But I got to thinking---always an idea killer---and I developed a conundrum worthy of posting here.
How would you describe nanotechnology to someone who's somewhere in the past? (Right now my story is set somewhere between 1945 and 1950, but I'm not firmly bound to that---I'm not firmly bound to anything 'cause I haven't written anything down yet at all.)
Saying "tiny little robots" just doesn't cut it for me. I could say "robots the size of germs," but would that really be accurate?
I've in mind that the description is being given to someone who's (a) at least high-school educated of that period, but (b) definitely not a science fiction fan.
Any thoughts?
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Nanotech would be virtually incomprehensible for anyone but the most advanced thinkers and dreamers in the WW2/post era. Explaining it to the layman would be virtually impossible, imo. Remember that a computer back then filled a high school gym and was made of huge tube transistors. Robots were still science fiction and few, if anyone, dreamed that they could be small enough to fit inside the human body.
You're best bet is to not explain it. If a character time travels and uses nanotech to heal someone, have him hide it and lie to the any characters of that era. First off, any responsible time traveler wouldn't say a word about it (messing with the timeline and whatnot) and even if he did people would think he was crazy.
Shoot up the wounded with "morphine" to ease the pain, but nanites could be in the syringe to enter the body and heal it. Then have the character wrap up the wounds and "hope for the best." Just play around with ideas like that to hide the tech using standard techniques of the day.
Just my $0.02.
Jammrock
I suppose "It's magic" would have to be some part of the explanation, as is true even today. We can imagine a world in which medical nanotechnology works, but we aren't there, yet. I think your historical characters could handle the same concepts. All this mini-rant means I'm voting for "robots the size of germs".
Without, say, a remote controled car(or something similar) to demonstrate and then a smaller one and then holding his thumb and forefinger together and saying, now imagine a hundred of them this small....
Or the nanotech could just be a limited supply of good spirits.
[This message has been edited by pantros (edited August 10, 2006).]
Driving on the highway, travelling at 75 MPH a car passes you doing 76. They take forever to pass you because they are going one mile per hour relative to your speed.
A car passes you doing 95 and you think they are insane.
A guy standing on the side of the road, looks pretty much the same from 400 yards away as from three hundred yards away, but as you get closer, he becomes more of a blur as you whoosh by.
That's relativity. Now expand those speeds to celestial speeds.
Nanotech - Remember how TV's used to be big heavy pieces of furniture made of glass and metal with wood colored shelf paper panelling? Now they are thin and plastic. Well, they did the same thing with robots (real robots, not the things that look like people. Think of the robots they build your car with. (automated machines that react to a precise set of stimuli) They made them smaller and from new materials. So small that they can fit inside a blood vessel. - Okay so we are really into microtechnology at this point, but nanotech isn't far off. Theoretically a nanobot could travel into a human blood cell. Current technology still travels only through the major blood vessels and is still often connected by the control wire.
The list is quite endless, but the technology is so advanced that very little on the nano scale has been successfully done. Every G8 nation is dumping billions into nantech as it has enough promise to revolutionize the world as much as the car, airplane, and microprocessor have, if not more.
Carbon fiber contruction.
Smaller, cooler, faster microprocessors (nanoprocessors?)
Microscopic remote controlled medical devices inside human blood vessals.
What I don't expect:
Nanites: Microcscopic robots with a built in computer capable of artifical intelligence.
Robots of any kind freely roaming inside the cells of the human body.
Polymorphic robots.
Robotic Viruses.
)[This message has been edited by sholar (edited August 11, 2006).]
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What I don't expect:
Nanites: Microcscopic robots with a built in computer capable of artifical intelligence.
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Relativity for dummies.Driving on the highway, travelling at 75 MPH a car passes you doing 76. They take forever to pass you because they are going one mile per hour relative to your speed.
A car passes you doing 95 and you think they are insane.
A guy standing on the side of the road, looks pretty much the same from 400 yards away as from three hundred yards away, but as you get closer, he becomes more of a blur as you whoosh by.
That's relativity. Now expand those speeds to celestial speeds.
[This message has been edited by Aust Alien (edited August 12, 2006).]
Muwhahahaha!!!!
A simple explanation: germs that take orders.
Oh and do those modified microbes that eat oil count as nanobots?
Besides, aliens wouldn't use a pseudo-Greek coinage like "nanotechnology" to describe them...besides that, I'm sure when it finally comes to market, it'll have a different name as well...
