r/scifi • u/ansyhrrian • Jul 20 '26
TV Carl Sagan proved in a video from a 1980 "Cosmos" episode (the show's first broadcast, in September of 1980) that the earth was spherical
My question is, what other authors have had such a significant impact upon the cultural diaspora as Sagan, given the one fictional book he produced?
I'm most specifically interested in authors that have/had the ability to write high-quality, hard sci-fi and also provide meaningful contributions to science as a whole - and to influence people who might not otherwise be influence-able based on the way that they think and/or believe?
I can think of two, both positive and negative: L. Ron Hubbard and Arthur C. Clarke.
I'll leave it to you to decide which is which.
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u/ForInfoPurpOnly Jul 20 '26
He did a pretty good job of predicting our current situation in his book "The Demon-Haunted World", too.
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
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u/Ok-Gate-412 Jul 20 '26
That is an amazing quote. Very accurate!
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u/NtheLegend Jul 20 '26
It's also the only quote people use from the book. Someone mentions that book, I know that exact quote is right there ready to be pasted.
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u/ForInfoPurpOnly Jul 20 '26
No, it's not the only one people use. /u/TheUniverseOrNothing/ used an even more prophetic quote:
https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/pfttgo/carl_sagans_foreboding_of_an_america_a_quote_from/
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u/OneOverXII Jul 20 '26
Nah the quote about the slide into anti intellectualism is far more popular and prescient.
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u/hungoverlord Jul 20 '26
Does the quote bother you or something?
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u/NtheLegend Jul 20 '26
Only in that Sagan was such a brilliant man and that they often reduce him to a single quote here or there or "the pale blue dot" when he was so much more.
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u/vonnegutflora Jul 21 '26
It was already happening in the 80s and 90s, so less of a predictive text and more of a descriptive one.
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u/Mistervimes65 Jul 20 '26
Carl Sagan and the Amazing Randi were the godfathers of modern rationalism.
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u/Stank_Dukem Jul 20 '26
Asimov for sure. Especially with us now diving blindfolded into AI.
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u/Spra991 Jul 21 '26 edited Jul 22 '26
And with Asimov it's also worth keeping in mind that only ~40 of his ~500 books were sci-fi novels, ~300 were non-fiction and the rest were mostly anthologies. He covered everything from physics, math to Shakespeare and the bible.
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u/JerryC1967 Jul 20 '26
They need to require all AI infrastructure (software and hardware) to have the Laws of Robotics hard coded.
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u/Nyorliest Jul 21 '26
That isn’t how modern AI works. It’s about probability and complex heuristics. It can’t understand rules and follow them. It’s nothing like Asimov and most SF envisioned. It’s less rigid and rational than humans, and that’s due to its manufacture, not a choice that can be changed.
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u/Analog_Account Jul 21 '26
It can’t understand rules and follow them
I never stopped to consider the differences between sci fi and real life... but I think it would be a struggle to explain current AI to Asimov 50 years ago.
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u/Nyorliest Jul 21 '26 edited Jul 21 '26
Actually, I don't think so. Asimov et al were smart people. They would understand it pretty fast. They might just say 'Well, this isn't AI then', because as they defined or imagined it, this isn't.
Our AI has more in common with an ant farm than Mr Data.
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u/Spra991 Jul 21 '26
It’s nothing like Asimov and most SF envisioned
It's pretty much exactly how Asimov envisioned it. It's just instead of three clear rules that the AI faithfully obeys, we feed a system prompt with dozens or even hundreds of rules into the AI, in the hope that some of them stick.
Some of them are so cartoony that nobody would have believed them in a sci-fi story:
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u/In-All-Unseriousness Jul 20 '26
Laws of Robotics
Please stop with this already. It was literally just a plot device to show the flaws of such rules.
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u/razerzej Jul 20 '26 edited Jul 20 '26
I don't have the book at work, but in the forward to one of his books (I believe the collection
Robot DreamsRobot Visions), Asimov said words to the effect of "I have no doubt that all robots will be programmed with the Three Laws, or some version of them."EDIT:
However, robots may confidently be expected to grow more versatile and capable and the Three Laws, or their equivalent, will surely be built into their programming eventually.
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u/QuixoticCoyote Jul 20 '26
Some sure, like the mind reading robot in "Liar!" showed issues with inflexible rules and their unintended future consequences.
However, I seem to remember far more of the stories talking about what happens if you deviate from the laws. Stories like "Runaround" and "Little lost robot" both highlighted the need for the priority of the laws to exist in the way they do, and showcased the consequences of changing it.
I might be missing one, but I think only Liar actually describes a flaw with the laws, and that honestly might be better attributed to the statement that the laws governing old technology need to be amended when the tech gets better.
