Science Fiction, or Fact?

I have been on a reading spree in the last few weeks. Many of you might attest it to the fact that I am without a computer, and for the most part, that is a correct assumption. I have recently finished reading Carl Sagan's Contact, the book that was transformed to the 1997 summer blockbuster movie. Since I saw the movie a number of years ago, I had longed to read the book, on the general premise that books are often more elaborate and detailed than movies are. I was hoping that the book would provide me with better insight to the physics behind the movie. I was particularly interested in how humans could receive a message from space, discover audio and video characteristics to the message, then interpolate digital data from interlaced frames from within the message, and then find a decryption primer that was hidden in a deeper layer of data. It seems that how Sagan describes the process in his book is quite a bit different from the methods described in the movie.

I shouldn't have to mention that the book is considerably different from the movie. The plots are quite different, even though the main themes remain the same. There are additional characters in the book that do not exist in the movie. Conversely, there had been legitimate scientific discoveries and current events that were interlaced with the movie to make it a little more authentic. Sagan of course, could have had no idea of the historical events of the late 1990's that seemingly complimented the events in his book that was first published in 1985.

The producer of the motion picture had done well in trying to combine current events and recent scientific discoveries to provide an authentic nature to the film. If you read Sagan's book, it would come across a little more like science fiction, reliant at times on technology that has not been invented yet, and on other times, on technology that has been invented, but has become obsolete or passé. Unfortunately, this is the common and disappointing nature of science fiction; is that technological advancement can sometimes surpass the ideas of the writer, and the integrity of the story can weaken. It often lessens the shelf life of such a book.

For example, in the book Contact, the staff of the SETI project Argus used a CRAY mainframe supercomputer to decrypt the message from space. When the book was written in 1985, a CRAY mainframe was one of the most advanced computers in the world. By today's standards, a CRAY isn't a terribly powerful computer, as UC Berkley is using millions of household computers to analyze space signals for the existence of intelligent life. The computing power of the SETI@home project is likely on the factor of millions of times more powerful than the CRAY computer depicted in Sagan's novel. I am not criticizing Carl Sagan; he was one of the most brilliant scientific minds of the Twentieth Century. How could he possibly know that there would become a thing as powerful as the internet, which single-handedly revolutionized the way we communicate and share information?

Speaking of the internet, and technologies of telecommunication, it seems that telephone companies are in fear of going bankrupt because programmers have found ways to use high-bandwidth modems to place long-distance phone calls for free. Long-distance phone calls used to be the bread and butter for telecommunications companies, but that no longer is the case. The telecommunications companies have had to migrate to cellular phone technology to provide them with the profits they once enjoyed. I am afraid, with the rapid development and implementation of Wi-Fi (wireless networking) that those days may be numbered as well. I suspect that within a generation, the word "long-distance" will no longer apply. Phone calls will be as cheap to make as it is to send an e-mail, and it would not matter if you send your phone call next door, or to Beijing.

It is the Darwinism of business and technology. Over the course of history, there are countless professions that have been made obsolete due to the advancement of technology. Even a century ago, there were "icemen" who delivered blocks of ice to the neighborhood for household cold storage. These people went out of business by the time the refrigerator hit the mass market. This might be the first time in history, that an industry so large and powerful, has the potential of crumbling under its' own weight.

The world is getting smaller day by day. It just seems that the telephone companies will have to change their marketing strategies if they expect to survive the next twenty years. I expect there will be a great deal of bankruptcies and corporate mergers in the decades to come as these telecommunications giants attempt to keep their books in the black amidst a technology that advances so quickly, it becomes obsolete within a year.

I unfortunately, have a difficult time swallowing the cellular phone pill. I just can't fathom that paying by the minute for your airtime on the phone is in any way economical. It's cheaper to place a phone call at a pay phone. When I had a cellular phone, I received phone bills that surpassed my monthly income. I would hope that sometime soon, that the digital revolution would make cellular technology not just affordable to everyone, but as economical as people's internet connection.

Convergence is inevitable.