Monday 3 June 2013

News: "Hay Festival: 'Science fiction goes hand in hand with real research', scientist admits"

Click here to teleport instantaneously (depending on your Internet connection) to these intergalactical news!

Always those discussions about scientific/social/creative/organised blablabla...
Finally someone puts a sign of conciliation and admits that one thing complements the other! Dr Zita Martins, an astrobiologist, spoke to the audience at the Telegraph Hay Festival (don't ask me what kind of super important festival it is) and explained that the real scientists can find inspiration sometimes in science-fiction films or novels.
It's funny to hear that, because if you think about it, and that's what I liked about this statement, she's actually saying that the imagination of the writers give the ideas for their work to the scientists. Or in other words, creativity and science work hand in hand. Isn't that BEAUTIFUL?
But if we have a closer look, we can see that the expectations that people had before from the future and the actual reality that we live now differ from each other. For example, if you think about futuristic movies (even if these futurustic films are already prehistoric ones, ironically), which were the inventions that dominated the vision of the future?
Basically flying cars, very very (almost particularly) modernized spaceships, teleports, time machines... But nobody (at least I haven't seen nor read anything alike) had the simple idea of mobile phones or the Internet, which are probably the two most successful achivements of science and technology in the last decades. Why?
Well, I suppose that we tend to imagine astonishing things to exist in the future because this is the way we'd like to experience it. Who doesn't want to travel in a flying car or go on an alien safari trip on Mars? Probably it sounds more exciting to our ancestors than sitting the whole day in front of a screen checking out the new photos of our slightly "prositutional" facebook friend, a girl we've never met in real life, and giving her our like when we are actually criticizing her or cursing her to death (or simply staring for a moment in the case of us boys).
But that's the way how things went. Definitely, thanks to the Internet we have quick access to a lot of information and it has speeded up modernisation dramatically (I still can't think of my current school life if I couldn't look up information on the Internet), but it also created a new way of distraction to us. We spend hours and hours with pictures of sweet cats, watching videos of sweet cats, reading blogs of sweet cats... Cats are so sweet, aren't they?

Even grumpy cats are so sweet!


*this abrupt ending was planned as a form of satire to express the dangerous distraction the Internet offers... it's not that I got distracted with sweet cats by myself or something

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