[This message has been edited by Sara Genge (edited August 13, 2006).]
[edited 'cause I clicked before my last sentence was completed.]
[This message has been edited by Robert Nowall (edited August 14, 2006).]
Someone in the 1940s would understand machinery. they would also know about disease.
The concept of autotoms, or robots, were already known, if not by the general public, at least by a large portion of the "in the know" public. The 1939 World's Fair had a lot of autonomous machinery. Cars that drove themselves, robot exibits, all sorts of things so the people would have a basic understanding of robots.
when I read you were trying to discribe it to someone in the past, I pictured someone in the 1800s or before. That would be a bit more difficult. That is why I said smaller than dust in my discription. For the 1940s, one could use microbes or bacteria.
I'm not fond of laying out too much of what I'm working on---it's like once I've written it down in any detail, it's done for me. Short outlines and notes are about all I can manage. Too much detail, and it's already done and I never get around to it. (My energy for working on it right now is high---I'm having my best writing period since I gave up Internet Fan Fiction...)
That being said, I like "rstegman"'s explanation.
And robots came in with Karl Capek's "R. U. R." (short for "Rossem's Universal Robots," robota being the Czech word for worker. The play was 1920, I believe...but when did the word become widely circulated? Certainly it was in play when the science fiction scene started going (Amazing Stories started publishing in 1926)...but when did it catch on with the general population? And when did it become "mechanical man," or "metal man?"
You're driving a car at 50 miles per hour. As you pass a man standing on the side of the road, he throws a baseball in the same direction you're traveling at 100 miles per hour.
To you, it looks like the ball is going 50 miles per hour. To the man, it looks like it's going 100. Pretty simple, right?
So, here's the trick. You pass by the man going at 75% of the speed of light, right when he flashes a light. To him, it obviously looks like that pulse is going away from him at the speed of light. How fast does that pulse look like it's going to you?
25% the speed of light? Nope.
That's the obvious answer, but it's wrong. That same pulse looks to you like it's going away from you at exactly the speed of light.
There you go. THAT is where all that wierdness about time slowing down comes in. The fact is, no matter WHAT frame of reference you're in, the speed of light is constant. It sounds ugly until you decide to agree that time isn't constant, and suddenly the math starts to work out. It's creepy, honestly. Once you figure that out, start asking yourself how gravity works and prepare to have your mind boggled.
Freaky, huh?
As far as nanotech . . . still magic, even in this day and age. I'd go with the deliberately confusing explanation that makes the eyes of the character being spoken to glaze over. That's always fun to write.
-Falken224 (posing as Corin)
Primitive people (human, alien, or whatever) might not have as many facts as the advanced...but there's no reason for the writer to assume they're stupid because they're primitive...
Millenium man: They are little tiny, microscopic (Great redundancy there) robots that flow through your blood to help fix your body.
40's man: Say what?
MM: Little robots that heal you.
FM: What the devil is a robot?
MM: They're machines.
FM: Like a tractor?
MM: Sort of...
FM: Who's drivin it?
MM: It drives itself.
FM: Boy are you one crazy son of a gun. Are you kidding me? 'Cause this ain't funny.
MM: No, I'm serious.
FM: So you're tellin me that there's a bunch of miniature tractors in my body, fixin stuff with no one tellin them what to do? How do you know they won't kill me? Why didn't you just shoot me instead?
MM: They are programmed to know what to fix and what to leave alone. You're fine.
FM: Well, how much gas they got?
MM: They don't have any gas.
FM: No gas? How do they drive?
MM: They use your body's electric current to power themselves.
FM: . . . Well that's a nice story. Why don't you write it down. I hear magazines will buy stuff like that.
At this point, the SM is truly convinced that MM is crazy.
[This message has been edited by Dead_Poet (edited August 21, 2006).]
In your scenario:
Scientist: It fision
Averege Joe: What?
S: Splitting an atom.
A: How do you get a hammer that small?
S: you don't, you shoot subatomic pariticles at it.
A: Guns aren't that small.
S: No you use an accellerator - like a cathode ray tube in your tv.
A: Yeah right, you use a tv tube to shoot an atom and make more energy than burning a truck full of coal. Crazy.
Therefore, by the arguement above 40's people didn't understand nuclear energy.
