Science Fiction Novelist Peter Hamilton Discusses His Vision of the Future

[pcgeekesq]

So youre saying if there is life out there in the universe there will never be anything on any planet that is capable of flight that looks like what we consider a dragon to look like?

No life form worthy of being called intelligent would ever think I said that. Ever.

 

[kju1]

No life form worthy of being called intelligent would ever think I said that. Ever.

So now you resort to personal attacks. You have no basis for your argument anymore.

 

[pcgeekesq]

So now you resort to personal attacks. You have no basis for your argument anymore.

This from the person who created a statement out of whole cloth and then attributed it to me?
Don't get cute with me, child, I was winning flame wars on USENET over thirty years ago.
But I'm being NICE, because this is the [H]ardForums.

 

[kju1]

This from the person who created a statement out of whole cloth and then attributed it to me?
Don't get cute with me, child, I was winning flame wars on USENET over thirty years ago.
But I'm being NICE, because this is the [H]ardForums.

Again, no merit to your argument.

 

[Eshelmen]

I personally feel that malls and stores won't exist per say in 50 - 100 years. Items to purchase will be easily at your doorstep within minutes to hours. However, a viewing gallery of all sorts of items will be displayed at mega sized infrastructures. Sounds weird, but I don't think in person human interactions will decrease over time, even with technology. We as a species like to socialize, and so this gallery idea is just another form of doing so. Viewing shit you're going to buy and hanging out.

 

[c3k]

Teleportation portal: If I step HALFWAY through...can I then pull back? How are my cells connected? What about air? Wind? Atmospheric pressure?

If I see a giant tentacle come through, then what? Is it only one way?

 

[kju1]

I personally feel that malls and stores won't exist per say in 50 - 100 years. Items to purchase will be easily at your doorstep within minutes to hours. However, a viewing gallery of all sorts of items will be displayed at mega sized infrastructures. Sounds weird, but I don't think in person human interactions will decrease over time, even with technology. We as a species like to socialize, and so this gallery idea is just another form of doing so. Viewing shit you're going to buy and hanging out.

I think even with teleportation we would have roads and malls still. I think for malls they will be greatly reduced...maybe youd have one per state or somethin.

I think roads and ground vehicles will stay around. I haven't read the book but unless it becomes so ubiquitous and is point to point in a trivial manner that what we will see is roads becoming less important for long haul but covering areas that arent as well serviced in the "teleportation network".

 

[M76]

ahhhhhh teleportation. Never gonna get me near one of those things. Ill be that old guy watching from his rest home as all the idiots commit suicide thousands of times over. And don't tell me about cell decay or clipping a fingernail, you are dead, and a copy is made. You died. The end.

I'd be more worried about a failure where my original copy isn't erased and suddenly there were two of me. Who gets to continue to live my life? The original or the copy? And what happens to the 'other'?

 

[NoOther]

You're dodging the question, not answering. I said teleporation was fantasy. A bunch of ignorati disagreed. That's the context.

No, you tried to define what Science Fiction is, I even quoted from the post where you literally tried to define it. I am not even sure how you can defend your statements here. Or did you forget the rest of your post:

Science fiction should involve logical and plausible extensions of the science we know, not mere wishful thinking and technobabble.
Yes, that means what is SF may change over time: for example, we now know there's no canals on Mars.
But if you're going to bother to distinguish science fiction from fantasy fiction, what other test can you propose?

Please, don't tell me I am dodging the question when you straight up deflect and lie about your statements.

Wow, it's like you haven't even heard of the Heisenburg Uncertainty Principle.

I hate to expose your ignorance-- oh, no, actually, I enjoy it-- but the effects of quantum mechanics are highly scale dependent. An electron may be able to quantum-tunnel through an insulator 10 nanometers thick with usable regularity, but your car is not going to quantum-tunnel through a brick wall any time this universe.

