The role of inexplicable events in hard science fiction
The modern world has few true mysteries, among them the fate of the Roanoke colonists and the crew of the Mary Celeste but do such happenings have a place in futuristic settings?
In settings with locally instantaneous communication and ubiquitous forensics using techniques we'd recognise but with equipment of far greater sensitivity is there any room left for not being able to explain odd happenings?
I'd like to have a setting which is technologically advanced where the "every day life" can be explained to a degree that almost makes life boring but in which a few paradoxical situations still have the scientists throw up their hands in puzzled disbelief once in a while. How can this be achieved without creating a visible paradox that is damaging to suspension of disbelief?
Even in a world where, in theory, everything can be known, measured and recorded, there are still plenty of gaps in know …
6y ago
First off, may I suggest a post I did many years ago on WorldBuilding: What's the smallest change to physics required to …
6y ago
The disappearances you gave as examples where very likely not unexplainable from the perspective of the disappeared peop …
6y ago
A little before Einstein's time, people were saying there's no sense in going into physics, since almost all the questio …
6y ago
> is there any room left for not being able to explain odd happenings? Yes, the flip side of high tech detection is hig …
6y ago
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5 answers
First off, may I suggest a post I did many years ago on WorldBuilding: What's the smallest change to physics required to allow magic?. I think the first step to answering your question is to unseat the assumption that things could ever be boring.
The next thing that I'd recommend would be looking at the Self. Science and technology cannot completely define the Self, because the preferred languages for scientific or mathematical descriptions break down when dealing with many of the attributes we associate with the Self. You'd have to pioneer new languages to describe things before the Self ever got boring.
Chaos is another interesting topic. Chaos and other "topologically mixing" phenomena. They make it very difficult to figure out what happened after the fact. You pretty much have to observe it as it is happening. If I gave you all the weather information you could process starting January 1, 2000 and ending December 31, 2000, you still could not do a good job of predicting whether it had been raining or shining Dec 1, 1999.
Also, there are limits to processing and storage. Consider that the internet currently stores around 1200 petabytes. That's basically all the harddrives hooked up to the internet. Many internet backbones are now 100G lines, meaning they transmit 100 Gigabits per second. If you run the numbers, any one of those backbones could "fill" our entire storage capacity in 3 years. And there are a lot of backbones. Most of that data has to simply... vanish. We lose it. It's gone forever. It's job is done.
All you need is for some of those lost bits to acquire newfound importance, and you have a mystery already.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/37819. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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The disappearances you gave as examples where very likely not unexplainable from the perspective of the disappeared people. They just seem inexplicable a few hundred years after the fact.
Similarly "unexplainable" things happen today all the time. Think of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. It is highly likely that the airplane wasn't taken up by an alien spacecraft or lost in the Bermuda triangle, but simply lost its way due to some technical malfunction of human error and now lies somewhere in the ocean where the searchers just haven't yet looked. Or all the people who turn up at police stations without identity, and no one knows who they are and where they came from. No, they aren't mermaids or returned from alien abductions, they just suffer from memory loss, psychosis, or outright lie.
So if something happens and someone cannot explain how it could have happend, there is always someone who knows how it happened who doesn't tell – either because he doesn't want to or because he can't (or because no one thinks to ask him or because they don't believe what he says).
It's like this: If you come home one day and find your window broken and a baseball lying on your living room floor, and the kids outside say that they don't know how it happened and they haven't seen anything, then you have an unexplained event.
So if you want a colony to disappear from a planet, simply have them disappear. It's perfectly fine if your narrator doesn't know the truth and believes the legends.
Re: your comment
It seems to me that you have plotted yourself into a corner.
You want a world that is so advanced that all facts are known. That makes any mystery impossible – unless you want to introduce the supernatural.
If you want non-supernatural unresolved mysteries, then you'll have to introduce imperfection. Either your technology is not ubiquitous or it fails or people intentionally subvert it.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/37806. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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Even in a world where, in theory, everything can be known, measured and recorded, there are still plenty of gaps in knowledge. This has very little to do with the actual tech and much more to do with the resources available. Even in an extremely advanced society, certain resources are still limited. The most important of these for generating mystery are time, people and ownership.
Time is probably the easiest. It's mostly related to more personal mysteries rather than (for example) a suddenly missing skyscraper but even there it applies. You could certainly have the tech to solve a missing person or someone's stolen datacore. However, that takes time. A lot of time, usually to the point where it's infeasible to cover 100% of all bases.
