Truth in Sci-fi

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  • #40252
    theFrey
    Participant
    Sidhecafe wrote:

    FAITH or rather BELIEF is not the same as TRUTH.

    Truth is an unconfirmed concept. A hypothothesis of reality. But truth can really go the way as Time….”blood under the bridge”.

    Truth and the arguement that it produces is dangerous ground for a species that has not moved beyond “eye for an eye” mentalities of justice and revenge.

    We must respect what one another believes, however and this is my version of Truth.

    Which is more accurately put as my belief in the shape of things for me.

    What any one believes as their truth must just be accepted as their Faith.

    We could spend days, megabites going back and forth over what truth is….But how does that apply to us being Scifi fans??

    Scifi provides an excellent forum in which to explore these ideas….as I mentioned before to play in our imaginations with our possible futures.

    history backwards/ reverse history…..that’s a potential of SciFi.

    I think a lot of sci-fi has some truth in it. It may not have been truth when it was originally shown. But either the creators looked to the forward trends or….. the vision itself inspired others to create it, and thus make it true.

    Two quick examples….. Dick Tracy’s wrist radios (telling my age here. ๐Ÿ˜† ) A unique communicator for each person that could easily be carried around. We now have cell phone that can be worn. Who would have thought this when they first hit the comic’s pages all those years ago….. forward thinking or inspiration?

    Second one…. hover vechicles. We have air cars that can hover over land and water… and while not common they are available. Also we have planes that can lift and hover. Again…. forward thinking or inspiration?

    So, is the stuff we are watching now the truth at this time? Most likely not, but is there a grain of truth in it that will grow? Yep, I think so.

    #73363
    mysteriesofthesea
    Participant

    BOOK “truth in science fiction” discussion post or a new post altogether?

    ……Stanelle

    #73365
    theFrey
    Participant

    This is a morfed topic concerning itself with sci-fi and truth. It jumped off a portion of Sidhecafe’s last comment.

    I have often wondered myself, what future problems we will have when records get old and perhaps unsearchable. I wonder if we will be in danger of having people mesh our sci-fi entertainment with scraps of actual historical record.

    If you think about it, it could be possible. Look how detailed some of the Star Wars and Star Trek stuff is for crying out loud. They have books full of ship designs and stats. And being popular with the fan, there are potentially more of those documents to survive. Especially with the uber-geeks perserving theirs in acid proff bags ect…. ๐Ÿ™‚

    #73366
    Sidhecafe
    Participant

    LOL!

    thefrey wrote:

    I wonder if we will be in danger of having people mesh our sci-fi entertainment with scraps of actual historical record.

    David MacCaulay wrote a book called Motel of Mysteries about people of the future totally misinterepreting the past….

    And I think there have been a number of Scifi stories of Aliens visiting Earth after intercepting tv transmissions and thinking they are actual representations of human life….

    Can you imagine if an Alien species had been watching the Scifi Channel and thought it was all real….

    They’d show up asking for Jack O’Neill!!! or heaven forbid Dylan Hunt! ๐Ÿ˜†

    #73368
    Anonymous
    Guest

    Well I don’t have anything to chime in really. So I’ll leave you with a story.

    Plato once said that Socrates, himself and Aristotle believed in the “Third Realm”, and this realm was analogous to the Sun, while our physical plane of existance was like the Earth, illuminated by the Truth (The Sun), but not a part of it.

    They believed that “Truth” existed, but only in this place,similar to Heaven, from which the Third Realm derived. The best example Plato used was that the Sun represented illumination, or Wisdom, the Truth if you will. But individuals illuminated with this Truth were filled with their own collective personal experiences which naturally create bias.

    Here’s a quick experiment. Grab a flashlight and turn off all the lights in a windowless room. Turn on the flashlight and shine it against a wall, with your hand inbetween. That image on the wall of your hand…is it really your hand? Or just a distorted image of the Truth?

    Plato would say the hand is the truth, but you can never fully see or understand it because we can only experience those images on the wall, not the actual truth.

    So in this mythical Realm there is only one chair, one table, one bench, only one representation of each perfect object, and that is Truth. But when a human thinks of a chair, or a table, or a bench, each of us thinks of a different thing, because each of these thoughts are just a reflection, an image illuminated by the truth, but merely a shadow of it. A construct of the human mind.

    Now I’ll tell you another quick concept. It’s called *necessity*. Many philosphers harp upon it, including Anselm (I think, god my memory sucks).

    This theory basically lays out the old cliche “Nothing is impossible”

    Basically anything dreamed can be realized. Many philosophers who subscribe to this school of thought argue that it’s necessary for something to exist because we can define it. Why would someone be able to define the impossible? It’s a contradiction.

