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• One requirement for hard SF is procedural or intentional: a story should be trying to be accurate and rigorous in its use of the scientific knowledge of its time, and later discoveries do not necessarily invalidate the label. For example, P. Schuyler Miller called Arthur C. Clarke's 1961 novel A Fall of Moondust hard SF ^[3], and the designation remains valid even though a crucial plot element, the existence of deep pockets of "moondust" in lunar craters, is now known to be incorrect.
• In this view, a story's scientific "hardness" is less a matter of the absolute accuracy of the science content than of the rigor and consistency with which the various ideas and possibilities are worked out.

• Verne wrote about space, air, and underwater travel before air travel and practical submarines were invented, and before practical means of space travel had been devised.
• Verne, along with H. G. Wells, is often popularly referred to as the "Father of Science Fiction".^[1]
• Mercier and subsequent British translators also had trouble with the metric system that Verne used, sometimes dropping significant figures, at other times keeping the nominal value and only changing the unit to an Imperial measure. Thus Verne's calculations, which in general were remarkably exact, were converted into mathematical gibberish. Also, artistic passages and whole chapters were cut because of the need to fit the work in a constrained space for publication.
• Jules Verne's novels have been noted for being startlingly accurate anticipations of modern times. Paris in the 20th Century is an often cited example of this as it arguably describes air conditioning, automobiles, the internet, television, and other modern conveniences very similar to their real world counterparts.
• In other works, Verne predicted the inventions of helicopters, submarines, projectors, jukeboxes, and other later devices.

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• • Mary Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN as the earliest (non-mythological, fantastic, mystic, etc.) example of man creating life via science.
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• Wells depicts the Martians firing spacecraft to Earth from a giant space gun, a common representation of space travel in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, bearing similarity to the modern spacecraft propulsion concept of mass drivers.
• Military theorists of that era had many speculations of building a "fighting-machine" or "land dreadnought" (as the Royal Navy called this hypothetical machine on which some experiments were made just before the First World War). Wells's concept of the Martian tripods, fast-moving and equipped with Heat-Rays and black smoke, represents an ultimate end to these speculations, although Wells also presents a less fantastical depiction of the armoured fighting vehicle in his short story "The Land Ironclads". [1] [2]
• On a different field, the book explicitly suggests that the Martians' anatomy may reflect the far future development of mankind itself — i.e. that with the increasing development of machines, the body is largely discarded and what remains is essentially a brain that "wears" a different (mechanical) body for every need, just as humans wear the clothes appropriate to a particular weather or work.

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• Space Exploration

   

  When 2001: A Space Odyssey was written, mankind had not yet set foot on the moon. The space exploration programs in the United States and the Soviet Union were only in the early stages. Much room was left to imagine the future of the space program. Space Odyssey offers one such vision, offering a glimpse at what space exploration might one day become. Lengthy journeys, such as manned flights to Saturn, and advanced technologies, such as suspended animation, are shaped and shown all through the novel.

• The idea of humanity reaching an end point through transformation to a higher form of existence is the main idea behind the concept of the Omega Point and of the technological singularity.

• Dr. Asimov, 65, is a severe critic of Star Wars. "I'm  against it, not because I'm a science-fiction writer, and  therefore have special knowledge, but because I like to think I'm  a sane human being."  

   He believes Star Wars is a dangerous waste of money.  "They're talking about spending $33 billion on research related  to Star Wars. We're going to withdraw money from needed aspects  of developing knowledge in order to set up something that  probably won't work and even if it does work, won't do us any  good."

• Part of the problem with Star Wars is that it will take  years to develop. "If I were the Soviet Union, I would have  spent all this time trying to work up methods to penetrate the  shield," said Asimov, who was born in Russia but grew up in New  York. "I have a strong suspicion it would be cheaper to  penetrate the shield than to set it up.  

   "And if we're in real danger of a nuclear war now, trying to  set up something for the middle of the 21st century isn't going  to do us any good. In fact, by filling us full of false  confidence, we're not going to make a strong enough effort to  prevent war now."

