In Brief:
Science fiction ideas have inspired advances in the real world - remember how Arthur C Clarke predicted modern satellites. In "Most Scientific Fiction Can't Come True" in a 1931 edition of Modern Mechanics magazine, William J Harris considered how the science fiction of the day might become a reality. Space travel Harris thought that the missing piece was to discover how vehicles could withstand the gravitational strain of space. It's not as dramatic as Harris's shape-shifting proposition, but scientists have beamed individual subatomic particles from one side of a lab to the other. Men on stars Harris proposed a more distant human habitat than we've ever considered:
