Does science fiction inspire real tech?

I read science fiction, and I read a lot of it to escape into another universe where the rules have changed and what it's like to be human and to be alive can be a totally different experience. But I also read science fiction to be inspired and to glimpse potential futures for humanity. In my view, science fiction authors are part of the science and engineering enterprise. Scientists are trying to understand the universe and engineers are trying to

Hello, I'm Kelly Wintersmith. I study parasites and space, and today we're talking about some of my favorite topics, which are technology and sci fi.

Hi, I'm Daniel, I'm a particle physicist, and I read a lot of science fiction.

You do read a lot of science fiction. So what I want to know is what piece of technology in science fiction if you could bring to life right now, would you want to bring to life to have in your own personal life.

Oh well, I have two answers to that. One is a replicator. I would love, like, essentially a three D printer that could make any I find it really frustrating that there are things that we know can exist, but we don't know how to make them, like how to arrange the atoms very easily, and so I would love a replicator. That would be amazing.

I'm having trouble following the dream there, Like what in particular would you replicate if you could.

I mean, imagine being able to make food without having to go through this complex food chemistry process to start from ingredients and end up at soufle a. Right. Yeah, you literally make anything in any shape, any arrangement. If you're doing like a complex baking project and you want like chocolate in the shape of a dolphin or whatever, like getting it in that shape is hard. Sometimes you have to like coerce it. So yeah, I want to skip over all of chemistry essentially.

Yeah, I mean in white, like you're cancer when you could have chocolate in the shape of a dolphin. Yeah. I see where you're going.

Okay, all right, all right, But I recently had the opposite experience, which is I read a science fiction novel in which something I invented appeared.

What.

Yeah, go on. So I'm reading this science fiction novel about somebody who's listening for messages from outer space and they rely on a distributed network of smartphones called crafus in order to capture the data. They actually reference the name of the experiment.

Yeah, what did one of our listeners send you give me more information? This can't be Do you know this person?

I do not know this person. And I emailed the author and I was like, wow, thanks for including our experiment in your book. And he wrote back He's like, oh, this is so fun. And we had a nice conversation.

Oh well, what's the name of the book.

The book is called The Receiver by Seth Jaffe and you can find it on Amazon. I'm about halfway through it right now.

That is so cool. Oh my gosh, you've inspired science fiction.

Well, it plays a minor role, but it was fun. Yeah, it was fun to appear in science fiction. I mean there's no Daniel whites in character, but they took the experiment and use it and they got the science right, So kudos Seth.

Wow. I mean, do you think that it would be more interesting if there was a Daniel Whitson character or more interesting if there's a tech div I loved by Daniel Whitson.

I've even mortified to see myself in science fiction. It's just very cool to influence somebody else's view of like what's possible out there in the universe? What can we do? Oh, this is a new capability and that's exactly why we came up with the experiment to create new sensing capability. So that was really fun.

That's awesome. So you know, over time, I've done like a bunch of interviews where people have asked about, like how do you inspire people to like do space stuff and like you know, invest in space, and then there's a lot of this conversation about how science fiction inspires people to do space stuff, and so I have actually pretty often said this phrase that like science fiction inspires technology, and then physics and technology inspires science fiction, and so

Exactly. I do the same thing all the time. I credit science fiction with inspiring technology. I say it's a healthy, two way inspirational street. And I expected, when digging into this episode to find lots and lots of examples to back up the claims I've been making for years. But as you know, when you started researching your book about Mars, sometimes when you dig into the details, you learn that the popular story isn't always accurate.

Oh no, you're giving away the punchline. I wasn't gonna give away the punchline. But yes, you had the City on Mars experience where you thought it was going to go one way, and then you're as you're researching it, you're like, I'm going to lose all of my friends.

Well maybe not all of them stick around. There are some really fun tidbits in here, all right, But before we dig into some fun examples, I want to out there, and I asked the extraordinaries what they thought might have been inspired by science fiction. Here's what folks had to say. Star Trek communicators are probably the easy one. Inspired flip phone technology, cell phone.

I mean, just taking Star Trek as a great example. Their pads inspired tablets, their communicators inspired cell phones, their medical devices inspired well, I guess medical devices and their replicators inspired the replicators that we all have in our homes today. Wait, wait, you don't.

You don't have one.

I bet Star Wars inspired a lot of great new theme park ride technology.

At Disney we have.

