comes to mind.

	Ahh, if I only had the time and skills, I write some myself!

	Mike H.
	

Re .23 (Mike):

A problem here is that the time-lag from writing to appearing in print is
fairly long.  For the better magazines, it's roughly 6 months. Something
too close, and the story might be passe by the time it hits print, unless
it's way out on the fringes.

Steve Kallis, Jr.

    Re .23, "Coma"
    
    Didn't Larry Niven write a series of detective stories centering on the
    crime of "organlegging"?  As I understand it, this is what the movie
    "Coma" was all about.
    
    Just to chill your marrow a bit (or whoever's marrow you're using at
    the moment), in the past week I've read of two different techniques for
    re-adjusting the immune system so that it recognizes a transplanted
    organ as "self" and need not be suppressed with drugs like Cyclosporin
    that leave the patient vulnerable to general infection.
    
    Earl Wajenberg

    
    Plenty of opportunity to chill the marrow with "biotech" advances.
    
    With the sometimes slow but general steady advances in medical science
    can anyone really doubt that in the future they will find a cure
    for AIDS, cancer, etc. I dont't. These treatments will probably involve 
    genetic manipulate/engineering of some sort, right ? How many people
    consider the flip side, however ? If we acquire that kind of knowledge
    and it's possible to cure deseases like AIDS/cancer, then how much
    farther is it to a world where unscrupulous people can CREATE diseases
    that kill one particular person, or worse yet a class or race of 
    people ?
    
    bruce

    re the Dick Van Dyke Show question (what's really changed in the last
    30 years):
    
    1) There's still a TV in the house- but now it's in color and has
    	a remote control.
    
    2) There's a VCR on the TV, and a rented R-rated movie in the VCR.
    
    3) There's a satellite dish in the backyard.  More programming than you 
    	can possibly absorb if all you did was watch TV.
    
    4) The shirts are permanent-press, and the carpet and couch upholstery 
    	are scotchgard-nonstain.  
    
    5) The pans in the kitchen are teflon-nonstick, and there's a microwave
    	oven on the counter.
    
    6) Richie has a computer in his bedroom.  He also has a modem.  Richie 
    	dials into a couple of BBSs every night, and sends messages to 
    	people around the world.
    
    7) Rob has a cellphone in his car.  So does Laura.
    
    8) Laura Petri pays her credit card bills via the touch-tone phone. 
    	The computer on the other end speaks back to her in relatively
    	normal English. 
    
    9) Rob's eyeglasses automatically turn into sunglasses on bright sunny
    	days.
    
    10) Rob's mom takes a bunch of different drugs for her heart condition. 	
        Most of those drugs were not even known in the laboratory ten years	
        ago.  The most recent of those drugs was designed, tested, and	
        evaluated on a supercomputer long before it was actually 	
        _synthesized_ in real atoms.  The production of the drug itself is
        done by genetically redesigning a bacterium to produce the drug as
        a waste byproduct.
    
    11) One of the kids in Richie's school has AIDS, but the parents
    	haven't let the news leak out.
    
    12) Two other kids at Richie's school sell crack.
    
    13) Laura and Rob decided not to go to the beach for a vacation this
    	year.  They're afraid of skin cancer.
    
    14) Laura and her next door neighbor talked today about how they
    	thought life would be so different in the 1990's.
    
    		-Bill

    I'm not sure if .27 was meant to show that the last 30 years HAVE had
    as much change as the previous 30, or that they HAVEN'T.  My own
    feeling is that there has been plenty of change, but technically much
    of it is mere refinement, taken from the perspective of everyday life.
    This kind of thing is very hard to quantify.
    
    Now we have whizzier TVs than in 1960.  In 1930, there were no TVs
    outside labs.  Ditto the clothes and glasses, etc.
    
    The computers are the best instance of change in .27.  They have
    increased in prevalence from '60 to '90 the way TV has from '30 to '60,
    and in '30 there were no computers, unless some of the relay machines
    go back that far.
    
    But the biggest shift has already happened, I think.  That's the shift
    from a world not flooded with gadgets to a world so flooded.  That
    shift took many lifetimes to happen and arguably took all history, but
    a great big chunk of it happened in the decades near 1900.  In that
    fuzzy chunk of time, all kinds of people came into possession of
    gadgets they could by no means make and generally did not fully
    understand, but could use.  And we get telegraphy, telephony, and radio
    toward the end of that period -- the beginning of the net we are now
    using.
    
    I'd say the "trentade" of 1880-1910 was even more changeful in terms of
    technology and daily life.
    
    Earl Wajenberg

If *exciting* changes haven't been happening there have certainly been those
that are frightening. Computer technology is allowing us to map individuals with
alarming acuracy (and sometimes, alarming inaccuracy). We are comming to a point
where the faster computers may make it quite possible to use this vast store of
data against us. 

