- advanced handheld medical scanners and treatments
- a genetically engineered human with super strength, health, and intelligence
- suspended animation that keeps humans alive for centuries
- artificial gravity
- faster than light communication and travel
- materials strong enough to maintain structural integrity after falling from space and plowing through a city
- matter transference across light years
I think the issue here is that author only paid attention to the elements that seem familiar, and dismissed the rest as fantasy. Of course handheld communicators and tablet computers were once fantasy too.
So lets take a moment and think about what we see vs what we do.
So if you take the Internet and extend it to its logical next step we've got 20 - 40gbits of bandwidth between everyone and everyone else.
We've got parallel rendering pipelines and physics simulation such that you can render a scene that is indistinguishable from reality to our poor brains, and then you can project all the moving pieces between any group of people.
So in a plausible future everyone is sitting inside a brain jar experiencing a 'shared world' in what is not unlike a giant World of Warcraft type experience, including the ability to do magic, conjure things out of thin air. While nutrients feed what's left of our bodies.
Is that exciting? Does that make for dramatic movies? No. But sadly it is the current path we are on.
That leads to plenty of interesting Asimov like thinking, except instead of AI and Robot, it would be us vs virtual us.
Also what happens with buffer copies, backup. How do you define being human at all ? Or even more basically the very concept of time become weird.
It is not necessary that a virtualised human would not have access to the external world. Maybe you can upload yourself, control animal, why not culturing special type of synthetic bodies for recreation ?
To me that does not look so bad at all, and there is definitively non-boring science-fiction material in there.
I think Star Trek tries to maintain a balance that still looks attainable. Also, perhaps there's a shortage of grandiose discoveries lately. We know the Higgs exists, the universe is flat from WMAP, quantum entanglement is gaining practical use. But this isnt as useable for movies as say discovering that we live in a universe with other galaxies, etc...
I'd agree the space race inspired amazing science fiction that mostly dried up by the end of the 80s in popular culture. Since then it's been super heroes, robots, and reboots.
I think the real issue is that Hollywood isn't interested in developing new franchises, or even stand-alone projects.
Instead, they are content to recycle the same characters, plot lines and assumptions.
Just like Silicon Valley isn't interested in investing in risky technology anymore, Hollywood isn't interested in investing in risky new ideas.
This, more than anything else, is a sure sign that the front-line of history and our collective future is happening somewhere else.
It's difficult to deny, IMO, that human imagination as far as the future is concerned has not dreamed up anything beyond what was conceived by the early grandmasters of science fiction literature and television.
This isn't just a "movie about the future". It's Star Trek. With legacy comes baggage. I'm sure there's a small encyclopedia detailing the available technology at the time the movie takes place, as well as potentially canonical books, stories, graphic novels, etc. In this context, the writers have limited wiggle room in which to dream up "tomorrow's technology".
On the flipside, it's also a bit inspiring to see that some of that which was considered sci-fi less than a generation ago is now hum-drum reality.
Will we see VGER? The monolith from 'Voyage Home' (ST4) must make an appearance, right? I mean we have to assume that whales are still extinct in the alternate timeline. Will Praxis explode resulting in 'Undiscovered Country' (ST6)?
While earlier in time than those (and even TOS), its a sequel to most of those (NextGen and DS9 certainly, I don't recall if Voyager has a necessary relationship at all), and not a prequel to anything that has previously come out (film or TV) in the franchise. [1]
Prior to seeing Star Trek, I watched Oblivion, which seemed to me full of futurism -- it had a ship that had a novel (to modern cinema) ship design, 'drone' design, antagonist design. I think we live in a world that is quickly gaining the capability of creating our ideas, so those things that were fantastical in the 70s but trope today are not as easy to devine today.
I was just thinking the other day that I sincerely enjoy how Scifi is quickly becoming a mainstay of modern film, because it means more scifi films to invent some novel idea of the future. You really should not be basing your assumptions of modern cinema off of a remake.
In terms of derivative sci-fi, I think Oblivion really reinforces the author's point.
