Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Does science fiction inspire real tech?

Episode Date: April 14, 2026

Daniel and Kelly discuss whether ideas from science fiction have inspired real scientific or technological progress.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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And our podcast, Game Recognized Game, has never been done before. Two active players giving you a real look at our... lives and what we actually think on and off the court. Nothing's off limits. We talk tanking. I might get in trouble for this answer, but I think it's like definitely happening in the WBA. We talk about our mistakes too.

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Scientists are trying to understand the universe and engineers are trying to bend it to our needs, but science fiction authors are part of it. that too. They live on the far forward edge imagining what we might create and thinking through what it means for living and loving and dying. At least, that's the story, but how true is that in history? What are some examples of ideas from science fiction that actually inspired real engineering or scientific leaps? That's the topic we're diving into today while we're waiting for our warp ship to be completed. Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's extraordinary universe. I study parasites and space, and today we're talking about some of my favorite topics,

which are technology and sci-fi. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I read a lot of science fiction. You do read a lot of science fiction. So what I want to know is what piece of technology in science fiction, if you could bring to life right now, would you want to bring to life to have in your own personal life? Oh, well, I have two answers to that. One, One is a replicator. I would love, like, essentially a 3D printer that could make anything. I find it really frustrating that there are things we know can exist,

but we don't know how to make them, like how to arrange the atoms very easily. And so I would love a replicator. That would be amazing. I'm having trouble following the dream there. Like, what in particular would you replicate if you could? I mean, imagine being able to make food without having to go through this complex food chemistry process to start from ingredients and end up at souffle, right? Yeah.

You could literally make anything in any shape and any arrangement. If you're doing like a complex baking project and you want like chocolate in the shape of a dolphin or whatever, like getting it in that shape is hard sometimes. You have to like coerce it. So yeah, I want to skip over all of chemistry essentially. Yeah, I mean, and why like cure cancer when you could have chocolate in the shape of a dolphin? Yeah, I see where you're going. Okay.

All right, all right. But I recently had the opposite experience, which is I read a. science fiction novel in which something I invented appeared. What? Yeah. Go on. So I'm reading this science fiction novel about somebody who's listening for messages from outer space, and they rely on a distributed network of smartphones called Crafus in order

to capture the data. They actually referenced the name of the experiment. Yeah. What? I know. Did one of our listeners send you? Give me more information. This can't be.

Do you know this person? I do not know this person. and I emailed the author, and I was like, wow, thanks for including our experiment in your book. And he wrote back, he's like, oh, this is so fun. And we had a nice conversation. Oh, well, what's the name of the book? The book is called The Receiver by Seth Jaffe, and you can find it on Amazon. I'm about halfway through it right now.

That is so cool. Oh, my gosh. You've inspired science fiction. Well, it plays a minor role, but it was fun. Yeah, it was fun to appear in science fiction. I mean, there's no Daniel White's in character, but they took the experiment and used it. And they got the science right. So kudos Seth.

Wow. I mean, do you think that it would be more interesting if there was a Daniel Whiteson character or more interesting if there's tech developed by Daniel Whiteson? I didn't mortified to see myself in science fiction. It's just very cool to influence somebody else's view of like what's possible out there in the universe. What can we do? Oh, this is a new capability. And that's exactly why we came up with the experiment to create new sensing capabilities.

So that was really fun. That's awesome. So, you know, over time I've done like a bunch of interviews where people have asked about like, how do you inspire people to like do space stuff and like, you know, invest in space. And then there's a lot of this conversation about how science fiction inspires people to do space stuff. And so I have actually pretty often said this phrase that like science fiction inspires technology and then physics and technology inspires science fiction. And so I. realized that when you sent me the outline that I have said those words many times but never actually dug in to like figure out what examples

there are of that and so I am super excited that today we're talking about this and now I will know how much meat there is behind that statement. Exactly. I do the same thing all the time. I credit science fiction with inspiring technology I say it's a healthy two-way

inspirational street and I expected when digging into this episode to find lots and lots of examples to back up the claims I've been making for years. But as you know, when you started researching your book about Mars, sometimes when you dig into the details, you learn that the popular story isn't always accurate. Oh, no, you're giving away the punchline.

I wasn't going to give away the punchline. But yes, you had the Ossidi on Mars experience where you thought it was going to go one way. And then as you're researching it, you're like, I'm going to lose all of my friends. Well, maybe not all of them. Stick around. There are some really fun tidbits in here.

But before we dig into some fun examples, I went out there and I asked the Extraordinaries what they thought might have been inspired by science fiction. Here's what folks had to say. Star Trek communicators are probably the easy one. Inspired flip phone technology, cell phone. I mean, just taking Star Trek as a great example. their pads-inspired tablets, their communicators inspired cell phones, their medical devices inspired, well, I guess, medical devices, and their replicators inspired the replicators that we all have

in our homes today. Wait, wait, you don't have one? I bet Star Wars inspired a lot of great new theme park ride technology at Disney. We have self-driving cars, hoverboards, lasers. bones. Yeah, from Star Trek communicators. I don't know. I'm sure there's a bunch we're missing. Maybe rovers to other planets were thought of before we actually created them. That'd be my only

thought. So I read the Neil Stevenson novel, Snow Crash, which was about Metaverse and how you can live these elaborate lives online in this virtual reality world. Well, the first thing that comes to mind is the Star Trek communicator and the flip phone.

