The Time Machine by H. G. Wells

The Time Machine is the big bang origin of the science fiction universe.  I’ve read The Time Machine a couple times before in my life, but I never noticed that it was the origin of all science fiction, but then I haven’t spent the last decade rereading the classics of science fiction before either.  On this third reading, this time via audio book, it seemed quite obvious that The Time Machine is the first science fiction novel.

Now a lot of people are going to argue with my revelation, by bringing up Jules Verne, or Mary Shelley, or many other stories that have fantastic elements in them.  And I completely understand because those stories are a kind of science fiction too.  No, I’ve come to the conclusion there are two types of stories labeled science fiction.  There’s the all-purpose label that imprecisely gets slapped onto almost any kind of far-out tale, and a second type, that’s very rare, that’s illustrated by what H. G. Wells wrote with The Time Machine.

This truer version of science fiction was created by Wells as a method to use science to speculate about the future.  Many writers have written stories that extrapolated the future from present trends, but Wells uses what he learned from the sciences, evolution and cosmology, to write what is essentially the matching bookend to the biblical book of Genesis.

The Time Machine comes after Charles Darwin, but before Albert Einstein and Edwin Hubble, but it’s message is just as thrilling and full of sense of wonder being read in 2009 as it was in 1895.  If you read this story as an adventure using a time machine, then you are seeing the book as generic science fiction.  If you read this book and realize that H. G. Wells is using his current day science to speculate about the evolution of man as a species, and the death of the Earth, then the term science fiction means something different.

H. G. Wells actually present three major speculative ideas for the readers of The Time Machine:

  • Time travel is the obvious idea that everyone talks about, but few people analyzes Wells theory for time travel.
  • Just a few decades after Darwin’s famous book, Wells suggests that mankind could branch into new species, and even species that aren’t as intelligent as home sapiens.
  • Finally, Wells paints a picture of the end of Earth after mankind is long gone.

H. G. Wells produces the essential elements of the science fiction novel out of these efforts.  Most people think inventing the concept of a time machine is the main science fiction element, but it’s not.  If the unnamed hero of this novel had traveled backwards in time, the time machine would only be a gimmick for writing historical fiction with a modern protagonist.  An absolute essential element of science fiction is its speculation about the future.

Many writers have suggested that Frankenstein is the first science fiction novel, but I don’t think that’s true, because the story wasn’t about the future.  It’s a horror novel.  A novel about a monster.  After reading The War of the Worlds immediately after The Time Machine and I’m struck by the immense difference between the two.  The War of the Worlds is an exciting novel, with far out aspects, and even sense of wonder, but it doesn’t feel like The Time Machine, it doesn’t feel like a science fiction novel that The Time Machine was.  It’s not about the future.  It’s about monsters from space.  It’s another horror novel.

Now I understand why I never felt H. P. Lovecraft was a science fiction writer even when he wrote about invaders from space.  I don’t know why movies like The Thing, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, Them and all those other monster stories from the 1950s were considered classic science fiction films, putting them into same the genre as Forbidden Planet and 2001, A Space Odyssey.

When I start to think about this I see the term science fiction as a box for throwing all kinds of odds and ends into that are hard to classify.  Most people throw UFO or X-Files type stories into the science fiction box and I think that’s totally unfair.  Space travel doesn’t equal science fiction.  Aliens arriving in flying saucers is not science fiction, but just monsters from outer space.  ESP and all of that are just more monster stories.  The human race has a long list of monster stories, in fact most of the oldest stories, Gilgamesh, Ulysses, Beowulf, are about monsters.

The Time Machine gives us many clues to what real science fiction is about.  Another essential element is it’s speculation about seeing reality through scientific ideas.  When the Time Traveler visits the year 802,701 and our pinnacle of culture is forgotten, we are like Dorothy realizing we’re no longer in Kansas.  The difference between L. Frank Baum and H. G. Wells, is Wells uses scientific ideas in a different way than they were ever used before.  Instead of using science to understand the present and the past, he uses it to understand the future.

