The Turing Test, Artificial Intelligence and Science Fiction
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It is hard even to begin a debate about the possibility of artificial intelligence because so much semantic rubble needs to be cleared away before we can agree on what we are talking about.
For a start, does artificial intelligence imply artificial self-awareness, artificial consciousness? In my view it should, as otherwise we aren’t really talking about anything except an advanced machine.
But some would disagree and say that the issue of consciousness is unimportant; the point is the building of an expert system to simulate human intelligence for practical purposes.
This may well turn out to be a question worth deciding, since quite a few pundits are predicting that artificial intelligence (AI) will be achieved in the present century, and will pose a huge threat to human supremacy on this planet.
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40 Years Of Star Trek - Looking At The Past And To The Future
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The original series of Star Trek (or Star Trek: TOS has fandom has renamed it) launched on NBC on September 8th 1966, that’s 40 years ago this Friday. The show, which ran for a mere three seasons finished its run on June 3rd 1969 and has been in re-runs almost ever since.
It’s popularity is such that 40 years after it started CBS are currently working on re-mastered versions of some of the original episodes complete with new CGI for release into syndication again.
But Star Trek is a lot more than just a science fiction show that has stood the test of time. It’s more even than the start of a popular franchise. Star Trek represents the entrance of science fiction into popular culture.
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The Ender Saga: A Noteworthy Science Fiction series
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January 1985 marks the beginning of America’s love affair with Ender Wiggin. It was that month that Ender’s Game was published, becoming an instant blockbuster, and “probably the most popular science fiction novel published in the last twenty years” (John Kessel). The child prodigy and ultimate savior of the earth, Ender Wiggin, had appeared seven years earlier in a short story published in the science fiction magazine Analog. Writer Orson Scott Card had spent much of his young life working in print, but had only set to writing science fiction when his meager salary as copy editor at a small press failed to pay a debt incurred from a failed business attempt. His magazine article won instant attention, and Orson Scott Card won the 1978 John C. Campbell Award for best new writer at the World Science Fiction Convention. But little Ender was destined for bigger things.
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Flash News for 2008-05-06
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Iron-Man and GTA IV Team up to Crush a Modern Marketing Myth
Marvel Sets Dates for Thor, Captain America, Iron Man 2
Dark Knight: Two Face revealed
Robert Piccardo guests on Smallville
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Sci-fi Movies That Didn’t Make It To The Top
When you ask someone (me included, I guess) which science fiction movies are the best they will throw down names of blockbusters and big earners. But what’s with the rest of the pack? Did you know there is something like 1437 sci-fi movies made according to scifi-movies?. There are some very good movies that deserve to be mentioned or recommended if someone asks you. Here is my list:
10. Gattaca
09. Soldier
08. Phantoms
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New Batman: The Dark Knight Trailer
Jocker looks super-fun 
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Fantasy Writing - Six Cliches to Avoid
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Article by: William Meikle
Fantasy fiction is doing good business at the moment, but there are certain situations that have been overplayed. So much so, that they have become genre clichés, and everybody knows what to expect next. If
you’re a writer in the fantasy genre, here are 6 clichés you should try to avoid in your stories.
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Flash News for 2008-05-04
Photo by The Wandering Angel
With shuttle, station clear, Pentagon destroys wayward spy satellite
Jurassic Park paleontologist Jack Horner still gets angry letters from kids
Galaxy Quest gets a comic book, ignites hopes for sequel
Hey! What’s your beef with young adult SF/F?
SF/F writers who blog (SF Signal)
The cutest sci-fi sidekicks and why they fail
What can movies teach us about space travel?
R2-D2 swiss army DVD projector
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Time Travel- A Possibility or Just the Stuff of Science Fiction?
Photo by Yves Lorson
article by Michael Watson
It’s been written about in hundreds of books, the subject of fantasy for everyone at one time or another, and the government has actually devoted research at one time or another on the subject. If you do a search on the Internet for time travel you will find millions of entries on it, and hundreds of websites fully devoted to talking about it. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could travel back in time? You could correct mistakes you’ve made in your life, study any period of time that interests you, not to mention build a financial empire on your foreknowledge of events. Beginning with H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, the concept of time travel has been one of the main staples of science fiction. Some of my favorite reads are David Gerrold’s The Man Who Folded Himself and The Light of Other Days by Stephen Baxter and Arthur C. Clarke.
So is it really possible to travel in time?
First of all we are all already time travelers in the sense that time moves forward, and at the same apparent rate of speed, for all of us. There seem to be no obstacles in physics to accelerating the forward momentum of time in one way or another. Cryogenics is a concept much written about as one method of “forward” time travel; lowering the body temperature to a little above absolute zero to nearly stop the metabolism as a way to sleep away millennia. The practical hurdles to this put any possibility of this far into the future. Although simpler organisms have been successfully frozen and returned, the human body is too complex to yet survive the process because of water crystallization and other factors. Another method of accelerating time is time differentials due to the relativistic effects of high velocity.
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Space Colonization - Will Space Tourism Drive Space Colonization? What’s The Timeline?
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by mark Moidel
NASA is going back to the Moon and eventually to Mars. At least that’s the plan. The steps are to try to live off-world at the International Space Station (as we are currently doing); then to go back to the Moon sometime in the next 12 years and set up a small lunar base; then off to our next destination, Mars. What is the timeline of these events and what will be the driving forces behind Space Colonization?
Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” vision of a beautiful spinning International Space Station clearly has not come to pass by that year. That vision is a roadmap to what we as a human race will undoubtedly accomplish, potentially in the near future, with the right incentives. The questions are ‘when’ and ‘what incentives’?
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