Remember reading Huxley's "Brave New World" in high school? The problem I always had, relative to that book's dystopian predictions of a world where people were churned out in factories and mentally stunted to order, was the elevator button.

One of the tasks in that novel for which a degraded little sub-human had been bred was to operate an elevator, since that was a task that was obviously a waste of a full human intellect. And so we had a society which could produce this poor, shrunken idiot to run the elevator... but hadn't discovered that, in fact, it didn't need poor, shrunken idiots to run the elevators because you could easily install elevator buttons.

That's what came to mind when I was reading this discussion about space elevators at Steven's. Science fiction hasn't really done a great job of predicting the future as we end up living it. We didn't go through an era of flying cars, we didn't go through an era of rocket ships, we didn't go through an era of cybernetically-modified skateboard punks. Even reading through a lot of far-future settings, something that struck me is that I actually use a lot more technology than the characters I'm writing about.

And part of that reason is that there are innumerable things in the world which are enabled by the technology that we have, but that nobody really set out to develop, and were conspicuously unpredicted years in the past. Plenty of people wrote about computers, but I don't think anyone expected them to become a tool of ubiquitous networking. We spend a lot less time flying through virtual cyberscapes that are representations of hideously complex systems, and a lot more just typing messages out.

Nobody predicted that we'd all have solid-state music players with custom playlists of our favorite songs, even though in theory people had predicted solid-state memory, music compression, and the like. The idea never gelled, just like nobody in Huxley's brave new world ever thought "gee, instead of spending years raising this little chimp-like man, why don't we just put three bucks of electronics in the elevator and call it a day?"

That's how I think of space elevators. It's too much of a "to be engineered for" project to actually work; it's a flying car, a rocket belt, a USB port behind your ear. It's the sort of thing that looks like a good idea on paper thirty years before you realize that it's a tremendous overkill solution to a problem you solved in a different fashion long ago, as a byproduct of doing something else you were trying to do.

That doesn't mean that space exploration is unimportant! But sometimes you have to sit back and wait for the technology to catch up with you, perhaps.

In other news, Ghost Slayers Ayashi is done, I'm down to the last volume of Lucky Star, and Kagami won Saimoe this year, beating Tsukasa in the finals. I'm actually kind of glad I wasn't following it closely, now; my life has been a little too full of Lucky Star as it is, of late...

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 12:33 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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