America post-WWII worked and studied its ass off. Then it defeated the Soviets. You ask people today though, what they think of the future, and I think that the picture is bleak not merely because of the economic malaise, but because people don't know what to strive for.
In a competitive sense, who are we fighting? Our ostensible enemies are (1) the lunatic fringe of Islam and maybe also Christianity, and (2) China/India, depending on who looks more fearful in any given year, except the West also trades and intermarries with those cultures. I think the kicker is that Westerners don't even fetish after Chinese and Indians the way they used to.
Now in a purely constructive sense, what does the future hold? Well we've already seen that the tech industry simply isn't providing jobs for most people the way that manufacturing did. And why should it? Lets face it, our culture is not one that really values math or science or engineering. Most of you weren't popular when you were kids, am I right? It's not nice to hoard all of the pie, but it's not easy to share it on these terms either. The best programmers are supposedly 10x-100x better than the average ones, so even if more people did get into tech, they'd probably be discouraged and see it to be insurmountably difficult, and they might be right.
Tech has increased the productivity of workers in the West, but it has not necessarily increased the well-being of the average person, and that's what cinema was originally made for. It is a mass media. It caters to the common man, and the common man probably thinks better of the past than the future. I think it isn't surprising then that the latest Star Trek actually feels strangely like a retro-future, or that the tech in it is just shiny polished toys. I think that's the real danger here, that in tech, we will simply just relegate ourselves to making shiny toys for people, and all they do is consume. That's probably not the path to a healthy future for our society.
It may be instructive to look at a series like Firefly, or even BSG. When people are feeling down, they want to be empathized, and Firefly assuages that in a way. In the future, even if things all go to hell, some people will still make it out, by the ties they share and their ingenuity.
2000-2010 was the greatest decade in all of human history for upraising the standard of living of the human race as a whole. The attitude in this entire comments thread sickens me.
When I was born two big countries had nuclear weapons pointed at each other with the very realistic possibility of exchange. Everything we built could be eradicated in an hour or two. We are quite better off.
The original Star Trek blew my mind -- warp speed, teleportation, colored people on the bridge! Even TNG had the replicators and the AI computer and Data. What do we get now? Tired, topical tropes of terrorists and characters recycled from the Wrath of Khan. For a recycled franchise, there isn't anything mind-blowingly new.
It's an action-oriented big-budget Star Trek blockbuster - you go to see spaceships crashing into each other. Intelligent sci-fi rarely sells enough tickets to justify a budget in the hundreds of millions.
I don't really like the reboot either (wrong tone entirely if you ask me) but you can't say you could expect much after the first, right?
Another vision of the future might be excessively biological. Sci-fi authors have depicted bio-engineered worlds, but cinema doesn't seem to do much with the idea. An old favorite of mine in this area is 'Existenz' by David Cronenberg, but then bio has always been his thing.
Cinema can also do a lot depictions of the future that seem flat out impossible today. For example, imagine identity being fragmented such that people can simultaneously be and experience life in many places at once. I'm not sure how that would ever be possible, but maybe it doesn't have to be explained. It could just be a piece of technology that appears to as as magic, much like a teleporter.
The coming next generations of technologies may well remake our species is ways that make everyday experience difficult to understand and distracting to narrative story. They may be intellectually interesting, but it would be difficult in a movie. From third paragraph illustrates the point.
I do like your first point, with respect to Star Trek. Certainly we can have both minimalism and exotic baroque lushness, sitting side by side.
I myself have a preference/hope to live in the universe that Peter Hamilton conjures up in Pandora's Star. Its everything that got me into Star Trek as a kid and so much more. That is just one of many books that give me hope for our near and distant future and what could be...even if a bunch of it seems as far from reality for us as iPhones were in 1969.
It just doesn't make for good cinema.
Beyond that, the Borg definitely make for good cinema.
Lots of wrong in that post ;)
That's the present, not 100 years in the future.
> Beyond that, the Borg definitely make for good cinema.
Not if we're the Borg.