• "There are science-fiction writers, notably myself and  Arthur C. Clarke,  who were anti-Vietnam and are anti-Star Wars," said Asimov.   

   Clarke, the author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, was born in  England and lives in Sri Lanka. "Clarke was howled down once by  someone saying as a non-American citizen he had no right to make  comments about Star Wars. That's an extremely stupid remark.   

   "If you have no right to decry the policy of a country  unless you are a citizen of that country, why the hell is Reagan  always yelling about the Soviet Union? Is he a Soviet citizen?"
• "I'm convinced nuclear winter is actually  something that will happen," said Asimov. "Unless we're  completely insane, we don't dare take the chance. So what the  hell good is this whole damned thing?"

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• Within a century, it will be possible to scan a human mind  and reproduce it inside a machine. Regardless of whether our  minds are just very sophisticated analog computers, or whether  they have a quantum-mechanical element (as Roger Penrose  proposes), we will nonetheless be able to duplicate them  artificially.
• Already, at the close of the second millennium, a  transhumanist movement has begun; Christopher Dewdney is the  principal Canadian spokesperson for it. This movement holds that  uploading our consciousness into machines is desirable, since  that will free us from biological aging and death. On the other  hand (a decidedly biological metaphor), there is more to being  human than just the networks of synapses in our brains; clearly,  much of what we are is tied in intimately with our bodies. We  may find that uploaded humans are not happy — indeed, are  incapable of happiness or any emotion.
• Just as laws today are moving toward recognizing a woman's  right to control her body and any separate sentience that may be  contained within it, so too will the laws of the future recognize  the right of humans to upload their consciousness and then  dispose of the original biological versions of themselves; such  eliminations will not be seen as suicides or murders, but rather  as a natural, perfectly legal step, eliminating a  no-longer-needed biological container and preserving the  uniqueness of the individual.
• It may, in fact, be dangerous to build conscious  machines that are more intelligent than we are; just as  intelligence may be an emergent property of sufficiently complex  systems, so too may ambition and desire be emergent properties of  sufficiently intelligent systems.
• Although we used to consider the mastery of  chess to be the pinnacle of human intellectual achievement, we've  had to concede that it is simply a mathematical problem, and even  today's primitive computers can do it better than the most  skilled human. But there are other realms — including art,  philosophy, and scientific theorizing — that, because of their  intuitive, nonlinear nature, we may always be better at than any  machine. Our AI servants may free humanity at the dawn of the  fourth millennium to concentrate on these areas.

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• We have lots of computers  and robots today and not one of them has even the rudiments of  the Three Laws built-in. It's extraordinarily easy for  "equipment failure" to result in human death, after all, in  direct violation of the First Law.  

   Asimov's Laws assume that we will create intelligent machines  full-blown out of nothing, and thus be able to impose across the  board a series of constraints. Well, that's not how it's happening.  Instead, we are getting closer to artificial intelligence by small  degrees and, as such, nobody is really implementing fundamental  safeguards.  

   Take Eliza, the first computer psychiatric program. There is  nothing in its logic to make sure that it doesn't harm the user  in an Asimovian sense, by, for instance, re-opening old mental  wounds with its probing. Now, we can argue that Eliza is way too  primitive to do any real harm, but then that means someone has to  say arbitrarily, okay, that attempt at AI requires no  safeguards but this attempt does. Who would that someone be?
• We already live in a world in which Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics  have no validity, a world in which every single computer user is  exposed to radiation that is considered at least potentially  harmful, a world in which machines replace people in the  workplace all the time. (Asimov's First Law would prevent that:  taking away someone's job absolutely is harm in the Asimovian  sense, and therefore a "Three Laws" robot could never do  that, but, of course, real robots do it all the time.)

