Some of you wonderful visitors to this site might be wondering why we should care about Enrico Fermi, his paradoxical absence of extraterrestrial life, and the theories listed on this blog. The reasons for this could range from a general snide dismissal of any and all science that doesn’t immediately reward you with VR headsets, microwave pizza bites, and jetpacks, from just having not much a of a clue what any of this means in general, or maybe you’re just nosey and have a general thirst for knowledge. (If it’s that last one, you seem cool and I can relate.)
The reason for this is simple: science and science fiction are two sides of the same coin. You jetpack and VR people will be happy to know that Star Trek has inspired and/or predicted a number of real-world inventions, including but not limited to cellphones, voice activated computers that function as personal assistants, 3-D printers, and tablets computers. Robert H Goddard was inspired by H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds and his daydreaming about a rocket that could take man to mars lead to the refinement of liquid-fueled rockets, which would eventually take men to the moon, and the TASER is an acronym for Tom Swift’s Electric Rifle, which was a favorite childhood story of Jack Cover, the TASER’s inventor (Purpura p 187). I could go on, but by now I think you see my point: science fiction leads to scientific reality.
The reverse is also true. Science fiction writers rely on scientific news, and even at the dawn of the genre, Mary Shelley was inspired by news of scientists who were performing experiments with electricity and the dead limbs of frogs, making them twitch and dance. Science fiction is always best when rooted in reality. Even if the science is a little fantastic, it can be rooted in very real fears, such as Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, which was written in no small part due to Bradbury’s horror and disgust at the book burnings in Nazi Germany (Westfahl, p 1029). Therefore, knowing about the issues and scientific theories of the day is important to add in the spark that will make a book, movie, or game truly shine.
The Fermi Paradox is important to potential science fiction writers because it provides very real reasons as to why we have not made contact with ETCs yet. Some of them even raise pertinent concerns about our environment, such as the Intelligence is Deadly and They’ve All Died Out theories, and any one of them can be used to add spice and depth to an otherwise flat or bland story.
This is, after all, a resource for those who want to write science fiction. Why shouldn’t you add in a little academic science?
Citations
Purpura, Philip P. (1996). Criminal Justice: An Introduction. Boston: Butterworth-Heinemann. p. 187. ISBN 978-0-7506-9630-2. Accessed April 29, 2019
Westfahl, Gary (2005). The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy: Themes,Works, and Wonders. 3. Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 1029. ISBN 9780313329531. Inspired by images of book burning by the Nazis and written at the height of Army-McCarthy ‘Red Scare’ hearings in America, Fahrenheit 451…
“The Science That Made Frankenstein.” Inside Science, 2 July 2013, https://www.insidescience.org/news/science-made-frankenstein.
H.G. Wells and the Scientific Imagination | VQR Online. https://www.vqronline.org/essay/hg-wells-and-scientific-imagination. Accessed 29 Apr. 2019.
“Did a Real-Life Alchemist Inspire ‘Frankenstein’?” Time, http://time.com/3648440/mary-shelley-frankenstein-history/. Accessed 29 Apr. 2019.
“The Science That Made Frankenstein.” Inside Science, 2 July 2013, https://www.insidescience.org/news/science-made-frankenstein.
Fermi's Paradoxical Prompts 