We will never know the future.  Science fiction isn’t about predicting the future.    Wells invented a kind of literature that tries to grok the future through scientific speculation.  By this measure Star Wars is not science fiction, but Star Trek sometimes is.  The War of the Worlds is science fiction, but not as much as The Time Machine.  Both novels are mostly fiction, but Wells weaves in concepts and speculation from the knowledge of 1895 science that he knew.  For instance, I’m trying to track down when astronomers first suggested the idea of the sun turning into a red giant.  It must be before 1895.

The odd thing about science fiction is you can’t learn science from science fiction.  You have to already know science to spot the science in science fiction.  It’s like jazz.  You can love jazz without understanding the concepts of music, but if you want to know what a jazz musician is doing, you have to understand music theory, even at a simple level.  Reading The Time Machine for me, was watching H. G. Wells take the science of 1895 and improvise speculative pictures of the future.

Most modern science fiction never even tries to do this.  Most science fiction is escapist adventure fiction.  Wells is working as a philosopher, using fiction with the lens of science, making science fiction a scientific instrument like the telescope, to show his readers something about the nature of reality and possible futures.  He’s pointing his finger at something, whereas most adventure science fiction doesn’t.  Real science fiction, as Wells invented it, points to a speculative concept.  It has something to say about reality, usually about the future.

But doesn’t all great literature point to something about reality?  The difference between fiction and science fiction is the science.  Most people study literary reality through lenses provided by culture, customs, upbringing, religion, and philosophy.  You have to study science to appreciate real science fiction, and few SF fans study scientific subjects.  Wells invented a kind of literature that many writers tried to copy, but few got it right.

And again, it’s not about predicting the future.  Time machines are extremely doubtful, and so are the Eloi and Morlocks.  Charles Darwin looks at nature and fossils and says, “Hey, there were probably other species of humans before us.”  Wells, takes that idea, and says, “Hey, maybe there will be others species of humans after us.”  That sounds very simple now, but try to do it yourself.  If you can, then you can write the kind of fiction I want to label science fiction.  If you take someone else’s speculative idea and turn it into fiction, for instance Star Wars, something I don’t want to call science fiction, then you aren’t doing what H. G. Wells did.

Yes, yes, I know I’m being very picky and splitting hairs, and probably sounding pretentious like those wine tasters who claim they detect all kinds of rare flavors when you can only taste alcohol.  Let me give you another analogy.  Watch the History Channel.  Can you tell when they are showing real history from made-up crap?  Many scholars would say The History Channel should be called the Science Fiction Channel.   I’m making two points here.  First, anything labeled History should be considered truly educational, and second, they are slamming The History Channel’s crap shows by using the label science fiction.

Can you see why I want to make a precise definition of science fiction?  One that will represent the best creative intentions of H. G. Wells, and not the one-size-fits-all box for weirdo ideas?

JWH – 6/24/9

Manned Space Flight – Is it even on your radar?

During the glory days of NASA, between President Kennedy’s great 1961 proclamation committing the United States to going to the Moon within a decade, and Apollo 11 landing on the Moon in July 1969, there were three great space programs:  Mercury, Gemini and Apollo.  Each manned rocket launch during those years was covered by all three television networks.  ABC, CBS and NBC would stop broadcasting game shows and soap operas and the missions would become  national events.  The 1960s represented a tremendous time for the public’s interest in the space program. 

Next month marks the 40th anniversary of mankind’s first landing on the Moon.  Popular interest in space exploration appears to have dwindled significantly ever since Apollo 11, with even Apollo 18, 19, and 20 being cancelled.  Our lunar exploration years only lasted from July 1969, through December 1972.  And when was the last time you took off from school or work to spend the day watching television of a space mission?  I would have taken vacation days to watch the recent Hubble repair mission if any of my damn 200 cable stations had covered it live.

Since 1982, the Space Shuttle has been our vehicle for traveling into space, but it’s scheduled to be retired next year.  The Space Shuttle never left low-earth orbit (LEO).  I wonder how many people know about our next manned space system that’s currently on the drawing boards?  It’s called the Constellation Program, that will use the Ares 1 rocket combined with the Orion space capsule, both in early design development.  It is a dramatic change from the 30 years of Shuttle flights, in that Orion will eventually leave LEO. 