What about ID bracelets that allow a prisoner to be kept at home and his movement
tracked? How far from that to all of us being marked and tracked by a great
government computer? 

My workstation has the disk and CPU power that was enough to run a business years
ago. I can "speak" to people all over the world in minutes via notes. That used
to be reserved to a very select few.

I can see a future where large groups of individuals with PCs are the guerilla
underground against the master government computers. Look how fast the net got
word of what was happening in Tianannen Square. 

Another thing to consider, we are used to so much change that a new idea has to
be really big to make waves anymore. liesl

This is a mild rodential orifice, but sure: the "revolutionary" technologcal
advances of the late 1800s and early 1900s are, well, nearly a century old.
However, even those revolutionary things weren't not that revolutionary at the
time of their inception.

For instance:

Before there was electric light, there was, in the larger cities, gas light.
A "revolutionary" improvement over the oil-based hurricane lanterns that it
replaced, just as they were an improvement over tallow candles ....

Before there was a VCR, there were movies.  Home projectors and films to run 
through them were commonplace by the mid-1920s.

There also was the phonograph, Edison's favorite invention.  It was followed by
the audio wire, then the audio taspe, then the cassette, and finally, the
CD disk.

And on and on.

Which is to say that technology advances steadily.  Read some of the 1930s 
speculations of life by the 1950s, or better, of the year 2000 or thereabouts,
and you may be astonished at the parallel universe you'll uncover.  One inter-
esting curiousity that way is an out-of-print book that might be found in the
Library of Congress or some of the larger university  libraries called _Edison's
Conquest of Mars_, by Garrett P. Serviss.  It was written as a kinda sequel
to WElls' _War of the Worlds_, where the world enlists the aid of Thomas Edison
to develop a bunch of electrical spaceships to do a counterattack on Mars.
Needless to say, the Wizard of Menlo Park delivers, and the narrator is one of
the army of folk that taske the battle to the Red Planet, with all kinds of
adventures along the way.

Technology has advanced, but it's not all that obvious.  Hypothecate a break-
through like cold fusion, and the impact on Joe and Jane Doe will probably be
lower light bills, in the short run.  That it might send people cheaply to the 
planets some 30 years down the road is immaterial to the Does.  What's important
that while breakthroughs help make things happen, they're also adapted to make
existing things better or cheaper.  Thus, there were portable radios before
there were transistors; they were just bigger and bulkier.

Extrapolating sciences for SF will go along with the genre; however, there has
increasingly been more impact on what the characters will do in the extrapolated
environment rather than on the advance/breakthrough of itself.

Steve Kallis, Jr.

    I think that what we are seeing is a manifestation of the, and I know I
    am going to spell this wrong, Kondratief longt wave.  Basically in the
    30's a Russian economist, when asked by Stalin to prove that the
    depressions then happening in the West were proof of the communist
    ideology, came up with a startling conclusion.  Technologic progress
    happens in waves.  
    
    .28 hit the nail on the head.  1990's technology is a refinement of
    1960's technology.  
    
    Theoretically, durring a long-wave, a core group of technologies is
    refined, or milked, for allits worth.  Industries are created, wealth
    is made, etc.
    
    At some point, and Kondratief said it was about every 55 years, the
    refinement process runs out of gas, you have a depression and a whole
    new slew of technologies takes root, leading to new concepts, new
    industries, new wealth.  
    
    Some believers of the Kondratief long wave theories have said that we
    have been in the long wave depression phase for the last 5 years or so.
    
    One core tennant of long wave economics is that their are a number of
    'business cycles'.  We tend to look at the economy and think that what
    we are seeing is the result of last quarter.  If you believe in the
    long wave (and it is just a theory), longer term influences can be
    hidden by short term decisions.  This could be why the mid-80's didn't
    look too bad.  It also implies that good short run policies (raising
    taxes in 1990 to cover the budget deficit) can be aborted because of
    the long term cycle.
    
    It is important to remember that in any system (and the economy is most
    certainly a system), there is a great deal of inertia and any attempted
    change to the state of the system will be masked by the reaction time
    to the change.
    
    Tony

	.25,.26

	Thats why our biggest military threat won't be from nuclear war
	but bio-warfare.  How do you defend against it?   How do you
	create the vaccine and distribute it before it wipes out its 
	target?  Stop putting money into Star Wars, lets work at 
	setting up a research program and distribution process to 
	develop generic or quickly convertible vaccines to defend 
	against ...Bio Wars.

	Mike H.

