Creating The World Of Tomorrow: Putting the SF into Sci-Fi pt 3
In part one, I looked at techniques for extrapolating from the world of today into a future world where technology has changed. These techniques have served me well in both fiction writing and developing sci-fi oriented game settings. In the second part, I examined some core technologies that everyone engaged in anything sci-fi really needs to make uniquely their own. In this third and final part of the series, I’m going to study the ways in which the technologies developed in the previous parts would actually shape the world around the characters, whether they be protagonists in a fictional work or PCs in a roleplaying game. Which is rather tricky to do in the abstract, but let’s get started and see how we get on…
The Human impact
The most immediate type of effect to look for and document – especially given that we started from a domestic technology foundation in part 1 – is on the day-to-day lives of the ordinary citizen. What does it enable people to do that they couldn’t do before? How does it impact the daily routine? What irritations and annoyances does the technology do away with?
Sometimes, where a new technology makes a daily event more efficient – faster and/or cheaper – the old technology forms the basis of a luxury or recreational activity. The less-efficient technology becomes associated with leisure. This possibility has to be assessed in terms of the societal imperatives of the culture; modern Australian society, for example, seems built around the philosophy of “work hard, play harder”, which means that if Star Trek’s Sonic Showers were invented today, “old-time” water showers would not necessarily become routinely associated with bathing in luxury and at leisure. On the other hand, the current bathing style – luxury bathtubs – might well be supplanted, the pace of a water shower updating the concept of what luxury consists of to something more appropriate to that “work hard, play harder” philosophy.
But the first flush of human impacts are only going to be the beginning of this story, the most direct impacts. The more profound consequences at the human level will be reflections of more substantial effects.
The Social impact
What are the impacts on society? What will be the impact on employment? What types of job will be made redundant, what new types of job will be created, and what existing jobs will be transformed? What will happen to pay scales?
For example, viewed in the broadest sense, the work of a clerk hasn’t changed since the 18th century. It’s still about creating, checking, maintaining, and filing documents. But when you look at the details, the job has changed several times over the last 160 years or so. Typewriters and biros replaced quills and fountain pens, the secretarial functions were split off into their own profession. That didn’t mean they could take it easy, though; changes to society resulted in a substantial increase in the amount of paperwork, and paperwork that was once done by other clerks shifted from service providers to customers. There was a time, for example, when bank clerks took care of money-counting and filling out of records; it was somewhere in the mid-20th century that standard account numbers and deposit slips that bank customers were expected to fill out were introduced. The early 20th century brought in faster, mechanized transportation systems and the telephone, enabling tasks that would once have been handled by letter or by an extended trip to be handled immediately and remotely. Fax technology came and went. Electronic document production and exchange, and scanning, and email; modems and internet banking. One of my duties at a job that I held in the 90s was to fire up the state-of-the-art 16 baud modem and query the bank account balances every morning to track the clearance of checks and verify that payments had been received. It took 10-15 minutes – just to get four account balances. Now throw in mobile phones with cameras, and the ability to edit and retouch images, and the job of some clerks, in fine detail, has changed again.
Vice
Does the new technology lend itself to any existing vices? Does its proper use lend itself to the creation of new vices? What are the symptoms of indulging, and overindulging, in those vices? Are there any social strata restrictions on the capacity to employ the technology as a vice? How does society react to this new vice, and what are the consequences of those reactions?
Abuse & Legal
So far we have only considered the social impacts of the technology when it is used properly. If there is one thing that’s for certain, it is that if there is a way to abuse the technology for a profit, people will find it. But there’s more to think about: Does the use of the technology open up new avenues for fraud or deception? Does it facilitate any existing criminal behavior? Are there consequences for the detection, investigation, or prosecution of crime? Humans are fallible – what happens when the technology is misused through ignorance?
Medical
Are there any new diseases that arrive as a consequence of the technology? Are there any impacts on the treatment of existing diseases? Is there anything that goes from the incurable to the curable or at least treatable as a consequence?
Secondary Flow-on effects
What are the flow-on effects from these primary social effects? The more connected society becomes, the greater the spillover impact on other occupations. Again speaking of clerks, every other occupation in modern society has dealings with them. Builders order materials, dealing with clerks; who dispatch deliveries, dealing with the clerks at the delivery company or arm of the company. The builder deals with bank clerks, council clerks, architects and their clerks, and on and on and on. Change the way those clerks deal with the paperwork that comes with their jobs and you change the way all these other occupations interact with the clerks and therefore with each other.
Consider another technology from Star Trek: they hardly ever put things in writing, they voice-record them. That requires an efficient means of storing them (or massive increases in storage capacity), for one thing. One means of achieving that is to take a leaf from an older technology, MIDI-based music. With Midi, the sounds of each instrument are pre-recorded note by note, and the music consists of a series of instructions to turn a particular note from a particular instrument on and off at the right time, just like a piano player roll. If you could find a standard way of “recording” the voice and pronunciation patterns of an individual with recording every word, you could then employ speech-to-text software to compress lots of speech into quite a small package. Instead of recording the voice speaking the entire log entry, you gather and encode a sample of the voice and use that to render the text.
The advantage of this approach is that text is searchable and can be cross-referenced quickly and automatically, so that you can find an entry that is relevant to a particular subject quickly and easily. The alternative – having the computer system actually understand the language and what it is communicating – requires a fully-functional artificial intelligence, and that’s a lot harder to get right. It’s quite clear from their interactions with their shipboard computers that the systems of The Next Generation are not AIs, and yet they can search log entries as required. This sort of encoding technique mandates the way the people in Star Trek actually use their technology.