You might imagine that total surveillance would help you catch every criminal all the time. In the best case scenario, you might have indestructible small drones, one for each person, that follows them 100% of the time. Congrats, you now have 12 billion (give or take) hours of footage to sift through every hour. Good luck finding the one minute of footage that shows you what happened. Data transfer speeds might make this even more of an issue and form a compelling reason for an investigator to hoof it to different datacenters and have some drama on the way to the mystery.
Even DNA tests, if they were 100% foolproof, take time to complete. Sifting through the rubble remaining when a building vanished takes time. Traveling halfway across the globe to talk to a potential witness who got on the first suborbital takes time. And if the mystery is urgent, there's your drama.
The second is people. Your tech might be able to 100% scan and map out the physical world but people lie. And ferreting out those lies is a compelling source of drama on its own. But that's not all people do. People are envious, greedy and self-centered. Just because you think you have the best tech on the block doesn't mean a different corporation or research entity hasn't developed something better and kept it to themselves. And why wouldn't they keep it to themselves? Hell, this doesn't even have to be tech. It could be someone lying about where they were the night before (at the club, cheating on their wife/husband/robot), someone inventing an elaborate cover story to avoid culpability or so they don't have to face facts (9/11 conspiracy theories come to mind) or any number of reasons.
Third is ownership. Every technological development is impossible, right until someone cracks it and then it's only impossible for those who don't have access to it. As a good example, consider the invention of radar in WWII. The nazis had no idea why the Brits were so good at fighting them at night and the British intelligence service got remarkably creative with inventing reasons as to why their pilots could figure out where enemy bombers were in the pitch dark. Information and technological asymmetry is a great source of drama.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/37833. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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is there any room left for not being able to explain odd happenings?
Yes, the flip side of high tech detection is high tech concealment.
Criminals can know all the tricks used for detection, and have their own high tech to conceal what they've done, or mislead the high tech equipment, or fake the high tech evidence. Or use exactly the same high tech as the detectives to make sure they leave nothing behind.
For example, long ago, I worked a gig in bank financial security. (I was a high tech consultant). Remember when credit cards introduced holograms on cards as a way to prove they were authentic? That was done in response to organized crime simply manufacturing valid credit cards, instead of stealing them. They had the machines, plastic, etc to just create a forgery of your card, and buy some stuff with it that they then sold on the black market, like cigarettes or jewelery. They got the names and numbers from waiters and store clerks; remember those carbon impression receipts they used to keep? They just paid some shady servants for copies of those. (In modern times, an iPhone could snap a photo of the front and back of your card). The holograms couldn't be easily faked!
But about a year after the introduction of holograms; some criminals hijacked and stole an 18-wheeler carrying a credit card printing machine for these hologram cards, along with raw materials to print tens of thousands of them.
You don't have to duplicate the holograms, you can just steal them. They never got caught, and presumably the rest of the operation continued as before (and may still continue).
Technological detection and concealment are in an arms race, every advance in one prompts an advance in the other. Exploit that and you can create mysteries and events nobody can explain.
Of course your other means of accomplishing this are magic, aliens, time travelers and antiquity. DNA and other biological evidence can degrade very quickly; especially trace evidence if somebody was aiming to be careful. And concealment 101 still works, satellites don't see through stone or steel barriers, and people (esp criminals) can communicate in codes that only they know.
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A little before Einstein's time, people were saying there's no sense in going into physics, since almost all the questions have already been answered, we understand everything that can be understood, there's only one or two unanswered issues, and those are going to be solved soon. Then came Einstein and his Relativity Theory, and we discovered there's a lot we don't yet know.
You want a mystery, there's no reason why you shouldn't have it. All the technology and knowledge that shows how we shouldn't have been able to understand what's going on, the chemicals shouldn't be reacting like that, etc. - they only serve to increase the mystery.
Also, remember sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic (A.C Clarke), and conversely sufficiently explained magic is indistinguishable from science. You need something impossible to happen? Make it happen. Then instead of saying "by magic" say "by science we do not yet fully understand". Think how many times Star Trek, for example, encountered a mystery (spaceship-swallowing giant amoeba, groundhog-day inducing "phenomenon", etc.), called it "science", and explained it with lots of technobabble.
End of the day, There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. You can make up anything to mystify the scientist of your story.
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