You know who else hasn't heard about the Heisenburg Uncertainty Principle? Everyone that was around before it was a thing... This is how science works, it explains what we think we know about the current universe, but it is never set in stone. The best thing about science is that it is malleable. That is the how point. If you take everything in science as concrete, you are doing it wrong. That doesn't mean we don't trust science or that any old thing should be believed, but it certainly doesn't mean we rule out future possibilities simply because of the limitations of our knowledge today. If that were the case, we would never have gotten to where we are now with science.

 

[FrgMstr]

pcgeekesq and kju1 - Neither one of you are allowed to post in this thread again. Take your childish squabbling elsewhere. If either of you post in this thread again, you will be lose your abilities to access this subforum.

 

[honegod]

And lead isn't the only material or even the best at absorbing x-rays. Platinum, Iridium, Osmium, and Tungsten are all about 50% better.

The point is to transfer energy into whatever you are shooting at.

So something that absorbs x rays would absorb the energy of the beam better than something transparent to x rays which would pass the energy through rather than absorbing it.

 

[motomonkey]

That's not science fiction, it's pure fantasy. Teleportation is magic, not science.
Like imagining "how the world would work" if you could summon unicorns with a snap of your finger.

A famous author I can’t recall at the moment commented you could safely violate one of the laws of physics at a time and get away with it in the name of literary license.....

 

[motomonkey]

Are you kidding?
Even in the 1930's, readers of kid's comic books (e.g., Superman) knew that lead can stop x-rays.
As would anyone who used an x-ray machine at a dentist's office or a hospital.
Generating the x-ray using a laser wouldn't change that, nor would the power source for the laser.

And lead isn't the only material or even the best at absorbing x-rays. Platinum, Iridium, Osmium, and Tungsten are all about 50% better.

You come off with a lot of attitude for someone so ignorant they can't be bothered with a simple internet search before running their mouth.
Sometimes I forget how stupid people can be. Thanks for the reminder.

Just because you stop an X-ray, doesn’t mean the energy it carries goes away, same as a regular light wave length laser, the energy just gets dumped into the target.

Saying an X-Ray laser “goes through anything” could be just another way of saying it blows a damn big hole in things.

 

[raz-0]

The idea of turning highways and such into shopping centers....did he really spend 6 months hashing things out because that's asinine. Does the internet cease to exist? If we have teleportation...you would have distribution centers that would just beam stuff to your house immediately after you order it online. Why the heck would I go to a shopping center...when was the last time you went to a mall?

I have thought about what the future will hold as drone deliveries become common place...almost ubiquitous. Like the opening scene of Ready Player One when the drone is delivering the pizza. Eventually, if we don't implode as a society, our thirst for instantaneous gratification will be further fleshed out by almost instant Amazon Prime drone deliveries, Dominos drone deliveries, etc...really anything. There are obviously a ton of things that would need to be worked out for that kind of world to exist, it won't happen overnight, but it will be someone's actually future, and I think that generation is alive now.

To play devils advocate, if you'd walk to your front door to get the package, why wouldn't you just step into the showroom rather than deal with all the crappy descriptions, misleading photos, etc?

Sure, eliminating the "may I help you" crowd is valuable to me in many cases, but ubiquitous teleportation would rewrite the cost benefit breakdown for everything. If checkout and billing was just wired right into the telport portal, you could keep the process very close to simply going to the fridge for a snack. Everything could be going to the fridge for a snack.

 

[schoenda]

Teleportation portal: If I step HALFWAY through...can I then pull back? How are my cells connected? What about air? Wind? Atmospheric pressure?

If I see a giant tentacle come through, then what? Is it only one way?

In the book there were airlocks when necessary to deal with atmospheric stuff...also shutting off the portal when something was half way through did result in the clean amputation of said thing...so that would likely deal with the tentacle. The portals were two way...not 100 percent sure but I cthink you could put your hand in and pull it back...all this per the imaginary universe of the author though.

What would be better is if we could transport into the one of the infinite alternate realities that is perfectly aligned with Mr. Hamilton's world in Salvation, then we could just look up how this stuff works.