If people are more used to having to organize their thoughts and speech in order to communicate with the strictly-logical machines that they use, that should also be reflected in greater efficiency in their communications with each other. Casual conversations aside, dialogue should become more purposeful and directed at communicating quickly and concisely. In modern times, we tend to associate those characteristics with militaristic communications – minimal superfluity, with precision and purpose to every statement.
Is there a difference in the affordability of the technology? Is there a difference in the way that large businesses and small businesses employ it? Are there any benefits or consequences that only manifest when considering economies of scale?
Tertiary Flow-On Effects
Having identified any direct social impacts as a consequence of the technology, and then pursued and identified the consequences of those impacts, it’s time to think a little about the effect that those consequences and the reactions to them will have. Some of these will be immediate, others will manifest as new social trends that will accumulate over time and reshape the society, sometimes in unexpected ways.
It used to be considered that technology would reduce the size of the working week, and for a while, that seemed to be true. Many jobs are far easier, physically, than they used to be. But technology has now begun to connect the worker with the workplace with far greater facility and ease, and the emerging consequence of that has been a blurring of the dividing lines between work and non-work time frames. More and more, people are expected to be on-call.
We’re only starting to see the impacts that this is going to have on 21st-century society. Rising stress levels and attendant health issues, the beginnings of efforts by employers to aid the employee in dealing with these issues, and a greater need to get completely away from it all when on vacations – these are just the tip of the iceberg. The more people are required to subordinate the private lives to the demands of their occupation, the more people will demand that their occupation make room for those private lives, and the more people will demand that their occupation will be something that they genuinely enjoy doing. The farther removed from those ideals that a job becomes, the greater the compensatory factors that employers will have to employ in order to recruit good staff. Stock options, workplace gymnasiums, recreational facilities, and childcare places – these are just the beginning. Some of the family-oriented activities that were a hallmark of the mid-20th century are almost certain to make a comeback – employee picnics and the like, employee sporting leagues, etc. The workplace will need to become a little more like a home, and will need to become a little more flexible than the clock-in, clock-out structures of the past. It seems only a matter of time before employers begin using their financial resources to underwrite insurance and home loans (or at least contributions to such), perhaps pegging the interest rate to on-the-job employee performance evaluations.
The implication is that it will become harder and harder to recruit people for the jobs that no-one wants. As early as the 1970s, it began to become more difficult to hire sanitation officers, for example. Being a garbage-man is a difficult, dirty, and increasingly undesirable job – but it’s also an increasingly complex and essential one. The only solution: to improve conditions enough to counterbalance the negative impacts. We have not yet reached the point of garbage men receiving fully-funded subsidized higher education through their employers (at least to the best of my knowledge), but that may eventually have to happen – work for 8 years as a Garbo and receive a fully-funded Master’s at the end of it that qualifies you for a mid-level position elsewhere. This is a strategy that the military have had to employ to an increasing degree in order to recruit the best, and I suspect that they are simply leading the way where others will follow. Labor shortages in specific fields will be ongoing and recurring problem for most of the 21st century. Conditions will be improved in one, only to drain recruits from another; five or ten years later, there will be a new crisis in employment.
At the same time, we have an expectation of increased staff turnover being built into the social system. There are very few places indeed where it can be considered normal to have the same employer throughout one’s working life. Most employees no longer progress through vertical promotion within a company, instead taking a sideways-and-upwards step to another employer, and only staying there until the next opportunity comes along. There was a time when each company had its own way of doing things, and this diversity left some better-placed than others to cope with any change in economic or social circumstances, either positive or negative. This cross-migration of employees means that techniques are passed from corporate entity to corporate entity, the good ones becoming general and standardized, while the bad ones get replaced. As a result, economic cycles can tend to be deeper and sharper, and affecting a broader segment of the economy. Boom-to-bust cycles used to take decades; these days, they seem to take months. Two or three poor recoveries in succession can have a compound effect. There’s still a bust for every boom, but sometimes the two are disproportionate.
Society In A Nutshell
Ultimately, society is about human interactions and the regulation of those interactions. It comprises everything from social graces to employment opportunities. Ideally, one would be able to summarize the society that is being postulated as a consequence of the march of progress and technology. The better you can generalize the patterns of the society that results from your postulated technological changes, the better you are able to apply that generality to other areas and situations within that society that you may not have considered at the time. This subtracts from the need to have everything worked out in advance and shifts the effort to an as-needed case-by-case basis.
The Economic impact
You can’t have social impacts without these being reflected in an economic impact, so we’ve already touched lightly on this subject in a number of ways. Now it’s time to look more deeply.
Does the technology rely on some key piece of infrastructure? Does it rely on some exotic material? Does it produce anything as a by-product for which a use can be found? Are there hidden costs to the technology, such as environmental factors? Does the technology impact on personal transportation, centralizing or decentralizing populations? Does it make certain types of land more valuable by overcoming one of the existing negative factors associated with that terrain? Does the technology reduce the need for high-density accommodations, or does it encourage denser population clusters?
The more fundamental the technology, the greater the economic impact of the valuation of the commodities apon which the technology is based. We may one day do away with the internal combustion petroleum engine, either through necessity, evolving social patterns, or technological advance – but that doesn’t mean that some new commodity won’t immediately become the critical economic factor in place of oil.
Which sectors of the economy gain from the technology? Which shrink? What are the requirements? What are the consequences? Which existing businesses will oppose the technology, and what will the reactions be? How will the laws change, and what will be the unanticipated consequences?
Consider, for example, file sharing technology and all the kerfuffle that this has caused over the last 15 years or so. This technology led to redefinitions of what you legally could “own” and what you could do with what you “owned”. It reshaped the music industry in ways that are still being explored and analyzed. Apple are now one of, if not THE, biggest consumer electronics companies on the planet. Would the iPhone and everything that’s come with it exist if iTunes had not been such a rousing success? The company was reportedly in serious financial trouble just before then. ITunes was followed by the iPod and then the iPad and then the iPhone – and here we are.