The Constellation program was conceived officially in 2005, and scheduled to blast-off in 2015, with the exciting goal of returning humans to the Moon by 2020.  How many Americans know about this, and do they care?

NASA plods on, year after year, with a decent budget that’s prone to suffer booms and busts depending on the political weather.  NASA goals are constantly up for debate.  NASA is a prestige agency for the United States.  Space flight has always been political, and the only real reason we rushed to the Moon was not for science, but as competition in the cold war.  The current Constellation plans probably came into being because of China’s new space program that’s aiming at the Moon, with India and Japan echoing Chinese ambitions. 

Like atomic bombs, manned space missions are the symbol of national pride.  Only the most elite of nations belong to the club.  Even though NASA doesn’t get a lot of public support, it’s budget will never be zeroed out because the President and Congress fear the United States would be seen as a declining world power if it did.  Within Congress and NASA the debate has always been how to get the biggest political and scientific bang for our buck.  There are two factions fighting for dollars:  those campaigning for exciting manned missions and those who advocate scientific robotic missions.  Robots have been our real space explorers, going where no man has gone before, or likely ever.

Many scientists, and maybe most of the public would be fine with letting robots have all the glory when it comes to space exploration.  Let’s be honest here.  The only real value of exploring space beyond thumping our nationalistic chests, is science, and it appears that the public has little interest in real scientific research.  NASA’s web site for the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity have had millions of unique visitors, showing the biggest peak of interest in space exploration since the 1960s, but how many people does that represent?  

Let’s say seven million.  There are nearly seven billion people on Earth.  Do the math.  1 million people is 1/1000 of a billion.  Let’s even say NASA has seven million hard core fans world-wide.  That would give them one tenth of one percent of popular support.  Probably more people spend time thinking about drinking beer than exploring space. (If NASA only had the money people spent on getting high.)  Seven million people seems like a big political block, but really it’s just a tiny sub-culture.

And are there really 7,000,000 people on Earth who actively spend a lot of their time thinking about space exploration?  That’s saying 1 person in a 1,000 has a serious interest in the final frontier.  These people would keep up with news on Space.com, read books about space exploration and technology, sign up for Twitter news feeds covering space vehicle development, and are members of one of the many space societies, like The Planetary Society, The Moon Society or the National Space Society.  But membership in The Planetary Society is only around 100,000.  What if the real figure is only 700,000, or .01%?

My guess that real world-wide space advocates number far less than seven million.  “Revision for Space Vision?” from MSNBC’s Cosmic Log, a blog by Alan Boyle, gives a listing of recent news articles about the Ares rocket that’s being built for the Constellation project, and other related news stories that would interest space advocates.  When I ask my friends if they knew there was space program in development to return men to the Moon, they say no.  For all I know, we could return to the Moon in 2020 and most of the people of the world won’t even notice this time.

Why is something as exciting as the universe get so little attention?  Why does the latest iPhone get more press than NASA’s latest lunar mission?  Did you even know about the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter that’s scheduled to reach the Moon on Tuesday?  Or about Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite that will crash into the Moon in October hoping to discover water ice?  The orbiter will take photos so detailed they will be able to see the tracks left by the Apollo astronaut’s rovers.  A lot is happening on the Moon right now, with spacecraft from many nations exploring it remotely, or will be in the near future.  But how many people care?

Within the very small community of humans that are interested in space exploration, the Moon is becoming a hot destination.  There is even a web site, Moon Daily, for keeping up with all the activity.  Over at Asimov’s Science Fiction, James Patrick Kelly has an story in the current issue set on the Moon, “Going Deep,” which he reads for an MP3 audio edition, so the Moon is still of interest to science fiction writers and fans.  And NASA recently held an art contest called “The Moon: Back to the Future,” with a very nice gallery of winners.