Self driving cars, harveboards, lasers.

Flip phones. Yeah.

From Star Trek communicators.

No, I don't know.

I'm sure there's a bunch one missing.

Maybe rovers to other planets we thought of before we actually created them.

I'd be I only so.

I read the Neil Stephenson novel Snowgrash, which was about metaverse and how you can live these elaborate lives online in this virtual reality world.

Well, the first thing that comes to mind is the Star Trek communicator and the flip phone.

All right, so I'm seeing a lot of communicators, tablets, cell phones, flip phones. Those are some of the things that I would have guessed initially. So should we start there.

Yeah, this is the most common thing. People like Kirk's Flip communicator. It's iconic. You know, people see it, they see the connection to smartphones, you know, the Motorola phone, and it's often cited is the most common example of science fiction inspiring something in reality.

Should we explain the Motorola phone for the like five young listeners we might have.

Yeah, So, Flip's communicator is a little handheld device. It's the size of your palm, and it flips it open like does this move and it makes this sound, and you know, something you carry with you. And the cool thing about it is that it's like always on, you know, like punch in a number to call Spock. You just open it and you talk and the Enterprise can hear you. And I think the most important thing about the communicator in the show was that it was kind of boring.

I love that he was comfortable with the Enterprise listening at all times, just like we're comfortable with Alexa and Siri listening to us at all times. They were also like, I'm going to give away all of my information and all of my personal conversations to the Enterprise.

And in science fiction, this was kind of novel. We already had an existence like two way walkie talkies, and there were mobile phones at the time, but they were only in cars.

So this was the nineteen sixties and there were already mobile phones in cars.

There were already mobile phones in cars, that's right, okay, And we had wireless communication with radios and transistors were shrinking everything. So it was sort of a novel idea, but it also inspired by a lot of similar technology.

I thought that it was like the seventies or the eighties where you had those giant phones in cars, but that was even earlier. I guess it was like the super duper rich, we're able to have them, and maybe it took up like the whole trunk to make it work or my family didn't have one, that's for sure.

Yeah. So the history of the mobile phone development is super fascinating. In the forties, already Aight and T introduced car phones. These were big, They were stuck in a car. Yeah, it's not very widespread service in the forties. The late forties, Yeah, it's amazing. And eighteen and T kept working on car based phones, and Motorola was aiming for a handheld phone. So this guy at Motorola Martin Cooper, and he's the

So for emergency use only.

Yeah, exactly, And this is awesome. The first call ever made on a handheld mobile phone was from Martin Cooper to his chief rival at eight and t.

That's amazing.

And then Motorola kept working on the phones and it wasn't until like nineteen eighty nine they we had the first sort of small animal flip phone that looked like a Star Trek communicator.

Okay, that's amazing.

Yeah, and then you know, the iconic in the nineteen nineties is the Motorola star Tack, which is this flip phone which is super popular and everybody who was alive at the time had one, or saw one or new one. Right, And this is connection in people's minds between the Motorola Startack and the Star Trek communicator. And this guy Martin Cooper at Motorola, the inventor of the mobile phone, explicitly

Okay, wait, a couple thoughts. One, how William Shatner changed the world? Did the shat do the writing or shouldn't like the writer it shouldn't have been How the writers of Star Trek changed the world. That feels like the credit's not going to the right person.

Yeah, and it's not even the writers, it's the prop designer. There's this guy Wa Ming Cheng who created so many iconic props on Star Trek. The Communicator, the Romulan bird of Prey, the Vulcan harp, all these things, the tricorder, so many things that we identify with Star Trek were invented by this one guy. While I'm being chang so, yeah, he should definitely get the credit. I bet he read a lot of science fiction.

Yeah, no doubt he changed the world.

That's right. So that's the sort of story that's going around, And if you only dig in superficially, it seems like this is a great example of science fiction Star Trek, in this case coming up with a new idea, of course, building on ideas that have been out there already, but coming up with a new idea which caught on and then inspired scientists in the real world to make something real. Right.

I am so glad that I was correct on all of those podcasts where I know said the thing.

So let's move on, But actually, oh yes, if you dig deeper. In twenty twenty one, Martin Cooper recanted that story. Yes, what exactly? Apparently there was this popular myth that Star Trek inspired the flip phone. Everybody says it. Kelly Winersmith says it, and she does a lot of research, so you gotta believe it.

