Stranger than fiction

Science fiction ideas have inspired advances in the real world – remember how Arthur C Clarke predicted modern satellites. But some SF ideas can turn out to be utter codswallop.

 

The link between science fiction and science is something columnist Henry Gee looks at in the April edition of Focus, on sale 11 March. In a great blog displaying vintage American science magazines, I found a writer doing exactly the same – in the 1930s.

 

In “Most Scientific Fiction Can’t Come True” in a 1931 edition of Modern Mechanics magazine, William J Harris considered how the science fiction of the day might become a reality. How many of the ideas he explored have moved from fiction to fact?

 

Harris thought that the missing piece was to discover how vehicles could withstand the gravitational strain of space. He also thought astronauts would only be weightless at the gravitational midpoint between the Earth and Moon when “occupants would cling to ceilings or hang suspended in the middle of the rocket until their space ship reached a point where gravity began to be exerted again”.

Harris imagined knocking electrons off the atoms in the human form to reduce it eventually to hydrogen. The body would move through the elements as it gradually lost electrons, becoming “in turn many rare and wonderful things, including krypton, antimony, argon, arsenic, cadmium, gallium, manganese, molybdenum, rhodium, and even silver”.

 

Harris ruled this out because the recently discovered ‘heavyside layer’ – the ionized part of Earth’s atmosphere – was believed to reflect all radio waves. “The prospect of forcing a signal through into outer space seems negligible,”he wrote.

 

Harris proposed a more distant human habitat than we’ve ever considered: “The mean density of the bright star Capella is about the same as pure air, so one could live at the center of it, if it wasn’t for the temperature of a few million degrees and an atmosphere composed of flying electrons.”