Hopefully, between now and 2020, the public will take a fresh interest in lunar exploration, but is that being too hopeful on my part.  Most people consider learning about the Moon as exciting as studying rocks, and geology has never been one of the glamour sciences like astronomy and biology.   (And when was the last time you met someone at a party talking about those topics???)  The public is probably more than willing to let scientists play with the Moon as much as their little hearts want, as long as they aren’t asked to listen to any of the boring facts.

I’ve always cherished the assumption that space was the final frontier, and the manifest destiny of humanity was to explore the cosmos, but I’m starting to believe that is a false assumption on my part.  I’ve started writing a novel about colonists on the Moon, but I’m wondering about its potential audience.  If I want to make any money, I’d need to call it “Vampires on the Moon.”  Science fiction is very popular in pop culture, but interest in science fiction doesn’t translate into interest in space exploration.  I wonder if space exploration was as popular as rock music or professional sports, if humans would have already visited all the places our surrogate explorers, the robots, have reached?

JWH – 6/21/9

LG BD390 Blu-Ray Player Part 2

[Update 12/30/9:  After using my BD390 for six months I wrote a new post about it’s Netflix feature.]

I’ve had my LG Blu-Ray player for ten days now, and I’m learning a lot about this specific player, and Blu-Ray players in general.  I had been waiting for the price of a Blu-Ray machine to fall below $200 before buying, which it had, but I ended up spending $150 more for my player because I wanted Draft-N wireless built in, which only LG was offering.  I wanted a Samsung player, like my TV, but Samsung only offered wireless-G that plugged in as a dongle, which I gave a Bronx cheer to as a buying option.

Networking speed is everything.  For the first six days of owning my LG machine I was totally delighted with the built-in Netflix feature.  I was getting the HD bar on their little connection meter, and content looked fabulous.  Then Memphis was hit by a storm that knocked out the power to 129,000 homes (luckily, not mine this time), and networking hasn’t been the same since.  This isn’t LG’s fault, and I hope Comcast will eventually recover, but this lesson from nature has taught me something significant.  Without a very fast broadband connection, don’t count on those extra features of Blu-Ray players that make them cost more.

There are many factors to networking speed.  First, is the wireless speed between the device and your wireless router.  Draft-N is the fastest, and I think this speed is needed for streaming video well.  Then there’s the speed between your house and the Internet.  With Cable Internet, this varies greatly.  Finally, there is the speed of the video servers.  If those machines are hammered, things will be slow no matter how fast the other two connections.

Each evening since the storm, I’ve selected something from my Netflix menu only to be told that my connection was too slow and the machine asked me if I wanted to try anyway.  After hopefully answering yes on several nights, I’ve learned to just say no.  Movies and TV shows that were once quick to load and beautiful to look at were now almost impossible to load and horrible to watch.  Bummer.

I’m not an early adopter, and after several years of Blu-Ray refinements, I had hoped things would be smooth sailing by now.  Not so.  My wife keeps asking me why I don’t take the LG back.  She complained that her DVDs looked better on the old DVD player.  The Gilmore Girls jittered.  I could see it too.  And I had read on the Amazon reviews many complaints about playing DVDs on the LG player, whereas many reviewers said old DVDs looked great.  I got into the setup and changed the screen resolution to automatic, and Susan’s problems disappeared.  That’s one of the many hassles of digital TV, matching the resolution of the content to the resolution set on the TV.  I had set the LG to 1080p, wanting to get the max out of my Blu-Ray discs.  The TV was set to 4:3 for playing DVD TV shows.

So my advice to people getting into this Blu-Ray game is to expect a learning curve.  They aren’t as easy to use as DVD players with old-style analog TVs.  And I also say “buyer beware” to people wanting those new gee-whiz features.

I really wanted Pandora streaming music, a feature offered on Samsung players.  I even wrote LG to see if they were working on it.  Here’s my plea:  “Will the BD 390 be upgraded to handle Pandora streaming music, and Amazon Unbox video?”  Here is LG’s short answer after editing out the flowery marketing speak:  “Unfortunately this unit does not handle Pandora that is a feature of one of our new home theater systems.”  I would have thought their fancy Blu-Ray player was part of their home theater system.  At least I got my reply within 24 hours.