• What does the new movie have in common with Asimov's writings?
• The Three Laws of Robotics 

  The movie faithfully quotes Asimov's three laws of robotics: 

   
  1. A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.  
  2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.  
  3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
• Asimov developed the Three Laws (with the help of his editor John W. Campbell) because he was tired of the science fiction stories of the 1920s and 1930s in which the robots, like Frankenstein's creation, turned on their creators and became dangerous monsters. The positronic brains of Asimov's robots were designed around the Three Laws, so that it was impossible for the robots to function without them. There were enough ambiguities in the Three Laws to make for interesting stories, but there was only one story in the collection, "Little Lost Robot", in which a robot posed any sort of danger to a human being.
• Researchers who later designed and built robots have said that utilizing principles akin to the Three Laws is simply common sense. But today not everyone believes that the Three Laws are sufficient or desirable for robots of the future.
• The character Susan Calvin 

  Susan Calvin, the robopsychologist for U.S. Robots, was a central character of the story collection. Calvin was brilliant, logical, and strong-willed, but was not considered attractive or even very feminine. In the movie, Calvin is portrayed by the young and beautiful actress Bridget Moynahan.
• The Nestor series of robots 

  The movie features the NS-5 robot, successor to the NS-4 in the Nestor series. Asimov's story "Little Lost Robot" concerned a robot in the Nestor series, the NS-2, which has a modified First Law which allows it to allow a human being to come to harm through inaction.

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• What you read here, though timeless, was a product of the time. 1973 saw the end of a lot of optimism carried over from the sixties, and the oil embargo was the first real inconvenience experienced by the baby-boomers of the USA on a nationwide scale. Many middle class families were now requiring two wage-earners, and the cost of living was on the rise.

•    I once, when I was not quite nineteen, wrote a story called "Trends". It was the first story I ever sold to John Campbell of the old "Astounding Science Fiction". It appeared in the July 1939 issue.

    And in it I dealt with the first flight around the Moon and back. I had it placed in the 1970's. The first attempt, which was a failure, was in 1973. And the second attempt, which was a success, was in 1978. The actual flight took place in 1968, so I was ten years conservative. In addition, my flight was all there was, whereas in real life the flight around the Moon was preceded by all kinds of orbital and sub-orbital flights, and dockings, and mid-course-corrections, and communication satellites, and navigation satellites...everything under the sun.

    So you can see how wrong I was. In fact I was even wronger than that because when I wrote my story back in 1939...38, it was printed in 39...When I wrote that story, I had definite ideas on how the space flight was to take place.
• The story was not printed because of any of the engineering details...you should excuse the expression. It was published because I had something in it that the editor had never seen before. I had postulated resistance to space flight. There was a whole  organization of people on earth who were sore as anything at the people who were trying to get out into space. They thought people should stay on earth and mind their own business. And this had never been postulated before. Never!

•   Well, when I read all of these references I discovered, to my amazement, that all through history there had been resistance...and bitter, exaggerated, last-stitch resistance...to every significant technological change that had taken place on earth. Usually the resistance came from those groups who stood to lose influence, status, money...as a result of the change. Although they never advanced this as their reason for resisting it. It was always the good of humanity that rested upon their hearts.

    For instance, when the stagecoaches came into England, the canal owners objected. Not that they would lose money, although they would, but they feared for humanity. Because as the stagecoaches tore along at fifteen miles an hour, the air whipping past the nostrils of the people on board, would by Bernoulli's Principle, suck all the air out of the lungs.

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• • To be perused more completely later; a few of the stories point to current trends in child care's and foreign relations' respective relationships to technology.
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• "The Veldt" — Two parents use an artificial "nursery" to keep their children happy. The children use the high-tech simulation nursery to create the predatorial environment of an African veldt. When the parents threaten to take it away, the children lock their parents inside where they are mauled and killed by the "harmless" machine-generated lions of the nursery.
• "The Highway" — A community of simple-minded people living by a highway in rural Mexico go on living their normal, idyllic lives as the highway fills with people fleeing a nuclear war. The story ends with some travellers they help telling them about the nuclear war, and how the world is ending. After the travelers leave, the confused resident briefly wonders what "the world" is, and then continues with his life.
• "Zero Hour" — Children across the country are deeply involved in an exciting game they call 'Invasion'. Their parents think it's cute until it turns out that the invasion is real and aliens are using the children to help them get control of Earth.