There'd be plenty who'd be ignorant enough back then to follow this line of thought, but then there are plenty today who would think you were pulling their leg.
PS Robots were first suggested in the 30s.
[This message has been edited by Aust Alien (edited August 21, 2006).]
You have to remember, the average Joe and Jane did not go to college in the 40's. The US was still in it's industrialization period where only the upper-middle class and up really went to college. There was no such thing as student loans back then and well paying jobs didn't require a 4-year degree, so the level of education isn't near what it is now with 4-year degrees being common, masters degrees becoming common, and the information superhighway well entrenched in society.
So unless the MC is dealing with someone with a good education and/or a well read SciFi background the chances of someone in the 40's truly understanding on any level what nanotech is is slim to none. Not to mention you are dealing with the beginnings of the Cold War/Red Scare era. So most westerners would wonder "where" the technology came from, too.
Jammrock
[This message has been edited by Jammrock (edited August 21, 2006).]
(I've ruled out SF reading for my characters for the moment---fifteen thousand words in, and maybe anothe fifteen thousand before I get to the point where the nanotechnology is actually explained.)
*****
On robots..."R. U. R." introduced robots as a word...but our more enlightened time would call his robots androids. But when did it transfer to "mechanical men"? Certainly it had by the time Asimov first wrote his robot stories (1941)...and when did it emerge from the SF ghetto into mainstream consciousness? Was it part of That Buck Rogers Stuff, when the comics pages started publishing SF strips?
quote:
We still don't know why this technology is being explained.
It's not germane to the discussion. I'm interested in the technical aspects of writing it---how would one explain nanotechnology and how it works (or is supposed to work), to someone in the past. The actual era doesn't matter---Roman Empire, the Dark Ages, Shogunate Japan, post-WWII America---it could be any of them.
The circumstances could be just about anything---say, a time traveler's nanotech thingies got away from him by accident while visiting Davidic Jerusalem, or somebody stumbled on inventing it and is trying to take over the world with it, or the nanos themselves came from a distant planet as spatial spores. Anything'll do. (My plan-of-writing is not any of those.)
I've found the discussion fascinating, and I have no doubt much of it will influence how I write the scene when I get to it. But it's also just a technical puzzle, a postulation, an assumption. It need not attach itself to any particular storyline.
If it is something used for bad, or is bad, One might write it simply by saying it is a new disease and discribe the effects
One might talk in the line of insects smaller than fine dust. Again one would talk about the effects.
One might discuss how it is transmitted (air, physical contact, swallowed, through wounds, through the skin.
one might also mention what people might do to protect themselves. washing regularly, avoiding certain soils, etc. fully cooking foods, etc. cleaning hands with wine, etc.
Before the 1940s, stay away from technical discussions, after 1940s, coach it based on the appearent knowledge of the person you are talking to. Someone in the middle of nowhere, might be talked to like a roman citizen or medieval priest. Someone from the city might be talked to in more technical terms.
The fundamental point of an explanation is to change another person's conception of something in such a way as to affect behavior. If we don't know what behavior is to be changed, and how, then we cannot know what explanation is to be used.
I wouldn't bother explaining any future technology at all if I didn't have a definite idea of what I wanted to accomplish with that explanation. Particularly if I were a time traveler, that would just be irresponsible.
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I wouldn't bother explaining any future technology at all if I didn't have a definite idea of what I wanted to accomplish with that explanation. Particularly if I were a time traveler, that would just be irresponsible.
An explanation might be advanced to the characters after use---say, after emergency medical treatment involving imported nanotechnology---which introduces another set of problems. ("Why did you do this terrible thing to me?" "But we saved your life!")
I suppose the pre-now invention of nanotechnology could also be a "sport," emerging seemingly out of nowhere, involving a character who spotted something in science that would allow nanos to be built / grown / whatever. Sometimes an invention is just spotting something that everybody else has overlooked. (Not that I think it's likely---most things grow out of something else, plus demonstrable need, and nanotechnology has its own history, too---it's just a possibility.)
As for the Star Trek Prime directive idea, I think that the history of our own world has demonstrated that you have to be very careful about introducing advanced technology to people who are likely to weaponize that technology and use it to destroy their neighbors or themselves. Since the "aliens" in the Trekiverse are basically humans with a bit of latex somewhere on their heads, it's actually a very sensible rule. Restricting even obviously benevolent interaction with non-starfaring species is unexpectedly wise. I suppose that somewhere along the way somebody realized that it doesn't help matters to give someone positive reasons to mistake you for gods.