If I had seen LG’s support page before buying the player, I don’t think I would have bought my player.  It doesn’t offer system updates for downloading, or any information about updates.  The unit itself has a menu option for checking for updates, but that only works if you have  the box networked or if put the update on a USB drive and feed it to your machine directly.  But how do you get those updates if the support page doesn’t offer them?  I was also wanting a user forum on the support page.  A Blu-Ray player is essentially a computer.  It has tremendous potential for expansion.  Many great equipment sites have these kinds of features on their support site.

Forums are especially useful because volunteer tech-wizards will offer hard won discovery tips, and company techs will add inside knowledge.  I get the feeling LG wants people to accept what’s listed on the box as the only features their machine will ever have.  They are missing a marketing advantage by not promoting such goodwill.  The menu on the LD BD390 has 8 icons, with room for 4 more without reducing the size of the current icons.  They could squeeze 20 icons easily onto the screen if needed, offering 20 super features.

These machines are computers, and adding features is like loading software and updating the menu.  LG could offer Pandora, Amazon Unbox, Rhapsody Music, Lala.com, iTunes, Hulu.com, and many other multimedia networked services.  And maybe they will.  The BD 390 is new.  I’m going to be pissed off though if they sell the same box labeled the BD 490 with those features.  If I see that, I won’t be buying LG anymore.

For now, I’m not going to take my player back.  It does what was advertised on the box, although the box should have had in very big letters, a warning that these features need a very fast Internet connection and without such a fast connection these fancy features will suck.  Many people are going to be disappointed.  Probably only the top cable and DSL speeds will offer pleasing results.   Doesn’t Korea have the best broadband in the world?  Their marketing execs need broadband simulator for the other countries they sell to, so as to get an idea of how their products will perform in different markets.

I hope my very fast Comcast connection comes back.  [Comcast contacted me because of this blog and reset my modem, and I’m  getting 17-20 Mb/s download speeds and the Netflix feature is back to producing excellent results.  Thanks Melissa, I’m happy with my LG again, and impressed with Comcast’s service, let’s hope LG might be reading blogs too.]

But the future development of Blu-Ray players that have networked features is illustrated by my desire to have Rhapsody support.  I have a separate device, a Roku SoundBridge M1001 that supports getting music off my computer that is stored in Windows Media, iTunes and Rhapsody.  The LG BD390 sees the Windows Media, but supports another media server, Nero, and doesn’t see iTunes or Rhapsody.  Roku now makes a Netflix/Amazon Unbox decoder.  Apple makes a AppleTV device.  How many boxes will I need to buy for my den to work with my TV and stereo setup?  How many HDMI connections and combinations of HDMI connections will that take?  How many surround sound connections to my receiver will I need?

The solution is one box.  And the obvious place for that box, is the Blu-Ray player.  I waited out the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray fight for the winner to emerge, but now it seems many other contenders must duke it out.  There are already several online video distributors, and many music services.  Right now it’s like buying a different brand of TV for each TV network you want to watch, and a different radio for each music station you want to play.

If you’re sitting at your computer you can take advantage of all of these offerings.  That’s because a computer is a general purpose device.  We need to think of the box we hook up to our TV as a general purpose device, and a Blu-Ray player is a computer.  They should be upgradable by software, so each quarter, as manufacturers make marketing deals, they can upgrade their players to offer more choices.

Here’s a specific example of my problem.  I discovered a new musical group I like, The Kings of Leon on Lala.com.  I then went to Zune Marketplace and added their album to my Zune to play on my trip to Birmingham, Alabama.  When I got home I wanted to play them on my big stereo in my den.  I have Rhapsody set up to do this, but I had switched the optical fiber audio connector to my LG BD390 player, so my SoundBridge M1001 wasn’t hooked up.  I went to Target to buy the CD so I could rip it and put it on my computer so the BD 390 could see it.  Target was out of the CDs.  I already have rights to play this CD on two paid subscription services, but I was willing to buy it on CD so it would work with my new LG BD 390, but that didn’t work out.  So I shifted the optical fiber cable from the LG to the SoundBridge and played the CD.  When I want to watch a movie, I’ll have to shift the fiber audio cable back.

