Science Fiction Timeline of Inventions
technovelgy.com
technovelgy.com
A entrepreneur friend of mine and I were debating the "value" of an idea vs the making of it into a real "thing." I'm in the camp that execution, the getting it made into reality is the 'hard' work and coming up with the idea is the 'easy' work. He was taking the other side that imagining something that nobody had yet thought about or mentioned was much harder.
Most of his argument rested on the claim that the creative spark was rare and could not be duplicated by any sort of process. Thus ideas, like music or art, were intrinsically valuable because only one person in the world could have them.
While I agree in principle that the idea is a requirement before execution can begin, my counter claim was that ideas are probablistic expressions of a useful combinations of available technology. Given that things could be combined in a useful way, I claim there is a finite probability that someone seeing all of the components, will realize the combination as a viable idea. So the more people you expose to the components, the more likely that one of them will see the idea and share it. This is subtly different than there is one person who is uniquely qualified to come up with the idea.
I don't believe either of us left the discussion with a truly different point of view.
I was wondering if the expression of ideas in science fiction would provide data to help illuminate his position or mine. I conclude that it does not as good writers should be familiar with the writing and concepts of the other writers, this would lead to limiting idea re-use since a writer would not want to be perceived as plagarizing their ideas from their peers.
There was a series in Scientific American that compared the ideas in Star Trek with what was available today. One of the claims in that article was that engineers were inspired as children watching the series to build the gadgets they saw on the screen. If that linkage was born out by solid research data it would make a strong case for having the characters in science fiction creating solutions to problems posited to occur 20 - 30 years hence. Prepping future engineers to start working on solutions early.
So that means we're about due for a time traveling delorian, right?
Yes I agree with your friend finding something truly and absolutely novel is incredibly hard and rare, but you almost never need to. A variation on a theme is often enough, especially if the execution is better than previous versions.
For instance, not only do Avatar and The Last Samurai come from a literary archetype, they come from the same literary archetype. The idea for figuring out how fast something changes was around for a long time before Newton and Leibniz developped differential calculus. Myspace predates Facebook.
the idea is a requirement before execution can begin
An idea is required before you can execute clearly, but once you start executing that idea often evolves in quite unexpected ways. There are also cases of discovering something purely by chance while working on something unrelated as long as you are executing something.
Sounds like a claim made by someone who has never had an idea that it turns out already existed or that someone else was already working on.
Invention - Date Invented in Fiction - Date Invented in Reality (if ever)
Knowing when someone dreamed it up is neat, but I was hoping to see how reality stacks up next to their predictions.
For example:
Warp Drive - 1966 - 2063 - N/A
But alas, the site appears to be dedicated to books, so Star Trek's reinventions of older ideas would probably be ineligible for inclusion.
Warp Drive - 2063 - N/A