Right, He's wrong sometimes, guys, I know.

And it turns out that when he was being interviewed, he says he felt pressure to endorse this popular myth even though it wasn't true. Here's a quote from him. I got caught up in this thing. Their premise was that the cell phone came from William Chatner and Star Trek, and I didn't argue with them. This is show business. We don't worry about facts. And I've had to live with that for how many years now.

I think when he sleeps on his bed of money, he probably sleeps pretty well. But some of them where did he get the idea?

So there's another twist. Right first, we're thinking, oh, it's inspired by Star Trek. Then it turns out no, But the answer is it's inspired by a different science fiction source. As a kid, he read Dick Tracy, comic strips and Dick Tracy. For those who don't know, is this famous

Okay, well, so here's what I want to know. So was Star Trek inspired by Dick Tracy or is this the case of like an idea. Like I feel like some ideas, when their time comes, they're just obvious, right, And so like maybe someone was going to come up with this idea, or like many people were going to come up with this idea independently, and it was just gonna it was an obvious thing that was going to happen eventually.

Yeah, I think a lot of people came up with this idea. You know, we had wireless communication already, you know, in World War One. And then if you look at like cartoons depicting the future, there's examples in like nineteen twenties of a cartoonist drawing a crowd in the future where everybody's walking around holding their own personal phone. So

So do you give this initial idea to sci fi or do you give this to the engineers? Where does the point go?

I think science fiction really did inspire this. I mean, Cooper says, if we can trust him now, that he was inspired by science fiction. And this timeline also makes more sense. I mean, by the time that Star Trek came out in the late sixties, like Motorola, was practically in the home stretch. It's not like they saw Star Trek and then a few years later they put this thing together. They had been working on this project for decades. People had had mobile phones already in cars, they were

Okay, but like I don't sense a delay, so I don't know, does that seem worth investing in?

Well, don't you want to have faster communication with the Moon and with Mars? Like, wouldn't that be great?

All right?

Okay, by the time we're you know, spending a lot of time on the Moon or Mars. Yes, we should figure that out. I'll give you that.

Yeah. And in star Trek, the next generation, they had this version of the communicator with badges, like you could just press your badge to talk to somebody, which is not something you see anybody really working on. I don't know if it's just not cool enough or what, but it's the capability of communicators in Star Trek which we haven't yet seen in the market.

I don't know.

Let's kind of like just talk into your your wrist Apple watch, isn't it. I Mean, I don't really want to have to like touch my chest to like make a phone call, but touching my wrists feels like way less weird.

I have not bought into the Apple Watch thing, so I can't speak to that.

No, I don't have one either. I'm way too clumsy. I would smash it into a wall and break it. But okay, all right, you.

Can get an app on your phone which makes the sounds of a communicator so you.

Can feel Star Trek y amazing.

Yeah, but we still can't use subspace.

All right, Well maybe one day, okay, So score one for science fiction. Although as a person who has married a cartoonist, I feel like maybe they should be score one for like comic books or comic strips, and they should get a little bit more cred. But let's take a break, and when we come back, we will move

Daniel, it is Star Trek has like really wormed its way into the minds of engineers. Nerds out there love Star Trek. And something that's ubiquitous in Star Trek, which we now also have are these tablet computers. Right in Star Trek next generation, they had these padd personal access displayed devices and if you watch the show. Now it looks a lot like an iPad. These things are flat,

Am I wrong in queuing into the fact that it's called a pad and we now have iPads? Was that on purpose? Or am I jumping the gun?

You're a jumping the gun. There's an interesting twist there at the end whether or not the iPad was inspired by the Star Trek pad. Oh, it's certainly very similar.

I can wait, I can wait.

And they appeared briefly in the original series, and they're hilarious, like I love the Star Trek Next Generation Technical Manual, which gives you like ridiculous sciencey, so sounding stories like how things work. And so I look this up and apparently the padd is powered by Serium Krelie power cells and have an outer casing of boronit whisker epoxy, allowing them to drop thirty five meters without any damage.

Oh wow, wow, boronight whisker.

Boron nit whisker epoxy. I'm going to go get that at the hardware store.

That yeah, that's a meaning. Where did you find those specs.

In the Star Trek next Generation Technical Manual? Of course?

Is that something you can buy online? Or do you have that on your bookshelf.

I do not have that on my bookshelf, but you can look it up online these days.

Yeah, okay, amazing.