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• It is a critique of what Bradbury saw as an increasingly dysfunctional American society, written in the early years of the Cold War.
• Bradbury has stated that the novel is not about censorship; he states that Fahrenheit 451 is a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature, which ultimately leads to ignorance of total facts.^[3]
• Anyone caught reading books is, at the minimum, confined in a mental hospital, while the books are taken away and burned; at the maximum, the penalty is a sentence to immediate death. The main books that are not allowed are those, of great and famous works of literature, by many famous writers, such as Dickenson, Poe, Twain, and others.
• Captain Beatty claims that society, in its search for happiness, brought about the suppression of literature through an act of self-censorship and that the totalitarian government merely took advantage of the situation.
• Mechanical Hound The mechanical hound exists in the original book but not in the 1966 film. It is an emotionless, 8-legged killing machine that can be programmed to seek out and destroy free thinkers, hunting them down by scent. It can remember as many as 10,000 scents of others it is tracking down. The hound is blind to anything but the destruction for which it is programmed. It has a proboscis in a sheath on its snout, which injects lethal amounts of morphine or procaine.
• In writing the short novel Fahrenheit 451 I thought I was describing a world that might evolve in four or five decades. But only a few weeks ago, in Beverly Hills one night, a husband and wife passed me, walking their dog. I stood staring after them, absolutely stunned. The woman held in one hand a small cigarette-package-sized radio, its antenna quivering. From this sprang tiny copper wires which ended in a dainty cone plugged into her right ear. There she was, oblivious to man and dog, listening to far winds and whispers and soap-opera cries, sleep-walking, helped up and down curbs by a husband who might just as well not have been there. This was not fiction.^[6]

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• He took a plane to Florence, Oregon, where the USDA was sponsoring a lengthy series of experiments in using poverty grasses to stabilize and slow down the damaging sand dunes, which could "swallow whole cities, lakes, rivers, highways."^[5] Herbert's article on the dunes, "They Stopped the Moving Sands," was never completed (and only published decades later in an incomplete form in The Road to Dune), but it sparked Herbert's interest in the general subject of ecology and related matters.
• The CHOAM corporation is the major underpinning of the Imperial economy, with shares and directorships determining each House's income and financial leverage.
• Melange is crucial as it enables space travel, which in turn is monopolized by the Spacing Guild; its Navigators use the spice to safely plot a course for the Guild's Heighliner ships via prescience using "foldspace" technology, which allows instantaneous travel to anywhere in the galaxy.
• Dune responded in 1965 with its complex descriptions of Arrakis life, from giant sandworms (for whom water is deadly) to smaller, mouse-like life forms adapted to live with limited water. The inhabitants of the planet, the Fremen, must compromise with the ecosystem they live in—sacrificing some of their desire for a water-laden planet in order to preserve the sandworms which are so important to their culture. In this way, Dune foreshadowed the struggle the world would have following Carson's book in balancing human and animal life.
• Environmentalists have pointed out that Dune's popularity as a novel depicting a planet as a complex—almost living—thing, in combination with the first images of earth from space during the same time period being published, was instrumental in environmental movements such as the creation of Earth Day in many nations worldwide.^[11]
• The Fremen also are more capable of self-sacrifice, putting the community before themselves in every instance, while the world outside wallows in personal comfort at the expense of others. In all these characteristics, Dune is not alone in drawing from Gibbon's work, as Isaac Asimov creates a similarly declining empire in his Foundation series, as does Arthur C. Clarke in his The City and the Stars.^[12]

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• • Early reference to cryogenics; current status?
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• • Intended reads.
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• • Robots as educators today? Tomorrow?
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• • Plato's perspective on "moral agency"; if a human being could be entirely reduced to formulas of action-reaction (etc.) and contain a moral center, so could a technological reproduction (robot).
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• • Mechanical restrictions, rather than only philosophical hang-ups.
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