All right, so I'm seeing a lot of communicators, tablets, cell phones, flip phones. Those are some of the things that I would have guessed initially. So should we start there? Yeah, this is the most common thing. People like Kirk's Flip Communicator. It's iconic. You know, people see it.

They see the connection to smartphones, you know, the Motorola phone. And it's often cited as the most common example of science fiction inspiring something in reality. Should we explain the Motorola phone for the like five young listeners we might have? Yeah. So flips communicator is a little handheld device. It's the size of your palm. And it flips it open. Like, he does this move and it makes this sound.

And, you know, it's something you carry with you. And the cool thing about it is that it's like always on. You don't have to like punch in a number to call Spock. You just open it and you talk and the enterprise can hear you. And I think the most important thing about the communicator in the show was that it was kind of boring. It was like not a big deal. Kirk treated it is like, well, of course we can talk to the enterprise, even though it's in orbit or far away. Right.

And it's this amazing thing that he can do that we couldn't do sitting in our boring and real universe. And that was exciting. And I love the conflict there, the fact that he's so casual about it. I love that he was comfortable with the enterprise listening at all times. like we're comfortable with Alexa and Siri listening to us at all times. They were also like, I'm going to give away all of my information and all of my personal conversations to the enterprise. And in science fiction, this was kind of novel. We already had an existence like two-way walkie-talkies, and there were mobile phones at the time, but they were only in cars. This was in the 1960s,

and there were already mobile phones in cars? There were already mobile phones in cars. That's right. And we had wireless communication with radio. and transistors were shrinking everything. So it was sort of a novel idea, but it also inspired by a lot of similar technology. I thought that it was like the 70s or the 80s where you had those giant phones in cars. But that was even earlier. I guess it was like the super duper rich were able to have them. And maybe it took up like the whole trunk to make it work or my family didn't have one, that's for sure.

Yeah. So the history of the mobile phone development is super fascinating. In the 40s already, AT&T introduced car phones. These were big. They were stuck in a car. Yeah, there was not very widespread service. The 40s? In the 40s, the late 40s.

Yeah, it's amazing. And AT&T kept working on car-based phones. And Motorola was aiming for a handheld phone. So this guy at Motorola, Martin Cooper. And he's the guy who invented the first handheld mobile phone. It's called the Dynatack. And it came out in 73, and it's nicknamed the Brick. because it's like five pounds.

Wow. And, you know, it's like 20 centimeters by 10 centimeters by five centimeters. Like, you should look up a picture of this thing. It looks like somebody's holding up like a couple of bricks, actually. And the thing could talk for like 30 minutes at a time and took 10 hours to recharge. Wow. So for emergency use only. Yeah, exactly.

And this is awesome. The first call ever made on a handheld mobile phone was from Martin Cooper to his chief rival at AT&T. That's amazing. And then Motorola kept working on the phones, and it wasn't until like 1989 that we had the first sort of small, minimal flip phone that looked like a Star Trek communicator. Okay. That's amazing.

Yeah. And then, you know, the iconic in the 1990s is the Motorola StarTac, which is this flip phone, which is super popular. And everybody who was alive at the time had one or saw one or new one, right? And there's this connection in people's. minds between the Motorola StarTac and the Star Trek communicator. And this guy, Martin Cooper at Motorola, the inventor of the mobile phone, explicitly cites Star Trek as inspiration for this.

There's a 2005 movie called How William Shatner changed the world. And he says, in that movie, in an interview, we were inspired by Captain Kirk. Okay, wait. A couple thoughts. One, how William Shatner changed the world. Did the Shat do the writing? Or shouldn't like the writer, it shouldn't it have been how the writers of Star Trek changed the world? That feels like the credits not going to the right person.

Yeah, and it's not even the writers. It's the prop designer. There's this guy, Wang Ming Chang, who created so many iconic props on Star Trek, the communicator, the Romulan Bird of Prey, the Vulcan harp, all these things, the tricorder. So many things that we identify with Star Trek were invented by this one guy, Wang Ming Chang. So yeah, he should definitely get the correct. I bet he read a lot of science fiction. Yeah, no doubt.

He changed the world. That's right. So that's the sort of story that's going around. And if you only dig in superficially, it seems like this is a great example of science fiction, Star Trek in this case, coming up with a new idea. Of course, building on ideas that have been out there already. But coming up with a new idea, which caught on and then inspired scientists in the real world to make something real, right?

