There’s an ongoing debate among Futurists of whether science fiction is a useful foresight tool or not.

Some fellow futurist argue that today’s’ populist science fiction is all doom gloom, dystopian, blowing up the world and technology running amok, others, including me, see it as the spark of childlike imagination that takes hold in some and causes them to make the impossible possible.

It’s also a tool I use regularly in my workshops and 1 of the 26 modules in my online Futurist Innovation Hack program, imaging big, by shifting our thinking and limitations from the ordinary and known, into the extraordinary and uncomfortably possible.

In this week’s on air chat with MMM Breakfast’s Anthony Tilli we go in search of retro future‘s and look at the influence Science Fiction has had on the origin of many of today’s great inventions:

• Mobile Phones – Start Trek
• Space Travel – Jules Verne 1865 From the Earth to the Moon
• Submarines – 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea – Nautilus manned by Captain Nemo
• Helicopters – Leonardo Da Vinci, Jules Verne’s in Robur the Conqueror
• TV News – Jules Verne’s 1989 article “In the Year 2889” also wrote about skywriting and videoconferencing
• Ear Buds –Ray Bradbury (22/08/1920 – 6/6/2012) had in ear buds called “seashells” in Fahrenheit 451 (1953)
• Credit Cards – Edward Bellamy’s (26/3/1850 – 22/5/1898) book Looking Backward (1887)
• Smart watch – Dick Tracy, James Bond, Star Trek
• Cyborgs – 6 million dollar man
• Skype / Video Chat – Hugo Gernsback 12 part sci-fi novel serial called “Ralph 124 C 41+” written in 1911 for Modern Electrics magazine
• iPad / Tablet – Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
• Fritz Lang’s Woman in the Moon (1929) showed us a rocket taking off to the moon, 28 years before Sputnik attempted it
• Antidepressants – Aldus Huxley Brave New World 1931
• Connected World – Arthur C Clarke “The Space Station”
• Electric Cars – John Brunner in 1969 published “Stand on Zanzibar” also mentioned a Detroit wasteland, decline in marriage replaced with short term hook ups

Listen now (4 minutes 56 seconds):