    If I had to guess at what kind of science would have the most
    effect of people's lives in the next couple of decades, I would
    say neurology.  We're learning a lot about the mechanics of the
    brain, and from there it's only a step to being able to control
    them.  A couple of drugs that might result:
    
        - Something that enhances or destroys memory.  The process that
        takes things from working to long-term memory is under heavy
        investigation.  If that is understood, it'll mean big changes to
        how we learn.  Or how we unlearn, if it turns out that the brain
        has finite capacity.  I wouldn't mind forgetting all those
        Saturday morning cartoons that I watched as a kid.
        
        - Something that enhances or destroys concentration.  Enhances
        for when you need it, destroys for those long bus trips.
        
        - True sleep drugs.  Anti-sleep drugs.
        
        - Dream control
        
        - Reflex formation control.  If you're a touch-typist, you know
        how there's some kind of low-level process that is actually
        moving your fingers.  Likewise if you play any kind of
        instrument.  What if that could be enhanced?
        
    Mind you, I wouldn't want to the first volunteer for the tests of
    these... 
    
    /jlr

    Re .29
    
    I am very intrigued by your idea that we are so jaded to technical
    advance that the advances have to be ever bigger to impress us. 
    Thanks.
    
    Earl Wajenberg

                      <<< Note 556.32 by LMOADM::HYATT >>>
>>>                            -< Andromina Strain ? >-

	Oops, so much for spelling. One of those brain defishantseas
	

re:.33

	Forget Rocky & Bullwinkle???   Not on yer life!

	But I agree, I don't think true AI (like ya read about) will 
	happen until we understand how the brain works and can manipulate 
	it.  Only then will we be able to mimic its actions.  How much of 
	what we do and act upon is unconscious thought - right down to
	our own "microcode", part of our reflexes and instincts?  Isn't 
	the basic ability of humans to reason genetic, not learned?

	Mike H.

RE: .30 (Steve Kallis, On technological progress)

>This is a mild rodential orifice, but sure: the "revolutionary" technologcal
>advances of the late 1800s and early 1900s are, well, nearly a century old.
>However, even those revolutionary things weren't not that revolutionary at the
>time of their inception.

[list of slow and steady progress deleted]

>Which is to say that technology advances steadily.  

I agree with your points, with one exception:  the telegraph.

The telegraph made it possible to communicate from New York to San Francisco,
or New York to London, in seconds rather than weeks.  While this may seem
like the kind of steady progress you were listing, I think that it is a
revolutionary change.

While it seems crude and clunky to people who watch CNN, the telegraph allowed
"real-time" conversations literally around the world.  At this point you 
could perform financial transactions, such as the following:

You get a cable: "Your ship arrived safely in London, and beat your 
		  competitor's ship into port"
You send back:   "Raise the price of the goods by $1.00/lb"

Meanwhile you borrow some money based on your ship having arrived safely,
secure that you are getting a good price on your goods (better than you
hoped!), and you make an obscene profit.  This kind of thing is simply 
*not possible* without real-time communication.

My point is that the incremental difference between the telegraph (low
bandwidth but real-time) and CNN (high bandwidth but no faster than the
telegraph) is evolutionary and small, whereas the incremental difference 
between the telegraph (taking seconds to send a message and get an answer 
back) and the clipper ships/pony express/railroad/whatever (taking weeks 
to send a message and get an answer back) is *R*evolutionary and large.

But after saying all that, I think that the telegraph was the last
fundamental invention.  Even the computer (as much as we all love it)
has not really demonstrated the kind of fundamental change in our
society that the telegraph and its successors did.  It may, but it
hasn't yet.

-- Ken Moreau

    Actually there were advanced non-electronic long distance
    communications systems in use prior to the introduction of the
    electric telegraph, the optical telegraph, or more commonly called the
    semaphore.
    
    Two inventors of improvements to this system Claude Chappe and George
    Murray overlap with the electric telegraph era.  The reason certain
    hills are called Telegraph Hill and Signal Hill are because optical not
    electric telegraphs were operated on them.  Improvements to optics were
    driven by these telegraphs, not astronomical research.
    
    In 1837 a semaphore connecting New York to New Orleans was considered,
    but by then Samuel FB Morse was on the scene.
    
    The ancients Greeks and Romans had similar systems, but civilization or
    more precisely the economic value of rapid communications was not
    needed in the West until late in the 18th century.  At the same time,
    carrier pigeons, unused for 14 centuries came back into use.