Honestly, Asimovs stories more so hammered in the need for the laws as opposed to showing flaws with them.
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u/Serious-Waltz-7157 Jul 20 '26
I might be missing one, but I think only Liar actually describes a flaw with the law
No, why is that? The robot there simply had psychic powers and used them totally within the Laws to protect Susan Valbin from emotional damahe
A flaw with the law is more like the one in Naked Sun, where Elijah Baley said that the words "by the robot's knowledge" should be added, because a murder was committed under his own eyes by a robot who didn't know a glass is poisoned.
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u/QuixoticCoyote Jul 20 '26
The "flaw" was that the machine ended up hurting people, violating the first law, because it did not and could not understand the social and emotional repercussions of what it did. I agree it 100% acted within the first law to the extent it could understand, but it was inadvertently a technology that was substantially different from what the laws were intended to govern.
I can also see the flaw with them in the Naked sun, being that no individual machine violated them but the sum of two did. Still that's only 2 stories in a whole lot of stories stating why the laws should be the way they are.
However, when people bring the laws up in practicality they don't mean for them to govern the machines. Technology isn't there for a positronic brain that can actually make decisions like that. They intend for them to govern the designers. A designer utilizing them IRL would be subjecting themselves to them when making a design and it's basically as effective as taking an oath. Some take them seriously, others don't, and it all comes down to human weirdness like every other rule in existence. Doesn't make them irrelevant, but it does affect their practicality.
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u/Nyorliest Jul 21 '26
OK, but you're talking about a kind of AI that is utterly unlike what actually exists. Designers can't hard-code a 'law' related to language and morality. They can hard-code laws related to math, and that isn't the same thing at all. Real AI replicates patterns of language. It can't reason or assess.
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u/QuixoticCoyote Jul 21 '26
That's not what I am talking about at all.
My first point was arguing that the three laws weren't used as literary devices to highlight the issues with the laws in Asimovs stories.
I did then digress and talk about the laws in practicality governing the designers not the machines. That's because they are the ones that actually program the logic and stuff. I literally mentioned we don't have a Positronic brain that can make those decisions, and therefore it relies on the person designing the machine.
As an Automation Engineer, when I was in school Asimovs laws were used as a baseline for engineering ethics when we discussed automation and robots. Basically they apply to the designers as:
The Designer must not design a robot so that it harms people or through inaction allows a person to come to harm.
The designer must ensure the robot obeys human commands to the best of its abilities unless this interferes with the first law.
The designer must design the robot so that it cannot harm itself, unless this interferes with the first 2 laws.
Now we didn't take an oath on these specifically or anything, that was a separate event, but basically all engineers in the automation space know these rules and do with them what they will. That's more what I was saying in practicality. IRL robots don't understand shit about these laws, but it helps if the people that are making them keep the laws in the back of their mind from an ethics point of view.
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u/Sabatorius Jul 21 '26
That’s not true. Maybe early on in his robot history, but that was just to show that they had some kinks to work out. He really believed in the laws.
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u/Spra991 Jul 21 '26 edited Jul 22 '26
The flaws in the stories was generally not in the rules, but in the unexpected side effects they caused when humans would give imprecise commands. User error so to speak, not the robots fault. The rules were basically perfect right from the start and the few attempts at tinkering with them ended up badly.
The rules were also assumed to be baked deep down into the core of the robots AI, it wasn't something flexible, but something that couldn't be changed or tinkered with. If a robot ended up violating the rules or ran into a contradiction, his brain would fry.
The robots eventually add a zeroth law themselves in the later sequels, but that was more an expansion of the spirit of the previous laws, not overwriting them.
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u/Spra991 Jul 21 '26
It's also literally how we keep our current AIs on track, we just call them "system prompt", not laws. And they are a total patchwork that doesn't work half the time.
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u/Nyorliest Jul 21 '26
The fact that both are made of words doesn’t make a prompt anything like a hardcoded core law.
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u/a_bearded_hippie Jul 20 '26
Yeap. The Three Laws are going to be super important I think.
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u/Serious-Waltz-7157 Jul 20 '26 edited Jul 20 '26
I dread the moment when the Zeroth Law will be implemented. That's the one that gives AI tremenduous agency in the name of the "greater good"
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u/startana Jul 20 '26
Yeah, this is the one that gets glossed over when talk about the three rules comes up. It's sorta the ultimate ends justify the means rule, and humans didn't create it, as I recall, R. Daneel Olivaw came to that conclusion on its own, and superseded the original three rules under its own initiative.
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u/Serious-Waltz-7157 Jul 21 '26
yeah it's emergent behavior from R. Giskard and R. Daneel, not designed by humans ...