Or we might turn a speculative eye apon the rich resources of our solar system. There are enough hydrocarbons in the atmosphere of Jupiter to fuel society at current usage rates of petroleum for millions of years. What would be involved in creating the technological infrastructure to solve the oil shortage forever, or close to it? We would need some means of obtaining the raw fuel against the steep gravity well of a gas giant. We would need some means of converting that raw fuel into concentrated form on an industrial scale. We would need some means of transporting the resulting fuel to earth on a routine, reliable, and (once again) industrial scale. We would need a way to get it down from earth orbit and distributing the concentrated fuel to the refineries that complete the refining process. Skyhook technology holds the promise of solving both the orbital problems, though the proximity of the asteroid belt and the relatively close-to-the-surface orbit of Jupiter’s Moons pose additional complications. The concentration problem requires at least one significant increase in industrial petro-chemistry and another one because we are talking about microgravity or “zero-G” industrialization. We would need the wherewithal to construct enough ships to establish a daily shipping cycle, with redundancies because accidents will happen when you have to cross the asteroid belt every day with a BIG spacecraft. A breakthrough in space travel is needed in order to ensure that the transportation of large masses of concentrated fuel is economical. New maintenance and repair technologies will probably be needed, and these also have to work in zero-G. We need the capacity to manage about 400 spacecraft in flight at a time – a “space traffic control system” analogous to existing air traffic control systems. We need breakthroughs in crew psychology and entertainment formats and health related to sustained zero-G, though we have a fair start on these. Of course, it’s one thing to build a skyhook that’s capable of getting a spacecraft weighing perhaps 100 tons into orbit and quite another to build one capable of handling a billion tons of explosive cargo on a daily basis. There are at least half-a-dozen major breakthroughs on that list – but none of them are completely out of reach. Perhaps, 50 years from now, such technology might be possible, and the price of petroleum will have risen enough to make the plan economically viable.
Fifty years of trending toward alternate fuels probably means that the problem will no longer be relevant by the time it can be solved. Or will it? A huge part of our chemicals industry, which produces everything from plastics to lipstick to pharmaceuticals, derives raw components from the petroleum industry – and at the moment, there is no substitute. We might not need the oil for petroleum, but we might still need it. But even if we assume that we don’t, simply having solved all those problems will have dramatic consequences – can anyone seriously suggest otherwise? The ability to reliably orbit satellites for a hundredth the current cost of doing so alone will reshape the world we live in. Cheaper, faster, more reliable drive systems will have made space flight routine, and potentially have paved the way for a manned mission to a neighboring star. Such a drive system might entail new ways of shifting energy around – which would have its own flow-one effects for a modern society.
Once you have a theory about what makes your future-tech go, you can start to assess the infrastructure needs that are required to make that technology widespread and commonplace. Those requirements cannot come into existence without economic impact.
Let me paint one more hypothetical scenario for your consideration before moving on. Biogenetic research in the western world is largely hamstrung by ethical and safety considerations, and – to my mind – rightfully so. It follows that in some countries where research is not constrained in this manner will probably produce results faster. The result is likely to pose a new ethical dilemma for the rest of the world: is it ethical to utilize a safe and practical treatment for a disease that has been developed by unethical means? We have faced this problem before, in considering what to do with the vast amount of experimental data obtained by the Nazi “Scientists” of the third Reich in the course of barbaric experimentation on unwilling subjects, but for the most part were able to set it to one side because no new medical treatments of value resulted from the perversions of science that were practiced. The problem could safely be ignored until it went away, in other words. In the course of doing so, we squandered the opportunity to establish ethical principles that could guide us when this more difficult problem manifests itself. It will happen, almost certainly. If we, as a society, stick to our moral high ground, the treatment will become a black market commodity available only to those with wealth and/or power. If we do not, are we not condoning the research because of its benefits? Could it not be rationalized that we are ensuring that some good came out of the unethical research? Is it ethical to withhold a viable treatment because of the process of its discovery and development? I would expect this issue to be at least as socially and politically divisive as the development and legalization of safe birth control in the 20th century – something that we are still arguing about, 40 years after the Roe v. Wade decision. What if the effect is not a cure for disease, but an anagathic or Longevity Treatment? More horrifying still, what if the treatment cannot be produced artificially, but requires that another person’s life be sacrificed to produce the serum – or worse yet, what if the process of extracting the serum doesn’t kill the subject but simply leaves them mindless or insane? We’re well and truly into a modern take on the vampiric theme here – would we view the prolonged life as being “stolen” from the victims?
The Political impact
When you’re talking social effects and economic effects, they can’t fail but to manifest as a political impact. But there are all sorts of other technologies that could have direct political impact as well as these secondary ones. If minds can be preserved by downloading them into a computer, do those minds still have the right to vote? If someone develops a soft drink that makes a hard life seem more tolerable, but which instills a level of suggestibility, does that impact the right to vote? Can nanotechnology rewire a specific portion of the brain to make one less empathic (and hence, less prone to liberalism) – and if so, what would be done about it?
Can technology change the way we vote? Can it change When? Might we end up in a future in which computerized voting makes it possible to vote for or against specific policies, making the people we elect closer to general managers – free to use their own judgment when an emergency or a new situation crops up, but in general elected to implement the specific will of the people? Perhaps political parties might offer a choice – “If you elect us, you can either have (a) a tax reduction or (b) increased spending on “X” – please indicate your demand below”. Perhaps elections would become more like internet shopping: “I’ll pay for policy A costing $B for the next three years, but I don’t think we can afford policy C” with the funding pie split amongst the different policies according to the popular vote?
