When Fiction Predicts the Future...

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

...carniculture vats.

Catchy name.

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

It tends to make you think ... what's to come?

While I don't know if it will ever be that easy to grow meat on your own in a basement, stranger things have happened. (Don't ask me to name any today...) If it ever becomes more popular to grow your own veggies in your own household, I suppose carniculture (I do like that name!) could be a part of it.

[Worldwalker]

Easy, not necessarily. It's not easy to raise jellyfish, either, or stony corals for that matter (though they're not as hard as jellyfish), but people do it as a hobby. And if there's anyone obessed with their hobby, it's foodies. There are people who pay obscene prices for a meal the way the rest of us pay for a vacation, and for much the same reason: it's an experience for them, a set of memories they want to have. If do-it-yourself meat -- totally under your control, cruelty-free, and arguably vegetarian-safe, for the philosophical vegetarians -- was as easy as do-it-yourself jellyfish (i.e., not very, but possible) they'd do it. If it was as easy as, say, fixing your own car, I'd do it. I don't grow all my own veggies, but there's nothing like the taste of a fresh tomato still warm from the sun, and I think this year I'm going to plant spinach and arugula so I can have fresh greens for salads instead of the limp grocery-store kind. I grow fresh food as a luxury, but it used to be a necessity. Many rural people (and some suburban, and even a few urban ones with generous balconies, micro-yards, etc.) grow at least some of their own veggies even today. And we're not all that long removed from the era of the Victory Garden, even if we do live in a society of people who think cooking involves a phone call to the pizza place. If home-grown meat becomes a possibility, I have no doubt that there are people who will grow their own. They'll probably trade cell lines like people today trade sourdough starters.

I'm afraid I didn't invent the term "carniculture"; that's pretty much the standard term for it, and has been since at least the 1950s. I'd have to do more research than I care to if I wanted to find out how much further back it goes.

[Theta Head]

William Gibson has always been pretty good at predicting future possiblities.

I remember reading one of his books about 15 years ago, Virtual Light, in which he wrote about a pair of sunglasses that, when you looked through them, made objects - such as buildings - contain viewable tags with information such as location, which companies were in those buildings, and so on. It seemed like such a classic, outlandish sci-fi idea at the time, but 15 years later we have augmented reality.

Greg Dawe
Author of Theta Head
http://fictiononedge.wordpress.com/

[Dopedangel]

Tom Clancy predicted that a commercial jet could be used in a terrorist attack a few years before 9/11.

[ApK]

Originally Posted by Theta Head

William Gibson has always been pretty good at predicting future possiblities.

I remember reading one of his books about 15 years ago, Virtual Light, in which he wrote about a pair of sunglasses that, when you looked through them, made objects - such as buildings - contain viewable tags with information such as location, which companies were in those buildings, and so on. It seemed like such a classic, outlandish sci-fi idea at the time, but 15 years later we have augmented reality.

By the time of 'Virtual Light', VR head-mounted displays, and Heads-up augmentation, like in fighter planes, was already real and in broad use. Sounds like he just shrunk them.

Sounds like a story I'd like to read though.

ApK

[ardeegee]

Originally Posted by Dopedangel

Tom Clancy predicted that a commercial jet could be used in a terrorist attack a few years before 9/11.

Steven King did, too, more or less. In The Running Man in 1982.

[bthrowsnaill]

I love William Gibson! Half the time I'm not 100% sure what is happening in his books, but I always feel like something cool is going on (and perhaps I'm not quite smart enough to comprehend it). After all, who can comprehend the machinations of Hubertus Bigend?
Gibson seems to be into drones and "secret brands" at the moment.
BTW: the song lyric I posted earler in this thread w/o explanation refers to a video game called "Alan Wake", where the hero is a writer who ends up as a character in a story of his own creation. It's a very cool game--especially if you're a writer.

[Namekuseijin]

humans are stupid. You may write about the most outrageously stupid event and be sure when humans get there you'll be hailed as a prophet...

[Namekuseijin]

Originally Posted by bthrowsnaill

I love William Gibson!

me too. Too bad he made some lousy predictions for memory size...

[G J Lau]

This thread hits on an idea that I wrote about in a recent blog posting, namely that we are incapable of imagining something that couldn't happen eventually. Or to put it another way, if we can imagine it, then sooner or later it will happen. Or maybe it has already happened and we are just echoing memories from deep inside our genetic subconscious. So when they say be careful what you wish for . . . well, be careful.

Fun stuff to think about on a quiet Sunday afternoon.

[Worldwalker]

Your premise is, not to put too fine a point on it, hogwash.

Aliens from outer space? Time travel? A cure for cancer? Not possibly. Inevitably. Maybe not exactly the way you imagined it in every little detail, but close enough for government work.

Let's take the first one: I can imagine we are alone in the universe. I can also imagine we are not. Only one, not both, can be true. Likewise, if the latter is true, I can imagine that our first contact with aliens will be friendly; I can also imagine that it will be hostile. Again, since they cannot both be true, I am imagining something which cannot exist (though I don't know which one).

And why is human imagination so privileged? If my cat imagines someone giving him all the cat food he could possibly eat, should it happen?

I can keep on dissecting that post (there are plenty of other points of failure). If you were trying to get hits on your blog, well, you succeeded with me ... once. But if you were trying to get hits from people who agreed with your premise, or even agreed that your premise was possible, you failed and failed badly.

[sportourer1]

Writers and inventors share the same quality of imagination but only one has the ability to make those wonderings a reality.

[G J Lau]

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

I can imagine we are alone in the universe. I can also imagine we are not. Only one, not both, can be true.

Wait, wait! I just imagined multiverses. Problem solved. You do make a good point about animals. And how about plants? Communication among plants is a fact of life. Who knows what dreams are rustling in the leaves.

As for the blog thing, point taken. I'll confine future self-promo to the signature. Although it was relevant. At least I thought so. Maybe I just imagined it.

[Worldwalker]

Originally Posted by G J Lau

Wait, wait! I just imagined multiverses. Problem solved.

Problem not solved, because I'm talking about us, here, not our paratime copies. For us, in this particular world branch, there are innumerable sets of exclusive things. I just ate an onion, not a mushroom. All the imagining in the world can't make the thing on my fork into a mushroom (that was the next bite). It scales up from there. Saying "it could be true in some other universe, maybe one with different physical laws" is ducking the question.

Here's another example: if everything is possible in some universe, somewhere, then there will be, somewhere in that infinity, a universe in which someone (we'll call him Fred) has come to our own (not any of its copies, this one) and made it blindingly obvious that he is a temporal traveler. And there will also be, in some universe, an organization aware of people like Fred and able to conceal the presence of such people. Both cannot be simultaneously true -- that is, Fred can't come here and be obvious and the paracops can't hide all evidence of Fred. Either he's obvious or he's not obvious. With an infinity of universes, if all things were possible, Fred would have to be both simultaneously. That is self-contradictory, so either there is not an infinite number of universes, travel between them is not possible, time travel is not possible, or the Paratime Police are better at what they do than Fred is. Any one of those things negates one of the premises.

So ... nope ... just because you can imagine something doesn't make it real.

[BenBanned]

According to the MERLIN projects findings, media influences collective conciousness, which in turn can be used to predict the future.

Check it out:
MERLIN

From what I understand it's a computer that monitors discussions on the internet and uses the information to predict the future.