Will science fiction films become reality?

Obviously, we're already enjoying modern technological marvels that just a few decades ago were mere flights of fantasy in popular science fiction films. Personal computers. Portable communication devices. Vessels that can transport us into space. Cloning. We're even making significant headway on flying cars.

A few months ago, I attended a presentation at IdeaFestival here in Louisville on the imperative need to colonize other worlds, lest humanity be wiped out before it gets the opportunity. The presenter was J. Richard Gott, a leading physicist from Princeton University, and he talked interestingly about how using the Copernican principle and simple math, one can predict with 95% confidence when something will begin and end. The span of time is usually pretty large, but he demonstrated that his formula has been correct for everything he's applied it to so far... from Broadway musicals to the Berlin Wall.

That said, his prediction for the end of humanity indicates that it would occur sometime between 5,100 years and 7.8 million years from now. A long time off, but considering that the relative age of the Earth hovers at around 4.5 billion years, we're a speck on the floor of Earth's history. Even the dinosaurs lasted about 165 million years (and probably would have endured longer), so it's entirely possible that we won't be so fortunate.

So anyway, this got me thinking. We as humans have come to believe that we're capable of overcoming insurmountable obstacles and achieving great things. And although we've proven this many times in our short duration, perhaps we've also come to believe that we'll go on making advancements in science, medicine, and technology till the end of time -- as our science fiction suggests.

Is this true? Will humanity persevere long enough to see deep space travel, teleportation, interplanetary colonization, time travel, and all the stuff now commonplace in science fiction films? Or will we die off before we get there?

How much more of the wonders we dream up in science fiction will we actually live to make into reality?

The thing is, even IF we do reach the point of deep space travel it would take a REALLY, REALLY long time to go anywhere 'worthwhile'. So then you say "what about lightspeed travel?"
I am not a physicist or anything, but I know that when traveling in light speed, if it is indeed possible, than time travels at a different speed for you, so what would take you 2 days L.S. will in fact have lasted maybe a week for the people back on earth (that's not even remotely close to the actual time variance, but it is a good enough example as im too lazy to find out what it really is.) Besides, the nearest star, (besides our sun :P ) is Alpha Centauri and is ~ 4.4 lightyears away, so traveling at the speed of light, it would still take approximetly 4.4 years just to get there.
5,100 years to 7.8 million years... who's to say we will last that long, at the rate we keep on multiplying and putting waste into our atmosphere, we wont last nearly half that IMO.

The perfect Utopian society with all the cures and perfect technology, maybe one branch of Sci-fi, but it doesn't encompass the whole thing. There is apocalyptic sci-fi, Dystopian, anti-Utopian and many other branches with less... optimistic futures, and I believe those ones are far more likely to take place at the rate/ direction humanity is heading now.

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"Somewhere between 5,100 and 7.8 million years" is one hell of a ballpark! A prediction like that is so vague as to be useless--like "predicting" a newborn baby will die sometime in the next 500 years.

One can "predict" anything if you give 'em enough wiggle room. One of the earliest silent films was about a successful moon-shot (literally, using a cannon to fire a manned projectile into space) so one might say it "accurately" predicted that man would get to the moon someday. But it totally missed on the means of transportation and the power used and on what would be found by the first explorers--it showed plants, creatures, and the astronauts walking around on the moon in their street clothes with no breathing apparatus. So it really was more of a "flight of fancy" than a prediction.

Science fiction films may look more believeable today because most of the science is simply an extenson of the familar. We have seen moonwalks and men in space; we have seen atomic powered submarines and jets and rockets and people exploring the ocean depths. But I don't think today's science fiction films are any better about predicting the realities of the future than were films that were around before you or even I was born.

My favorite so-called science fiction films are the cartoons and documentaries made back in the 1930s-1950s that showed the period concept of the "house of the future." But everything is a Goldfarb complicated and extended version of things they were familar with in those times: example, in the future a toaster would not only toast your bread but also butter it and put it on the plate. Automation and robotics seemed always to be featured prominently in homes of the future. According to some of those films, we should by now be commuting to work in flying cars or strap-on rockets. Some pictured upright vacumn cleaners either self-operated or run by a robot that would clean our houses. I don't remember ever seeing anything like those small prototype vacumns of today that are capable of going under furniture, because the computers they were familar with in the early 20th century were powered by electric tubes, not transistors. They visualized mechanical typewriters that were voice operated, but not the PCs that have replaced typewriters, storage cabinets, snail-mail, libraries, and lord knows what else today. None of them predicted microwave and convection ovens or even the very international mix of foods we eat today.

