Worst epic science fail you have seen in sci-fi?

[selden]

Ringworld was published in 1970, long before Vinge wrote about the Singularity.

I just discovered that Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep was published in 1992, but his writings on the singularity weren't published until 1993. For some reason I'd always assumed they were published in the opposite order. Presumably he'd been thinking about it for quite a while.

[Drashner1]

Hm. I'm thinking he must have published earlier than that. Marooned in Realtime came out well before A Fire Upon the Deep and was the first book to introduce the idea of the Singularity in popular SF AFAIK.

Although I suppose the formal paper on the subject could have come later...

Todd

[selden]

The publication Google finds most often cited is his contribution to a NASA conference that took place in March, 1993:

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi....022855.pdf

A more recent publication by Vinge (June, 2008) http://spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/ethi...ingularity mentions that 1993 essay but nothing earlier.

[stevebowers]

Did anything in Niven's Ringworld books say the Puppeteers were human sized?

The puppeteers in the books were antelope- or deer-sized, big enough to kick you in the face if necessary. But their large buildings might be mostly empty space inside - they are creatures of grassland, so I imagine their buildings to be large tracts of veldt enclosed in an artificial environment, layered on top of each other with relatively high ceilings, and stepping disks to get from one layer to another.

In OA we have elephant provolves- if they have any architecture at all, it might be similar, but significantly larger. Since OA doesn't have stepping disks, the various levels would need to be connected by ramps or lifts.
Spiral ramps for elephants would be an interesting architectural feature.
Here's an equestrian ramp in the Round Tower in Copenhagen. An elephant ramp would be at least twice as large, although not necessarily less steep.

[JohnnyYesterday]

Not necessarily lifts as we know them now. They could be a lot like oversized versions of the transport tubes from Futurama -- but filled with ufog that lifts and shunts you along, not cartoon-pneumatics-based.

[Rynn]

I wonder if elephants could jump and climb stairs if they lived in a lower gravity environment...

[Alphadon]

Humans in Star Wars. How did they get there, and why do they speak English? (Yes, they are actually speaking English according to the EU)

[JohnnyYesterday]

Humans in Star Wars. How did they get there, and why do they speak English? (Yes, they are actually speaking English according to the EU)

They got to the Tunisia, England, California etc. filming locations by jet and auto, and they speak English because it's a popular international language.

[Alphadon]

That remind me of the last Space Odyssey book where they find one of Kubrick's props and mistake it for an actual monolith

[Rhea47]

Watching Star Trek TOS. The crew are whispering because they are hiding from an enemy ship. In space. *facedesk*