Anyway, if your motive is to help accelerate the development of nanotechnology, then you'd want to establish prerequisite technologies first. So there would be no point in explaining nanotechnology directly, first you'd start out with an advanced explication of microbiology, protein synthesis and interactomes and all that stuff.
"Nanotech is using proteins - the building blocks of all cell life - or something similar, to build small rudimentary machines. These are assembled to create large, purpose-built units. Thousands of units work together toward a specific goal. They are powered much the same way that the antibodies that fight disease in your blood are power: the body's own chemistry. They are controlled by radio waves or even by your own nervous system."
Something like that - I got no idea who nanobots are envisioned to be controlled.
My point is: from a viewpoint of chemistry - something very familiar to the 40s population, even if not in detail - there might be a suitable explanation. People would not need college degrees to follow the discussion.
The sad thing is, when I read this, my first thought was deoxyribonucleic acid. Duh. ;-)
Speaking of "I, Robot", was anyone else as disappointed in that movie as I was? Susan Calvin was an absolute joke compared to Asimov's vision of her in his books. I demand justice!
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The sad thing is, when I read this, my first thought was deoxyribonucleic acid.
I was told National Dislexic Association
I'm not sure of the precise dates, but I think Binder's story came out two or three years before Asimov wrote his first robot story. ("Robbie," also known as "Strange Playfellow.") Certainly robots---as we know them---figured in other stories before then. ("Helen O'Loy," Lester Del Rey, for example.)
(On the movie---it looked like nothing to do with any of Asimov's stories one way or the other: I stayed clear of it. Y'know, Harlan Ellison wrote a screenplay version of "I, Robot" that was never produced---it wasn't without its problems, but would've been a better movie than what was actually made. You go to the movies expecting it to be like the book, though, and you're just setting yourself up for disappointment.)
The situation can be anything. I threw a few ridiculous ones out. I'm sure the great majority of you can come up with some more of your own---possibly even better than what I actually intend to use when I get there. It's still some distance away, maybe half the novel (I'm maybe one-fifth through) and much of what comes in between it is still working itself out in my mind.
Try some out on your own. It wouldn't be any worse than, say, a Flash Challenge.
The only cases where I would explain anything about nanotechnology to someone living in the past would be if that person was already an expert in the field who needed a little guidance to either achieve or avoid a technology breakthrough directly related to my mission in the past. In which case I would be explaining it to someone with knowledge far greater than what is ever going to be common coin. I would use the exact same terminology that said expert would expect from a peer working on the cutting edge of the field.
That said, your question implies that you would be talking to people who are not experts in nanotechnology. Since my answer isn't applicable to explaining things to a non-expert, I need to know what kind of situation you're talking about before I could give you a useful answer.
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That said, your question implies that you would be talking to people who are not experts in nanotechnology. Since my answer isn't applicable to explaining things to a non-expert, I need to know what kind of situation you're talking about before I could give you a useful answer.
Nano-knowing and nano-ignorant are great names, by the way.
I'm not enamored of flinging the words "nanotechnology," or "nanotech," or "nano," around, either. I was just reading a story in Apex Digest, where the writer mentions "nanotech sails," meaning (I presume) sails intended to move a spaceship through the force of emitted photons. (A grotesque explanation in itself.)
First off, I've always thought of this as a "solar sail" or "light sail." And second, I don't know that the character in question would necessarily refer to it as anything but a "sail." (As she does in several places in the story.)
It's like referring to "electric refrigerator" or "gasoline car." There are other kinds, but we would go with what was most familiar and, in most circumstances, not introduce a modifying adjective.
(What pointed this out for me, years ago, was when I used "spaceport," a familiar word to most of us---but, chances are, those who lived around one would call it the "port," without a modifying portion. Realizing this clarified writing about the future for me...created a few ideas, too.)
*****
"....It appears to have been an isolated attack. I can detect nothing within range. If the Master were awake---"
"But he'll be all right?"
"Oh, he should. The Little Robots in him should fight off the attack."
"Little Robots?" The term was unfamiliar to her.
"You are familiar with the concept of robots, aren't you?"
"Mechanical men," she said. "But what did you mean?"
"These are tiny robots, the size of microorganisms. Millions of them, in his bloodstream, throughout his body." He blinked. "You have them too."