Politics is about decision-making, and contentious social issues, and the services provided by the government, and about the definition of citizenship. A lot of technologies can impact on one or more of those issues.
The Politics of Technology
There is also the other side of the coin: Decision Making and Social Issues can decide questions about what technological advances are distributed to the population and how, and hence can themselves shape the impact of those technologies. Politics is supposed to be about enacting the will of the people, but all too often it is actually about imposing the will of a vested interest in opposition to the best interests of the people. If enough people get burned by those decisions, there may be a change of government, and hence a change of policy. If the people are uncertain whether a change of government will actually result in what they regard as a desirable policy shift, you get frustration and rebellion and counter-cultures, some of which are likely to turn violent – domestic terrorism is the ultimate consequence of a government that is viewed (rightly or wrongly) by extremists as being nonresponsive to the demands of the populace. Regulation drives and produces additional social impacts that also have to be counted amongst the consequences of a technology.
The Military impact
Can a new technology be used as a weapon? Can it be used to improve an existing weapon, for example making it more mobile? Can it be used to create an improved defense against existing weapons? Can it be used to gather intelligence, or improve the analysis of the technology?
Whenever I consider this subject, I am reminded of a subplot within Red Storm Rising by Tom Clancy. The Russians are using camouflaged positions to conceal where their units are. Satellites and recon flights show convoys when they are on the road but not where they are going to or from, and its vital for the Americans to locate the targets they need to strike. Someone gets the bright idea of recording the recon results on their VCR and playing it back at 2x or maybe 5x speed, which enables patterns to be discerned that were occurring too slowly to be visible. The VCR thus became an essential tool of military intelligence and analysis.
Militaries generally have the funding to pump into any research with the potential to yield a military dividend. Sometimes that dividend fails to materialize but the research turns out to have non-military applications. Sometimes, technology developed for non-military applications will transform the military. Human beings have the same basic physical needs whether the individual is part of the military or not; it follows that developments in food technology or water purification may have spin-off impacts on military capabilities. Even something as simple as a more efficient engine may yield military applications in the distribution of supplies.
Consider the impact of a Star Trek -style teleporter on the capacity to lay a minefield or bomb a target from a remote location – without exposing a delivery vehicle (minelayer or bomber) to the enemy forces, never mind the obvious capabilities for insertion of combatants into a forward area without having to fight your way to it.
Heck, even a more efficient technology for administration and clerical work can have military applications and implications.
Targets
Another subject to consider: does the technology bring about a reassessment of military targets? Does it decentralize something that used to present the military with a nice, juicy, central target? Does it create a new category of military target? Does the technology create a new cause for war?
The more closely-related a technology is to the creation of raw materials, the broader the impact, and the greater the significance in a military targets sense. Consider for example all the technologies that aluminum has been involved in – from aircraft on – since the Hall process made it affordable in 1886, or all the things that Carbon Fibre is used for, which I used as an example in Part 1 of this series. In any serious modern war, carbon-fibre manufacturing facilities would be key aerospace industrial facilities and therefore military targets.
The Global impact
There aren’t many technologies that will have a direct global impact; most often, these effects will be secondary in nature, the consequences of a change in some other field of assessment. But there are a few that potentially could have direct impacts. Weather control comes to mind. New manufacturing processes. Green technologies, and technologies that permit industries to run ‘cleaner’. Global infrared imaging by satellite as a means of monitoring global warming.
But there would also be global impacts from Political and Military considerations. Consider the global impact of the oil industry, or the space race. Or the impact of global satellite imaging. Or of modern communications technologies. ’nuff said.
This Begets That
Wars seem to trigger massive strides forward in technology, for three reasons:
- Funding becomes available that would otherwise not be forthcoming. Scientists that might otherwise be engaged in non-military research tend to get recruited into high-priority military projects. Victory is priceless, and governments spend whatever is necessary to achieve it, because defeat is a worse fate. Every other consideration is regarded as secondary. In peacetime, this enabling desperation does not apply to anything approaching the same standard; peacetime governments have other priorities. The same is also true to some extent of aggressors in military encounters; they lack the desperation to throw absolutely everything into the quest for survival. Does that mean that the aggressors will always lose a protracted modern war? Not necessarily, but given parity in resources and initial capabilities, it begins to look a lot more likely.
- Restrictions on research are relaxed. Red tape tends to get bulldozed out of the way. The greater the desperation, the greater this effect.
- Research in wartime tends to be focused into areas that seem most promising of short-term success. Actually, I must correct myself; the priority is the probability of success in a given timeframe multiplied by the magnitude of the military advantage that will be achieved by such a success. Research that will take longer, or be less likely to succeed quickly, may still get accelerated funding and regulatory assistance if the eventual benefits are promising enough, while even research that seems certain to be of short-term benefit may be ignored if the scale of those benefits is trivial enough.
The combination of these three factors – focus, regulatory concessions, and resources – produces a dramatic rate of progress.
And yet, this is a relatively inefficient approach to research. It succeeds by throwing resources at the problem, but the priority is to get answers quickly regardless of any increase in cost that might result. What’s more, the results tend to focus on one or two applications of immediate military value; significant outcomes that do not contribute to the military objectives tend to get shunted aside. The research may be more focused, but it is also more narrow-minded.
In terms of overall impact and technological change, peacetime research usually yields more substantial change for a fraction of the cost; it just takes longer. There is a greater willingness on the part of scientists to spend time on pure research and to follow interesting sidelines. The biggest impacts are frequently felt immediately after a conflict, when all those sidelines that were ignored in favor of the military objectives begin to be explored; there is a flow-on effect from the kick-start given by the military research; the military applications don’t change the world half as much as the subsequent non-military applications of the technology developed for military purposes.
