Where have all the dreamers gone?
Have you ever considered why we have the technology around us?
In many cases it’s because of people seeing some gadget in a science fiction series, deciding they’d like a real one of them and then setting about making it. For example, one of the people watching the original Star Trek series decided that he’d quite like one of the little notepads that Captain Kirk always signed and started off on an engineering career ultimately ending up in AT&T where he produced an almost exact replica of that notepad around the late 80s (ie nearly 20 years later).
There are other dreamers who wouldn’t openly admit that their inspiration was some science fiction series or movie from 20 years earlier yet if you look around you you’ll find a considerable number of items that look strikingly similar to “products” that were in various science fiction productions 20 or 30 years earlier. For example, that Star Trek communicator looks almost identical to the early Motorola fold-up phone style (and was incredibly popular with Trekkies at the time: finally they could buy a real communicator). The little memory cards that Spock was continually putting into the computer are pretty much identical to the Compact Flash cards that you’ll see in stores these days. And so it goes on.
So where are the dreamers now and what are they dreaming of? What product have you seen recently in science fiction that would inspire you to work towards building a real version of it? Is there someone out there who wants to travel in time so much that they’re prepared to dedicate their lives to studying how it might be done and perhaps go on to build that first time machine? Or perhaps there’s someone who’d really, really like a transporter?
Forty years ago the dreams were of going into space, landing on the moon and building the first space station. We’ve already done those things so we need people to go even further ahead in their dreams.
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Copyright © 2008 by Arnold Stewart. All rights reserved.