new sci fi technologies – How can I "invent" them?

[Writer’s_Magic]

If I ask you about sci-fi technology, what would you answer? Hoverboards? Holograms? Light saber? Jet packs? Don’t worry! These aren’t bad. These are just clichés.

Well, you can use them. Or you can invent new sci-fi technology ideas. But how? What are your best tips?

 

[Penpilot]

Read about science and what people and companies are working on right now and extrapolate. Look at technology now and extrapolate improvements or what the next stage for things are with that tech. Look at your life and think of how it could be improved by a bit of technology that solves a basic problem or need.

Basically, look at the world and use your imagination.

 

[CupofJoe]

Don't use any numbers!
In an 80s Cyberpunk novel, the hacker has a neural upgrade to 40Mb of storage!
I have a coffee mug with 8Gb of storage.
But the neural implant still a good idea.
Anything you invent has to work in the setting you are writing, so if it is Dieselpunk I'd expect Big V8 Engines and lots glowing Valves in the electronics. For a post-apocalypse then a more make-do-and mend aesthetic with things looking like they've been built from parts of different things.

 

[Writer’s_Magic]

CupofJoe I put a thread in this forum, where I told you about an idea. The idea is set in a futuristic world. But not a steampunk one. The classic sci-fi one. I don’t know if I choose dystopian or not. And C'mon! The classic one is more realistic than a steampunk world. Especially, today where people know about environment problems; and they must fight them before it’s too late. I mean, there is a thing kinda á la hyperloop realistic. Even holograms are possible today. Maybe not like in a sci-fi movie; but they work with steam. Here is a documentary about it:

 

[CupofJoe]

If this is your source/inspiration, work on what you have here and think "What comes next?", "What would look cool here?".
Some of the stuff in the video looks like a slightly cleaner version of the 1982 Blade Runner world tech. I like that dirty version of possibility. To me it feels believable. You world has to feel believable too. Futurologists are almost certainly wrong. It's just that we don't know exactly what they are wrong about. The NBT [Next Big Thing] is usually not experts expect it to be. We don't use stuff the way that the people that invented it thought we would/should.

 

[Writer’s_Magic]

CupofJoe That’s true! It looks like Blade runner or Back to the future 2. But hey. I believe it’s because many people see the future like this. However, I must be creative. I mean, almost everyone thinks the future will be like this—Because of science fiction movies! But it’s cheesy and boring to read about holograms and hoverboards or cars. So, how do I make them unique?

 

[CupofJoe]

CupofJoe So, how do I make them unique?

By making them unique. You have to come up with what you want. There is no magic trick to it. The chances are, that if you can think of it so can someone else, so please be wary of making things "different" for the sake of difference alone.
If you want to have something like a gun... then it has to act like a gun. Making it out of marshmallow just to be different, means that it probably, almost certainly, won't work as a gun very well. Unless you want people covered in molten sugar. Which you might.

 

[Penpilot]

In an 80s Cyberpunk novel, the hacker has a neural upgrade to 40Mb of storage!

Does anyone remember this movie?

 

[CupofJoe]

Does anyone remember this movie?

How I miss dear Johnny M....

 

[Simulacrum]

If this is your source/inspiration, work on what you have here and think "What comes next?", "What would look cool here?".
Some of the stuff in the video looks like a slightly cleaner version of the 1982 Blade Runner world tech. I like that dirty version of possibility. To me it feels believable. You world has to feel believable too. Futurologists are almost certainly wrong. It's just that we don't know exactly what they are wrong about. The NBT [Next Big Thing] is usually not experts expect it to be. We don't use stuff the way that the people that invented it thought we would/should.

This.

The Nostromo in Alien is a straight up piece of shit. It’s an old, creaking ship with mechanical problems. Its terminals are grubby and worn from use. There are dirty ashtrays everywhere. Every part of the ship shows significant wear and tear.

When you see that ship, you think “This thing has been lived in.” You can tell from the opening shots, which have no dialog, that this is a ship that has seen many voyages and has traveled many light years.

Same deal with Bladerunner, which is intentionally filthy and upsetting. The sun is blotted out by a permanent layer of smog. All the world’s wildlife is dead. Urban sprawl covers everything. Even K’s magnificent car in 2049 shows signs of wear.

As for OP’s question, the truthful answer is you’re not going to “invent” anything unless you’re neck deep in the latest research and tech, living and breathing that stuff, with a deep understanding and an ability to extrapolate. But think about this: How many science fiction stories really invent something new? Very few of them do, and you’re putting enormous pressure on yourself to come up with something.