I don't think it's so much a case as us "dying off" as it is that nearly all of that is physically impossible. Especially teleportation where molecules are disassembled and then reassembled--do you really believe any living organism would still be alive if it were converted into some sort of electric charge and shot through space? If we can't survive in space in our present form, why would we survive if reduced to the simplest form of life?

As for colonization, some films predict the colonization of the seafloor, which is possible and would be more easily done than colonizing Mars today. Yet there has been no widespread serious move to do so.

Time travel is also out. Read sometime what Einstein theorized about time travel. In a nutshell, as I recall it, he said that at some point in the process, time begins to slow and that stretches and distorts space--and whatever is in it. Anyhow, the basic idea is if that one traveled through time or entered a wormhole in space, one literally would be pulled apart.

Einstein also pretty well took care of the chances for deep-space travel, since the parts of the universe beyond the small group of planets circling our sun are so far away that distance is measured in light yars--the distance one can reach if traveling at the speed of light for a whole year. And since only light travels at the speed of light, it's not likely a human--or any other humanoid--can reach that speed without being converted into a light beam. Even then, we're talking about distances in the hundreds, thousands, millions and more light years away. What would one pack for a 200-year trip to another planet? Would it matter, since one would have died of old age or worse prior to arrival.

Maybe we should concentrate on patching up the raft we're on rather than dream about swimming the Pacific because a better raft may be out there--somewhere.

If spacetravel does become common in the future, I think it would turn out more like the human survivors in Wall-E.

Not to be a total spoilsport, I imagine there will be many scientific and engineering developments that Hollywood has never imagined that will make life on earth better in the future. But the bottomline is all things end. Nothing lasts forever. Humanity may run but it can't hide from it's ultimate fate.

Some science fiction will become reality, sure. Lots of it won't. Lots of older films and TV series seemed to suggest that, was time went on, we'd become more centralized; big, hub-like buildings. Standard human "uniforms." All those things seem cheezy now. Not only has this not yet happened...we've moved in the opposite direction. Far from conforming, individuality seems, at least in the most developed countries, to be increasingly celebrated and emphasized. Instead of meeting in central locations, we've just found ways to communicate and work from where we already are.

Things haven't gotten bigger, they've gotten smaller. Media and content have become increasingly niche-based and personalized. It's like the the whole Ma Bell thing; they chose to focus on long-distance, but it was the last 10 feet to the house that was valuable. What's valuable now isn't the one-show-fits-all-model, but something increasingly personalized and focused.

I digress. The point of this is not only that science fiction has gotten so much wrong, but that sometimes it's wrong in ways that it hasn't even conceived of. It hasn't just been wrong about how fast we'll get to one destination or another, but about the very direction we've gone in. It's wrong in ways we usually can't even guess.

I think this is something most medicore fiction does; it assumes that, whatever we have, we will have MORE. So, if we have cars, eventually we'll have faster, flying cars to go to work with. Only the exceptional stories think to ask whether or not we'll still need to go anywhere in the first place.

I do wonder about the limits of science. History suggests that there are none, and that the march forward will continue. In some sense, this is probably right, but only because, if we hit some kind of wall, we'll just do something else. As much as the evidence for us achieving any given goal eventually seems overwhelming, I still don't know if we'll ever be able to, say, create genuine artificial intelligence, or travel at the speed of light. We might not have limits, but what if the Universe does?

In retrospect, this post doesn't have a whole to do with fiction. Sorry for that. The only thing about fiction I can say is that it's going to get more wrong than right, and when it's wrong, it's often going to be wrong in the most fundamental of ways.

Also, we'll never have flying cars. Time for us all to let that one go.

The Sci-Fi classic Soylent Green has already come true. If you know how to read between the lines of the ingredients list of a Slim Jim™ brand meat stick you may be surprised to find they are comprised largely of human flesh and organs. And while some small percentage of the processed meat will indeed be from men named James, they do not specifically target only the corpses of "Jims", nor even exclusively male specimens and the numbers of actual Jims in a Slim Jim is negligible. That much of the urban legend you may have heard is untrue. Also, the sleekness or girth of the pre-processed corpse has no bearing. You may, in any package, be eating a mixture of hefty Alice, diminutive Charlie, and average-build Jose.