Article: 79427
Newsgroups: sci.space
From: swormley@thr1.cnde.iastate.edu (Sam Wormley)
Subject: Re: Travelling to Alpha Centauri
Sender: news@news.iastate.edu (USENET News System)
Organization: Center for Nondestructive Evaluation
Date: Fri, 10 Dec 1993 01:35:19 GMT
 
      THE UNIVERSE AND EYE
      Text by Timothy Ferris, Illustrations by Ingram Pinn, Forward by John 
       Gribbin
      Cronical Books, San Francisco  1993
      Q126.F47  1993  500--dc20  92-25619  CIP
      ISBN 0-8118-0300-7
 
      The Universe and Eye is a delightful book suitable for young readers as
      well as old. Timothy Ferris has penned a number of one- and two-page
      essays, each illustrated by an original drawing by Ingram Pinn. The
      subject matter ranges from nanotechnology to the environment to
      inflation and the big bang. Philip Morrison (book reviewer for
      Scientific American) recently praised The Universe and Eye on NPR's Talk
      of the Nation, Science Friday. This reviewer couldn't agree more. Here
      are a couple of samples:
 
      Interstellar Travel: "Interstellar travel is routine in the pages of
      science fiction tales, but most of the scientists and engineers who have
      studied the question are pessimistic about the prospect of flying to the
      stars. The cost in propellant, they note, might well exceed the total
      current energy output of the industrialized world. A starship at speed
      would have have to deflect or evade every tiny interstellar dust grain,
      each of which would pack the wallop of a cannon ball. These and many
      other high hurdles lie between here and a real-world realization of Star
      Trek.
 
      "Still, one wonders. A haunting invitation is contained in the special
      theory of relativity, which shows that the passage of time aboard a
      starship moving at nearly the velocity of light would be so much slower
      than here on Earth that astronauts could travel vast distances in
      manageable periods. If their ship could maintain a steady acceleration
      that reproduced the force of Earth's gravity, they could sail all the
      way to the Andromeda galaxy in less than thirty years of on-board time.
      But they could never return [to their own spacetime]. By the time they
      landed in Andromeda, two million years would have expired back home".
 
      Time Travel: "Theorists tilling the fertile gardens of Albert Einstein's
      general theory of relativity tell us that time travel may indeed be
      possible -- not out here in the ordinary world, where journeys into the
      past would violate fundamental laws of science and logic, but in the
      netherworld that lurks within black holes. There, on the slopes of
      steeply curving space, one might find "spacetime loops" spun in such a
      fashion that an astronaut who dove into one would emerge in the past.
      "The American physicist J. Richard Gott III, working with a conjecture
      first published by Kip Thorne, described such a scenario. "If you fell
      into a black hole you'd look for a closed time-like curve, because
      entering one would forestall your doom," Gott remarked. "If you made
      your way to an entrance you'd see, say, eleven copies of yourself. The
      first version of yourself might say, 'I've been around once,' the
      second, 'I've been around twice,' and so on. You plunge into the loop,
      fly around it, and return to see yourself entering the black hole.
      Wanting to be helpful, you call out, 'I've been around once.' You're now
      the first image of yourself that you saw when you entered. After another
      trip, again encountering your original self, you call 'I've been around
      twice.' And so on, until, after eleven times around, you leave the loop,
      only to be killed a short time later when you crash into the singularity
      at the center of the black hole."
 
                                                             -S. Wormley

Article: 79439
Newsgroups: sci.space
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Travelling to Alpha Centauri
Date: Fri, 10 Dec 1993 03:14:23 GMT
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
 
In article <CHspqv.A3v@news.iastate.edu>
swormley@thr1.cnde.iastate.edu (Sam Wormley) writes: 

>    Interstellar Travel: "Interstellar travel is routine in the pages of
>    science fiction tales, but most of the scientists and engineers who have
>    studied the question are pessimistic about the prospect of flying to the
>    stars. The cost in propellant, they note, might well exceed the total
>    current energy output of the industrialized world. A starship at speed
>    would have have to deflect or evade every tiny interstellar dust grain,
>    each of which would pack the wallop of a cannon ball. These and many
>    other high hurdles lie between here and a real-world realization of Star
>    Trek.
 
Ferris has spent too much time listening to Carl Sagan and not enough
reading JBIS.  Most of the problems he alludes to have solutions, things 
we can confidently expect to build within a century, if not today. 
 
There are people -- Sagan seems to be one of them -- who apparently
*want* to believe that interstellar travel is impossible.  The facts
no longer support this belief, as Enrico Fermi realized nearly half a
century ago. 
 
The energy problem is the fundamental one.  It's indeed serious... but
plot the amount of energy available to mankind versus time and you find 
there is reason for optimism.  Compare the output of one large power 
plant today to that of the industrialized world a hundred years ago. 
 
Bear in mind that there are people alive today who remember a time
when man could not fly, radio did not exist, "antibiotic" was not a
word, and most of the population were, of necessity, farmers.  The
world has changed beyond recognition in one lifetime.  We can
confidently speak of what is possible today, somewhat less confidently
of what will be possible twenty years from now... but claims that
something will remain impossible a century or a millennium from now
are meaningless blather. 
-- 
Belief is no substitute                 | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
for arithmetic.                         |  henry@zoo.toronto.edu  utzoo!henry