Science fiction, and to some extent all fiction, paints humans as different from nature. Some adventure stories portray their characters struggling against ravaging wilds, while many times science fiction shows people overcoming or dominating nautre, or, sometimes, falling into a trap of thinking they have control of nature only to find nature is not so easily tamed.

So what is the nature of nature? Go back to some of the earliest recorded thoughts on the subject and we hear that nature abhors a vacuum. Turns out that's only true on a limited scale, the very limited scale of the very thin layer of lighter solids, liquid water, and dense gasses on the outer crust of out planet. And, of course, any other planets that are similar to ours. Between those planets nature does not abhor a vacuum, it mostly is a vacuum. It's true that in the very thin layer around the outer crust of our planet there is the right degree of pressure that any place there is a vacuum something will fill it fairly quickly. Move some water or gasses out of any volume and as soon as they find a way back in they will fill that volume again. Water in particular will find a way from the oceans to the skies and back again, bringing plenty of other elements with it. Species will find the remotest and harshest environments and populate them, changing their very nature if needed to survive in that environment. Outside the atmosphere of our planet, though, nature is mostly vacuum, at least as far as the ordinary matter we are made of is concerned.

If nature is mostly vacuum, and possibly more and more vacuum as the universe expands, then does our very complexity make us different from nature? Across the entire expanse of the universe we exist because tiny, tiny variations in the uniformity of the early universe led to the formation of the first generation of stars, and because changes in the nature of those stars led them to eventually explode and distribute the progenitors of second generation stars throughout the vacuum. For complex life of our sort to exist it requires a lot of heavier stuff formed in the second generation stars to condense into planets, and a long time for a planet to churn that heavy stuff around until life becomes as complex as we are. And while we still have a lot of the simple stuff, hydrogen, by count of atoms in our bodies, we would not even have a basic body shape without the moderately complex atom oxygen, and without even heavier stuff such as iron we would not have the complex bodies or minds that we know. We are the result of tiny variations upon tiny variations creating more and more complex atoms, molecules, and biology. Is it then our very complexity that makes us different than nature?

On the surface it might seem that our billions of cells formed from thousands of different protiens and other molecules makes us unique in nature. The problem with this idea, though, is that the cause of our complexity is natural. The way the early stars formed and exploded, and the way our plantet formed and evolved life is all because of the same nature that seems to prefer uniformity. Gravity is as natural as any other force, and if you give gravity enough time it will do things such as make planets that can evolve life. Without gravity there is no life, and as special as our complexity might appear, it is as natural as anything else in the universe.

Nature, through the force of gravity and light from our sun, has created the thin shell of life on our planet. Aside from the small amount of life we have sent into space, all the life that we know exists in a layer that gravity has given an enormous range of complex elements and conditions. If the earth were the size of an orange all our life would exist in a layer no thicker than the dimples on the skin of the orange. Not the whole rind, just the dimples. Extremeophiles live from the deepest ocean trenches to the coldest mountain peaks. From our human scale the challenging depths and remotest peaks appears to be an enormous range, but compared to the diameter of the planet it is very small. It's taken about 3.8 billion years to develop life even across this thin shell, when life started it occupied only some shallow waters in the primordial oceans.

Billion is a hard number for humans to process. It's not something our brains evolved to understand, but an abstraction that our complex brains developed as a result of having a lot of neurons that are able to connect in just the right way. Most humans in contemporary industrialized countries have a life expectancy between two and three billion seconds. Take a moment and count three Mississippis – one Mississippi – two Mississippi – three Mississippi. Those three seconds are approximately one one-billionth of your life. Then compare four years of your life to the history of life on the plant. It's about the same ratio as three seconds to your entire life. Using the same scale of years to billions of years, for over three out of four of those years all life was single celled organizms. It took over three billion years for single celled life to process enough sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide to put sufficient oxygen into the atmosphere for complex life to develop.

If there is life in other places in the universe, there is a good chance most of it is single celled life. There is no guarantee that single celled life will survive on any planet long enough to evolve into complex life. Oxygen does not like to exist by itself – it grabs onto any other elements it can find and holds on firmly. Maintaining free oxygen in our atmosphere requires enormous energy every day, and required enourmous energy just to develop in the first place. Another one of the tiny variations that allow us to exist is that the way our solar system formed there was enough water on earth and few enough large asteroid impacts that life was able to persist for almost four billion years. Long enough that simple life made enough atmospheric oxygen for complex life to evolve. Given that one of the first things the complex life did was start eating the simple life, if the simple life had any ability to know better it would never have allowed the oxygen to get that rich in the first place.

