Stanislav Lem, 1966.
It is exactly 100 years since the birth of the Polish writer and futurist Stanislaw Lem. He was born on September 12, 1921 in Lviv, survived the German occupation, despite his Jewish origin, and in the difficult post-war period began to write stories in order to secure himself a small increase in the salary of a professor assistant. Then the hobby grew into the main occupation and became the work of his whole life.
Lem's books have been translated into dozens of languages, and the philosophical treatise “The Sum of Technology” contains some scientific and technical ideas that have become reality these days. Here are just a few predictions described in the works of the famous science fiction and futurist.
A virtual reality
Lem called it “phantomatics.” With this term, he denoted a system of illusory sensations entering the human brain – a new world that people of the future will not be able to distinguish from the present.
The writer turned to the theme of life in the fictional world several times, and for the first time depicted it just in the treatise “The Sum of Technology”, published in 1964. There he describes a “phantom generator” capable of creating an alternate reality. Moreover, this reality can be multi-layered – like one dream inside another. And a large number of artificial worlds can lead to the fact that a person will forget what reality is real, and get lost in them: trying to return to the real world, he will find himself in another virtual one. Lem saw this as a potential threat:
“The indistinguishability of a phantomatic spectacle from reality would lead to irreparable consequences. A murder may be committed, after which the killer will justify himself by claiming that he was deeply convinced that all this was just a “phantom spectacle.” In addition, many people will become so confused in indistinguishable from each other genuine and fictitious life situations, in a subjectively unified world of real things and ghosts, that they will not be able to find a way out of this labyrinth. “
Internet and gadgets
In the collection of philosophical essays “Dialogues”, written in 1957, the science fiction writer suggested that to increase the performance of powerful computers, they should be combined into a single network. The gradual accumulation of “information machines” and “memory banks”, in his opinion, will lead to the emergence of “state, continental, and then interplanetary computer networks.”
On March 27, 2006, the science fiction writer and philosopher Stanislav Lem, the author of the work “The Sum of Technologies”, in which he anticipated the creation of virtual reality and artificial intelligence, died. Listen to the # radio play “The Star Diaries of Iyon the Quiet” (1962): https://t.co/mAZEfSfwVK pic.twitter.com/cOShZxDG8e
– Eugene Zhukov (@Eugene_Zhukov) March 27, 2018
And a couple of years earlier, in the novel “The Magellanic Cloud”, he predicts the future, where all people have quick access to a giant virtual database – “trion library”. At the same time, each user has his own portable device – trion. It is a tiny quartz crystal capable of transmitting and storing any information:
“In the trion, you can fix not only light images that cause changes in its crystal structure – pages of books, photographs, all kinds of maps, drawings, drawings and tables; it is just as easy to immortalize sounds, including the human voice and music. “
Or here's a description of a gadget connected to the Internet (though with a much larger coverage area than now):
“Today, using this invisible network that encircles the world, we do not at all think about the gigantic scale and clarity of its work. How often each of us in his office in Australia, in an observatory on the Moon or on an airplane took out a pocket receiver, called the Central Trion Library, ordered a piece of work and in a second saw it on the screen of his color, three-dimensional TV.
Readers, tablets and audiobooks
The hero of the novel “Return from the Stars” (published in 1961) arrives on Earth after a space expedition that lasted 127 years. The world has become different, and the astronaut feels like a stranger in it. He goes to a bookstore and finds out that paper books have not been printed for a long time, but instead they use gadgets that look like modern tablets. They are called optons.
“I spent the afternoon at the bookstore. There were no books. They have not been published for nearly fifty years. And I longed for them so much after the microfilms that made up the library on Prometheus! Alas! It was no longer possible to scour the shelves, weigh volumes in the hand, feel their promising weight. The bookstore was more like an electronics lab. Books are crystals with information imprinted in them. We read them using an opton. Opton looked like a real book with only one single page between the covers. Every time I touched it, the next page of text appeared on it. “
There, the main character learns that people have already lost the habit of reading and prefer to listen to books: “But optons were rarely used, as the robot seller told me. People preferred lektons – they read aloud, they could be adjusted to any timbre of voice, arbitrary tempo and modulation. “
All the audiobooks he bought (almost 300 titles) fit into one pocket.
Nanotechnology
Devices that are invisible to the human eye, but capable of affecting our body, have been mentioned by Lem since the 1960s. Many of his works feature such a topic as the correction of physical disabilities with the help of what we now call nanotechnology.
In the novel “Invincible”, written in 1964, a spaceship with a crew lands on an unknown planet, where people meet “flies” – small robots left behind by an alien civilization. Deprived of the supervision of intelligent beings, “flies” began to develop and change uncontrollably. In fact, they went through the process of evolution, having learned how to effectively fight competitors – other robots and the living world of this planet.
How can you not recall the hypothesis known as “gray goo”? It was first expressed by nanotechnology pioneer Eric Drexler in 1986. According to the scenario he described, microscopic nanobots will learn to reproduce themselves. They can get out of control and begin to secretly attack people, injecting them with poisons or getting into the brain. Carrying out their program of self-reproduction, nanorobots will devour all life on the planet, literally “eating” it. After that, the Earth will be covered with “gray slime”.
I am glad though that not all predictions of science fiction writers come true.