If the LG supported Rhapsody, Zune or Lala, I could have played it through the Blu-Ray box as it was set up.  By the way, even though my connection isn’t fast enough for streaming video from Netflix, it’s perfectly fine for streaming music.  The Kings of Leon sounded great.  I may still buy the CD to hear them in their best sound quality, but my SACD CD player won’t work if the LG BD 390 is connected because my receiver won’t take 5.1 RCA connection setup from my CD player and optical fiber input by the LG at the same time.  The LG will play a normal CD, but it doesn’t support SACD, an orphan technology that I need to keep the old SACD CD player around to play my handful of SACDs.  The LG could have offered SACD and DVD-Audio support.

Sometimes I want to just give up on technology for five years, and come back and see if the Geeks of Earth have worked everything out.  Man, the Amish must have it easy.

JWH – 6/18/9

Update 6/19/9:  Melissa at Comcast posted a reply to this blog offering help, and my network is working perfectly again.  The Netflix feature is back too, and this has a lot of implications.  I’m on Netflix’s unlimited 1 disc out at a time subscription, but with this new feature I can watch as many TV and movies I want from their Watch Now list.  I’ve converted all my queue to Blu-Ray discs.  I read customer reviews of the Roku Netflix box on Amazon, and many say how streaming Netflix movies and TV shows have changed the way they do things.  One thing they do is to cut their Netflix subscription down to 1 disc out at a time, and many talked about canceling their cable TV.  Streaming Netflix, when it works right is a game-changer.  I know, for the most part, I’ve stopped buying DVDs because of Netflix, and I won’t be buying Blu-Ray discs, because I can get them from Netflix too.  We know Comcast is reading this too.  I wonder if they will change the way they offer content.  Instead of me buying a zillion channels, I’ll pay a few and stream just the shows I want to watch.  Streaming content could mean the end of networks.

New to Me, Old to You?

I discovered popular music as a kiddo while riding around in my Daddy’s 1955 Pontiac, playing with the AM radio push-buttons.  This was around 1958, and I was seven.  For some reason my parents didn’t have a radio in the house, nor did they own a record player and records.  Music wasn’t important in their life, but they seemed to love the music on TV, on the variety shows, where my Dad dug Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra and my mother would tell us kids to shut up so she could listen to Nat King Cole or Perry Como.  Those crooners were so damn old, even then.

My parents would get especially excited if music clips of Benny Goodman or Glenn Miller played in an old movie.  They’d tell my sister and I how that was their music.  Big bands, with trumpets and clarinets, it seemed as ancient as Egypt.  Music that felt new was the rock and roll music I found on the AM radio in the car.  That music made my Dad turn red and shout, “Turn off that goddamn noise.”

I’m listening to Quicksilver Messenger Service, a San Francisco rock band from the late 1960s.  Quicksilver still feels out of the womb new to me.  Even though it’s forty years later, a much greater span of time than from Benny Goodman of the late 1930s to the late 1950s, Quicksilver didn’t get old to me.  Why?  Would kids hearing my music today feel it had been dug up by archeologists?

Is my music new to me, but old to you?

Listening to current pop music makes me feel old.  It’s all made by teenagers, or over-the-hill burnouts in their twenties, but then the rock and roll of the 1950s was made by teenagers too.  Time is doing a number on my head.  Time is more than relative.  I can feel young and old, both at the same time, just by listening to music.

JWH – 6/16/9

Better Than Television

Will there ever be a better invention than television?

Of course I hear all the young Internet dudes instantly reply, sex.  Really, and how many hours have you spent humping compared to boob tube dazing?  And by the way, I count video games and porn as byproducts of the invention of television.  Television is powerful.  It’s one hell of an addiction.  After air, water and food, I think I’d have to list television as the next necessity for life.

