Over the past two years I have read more than a hundred science fiction books, an average of about one per week. You can see the full list here , I even marked my favorites.



I started reading science fiction, just to pass the time. I still have good memories of reading the “Jurassic Park” in childhood. I continued to read, because I noticed that this book gave me something: a strong imagination, a dislike for the ordinary.

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I caught myself on the fact that my ideas are different from those that draw a lot from the same articles of TechCrunch, Hacker News, Habrahabr and other “daily” sites of the residents of Silicon (Silicon) Valley. My business is the sale of ideas, and these books are both a real treasure and my toolkit.



As futurologist Jason Silva says:

“Imagination allows us to experience exciting future opportunities, choose the most amazing, and move the present forward to finally meet her.”

I think that reading these books helped me in creating an idea and in moving towards it.



Every good science fiction, in fact, is a thought experiment, and I would like to launch my own right now:

What if these books are a fair guess as to what our future will look like?

This assumption is not so contrived. Reading the early works of the classics of Jules Verne or HG Wells, I am more amazed not by how wrong they were, but by how right they were in their guesses. I chose which books to read from the collection “Top 100 best science fiction works of all times”, so most likely these books contain the best (or at least the most interesting) ideas from all possible.



This is the future for which we are headed, as our greatest science fiction writers have predicted:

1. In order to save humanity, we must lose it.

We all know that the long-term survival of our species depends on the colonization of other planets, and as a result of other star systems. The question is not whether our planet will become uninhabitable, it is a question of when this will happen.



Just looking at the distances and possible dates associated with this process, it becomes clear - as soon as we start it, we will begin to move away from each other.



The gap will begin with language and culture. Settlements on individual planets, separated by millions of kilometers and time gaps in the transmission of communication signals, will begin to develop their own dialects, their slang, their music, their tendencies and aspirations.



Just look at the changes in English, between the Scots of the mountains and the Californian surfers, the South African drillers and the inhabitants of the Caribbean - this will give you a clear hint of the coming cultural drift.



The next is a political and economic gap. Like the establishment and cultural self-determination of American society, culminating in independence, the colonies will begin the process of self-identification of themselves, their differences, and ultimately they will require a government that will represent their interests. Given the distances, we will be able to put down the first few uprisings, but their separation will only be a matter of time.



Economic integration will expand, but much slower than the speed of colonization and intelligence. By the time we can fully integrate these colonies into our economy, they will have developed self-sufficient economic systems.



Finally, we begin to see a genetic gap. Despite our huge diversity here on Earth, we are all one species, and this means that any person can have a child with any other person of the opposite sex for more than 160,000 years.



But it happened historically. For most of the prehistoric period, at least several species of hominids roamed the planet, and only the rapid emergence and expansion of the homo sapiens sapiens species from Africa around the world was the key to unified humanity.



The moment some of us leave the planet, our total DNA will begin to diverge again. Starting from the conditions of a limited gene pool and at different pressures, different sources of mortality, at different levels of radiation and mutations, the “space navigators” will embark on a new evolutionary path of development.



After all, hundreds of years or thousands, one fatal mutation in one remote, isolated colony will make reproduction impossible, cutting off this branch of humanity forever.



In order to save humanity, we must colonize the stars, and at the same time a single humanity, such as we know it, will be lost forever.

2. Time will be our greatest enemy.

With the conquest of three dimensions of space, the 4th dimension of time will become our greatest problem.



The first reason is the slowing down of time, which is proved by the theory of relativity (most recently this topic was raised in the film Interstellar), but which plays an important role in dozens of science fiction stories written over the past decades. Slowing down time is a phenomenon of different time flow at different speeds depending on how fast you are moving, which means that someone traveling at speeds close to the speed of light will age more slowly than anyone on Earth.



The humanitarian consequences of this phenomenon are striking. Long-term space travelers will return to their home planet where everyone they knew is dead and no longer there. Families will be stretched through the ages, with people who outlive their great-great-grandchildren. Historical characters will emerge from the space capsules still young. Those who want to see the future will be sent on a long, high-speed round trip, arriving at the desired time. It will be like a time machine without the possibility of returning to the past.



The second reason lies in the vast distances involved in interstellar travel. It is likely that the first to go on an interstellar journey will not be the first to arrive - while they are on the way, new technologies will develop, allowing a later expedition to overtake them. Imagine that you are immersed in cryogenic sleep, in the first group of interstellar travelers, only to wake up and discover that your destination was colonized hundreds of years ago.



The third reason is technological differences. Technology will be extremely important in space civilizations and will improve so quickly that even small differences will have far-reaching consequences:

• Take two systems with a slight difference in the speed of technological development and you will find a huge gap between them in a few decades or centuries. Their society can be so fundamentally different that it will be difficult to imagine communication and exchange between them.
• Technologies sent to remote systems will be outdated by the time they receive them. Even sending information at the speed of light cannot be fast enough for star systems that are several light-years from each other. This will reduce trade to nothing, except perhaps extremely rare raw materials.
• Wars at such great distances will be in vain, therefore any attacking forces sent on subluminal lines will be outdated by the time of arrival. But it can also mean a never-ending war, where neither side can win, as Joe Holdeman describes in The Forever War, 1975

We are already experiencing time limits in space travel. In a recent documentary about the spacecraft Rosetta, launched by the European Space Agency, for landing on a comet, it is noticeable that the probe cameras have a resolution of only 4 megapixels, which was quite good in 2004, when it was launched. Today, even smartphones have more modern cameras.



The Philae landing probe was equipped with a well-adjusted harpoon system and ice drills, and we thought that would be enough for a successful landing. But in subsequent years, we discovered that the surface of a comet is actually a mixture of dust, gravel and ice, which makes this equipment much less suitable for work.