Ironically, the more R&D becomes commercialized, the more it comes to resemble the militaristic model, with the substitution of profitable technology replacing the victory imperative. Arguably, the most radical advances in modern times have not derived from this type of research, but have instead resulted from outside research being harnessed by corporate entities. The focus on the profit factor yields improvements in existing products, but rarely results in completely unexpected products. To their credit, many of the largest corporations are well aware of this and sponsor at least some pure research.
Closer analysis of the history of the last 120 or so years of technological development prompts me to offer the statement: Nothing begets technological advance like technological advance. To justify that conclusion, I draw the reader’s attention to three principles:
- The Bootstrap Effect;
- Tech Serendipity; and
- Tech Cascade.
These are my terms for the phenomena; I would be surprised if these were wholly original thoughts, but I am unaware of any other terms for them. Let’s take a look at what each one has to say:
The Bootstrap Effect
Technological develop proceeds in cycles. One such cycle may be summed up:
- A new Technology is developed;
- The new technology is packaged into a new Product;
- The new product creates a Demand;
- The demand produces a Profit for the producers of the product;
- Some of that profit is reinvested into further Research into the applications and fundamental theories behind the original Technology;
- The Research results in the application of the principles of the technology into another New technology, restarting the cycle.
This loop means that a successful technological development tends to bootstrap further developments in that general field.
The clearest example is the computer chip – from Shockley’s first development of the transistor through to early integrated circuits through, step by step, to the modern Processors.
Tech Serendipity
Robert A Heinlein, in one of his novels, defined serendipity as “digging for worms and discovering gold”. I don’t quite mean the term in that sense of the word. What I am attempting to describe with the phrase “Tech Serendipity” is the situation in which an advance made in pursuit of one objective solves a problem with another piece of emerging technology.
Consider the great strides that have been made in engine efficiency within motor vehicles; without the development of electronic engine management systems, these would be quite impossible. By the year 2000, auto engines had processors that were more powerful than those used in the Apollo space capsules. These days, the typical pocket calculator or mobile phone has more computer power than all the computers that mission control used for those same missions. Think about that for a minute.

NASA Mission Control during the Apollo 16 mission to the moon
A lot of people are under the impression that the screens visible in mission control were computer terminals. The truth is somewhat more startling, as revealed in Apollo 11: The Untold Story (unfortunately not available on DVD so far as I could tell); computers ran the status display lights beside those panels, the “monitor screens” simply displayed pre-prepared slides of what the status display should show at the current stage of the mission. The technology was incredibly primitive, which only makes the feats achieved by the Apollo program all the more astonishing.
In short, without Technology “A”, Technology “B” is impossible or hopelessly inefficient. The more the state of the scientific/engineering art is advanced, the more likely it is that a solution has been found to any merely technical problem; it’s just a matter of finding it and adapting it. Quite often, Technology “A” has nothing to do with the reasons technology “B” was invented. As a result, the faster progress is made, the faster progress can be made – provided that it is not constrained into one or two narrowly-targeted focal points.
Tech Cascade
The final principle that leads me to the stated conclusion is something I call “Tech Cascade”. Fundamentally, it states that all technological developments can be viewed as tools and/or as components which have vastly greater potential application than the original purpose. Again, the microchip is the perfect example. These are present in everything from computers to Christmas cards in the modern day. The purpose of the original integrated circuit (patented in 1949) was as an amplifier; these days, the switching capabilities are considerably more important than this function.
In other words, if you invent something new, it will have applications far beyond the original purpose, and many of these will tend to be developed simultaneously as a “second wave” of technological advance; each of which may yield a “tertiary wave”, and so on.
The Implications
Putting those three functions together justifies (to me) the conclusion offered: Nothing begets technological advance like technological advance. That’s why it is so important to identify the operating principles apon which any new technology that you introduce – so that you can look for all the other ways that discovery would impact the world around the characters.
The Human impact revisited
It may not have escaped the attention of the reader that there was an underlying order to the series of impacts that were discussed – from the personal to the social (local to national), to the economic, military and political (national to international) to the global and to technology itself. The final step in translating the technology that you have devised into game-ready campaign background is to look at how all these non-personal impacts are reflected in the personal lives of the people who live within the affected societies. Ultimately, the core meaning of any technological advance is in how it alters the lives of the people who experience it; the core value in gaming or literary terms of a sci-fi technological postulate is how the characters interact with it and its consequences. Describing such effects to the reader or the players gives you the opening you need to discuss the wider implications – and that’s what sci-fi is all about.
- Creating The World Of Tomorrow: Putting the SF into Sci-Fi games pt 1
- Creating The World Of Tomorrow: Putting the SF into Sci-Fi Pt 2
- Creating The World Of Tomorrow: Putting the SF into Sci-Fi pt 3
- Creating the World Of Tomorrow: Postscript – The Design Ethos Of Tomorrow
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May 31st, 2013 at 9:41 am
First I want to thank you for this series – killer awesome in just about every aspect, and I’m loving the step-by-step formula to follow.
On the other hand, I wanted to point out that the Jupiter-based hydrocarbon mining economy doesn’t make much sense from a physics perspective: the specific energy of most hydrocarbon fuels is 46 MJ/kg, but it takes 1770 MJ to bring 1kg to escape velocity from Jupiter’s surface. To put it in monetary terms, it would be like spending $1,770 to get $46 back – not a great investment. Likewise, extracting hydrocarbons for non-fuel uses is probably still not worth it, unless the costs for base carbon and hydrogen goes up substantially – we can synthesize hydrocarbons in the lab for roughly 46MJ/kg (plus the cost of base elements and probably some overhead) vs the 1770MJ/kg to import it from Jupiter (plus the cost of shipping, refinement, etc). We can even grow hydrocarbon fuel (e.g. the current ethanol craze) for much cheaper than we could import it from the outer planets. A more likely use for the gas giants would be deuterium/tritium mining/extraction. The specific energy of D/T is ~330 million MJ/kg, which is a far sight higher than the 1770MJ/kg extraction cost.