All the complex life we know, every plant, insect, fish, reptile, bird, and mammal we know evolved in the last six hundred million years. We inherited characteristics from all of them. We still use some genes developed by single celled life, and we use, often in different ways, genes developed in all the species that came before us. Every one of those species changed their environment, sometimes to their detriment. Single celled life put enough oxygen into the air for complex life to develop. As life became more complex it developed different techniques to survive, from hard shells to protect from being eaten while still being able to eat other things, complex muscles and skeletons to give speed and stealth, sophisticated sense organs to detect both danger and food, and eventually large and complex brains capable of abstract ideas such as counting to one billion and higher.

We live in a tiny shell on a single planet, the result of millions of tiny variations in the smoothness of nature that came together in just the right way to form us. That doesn't make us special, it's just a coincidence that the little ripples of space time, echoes of the beginning of the universe, have come together at this place. We are a part of the nature that surrounds us. Knowing what we know, we can make choices that favor our continued survival or lead us to extinction along with almost every species that has ever lived.

Nature is mostly very flat and even. The nature of nature is a uniform consistency, with a few characteristics such as gravity that create tiny specks of difference in the cold universal background. Hope for the future of humanity lies in understanding our place in nature, our own evolution and how it has shaped us, and how we might shape that evolution in the future. It is up to us to make good decisions on how we apply technology, using the knowlegde of our evolution to guide us. We will soon have the ability to have permanent implants in our bodies, implants that will lengthen our lives through improving ou health. Wearables and implants linked to our vision and hearing could dramatically enhance our memory and abilities, giving everyone rapid access to the accumulated knowledge of humankind. To get the best out of advanced technologies we must recognize our place in nature, the nature of the thin shell that we live in and that has shaped us to our very genetic code. We will never achieve transhumanism without understanding first the nearly four billion years history of what it truly means to be human.

We must rethink our environment, designing our buildings using biophlic techniques based on the way we evolved. Too often our built environment is toxic to us, or at least unhealthy, and we have the knowledge and ability to build environments that best suit our evolutionary history. We should not look at our built environment as conflicting with nature, but see the history of our built environment as part of our evolution, something to help us build better environments in the future. The best of biophilic design does not take us backward, it takes our cumulative knowledge forward.

Lastly, we need to come back to the nature of nature. We tend to think of of the the things created by humans as artificial, but we are beings of nature. Humans evolved as a part of nature, due to natural forces. To think of ourselves and the things we create as different or separate from nature ignores all of our evolutionary history. We might exterminate ourselves, similar to the way early single celled life changed the global environment to it's own detriment, but that would still be the natural process of evolution. Only when we think of ourselves as an evolved part of nature instead of separate from it will we be able to make the most of advanced technologies.

Evolution occurs through punctuated eqiulibrium, with long periods of stable species in stable environments, punctuated by periods of rapid adaptation. Our technology is ending a period of rapid adaptation, and we must understand what that means to future developments. The most sophisticated medical devices are not going to provide the same improvement in average human quality of life that ready access to clean running water offers. Biophilic design can give us more comfortable environments that also provide protection against weather and predators, but we still have to make the design decisions to create biophilic spaces. Embracing the coming equilibrium, we can tune it to provide the best qulaity of life for all humans until the next punctuation takes us to an evolutionary stage we cannot even accurately foretell today.

Wars, terrorist attacks, global warming, corrupt politicians, we are surrounded by bad news all the time. Fiction can be an escape from the fears that surround us, an idealized world where the problems of the characters are resolved in a satisfying conclusion. It is important that we have the escape of fiction, as communication technology delivers more and more news of terrible events directly to our phones and tablets and televisions.

It is also important that, where possible, we make a difference in our world.

That's the foundation of Like Lisa, one way of making a difference in the world. Lisa is a fictional character, drawn from many influences, inspired by many people. She is brave, and caring, and passionate about her art and the people she has chosen to represent. When she is tested by the Spacer invasion of Tirimba, Lisa has to find the strength to keep going through a chaotic evacuation, Spacer attacks, and the struggle to survive deep in a mine. Lisa's struggles resonate with people who have faced their own struggles, and survived them. Links to people who have shown the same sort of courage and resilience in real life that Lisa shows in Without Gravity are celebrated in the Like Lisa list.

If we want to live in a future that has all the promise science fiction offers, it will take cooperation. The time of great single inventions has come and gone. For example, there is no need to invent the electric grid, Edison has done that, and Westinghouse and Telsa improved it. There is a need for constant invention and improvement of the grid, though. While individuals had the original ideas, the modern grid is the work of thousands of people who contribute their skills to deliver safe and reliable power. Working together, the electric grid is improved every day by people who create the future using computer technologies and advanced power controls. Technologies that were science fiction just a few decades ago are reality today thanks to all the people who worked together to make them real.