Personally, I think the fact that you didn't even notice the more world-changing advances in the background to be a credit to the movie; a world like that was so believable that you didn't even notice how far away it actually is.
From a SF big-picture sort of movie archetype, this stuff seems pretty tired, thin and boring. I think we are only beginning to understand the societal implications of the first two waves of digitization, and even the most hardcore dystopia hasn't yet captured all the avenues of the third. Seems to me, Hollywood can only make blockbusters profitable, and the type of SF that we are envisioning now is a lot more subtle.
On finishing the article... I'm closer to siding with the author. I don't know if it's the rational-rather-than-nostalgic way it's written or what, but it does make me feel like we're selling ourselves short, and it definitely wakens an old question: What might the future look like, if it changes as much as we've seen things change since that venerable original series?
I don't think looking to the tech industry is fair; that is and always has been about business. But Hollywood is sticking to the safe franchises even more than they ever have with the advent of comic book movies (another thing I've enjoyed some of, but they've been done to death several times over). There have been some really good science fiction series in the last decade, but in the vein of this article, I can't really think of any that really pushed the envelope in terms of futurism with technology.
I actually find this a bit more inspiring than morbid, though. What could be coming? Childlike wonder, here I come! :)
Disclaimer: I have not yet finished the series, it is animated, it does not seem to have the type of accuracy that GitS has (but still interesting!), it stars kids, and is somewhat family friendly.
Goku Midnight Eye Cyber City Oedo AD Police
Think about how outdated a bat signal is, why can't batman check for tweets?
1. It's inherently asymmetric (Batman can observe the message but messengers cannot observe him).
2. It's highly unlikely to be forged.
2.) I'm pretty sure that what seemed like a good third of the sixties Batman TV show episodes involved Batman showing up to the Bat Signal only to have it have been a trap. (and yes, I consider the TV show to be the canonical Batman).
There are other inspirations out there. Hannu Rajaniemi's maths/crypto heavy scifi draws gives us a glimpse of new ways to think about personality, privacy and culture. The Fountain's future parallel provides a very different view of a potential space traveller, and Isaac Asimov's collective work spans so many cultural diversions that have fallen out of fashion just waiting to be re-imagined.
Forget hoverboards and dick tracy watches, Star Trek still has plenty of imaginitive technologies that don't yet exist. Between cold fusion, warp drive, teleporters, transcoders, etc... there is still plenty of good tech to make an entertaining movie with.
"Matrix style" is already here, it just doesn't use a giant SO-239 in the back of the head.
More apropos of the topic at hand: sure, the current version of Trek could be said to be lazy in its futurism. And futurism was certainly a big part of the original Star Trek. This is, after all, the series that gave us such geek staples as the replicator, the transporter, phasers, warp nacelles, and so forth. Even the "cell phones" used in the show were, back in the '60s, freaking crazy by the standards of their day. In a very real sense, yes, it's a crying shame that the new interpretation of Star Trek is not making the bold leaps forward that its predecessor did.
On the other hand, this new interpretation of Star Trek is an attempt at returning an increasingly greying, idiosyncratic, and narrowing universe to a broad audience. It's about mass appeal. It's about emotional storytelling. In some respects, I don't fault Abrams's Trek for not reveling in futurism the way the original Trek did. Abrams has very different strategic goals in mind.
It was a sequel to the immediately previous Star Trek movie, which itself was, by its own terms, later in causality (though earlier in time) than the last appearance of Spock (or, for that matter, Romulus as an existing planet) in the earlier canon (and, also, later in both time and causality than the most recent TV series.)
The latest Star Trek movie isn't a prequel to anything, since none of the pre-existing canon follows it in causal sequence, its a sequel (though an alternate-universe-earlier-setting-date sequel, for some of the earlier canon) to the earlier canon.
what? ;)
I think there is only one universe. But since it is infinite , there is an infinite copy of ourselves in different times ( since in different places far away from each other). So it is a prequel from the 2009 point of view, but a sequel from the old Star Trek P.O.V.