This in no way invalidates the secondary analysis (extraction, transportation, refining, etc) but barring some pretty bizarre physics advancements or economic developments (enough to overcome the massive energy disparity or dramatically increasing the value of hydrocarbons) it’s not a likely scenario.
Of course, it’s also possible that my back-of-the-envelope calculations based on 20+ year old physics are off somehow…
May 31st, 2013 at 4:25 pm
Good to hear from you, Brandon!
I’ll take your word for the calculations. Certainly, no-one who wanted to run or write a hard SF story would find the proposal plausible. On the other hand, it’s my understanding (possibly flawed) that beanstalk technology avoids some of those energy costs, and I would argue that in a soft-scifi environment you should never let something that technical get in the way of a good story. All that has been done is the addition of an additional technological requirement, that of efficiency in transporting the material from Jupiter.
Consider, by means of reply: Earth’s atmosphere is thin but detectable beyond the orbit of the moon. Jupiter’s atmosphere, consisting of much lighter elements, may well extend beyond the level of any orbiting extraction satellite when expansion due to solar heat is taken into account. Why not a ramscoop arrangement to gather it? Let the sun do all that heavy lifting.
For game and soft-science fiction purposes, it doesn’t have to be plausible, it just has to sound plausible.
Appreciate you taking the time to comment. Feel free to rebut this reply with more physics!
June 1st, 2013 at 11:47 am
(apologies in advance for length – sometimes I ramble)
I totally agree with the soft vs. hard scifi argument – there’s some really great soft scifi stories that are completely implausible – John Carter of Mars, H.G. Wells, Jules Verne (and I’m sure many others could name more contemporary examples). By the same token, while the folks over at Orion’s Arm strive for the hardest of hard scifi, their stories aren’t always the most entertaining. So plausibility isn’t a sine qua non factor, but it is something to consider. For my part, as sci-tech geek, I definitely appreciate when authors put in the necessary thought to achieve verisimilitude.
A key question to ask is how much effort to put into verisimilitude? I’d guess that 90-95% of the world’s population probably wouldn’t bat an eye at hydrocarbon mining from the gas giants – but it seemed pretty implausible to me. Any economics or business professor will tell you that spending $1800 to build something that you can only sell for $50 is a losing proposition – it just doesn’t make sense. Given that the scifi audience is likely to be more scientifically educated than the general public, it gives a bit more incentive to do a little research, especially if the science is crucial to your story (which, if you do all the follow-on research and planning suggested above, it might be). Of course, when the science is in your favor – it can make the story SO much better (Heinlein’s Moon is a Harsh Mistress puts the same gravity well concept we’re discussing into particular stark relief).
As for your ideas on beanstalk (space elevator/skyhook) technology, they’ll definitely change the current economics of gravity well extraction, but they don’t really affect the physics I discussed before. A space elevator will dramatically reduce the costs per pound for lifting material into orbit, but it does so by eliminating the super-expensive high energy fuel costs. Instead of loading tons of high specific energy (read: expensive) liquid hydrogen and oxygen, and then burning it in a massive burst over 8 minutes to reach LEO (low-earth-orbit) – achieving ~1500mph. An elevator climber will probably travel at a much more pedestrian pace – at 60mph it’ll take about about 2.5 hours to reach LEO and 15.5 days to reach GEO (geosynchronous orbit). Costs per pound go down because we’re not lifting tons of fuel and fighting massive air resistance – but the absolute minimum energy costs to lift an item are still based on the physics above.
As an example, let’s consider lifting a kg of gasoline out of Earth’s gravity well. It takes at least 62.72MJ to lift that kg into an escape orbit. Given current technology, it takes WAY more than that – because we have to lift a few tons of fuel into LEO just so we can finish the push to the escape orbit. For simplicity’s sake, we’ll say it takes 1000kg of gasoline to lift the rocket and the fuel container to escape orbit. A beanstalk/elevator may change the equation so we only require 450kg of gasoline to lift the fuel container to GEO, and another 50kg to reach escape orbit. The elevator has cut the cost/kg by 50%. In the optimal extreme best-case-scenario (assuming we don’t violate conservation of energy), it will always take burning at least 1.4kg of gasoline to lift our 1kg of gasoline to escape orbit. If we need gas in orbit, that’s not a bad deal (nearly 1000x more efficient than our current chemical rockets, and roughly 500x more efficient than an elevator). Comparatively, the best case scenario for a Jupiter lift requires burning 38.5kg of gasoline for every 1kg of gasoline that reaches escape orbit – or ~19,200kg for an elevator, or ~38,500kg for a rocket (those estimates are low by several orders of magnitude, since we’d need MUCH bigger rockets/climbers to escape Jupiter’s well). Then we spend ~5kg of gasoline to use low-energy orbit transfers to get to Earth orbit (or ~1000kg for a faster trip), then a free trip (most likely on an elevator) down to the surface – for a net cost of 45-40,000kg of gasoline to get 1kg of output. Or, we could refine organic crops into ethanol for a cost less than 1kg of gasoline to get the same output, or take base carbon/hydrogen and chemically synthesize 1kg of gasoline at a cost of 3-4kg of gasoline.