Cooperation itself is not new to the human story. The entire history of modern humans is a story of cooperation, starting with the early humans on the African savannahs cooperating to form the first human communities. New understanding of the human brain is pointing toward neurological mechanisms that reinforce cooperation. Reward mechanisms in the brain provide equal reinforcement for a gift giver and receiver, while the activities such as negotiation can increase stress hormones and supress the immune system. Our brains evolved to reward cooperative behavior simply because cooperation is a powerful survival mechanism.

We live in a tense present. It is easy to succumb to fear, to let the complex challenges of our twenty-first century world intimidate us. In the end though, I believe that people like Lisa Madison will help us all endure, survive, and finally succeed at making this world a place where everyone has opportunities to live and grow in peace.

If you know someone who has fought hard to make a difference in their community please contact me at davidpaxauthor@gmail.com. Fiction can inspire great stories. Real people can create great results.

Just after World War II, science fiction helped define the new era of physics and technology that emerged from the ashes of global civilization. Hard science fiction helped describe the potential of space, with real technolgy such as communication satellites developing out of fictional stories. Other stories may not have been scientifically accurate, but helped people emotionally process the implications of all the new technology surrounding them.

As technology developed more and more science fiction concepts into real products, hard science ficion started to fall aside. Science fantasy still offered the same emotional release, and became more prevalent as the range of underlying fears grew from older themes such as technological obsolesence to include modern themes such as nuclear apocalypse, digital privacy, and climate change.

cience fantasy serves an important way for people to process their deep emotional responses to technology, just as fairy tales did for the unknown in previous generations. Inspiring the future, though, takes both an emotional resonance and technical accuracy. One reason there have been fewer hard science fiction stories in recent years is that the stories based on physics and chemistry have less emotional resonance as the devices that were once imaginary have become real. In the mid 1940's a “two-way wrist radio” in the Dick Tracy comic strip was imaginitive and futuristic, especially since it was introduced to the strip about a year before the first transistor. Today we use technology with millions of transistors every day, including devices with more features than Dick Tracy could have imagined. The emotional resonance of defeating crime is still relevant, even though the technology has become commonplace, so it is easy to see why science fantasy has become more prevalent than hard science fiction.

Modern technology is one of incremental improvement, not the rapid large advances of the last century. Smart device apps come out every day, but they cannot provide the technological change that the transistor created, and the transistor itself did not provide the same level of quality-of-life improvements that indoor plumbing provided just a few decades before. Technological advancement shifting to incremental from revolutionary also drives science fantasy. Expectations of the same sort of rapid large changes seen in the past century are inevitably going to be disappointed, creating an emotional resonance with fantastic stories about possible future worlds.

In a world where exciting large advances in technology have given way to incremental changes, is there still room for science fiction to inspire the future? The answer is yes, though with different sciences than last century.  Physics and chemistry have given us their large changes. There will be many new discoveries and developments in both fields, but they will not change quality-of-life the way that chlorinated and fluoridated water, pumped to every home, already has. For science fiction to inspire the future requires turning to the sciences that are not as well developed today, such as social sciences, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology.

Imagination is a double-edged sword. There are times when our imagination drives us forward, but there are also times when it holds us back. There are many times when we imagine a future that is an extension of our past and present, missing the more complex and subtle reality as the future develops. This is where science fantasy falls short. Many times science fantasy retells olds stories with a technological setting, missing the opportunity to tell a new story. The new story is where science fiction must venture, capturing the hard science as we understand it and considering what it really might mean to future humans. Echoing our fears of the future does nothing to help us live there. Science fiction today has the opportunity to lead human understanding of how we live in a technological world, just as in the last century it lead the understanding of the technologies.

Jules Verne wrote in 1863 of future streets lit by underground wires, and vehicles carrying passengers. In 1863 neither the incandescent lamps nor a functional internal combustion engine existed. He wrote about air independent power for submarines in 1870, thirty years before the USS Holland became the first US commissioned submarine, and more than eighty years before SSN-571 was named Nautilus after the submarine in his story. Verne also made errors in prediction, such as the use of a gun to launch a capsule to the moon. All of the physical technologies Verne worte about have now come to pass, or have been tested and replaced with more workable ideas. The stories we need are not about flying cars or submarines, but about how the human mind will adapt to a future it never evolved to meet, and how we as humans will shape our own evolutionary path.

There are exciting stories to tell, stories that will inspire the future. Just as Verne was not afraid to describe a future that was foreign to his contemporaries, so we must explore where science takes us, wherever they may lead.

Science fiction is ready for change. At one time science fiction included fiction being written by scientists, but in the later part of the twentieth century and early twenty-first century there is little hard science fiction in the mass market. There are many possible reasons for that, but whatever the causes, there is a need for science fiction to address twenty-first century technological challenges.

