When sci-fi becomes science

Scientific and technological breakthroughs that were once only dreamt up in the pages of fantasy novels.

January 06, 2016 03:39 pm | Updated September 22, 2016 10:27 pm IST - Thiruvananthapuram

Blue Origin's reusable New Shepard rocket Photo: NYT

Blue Origin's reusable New Shepard rocket Photo: NYT

The new Star Wars movie is breaking box-office records at the speed of light, proving time and again the ever-lasting influence of science-fiction fantasy. A part of its popularity, perhaps, rests on a feeling that the fantastic technologies showcased in the film might turn out to be a reality in the future. Some of them do end up as real. 2015 had its own share of scientific and technological breakthroughs, which were once a part of a fantasy. Here are some of them…

Vertical Take-off Vertical Landing (VTVL)

VTVL is said to be the next stage of rocket technology. Two remarkable test flights took place in 2015. On November 23, New Shepard, a reusable sub-orbital rocket of Blue Origin aerospace company became the first rocket to make a safe, soft vertical landing on Earth after sending a payload to space. This was immediately followed, on December 21, by Space X’s successful test of the reusable and a much more powerful Falcon 9. The first stage (booster) made a perfect vertical landing after successfully deploying 11 satellites into orbit. VTVL is hailed as the future of rocket technology. It’s not a recent concept, though. It was first depicted in the early 19th century space opera comic strips such as Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon . Falcon 9’s smooth landing recalls a similar vertical landing employed by ‘XFLR6’ rocket in 1954 comic Tintin And The Explorers On The Moon .

Virtual and mixed reality

Imagination drives science forward. Remember that holographic message that Princess Leia sends to Jedi master Obi-Wan from Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977)? But man’s reach exceeds his imagination. In January last year Microsoft launched its augmented/mixed reality device HoloLens, a head-mounted holographic computer, that enables high-definition holograms projected onto the real world. Users can manipulate and create virtual images using hand gestures in real space in front of them. Now that is something straight out of fiction or, may be, from our wildest imaginations! United States-based start-up Magic Leap’s headset is another such device that is aiming to bring the magic of augmented reality to the public. While Microsoft and Magic Leap showed their prowess in mixed reality tech in an eventful year, Facebook’s Oculus, HTC partnering with Valve and Google, released their virtual reality headsets for consumers.

In fiction, the first reference to holograms dates back to 1898. Jules Verne in his novel The Carpathian Castle portrayed a 2D projection of a man made out of light. But one of the earliest portrayals of a 3D hologram was in 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz . On the other hand, the first comprehensive depiction of virtual reality was in Stanely G. Weinbaum’s 1935 short story ‘Pygmalion‘s Spectacles.’ But the term was coined much later, in 1980s. More recently sci-fi fantasy movies, starting with Star Wars , have extensively depicted different kinds of mixed and virtual reality tech.

Mars prospects

The red planet has been a thing of awe for centuries now. From late 19th century onwards Mars has been a favourite theme for sci-fi writers. Works such as Kurd Lasswitz’s Auf Zwei Planeten (1897), Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles and Arthur C. Clarke’s Sands of Mars (1951) have engraved Mars and Mars exploration as a popular topic of discussion among scientists as well as space enthusiasts. After decades of research, the question still remains on whether the planet supports life or not. The search for the answer got a major boost in 2015 when NASA confirmed the discovery of flowing water on Mars. With huge strides being made on every front, plans are actually being made for future colonisation of the planet. At the end of December last year, NASA was allotted a fund of USD 55 million from the U.S. government to build a habitation module for Deep Space exploration by 2018, keeping Mars as the primary destination. It is becoming increasingly more evident, as it was portrayed in The Martian Chronicles , that we are the Martians we seek.

Gene editing

Genetic engineering means altering life and that is what we have been doing for over a quarter century by creating new medicines and highly resistant crops. But 2015 has taken genetic engineering to another level. For the first time ever, a human life was saved using gene-editing when doctors at Great Ormond Street hospital in London successfully treated a one-year-old British girl Layla, who was suffering from leukaemia and was not responding to conventional treatment methods. Gene-editing has always been an extremely difficult thing to do. But 2015 also saw the numerous tests of a new tool based on a DNA sequence known as Clustered Regularly-Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR) and Cas9 enzyme, which makes gene-editing simple, extremely precise and very cheap. In 2015 it was utilised in several remarkable experiments like the correction of an inherited-disease causing mutation in a non-viable human embryo and disabling mosquitoes from carrying malaria genes. Scientists have claimed that 2015 was a landmark year in genetic engineering and that CRISPR-Cas9 will open immense possibilities for gene therapy in treating diseases like cancer and HIV. The term ‘genetic engineering’ was popularised by Jack Williamson with his 1951 sci-fi novel Dragon’s Island . But references to the technique existed even before that. Also, sci-fi comic books and novels have been graciously employing genetic engineering to create super-natural living beings.

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