Back To The Future
Palmer Luckey's Perspective on Historical Futurism
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I love science fiction. I have always been a highly committed daydreamer. In fact, I think daydreaming was a key input that made me initially want to go into filmmaking. I could see the stories in my mind and I wanted to make them a reality. But technology represents the next logical step. First you dream the story, then you tell the story, then you live the story.
My favorite line I've written about fiction came in a piece a few weeks ago, Science Fiction's Dueling Fates:
"The fun thing about fiction is that it is literally boundless. You can do anything. You can make anything happen. Your only boundary is your imagination."
That was just the latest piece from me on science fiction. And, more broadly, my writing has extended from trying to turn science fiction away from dystopia to solutions, how to use science fiction as a product roadmap, applying a healthy dose of self-reflection on what stories we're telling, and finally my magnum opus on the subject: Historical Futurism.
In that piece, I laid out that term, historical futurism, as one that I've used to collect a myriad a future-looking stances from the past. This is how I talked about the concept:
"There's a lot you can learn about the future from looking backward. The future is a relative term. Understanding how the people in the "present day" of the past saw their future, and how it became our "today." One element of using the past to predict the future is making sure that you have a correct understanding of how yesterday's future unfolded to help you understand how things often go."
I can't say too much yet, but I came across a podcast with Palmer Luckey recently that I was surprised I hadn't heard before, given I've listened to, watched, or read over 300 interviews with the founders of Anduril.
In this podcast, turns out Palmer has experienced the benefits of a very similar concept to what I've described as "historical futurism." Here are some of the best excerpts from that interview, paraphrased a bit for flow:
Palmer's Take On Historical Futurism
Palmer starts by talking about the not exactly common idea of creating synthetic long chain hydrocarbon fuel that he had been learning about for a while.
Question
I'm curious how you find ideas like this. How do you weight the potential against the odds of being unable to do anything with it?
Palmer
Well, in this case, it's 1950s era Department of Energy documents regarding potential energy futures for the United States, accounting for what they assumed would be a nuclear future. I always find it interesting when I go into an area that I don't understand to try and understand it better.
If I want to understand what's going on in the modern day, you want to go back to the future and say, what were people saying, back then, what are the ideas that people aren't even discussing right now? Because I don't want to be too pessimistic on present, but if you look through a lot of the academic literature and government literature today on energy solutions for the United States, they're really, really narrow minded.
They are really, really politically driven, it's all about what is aligned with the current debates going on between political parties. The people in these agencies are largely tied to the things that have already been deemed important. And if you go back on the other hand, to let's say, post-World War II America, where we were really thinking from first principles, what do we want the world to look like? What do we want the United States to look like?
I didn't actually have to be a big thinker. I just had to go say, what were people thinking when they were allowed to think whatever they wanted and when they could think really, really big things?
Question
I'm just curious what your method of invention is. So you find an interesting problem either that you want to work in this case, don't want to work on necessarily. Is your method iterative? Is it more theoretical? Describe the way that you start to invent in a field when you approach something for the first time.
Palmer
Well, it depends on if it's a field that I know a lot about or don't know a lot about. If you know a lot about something, it's easier to get right into the iterative side of things and know that you're probably on a pretty reasonable path. In that case, iteration is a valuable tool to move very quickly, find out what works, find out what doesn't and then continuously make it better.
The risk of going with a strongly iterative approach in areas that you maybe don't understand, and you might even think you do, but let's say you truly don't is that there might be much better approaches that you should have started iterating on. Or that you should have examined before you committed to one particular path. It's really about going back to the future. I love to go and see what everyone else who solved this problem thinks about it, not in the recent times.
I don't want to know what my competition looks like because when I started Oculus, I wasn't looking at what existing companies were doing in VR because clearly, they were all doing it wrong. Whatever they were doing was not working. I was not going to look around at the handful of VR companies that existed in that time and learn anything except how to fail. So I wanted to look into the past, what were people thinking when they were thinking bigger, when they were willing to look at wackier paths.
When they were willing to consider things that have been eliminated often because technologies just weren't ready. There's a lot of technologies that have been discarded because they weren't practical at the time, and nobody ever revisited them and said, "Hey, I actually think the time has come." A good example is with the Rift. Doing real-time distortion correction is not a new idea. It existed in the 1980s and 1990s in the virtual reality community. It had been discarded even by NASA.
And most of the things that made the Rift successful were ideas like that, there's a few others where I was just going back to the future and realizing, "Wait a sec, these ideas, they were actually pretty good. They were just a little too early."
Therefore, What?
When I originally wrote about Historical Futurism, I told the story of walking past The Institute For The Future in Palo Alto. I'm no expert on their mission, or other futurist organizations, but my sense is a lot of the science of prediction, forecasting, and futurism revolve more around extrapolating into the future, rather than understanding the past.
What Palmer is describing is a systematic review of past ideas that were ahead of their time. Often, those are in obscure government documents or research reports. But a lot of times they're also tucked into science fiction you've never heard of. Not just Star Wars or Blade Runner, but in something like Stranger in a Strange Land. It may not be mainstream fiction, but its considered one of the books that shaped America.
I recently started watching For All Mankind, thanks to a comment on one of my previous science fiction pieces. What I love about the show is that its not an outlandish future. Its just a thought exercise based on a simple question: what if the United States lost the moon race? And the answer is we would keep going, keep pushing, advance more quickly. Our early win in getting to the moon made us complacent. Progress could have kept up pace if we kept needing to race.
We need more ideas like that. What I've called "Solution Science Fiction" could be benefitted by two things I takeaway from Palmer's comments:
First, we need an organization whose mission it is to catalogue and publicize these ideas that Palmer is describing. Get them a breath of fresh air and more out into the world.
Second, Palmer's point is that today our thinking is too politicized and calcified. He needed to go back to a time when people were thinking bigger, crazier ideas. But there's nothing to stop us from thinking those ideas now.
So let's do both.
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