Consider the strange cause-and-effect loop involving science fiction. An example I like to bring up is the multi-touch screen as featured in the movie Minority Report, the one where you can scroll through the information by performing sweeping motions with your hands. I was somewhat surprised how much attention this fictional gadget got. Everyone talked about the “Minority Report screen” (particularly as technology was developed that made such a screen possible); when Microsoft came up with its Surface product, it looked surprisingly like those screens in the movie. I think it’s safe to say that science fiction inspired a number of scientists, engineers, product managers to come up with a product that mimicked the fictional entity.
In fact, it’s not the first time this has happened, even if often it’s difficult to trace the elements of our culture that have previously been introduced in a work of fiction. Today’s robots are largely based on renderings by the early science fiction illustrators and movie directors. Cars dropped their box-like shape. In a way, one can say, science fiction predicted what was going to happen. But of course science fiction itself, just like fiction in general, has a power to motivate, inspire, and influence, so one can also say that it influenced what was going to happen (we made cars look what they look because the public was used to seeing images of “futuristic” cars already and why not introduce a product the public is already familiar with. I believe that things such as the Star Trek franchise have been engrained in our culture so much that space ships may very well be similar in structure to USS Enterprise; the doors may slide sideways; and we may be greeted by a warm yet machine-like female voice of an omnipresent “computer” (incidentally, voiced by Gene Roddenberry’s wife, if I remember correctly).
If that’s the case, we may say that we really came up with those inventions of the future already: when we depicted them in the science fiction movies. They haven’t materialized yet but it’s just a matter of time. The future, indeed, is now.
I’ll take one more leap here. These days, as ideas presented in works of fiction (particularly visual works such as movies and TV shows) get tested and engineered more and more, the public becomes to have a controlling stake in what is presented. A small “control” set of viewers, for example, is often asked to rate pilots of TV shows (and decide–not quite as dramatically as the Emperor with his thumb in the ancient Roman Gladiator games, but in a similar fashion–which TV shows see the light of day and which never do) or help decide on which one of the two endings a film should have. I’m going to say that over time, the public will decide more and more on the details of many works of fiction.
In a way, then, the public may end up collectively deciding what the future will look like. Reducing further, since the public opinion as such is timeless, even though the individual outcomes may vary over time, it seems that today, the public has all the information to know what an arbitrary object, time period or an outcome in the future will look like.
How does that work? Assume that we want to know the status of a future outcome A. This outcome will be influenced by a series of events, and (and this is a big assumption) assume that we can trace this influence to some outcome B in a particular work of fiction, say, a TV show. The producers will want to gauge public opinion on B to maximize the chance of success of the show. Based on how the public reacts to different stimuli, B will be chosen. The value of B which causes A to materialize is therefore a result of a particular class of reactions of the public (it’s not necessarily the case that everyone has to have the same reaction; it’s also possible that many different sets of reactions influence the value of B). We can repeat this experiment many times, each time constructing outcomes based on the set of reactions, and having these outcomes influence some future outcomes.
The public, therefore, today has all the knowledge of the world at any time in the future. This knowledge pertains to a large number of outcomes, so we can compress it to some linear combination of the public’s reactions (we can reconstruct any outcome A by applying this combination to an outcome B and “playing the movie” to see how A would be influenced) the same way we compress a curve that passes through n specific points with a linear combination of monomials. This linear combination consists of a large number of coefficients (just like the curve is actually a polynomial with some coefficients) with which we can express the total future of the world. Hence, these coefficients are a de facto encoding of the world as we know it (now and into the future). Different sets of coefficients lead to different outcomes so they describe different worlds.
The worlds are therefore countably infinite.
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