The Relationship Between Science and Science Fiction
If you enjoy reading, then it’s possible you’ve read a science fiction book. Science fiction, or sci-fi, is a genre of fiction that usually deals with futuristic themes such as advanced technology, time travel, space exploration, alternate reality, artificial intelligence, and alien life. The sci-fi genre is related to, and often intertwines with fantasy, horror, and superhero genres as well. Reading sci-fi books and watching sci-fi movies are often exciting, since the stories are usually action-packed and fantastical.
But how many sci-fi themes are present in the real world? Let’s look at some popular elements in sci-fi stories and see how they relate to science in the real world.
How many elements from science-fiction can be found in the real world of science? (Image credit: Nicolagypsicola / Unsplash)
Artificial Intelligence
Many sci-fi stories have really neat technological gadgets that appear more advanced than what we currently have in the real world. For example, some stories have artificial intelligence, or robots, that often help or hinder the heroes in the story. These robots will usually speak and think on their own, appearing to have feelings and the freedom to make their own decisions. In the popular sci-fi movie franchise Star Wars, a well-spoken robot named C-3PO helps the main characters with language translations, manners, and customs of different cultures from faraway planets. Sci-fi stories can also have robots that are not so nice; many stories contain artificially intelligent beings that try to take over the human race.
In real life, we have developed robots, but not to the extent that everyone has a talking robot that cleans the house, does the grocery shopping, and drives kids to soccer practice. Artificial intelligence in the real world comes in many forms:
How soon will it be until we have robots in every household that could perform any task a human could? (Image credit: Andy Kelly / Unsplash)
We have personal assistant tabletop robots that can control lights, set timers, maintain a grocery schedule, play music, and tell stories and jokes.
We have robot vacuums that can learn your house layout and clean only the rooms you want and when you want.
We have robots called animatronics; automated moving creatures that are often seen in amusement parks and movies.
We also have robots that help science researchers. There are some that explore the bottom of the ocean or the surface of mars.
We even have robots that work in an industrial setting such as welding and advanced manufacturing.
Maybe someday in the near future there will be robots like C-3PO from Star Wars in each and every household. For now, we’ll have to learn manners on our own.
Space Travel
The idea of traveling through space sounds really exciting. Hopping into a speedy little spaceship that takes the heroes to the next galaxy in less than a minute is the norm in many sci-fi books and movies. Terms like wormholes and black holes, are things that can be frequently encountered in a space-themed story.
Unfortunately, space travel like that just doesn’t exist in the real world. Humans have made extraordinary progress in the field of space exploration during this century and the last. World-changing events such as astronauts landing on the moon have opened up many doors to the idea of further space exploration including sending humans to Mars. In addition, many everyday items have been developed because of space travel. But as of now, our current technology is just not advanced enough to quickly jump to the closest star system or galaxy.
The closest star system is Alpha Centauri, and it’s 4 light years (about 24 trillion miles) from Earth. To understand how far away that is, it would take a space probe going approximately 8,333 miles per second around 100 years to reach it.
If you thought Alpha Centauri was far away, the closest spiral galaxy to our own Milky Way is the Andromeda Galaxy. Andromeda is about 2.5 million light years away. The length in miles is almost too long to comprehend (it’s in between a quintillion and a sextillion!). A space probe wouldn’t reach Andromeda for over a million years!
It looks like we won’t be galaxy hopping any time soon. It just isn’t feasible with our current technology, but it sure makes for great action-packed sci-fi story plots.
What’s NASA been up to? Click here to read about NASA’s plans to return astronauts to the moon, send a new rover to mars, and develop quieter aircrafts.
The thought of traveling through space excites the minds of many. (Image credit: Jeremy Thomas / Unsplash)
Time Travel
We’ve all seen those movies or read those books about a group of adventurers building a time machine to travel back or forward in time in order to accomplish something. In these exciting stories, time travel can often occur alongside space travel providing us with great entertainment. We know that in the real world, space travel is possible only in the most limited forms such as flying space probes to locations in our solar system. But is time travel possible in real life?
Author H.G. Wells wrote the novel “The Time Machine” in 1895, which has also been made into several movies. It popularized the idea of traveling through time using a machine. (Image credit: Reynold Brown / Wikimedia Commons)
It's currently impossible to hop into a makeshift time machine and travel back in time, so for now we can rule that idea out. However, the late theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking came up with a time travel theory using the basics from the theory of relativity. Hawking proposed the idea of a bullet train that travels close to the speed of light (about 187,000 miles per second) around Earth. If you were to board that train and travel across the earth at that speed, you’d be circling the globe about seven times each second! If you do this for a week, Hawking states that you’d eventually travel 100 years into the future!
Unfortunately, we currently don’t have the technology to build anything that can move at the speed of light yet, so we can’t test this theory.
Watch Hawking’s “Train Ride to the Future” video for more information.
Aliens
Extraterrestrial creatures, also known as aliens, are one of the most popular features in a sci-fi story. You can’t have intergalactic space travel without encountering aliens, right? Scientists think that there are over 100 billion galaxies in the universe! Our Milky Way Galaxy alone contains a minimum of 100 billion planets, so one can only imagine how many planets are out there in the billions of other galaxies! There must be aliens somewhere in the universe with those numbers. There are sure to be some in your favorite sci-fi stories, but have we encountered any in real life?
There have been many stories of people seeing strange flying objects (sometimes called UFOs). There have been people claiming to be abducted by aliens. However, these are just stories and claims. In the world of science, aliens have not been encountered yet and so the answer to whether or not aliens exist is this: we don’t know.
Jill Tarter, astronomer and former director of the SETI Institute, a company that works closely with NASA, explains really well why we haven’t found aliens yet, using the ocean as a comparison. She says to picture the universe as an enormous ocean. If you’re on a boat in the middle of this ocean and you take a 12 ounce glass and fill it up with seawater, you probably won’t see a fish in that glass. But look around you at the rest of the ocean. Your glass is not large enough to sample the rest of the water is it? That small glass can be compared to the limited technology we have to search for alien life in an ocean of a universe. Maybe someday we’ll have a larger glass, but for now, we don’t have the means to search the entire universe.
We are trying though. Click here to read about the Mars rover Perseverance and a helicopter called Ingenuity that NASA plans to send to Mars this month to look for signs of life!
Left: Aliens may be out there in some shape or form, but we have not found any signs of life yet. Right: There are rovers on Mars like this one that are currently searching for many things, including evidence of life. (Image credits from left to right: Comfreak / Pixabay ; NASA / Wikimedia Commons)
For some advanced reading, check out “The Search for Life in the Universe” written by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson.
Science and Science Fiction
Movie screenwriters and book authors come up with extraordinary sci-fi stories that excite and delight us. Many science fiction elements are based on real science, but are not always accurate. There are also older sci-fi stories, featuring technology that didn't exist yet but does now. In some ways, science and sci-fi are very much related. In other ways, science has not caught up with some of the things presented in sci-fi stories. Either way, we can appreciate both science and science fiction as two separate, but interesting topics to learn about.
Watch the video Science Fiction Inspires the Future of Science by National Geographic.
By Megan Goldsmith
