Perhaps different from ordinary people's imagination, many of the current black technologies such as space technology, nano quantum, VR virtual reality, AI artificial intelligence... Although the breakthrough was achieved in laboratories and factories, it is likely that the original idea did not come from scientists in the academy, but from daydreaming science fiction authors.
Since the first Hugo Awards were promulgated in 1953, the award-winning works have not only been adapted into film and television works to make the public happy, but more importantly, they have spawned many black technologies and new concepts that have profoundly affected modern life. The illusory scenes created by science fiction writers have been transformed into reality by scientists one by one - the real scientific and technological progress of human beings is indispensable to the original whimsy.
01
Technology Beyond Earth: Flying into space
The 1956 Hugo Award for Best Short Story, awarded to Arthur Clarke, one of the Big Three of Twentieth-century science fiction, "The Star", tells the story of an extraterrestrial civilization destroyed by a supernova explosion 3,000 light-years from Earth, which was also the first time in Clark's life that he won the Hugo Award.
But Clark actually published an article called "Extraterrestrial Relay - Can Satellites Give Radio Coverage on a Global Scale?" as early as 1945 when he was working on radar technology in the British Air Force? paper. In the article, Clark believes that if the satellite is manually launched into Earth orbit, it can be used as an intermediate station to receive and reflect ground signals, realizing the idea of long-distance communication, cross-sea communication and retransmission of radio programs.
The year after the award for Star, the Soviet Union launched the first Sputnik. In 1964, the United States launched its first geostationary satellite; In 1965, the International Satellite Communications Organization launched the first generation of "International Communications Satellite" to officially undertake international communication services, which also marked the arrival of the era of satellite communications. The orbit of the geostationary satellite is named the "Clark orbit". Clark's hypothesis became a reality only twenty years later.
In 1968, Clark personally participated in the screenplay of the film of the same name "2001: A Space Odyssey" won the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Performance, and the plot depicting the landing of earthlings on an alien planet became a reality in 1969 because of the successful Apollo 11 moon landing. In his 1980 Hugo Award-winning Fountain of Heaven, Clark envisioned a future in which a kind of superelevator — a "space elevator." Housed in a 37,015-kilometre-high tower, the elevator is used to transport people and goods safely and cheaply to space on a daily basis.
Clark was not the pioneer of the space elevator concept, but his huge influence made the space elevator a reality step by step. In 1999, NASA published the article "Sky Ladder: Advanced Infrastructure in Space"; In 2012, Japan's Obayashi-gumi Construction announced that it expected to complete the construction of the "Sky Ladder" by 2050; In November 2017, the First Research Institute of China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation released the "2017-2045 Space Transportation System Development Roadmap", which clearly mentioned that "by 2045, there will be subversive changes in the way of entering and exiting space and space transportation, and the construction of sky ladders, earth stations and space stations is expected to be realized".
In addition, the space flight, the International Space Station, and high-power manned rockets mentioned in Hugo Award-winning works have all become a reality. Today, the rockets and Starlink that Musk has worked tirelessly to build have the concept of these science fiction novels.
02
Visible technology: AI and VR
In 1963, Asimov won the Hugo Award that year for the "Base" series, and he was also the creator of the famous "Three Laws of Robotics":
The first law: Robots must not harm individual humans, or stand idly by when they see that individual humans are going to be in danger
Second Law: A robot must obey an order given to it by a human, except when that command conflicts with the first law
Third law: Robots should protect their survival as much as possible without violating the first and second laws
Asimov's series of related behavioral norms and ethical guidelines on robots and artificial intelligence have become the direction of later artificial intelligence development. Before humans could build robots, robots existed in Asimov's novels. In the 1986 award-winning feature "Ender's Game", the scene of a robot operating on a human has become a reality with the laparoscopic surgery of the "Raven II" developed by the Robotics Laboratory of the University of Washington in 2012.