I want to do a quick look back at the history of television, but then move onto using my science fiction vision to see if I can picture something better than TV.  For the purposes of this essay I define television as a visual 2D screen with audio, so it doesn’t matter if the actual gadget is a Sears Roebuck cabinet with CRT from 1955, or iPhone from 2009, it’s still television to me.  If you can watch a live or recorded TV show on it, then I call it television, so something like the Kindle ebook doesn’t count, but an Asus netbook does.

What did people do before television?  I was born in 1951 and grew up with the glass teat, as Harlan Ellison named it.  As a child all the adults told me stories about life before television.  My mother’s mother, Nanny, was born in 1881.  She told me about life before cars, airplanes, radio and television.  The only way I could relate to my Nanny’s tales of old America, was through the westerns I grew up watching on TV – those shows showed life with no radios, cars, airplanes or televisions, like Dodge City, in Gunsmoke.  It hurt my little head to try imagine life without TV.

Last night I watched, “The Naked Time,” the fourth episode from the first season of Star Trek, which I first viewed on September 29, 1966.  Because I grew up thinking television was a new invention, it’s hard to believe that was 43 years ago, and that the first shows I remember seeing at age four, were 54 years ago.  That generation that raised me, the ones who knew a time before television, are dead now, or sleeping in line waiting to get into heaven.  I imagine rugrats today believing that television existed in the time of Jesus.  Television has so perfectly integrated into our minds, culture and life, that it’s almost impossible to imagine life without the TV screen, or its daddy, the movie screen.

Now, I’ve got to ask:  Is there a better invention than television waiting to be invented?  Some people are going to point to the computer, but I’m going to claim that what we love about the computer is the CRT/LCD screen, so that the Internet is really just a different kind of television show.  Ditto for video games.  I used computers before they were connected to TV screens, and although I found them fun, most people would have considered them boring with a capital B.

Television is a gestalt experience.  Forget about all that damn ESP mumbo-jumbo, television screens are our real sixth sense.  Until we get a neural jack in the back of the head, like Neo in The Matrix, the television screen is our information pie hole.  Up until the advent of the Internet, the screen was one-way.   Now, the screen is a two-way street to the hive mind.  As I type this, I’ve got Lala.com open in another window playing “Boom” by P.o.d.  If I wanted, I could open Netflix, Amazon Unbox or Hulu, and watch old-style TV shows.  Also, I wanted, I could use my webcam and send video back into the system.

But my question still remains:  Will there ever be a better invention than television as a communication’s tool?  When my Nanny was little, the newspaper was the only form of mass communication.  News from around the world was slow and sparse.  And it had no immediacy. 

By the time my mother was born in 1916, radio was beginning to replace the newspaper as the media of mass communication.  To obtain a glimmer of this mind-blowing this transformation was,  I can only recommend watching Empire of the Air, a Ken Burns documentary, which is easily found on Netflix.  But if you want a much deeper insight, find the out-of-print book by Tom Lewis that the show is based on.  The effort will be worth it.  Radio is really the audio portion of television, and network the world in the first half of the 20th century.

Television is older than most people think – the technology begun to emerge in the 1920s and 1930s, slowly gained success in the late 1940s, and then blasted-off into the Leave it to Beaver world of the 1950s.  Many people think of life before the 1960s as black and white, because of old movies and TV shows, and think it was the psychedelic sixties when reality took on Technicolor hues.  Now that we spy on reality in 1080p, I bet future writers will look on the second half of the 20th century as being the fuzzy years. 

Radio allowed millions of people to have a shared experience.  Now that’s leaving Kansas for Oz.  Television expanded on the power of radio, so routinely tens of millions, and on extreme occasions, hundreds of millions, have shared a single historical event.  What next invention can top that?

Cell phones are having their impact, now that they are becoming universal, and Apple and its iPhone are pushing the envelope by evolving its invention into a pocket television, because the iPhone is only another form of a TV screen.  And as humanity evolves towards those higher beings in WALL-E, sitting on their moving recliners with their faces glued to TV screens, seeing the world not with their eyes, but their television, I can imagine it as the ultimate addiction.