And this is not actually the first time this kind of device appears in science fiction, but it's the first time. It's so similar to the device we have now. Back in nineteen fifty one, in the novel Foundation, Isaac Asimov's characters have this thing called a calculator pad, and then in nineteen sixty eight two thousand and one Space Odyssey

Well, so is this so surprising? So look, if you've got this idea of like a flip phone where you can, like c Spock when he pops up, an iPad is just like the flip phone wider like, So it's not that different, is it.

You sound like all the naysayers who were like, the iPad is not going to succeed, and meanwhile it's like a zillion dollar business. You're right, it's very similar to the smartphone, but it's something different, right. That's why people buy tablets and also smartphones, because it's like a bigger window into the Internet. Somehow. I was also skeptical. I remember being like it's just a big smartphone, and smartphones are already too big. But lots of people like their tablets.

You're right. When the iPad first came out one, I thought the name was hilarious, and when the Saturday Night Live jokes were coming out about how it's named after

Yeah, exactly. And you know, Apple didn't invent the idea of a tablet, as in many cases, they came in very late, made it awesome, and sold billions of them.

Right.

The idea for like a touchscreen tablet goes way way back. The first patent was in nineteen seventy nine by team at Hitachi for the idea, and Apple had a touchscreen mac andsoft concept as early as nineteen eighty four. You can see a prototype of it in the SF MoMA. Actually, and in nineteen eighty nine, the predecessor to the Pom Pilot. The first maybe successful tablet was this grid pad, which is based actually on MS DOS for those who remember that.

Had a tablet that's amazing.

And you know the powered Apple and their design and their slick interface and their marketing. I don't know, all right, So did the Star Trek pad inspire the iPad or other similar devices? So if you ask the guys at Star Trek, they think it did well. Doug Drexler, he's one of the designers behind the pad. He said that iPads felt quote eerily similar to his team's vision. Quote. It's uncanny to have a padd that actually works, he said,

Would Doug Drexler say that he was inspired by earlier science fiction that came before him?

Probably, I mean, I'm sure as a designer on Star Trek, he's read all that earlier science fiction and he knows it didn't come up with the concept all on his own. But again, you know, it's a big step forward, right having it be ubiquitous, having it be in casual use, having them to be so small and portable. These were new things for Star Trek to come up with.

Okay, So I'd say this is definitely a point for science fiction. Yeah, and probably actually a point for Star Trek. So you're not having the full a city on Mars experience here. In fact, this is a very light, a calm experience.

There's a lot more nuance here than I expect you.

Yes, yes, all right, So are we going to get to a technology that doesn't have anything to do with Star trekkers, Star Trek the only thing that's driven technology forward.

No, let's go underwater. Many folks are under the impression that the book twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, which came out in eighteen seventy, inspired people to build submarines and is like the reason we have submarines now, And it was a really cool book. You know, a lot of concepts in that book, like electric propulsion and driving for a long time underwater and having self contained life support.

Yeah, that's a problem.

Yeah, the history of submarines goes all the way back to the fifteen hundreds, so like three hundred years before Jeules Byrne wrote his novel.

I gotta be honest, I would not want to be in a fifteen hundreds submarine. I can't imagine that was safe.

There's a record that in the city of Toledo, two Greeks submerged and surfaced in the River Tagus several times without getting wet, and with a flame that they carried in their hands, still a light. So this is like, you know, one record of maybe some prototype submarine all the way back in fifteen sixties.

Did they probably have like a tube that went to the surface or.

It's not clear. There's not a whole lot more details there in the record, Okay, but it's like the first reference to maybe what could have been a prototype submarine. And then in fifteen seventy eight, the English mathematician William Byrne recorded in his book Inventions or Devices, one of the first plans for an underwater navigation vehicle. So there's evidence that, like the idea was around. The first time we're sure that somebody actually built a submarine is sixteen twenty.

Like underwater, Yes, underwater with like a I know, I'm harping on this toobe, but like with like a tube that attaches you to the surface for breathing air.

Oh that's a good question.

Also, I got to be honest, I would not trust a man named Cornelius Drebbel. That sounds like someone who's trying to put you on.

Apparently, this thing was tested many times in the Thames, but failed to attract enough enthusiasm and was never used like in bad or anything. So this guy basically invented it. In sixteen twenty.

Holy cow.

