Centuries Before ‘Arrival’: The Original Science Fiction #SciFiSunday
The Atlantic explores how the imaginative spirit behind some of the earliest science fiction had eventual effects on real-world developments in science and technology, and not the other way around.
An explorer builds a space ship and meets aliens on another world. They are a “people most strange,” these extraterrestrials. They’re twice as tall as humans; they wear clothes spun of a mysterious material, dyed in a color unseen by human eyes; they speak only in haunting musical tones. Then the explorer returns to Earth.
This has been the plot of seemingly countless examples of pulp magazines and canonical science fiction in the past century. Similar themes have been explored by authors like Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, and Arthur C. Clarke, classic television such as The Twilight Zone and Star Trek, and films like this month’s Arrival. But this particular story isn’t from the past century. Its explorer, Domingo Gonsales, is the fictional narrator of The Man in the Moone, a novel by Francis Godwin, a bishop in the Church of England. It was published in 1638.
Eink, E-paper, Think Ink – Collin shares six segments pondering the unusual low-power display technology that somehow still seems a bit sci-fi – http://adafruit.com/thinkink
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