SLIM JIM™ IS PEOPLE!!!

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"Film is a disease. When it infects your bloodstream it takes over as the number one hormone. It bosses the enzymes, directs the pineal gland, plays Iago to your psyche. As with heroin, the antidote to Film is more Film." - Frank Capra

Funny you should mention Soylent Green, actually, because it's a great example of futuristic fiction being spectacularly wrong. It, mirroring the concerns of the day, I suppose, depicted the future as horrendously overcrowded, and the Earth's resources as overtaxed. Of course, these depictions proved to be terribly wrong, as birth rates have levelled off in more affluent societies and we've become better and better at producing and storing food.

Far from being in a world where only the wealthy can afford such rare "luxuries" as meat or strawberries, we apparently now have an "obesity epidemic." Just another example of a crisis-du-jour not only petering out, but having things completely backwards.

Now that's a nugget! Thank you, I never thought of that.

A lot of them, probably. Did you hear that some scientists recently teleported matter a few feet?

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,482264,00.html

(The article is by Faux News, though, so I'm not sure how much of it is true.)

I think in the sense that Pcs, television, home theatre, and interactive entertainment will be merged into a single platform, eventually.

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...uh the post is up there...

There's certainly no denying that this is a vast period of time, and that he's making a broad prediction. But I'm not sure the prediction is the focus so much as the time frame itself, which is quite alarming by itself. The formula is based on the Copernican principle, which theorizes that we're not at the center of the universe, and in fact are probably viewing the universe's duration from beginning to end at somewhere in the middle.

This can be applied to anything. Of course, we could witness the fall of Western society in the next few hours. But there's probably nothing special about today with respect to the continuing existence of Western society. The chances are astronomical. So we're likely looking at its point somewhere in the middle of its entire existence.

If this is true about humanity as a whole, and it probably is (despite the current state of things, humanity is unlikely to end in the next few hours, years, or even decades). And yet, his projected range is still very, very soon.

I'm inclined to say you're right... there's no way any living thing could be disassembled at the molecular level and survive for reassembly. However, the fun of this particular discussion is that you can attach caveats to just about anything. For example, we're well aware that we still don't know anything about various types of matter we've only recently discovered, much less matter we haven't discovered yet. And teleportation is all about how matter reacts to certain changes. Without the whole story, we can't say for sure what is ultimately possible.

Curiously, the physicist/presenter in question has talked about time travel before, and says that because of the same issues you've mentioned, some objects actually experience time travel to the future in tiny ways. For example, it has been observed that moving particles age more slowly than stationary ones. On the human level, certain astronauts who have orbited Earth at high speeds are actually fractions of a second younger than they would have been if they had remained on Earth. This, of course, comes nowhere near the kind of Land of the Lost-time travel we're accustomed to seeing in films, but it's certainly an interesting thought.

And I think this stabs at the heart of the original matter. If our Sun was in no danger of burning out and going supernova, which will at some point consume and destroy our planet, then would we continue to move toward limitless scientific discovery? This is nothing more than supposition, and moving into a social discussion on the viability of humanity to survive on its own. But it's interesting to think that at the end of it all, if you could look back and see that humanity would have eventually achieved, say, deep space travel... if it had only been able to refrain from smothering its own flame so early.

Or maybe that's socially telling enough.

Well who knows. You never know, It could happen one day. I guess time will tell.

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I've got the whole thesis for this thread...

Watch WALL-E, then think about it. Pixar didn't just pull something out of their arses, they actually were thinking logically. The way this world is going, will probably end up like that before long.

Flicks like Minority Report are a little far-fetched, IMO.

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You know, the scene in Wall-E that shows all the hundreds of satellites in orbit around the Earth always struck me as a fun exaggeration for the sake of making a point...

...until I saw the artist rendering released by NASA just a few weeks ago that shows the amount of actual man-made machinery we've put in orbit so far: [CLICK]

Wow.

HA! When I saw that artist's rendering, I couldn't help but think of that scene in WALL-E. Too funny, but all too real.