Yeah. The first military submarine was the Turtle seventeen seventy five. This thing is shaped like an acorn. It's basically for like one person. It was designed by American David Bushnell, and it's the first verified submarine capable of independent underwater operation. And the first time they used screws for propulsion, right, you know how like a modern submarine has basically a

Huh.

Yeah.

And he would like run into things on purpose, Like what can you do? I guess he's just spying to figure out where things are, is that?

Yeah? I think at this point it's spying. In the US Civil War actually was one of the first uses of submarines in actual battle. In eighteen sixty four, the Confederate had a submarine called the h L. Hunley, and it was the first military submarine to ever sink an enemy vessel. It sank the uss Hausatonic problem is it

So we've got a point for engineering now, all.

Right, yeah, and Vern probably saw this at the World's Fair in Paris that year and then extrapolated.

Okay, so we've got two points for sci fi, one for engineering exactly.

And then you know, submarine pioneer Simon Lake, he really he was inspired by Vern, right, and he made the first open ocean voyage by submarine in eighteen ninety eight, and then Vern sent Lake a telegram. So I think there might have been a little bit of healthy back and forth here. Right, engineers inspier science fiction, who inspire more engineers? Dot dot dot the U boats sink the Lusitania and we get into World War One.

I love you in wet blanket mode. All right, I'm still doing two for sci fi, one for engineering. If I remember twenty thousand leagues under the sea. One thing I think Vern did Pioneer was like a really posh submarine, which I feel like most submarines have not taken up yet as far as I know, most are a bit cramped and stinky.

M no velvet couches and like nice table for your drinks and stuff.

No, no, all right, but let's leave the sea and let's start talking about communication.

So a famous science fiction author is Arthur C. Clark, and he's written lots of influential stuff, including not fiction. He's actually written essays, And in nineteen forty five he wrote an essay proposing that we build a set of satellites in geostationary orbit so we can have global communications. Right, so this is pre Sputnik. This is like visionary and saying, hey, let's put a bunch of stuff up in space so that I can talk to people on the other side

Was Clark also an engineer?

Like?

Was this the case of a sci fi writer also being like an engineer? Like, I'm wondering if we could split this point.

I think Arthur C. Clarke is not efficiently an engineer. Isn't that no real education there? He's an all around nerd though, Okay, I mean he was like inspired as a kid by dinosaurs, cigarette cards, enthusiastic about fossils. He's sort of like a futurist more than an engineer.

Did you say dinosaur cigarette cards? M? Yeah, what do those three words being together, Daniel.

Cigarette cards are these things which appeared in like packets of cigarettes that had like images on them. You could have like actors, or you could have pictures of dinosaurs or whatever, or like you know, football players or something.

That was a different era.

Okay, maybe I watched too much Edwardian or Victorian television, so I like know these things. I'm all about Masterpiece Theater.

I watched Mausterpiece Theater when I was a kid. It was Disney, So I guess we were different kinds of kids. Okay, so it sounds like we're given this point to sci fi, all right, keep going.

Yeah, absolutely, he got a lot of technical details, right. Of course, these days, you know, we're all about satellite based communications. It started like in the sixties, sixty four sixty five with the first launches of commercial satellite based communication systems. These days, of course, you know, most of the satellites in orbit are starlink satellites for Internet. We are using one right now to have this conversation. We sure are thank you to Arthur C. Clark for pioneering this idea.

But I don't think the starlinks are in geostationary orbit.

No, they're not. They're in low Earth orbit, right, and the idea there is that they can be closer and so they're a lower latency, but you're passed off from one to another. It's a different system.

Yeah, yeah, but we'll still give that to Clark. All right, let's take a break and we will move from Arthur C. Clark to Hindline. All right, we are back, and we were just discussing what Arthur C. Clark contributed to technology today? What about Hindline? What did Hindline contribute?

So there's a great book called Starship Troopers came out nineteen fifty nine, which is mind blowing that it's so old it feels much more modern.

You gotta watch out. We did a survey and we have a number of listeners who are let's say older than we are. Oh wow, And so I think that you don't want to you don't want to be casting dispersions on the year nineteen fifty nine.

No, No, it's the opposite. It's exactly the opposite. I feel like, why that book didn't come out that long ago? Did it? It makes me feel like, Okay, yes, maybe I'm saying I'm old and our listeners are too. Yeah, Anyway, a cool idea that's in that book is powered armor, basically like an exoskeleton. And you know, we've seen this, of course much more recently. It's all over Avatar and

All right, so does this point go to sci fi? Then give us the context.