I am so glad that I was correct on all of those podcasts where I, you know, said the thing. So let's move on. But actually, yes, if you dig deeper, in 2021, Martin Cooper recanted that story. Yes. What? Exactly. Apparently, there was this popular myth that Star Trek inspired the flip phone. Everybody says it. Kelly Wiener Smith says it, and she does a lot of research. So you got to believe it, right? She's wrong sometimes, guys. I know. And it turns out that when he was being interviewed, he says he felt pressure to endorse this popular myth, even though it wasn't true. Here's a quote from him. I got caught up in this thing. Their premise was that the cell phone

came from William Chattner and Star Trek, and I didn't argue with them. This is show business. We don't worry about facts, and I've had to live with that for how many years now? I think when he sleeps on his bed of money, he probably sleeps pretty well. But so then where did he Get the idea. So there's another twist, right? First, we're thinking, oh, it's inspired by Star Trek. Then it turns out no. But the answer is it's inspired by a different science fiction source.

As a kid, he read Dick Tracy comic strips. And Dick Tracy, for those you don't know, is this famous detective, and he had a two-way radio wristwatch. And Cooper, who's like 99 by now, read this in the 40s, and he was inspired by the Dick Tracy wristwatch. That was the real inspiration for. mobile communications. Okay, well, so here's what I want to know. So was Star Trek inspired by Dick Tracy, or is this the case of like an idea? Like, I feel like some ideas when their time

comes, they're just obvious, right? And so like maybe someone was going to come up with this idea or like many people were going to come up with this idea independently. And it was just going to, it was an obvious thing that was going to happen eventually. Yeah, I think a lot of people came up with this idea. You know, we had wireless communication already, you know, in World War I. And then if you look at like cartoons depicting the future, there's examples in like 1920s of a cartoonist drawing a crowd in the future where everybody's walking around holding their own personal phone. So the idea was definitely there. There's lots of drawings like that. And it appears all over the place in science fiction. So the idea of small personal communicators was everywhere already sort of in the zeitgeist.

I think that Star Trek made a really cool prop and a really cool noise, and it was just seen by everybody and sort of coalesced into this one concept. So do you give this initial idea to sci-fi or do you give this to the engineers? Where does the point go? I think science fiction really did inspire this. I mean, Cooper says, if we can trust him now, that he was inspired by science fiction. And this timeline also makes more sense. I mean, by the time that Star Trek came out in the late 60s, like Motorola was practically in the whole. It's not like they saw Star Trek, and then a few years later they put this thing together.

They've been working on this project for decades, right? People had had mobile phones already in cars. They were working towards handheld devices. So I think this story makes a lot more sense. But you know, the flip phones that we have still can't do some of the things that Star Trek communicators could do. So they still work out there for engineers to do. For example, Kirk's communicator used subspace transmissions, which could bypass

electromagnetic interference and have almost instantaneous communication, which, of course, our cell phones can't do because we're limited by relativity. Okay, but like I don't sense a delay, so I don't know. Does that seem worth investing in? Well, don't you want to have faster communication with the moon and with Mars? Like, wouldn't that be cool? All right, okay. By the time we're, you know, spending a lot of time on the moon or Mars, yes, we should figure that out. I'll give you that. Yeah. And in Star Trek the next generation, they had this version of the communicator with badges.

Like you could just press your badge to talk to somebody, which is not something you see anybody really working on. I don't know if it's just not cool enough or what. But it's a capability of communicators in Star Trek, which we haven't yet seen in the market. I don't know. That's kind of like just talking to your wrist Apple watch, isn't it? I mean, I don't really want to have to touch my chest to like make a phone call. But touching my wrist feels like way less weird. I have not bought into the whole Apple Watch thing. So I can't speak to that. No, I don't have one either.

I'm way too clumsy. I would smash it into a wall and break it. But you can get an app on your phone, which makes the sounds of a communicator. So you can feel Star Trek-y. Amazing. Yeah, but we still can't use subspace. All right. Well, maybe one day.

Okay, so score one for science fiction, although as a person who has married a cartoonist, I feel like maybe this should be score one for like comic books or comic strip. and they should get a little bit more cred. But let's take a break. And when we come back, we will move on to our next potentially science fiction-inspired technology. 2%.

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which we now also have are these tablet computers. And Star Trek Next Generation, they had these PADD, personal access display devices. And, you know, if you watch the show now, it looks a lot like an iPad. These things are flat. You use them by touching them. They're really portable. They use them for all sorts of stuff, like reading information, like signing documents, sharing data, all sorts of stuff.

And just like the flip phone, it was treated casually. Like you treat it like a piece of paper. It's not like, this is some cool piece of technology. Everybody be careful around it. You just like casually toss it on a desk, right? And so these things are everywhere in Star Trek. Am I wrong in queuing into the fact that it's called a pad? And we now have iPads.

Was that on purpose or am I jumping the gun? You're a jump in the gun. There's an interesting twist there at the end. Whether or not the iPad was inspired by the Star Trek pad. Oh, all right. But it's certainly very similar. I can wait. I can wait.

And they appeared briefly in the original series, and they're hilarious. Like, I love the Star Trek Next Generation Technical Manual, which gives you, like, ridiculous, science-y-stounding stories for, like, how things work. And so I look this up, and apparently the PADD is powered by serium chrylite power cells and have an outer casing of Borenight Whisker epoxy, allowing them to drop 35 meters without any damage. Oh, wow. Wow. Borenate Whisker?