I need to go back and plus rep several posts, but there's little doubt in my mind that "science fiction" has become reality, and you usually find it coming true in the more "average, everyday" movies than in the new sci-fi ones. Some of the poltically-overtoned sci-fi novels have been mentioned as reflecting present-day politics. (I won't insult your intelligence by explaining which ones, unless you make the request). Anything which involved cloning in the past is basically a reality now, even if it's not quite been taken to the ultimate as of yet. The idea of artificial organs used to be sci-fi, but long ago it passed into reality. Real space exploration, although it's been crimped, was posited in fiction long before it could become a reality. Even the idea of mini-cameras passing through people's bodies was considered in such films as Fantastic Voyage.

I realize that I'm not being totally specific as far as what relates to what, but it's happened and I'll direct you if you need any help.

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It would really suck if I walked up to a T-1000 as I'm walking down the street 20 years from now.

Or it would be really cool if he didn't kill me.

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On Apr. 2, I'll be 66 years old. The projected end of my universe is much, much less than 5,000 years, so it's kinda hard for me to worry about the fate of mankind that far in the future.

Well, that's one way to look at it. Another way is that man has been interested in flight for more than 1,000 years, going back to legends of making wings from feathers and wax and stories of flying carpets. It wasn't the stories that led to airplanes and space rockets--it was man's continued interest and his determination to master the scientific principles and engineering. Remember, too, that Fantastic Voyage wasn't about inserting a camera into the body but rather shrinking a submarine and its crew for both the examination and treatment. I doubt if someone came out of the theater after seeing that movie inspired to invent a camera small enough to insert in a vein. Instead, someone invented fiber optics, and others started wondering, "What other uses can I find for this?"

A lot of smart people in the past have lacked the imagination to visualize our present. Take for instance Malthus who was convinced that the world's population would at some point outstrip its food supply, resulting in massive famine. But he failed to reckon with the development of fertilizer, insecticides, more productive crops, and the use of machinery to expand agriculture far beyond the level of his day. More recently, Karl Marx and others were convinced that the great disparity between the rich and poor would lead to a bloody class war. But they didn't figure on the rise of labor unions and their success in dealing with capitalist factory owners, or the development of a middle class that outnumber both the poor and the rich and who have vested interests in both labor and property.

The Boys from Brazil was not so much about cloning as about society's worse fear of cloning--the use of science and society to create another Hitler or some other monster, which goes far beyond the scientific basis of cloning.

And as for artificial organs and transplants, I don't recall that being a subject for films before medicine had mastered blood transfusions and invented plasma. If science can replace a person's blood, then it's just a matter of time before it can replace a cornea, a knee, a lung, a heart.

Go back to the 1930s-1940s, a period of great upheaval and war--but where are the films of that period that are the equivalent of The Manchurian Candidate and Seven Days in May or even A Face in the Crowd? People didn't start worrying about brain-washing until the word became familar in the 1950s as a result of the Korean War. No one visualized the use of television to influence and dominated the masses until most US households had one. (I would argue that in the 1930s-1940s there were more films about the individual influencing society--Mr. Deeds Goes to Washington, It's a Wonderful Life, Foreign Correspondent--than about being dominated by government or society.) And although H.G. Wells wrote War of the Worlds and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea around the turn of the century, Hollywood didn't make very many submarine and flying saucer films until WWII with submarine warfare or 1949 when the term "flying saucer" was first used. No one did much with rockets, either, until Germany's use of rocket engines to attack England and Belgium.

It seems to me it's more a matter of science fiction using its imagination to streatch reality, rather than creating a new reality from science fiction.

I think it depends how many alien meteors form into a square and attack us. Or something

Who knows on human longevity - and certainly a lot of films peddle classic off-base futurism which'll never happen anyway.

One of the most fascinating recent advances for me though has been the jump taken into Strange Days territory by these guys. And they're aiming to go beyond potentially 'recording' (or at least artificially reconstructing) someone else's perceptions - they're even talking up the possibility of viewing others' dreams!

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And the greenhouse effect kicking in as well, i seem to recall

Skynet is already up and running

There's a hunka good stuff like that preserved at the Prelinger Archive. I've spent many an hour in there. Mainly giggling

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I think science fiction films could become reality someday.
haha. it depends on the scientists. Who knows?
they might invent a car that can fly?