Also, I could easily see the opposite of this article being written if the movie was indeed doing what you asked for, from the technology and futurism standpoint. For example, if everyone just teleported everywhere (or something crazy like that), people would just call it ridiculous and fake. They would just complain that the movie doesn't relate to a realistic future.
I, personally, loved the new Star Trek, and thought it was incredible. I think they hit a great balance of innovation and futurism, but also still made it relevant to things we see everyday (iPhones, minimalistic designs, etc).
Futurism isn't lost in the Star Trek reboot. The tech seen in the new Star Trek movies, rather than diminishing futurism, serves to show us that the future that Star Trek introduced to us these past few decades is just around the corner. They are using devices we are now starting to see every day, and some tech that we can imagine our children using in the very near future.
Maybe that's not as exciting to some, but to have that mix of technology and design from the present day feels like a confirmation that a lot more Star Trek tech might become reality within our lifetimes :).
Perhaps the future holds something much more important for our lives than more advanced technology. Perhaps the future will be defined by a greater understanding of our universe through different means, through non technological means.
"In the 1960s I think that in some sense the present was
actually about three or four years long," he said, "because
in three or four years relatively little would change… The
present is really of no width whatever."
Surely gimmics like screens in tshirts, glasses, and what not may appear as well, but a flat hard device simply is a good useful form.
I also never saw them charge their devices by plugging them in the wall. There's something that's pure sci-fi for us: actually long lasting batteries.
And having a screen is itself redundant when you have glasses with true 3D overlaying, where you can just make a screen appear wherever you want with the size you want.
I think video games, AAA and indie titles alike have got this covered for me. What inspires one man does not inspire another.
It's interesting that we don't see many portrayals of the future of the web or internet either, considering how large of an impact it has had on humanity in the past 20 years.
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/toast/to...
(The intro in the collection, not on that page. Click through to whichever format...)
Even Star Trek is completely unrealistic - it takes place less than 25 decades from now. There's no way we have space vehicles so advanced so soon.
(edit: even ignoring 'warp speed')
It's not our technology 250 years from now, it's our galactic neighborhood's technology 250 years from now.
I wouldn't necessarily rule out a major breakthrough in space travel, though it seems extremely unlikely. But transporter technology is so wildly implausible as to be effectively impossible, certainly in that time frame. Reassembling a full human being doesn't even begin to fit our current understanding or any suggested theory of physics.
Moon is 380,000 km away. The nearest galaxy is 1×10^18 km away.
If you have a hundred backup copies of your mind all over the solar system, what do you care if one of you gets killed? How can you possibly write a plausible plot that includes a weakly godlike AI that doesn't involve it instantly solving any problem that faces the protagonists? How can current audiences relate to a world where the population of the Earth is 100 trillion, all of them running as uploaded minds on computers?
(Disclaimer, I'm not a fan of Star Trek: http://bbot.org/badtranscript-startrek2.html )
In the real world, there's no reason to expect any of these limitations to exist. It makes more sense for backups to be cheap(ish) and taken every five minutes.
SPOILERS:
Altered Carbon also addresses the nightmare scenario of state vector theft very well; if the bad guys have a copy of your mind, they can torture you to death, over and over, forever. But in the real world, the precise mechanism of capture used in the book would be unlikely: if you thought you were about to be kidnapped, you'd just suicide, (using a explosive charge in your brain) and let one of your backups figure out what happened.
Any suggestions for something written after, say, 2005?
In case you're wondering about more recent Sci-Fi, I googled it, and here's a good listing of interesting concepts:
http://io9.com/5929436/10-recent-science-fiction-books-that-...
I think comments such as these bookending the Cold War speak for themselves. The tendencies of monopoly capitalism have been written about for over a century. Romney's slam of Tesla is part of all that (please don't say Romney was against Tesla due to government breaks - it's more difficult to name a large company not getting government subsidies than one which does get one, including Romney's own Steel Dynamics). The Democratic party is so near this position as well to be almost indistinguishable from the GOP.