This is a post on historical curries. Honestly.

::jedi hand wave::

Or, you know, it’s a post on why we’re living in the future, and how awesome space is. Curry can come later. This is inspired by a post on Odd Shots and a conversation with my housemates about how significant the water on the moon thing is.

1. Virgin Galactic – Commercial space flight in the next few years. They’re building an actual fricking spaceport in New Mexico. I’ve mentioned this before, but I still love it because of the sheet number of novels and films (e.g. Destination Moon) that have been predicting it for years. I think a lot of people were surprised that America won the space race with a government programme; they figured that was what the communists would do, so clearly in America it would be a matter of free trade capitalism.

2. There’s Water on the Moon – there’s a reason this is all over the news right now. As I broke it down for the housemate: Water is heavy. Heavy rockets are hard to launch, due to Earth’s gravity well. The Moon has a much smaller gravity well, so it’s easier to launch from there. If we can get as much heavy stuff to the moon as possible before we start a mission, setting off becomes that bit easier (all you’ve got to do is get the astronauts to the moon). Physics. My favourite example of the Space Station -> Moon -> Mars ( -> Venus) process is Sci Fi is, hands down, The Outward Urge by John Wyndham, cowritten with John Wyndham.

3. Getting the rest of the heavy stuff into space… by Elevator! – Still theoretical right now, but NASA has been awarding prizes for the best models and the latest ideas is to use vibrations to make it move. Arthur C Clarke mentioned it in his 1979 novel The Fountains of Paradise, and expanded on it in a scientific paper in 1981, but the idea dates all the way back to Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in 1895.

4. Wireless Electricity – it’s been touted since Tesla, but it’s becoming a reality now. In fact, it was originally considered the only way to get electricty around the world, since the idea of making and burying hundreds of thousands of miles of cable was inconceivable. Somehow we achieved that, but it’s taken until now to prove Tesla was right all along. The best application mentioned in the article is electric cars; you don’t have to plug them in and have cables trailing acorss the stret, you just park them in a garage or over a wireless point, and let them charge themselves. You could set it up in every car park and residentail street.

5. Battle robots and Mech Suits – even as an anime lover, I’m less enthused about these, but I’m still impressed they’ve been achieved. And the robot’s pretty cute. In terms of space travel, both are highly significant. Exploration of dangerous terrain, enhanced abilities and human agility.

There’s a handful of good articles on the BBC website about Sci Fi and Sci Fact: Sci Fi Science, Arthur C Clarke’s predictions, and four authors on how Sci Fi moves with the times.

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I’m actually at home this weekend, both days (compared with the last, um, four? I think I was at home the weekend before that, but I was away the three preceding). I’m going to another burlesque event tonight, so I might post on that tomorrow, since it’s the fifth in about a month. And now I’ve figured out how to set things to post in the future (the fuuuuutuuure) I’m going to set up the rest of the Foody Fridays. Just as soon as I can actually find the curry recipe in Hannah Glasse, because it’s proving elusive.