What hard sci-fi can bring to children

The space elevator in The Wandering Earth 2. Photo courtesy of the filmmaker

    What does a hard science fiction work bring to teenagers?

    As of 0:00 on February 9, 19 days after the release of the domestic sci-fi film "The Wandering Earth 2", the domestic box office has reached 3.471 billion yuan.

    Zhang Jiayi, a high school student in Sichuan, came out of the cinema and felt that what attracted her most about this film was the shocking audiovisual experience and her vision of the future world, "as if we can see our own future."

    In the words of Luo Yiyun, a science producer and author of the worldview of this sci-fi film, the team has created a "near-future chronicle" spanning half a century, with the original novel and the worldview of the first film of "The Wandering Earth" as the "end". A closer tour along the sci-fi route laid by the movie, a sample of thinking that advances in science and technology and imagination climb each other upwards slowly unfolds in front of people's eyes.

    Lead your child to the door of the Science Building

    Recently, the film's producer and screenwriter Gong Ge accompanied the main creative team to roadshow around the country, wearing clothes printed with the word "The Wandering Earth" to travel to different cities every day. On the plane from Guangzhou to Xi'an, Gong Ge sat next to a 13-year-old boy, and after politely asking Gong Geer about his job, the boy asked him two different opinions about the scientific setting in the film.

    "When I heard it, my heart was filled with trepidation and emotion." Gong Ge told the China Youth Daily China Youth Network reporter that teenagers are an important target audience of the film, and the information density of the film is so large, largely because of the fact that today's young people are a generation that "watches videos twice as fast while sending barrages", but the understanding and expression skills shown by teenagers are still beyond their imagination, making the main creators feel "stunned".

    When Luo Yiyun was watching a movie at a screening site, there was a primary school student who looked to be about the second grade sitting next to him, "staring at the screen intently the whole time."

    When she saw a plot about the countdown to the moon, the little boy's mother whispered to the child: "Why is more than 200 hours 4 days?" The boy replied calmly: they changed the setting, and there were 60 hours a day after the earth stopped.

    According to the imagined architecture, circadian rhythm changes are one of the important consequences of the Earth's standstill, and it also means that almost all scientific settings related to time calculations need to be re-deduced. The process was so complicated that Luo Yiyun wanted to back down for a while, but she didn't expect that after a large number of trivial details calculated by the scientific consultant, a primary school student could accurately capture the tricks.

    Han Guilai, an associate researcher at the Institute of Mechanics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, is one of the scientific advisors of the film and the father of a third-grade elementary school student in Beijing, and after watching the movie with his children, he was surprised to find that the concepts mentioned in the film such as space elevators, rockets, engines, robots, nuclear fusion, and quantum computers could be understood by children.

    Talking about the scientific literacy of current teenagers, Luo Yiyun sighed that when he was in junior high school after the 90s, the familiar physics experiment was the gravitational acceleration punching timer, and now, the famous double-slit interference experiment in the field of quantum mechanics has entered the middle school laboratory. "'Quantum mechanics' may be a joke for us, but for the next generation of kids, they can really understand it," she said. ”

    Faced with such a group of children, Gonger believes that good science fiction works should recruit them to the "door" of the "skyscraper" of science.

    The digging of imagination is "cool" and "desperate"

    This hard sci-fi film has a team of scientific advisors, composed of experts from different fields such as physics, astronomy, artificial intelligence, earth sciences, etc., who are responsible for ensuring that the artistry of sci-fi films is not too far from reality.

    Many people try to use science fiction for popular science, keen to analyze whether the scientific settings in it can be realized. Wei Hongxiang, the scientific advisor leader of The Wandering Earth 2 and a researcher at the Institute of Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, encourages diversified thinking, but from a scientist's point of view, he knows that the word "fantasy" in science fiction is synonymous with "unreasonable". Therefore, he believes that stimulating imagination may become a pursuit of science fiction.

    As a post-90s generation, Cui Yuanhao, assistant to the director of the Science Popularization Committee of the China Computer Society, is one of the scientific advisors of the film. The progress of deducing the "digital life" line made him feel very "refreshed".

    "A small step in scientific research, a big step in science fiction." Cui Yuanhao said that in the real world, scientists need to carefully follow a series of steps such as "question-hypothesis-experiment-verification-paper" to make a little progress, and to do science fiction deduction, he can let his imagination move forward. If scientific research is "creating knowledge", science fiction is closer to "dreaming".

    The words "Digital Life Institute" in Hindi that appear in the trailer of the film were translated by Li Chenxi, a senior major in Hindi at Beijing Foreign Chinese University. She believes that in the future, this technological route is likely to subvert the way humans live.

    In fact, the "near future" time setting of the film is mainly due to the needs of the plot, but the ending of "digital immortality" is based on the existing scientific foundation.

    Luo Yiyun said that the worldview design of artificial intelligence lines began in 1950, when Turing first published a paper on the Turing test, to the popularity of the meta-universe concept in recent years, combined with the breakthrough progress of brain-computer interface research in the 21st century and the possibility of brain scanning, it is deduced that in the future, the data scanned by the brain can be transferred to the "digital space" through the brain-computer interface, and finally the form of "digital life" in the film is generated.