    It states that there’s nothing an individual can contemplate that does not currently exist, or will exist in the future. And despite the immediate scoffs, it’s true, or at least I can’t disprove it. Think about it, and stretch your mind. This is exactly what the subject here is about with Sci-Fi and Truth. A six headed purple dragon? Not impossible, heck with trillions of planets the odds that somewhere out there one exists is not remote. On another planet at this very moment people are laughing over the possibility that huge giant Lizards once ruled a planet… And if our purple dragon doesn’t exist anywhere in the Universe currently? We can sure as heck create one with the right genetic knowledge someday.

    So lets get even more super crazy. How about a giant planet as big as a Galaxy? Hrmm, might’ve happened early on the Universe…. Might even be able to collapse enough matter by colliding dying galaxies in a few billion years.

    How about six black holes all stacked upon one another?

    And here’s the catch my friends, this is an example of something that cannot be defined, and therefore may not really exist. If something cannot be confined with a definition it isn’t a fully formed thought and therefore doesn’t exist through necessity. However, the thought is based on something that does exist and can later be confined by definition

    The point is, our imaginations are not nearly as wild or irrational as some think. Therefore as we get more and more advanced as a race, it becomes harder and harder to blow peoples mind with good Science Fiction. Back in the day people like Jules Verne blew people away with stories about submarines. Leonardo DaVinci drew a model of a helicopter among other things.

    We don’t dream the impossible, we’re simply voyeurs of the past, present, and future. Anywho not sure I believe it myself, but this thread reminded me of those old stories, so figured I’d dump ’em in your laps ๐Ÿ˜ˆ

    #73370
    mysteriesofthesea
    Participant

    and wonder!!

    #73375
    theFrey
    Participant

    I was thinking of what would happen, if some of the history we accept is just fiction. It could happen. Take the Rosetta Stone for example it survived because it was on a tablet and not papyrus ect… The basis for
    translation of Egyptian hieroglyphics. But what if the stuff written about in the hieroglyphics is fiction?

    Okie dokie now we have John Uber-Geek Fanboy who as an extra credit exercise (or in a fit of geek-one-up-manship) translates a favorite passage into English, Latin and Klingon. And since this is an uber-geek perhaps he takes it to metal shop and engraves or acid etches it on a copper plate.

    Year later, John Uber-Geek Fanboy is now a highly regarded scholar or history or linquisticts. So perhaps there will be traces of him here and there…. Centuries later, when we are all dust…. Traces of this odd language pop up everywhere (those trekies are diligent little buggers) but no one knows what this lost language is until this brass plate is discovered…. And there ya go….

    What is to say that the ancient Egyptians did not have fiction fan-boys who worked stories and make believe languages into various places as decorative elements. And ya, know… there could have been trekkie-like fan-boys back then. ๐Ÿ™‚

    #73381
    Sidhecafe
    Participant

    Hieroglyphics are really just old advertisments from the greatest Marketing Firm to ever exist: Pharoh Inc.

    #73397
    theFrey
    Participant

    I really liked their fashion and cosmetic line. Sadly, their furniture collection left something to be desired.

    #73408
    theFrey
    Participant

    Speaking of Egyptians….. and that book I was talking about eariler
    Amazon has a peek inside of the Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody by Will Cuppy and the section that they decided to sneak peak was Cheops. ๐Ÿ˜€

    L O’conner wrote in a review >> I must have read this book twenty times at least, and I never get tired of it. Every time it seems just as funny, as Will Cuppy tells us about the lives of historical characters, from Cheops ( or khufu) through to Catherine the Great, taking in such diverse characters as Cleopatra, Attila the hun, Lady Godiva, henry the eight, John Smith, and miles Standish. His wonderful dry comments are hilarious, as on Charlemagne who was born in the dark ages when people were not very bright. They have been getting brighter and brighter ever since, until finally the are like they are now’Or on the American revolution , started because the colonists had to pay takes to which their consent had not been asked ‘ today we pay taxes but our consent has been asked, and we have told the government to go ahead and tax us all they want to.

    http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0879235144/ref=sib_dp_pt/103-3055337-5892653#reader-link

    P.s. the foot notes are a scream. ๐Ÿ˜†

    #73417
    Sidhecafe
    Participant

    Thanks for the tip on the Will Cuppy book, thefrey!!!

    Made me think of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds which was written in the 1800’s about how all these ideas have just been swallowed whole by the mass consciousness. Like Tulip Mania and the Inquisiton and paper money backed by gold somewhere you’ll never see it.

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