

Science Fiction Timeline of Inventions - otherwise
http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/ctnlistPubDate.asp

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ChuckMcM
This is a great collection of ideas, some of which we have seen turned into
products. (would love an anti-gravity belt but alas).

A entrepreneur friend of mine and I were debating the "value" of an idea vs
the making of it into a real "thing." I'm in the camp that execution, the
getting it made into reality is the 'hard' work and coming up with the idea is
the 'easy' work. He was taking the other side that imagining something that
nobody had yet thought about or mentioned was much harder.

Most of his argument rested on the claim that the creative spark was rare and
could not be duplicated by any sort of process. Thus ideas, like music or art,
were intrinsically valuable because only one person in the world could have
them.

While I agree in principle that the idea is a requirement before execution can
begin, my counter claim was that ideas are probablistic expressions of a
useful combinations of available technology. Given that things could be
combined in a useful way, I claim there is a finite probability that someone
seeing all of the components, will realize the combination as a viable idea.
So the more people you expose to the components, the more likely that one of
them will see the idea and share it. This is subtly different than there is
one person who is uniquely qualified to come up with the idea.

I don't believe either of us left the discussion with a truly different point
of view.

I was wondering if the expression of ideas in science fiction would provide
data to help illuminate his position or mine. I conclude that it does not as
good writers should be familiar with the writing and concepts of the other
writers, this would lead to limiting idea re-use since a writer would not want
to be perceived as plagarizing their ideas from their peers.

There was a series in Scientific American that compared the ideas in Star Trek
with what was available today. One of the claims in that article was that
engineers were inspired as children watching the series to build the gadgets
they saw on the screen. If that linkage was born out by solid research data it
would make a strong case for having the characters in science fiction creating
solutions to problems posited to occur 20 - 30 years hence. Prepping future
engineers to start working on solutions early.

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cube13
>If that linkage was born out by solid research data it would make a strong
case for having the characters in science fiction creating solutions to
problems posited to occur 20 - 30 years hence.

So that means we're about due for a time traveling delorian, right?

~~~
pavel_lishin
I'd settle for a hoverboard.

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lucasjung
I was hoping for more of a side-by-side:

Invention - Date Invented in Fiction - Date Invented in Reality (if ever)

Knowing when someone dreamed it up is neat, but I was hoping to see how
reality stacks up next to their predictions.

~~~
nitrogen
I would add another column before the last: date fiction claims invented in
reality.

For example:

Warp Drive - 1966 - 2063 - N/A

But alas, the site appears to be dedicated to books, so Star Trek's
reinventions of older ideas would probably be ineligible for inclusion.

~~~
lucasjung
That's actually what I had in mind. My columns would have been:

Warp Drive - 2063 - N/A

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malingo
Slightly related, time-line-wise:
[http://scimaps.org/submissions/7-digital_libraries/maps/thum...](http://scimaps.org/submissions/7-digital_libraries/maps/thumbs/024_LG.jpg)

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noonespecial
I vote we prepend "Claims:" to this fabulous list, submit it to the patent
office and put Myhrvold out of a job.

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lurchpop
some of those seem off. The first EV, for example, predates its "prediction"
by like 60 years: [http://inventors.about.com/od/estartinventions/a/History-
Of-...](http://inventors.about.com/od/estartinventions/a/History-Of-Electric-
Vehicles.htm)