I know. Boronite Whisker epoxy. I'm going to go get that at the hardware store. Yeah, that's amazing. Where did you find those specs? In the Star Trek Next Generation Technical Manual, of course. Oh, is that something you can buy online? Do you have that on your bookshelf?

I do not have that on my bookshelf, but you can look it up online these days, yeah. Okay, amazing. And this is not actually the first time this kind of device appears in science fiction. But it's the first time it's so similar to the device we have now. Back in 1951 in the novel foundation, Isaac Asimov's. characters have this thing called a calculator pad. And then in 1968, 2001 Space Odyssey, they have flat displays, which was a big thing. They don't have touch screens, but they don't have like CRTs with a crazy curve monitors. And that made it seem really futuristic. And lots of books from the golden age of science fiction have things like e-readers, e-books. We don't have like physical printed pages. But most of those have things like, you know, a button at the bottom where you press to change the page. And not like really a touchscreen device. Okay.

And fans of Doctor Who might remember that one of the characters there has a tablet in which he can input data using swipe gestures. This is 1967. So like the idea is sort of out there even before it's again coalesced into an awesome prop on Star Trek.

Well, so is this so surprising? So like if you've got this idea of like a flip phone where you can like see Spock when he pops up, an iPad is just like the flip phone wider. Like, so it's not that different, is it? You sound like all the naysayers who were like, the iPad is not going to succeed. And meanwhile, it's like a zillion dollar business. You're right.

It's very similar to the smartphone, but it's something different, right? That's why people buy tablets and also smartphones because it's like a bigger window into the internet somehow. I was also skeptical. I remember being like, it's just a big smartphone and smartphones are already too big. But lots of people like their tablets. You're right. When the iPad first came out, one, I thought the name was hilarious. And when the Saturday Night Live jokes were coming out about how it's named after a feminine hygiene product, I was laughing. I was like, this is never going to work. And now my family had, you know, every member of my family has one. So definitely in my face. But I don't think it's a big jump to imagine that like you might want bigger screens for some ideas. Like it doesn't seem like a completely different. technology to me. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, Apple didn't invent the idea of a tablet. As in many cases, they came in very late, made it awesome, and sold billions of them, right? The idea for, like,

a touchscreen tablet goes way, way back. The first patent was in 1979 by Tim Hittachi for the idea, and Apple had a touchscreen Maconsoft concept as early as 1984. You can see a prototype of it in the SF MoMA, actually. And in 1989, the predecessor of the Palm Pilot, the first maybe successful tablet was this gridpad, which is based actually on MS DOS, for those who remember that. And then in 93, Apple came out with the Newton, which is, you know, like a little tablet device and you could interact with it. It didn't have a keyboard, right? It wasn't a smartphone. It really was like a proto tablet.

But there were lots of failed devices in the 90s. Like Microsoft came in and tried to build one, the windpad, which never went anywhere. And people kept trying to build this and say, like, consumers are going to want it. In 2001, Nokia developed a tablet internally, but decided not to sell it because they said the market wasn't ready. And in 2005, they finally came out with a tablet. And then again, before Apple and the iPad, in 2008, the first Android tablets came out. So Apple wasn't even the first, like, to produce the tablet like what we see today. In 2010, Apple came out with the iPad and pushed to the mainstream.

And by like 2012, one third of U.S. households had a tablet. That's amazing. And, you know, the power of Apple and their design and their slick interface and their marketing, I don't know. All right. So did the Star Trek pad inspire the iPad or other similar devices? So if you ask the guys at Star Trek, they think it did. Well. Doug Drexler, he was one of the designers behind the pad.

He said that iPads felt, quote, eerily similar to his team's vision. Quote, it's uncanny to have a PADD that actually works, he said, calling it the true Star Trek dream. And so they see a connection, right? They claim credit for it. But if you ask Apple execs, they are mum on the idea. Like, nobody at Apple admits that Star Trek inspired their work or even earlier designers of tablet computers. I don't know if that's an intellectual property issue and the lawyers have weighed in, but the engineers deny it. Would Doug Drexler say that he was inspired by earlier science fiction that came before him?

Probably. I mean, I'm sure as a designer on Star Trek, he's read all that earlier science fiction. And he knows he didn't come up with the concept all on his own. But again, you know, it's a big step forward, right? Having it be ubiquitous, having to be in casual use, having them be so small and portable. These were new things for Star Trek to come up with. Okay. So I'd say this is definitely a point for science fiction.

and probably actually a point for Star Trek. So you're not having the full acidion Mars experience here. In fact, this is a very light ACOM experience. There's a lot more nuance here than I expected. Yes, yes. All right. So are we going to get to a technology

that doesn't have anything to do with Star Trek or is Star Trek the only thing that's driven technology forward? No, let's go underwater. Many folks are under the impression that the book, 20,000 leagues Under the Sea, which came out in 1870, inspired people to build submarines and is like the reason we have submarines now. And it was a really cool book. A lot of concepts in that book like

electric propulsion and driving for a long time underwater and having self-contained life support. These were really cool concepts that we now see, of course, in submarines. And Simon Lake, who's a submarine pioneer, he cites Jules Verne as an influence, right? But the problem is that, like, people have been building submarines long before this. Yeah, that's a problem. Yeah, the history of submarines goes all the way back to the 1500s. So like 300 years before Jules Byrne wrote his novel. I got to be honest, I would not want to be in a 1500s submarine.

