Arthur C. Clarke's "2010" still out of our grasp.

I found this article very interesting.

Over the years, we have seen alot of Sci-fi ideas brought to life. Think cell phones, ipods, cloning....

But deep space travel is still out of our reach.

The year 2010 has arrived, but humans have yet to travel out to the gas giants of our solar system as portrayed by Arthur C. Clarke in his book "2010: Odyssey Two" — much less unearth alien artifacts on the moon.

In the book, there is alien life lurking around in our own solar system. It's a great story, because like the late great Crichton, Clarke often backed up his ideas with actual science since he was a scientist as well as a novelist.

In "2010," the lead characters venture out to Jupiter employing spacecraft equipped with "the Sakharov drive," which uses "a pulsed thermonuclear reaction to heat and expel virtually any propellant material." In nuclear fusion, atomic nuclei are forced to fuse together, which can generate an extraordinary amount of power when a fraction of the mass of these atoms gets converted into energy, following Einstein's famous equation: E=mc^2. The Sakharov drive, named after Russian nuclear physicist and political dissident Andrei Sakharov, uses this energy to heat and expel liquid hydrogen and potentially methane, ammonia and even water.

Well, we arent there yet. But we may be soon.
Also, as I mentioned, the book deals with alien life in our own solar system, hidden away.

While "2001" suggest that alien life might exist, "2010" portrayed aliens evolving right in our own solar system, both deep in the atmosphere of Jupiter and the underground oceans of Jupiter's moon Europa. Life on alien moons has long been a staple of science fiction, and the recent sci-fi blockbuster "Avatar" is set on a jungle moon of a fictional planet orbiting the real Alpha Centauri A.

There is also the problem of "hibernation" or "hyper sleep" that the travelers use to acheive a suspended animation while shooting millions of miles away.
We all remember the HAL computer also, that malfunctioned in "2001". While actual AI doesnt really exist yet, there have been advances. There seems to be a constant advancement in computer science, in fact it hasnt slowed down in the past 30 years. Constantly better, and smaller.

I think it is neat that science fiction inspires actual invention.