What really matters is what you do with ideas. You can use established ideas without resorting to tropes. For example, Bussard ramjets are a proposed idea for propulsion in space travel. Do you need to invent an entirely new form of propulsion for readers to enjoy your story, or is it better to put that effort into character development, world-building and so on?

Go easy on yourself. You don’t need to be a prophet to write a good science fiction story.

 

[Simulacrum]

Don't use any numbers!
In an 80s Cyberpunk novel, the hacker has a neural upgrade to 40Mb of storage!
I have a coffee mug with 8Gb of storage.
But the neural implant still a good idea.
Anything you invent has to work in the setting you are writing, so if it is Dieselpunk I'd expect Big V8 Engines and lots glowing Valves in the electronics. For a post-apocalypse then a more make-do-and mend aesthetic with things looking like they've been built from parts of different things.

In Larry Niven’s Ringworld humanity is an interstellar civilization and has conquered mortality, but they still use tapes to store data. That pulled me completely out of the narrative for a moment.

Another good example is 1998’s Event Horizon, which did a fantastic job with visuals and making both ships look realistic and lived-in. But when one character gets to the Event Horizon’s bridge and announces she’s trying to locate the ship’s log, she finds stacked drive bays — the kind you’d find on any computer in those days — and the log is on a compact disc.

It’s the future, an experimental ship can travel FTL...but they store data in CDs!

I think it would be safe to dispense with physical storage media entirely, which is what we’re doing nowadays anyway. And of course avoid numbers

 

[Demesnedenoir]

My new favorite is watching any sci-fi more than a few years out that speaks of mass starvation due to food shortage. Or, people with the tech to reach alien planets, who still have our expected lifespans. Tech will eliminate starvation in free countries in the near future... leaving only politically inflicted famine. It might not taste great at first, but we’ll get there. Post scarcity Earth is coming, it’s just a matter of whether AI wipes us out before it happens, heh heh.

 

[Miles Lacey]

If you really want to be different with your sci-fi do what I do. Look to the past and see what ideas have been mothballed because of cost or ideas that were not followed through for one reason or another.

For example in July 1969 man landed on the Moon. People began to think of moon colonies and spaceships to the moon. Yet less than five years later NASA pulled the plug on manned missions to the Moon and the public seemed to lose interest in the idea. When the Space Shuttle was first launched in April 1981 it was greeted with great fanfare but the last flight took place in July 2011.

In May 2017 New Zealand launched its first rocket into space. It is planned for the first commercial space flight to be launched from New Zealand in the second quarter of 2018 (weather and atmospheric conditions permitting). But what if New Zealand not only began successful commercial flights into space but came up with the radical idea of having manned flights to the moon and back? What if they established a moon base that initially offers visitors a chance to visit for a couple of Earth nights but gradually goes from little more than an over-glorified hut into a colony made up of a few hundred people, mostly fee paying guests and scientists?

New Zealand's space programme is a privately run operation that has its launch site on the Mahia Peninsula on the east coast of the North Island. Because it has contracts with NASA for launching micro-satellites into space the New Zealand space programme can call upon the resources of NASA. Hence the idea of Kiwis on the moon is not as crazy as it sounds.

Think of all the challenges that would be posed by a privately run moon base that is supported by the New Zealand government. What could go wrong? What challenges would be faced by people who live and work on the moon and the vessels that take people to and from the moon? What sort of technology would they use? Would they be able to become self-sufficient or would they have to rely upon supplies from Earth? How would they communicate? Deal with crimes? Cope with children (assuming they're allowed to travel to the moon)? How would other countries react to the colony?

Just a madcap idea worth considering.

 

[Simulacrum]

My new favorite is watching any sci-fi more than a few years out that speaks of mass starvation due to food shortage. Or, people with the tech to reach alien planets, who still have our expected lifespans. Tech will eliminate starvation in free countries in the near future... leaving only politically inflicted famine. It might not taste great at first, but we’ll get there. Post scarcity Earth is coming, it’s just a matter of whether AI wipes us out before it happens, heh heh.

Thankfully we don’t have to worry about AI wiping us out because AI doesn’t exist. Everything we call “AI” these days is algorithmic, not actual AI, and no one has a path forward on conscious AI, called “strong AI” in the industry, because we don’t understand consciousness. Hell, we can’t even agree on a definition for consciousness.

In addition to that, current AI research gets us no closer to strong AI, it simply improves on algorithmic “AI.” All the stuff about machine learning and neural networks is algorithmic. Or to put it in different terms, we can create software that becomes very good at one thing, like facial recognition, but that gets us no closer to conscious machines that can act completely independent of human operators.

Unfortunately because of fearmongers like Elon Musk, a lot of people think SkyNet is going to wipe us all out with nukes and terminators.