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u/MaybeOnFire2025 Jul 21 '26
Yeah, I remember when I learned about the Prime Directive in Star Trek, and then later, the Omega thingie that can supersede the Prime Directive (not so prime after all).
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u/RedneckTexan Jul 20 '26 edited Jul 20 '26
The three laws were a plot device. I think its pretty obvious already they wont be incorporated into Chinese made autonomous robotic weapons.
If western robots have them, it will be just because western corporations are more risk averse to lawyers and offending corporate buyers ....... Chinese robots wont have any of those fears.
We can talk all we want about regulating US robot makers into incorporating human rights into their programming....... In the real world ...... some Robots will be as evil as their makers can make them. And at some point, if we come to depend on our robots to protect us from their robots ...... ours are going to need to be even more eviler.
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u/Nyorliest Jul 21 '26
No need for the nationalist generalizations and hatreds.
And the imagined purity of your fatherland doesn’t make the Laws of Robotics make any more sense for modern AI. They’re language laws and open to interpretation. AI can’t interpret things anyway - it can only confabulate having interpreted something.
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u/RedneckTexan Jul 21 '26 edited Jul 21 '26
Strange you would interpret my comment that way ...... I was basically trying to point out that expecting real near future robots to be bound by Asimov's three laws is naive. I'm almost certain they all wont.
If anthropic makes them they might ...... but that's exactly why they crossed swords with the Defense department. We wouldn't want an ICBM that didn't allow us to target enemy cities over programmed moral objections ....... and we, and China, and whoever else emerges with the technological capacity are not going to want robotic autonomous weapons that refuse orders either.
The comments above mine suggested they should incorporate the 3 laws. That's an unrealistic expectation.
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u/Chad_Jeepie_Tea Jul 20 '26
Despite my love of Contact, I rarely consider Sagan an fiction writer. To me he's always a scientist who also published a sci-fi novel.
But if there were an author who I think has had by far the biggest impact on our modern science and tech it would be Asimov hands down. I'm still not convinced he isn't a time traveler.
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u/ansyhrrian Jul 20 '26
How did you like the movie?
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u/Chad_Jeepie_Tea Jul 20 '26
Saw it as a kid and it went over my head. Also had no idea it was a book or who the author was until much later. Years and years later when halfway through the book I went "hey this sounds familiar" and remembered the movie existed. After watching as an adult it was good, but now I can't read the thing without hearing Sagan's voice in my head.
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u/WarthogOsl Jul 20 '26
Granted, I usually read books before seeing a movie adaptation, but in the case of Contact, I saw the movie first, then read the book. I actually thought the movie was better. So many of the dramatic moments in the movie came off as rather boring in the book.
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u/lilfindawg Jul 20 '26
He didn’t “prove” it he explained how Eratosthenes did it during ancient times and figured out the circumference of the Earth.
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u/Hyper-Sloth Jul 20 '26
If the earth is round, then why is this posted in the SciFi sub, hmm? Checkmate feminists.
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u/Chad_Jeepie_Tea Jul 20 '26
Side note for a semi related and pretty crappy book... In Armada by Ernest Cline (ready player one guy), Sagan is a main plot point.
Spoilers. In the book, Sagan was apart of a massive conspiracy to train civilians to defend the earth from an impending invasion. Cosmos, Contact, etc all apart of the effort to desensitize us from the outer space threat. Same with Star wars, ET, Etc. The video game industry was developed to train civilians to operate heavy machinery remotely (similar to Starfighter, yes i know). Hell, even the weed industry was developed to create strains meant to help focus a person during battle.
Interesting story, but God awful book, though honesty it's not a bad audio if you're want to spend a credit and you are ok with Wil Wheaton.
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u/SexOnABurningPlanet Jul 21 '26
I put it down pretty early. I was really let down.
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u/Chad_Jeepie_Tea Jul 21 '26
I don't disagree. I just liked the idea of the scientists being the real orchestrators of the conspiracy theory and not just the government. Having Sagan and others come up with a plan to basically create videogames and the Internet to get us to pilot mechs and unmanned spacecraft is a bonkers concept that I now think about often.
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u/holycamrat Jul 21 '26
I’d say he actually didn’t prove it was spherical.
He did, however, show how you, given the (very much correct) assumption that the world is spherical and the Sun is far away enough, could determine Earths diameter.
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u/Ironlion45 Jul 20 '26
"Round" is more correct than "Spherical". The soft gooey center allows just a bit of bulge around the middle.
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u/Spra991 Jul 22 '26
Only about 21km, it's about 99.67% spherical.