It's nuanced. The idea for this definitely predates Starship Troopers. In the eighteen nineties there was a Russian inventor, Nicholas Yagan, who invented a spring and piston based apparatus for running and heavy lifting, used like compressed gas and springs. This is like real steampunk exoskeleton kind of stuff.

It must have been awesome, yeah, totally, unless it's like exploded.

Yeah, I'm sure it was super dangerous. And then in nineteen seventeen in the US we had the pedal motor powered soft exosuit, So this idea was definitely out there to use like mechanical support for human labor. And even in nineteen fifty eight, so a year before Starship Troopers, General Electric came out with something called the Handyman, which is basically like robotic arms that you could use for

So I wonder if GE was super excited when Starship Troopers came out because they were like free advertising, or.

If they were like, hey we got scooped. That was our right. And there's probably some grumpy engineer GE who's mad that Hindline gets credit for this.

Yeah, probably fair enough.

Something we definitely learned is that like credit is not being applied correctly, Like Kirk and Shatner do not get credit for the flip phone.

Yeah right, okay, but you know welcome to Life, am I right?

Exactly?

So it sounds like this point definitely goes to engineering, right, m yeah exactly.

Another concept we see a lot is voice control. You know in Star Trek, for example, was one of the first places you saw natural language commands. In that show, they can just talk to the computer. They ask it complicated questions or require context and analysis. It solves problems. It's like talking to a person. It's a very conversational interface, whereas you know computers until very very recently, we're much more like push button and you have to give them very specific commands.

Yeah, and now it's kind of amazing. Like I when I talk to AI and I'm trying to use it to like practice Russian or something, it is amazing how natural it sounds.

Yeah, it's really incredible. It's improved a lot, but this is something people have been working on again for a long long time. In nineteen fifty two, men Labs had something called Audrey, which was a tortured acronym for automatic digit recognition, and its goal was just to recognize spoken digits zero to nine. You know, you can just say numbers and it would recognize them fifty two. So, like you know, we did not have powerful computing back then.

Huh, Well, so I guess I'm I'm gonna kind of make a critique I made earlier, which is like, okay, so yes, science fiction came up with this idea first. But isn't it kind of obvious that at some point we'd rather not have to type something in and we'd want to just be like, you know, sit on our lazy butts and yell across the screen, like turn the DV on, you know, Like, isn't it kind of an obvious thing.

It's kind of an obvious thing, but it sometimes only seems obvious in hindsight. I think what science fiction does really well is show you how technology can transform life. What would life be like if we had this thing? Like you can say, yeah, that would be cool, but what would it really be like to be alive in that world and to live that way? And it was incredible what we saw on the screen, the way they could talk to the computer, this assistant they had, which

I think that if I was trying to sell a new technology, I would hire you to be a person to pitch it, because that was very convincing. All right, how about self driving cars, which I am hoping that I can purchase by the time my kids are old enough to drive, which is happening way faster than I thought that it would.

I know. So this first appears in science fiction in nineteen thirty five. There's a story called the Living Machine where there are driverless taxi cars and a futuristic society. And then it appears everywhere in science fiction nineteen fifties, The Magic Highway, Herbie the Lovebug in nineteen sixty eight, and one of my favorite movies. It's not really a self driving car, it's sort of like a car with a mind. And then of course night Rider in the

I'm not familiar with any of these What you don't know night Seriously, I know of night Writer. I didn't know that it was spelled K and IGHD, but I see that in your outline there's a K there.

I can still hum the theme song to night Rider, Okay, go aheach, I will not do oh no, but.

Matt, Matt would give you a musical accompaniment.

Probably, let's just ask Matt to give us some musical background right now, all right? Night Writer was very influential. I actually went to the Automotive Museum in LA where they have the night Rider one of the prop cars. Very big moment for me. I have a picture standing in front of it.

Of course, wow, whoa, yes, thanks Matt.

I watched that in the spinoff version with the helicopter lots and lots as a kid. Anyway, this is big in science fiction, and of course now it's maybe big in the real world. But this is something that again engineers were working on before it even appeared in science fiction. So in nineteen twenty five, there were already cars without drivers. These are radio controlled cars, so like think of the RC car that your kids drive around, but just like

Oh, it sounded to me like engineering gets a point.

