Rise of the robot age
QUESTION Was the word robot coined by a science fiction writer? What other words have been introduced into the language via sci-fi? MANY people attribute the word ‘robot’ to the famous sci-fi author Isaac Asimov. His 1941 story Liar! contains the first recorded use of the word robotics.
However, the first time ‘robot’ was used was in the play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), written by the Czech author and dramatist Karel Capec in 1920, but set in a future 1950. The word comes from the Czech robota, meaning slave or forced labour.
The play was produced in English in 1923 and tells the story of a remote island where the robots were made.
They are indistinguishable from humans, but only do the more menial tasks.
Eventually they gain intelligence and human emotions, and fed up with their servile existence, they rebel and destroy their masters. However, the robots can’t reproduce and only exist for 20 years, so you can imagine the result.
I remember hearing R.U.R. as a boy on BBC radio on Saturday Night Theatre in the Forties. Graham Lench, Stoke-on-Trent,
Staffs. MANY terms have been introduced by the fertile minds of sci-fi writers. The term ‘parallel universe’ was coined by one of the pioneers of science fiction, War Of The Worlds author H G Wells.
In his 1923 novel Men Like Gods, a man is transported to Utopia and told: ‘We conceive ourselves to be living in a parallel universe to yours, on a planet the very brother of your own.’
Cyberspace, meaning the online world of computer networks and especially the internet, is one of those words that has quickly travelled from science fiction into the mainstream. It was coined by the author William Gibson in his 1982 short story Burning Chrome.
The concept of the computer virus is a clever verbal analogy between biological viruses and self-replicating computer programs. It was first used by Dave Gerrold in his 1972 story When Harlie Was One.
A worm – a self-replicating computer program – was named by John Brunner in his 1975 novel Shockwave Rider.
Charlotte Walker, Ely, Cambs. QUESTION Would it be illegal to breed and release wolves into the wild in Ireland? IT’S well over 200 years since Ireland last had wolves; in recent years, there has been much talk of reintroducing them, but no followup. In theory, wolves could be bred and released here, but in practice, it’s unlikely ever to happen.
The only way that people can see wolves in Ireland is when they are kept in captivity, for instance at Dublin Zoo, which has long had a tradition of keeping wolves.
Ireland’s wolf tradition goes back to prehistoric times. The earliest carbon dating for wolf remains was on the skeletal remains of wolves found in Castlepool Cave, near Doneraile, north Co. Cork, in recent years. These remains were dated to 34,000BC.
So prevalent were wolves in prehistoric times that one of the main reasons for building ring forts all over the country was to stave off wolf attacks.
But coming closer to the present day, by the first half of the 17th century, the wolf population was down to between 400 and 1,000. The bulk of anti-wolf legislation was brought in during the Cromwellian occupation in the 1650s. The last wolf reputed to have been killed in Ireland was a female killed in Co. Carlow, near Mount Leinster, in 1786, because it had been killing sheep.
The last wolf in Ireland came 300 years after wolves had been banished from England and a century after they had been wiped out in Scotland.
Today, in mainland Europe, from Spain right across to Poland, wolves are still quite numerous.
Close on 20 years ago, concerted efforts were made to reintroduce wolves to the Highlands of Scotland, but this came to nothing because of opposition by sheep farmers, afraid for their flocks.
The most recent effort to reintroduce wolves cross-channel came in March 2017, when the Wildwood Trust brought a pack of six wolves from Sweden to its 80-hectare parkland site in east Devon. The aim was to see if they could adapt to living in Britain.
These days, it’s suggested that the only countries in Europe without resident wolf populations are Ireland, Britain, the Netherlands and Denmark. Proponents of the reintroduction of wolves into Ireland claim that if the animals were once again living here, it would bring many benefits to natural ecosystems. In theory, there’s no reason why wolves couldn’t be bred and released here, but it remains a fanciful notion.
One of the reasons why the reintroduction of wolves here is such a remote possibility is that the number of areas where they could live is so limited. Our largest national park is Glenveagh in Co. Donegal, which covers 170 square kilometres. It’s one of six national parks in the State and the National Parks & Wildlife Service remains chronically underfunded.
Yellowstone National Park in the US, where wolves were reintroduced in 1995, covers a vast area: 9,000 sq km. When there was talk of reintroducing wolves to Scotland, the Cairngorms National Park was suggested as a habitat, since this covers over 4,500 sq km. Our national parks, by compari- son, are small, probably far too small for reintroducing wolves.
People in favour of bringing back wolves had their hopes raised falsely earlier in 2017 by a report in the Wicklow News. It said that an organisation called HOWL, short for Hibernian Organisation of Wolves in the Landscape, was proposing the small-scale reintroduction of wolves, with a pilot project planned for the Wicklow Mountains National Park. This organisation said that bringing wolves back could have many benefits, including as an added attraction for tourists traversing the Wild Atlantic Way. But this issue of the Wicklow People was dated April 1, 2017, so it was soon clear that this was a classic April Fool’s stunt.
The only way people in Ireland can see wolves is in captivity. In March, 2016, Dublin Zoo brought in eight grey wolves from Osnabruck Zoo in Germany: an alpha male, an alpha female and their offspring. Dublin Zoo had reintroduced wolves back in 1985, after a 40-year absence, when it introduced two male and two female timber wolves.
However, the notion of rearing wolves for release into the wild in Ireland remains a purely theoretical idea, highly unlikely to ever be put into practice.