Furthermore, while beanstalk technology is definitely way cool, it has some serious materials-science requirements. Our current state-of-the-art is capable of producing a Mars-based elevator (cable from surface to geo/areosynchronous orbit), and if we can manage to generate longer carbon nanotubes (currently we can make strands a few centimeters long, and we need at least 35,786 kilometers), we can probably manage an Earth-based elevator. But there’s nothing on the horizon – even in the wildest theories – that would make a Jupiter-based elevator possible.
I might be possible, given some super-science tech that we haven’t yet discovered, to lift matter from a gravity well at a lower cost, but any such technology would violate Conservation of Energy – which brings all sorts of weirdness into play: perpetual motion machines, creating something for nothing, getting more out of any reaction than you put in. I personally don’t think it’s 100% impossible to violate energy conservation (more like 99.99999% impossible) – but I definitely think that if we can violate it, we won’t be burning hydrocarbons for fuel (and I suspect we’ll have other material sciences replacing the non-fuel uses of hydrocarbons).
As for atmospheric densities, I couldn’t find much on density beyond the moon, but the exosphere (Earth’s outermost layer) starts at an elevation of 600km – or halfway through LEO, roughly 3x the height of the ISS, 1.6% of the way to GEO, or .15% of the way to the moon. At that height, the atmosphere is basically individual molecules in ballistic trajectories rather than any sort of coherent gas. Ramscoop technology would probably be feasible at that altitude – but it’s only slightly more concentrated than the interstellar medium. Basically, if you’re far enough away from the gravity well to make a difference in extraction costs, you’re not getting any benefits in density from being near the planet.
XKCD’s Gravity Wells (http://xkcd.com/681/) is probably the best graphical representation I’ve ever seen on just how big these gravity wells are.
June 1st, 2013 at 10:05 pm
@Brandon: The longer the reply, the more the writer cared about the subject – otherwise they would not have invested the time and effort. So I’m always appreciative when people are interested enough to make a contribution, and the more effort they go to, the more I like it.
So, on to the actual content of your reply: How much effort to put into verisimilitude? The answer is, “enough to generate a suspension of disbelief at the time“. It’s not necessary to have science accurate enough that it can stand later scrutiny, though that is always an asset; the goal isn’t scientific speculation or projection, it’s to tell a story. Any more science than is needed to achieve that purpose is wasted effort, and there’s never enough time to do everything you might want to.
Beanstalks: Personally, I have grave doubts that one will ever be built in real life. The potential for catastrophe and the real-world engineering difficulties seem to combine into a 1-2 punch that is lethal to the concept. But that doesn’t mean that the concept should be ignored if your story becomes more plausible for assuming that the technology has been created and successfully deployed. Which goes back to the point that I made in the previous paragraph.
Violation of the conservation of energy: Quantum physics actually holds the potential for permitting this on a technicality, if any of the many-worlds / multi-universal theories hold true. That is because the principle assumes a closed system, and the multiverse concept means that our specific universe does not have to be a closed system – energy could be leeched from some other universe into ours. But we are a VERY long way away from any such capability, if it is possible at all. The principle would remain true of the multiverse viewed collectively, but so far as any local universe is concerned, it could be violated. And I agree with your suspicions about the changes in technology that will have resulted by the time we reach this point!
The Ramscoop mining concept: By consuming some of what is collected as fuel for a drive, it would be possible for a collection station to force itself into a lower orbit – as low as is necessary to skim the surface. Frankly it would all depend on the fine details of the efficiency of the engineering, and without an actual working ramscoop, we have to make so many assumptions that any figures would be pure speculation. Which makes it perfect for story needs under the assumptions given by the example.
But the bottom line is not whether or not Jupiter hydrocarbon-mining will ever be possible, let alone realized; the proposal was offered as an example of breaking a concept down into the required technological advances that have to be assumed in order to make the proposal plausible enough to use in a story or game.
Finally, thanks for the link to the wonderful infographic on gravity wells! You’re right, it’s about the clearest illustration of the requirements that I’ve ever seen, and really puts the question into perspective. The only way that it could possibly be more relevant to the question we’ve been discussing is if the gravity wells were at proportionate orbital distances from the sun, so that it becomes quite obvious why the lesser gravity fields of Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus are not more practical resources than Jupiter, despite that deep gravity well.
June 2nd, 2013 at 3:25 am
On further thought, I was probably a little overzealous on saying that hydrocarbon mining of the gas giants would never be feasible. You’re right to conclude that the necessary surplus energy to get out of the well could be collected at the same time as the target fuel. The key failing in the scheme is that it’s significantly cheaper to grow or synthesize the hydrocarbons. In order to make the Jupiter mining scheme economically feasible, the opportunity costs of agricultural land (or sources for elemental carbon and hydrogen) would have to skyrocket. (Which could certainly make for an interesting story…)
To use an analogy, imagine setting up a greenhouse on the moon to grow tomatoes. You have massive input costs to get it started, as well as colossal transportation costs to deliver the cargo back to Earth. The only reason you would go to all the trouble is if there were no longer any way to grow tomatoes on Earth, or if the lunar tomatoes were sufficiently special to warrant the huge markup (maybe a foodie-craze for the unique lunar-tomato taste?)
