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Cool story, but I’ma need some sources for these points. Submarines, for example, predate HG Wells by a lot. They even predate the other major novel about one, by Jules Verne. I absolutely agree that fiction sparks innovation, but let’s use sourced examples instead of just throwing stuff out there.
Yeah, I think that list overemphasises the role of fiction in individual inventions. Most significant inventions have messy histories of iterative development and multiple sources of inspiration with varying degrees of influence. Here is a patent for a taser-like devices that predate the taser and doesn’t use that name: https://www.freepatentsonline.com/3523538.html. It was also invented by a Japanese guy who probably never read the electric rifle book. The later company and commercial product just used the book as loose inspiration for the name.
On the other hand, that last paragraph in the long post undersells the role of fiction in how people’s worldviews are shaped and how it can influence their everyday decisions. I think that’s way more significant than any one invention, but it’s even messier and hard to trace conclusively.
They made a mistake by just saying submarine. HG Wells wrote about a man exploring the ocean in a sphere. It was written in 1896. In the 1930s, the bathysphere was created. I don’t know if they were inspired by his story or if it was a coincidence, but it’s pretty cool either way!
I’m also not buying the idea that star trek was needed to invent cellphones after we had already invented wireless communication
Needed? No
Directly inspired? Literally yes. Look up a communicator and compare it to an early flip phone, for example. Also the nerds who did it admitted it lol
fair enough
To expand on one of the points made - TASER doesn’t just stand for Electric Rifle. It stands for Thomas A Swifts Electric Rifle, 100% named after the book
I struggle with this a lot. Especially recently. I grew up reading sword and sorcery, where when A Bad Thing is happening, you go stab it. Where it is moral and sensible to bring violence to evil. Where almost any evil can be defeated by a small group of determined do-gooders.
In the real world, if I set off on a quest to defeat evil with a sword and a dream, I’ll get picked up by secret service and locked in a nice hole before I make it two blocks away from my house.
Recontextualizing “heroic struggle” into things like community building, education, and charity is difficult when every instinct is screaming at me that there’s a simple and obvious solution. That solution isn’t really simple and obvious because we don’t live in Middle Earth. But a million billion stories of a hero putting the tyrant king to the sword beg otherwise.
i don’t think it’s a coincidence that the only species (that we know of) that tells stories through our language is the one that’s dominating the planet.
Other species have their own languages, their own methods of communication, but so far we’ve never seen a single one tell a story, or even lie (not counting the evolutionary instinct to play dead, that’s not a conscious action).
We got very lucky twice on our evolutionary journey and with our opposable thumbs, and unbound creativity, we managed to create so much, not all of it good, but hey it wouldn’t be a good story without some adversities
I watched a video once talking about how important storytelling is to the success of humans. I don’t know what the video is called so I can’t find it but it’s an interesting way of thinking that I don’t hear very often
What you call lucky nature calls ‘just keep
tryingmutating’the only goal is to survive, evolution kinda defaults to crabs & laying a billion eggs. We got lucky to get our thumbs and brains that allowed us to not just survive but thrive! even with one or two offsprings per birth, before we got crabified somehow
eccetera
Maybe they’re italian
It’s all just stories, stories and habits.
Did your water come on when you turned on the tap today? Well, somebody somewhere has a checklist they’re in the habit of doing, because they’ve been given the idea that it’s important. They will never meet you, probably, and it wouldn’t impact them directly in any way if you didn’t have water. But, because of all the habits of them, you, and all the people in-between the two of you that connect you: You got to drink and shower, instead of having to hike to a well in the back yard.
Same for the people that built your cell phone, same for the people that decided that you can have groceries at the store because you told your side of the story, same for the people keeping Mahmoud Khalil in prison or letting him go. Don’t ever let people tell you stories in the head are not important. They’re near top of the list of the most important things we have.
All of Greek history was just verbal for most of it. During Ancient Greece stories were the only thing they left behind. some didnt even have anything but the stories told over generations. The problem is retelling we can lose important details they think is common sense/lack of context.
My friend always wanted to spar like DBZ.
Fiction is not reality, but it is in our brains. Our brains are the most powerful tools we use to shape reality.
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More importantly, stories allow us to explore morality and philosophy in safe hypotheticals. Faust allows us to inspect the thirst for power and the danger of being willing to do anything for it. Gilgamesh allowed our ancestors to wrestle with mortality and what it means to live a good life. Modern works like Altered Carbon explore generational wealth and the compounding effects of the ownership and control of capital. Even the term “republic” comes from a fictional story Plato wrote about his ideal society. I would say the interaction between fiction and philosophy is far more important than the interaction with technology. After all, the term very term “robot” comes from a play whose entire point was a critique of capitalism where the robots were a metaphor for the working class being exploited by the owners of capital.
