As meager as they are, these observations hew close to ones that first appeared in 2013 work of fiction, the novel Proxima by the author Stephen Baxter-a book that describes the human exploration and colonization of a remarkably similar world around Proxima Centauri centuries from now. Additionally, they suspect it might be tidally locked, meaning the world eternally turns the same face to its star, leaving its trailing hemisphere forever shrouded in night. Astronomers presently know little more than the planet’s estimated mass-perhaps just a third greater than Earth’s-and its orbital distance from its star, which is slightly more than seven million kilometers.

More recently, the most obvious example of real and fictional history aligning is last month’s announcement of Proxima b, a newly discovered and potentially Earth-like planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, our solar system’s nearest neighboring star. In such self-fulfilling prophecies dreams become reality as other people, inspired by an author’s visionary extrapolations, seek to confirm or refute them. Similarly, the fact that the Apollo 11 command module was named “Columbia” was not coincidence-it was directly inspired by Verne’s capsule, called Columbiad, which was shot from a giant cannon in Tampa rather than a rocket launchpad in Cape Canaveral. Wells’s nuclear bombs were very different from the ones eventually built, although the physicist Leo Szilard did read the book about a year before conceiving of the nuclear chain reactions that made real atomic weaponry possible. In Verne’s book and in actual space history three astronauts launched to the moon from Florida and returned by splashing down in the Pacific Ocean, all in a cramped capsule named for Columbus.ĭespite outward similarities, however, reality never seems to truly repeat these imaginary histories-instead, it merely rhymes. Wells’s vision of nuclear war from 1914’s The World Set Free or Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon, which in 1865 predicted many key features of the Apollo 11 lunar landing.

Sometimes reality’s similarity to an author’s imaginings can be downright eerie such as H. Never display translations Registered users can choose which translations are shown.One of the underappreciated thrills of reading science fiction is the possibility, however unlikely, that some far-out fiction will eventually prove to be at least partial fact-its wild speculation maturing over time until, like fine wine forgotten in a cellar, it is finally remembered and savored.

Time by stephen baxter