In 1985, William Gibson's "Neuromancer" was the first book to win both the "Hugo Award" and the "Nebula Award" and "Philip G. Gibson". The K. Dick Award" is a book that has won three science fiction awards, and it can be called a masterpiece related to the transformation of science and technology. Set in a futuristic world that is considered dystopian, the protagonist, Keith, is an online hacker who loses the ability to connect to cyberspace before the story begins. The plot revolves around him being cured by a mysterious man and hired to assist in a seemingly impossible cybercrime, which gave birth to the movie The Matrix.
The novel includes many current technological concepts, such as artificial intelligence, virtual reality (VR), genetic engineering, super-large multinational companies far superior to traditional single enterprises, cyberspace... To this day, almost all the scenes in the novel come true. On November 30, 2022, ChatGPT was released; This year, the first human clinical study of brain-computer interface has been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Cyberspace has long become an inseparable part of today's life.
03
Invisible technology: quantum and nano
In the 1973 Hugo Award for Best Feature, Asimov's "The Gods Themselves" coined the concept of "electronic channels": humans accidentally discovered some matter that did not belong to the earth, and through investigation and research, found that it came from a parallel universe. So humans have established electronic channels to exchange a steady stream of energy with parallel universes and effectively solve energy problems.
In reality, Asimov's "electron channel" can basically be regarded as an approximation of the "quantum channel". In 1992, scientists first proposed the "BB84" protocol as a practiced quantum key distribution protocol that uses the principles of quantum mechanics to enable communicating parties to securely exchange keys. In 1995, quantum key distribution was successfully implemented for the first time in a laboratory environment. In 2008, Chinese scientists used quantum key distribution and quantum entanglement technology to successfully transmit a 128-bit quantum key between Beijing and Tianjin (160 kilometers), breaking the 100-kilometer record and marking a breakthrough in long-distance quantum communication technology. In 2017, the quantum science experiment satellite "Micius" was the first to successfully realize the distribution of satellite-ground two-way quantum entanglement at the level of thousands of kilometers... Quantum channel technology is changing rapidly, and it seems that Asimov's vision is gradually being realized.
In 1984, American science fiction writer Greg Bell's "Blood Music" won the Hugo Award for Best Novella. In the novel, he recounts the plot of genetic engineer Virgil secretly injecting the ultra-tiny intelligent life form he developed into his own blood, thereby completely changing humanity and the world. 1 ten-thousandth of a centimeter is 1 micron, and 1 thousandth of a micron is 1 nanometer, and this novel is also considered to be the first science fiction novel to describe nanotechnology.
Nanotechnology has advanced by leaps and bounds in the years since Blood Music was published. Since Japanese physicists started the study of carbon nanotubes in 1991, there has been more than 30 years of international exploration of this new material. At present, the application of nanotechnology covers many fields: in the field of life sciences, nanotechnology can be used for DNA sequencing, protein analysis, drug screening, etc.; In the field of energy, nanotechnology can be used in lithium batteries, fuel cells, etc.; In the field of environmental protection, nanotechnology can be used for pollution control, wastewater treatment, etc.
In the military field, the RAND Corporation and the National Defense Research Institute, after fully studying future technologies, believe that nanotechnology will be the key technology that "will drive the revolution in the field of military operations in the future." In 2015, in Hugo Prize-winning Liu Cixin's "Three-Body Problem", the concept of nanoweapons once again impressed the world. In 2018, Tsinghua University successfully experimented with ultra-long carbon nanotube bundles.
In addition, the relevant genetic technologies described in the Hugo Award-winning works have been verified and promoted in reality. The brainwave communication technology mentioned in "The Three-Body Problem" has also achieved a breakthrough in 2020: 8 experimenters implanted relevant devices into the brain, with the help of receivers and decoders, converted human thinking into digital commands, controlled computer operating systems with direct thinking, and realized operations such as sending text messages, emails, shopping and banking.
Nowadays, while "meta-universe" has become a hot technology word, it may be more worth paying attention to which brain holes in today's Hugo Award winning works will become a reality in the near future. Science fiction writers have become contemporary prophets in this techno-supreme society, and the Hugo Award is the stage for prophets.
Text/Qiling Editor Li Ruifeng
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