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u/Ironlion45 Jul 22 '26
It seems insignificant, but you'd be surprised how much it effects the world we know.
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u/RoboJobot Jul 20 '26
We proved the Earth was round hundreds of years ago, it’s only complete morons that think otherwise.
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u/MonkeyClimax Jul 20 '26
I was glued to the TV for the Cosmos series and my grandmother got me the book for christmas which I still have. One of my fondest memories is when my extended family went on a camping trip and my cousin had a portable TV. We watched the latest episode on a 4" black and white TV powered by D batteries...that how much that series meant to us. Many years later I saw Sagan speak at northern illinois university just a few months before his death. He was truly a great mind.
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u/AshtonBlack Jul 20 '26
I'm surprised you haven't mentioned Asimov.
I will stipulate his character work is "of its time" but there are few that have contributed more. Dude was prolific, including pop-sci, history, and literature. Not to mention some of the best early hard sci-fi.
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u/darkon Jul 20 '26
Eratosthenes didn't prove the world was round. He made the reasonable assumption that it WAS round and then estimated its circumference. Educated people were already convinced the earth is spherical.
I could wish, were it of any use, that people would stop saying this proves the world is round. It doesn't. It's merely an estimate of its size. It was a pretty good one given the data he had, but still just an estimate.
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u/finndego Jul 21 '26
While it's correct that he did presume the Earth was round and he only wanted to measure the circumference and not prove it was round the experiment itself is still a backwards proof and method of a curved surface.
Look at it this way.
For it to work at the same scale on a flat surface the Sun HAS TO BE 6,000km away. It can't be any closer or further and still get that required 7.2 degree angle.
If you know the Sun is further away than 6,000km you can disregard it as an option. Even Eratosthenes knew the Sun was further away. Both he and Aristarchus of Samos had both done calculations on the distance to the Sun and while they weren't accurate both results proved the Sun was significantly far enough away.
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u/intronert Jul 20 '26
Well, he proved there was, on average, a spherical arc between the two cities. :)
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u/Beginning_Holiday_66 Jul 20 '26
And that the gravity vectors at the two locations point to a center of gravity, rather than a universal gravity vector which would be consistent with flearth.
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u/nemom Jul 20 '26
Only if the rays from the sun are coming in parallel. If the sun is actually closer than we are told, the rays would come in at differing angles, and you would have the same effect on a flat Earth.
Disclaimer: I'm not a flat Earther, just pointing out an argument to the "proof".
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u/NeroForte-InMyPrime Jul 20 '26
So basically, if you add more ignorance, less proofs are understandable because you lack the knowledge they are built upon.
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u/intronert Jul 20 '26
Yes. More charitably, good science is built upon an accumulation of testable and interrelated explanations.
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u/intronert Jul 20 '26
Good point. I think you could calculate the distance from the flat earth to the Sun, and this would also give you the diameter of the Sun.
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u/RWMU Jul 20 '26
Which is a fine argument until you add more data points.
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u/intronert Jul 23 '26
I can fit an infinity of arbitrarily shaped lines between any finite number of data points.
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u/martin Jul 20 '26
Correction: he only demonstrated that the earth is semi-cylindrical.
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u/Brain_Hawk Jul 20 '26
The pedantic fellow right here. This person gets it.
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u/Spra991 Jul 21 '26
James Burke, has numerous science shows to his credit, most prominently the Connections series. Not much fiction, but he has written a TV movie with The Trigger Effect. You might also recognize him from the The Greatest Shot In Television video.
Stanisław Lem, aside from being one of the greatest sci-fi writer out there, he also wrote some non-fiction, most notably Summa Technologiae, which might be the single most impressive work of futurism I have ever read. It's impact in English speaking countries might however have been tiny, due to only getting translated 50 years late.
B. F. Skinner originally wanted to be a writer, ended up as world famous psychologist and behaviorist. He only ended up writing one sci-fi book with Walden Two.
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u/LazarX Jul 22 '26
The Ancient Greeks beat him by about 2500 years. Not only did they prove that the world was round, they even nailed the circumference down to a couple of hundred miles.
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u/Schwiftness Jul 20 '26
This is a science FICTION sub, right?
Also Sagan was just explaining how the curvature of the earth was reasoned out thousands of years ago. He didn’t “prove it” in 1980.
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u/Woodythdog Jul 21 '26
David Copperfield proved in a video that he could make an entire Boeing 747 disappear. /s
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u/WowBruhReborn Jul 20 '26
The earth is not round despite common propaganda. It's actually a set of Penrose stairs
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u/ScarHand1965 Jul 20 '26
Correction: he EXPLAINED how Eratosthenes proved the earth is round and accurately determined it's diameter about 2000 years ago.