Luke Burrage on Science Fiction, Time Travel, and Creativity

Luke Burrage, a professional juggler (but hey, aren’t we all?), does one of my favorite podcasts, The Science Fiction Book Review Podcast. His Episode 100, “Science Fiction and Personal Philosophy,” is fascinating–he explains many of his career choices and approaches to life and creativity. He has a long and rambling but interesting discussion–first thirty minutes or so–where he uses the metaphor of how his love of sci-fi and imaginative personal fantasies of time traveling to the past helps explain how he deals with living now. It sounds odd at first but if you get into it, it’s quite interesting. Basically he talks about how if he were transported to some primitive society somehow (time travel; alternate universe; goes into cold sleep and awakens in a future dystopian primitive society), it at first would seem that the advanced knowledge he has would help him to become like a god; or, if he were say put down 50 years ago, to know the trends that are coming — culturally, scientifically, etc.–and to win nobel prizes or fame and fortune. But then he shoots holes in all this and makes a good point that knowledge of this type is not enough. You would not know how to make a TV or transistor (unless you happened to be an expert in that) just because you know about them. You might know DNA is a double helix but would not be able to explain much more beyond this, or prove it. Etc. At most if you lived in the past then you would be a future guy living in the past, and maybe on occasion the extra information you have would come in handy or make you somewhat unique. His point is that he accumulates information now, in the real world, he is in a similar situation–not much different than some future man living among us. And that we ought to always accumulate knowledge and skills and be prepared to use them when the opportunity arises. He goes into a lot about serendipity and helping create your own luck and his ambitions in his career. The part I noted as relevant to IP and information is his implicit if not explicit recognition that good ideas are not enough; you need to execute and be prepared to execute. That is a point many critics of IP have noted, when they rebut claims that we need ownership of ideas, on the grounds that ideas are cheap and easy, and not what you need for success anyway. (BTW Luke’s use of the term “intellectual property” does not, I think, mean patent and copyright, but is just an informal usage common among businessmen to refer to successful ideas, reputation, skills, know-how, etc.)