Over the years, our understanding of the very essence of time will change, and we will find that the 4th dimension creates for us much more problems, all 3 physical dimensions combined.

3. The future will be strange

If I had to choose one word to describe the future, as it appears from the stories that seemed to me the most convincing and believable, it would be strange . Let me explain.



Writers like Ray Kurzweil have done a good job explaining why it’s so hard for us to imagine the future that we are heading for. He argues that all our primordial heuristics are linear — like tracking antelope passing through savanna, counting the remaining products in the store — but due to Moore's law, we are entering an exponential phase with which these heuristics are simply not ready to cope.



In other words, we look at the rate of change from the recent past, and extrapolate to the near future. But now, when we reach the exponential part of the graph, this kind of extrapolation is simply not applicable.



I find this argument convincing, but what is most interesting for me is not just the speed of change, but also the unpredictability of its direction. The stories I read led me to believe that we barely knew about the future consequences of some of the technologies already developed, and that these effects manifest themselves in an entirely strange way.



Take dating for example. How will dating happen in the world of highly developed anti-aging methods? Imagine a man and a woman on a date. They both look about 25, but their appearance means nothing at all. They have to play a difficult game of testing and testing each other’s knowledge in the field of pop culture and not only to try to determine each other’s age without naming them on their own. There will be whole industries, schools, and a new world view on how (and why?) To meet people who are many decades older (or more than ages?) Older or younger than you.



The area where we will see this oddity in the very near future is a virtual reality. It's funny that most assumptions about virtual reality are built on how it will inherit ordinary reality, with realistic human bodies on realistic worlds. But I think that we will very quickly understand that this kind of reality is more of a bug, not a feature.



What would you look like if you could take any form? There will be new industries designed to help us experience the experience of living in the role of other people, animals, inanimate objects and foreigners. Other industries will focus on the design of the environment, the laws of physics, mental states, personalities, memories, and many other things over which we will have control. An example of such a scenario was presented by Robin Wright, in 2013 in the film Congress (based on the science fiction novel by Stanislav Lem).



But the best example of how strange the future will be is artificial intelligence.



The idea behind the technological singularity is that there is a point in our future beyond which we do not see. Presumably this is the point when human-level artificial intelligence accesses its own source code, marking the beginning of an exponential explosion of intelligence.



But what does “super-human” intelligence mean? What can we expect from a computer whose power, say, is a million times the computational power of all people who have ever lived?



We believe that it would be wise to direct it to solving “difficult” tasks, such as solving the problem of world hunger, modeling the Earth’s climate, deciphering the brain structure, etc. But our anthropomorphic, linear thinking plays a cruel joke with us again.



Let's look at it through an analogy: imagine an ant watching a person’s behavior. From the point of view of the ant, a person does not spend his time “on solving difficult ant-oriented tasks”. Virtually nothing that a person does is not remotely understandable, and is not even directly observed, since the scale and complexity of the simplest actions of a person goes far beyond the concepts of the ant. From this point of view, I think it can be concluded that the ant would use the word " strange " to describe a person.



And this is exactly the word, as we will describe the actions and thinking of superhuman AI. If the explosion of the level of intelligence really happens, then it will very quickly reach the level of surpassing us in the way that we transcend ants and even more.



Who knows what actions they will take? Maybe they will invent a new logical system that is incompatible with human neurology. Maybe they will find that our Universe is modeled and enter into contact, negotiation or cultural exchange with our creators. Maybe they use pure mathematics to disassemble dark matter and move our reality into an alternative quantum state, where they are creators, and we are an artificial form of life. Most likely, they will do something for which we do not even have a language to describe it.

Why is it important

There are many other interesting ideas, but as this post becomes long, it is time to complete it. Maybe I will write a sequel.



When I started reading science fiction, I thought it was an interesting way to predict the future for myself. But I began to learn a variety of methods that rely on the principles of science fiction to create things in the real world. Narrative and science are among the most powerful tools to which we have free access - and their combination has great potential.



I started with a book called Science Fiction Prototyping: Designing the Future with Science Fiction . She was recommended to me by a guide in a company where I worked at that time, as the most important book that can be recommended for innovation, and my curiosity was piqued.



It describes the free process of using common elements of science fiction stories to create and test the consequences of new technologies. Just as the narrative reflects human experience, NF prototypes use fiction to explore the potential experience of new technologies.



One of my favorite futurists, Thomas Frey, uses a process called " situational futuring " to quickly create and explore probabilistic scenarios for the future that can be used for everything from geopolitical strategy to product development. The huge amount of exciting scenarios that he comes up with in his blog is a convincing proof of the effectiveness of this method.



I even recently learned about Appreciative inquiry, a model created at Case Western Reserve University in response to our obsession with problem solving. It is based on the “proactive principle”, which states that “what we are doing today is guided by our present image of the future”. This model uses the “tricky creation of a positive image on a collective basis for proactive reality”.



I'm not sure how to put it into practice, but I think that it is worth noting that someone is working to make sci-fi prototyping more rigorous.



The bottom line is that the line between science and science fiction is becoming very blurred. Every day brings news of stunning discoveries, promotions or inventions that should not have happened for many years. The ability to create scenarios in a purely imaginary future, and to work out the subtle consequences of fundamentally new opportunities, becomes useful not only for writers - it becomes the key skill for creating these opportunities in the first place.



The author Nassim Taleb in his book Antifragile discusses a rule of thumb that he uses to evaluate how long something will be around us: the longer this “something” has been around, the longer it will probably remain. According to this indicator, as long as specific technologies come and go, and while we experiment with virtually every aspect of our environment and consciousness, the instinct of the narrative will continue to be a major human trait.



I suggest learning to use it to tell stories about the future that is worth creating.