Men of Sci-Fi

Today, for us, it is easy to talk about science fiction.

This culture of scientific imagination is taught to us since our childhood, we learn it from films, novels, comics and urban legends that spread news of abductions suffered by human beings by extraterrestrials who, it is said, are studying extensively our biology in secret or, at worst, they are pursuing a global agenda to control human beings, their governments and their destiny.

And I mention here just some of the numerous theories that tell us about extraterrestrials.

But science fiction is also much more.

It is the prediction of how humanity will live in a few centuries, thanks to its new probable technological inventions. It is the explanation of the legendary civilization of Atlantis. It is to imagine that humanity will create artificial human beings, or computers equipped with feelings.

And these are just some of the most recurring themes of science fiction.

In all these cases it is a culture that, in large part, began with the industrial revolution of the 19th century, when science demonstrated its ability to play a fundamental role in the civil and social life of human beings.

In those years of progress and cultural revolution, everything could be explained, designed and imagined with science.

In those years, people witnessed their world change, directly before their eyes, and nothing that was previously certain to them continued to remain obvious.

Everything becomes relative to the laws of scientific research and technological progress.

This great change that civilization brings to ways that people have learned to consider who they are, why they live and what place they have in nature on our planet and within the universe, is the mental place where fantastic thinking takes shape aimed at scientific laws and the culture that contains them.

This is how science fiction culture comes to life in the civil experience of modern people.

However, there were human beings who thought about certain science fiction themes, long before the industrial revolution of the 19th century created the conditions for this new culture to become a natural part of our contemporary civilization.

The fact that these 'precursors' of science fiction thought went so far as to hypothesize technological means that were inconceivable for their time, or the fact that they went so far as to hypothesize the possibility that there could be other inhabited planets in the universe, or even the belief that in a perfect civilization science would have provided rational principles on which to build the social order of a people, makes them, reasonably for us, men of science fiction.

That is, they are people in whom the culture of science fiction was already present, not as a result of the culture in which they had grown up, but because they themselves had managed to develop ideas, questions and hypotheses of a science fiction type, that is, without certain bases but only due to their personal interpretations.

However, in this blog we won't just talk about people who imagined science fiction themes before modern science fiction culture.

The culture of science fiction took shape thanks to the contribution of many people who, aware of their task, added narrative, architectural, political and ethical topics to the vast panorama of modern science fiction.

Furthermore, although they did it for not very acceptable purposes, there were scientific researchers who falsified their research and results to announce discoveries that in reality were only the fruit of their imagination. Their aim was to gain fame and funding.

These false discoveries, however, remained undisputed for so long and caused so much hype that they easily became part of the science fiction culture of our time, due to the fact that they were talked about so much but without being proven by scientific evidence.

The culture of science fiction is, in short, the collection of all those ideas which, despite not having certain demonstrable evidence to support them, or not being demonstrated through the use of measurable data or approved scientific laws, address topics of various types while still using a type of explanation that seems either scientific or technological, to explain nature, the universe, to give theoretical solutions to practical, philosophical or moral problems that have always accompanied the life of human beings on this planet.

The fact that certain technological means or certain philosophical theories on nature have, in recent times, become a real component of our civilization or of our culture of rational

objectivity, does not take away the credit of those brilliant engineers or philosophers for having imagined technology and the culture of a civilization of the future (that is, the one in which we live today), using only their imagination and their ingenuity.

The fact that the fruit of their imagination has, in the present day, become reality does not change the fact that they were, reasonably speaking, men of science fiction.