In the interests of getting a better real-world grasp on the physics of orbital mechanics, I looked up some more price data. Current rocket technology costs $4300/kg to $40,000/kg to reach Earth GTO (geostationary transfer orbit). Current beanstalk proposals estimate a cost of $220/kg to reach the same orbit. Assuming a perfectly efficient system (while not violating conservation of energy), it would cost $1.70/kg (62.72MJ to reach escape velocity, 3.6MJ = 1kWh, US electricity cost of $.10/kWh) or $1.03/kg ($100/barrel of oil, 131.5kg/barrel, 46MJ/kg, 62.72MJ to reach escape velocity). If we then assume that Jupiter costs are proportionally the same (they are actually MUCH worse), then it costs $29/kg ($3822/barrel) for a perfect system, $6210/kg ($816,000/barrel) for a beanstalk, or $121,348/kg ($1.6 million/barrel) for a rocket. Consider that we’re already at a point where if oil is much more expensive it gets supplanted by alternative energy sources (anything over $200/barrel and it becomes the most expensive energy source currently in use), and that as long as we have carbon and hydrogen (and there’s no foreseeable shortage in either), we can synthesize hydrocarbons using those same alternative energy sources at their cutoff cost. (e.g. if photo-voltaic solar is more efficient than oil at $150/barrel, then we can synthesize oil at ~$150/barrel, plus relatively negligible costs for carbon and hydrogen.)
I also want to reiterate that while hydrocarbon mining is likely unfeasible without tweaking some of the inputs, hydrogen mining (deuterium/tritium) would be incredibly lucrative. The only sources for deuterium/tritium are lunar regolith refining (expensive, but cheaper than synthesis) and synthesis (which effectively makes it a battery technology instead of an energy source). If I remember my celestial mechanics course, I think Saturn would actually be a cheaper mining location – it’s much shallower gravity well more than making up for the greater distance from Earth. (Neptune and Uranus, while shallower still, are too far out to beat Saturn – though I don’t remember how they compare to Jupiter)
As for your comments on suspension of disbelief – I disagree that the goal isn’t scientific speculation or projection. A great story without scientific speculation or projection is fiction, but it isn’t science fiction. I’ll agree that you don’t want to spend so much time doing the science that you don’t write the story or that the story suffers. But good science can improve a mediocre story – while sometimes even the best story can’t save terrible science. It’s all a balancing act – good enough science for verisimilitude for your target audience while making the best story with what time you have left.
As for the beanstalks – I may be too much of a fanboy or just an eternal optimist, but I strongly believe we’ll see one within 50 years (95% confidence). The engineering difficulties at this point are more a matter of manufacturing and scale, and thus will be solved via technological progress. As for the potential for catastrophe – most of the problems are overstated – current Earth-based designs, the worst-case scenario would be severing the cable above 23,000km, which would result in most of the upper cable disintegrating on re-entry, and the lower cable (slowed by air resistance) would land pretty softly. (If you’ve read Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars, the elevator catastrophe therein is pretty terrifying, but much more relevant to older Martian-specific designs based on metallic cables and minimal air resistance) I think the greatest actual catastrophe would be the destruction of the last operating elevator – because cargo costs would go back to astronomical levels, making the replacement costs that much higher. But don’t take my word for it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator_safety
June 2nd, 2013 at 5:50 am
Fascinating, Brandon.
Re: Suspension of disbelief – perhaps I should have described the target as “scientific speculation or projection beyond the needs of the story”, but I thought that was implied. I absolutely agree that it’s a balancing act – I was trying to define the point of balance, as in “beyond this point, scientific projection exists only for its own sake, or for the sake of style, and not for the needs of the story.”
One of the easiest arguements to start is exactly what is, and is not, science fiction. Everyone has their own definition, though they all overlap to some extent. I’m trying to avoid getting into that debate! :)
Mike recently posted..Creating The World Of Tomorrow: Putting the SF into Sci-Fi pt 3
June 12th, 2013 at 1:51 am
Just my two cents,
For quick and easy suspension of disbelief, I propose a simple solution like ST:TNG’s heisenberg compensator. Teleportation is theoretically impossible for some reason ? Create a wonderful piece of advanced technology to address the technical problems. For example, Space elevator materials are presently too fragile ? “Neo-carbosilk polymers”. I’m a firm believer the thing that matters the most is the Bottom Line, in this case, not profit but fun.
I think you nailed it Mike with this part : “It’s not necessary to have science accurate enough that it can stand later scrutiny, though that is always an asset; the goal isn’t scientific speculation or projection, it’s to tell a story. Any more science than is needed to achieve that purpose is wasted effort…” I believe Plot considerations trump Uniqueness and Uniqueness trumps Verisimilitude. But other GMs probably have a different order, and I also agree with their opinions.
But I know some players enjoy reflecting on how such or such feat of technology could be possible. However, if the story comes to a screeching halt and an evening of role-playing becomes a debate I, as gm, will stop it and plan to include a specific explanation further down the road (and ask the interested player(s) to figure out that part and write down their explanation as a technical document). It will add to the richness of the game world and i’ll make sure the player’s get the recognition for their work. In this case, have an NPC Engineer/Researcher/Whatever, explain the tech, and cite the document or work a plot requiring to read through the document to figure out the answer to the problem.
My point is, the game has to be fun for everyone, but everyone has a varying definition of fun. Me, it’s telling a story, driving the action and creating compelling drama. But I strive to adjust to every player’s definition.
Great series of articles Mike, I laughed at part 2’s FTL experience descriptions, it made me think about Hitchhiker’s guide infinite improbability drive. Thanks for writing all of it.
June 12th, 2013 at 10:13 am
Good to hear from you, Eric.
Your proposal is something I have considered, and which is perhaps best summed up as “The Technobabble solution”. The problem that can arise when employing it is consistancy in what that technobabble device can do. It definitely helps if the technobabble at least sounds plausible and relevant. Star Trek’s “deflector dish” is a case in point – it existed as a critical ship’s system for a long time before anyone suggested what it might actually be for, and as a result the crews of various starships Enterprise/Voyager/Defiant were forever getting it to do something that amounted to a deus-ex-machina.
But, with that caveat accepted, I otherwise agree completely with your comments.
As for the FTL drive in part two, Hitchhiker’s was definitely one of the seeds of inspiration :)
Glad you enjoyed the series, and hopefully you got something out of it!