Yes, absolutely, And then people have been working on this hard for a long long time. You know, DARPA had these challenges, how long can you drive a car? Before it crashes, and it was hard. This is like mostly led by university teams, and most of the cars crashed after like ten meters or something. So the fact that we have like competing Endeavors and Waimo and Tesla and Zooks and whatever these days they're like almost working is amazing.

Yeah, I didn't know that. Can your brother get me a Waymo car?

My brother can't even get me a Waymo car? So yeah, I know, or Waymo stock for that matter.

Oh all right, well bummer, Okay, So it sounds like we're giving this one to engineering. I think we've got time for one more technology. Let's end on three D printers and we're back to star Trek.

I know, and Daniel's preferred device, the replicator. Right, this is awesome on starcheck because again it's something you can just use casually. It's not like you go into the lab and you have to sign up and it takes seven weeks to configure the machine. You just like want a cup of hot tea, You just make a cup of hot tea to your hot time.

That beverage has not been programmed into the replication system.

Or you can like build spare parts or whatever you need. There's no ordering anything on Amazon anything you need. It just assembles. It's from the raw ingredients. It's incredible, and it's everywhere. It's not like the ship has one of them. Like everybody's got one in their quarters. It's like having a microwave.

Earl gray black. Oh no, wait, what was it?

Was it?

Earl gray black colst what do you want in it?

So this is exactly the kind of thing I would love to have around, and it's the kind of thing science fiction nerds love. But it was not invented again by star Trek. This appears first in like nineteen forty five and a short story by Murray Leinster. The idea of like feeding plastics into something, and then there's a moving arm that makes drawings in the air and the stuff that comes out of it hardens. The idea of like a three D printer really has much earlier roots

Okay, all right, but did engineering predate the idea?

So engineering does predate this. In nineteen seventy one there was a liquid metal recorder, basically sort of like printing with metal. The idea that you could like, you know, use something which was a liquid and then hardened and you could use that to build up something. They call this additive manufacturing. The idea really emerged in the eighties.

You said he was doing it before Star Trek, so he couldn't have been right.

Yeah, exactly. But the idea appeared before Star Trek in science fiction, you know, a concept of a replicator. He says, he was not inspired by science fiction. But you know, once the idea came out and three D printers were more ubiquitous, Star Trek again had already prepared people. It's a lot like the flip phone. You know, this concept was everywhere in Star Trek. People had the idea, what if we could just build things out of their raw parts?

Printer, and now we use them to build things like rocket like I think Rocket Lab at least used to three D print some of their rockets. Maybe they still do. And people are trying to three D print things like livers, and they can already do some stuff.

Yeah, absolutely, casts, right, bones, things you can put in your blood vessel, Like if you need a really specific shape for something, then you can three D print it, and so biomedically, there's a lot of applications. So it's a really cool thing, and it doesn't seem like it was inspired by science fiction, but you know, maybe its

So what do you think do we split that point?

Then?

I think maybe we should split it, you know exactly? So where do we stand in the end? Kelly?

Yeah, So here's the neat thing about the point system. I wasn't writing this down anywhere or keeping track of it at all, and so I think probably science fiction one, but I can't be sure because I didn't write it down.

Well, for those of you keeping score at home, you know more than we do about the outcome of this episode. I was assuming Kelly was keeping track, so I don't remember either.

No, nope. Well that's what you've come to expect from an episode of Daniel Kelly's Extraordinary Universe. Extraordinary detail, but not a lot of planning.

So I think my take on message is that a lot of the stories that are out there about science fiction inspiring real technology are on sort of shifty ground and rely on facts that are more myth than reality, but there is real inspiration here. People are reading science fiction thinking about those future worlds and then trying to build them, and it goes back and forth. So I think that's definitely solid.

Yeah, And I think that there are so many things that you hear in your daily life that when you dig in and you really look for the facts, the stories are so much more nuanced, which is why I kind of love that we have an hour long podcast where we get to like dig in and try to tell the more nuanced stories, and then we don't record things like points, and you know, we just we do whatever it is that we do here.

Well, if anybody's getting points, it's not William Shatner, it's Waming Chang. For all the awesome props on Star Trek, Thank you very much to all the science fiction authors who envision possible future worlds, and thank you to all the scientists and engineers who make them happen.

That's right, all right, until next time, extraordinaries, thanks for listening.

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