: Re: The role of inexplicable events in hard science fiction The modern world has few true mysteries, among them the fate of the Roanoke colonists and the crew of the Mary Celeste but do such happenings

@Speyer920

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First off, may I suggest a post I did many years ago on WorldBuilding: What's the smallest change to physics required to allow magic?. I think the first step to answering your question is to unseat the assumption that things could ever be boring.

The next thing that I'd recommend would be looking at the Self. Science and technology cannot completely define the Self, because the preferred languages for scientific or mathematical descriptions break down when dealing with many of the attributes we associate with the Self. You'd have to pioneer new languages to describe things before the Self ever got boring.

Chaos is another interesting topic. Chaos and other "topologically mixing" phenomena. They make it very difficult to figure out what happened after the fact. You pretty much have to observe it as it is happening. If I gave you all the weather information you could process starting January 1, 2000 and ending December 31, 2000, you still could not do a good job of predicting whether it had been raining or shining Dec 1, 1999.

Also, there are limits to processing and storage. Consider that the internet currently stores around 1200 petabytes. That's basically all the harddrives hooked up to the internet. Many internet backbones are now 100G lines, meaning they transmit 100 Gigabits per second. If you run the numbers, any one of those backbones could "fill" our entire storage capacity in 3 years. And there are a lot of backbones. Most of that data has to simply... vanish. We lose it. It's gone forever. It's job is done.

All you need is for some of those lost bits to acquire newfound importance, and you have a mystery already.

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