I can't imagine that was safe. There's a record that in the city of Toledo, two Greeks submerged and surfaced in the river Tagas several times without getting wet, and with a flame that they carried in their hands, still a light. So this is like, you know, one record of maybe some prototype submarine all the way back in 1560s. Did they probably have like a tube that went to the surface? It's not clear. There's not a whole lot more details there in the record.

Okay. But it's like the first reference to maybe what could have been a prototype submarine. Okay. And then in 1578, the English mathematician William Byrne recorded in his book Inventions or Devices, one of the first plans for an underwater navigation vehicle. So there's evidence that like the idea was a... around. The first time we're sure that somebody actually built a submarine is 1620. A Dutchman named Cornelius Drebble built this thing, and it's powered by oars. And it looks kind of like a

submarine, but with oars sticking out the side. Of course, the holes, you know, have cloth or rubber or something to keep it waterproof. And so it looks a little bit like a sub. And then it's, you know, it swims along. It's kind of like a mechanical fish. Like underwater. Yes, underwater. With like a I know I'm harping on this tube, but with like a tube that attaches you to the surface for breathing air? Oh, that's a good question. Also, I got to be honest, I would not trust a man named Cornelius Dribble. That sounds like someone who's trying to put you on. Apparently, this thing was tested many times in the Thames, but failed to attract enough enthusiasm and was never used like in combat or anything.

So this guy basically invented it in 1620. Holy cow. Yeah. The first military submarine was the turtle. 1775. This thing is shaped like an acorn. It's basically for like one person. It was designed by American David Bushnell.

And it's the first verified submarine capable of independent underwater operation. And the first time they used screws for propulsion. You know how like a modern submarine has basically a propeller, right, to push it along? So instead of like oars, they used screws, which basically, you know, you turn it and it pushes the water. Huh. Yeah. And he would like run into things on purpose? purpose? Like, what can you do? I guess he's just spying to figure out where things are.

Is that... Yeah, I think at this point it's spying. In this U.S. Civil War, actually, was one of the first uses of submarines in actual battle. In 1864, the Confederate had a submarine called the H.L. Hunley, and it was the first military submarine to ever sink an enemy vessel. It sank the USS Hossatonic. Problem is, we've also killed the crew instantly and sink the submarine. Yeah, thumbs down. Yeah, thumbs down.

But, you know, progress, I guess. Of a sort? Of a sort. And then the French developed the first mechanically powered submarine in 1867. So we're still before 20,000 leagues under the sea. This was the plongour, which is French for diver. And it had compressed air inside, which I guess must have protected the inside a little bit so you can go a little bit deeper.

And this probably was the inspiration for Jules Verne. So I think in this case, it actually went the other direction. direction. Jules Verne saw this exciting development in submarine technology, and then he went further. So we've got a point for engineering now. All right. Yeah. And Vern probably saw this at the World's Fair in Paris that year and then extrapolated. Okay, so we've got two points for sci-fi, one for engineering. Exactly. And then, you know, submarine pioneer Simon Lake, he really was inspired by Vern, right? And he made the first open ocean voyage by submarine in 1898. And then, you know, submarine. then Vern sent Lake a telegram. So I think there might have been a little bit of healthy back and forth here, right? Engineers inspire science fiction who inspire more engineers. Dot, dot, dot.

The U-boats sink the Lusitania, and we get into World War I. I love you in wet blanket mode. All right. I'm still doing two for sci-fi, one for engineering. If I remember 20,000 leagues under the sea, one thing I think Vern did pioneer was like a really posh submarine, which I feel like most submarines have not taken up yet. As far as I know, most are a bit cramped and stinky. No velvet couches and, like, nice table for your drinks and stuff. No, no.

All right, but let's leave the sea and let's start talking about communication. So a famous science fiction author is Arthur C. Clark. And he's written lots of influential stuff, including not just fiction. He's actually written essays. And in 1945, he wrote an essay proposing that we build a set of satellites in geostationary orbit so we can have global communications, right? So this is pre-Sputnik. This is like visionary and saying, hey, let's put a bunch of stuff up in space so that I can

talk to people on the other side of the world, right? At the time, this was seen as like wildly speculative, right? We didn't have commercial satellites at all yet. So it was kind of a cool idea. We had already the concept of geostationary orbits. People understood that, like, that was a solution. That was something you can do. And in 1929, another guy, Herman Ptochnik, already had thought about using satellites in space for observation and communication.

But Clark was the first one to have this idea, like really specifically how this would work and what the network would look like and to use satellites for orbit. In fact, these orbits are sometimes called Clark orbits now because they're inspired by this essay. Was Clark also an engineer? Like, was this the case of a sci-fi writer also being like? like an engineer. Like, I'm wondering if we could split this point. I think Arthur C. Clark is not officially an engineer. Isn't like no real education there?

He's an all-around nerd, though. Okay. I mean, he was, like, inspired as a kid by dinosaur cigarette cards, enthusiastic about fossils. He's sort of like a futurist more than an engineer. Did you say dinosaur cigarette cards? Mm-hmm. Yeah. What do those three words mean together, Daniel?

cigarette cards are these things which appeared in like packets of cigarettes that had like images on them. You would have like actors or you could have pictures of dinosaurs or whatever or like, you know, football players or something. That was a different era. Maybe I watched too much Edwardian or Victorian television so I like knew these things. I'm all about masterpiece theater. I watched Masterpiece Theater when I was a kid. It was Disney. So I guess we were different kinds of kids.

Okay. So it sounds like we're giving this point to sci-fi. All right. Keep going. Yeah, absolutely. He got a lot of technical details, right. Of course, these days, you know, we're all about satellite-based communications. It started like in the 60s, 64-65 with the first launches of commercial satellite-based

communication systems. These days, of course, you know, most of the satellites in orbit are Starlink satellites for Internet. We are using one right now to have this conversation. We sure are. Thank you to Arthur's. see Clark for pioneering this idea. But I don't think the starlings are in geostationary orbit.

No, they're not. They are in low Earth orbit, right? And the idea there is that they can be closer, and so they're a lower latency. But you're passed off from one to another. It's a different system, yeah. Yeah, yeah. But we'll still give that to Clark. All right.

Let's take a break, and we will move from Arthur C. Clark to Heinlein. 2%. That is the number of people who take the stairs when there is also an escalator available. I'm Michael Easter, and on my podcast, 2%. I break down the science of mental toughness, fitness, and building resilience in our strange modern world. I'll be speaking with writers, researchers, and other health and fitness experts, and more, to look past the impractical and way too complex pseudoscience that dominates the wellness industry. We really believe that seed oils were inherently inflammatory. We got it wrong.

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Follow the Amy and T.J. podcast, a one-stop news and pop culture shop to get you caught up and on with your day. And listen to Amy and T.J. on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, we are back, and we were just discussing what Arthur C. Clark contributed to technology today. What about Heinlein. What did Heinlein? What did Heinlein contribute? So there's a great book called Starship Troopers. Came out in 1959, which is mind-blowing, that it's so old. It feels much more modern. You got to watch out. We did a survey, and we have a number of listeners who are, let's say, older than we are. Oh, wow. And so I think that you don't want to, you don't want to be casting dispersions on the year 1959.

No, no, it's the opposite. It's exactly the opposite. I feel like, why that book didn't come out that long ago, did it? It makes me feel like, okay, yes, maybe I'm saying I'm old and our listeners are too. Oops. Yeah, anyway, a cool idea that's in that book is powered armor, basically like an exoskeleton. And, you know, we've seen this, of course, much more recently. it's all over Avatar and it's an alien and all kinds of stuff.

But some people give credit to Heinlein and Starship Troopers for the idea of powered armor. All right. So does this point go to sci-fi then? Give us the context. It's nuanced. The idea for this definitely predates Starship Troopers. In the 1890s, there was a Russian inventor, Nicholas Yagen, who invented a spring and piston-based apparatus for running and heavy lifting. used like compressed gas and springs. This is like real steampunk exoskeleton kind of stuff. It must have been awesome. Yeah, totally, unless it like exploded.

Yeah, I'm sure it was super dangerous. And then in 1917 in the U.S., we had the pedo motor, a powered soft exosuit. So this idea was definitely out there to use like mechanical support for human labor. And even in 1958, so a year before Star Trek troopers, General Electric came out. out with something called the Handyman, which is basically like robotic arms that you could use for like heavy lifting and this kind of stuff. And then in 1960s, they worked on the Hardy Man, which was aimed at like full body augmentation. So like legs in addition to arms.

So this thing was definitely in development and in the zeitgeist before Star Trek troopers. I think that Heinlein here gets credit for like popularizing the idea and maybe like codifying the concept and then influencing, you know, engineers. and science fiction down the road. So I wonder if GE was super excited when Starship Troopers came out because they were like, free advertising. Or if they were like, hey, we got scooped. That was our idea.

There's probably some grumpy engineer at GE who's mad that Heinlein gets credit for this. Yeah, yeah, probably. Fair enough. Something we definitely learned is that credit is not being applied correctly. Like Kirk and Chattner do not get credit for the flip phone. Yeah, right. Okay, but, you know, welcome to life. Am I right?

Yeah, exactly. So it sounds like this point definitely goes to engineering, right? Yeah, exactly. Another concept we see a lot is voice control. You know, in Star Trek, for example, was one of the first places you saw natural language commands. In that show, they can just talk to the computer. They ask it complicated questions. They require context and analysis. It solves problems. It's like talking to a person. It's a very conversational interface. Whereas, you know, computers and Still very, very recently, we're much more like push button and you have to give them very specific commands. Yeah, and now it's kind of amazing. Like, when I talk to AI and I'm trying to use it to like practice Russian or something, it is amazing how natural it sounds.

Yeah, it's really incredible. It's improved a lot. But this is something people have been working on, again, for a long, long time. In 1952, Bell Labs had something they called Audrey, which was a tortured acronym for automatic digit recognition. and its goal was just to recognize spoken digits zero to nine. You know, you could just say numbers and it would recognize them. 52, so like, you know, we did not have powerful computing back then. And then 10 years later, IBM had the shoebox, which could recognize 16 spoken English words.

Most of them are like plus or minus, this kind of thing. So it's like a verbal calculator you can use. And this is because natural language processing is really, really hard. Like language is complicated. It takes a long time to teach a human how language works because, you know, there are rules, but they're not precise and we don't always follow them. And small changes can mean big differences in meaning, right? One comma, for example, can really change what something means. So at the time, Star Trek was really far forward thinking.

Like, in 1966, nothing came close to what you saw on Star Trek. And folks at Google and Apple, in this case explicitly cites Star Trek as an inspiration for Siri and alex. Alexa. Huh. Well, so I guess I'm going to, I'm going to kind of make a critique I made earlier, which is like, okay, so yes, science fiction came up with this idea first, but isn't it kind of obvious that at some point we'd rather not have to type something in and we'd want to just be like, you know, sit on our lazy butts and yell across the screen, like, turn the TV on, you know? Like, isn't it kind of an obvious thing? It's kind of an obvious thing, but it sometimes only seems obvious in hindsight. I think what science fiction does really well is show you

how technology can't transform life. What would life be like if we had this thing? Like you can say, yeah, that would be cool. But what would it really be like to be alive in that world and to live that way? And it was incredible what we saw on the screen, the way they could talk to the computer, this assistant they had, which was intelligent

and never got tired. It was amazing and very forward thinking. Even if they didn't invent the technology or even the idea, they showed us what life could be like if we had it. And I think that is part of the inspiration. I think that if I was trying to sell a new technology, I would hire you to be a person to pitch it because that was very convincing. All right.

All right. How about self-driving cars, which I am hoping that I can purchase by the time my kids are old enough to drive? Which is happening way faster than I thought that it would. I know. So this first appears in science fiction in 1935. This is a story called The Living Machine, where there are driverless taxi cars and a futuristic. society. And then it appears everywhere in science fiction, 1950s, the Magic Highway, Herbie the Love Bug in 1968, one of my favorite movies. It's not really a self-driving car.

It's sort of like a car with a mind. And then, of course, Knight Rider in the 1990s, right? That's a car that not only can talk, but can drive itself. I'm not familiar with any of these. What, you don't know, Knight Rider, seriously? I know of Knight Rider. I didn't know that it was spelled K-N-I-G-H-T, but I see that in your outline, there's a K there. I can still hum the theme song to Knight Rider. Okay, go ahead. Which I will not do. Oh, no.

But Matt would give you a musical accompaniment, probably. Let's just ask Matt to give us some musical background right now. All right. Night Rider was very influential. I actually went to the Automotive Museum in L.A. where they have the Knight Rider, one of the prop cars. Very big moment for me. I have a picture standing in front of it, of course.

Wow. Well. Yes. Thanks, Matt. I watched that in the spin-off version with a helicopter. Lots and lots as a kid. Anyway, this is big in science fiction. And, of course, now it's maybe big in the real world. But this is something that, again, engineers were working on before it even appeared in science fiction.

So in 1925, there were already cars without drivers. These are radio-controlled cars. So, like, think of the RC car that your kids' drive. drive around, but just like a real-sized version. They had radio technology and somebody like put radio technology together with a car. I was like, hey, this is cool. That's not a car you can get in and tell it where to go, but the driver's not literally in the car. So in principle, it's a sort of separating the driver and the car. And then in 1930s, popular magazines already envisioned the futures with automatic cars. So you see articles and depictions where you have driverless cars already

in the popular imagination in the 1930s. Oh, it sounded to me like engineering gets a point. Yes, absolutely. And then people have been working on this hard for a long, long time. You know, DARPA had these challenges. How long can you drive a car before it crashes? And it was hard. This was like mostly led by university teams

and most of the cars crashed after like 10 meters or something. So the fact that we have like competing endeavors from Waymo and Tesla and Zooks and whatever these days that are like almost working is amazing. And in the sake of full transparency, My brother works for Waymo, so I have a conflict of interest there. Yeah, I didn't know that. Can your brother get me a Waymo car? My brother can't even get me a Waymo car, so, yeah, I know.

Or Waymo stock, for that matter. Oh, all right. Well, bummer. Okay, so it sounds like we're giving this one to engineering. I think we've got time for one more technology. Let's end on 3D printers, and we're back to Star Trek. I know. And Daniel's preferred device, the replicator, right?

This is awesome on Star Trek, because, again, it's something you can just use casually. It's not like you go into the lab and you have to sign up and it takes seven weeks to configure the machine. You just like want a cup of hot tea. You just make a cup of hot tea. Tea are gray hot. That beverage has not been programmed into the replication system. Or you can, like, build spare parts or whatever you need. There's no ordering anything on Amazon.

Anything you need, it just assembles it from the raw ingredients. It's incredible. And it's everywhere. It's not like the ship has one of them. Like, everybody's got one in their quarters. It's like having a microwave. Earl Grey. Black. Oh, no, wait.

What was it? Was it Earl Grey Black? Hot. Couls it. Art. What did you want in it? Nothing. So this is exactly the kind of thing.

I would love to have a round. And it's the kind of thing science fiction nerds love. But it was not invented again by Star Trek. This appears first in like 1945 at a short story by Murray Lainster. The idea. of like feeding plastics into something, and then there's a moving arm that makes drawings in the air and the stuff that comes out of it hardens. The idea of like a 3D printer really has much earlier roots than Star Trek. And then in The Midas Touch, a book by Frederick Pole, there's the idea

of matter conversion that you can turn anything into anything. And then more recently, the Diamond Age, Neil Stevenson, has matter compilers, though these are probably inspired by Star Trek. So there's sort of a thread here in science fiction. Okay. All right. But did engineering predate the idea? So engineering does predate this. In 1971, there was a liquid metal recorder, basically sort of like printing with metal.

The idea that you could like, you know, use something, which was a liquid and then hardened and you could use that to build up something. They call this additive manufacturing. The idea really emerged in the 80s. There's a guy named Chuck Hall who invented this concept of additive manufacturing, soft layers, which are added one at a time, and then cured to make hard with like UV radiation or particles or something. And so it goes from soft to hard, and then you can build something. And so this came out in the 80s, which again, predates the next generation. And back then you could buy one, you know, in the 80s, a 3D printer that would cost like two thirds of a million dollars in today. days money. Yikes. People have asked Hall, like, were you trying to build this thing from Star Trek?

And there's no evidence for that. He just thought this would be useful if we could, like, you know, basically print stuff in 3D. You said he was doing it before Star Trek, so he couldn't have been, right? Yeah, exactly. But the idea appeared before Star Trek in science fiction, you know, the concept of a replicator. He says he was not inspired by science fiction. But, you know, once the idea came out and 3D printers were more ubiquitous, Star Trek again

had already prepared people. It's a lot like the flip phone. You know, this concept was everywhere in Star Trek. People had the idea, oh, what if we could just build things out of their raw parts? And now printers are everywhere. It's like for $200, you can get a pretty good 3D printer. And now we use them to build things like Rocket. Like I think Rocket Lab at least used to 3D print some of their rockets. Maybe they still do. And people are trying to 3D print things like livers and they can already do some stuff. Yeah, absolutely. Casts, right? Bones. things you can put in your blood vessels. Like if you need a really specific shape for something,

then you can 3D print it. And so biomedically, this is a lot of applications. So it's a really cool thing. And it doesn't seem like it was inspired by science fiction, but maybe its use and its adoption was inspired by science fiction. Science fiction sort of prepared us for thinking about what life would be like if we had this and then made people more enthusiastic when it came around. So what do you think?

Do we split that point then? I think maybe we should split it. Yeah. Exactly. So where do we stand in the end, Kelly? Yeah, so here's the neat thing about the point system. I wasn't writing this down anywhere or keeping track of it at all. And so I think probably science fiction won, but I can't be sure because I didn't write it down. Well, for those of you keeping score at home, you know more than we do about the outcome of this episode.

I was assuming Kelly was keeping track, so I don't remember either. Nope, nope. Well, that's what you've done. come to expect from an episode of Daniel and Kelly's extraordinary universe, extraordinary detail, but not a lot of planning. I think my take-home message is that a lot of the stories that are out there about science fiction inspiring real technology are on sort of shifty ground and rely on facts that are more myth than reality, but there is real inspiration here.

People are reading science fiction, thinking about those future worlds and then trying to build them and it goes back and forth. So I think that's definitely solid. Yeah. And I think that there are so many things that you hear in your daily life that when you dig in and you really look for the facts, the stories are so much more nuanced, which is why I kind of love that we have an hour-long podcast where we get to like dig in and try to tell the more nuanced stories. And then we don't record things like points. And, you know, we just, we do whatever it is that we do here. Well, if anybody's getting points, it's not William Shatner. It's Wang Ming-Chang. for all the awesome props on Star Trek.

So thank you very much to all the science fiction authors who envision possible future worlds. And thank you to all the scientists and engineers who make them happen. That's right. All right. Until next time, Extraordinaries. Thanks for listening.

Thanks, everybody for listening. Please go and do us a favor and rate the show on whatever podcast app you're using. It really helps people find us. Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is edited by the amazing Matt Kesselman. He really is a wizard. You can also find us online on Blue Sky, Instagram, and X, D&K Universe.

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