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Not sure your point. It's fiction. Are we closer to finding dragons, faeries, or magic? Visiting remote planets is as unlikely as riding a dragon. But both mak
by bot403 8mo ago
Not sure your point. It's fiction. Are we closer to finding dragons, faeries, or magic?
Visiting remote planets is as unlikely as riding a dragon. But both make for great stories.
- dboreham 8mo agoPresumably these are equally likely because you could build a DNA-printer and thereby create a dragon of some sort (not sure if it could have fully functional fire breathing though)?
- WJW 8mo agoDragons are physically impossible in many more ways than the firebreathing. For one, things that large would probably struggle to fly. We can make larger things fly, but have to cheat using jet (or rocket!) engines to generate incredible thrust in ways not typically accessible to living beings.
- boothby 8mo agoAnd now I'm picturing a dragon with bombardier-beetle style pulsed jet boosters. And while I'd typically question your assumptions of how big dragons need to be in order to deserve the name, I'll assert that quetzocoatlus nothropi[1] was big enough. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quetzalcoatlus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quetzalcoatlus
- krapp 8mo ago"Dragon" as a classification is odd, because when you look at every kind of mythological creature that gets classified as such nowadays, sometimes from cultures that wouldn't have recognized the concept, you find that they have little in common beyond some vaguely reptilian vibe and being scary. And I'm sorry but that thing is too goofy looking to be considered a dragon.
- PaulHoule 8mo agoDragons are dinosaurs, that is, closer to birds then contemporary reptiles.
- coldtea 8mo agoThat's begging the question. We don't need to look "at every kind of mythological creature that gets classified as such nowadays" from "cultures that wouldn't have recognized the concept". One could stick on those classified as such in western culture - which is where the fantasy novel about dragons and knights and spells and the rest are based on. And in there, dragons have quite specific characteristic and vibes, as evidenced from medieval iconography of St George to countless fantasy book covers and illustrations.
- fc417fc802 8mo agoBut if we do expand the set under consideration then I'd suggest they do in fact have specific things in common. Large flying carnivorous reptiles. That won't cover all the various edge cases but I think it describes the vast majority of the popular usage of the term. That definition would imply that sufficiently large flying dinosaurs qualify as dragons. And at least personally I think I agree with that conclusion. Dragons aren't purely fantasy, they're merely extinct (and never breathed fire IRL).
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- Dylan16807 8mo agoYou can make a setting with denser air and less gravity too.
- andrewflnr 8mo agoThat's ok, we just need to put them on the moon or somewhere else with lighter gravity.
- onraglanroad 8mo agoLess gravity has its own issues. Nothing can fly on the moon :)
- andrewflnr 8mo agoObviously you put them under a big dome. That's the easy part.
- squeaky-clean 8mo agoScience Fiction doesn't have to be fantasy, it can be speculative. But if your setting or plot relies on something we know to be scientifically untrue, and you don't put some effort into explaining why it somehow works in your setting, it's fantasy and not speculative. Someone like Asimov never considered his books to be fantasy and that he could just insert whatever he wanted with no justification. In fact, he never considered sci-fi to be a genre, he always argued it was a setting and that his most famous stories were detective stories in a sci-fi setting. But detective stories don't work if your world isn't grounded in something real. Otherwise the reader can't reasonably build their own theory or deduce the answer because it's based on what the author thought was cool and not what logically connects. The appeal of something like The Expanse just falls apart if you introduce a FTL engine just because it makes for a more dramatic story moment somewhere in the plot unless there is some serious justification as to why the author didn't just break all the rules of their world (which is supposed to be our world, but in the future).
- Recurecur 8mo agoFTL starships in an SF story don’t need a detailed explanation, just a new invention. It’s the exact same thing as a speculative story in the 1920s discussing supersonic flight, even though the jet engine hadn’t been invented yet. For instance “Tunnel in the Sky” bypassed the whole issue in the 50’s, later imitated by “Stargate”…
- wolvoleo 8mo agoTrue but at that point objects travelling faster than sound had been demonstrated. It was just hard to engineer a manned plane that could do it. For example during WWII the V2 rockets travelled much faster than sound. They were just unmanned. Or more simple, bullets were supersonic for longer too. What I mean is, nobody thought the sound barrier was a hard limit we could never break.
- direwolf20 8mo agoJust specify an Alcubierre drive. Job done.
- jacquesm 8mo agoThese two examples are not equally unlikely. They are of different orders of unlikelihood, the one is extremely unlikely, the other simply impossible.
- vanviegen 8mo agoGenetically engineering and then riding a dragon actually sounds easy in comparison to creating FTL travel.
- stevedonovan 8mo agoExcept for the power-to-weight problem. Would need very big wings!
- jacquesm 8mo agoIt's not FTL that will get you to the stars. It's patience, eco systems, hibernation and radiation shielding.
- lukan 8mo agoOr building a very big spaceship and have generations live on it until they reach the end of the journey.
- jacquesm 8mo agoHence eco-systems, yes. But that's probably a harder problem than radiation shielding + hibernation. You'd still need the radiation shielding but it would be far, far more of it (because non-local). These are interesting problems to think about, right now they are solidly SF but dragons are and always will be fantasy because physics says they can't exist in the way they are described. But you can't 100% rule out that one day descendants of humanity will visit the stars in person, assuming we don't blow ourselves up first. That's one of the main reasons I dislike Musk so much: he takes people motivated by positive dreams (a clean planet, off-world travel and living) and then subverts their energy for grift. But 'DOGE' has shown the world who he really is, the mask is off now and anybody still empowering that asshole is co-responsible.
- coldtea 8mo ago30s to 60s, sci-fi wasn't just driven by the "makes for great stories", but by the optimism for scientific advacements and the idea that these could get within reach in the future. It was "science fiction" and not merely "space fiction".
- danans 8mo ago> Not sure your point. It's fiction. Are we closer to finding dragons, faeries, or magic? No, but we've become increasingly superstitious, and cultish. A lot of the day to day parts of sci-fi (screens everywhere , instant communication) have become reality so it's not as exciting anymore. Sci-fi no longer serves as escapism. Anymore, it reminds us of our limitations.
- satvikpendem 8mo ago> Visiting remote planets is as unlikely as riding a dragon No, because one is theoretically impossible while the other is theoretically possible.
- bluescrn 8mo agoCreating some sort of genetically-engineered dinosaur-derived ‘dragon’ may be more plausible than actually reaching another star system. It’s not going to breathe fire though.
- hdgvhicv 8mo agoStomach full of natural gas or oil of some sort. Surely nature has examples of creatures that can produce a spark?