    The survival path of "digital life" is only the tip of the iceberg deduced by the film's more than 100,000-word world view. In the face of the disaster setting of "helium flash", the entire deduction process is "desperate" for the worldview team - can humans really cope with the impact of large-scale changes in the universe on individuals?

    Back to reality, Cui Yuanhao said frankly that the current scientific and technological level of digital life research and the distance between digital immortality are roughly equivalent to the distance between the Cambrian explosion of life and modern society.

    At present, the scientific community's research on digital life is limited to extremely basic "behaviors" such as genetics and mutation, and human beings are not yet aware of how consciousness is formed, let alone consciousness uploaded, but Cui Yuanhao, who has loved to watch science fiction since childhood, still believes that imagination is one of the foundations for promoting human development.

    Wei Hongxiang believes that the charm of science fiction is not whether it will be achieved, but whether it will be realized, but that it will show you something bigger than you can think of, and inspire you to pick up the baton and move forward.

    Science fiction and youth education coincide

    After completing the work of scientific production, Luo Yiyun deeply felt that the process of building a sci-fi world view between the team and scientific consultants was actually a process of deeply mining his imagination and constantly learning and growing.

    And this thought process coincides with the connotation of "science fiction education".

    Wu Yan, a science fiction writer and professor at Southern University of Science and Technology and director of the Center for Science and Human Imagination and one of the explorers of science fiction education, noticed an interesting fact: in the past 10 years, science fiction teaching has gradually become a unique topic, appearing in the discourse of a small number of educators.

    In Wu Yan's view, China has entered the stage of "imagination education", "We are now at the forefront in many aspects, there is no road ahead, what should we do?" It's up to imagination." Science fiction education is a new form of education that extracts and teaches the imagination, fiction and other content involved in science fiction.

    He believes that science fiction teaching is essentially a part of future education, which is expected to release inherent knowledge from the closure of disciplines, broadly integrate disciplines, shift one-way teaching to two-way shock expansion, and put the imagination, intuition, beauty and other contents that teachers did not care about, did not want to care about or could not care about in the past in a reasonable position, and these are indispensable parts to better improve the ability of independent innovation.

    Dr. Chen Faxiang, a student of Wu Yan, shared a scene of science fiction teaching in Guangzhou No. 5 Middle School in Guangdong Province: scholars and students discussed "The Three-Body Problem", and students quickly spoke enthusiastically around the "dark forest" hypothesis and many problems in the novel, defending their own views, arguing with their peers, and the debate soon went beyond the novel to bioethics, species ethics and so on.

    This process of speculation is actually similar to Luo Yiyun's process of building a world view of science fiction movies. Chen believes that thought processes such as these can help boost imagination.

    Du Chunyan, a science and technology teacher at Beijing No. 35 Middle School, observed in teaching practice that science fiction education not only arouses students' attention to cutting-edge science and technology, but also has strong humanistic values, which can stimulate children's thinking about science and technology, survival, emotions and other issues, cultivate critical thinking, and help students establish a sense of responsibility to solve real problems and create a better life. She said that this past winter vacation, one of the winter vacation assignments left by the school for students was science fiction writing.

    If you let children continue to write "The Wandering Earth 3", what kind of answer will they get?

    Du Chunyan's student Sun Houze hopes that the brain-computer interface directly deployed on the retina can appear in the film, at which time the human brain can be regarded as a computer, which can directly save and read brain information, directly exchange data with the computer, and control the operation of exoskeletons, drones and other equipment through the mind.

    Zhang Jiayi, a high school student, said that Moss represents a high degree of intelligence, and if it does everything in its power to destroy humanity in the next science fiction movie, using humanity's high dependence on technology as its most advantageous weapon, to attack "human civilization with humans." At this time, while trying to fight back, human beings can also deeply realize that human beings cannot rely on science and technology in the end, and should develop science and technology appropriately.

    College student Li Chenxi proposed that he wanted the earth to meet the trisolarans who were rushing to the earth on the way to "wander", and then there would be some collisions about two different civilizations.

    Wang Yuanzhuo, scientific advisor to The Wandering Earth 2 and a researcher at the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, is not surprised by the imagination of teenagers. He has been insisting on hand-drawn science popularization since the first part of the series, and in his continuous interaction with children, he has come up with the "four-step" theory from science fiction to education:

    First of all, science fiction makes science visible to more people; After that, the discussion of science fiction stimulated more people to think and imagine; Then, seize the spark of scientific interest that has been aroused and quickly carry out the initial popularization of science; Finally, guide young people to carry out systematic and correct scientific exploration.

    Gou Lijun, another scientific adviser to the film and a researcher at the National Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, remembers that the characters in the movie "Star Trek" did not wear oxygen masks when traveling through space, but this did not prevent it from becoming a classic science fiction work that inspired the imagination of a generation and even plunged into science.

    He believes that the process from science fiction to education to scientific and technological innovation should be like the process from planting a "seed" to "flowering" and "fruiting".

Source: China Youth Daily