A Science Fiction Rant
Mood:  spacey
First read this...

Space Elevator

And tell me why it took this long for someone to actually propose the workability of this? We've been reading about this in sci fi for fifty years, folks! Gibson and others predicted this, just as they predicted the internet, and still our 'smart guys' are behind the curve because instead of mining sci fi for ideas, the allegedly 'smart people' of the world are busy trying to pretend that the genre is a joke.

HG Wells predicted lunar exploration. Decribed rockets propelled by explosions that were alarmingly similar to what was eventually used. The Powers That Be pretended it was a fantasy until WWII! Then suddenly they were all interested in launching objects into the atmosphere with explosions, just as Wells predicted.

And we never learn. It takes a whole new generation of scientists who cut their teeth on the sci fi of their generation to rise up and gain enough personal juice to freely ignore their elders' disdain for such outlandish ideas.

Aurthur C Clark talked about this in the seventies. The first real work is only now being done to make it a viable enterprise? Sure, nanotubes didn't exist yet, but how much of that is due to the sci fi nature of nanotech? Prior to 2000 the only place you heard about nanotech was in the genre we know as Cyberpunk... the same genre that predicted (and spawned) the internet.

It's like the spaceramp we talked about awhile back. Will it work? Do we really have all of the technology needed as claimed? I don't know. I only know that if we don't try we're going to shoot ourselves in the collective foot.

And this also begs the question... what is in our current science fiction that we're ignoring? What dreams of the visionary are currently in the pulp sections of our bookstores that are going overlooked by the current establishment?

The mind boggles.

Scott