There has never been a clear line between true science fiction and science fantasy. Many examples exist of the edges of the genre, but there is a broad middle ground. Arthur C. Clarke is well known as a scientist who wrote science fiction, and where his science blends with speculation it remains grounded in what is known to be possible. This is the way that advanced technologies find their way from the pages of fiction to the hard reality of practical application. Other stories such as George Lucas' Star Wars have never been anything but science fantasy, where classical tales are retold in a setting of wondrous worlds filled with advanced gadgets.

Personally, I enjoy many of the stories told by both Clarke and Lucas. The difference is that Clarke has directly impacted development of current technology, and it is this aspect that is generally missing from current science fiction and fantasy. Science fantasy can tell enjoyable stories, but without a solid grounding in the physical world it will not lead to technological development. And at this time there is a need for stories that help guide technological development.

We are surrounded by devices that have been created or inspired by earlier science fiction. Our computers, tablets, phones, communication systems, vehicles, and entertainment are some of the aspects of our lives that were influenced by hard science fiction. It's hard to imagine real items inspired by most current science fiction stories, though. The worlds we so often see are dressed up in a veneer of advanced technology, but lack a scientific basis. There is nothing wrong with stories that are told strictly as entertainment, unless we expect those tales to impact the way our technology develops.

Writing hard science fiction requires some level of scientific knowledge. Without a background in science it's impossible to create a nuanced story that will affect future technology. It's easy to imagine interesting gadgets, but inspiring new innovations requires understanding how those gadgets might be made to work. At least a basic understanding of energy, for example, is needed to create fictional devices that might one day become real. A hand held communication device with a range of hundreds of miles is not impossible with sensitive enough amplifiers, but a hand held laser capable of slicing entirely through a building in a second is. There is simply too much energy needed, and it would generate too much heat to hold in a hand. There are other issues with the way lasers are portrayed in current science fiction as well, such as the combat effectiveness of a weapon that literally draws a line to the source of the beam. A laser as a point defense emplacement is possible, and could be an effective defense against drones, but a hand held laser would not make an effective weapon.

There is always the question of whether it is important that science fiction inspire new technology. Stories have their own value as fiction, regardless of whether they lead to practical devices or not. Hard science fiction stories offer us a way to discuss technology, the problems it might solve and the issues it might create. All fiction offers us the opportunity to explore our worlds and learn new perspectives, hard science fiction simply offers a venue for conversations about how we interact with technology. As technology continues to develop it becomes more and more important for science fiction to address the cultural implications of new technologies.

Science fiction in the middle of the twentieth century had a focus on mathematics, physics, and chemistry, and the potential new creations that could be developed from those sciences. One measure of time is years Before Physics and After Physics, based on the levels of background radiation before and after the detonations of atomic bombs. Unleashing atomic forces completely changed our world, both in physical ways and social ones. At the same time the level of background radiation was being changed by atomic bombs, semiconductors began to enable new technologies and binary mathematics were moving from the abstract into the real. Humans were reaching into space for the first time, stepping onto our moon just a few decades after practical large rockets were first developed. It was natural for science fiction to imagine where these technologies might go, what they might develop into. The focus on tangible, physical, objects and processes was also natural.

In the early twenty-first century we have grown used to the presence of advanced physical objects, and much of what science fiction imagined in the twentieth century has become routine. Some of these imaginings became practical, such as geosynchronous communication satellites. Others, such as the artificial brains, have been obsoleted by developments in the fields of technologies they imagined. Most of the recent stories about Artificial Intelligence have not been as interesting as the actual developments in the field of AI, or the understanding of the human brain learned through the study of neuroscience. There is no need to imagine things that can be easily purchased at the nearest mall, so the current prevalence of science fantasy over hard science fiction is understandable. To excite readers with ideas of new physical items we have to venture into fantasy, leave the world of the possible behind and imagine things that are not bounded by the physical world. That serves the purpose of entertainment, but does not create science fiction that leads to new technological development.

For science fiction to retake a position of leading technological development it needs to turn to the areas of rapid advancement today. Stories about rockets and atomic power and the potential of computers will not lead to new innovations the way they once did. Stories about advances in engineering, materials, neuroscience, biology, and the social sciences will lead to innovation in the real world. To have relevance these stories must be written with some understanding of the underlying science, so must either be written by scientists or engineers who are already experienced in a subject, or writers willing to study the science. There is an interesting potential for collaboration between scientists and writers as well.

My stories explore these new frontiers of human experience. They present situations where humans interact with technology, and how we will integrate it into our lives. Science fiction is ready for change.