Poul Anderson, Shield, VI.
Shields designed to fit like thermsuits so that the wearers can walk and manipulate;
hull-less land, air and space vehicles;
spaceships transformable into dome houses;
asteroidal mineral mining (as with gyrogravitics in Tales Of The Flying Mountains);
a motor that moves a spaceship by changing its energy potential;
maybe near light speed;
spacewarp equations yielding FTL?;
a new source of atomic energy;
conversion of any kind of matter into energy?;
costless fuel;
unlimited power.
Not only will people kill to control this technology but also powerful vested interests will want to suppress unlimited power for everyone. In fact, we could probably be much further along the road to that goal already...
5 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Granting the premises of SHIELD, I can certainly see why various powerful special interests, such as gov'ts, would feel threatened by the shield Koskinen and his Martian friends had invented. Not only would the shield offer enormous practical advances economically and technologically, it would enable people to defy and resist their governments. And, I have to admit, for bad as well as good reasons.
As a matter of real world practicality, however, I have my doubts that a single invention like this shield will ever happen. More likely, there will be a SERIES of inventions which in turn will create secondary and tertiary consequences leading to drastic changes in the world. Which is what happened when the automobile was invented.
Also, I'm not sure how to understand the last sentence of this blog piece of yours. I don't see anything like "unlimited power" for everybody being suppressed in the sense of a powerful new technology with incalculable possibilities being smothered.
Sean
Sean,
We are not there yet but a great deal of power and energy is currently invested, e.g., in maintaining instruments of mass destruction. That power and energy, hopefully, will be put to better use, doing more good for more people, in future.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
We can hope! But I don't think that is at all likely, considering how quarrelsome human beings are. We have to base our plans and hopes on people as they actually ARE, not as we would like them to be.
Sean
"We have to base our plans and hopes on people as they actually ARE, not as we would like them to be."
Ironically, in one of the Captain America movies, U.S. intelligence officer Nick Fury says almost exactly that — and he's speaking as Director of an agency called S.H.I.E.L.D.:
"S.H.I.E.L.D. takes the world as it is, not as we'd like it to be." Captain America rebuts, gesturing at the amassed super-weapons: "This isn't freedom. This is fear."
Kaor, DAVID!
The problem is, both Nick Fury and Captain America are right. And I agree more with Nick Fury than I would with Captain America.
Sean
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