4 ms·

Boyle's goals were super creative! A lot of them have been reiterated by the modern-day Transhumanist movement (longevity, expanding the mind, reducing the nee

Boyle's goals were super creative! A lot of them have been reiterated by the modern-day Transhumanist movement (longevity, expanding the mind, reducing the need for sleep, etc etc), and some of them sound like Marvel superpowers (e.g. the ability to grow gigantic is one of Ant-Man's powers). And he foresaw the need for a way to remain and work underwater! Super imaginative.

notahacker 3y ago
"The Emulating of Fish without Engines by Custome and Education only" is certainly not a futurist goal I was expecting to see
cb321 3y ago
Boyle's "growing giant" idea probably at least partly inspired Jonathan Swift's Brobdingnagians in Gulliver's Travels several decades later in 1726.. maybe the natural inverse the Lilliputians. By the 1800s Mary Shelly & Jules Verne would strike out a bit further on speculative-technologico-science fiction. Things picked up with HG Wells, and by The Atomic Age imagination literally exploded even before comic books got popular.. :-) Asimov's 1966 Fantastic Voyage was likely more inspirational to the 1970s _Ant Man_ than Boyle. I wonder if Asimov knew of Boyle (or was derivative of other things - no dis meant to Asimov - dude was The Master).
- stonogo 3y ago
  I'd wager pretty heavily that Asimov, with a doctorate in chemistry, would have been exposed to Boyle at some point, what with the ideal gas law bearing his name.
  - cb321 3y ago
    Agreed! I would not take the other side of that bet! :-) Asimov sure liked to type words on a typewriter, too. So, he may well have even documented such. Just to point out the perhaps obvious, though, in terms of the history of that specific idea, long shadows of things / your body / arms / head around sunrise / sunset could probably inspire this vague concept (in the embiggen direction) in people pre-historically. The idea can be re-cast as just "make such projection/optics 'more' real".

notahacker 3y ago

"The Emulating of Fish without Engines by Custome and Education only" is certainly not a futurist goal I was expecting to see

cb321 3y ago

Boyle's "growing giant" idea probably at least partly inspired Jonathan Swift's Brobdingnagians in Gulliver's Travels several decades later in 1726.. maybe the natural inverse the Lilliputians. By the 1800s Mary Shelly & Jules Verne would strike out a bit further on speculative-technologico-science fiction. Things picked up with HG Wells, and by The Atomic Age imagination literally exploded even before comic books got popular.. :-) Asimov's 1966 Fantastic Voyage was likely more inspirational to the 1970s _Ant Man_ than Boyle. I wonder if Asimov knew of Boyle (or was derivative of other things - no dis meant to Asimov - dude was The Master).

stonogo 3y ago
I'd wager pretty heavily that Asimov, with a doctorate in chemistry, would have been exposed to Boyle at some point, what with the ideal gas law bearing his name.
- cb321 3y ago
  Agreed! I would not take the other side of that bet! :-) Asimov sure liked to type words on a typewriter, too. So, he may well have even documented such. Just to point out the perhaps obvious, though, in terms of the history of that specific idea, long shadows of things / your body / arms / head around sunrise / sunset could probably inspire this vague concept (in the embiggen direction) in people pre-historically. The idea can be re-cast as just "make such projection/optics 'more' real".