Jan Zalasiewicz
Professor of Palaeobiology, University of Leicester
Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind
(Hayao Miyazaki, 1984)
When I reread the science fiction I loved as a kid – Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein – I’m usually disappointed. There are some wonderful plots but the books are kind of clunky. With Hayao Miyazaki, who I discovered as a parent, there’s none of that clunkiness. He makes films that both young kids and decrepit adults like myself can absorb at pretty well the same level. He thinks very deeply, and quite pessimistically, about history, politics and environmental issues. As someone who works on the Anthropocene concept – holding that people are changing the geology of the Earth, with uncomfortable consequences for future generations – I find his work very compelling.
Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind is set in a postapocalyptic landscape, with acid oceans and poisonous forests inhabited by huge, threatening-looking insects. Nausicaä belongs to one of the smaller human communities fighting it out over the remains. She strives to protect the giant insects, which in any other film would be the monsters, and is trying to do some ecological restitution on the poisonous forests. She understands the insects as part of the ecosystem rather than an aberration.
It seems to me that Miyazaki is one of the few contemporary popular artists whose work is adequate to the reality of the Anthropocene, and to its human consequences. He faces the predicament full on, yet he realises that people have to live through it. Life goes on. You do what you can in the circumstances. We have no option but to live in this damaged world and do our best.
David Eagleman
Neuroscientist and adjunct professor at Stanford University
Westworld
(TV series, 2016-)
One of the big questions of neuroscience is: can we understand the principles of intelligence so that we can replicate them on a different substrate? A related question is: could we build consciousness on a computational substrate? The answer to this is not known but it seems likely that we could, given that mother nature used a hundred billion cells to build our conscious brains.
These questions are at the heart of the TV show Westworld, to which I’ve contributed as a scientific adviser. It takes place in a near future where we can build androids that are indistinguishable from humans in terms of how they look, feel, talk and act. A company launches an entertainment venue recreating the old west where you can shoot these androids, sleep with them in a brothel, go on adventures with them. The plot turns on some of these androids starting to develop self-awareness and remembering things from their previous incarnations, which leads to trouble for the humans.
The idea that robots could gain consciousness is an idea that we can’t rule in or out right now, but it certainly seems plausible. There are so many directions that AI might go in. It’s much easier to build software and not have to deal with all the physical stuff. But whether we want, and can create, AI that is like a human is yet to be seen.
My colleagues and I have been writing about these issues for decades, but when you wrap an idea in fiction it attracts a much larger audience. I think Westworld is doing a terrific job of bringing these issues into the public consciousness.
Giovanna Tinetti
Professor of physics and astronomy, University College London
Interstellar
(Christopher Nolan, 2014)
What I loved about Interstellar was its representation of exosolar planets – planets outside our solar system that orbit a star. I have a team at UCL which explores the nature of these planets, typically tens or hundreds of light years from Earth. We started out looking for planets similar to ours, but in the journey we’ve discovered such a diversity of planets out there, and they are so exotic, that I think my own interests, at least, have shifted a bit.
The planets they were travelling to in Interstellar seemed to me very accurate, based on the information we have. The first one that Matthew McConaughey’s character visits after leaving Earth is a water world, where a gigantic tidal wave is heading towards them. We believe that similar sorts of planets must exist – and the same with the icy world, which they visit later in the movie. We know that there are many rocky planets very far from their star, so presumably this is a realistic representation of what they might look like. I also thought the description of the scenario on Earth, if we keep going with climate change, was, unfortunately, very realistic.
In a certain sense it helps to see what these planets might look like: when I think of water worlds now, all of a sudden I have this image from the film. And sometimes I use pictures from Interstellar when I’m doing a public science talk. Rather than describing the density of the planet or what it might look like, you just show an image and everyone connects with what you want to say. It’s very powerful.
Martin Rees
Astronomer royal and emeritus professor of cosmology and astrophysics, University of Cambridge
Last and First Men/ Star Maker
Olaf Stapledon (1930/1937)
I’m not a great reader of science fiction but I am a fan of the books of Olaf Stapledon. I first read them as a student in the 60s. At the time I saw them as entertainment, but thinking back on them now they seem quite far-sighted.
His 1930s books Last and First Men and Star Maker are full of fascinating ideas. Last and First Men is really a history of the future covering 2bn years and following 18 distinct species of human, the first of which is our own. Over time they leave Earth and spread towards the outer planets. One species are giant brains without much of a body. The idea of a disembodied brain that can create new species – they design the type of human that comes after them – is very imaginative. We’re talking about similar ideas today.
Star Maker is even broader in its scope. The narrator starts on the Earth, goes out into space and gradually merges with the intelligences in other places. Then he meets the star maker who, it turns out, has made lots of universes besides our own, some of which work better than others. One universe is an interesting precursor to the Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics, which says that whenever there’s a quantum uncertainty, both options are taken and the universe divides. Another universe has no spatial dimensions at all but just time – Stapledon calls it a musical universe. These ideas, especially given that these were written in the 1930s, are manifestations of a very original mind.
Jennifer Doudna
Crispr inventor
The Martian
(Ridley Scott, 2015)
The Martian begins with an astronaut – played by Matt Damon – getting stranded on Mars after a dust storm forces his fellow astronauts to leave. It deals with two main challenges: first, how Damon’s character will survive alone in this very difficult environment – how he’s going to provide food and power for himself – and second, how the space scientists back on Earth are going to get him home.
My own work focuses on genome editing: I’ve been working on technology, known as Crispr, for altering the DNA sequences in cells in a precise fashion. Since 2012, when we first published our work on Crispr, it’s been adopted worldwide for altering the DNA sequences in human cells but also various types of animals and plants.
When I look at The Martian – and this actually sparked a lot of conversation in my own lab after the film came out – I think about how genome editing might be useful in human space travel to Mars. For example, the character played by Matt Damon grows potatoes to survive. If gene editing were available, you could potentially make some changes to the potatoes so they would require less water, or in different ways be more suited to that environment.
We have a lot of issues here on our home planet, and rather than spending our treasures on sending a couple of people to Mars, I’d like to see us addressing challenges that we have on Earth. That being said, ours is a species that likes to explore; we’re adventurers, and if we were to make a trip to a planet like Mars, I think a lot of interesting technologies and ideas would come from that, which might actually benefit our own planet.
