Everything started when we started dreaming. Imagination has
become faster than reality. That twinkling glimmer that was until the recent
past ignored and dismayed as an impossibility, has become a lighthouse that all
decisions follow. Science fiction is no longer fiction, it has become the
epicenter of a fast developing world.
Science fiction is not new. In the 15th century, Leonardo Da
Vinci designed and sketched machines that were impossible to create until the
20th century, much like visionaries of the 20th century imagined inventions
that seem today impossible to co-exist with the laws of physics. We know that
laws of physics mirror the human understanding of how the world works, they are
what the human mind could explain and not what lies beyond the human
understanding.
Imagination is the act of ignoring the laws of physics.
Why we as children excel in imagination is because, as
children, we have little to no regard to laws in general. As we grow up we are
"socialized' and our minds get tamed. Civilized society depends on law
abiding individuals to flourish; breaking rules leads to chaos and decline.
Yet, imagination is a key factor in progress and development on any level and
in any field of life. Creative individuals find solutions. Creative individuals
outperform their colleagues. Creative individuals ignore the rules and thus
have the ability to imagine. Creativity which was for millennia pigeon-holed in
arts, has become a necessity in the information age, a.k.a. digital age.
Creativity is freedom.
It takes a free mind to create an idea that goes against the
laws and every person is somehow creative. Have you never imagined yourself
somewhere else? How many times have you closed your eyes and imagined yourself
on a beach or with people you wanted to be with? It may come as a surprise to
many that the smallest, simplest act of imagination that every human being must
have done so many times in a lifetime, that of imagining yourself somewhere
else, is in fact a very complex theory either of time bending or of multiverse;
i.e. a very advanced vision in the world of physics that assumes we could
travel across time and be in two places at the same moment, or that there
exists infinite parallel universes where every possibility is certain.
This is the core of science fiction: imagining what would
become if the limitations were stretched or if possibilities became certain. It
is imagining the future to be your present and creating a vision of what might
have happened if the impossible was possible. Without the minds that could
stretch limitations there would have been no technology and none of what we
have today could have existed.
People must embrace science fiction just like they embrace
technology and modernity. It is not a sane choice to consider the present to be
the climax of civilization. The climax will always be the future. The future
will always be a vision. The vision will aways be imagined by free minds.
by Nael Gharzeddine
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