Writing, and its descendent, the book, was the asynchronous form of mass communication that took over the world.  Radio synchronized people’s lives.  Television brought that synchronized communication to our major sense organ, the eyes, and it has dominated the communication landscape ever since.  Can it be topped?  I suppose scientists could invent some kind of machine that could broadcast reality directly into our brains, bypassing the screen, but I tend to doubt it.  If they could, we could live like the billions in The Matrix, never knowing if we’d taken the red or blue pill.

Such inventions are a long way off, so what could geek science invent before then?  TV eye-glasses already exist.  The goal is to fool the eyes, but despite fantasy shows like Caprica, there are some major limitations to virtual reality.  As long as the viewer just watches we can create better and better ways to view distant reality.  But if the viewer wants to interact with virtual reality they quickly face limitations.  It’s like waking dreams, if you try to manipulate them, they fall apart.

We can create virtual worlds like Second Life, but no matter how sophisticated such worlds get, will they ever be better than televised views of our reality?  Think of the difference between ABC World News Tonight, the latest Star Trek film and Up, a current animated film.  One shows scenes from around the world, one shows real actors mixed into CGI scenery, and the last is total animation.  Cartoons have always been a staple of TV, but would you want to live inside one.  Well, hell yes, for short times.  So virtual reality is one candidate to supplant TV.

This means, in the decades to come, there will be kids growing up with virtual reality as part of their lives, and old farts like me will be telling them stories about life without virtual reality.  How significant will be their cultural paradigm shift?  What if every day you could walk through a different art museum from cities all over the world, but without taking any flights?  How close could virtual reality get at showing the details of each painting?  What if we had the technology to scan each canvas so it was equal to looking at it from 2 inches away with our eyes, with the choices of various wavelengths of light, and the choice of having the light source come from 8 different directions.  Would that beat standing in front of the actual masterpiece?

I’ve always wanted to see Paris, but a phobia against claustrophobic transatlantic flights keeps me from going.  What if I could wear a helmet, recline in my La-Z-Boy, and walk the streets of Paris every night for an hour.  That would be television too, unless I got beyond the sense of viewing reality through a 2D screen.

We have to think about the holistic nature of television.  Television means vision at a distance, with the implied implication we’ll also get sound.  Writing and books, were information at a distance too.  Photograph and movies were the precursor to television.  All are based on 2D transmission.  Something better than television will have to be 3D.  Thus if I use this new invention and feel like I’m sitting in a room at MIT hearing a lecture or walking on Mars, then that will be a major step forward over 2D television at a distance.

Science fiction has been exploring such ideas for decades, and it has  taken that speculation even further with the concept of downloading, which is recording our minds and putting them into computers.  How far will reality ever get to catching up with science fiction is open to debate, but I do think VR goggles or helmets will probably be common in the near future, maybe before I die, and I will play the role of Nanny when talking to children who spend most of their time with their heads in VR helmets.

But at a personal level, what do I want from television and its possible replacements?  This is where things get philosophically interesting.  We use television for entertainment, vicarious thrills and gathering information.  What that implies is our brains are bored with our existing location in time and space and we want to fool them into believing we are located in a different time and space.  For centuries books were the technology we applied to this simple quest.  Intellectuals will claim that reading Pride and Prejudice is superior to watching one of the many 2D screen versions, but the details of a televised version are so vastly richer to our senses.

I know lots of people who shun TV screens, either the broadcast kind or the computer kind.  They live among family, friends and pets, pursuing hobbies and enjoying nature.  They live in the now, like all good Zen monks teach, but I’m not one of those kinds of people.  I grew up on television that has conditioned my mind to want to constantly teleport via 2D screens to distant places, real and imaginary.  Is that good or bad?  A world without television is like being an ant and not knowing how big reality really is compared to the little environment in which I crawl.  Does knowing matter?  I think so.

Thus, I’m sure if a better invention than television came around, I’d jump on it, if it allowed me to teleport with more details.  But there are other things to consider.  I’ll put this into an analogy that horny young men will understand so clearly, and be just as obvious to people who aren’t horny young men.  Which is better, a real live naked woman, or a naked woman on HBO?

JWH – 6/13/9