From fiction to fact

If you have ever watched Star Wars, George Lucas' science fiction film series set in a galaxy far, far away, the word Tatooine must sound familiar. The childhood home of Star Wars hero Luke Skywalker, it is unlike any other planet we know, because it orbited around two suns. Most people thought that was part of Lucas' creative licence. But just last week, scientists discovered an actual planet that does just that: It goes around two suns. Named Kepler 16b and nicknamed Tatooine (what else ?), the cold and gaseous world enjoys a double sunset as it circles a pair of stars approximately 200 light-years from Earth. It's not thought to harbour life, but its discovery is a very significant development.

The discovery marks yet another instance of a science fiction 'prediction' coming true, in terms of new products and scientific discoveries.

There have been so many inventions and discoveries within the past 500 years, some of which have been predicted decades previously by fiction writers. And don't forget that Leonardo da Vinci had drawn up plans for many inventions such as the helicopter which did not arrive, well, until 500 years later.

One of the most well known predictions by a science fiction writer was about the geosynchronous communications satellite by Sir Arthur C Clarke, who later called Sri Lanka home.

He wrote about such satellites in 1945 for Wireless World magazine and just two decades later, it became a reality. Today, we can watch a rugby match being played live in New Zealand or a news conference in Washington D.C. 'live' on television thanks to this technology. But we don't even think twice about a discovery that has fundamentally changed our lives.

It is rather interesting to take stock of the many science fiction predictions that have come true, especially over the past 150 years. Nearly everyone on the planet has a mobile phone now, but way back in the 1960s when the crew of fictional Star Trek carried personal communicators, it was a strange gadget.

A Star Trek movie screened as late as 1986 featured such a gadget, though Motorola was already testing cellular technology at the time. And how about that credit card/debit card that you use to pay the mobile phone bill ? It was predicted around 1888 by Edward Bellamy in his novel Looking Backward, which envisaged little plastic cards that would one day replace paper money.

We are not exactly there yet, but that day will come. If you go to a bank or supermarket to pay your credit card bill, you will not fail to notice a bevy of so-called Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) cameras literally eyeing you.

They are everywhere today, but it was unimaginable to readers of 1984, George Orwell's science fiction bestseller published in 1949. Ever noticed your bank's automatic door? H.G. Wells predicted it in 1899. (By the way, he also predicted the Atomic Bomb in 1914, if that is any comfort).

Some of you would be reading this article on a laptop PC or on an Apple iPad. Long before the wizards at Intel, Apple and Microsoft devised computers, science fiction writers and film makers had portrayed such devices (and the Internet) in their creations. Arthur C Clarke's seminal sci-fi novel 2001, paired with Stanley Kubrick's film of the same name, was the first to popularise the notion of reading newspapers online.

The book's descriptions of being able to scan through the world's daily newspapers sounds a lot like the now-common practice of visiting news sites to get the latest headlines. This film, as well as books by Stanislaw Lem (Return from the Stars) and James P Hogan (Inherit the Stars) described tablet computers/e-book readers and laptop computers respectively. Lem's story tells of how books have been turned into "crystals with recorded contents" that are read and navigated using touch-screen technology. Clarke wrote in 2001: "One by one he would conjure up the world's major electronic papers...Switching to the display unit's short-term memory, he would hold the front page while he quickly searched the headlines and noted the items that interested him. Each had its own two-digit reference; when he punched that, the postage-stamp-size rectangle would expand until it neatly filled the screen and he could read it with comfort". Sounds like an iPad to me.

If you use in-ear shell-type headphones to listen to content on your Kindle, iPad or MP3 player, listen to what Ray Bradbury had to say in Fahrenheit 451 in 1950: "And in her ears the little seashells, the thimble radios tamped tight, and an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk and music and talk coming in, coming in on the shore of her unsleeping mind." We know that these headphones can also be used to listen 'live' to someone who is on the other side of the world. Moreover, we can see him or her 'live' on our laptop screen or iPad.

It is called video calling. Although we take video calling for granted, it was a revolutionary idea when Hugo Gernsback prophesied it in his novel Ralph 124C 41+ in 1911. Gernsback also predicted Radar, which is said to be the "one invention that ever appeared first in science fiction in adequate form and detail to count as a true prediction." Word for word, Gernsback's description of Radar matches how the concept actually works.

Although not exactly a prediction or discovery, robotics received a boost through Isaac Asimov's novels. Likewise, the escalator and the submarine had been invented before Robert Heinlin and Jules Verne wrote about them in their novels The Roads Must Roll and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Nevertheless, they helped popularise the two inventions. Ultimately, all scientific inventions and discoveries are the product of imagination. Someone had to think of the telephone, the television, the motor car, the iron, the medicine pill, the airconditioner and so on. Someone yearned to see a planet with two suns.

As long as the fire of imagination burns within the human soul, we shall see more inventions and discoveries that will change the world and the way we live.