December: What fictional invention do I wish existed?

[jack]

Good question. There's lots of things I might talk about, and it's hard to pick a particular one. Like most geeks, I would be happy if space travel existed as much as science fiction hoped. But even we do start building towards missions to mars and asteroid mining, it probably won't be a revolutionary change. I hate the energy wasted (by me and society as a whole) on travelling to places we need to be, I'd be interested to see how society would change if you could open a zero-hour almost-free transport link from the middle of one area to another, or even from each house.

Many fictional inventions have come a long way to existing. I'm really used to always having a map and encyclopaedia in my pocket, and widely-used asynchronous communication that lets me build friendships with people who are similar to me as well as people who live in geographical proximity to me. And being able to deal with many bills, forms, etc, with the press of some buttons, without having to go places. I don't think I was cut out for the 20th century :)

But one example that especially springs to mind is Bujold's uterine replicator, that can safely gestate a baby without a human womb, for what it symbolises about society. It's the sort of thing that sometimes rubs some hard science fiction fans the wrong way, because it's not physics or mechanical engineering, and the focus is on the societal implications, not how the technology could be built. But I think the same is often true of hard sci-fi, of building something which seems plausible, but not always from actual blue-prints, and seeing where you go with it.

On the one hand the uterine replicator is a symbol of how society could change, if gestating babies wasn't randomly assigned to half of the population. And all sorts of secondary potential changes: like Athos, the planet of only men[1]; or the possibility of centralising child-rearing completely, and people can be parents only if they'd like to be; or of reducing the need to unwanted pregnancies.

On the other hand, a lot of the inequality in society is cultural, not biological, in the assumptions that mothers should be primary child-rearers more than fathers, even apart from gestation and breast-feeding. So maybe it wouldn't make that much of a difference :(

Footnotes

[1] I thought Athos was interesting example of Bujold's worldbuilding, in that she postulated Athos as originally populated by monastics, but that after a couple of generations there was a mix of monastic celibate farmers, and essentially gay cosmopolitan culture, but because she didn't NEED to, she never specified if the proportions were 90%/10% or 10%/90% and the reader could assume either way.

This post brought to you in the past from the future by the power of cheating! :)

Comments

[syderia]

I'm right with you on wishing the uterine replicator were finally invented. I do think it would change things (maybe slowly), but just being able to stop tying parental leave to biology would have a great effect of women's careers. The change would probably be slow (of only because people would probably be slow to adopt the replicator), but I do think it would happen.

[rmc28]

The possibility of having a(nother) child without pain, nausea and misery, and without more abdominal surgery: I wish very much there were uterine replicators.

Though I've always wondered how breastfeeding gets triggered in the absence of the existing massive hormone signals that occur in early pregnancy and following the removal of the placenta. Presumably if we have the tech to safely reproduce externally, we have the tech to replicate those hormonal signals.

[lavendersparkle]

I think I've heard of women managing to breastfeed without giving birth by taking hormones and expressing to increase their supply.

[adrian_turtle]

It's the sort of thing that sometimes rubs some hard science fiction fans the wrong way, because it's not physics or mechanical engineering, and the focus is on the societal implications, not how the technology could be built. But I think the same is often true of hard sci-fi, of building something which seems plausible, but not always from actual blue-prints, and seeing where you go with it.

It seems like there are very, very, few science fiction stories that are truly about how the new technology could be built. It's almost always about the implications of having it. We can build large generation ships we expect to reach a planet we can terraform? What does that mean for the people on the ship? For their descendants on the planet? We can travel faster than light. What does that mean for the economy? We can extend our lifespans another hundred years. What does that mean for the military-industrial complex?

Fiction about doing science is a wonderful thing, but I'm not sure it really counts as sf.

[gerald_duck]

Here's a question I've thought of because of this posting, but maybe it's a topic for another day, if you still have some spare?

In one of his short stories, Neil Gaiman postulated that a cure for cancer was created that, as a side effect meant that the day after you took a dose you woke up with your physiological sex flipped. Initially, in this story, that was regarded as an acceptable side effect, especially as you could take another dose to flip back 24 hours later. But then people got hold of it as a recreational drug and started flipping for fun.

Would you take it? If so, why and how often?