Futures That Never Were

Science fiction writers have predicted numerous things that came true. But then there are those who have predicted stuff that didn't quite work out the way they imagined. This episode is dedicated to them.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
and love all things tech, and I also love speculative fiction,
and I really love science fiction. No big shock there,

(00:27):
I'm sure I love stories that involve cool and futuristic
technology and you know, technically, stories that they play out
in such a way that, if done well, it says
something interesting about what it is to be human when
you get down to it. A lot of science fiction
isn't so much about the pew pew lasers and the
zoom zoom spaceships. It's really more about stuff like resilience

(00:51):
and hope and hubrists and enmity and other very you know,
human qualities. So when you strip it all away, a
good science fiction story you should tell us more about,
you know, humanity. Now, when you create a science fiction story,
you have to set it somewhere and some win. And

(01:14):
that's what brings us to today's topic. I wanted to
talk about some science fiction stories that were set in
the years two thousand to two thousand twenty one, So
over the last twenty one years, now, not necessarily written
during that time, but set in that time, like this
would be the futuristic setting, because sometimes it's fun to

(01:34):
go back and talk about some of the wild things
that writers imagined happening by now. And sometimes they predict
stuff that comes true in some form or another. A
lot of times they predict stuff that we just don't
have yet. And I don't mean for this to be
a Hey, isn't it fun that they thought we would
be using holograms by now? Although there are a couple

(01:55):
of instances of that in this episode, but it's not
meant to poke fun at the futurists who were imagining
the world. In some cases, the writer clearly was thinking,
what is a year that's far enough out from today
that this could seem plausible. In other cases, the writer
might just have arbitrarily picked a year because the year

(02:16):
itself isn't really what's important, Like you might say in
the distant year of two thousand nine, but what you
really just mean is at a time that's in the future, right,
So in some cases, I think a lot of science
fiction stories, when they have a year, you might as
well just replace that year with, you know, in the future.

(02:38):
But we're gonna ignore that, and we're gonna poke fun
at some movies and some of their predictions, and not
just movies, other stories too. So I'm gonna look at
a lot of stories that were produced before the year
the story is set in. So, in other words, these
stories have to at least on some level make predictions
about the future. A lot of science fiction films are

(03:00):
set the same year they came out. A lot of
science fiction stories are set the same year they come out,
so those become more like alternate present rather than futuristic.
So I'm ignoring all those, and I'm really focusing on
ones that are more about projecting into the future. This
also is not going to be an exhaustive list, either,

(03:20):
because there have been a lot of stories that have
been set between two thousand and two thousand twenty one,
not as many as I thought there would be, or
at least, based upon my research, not as many as
I thought there would be. But there's still quite a few,
and I'm gonna try and stick with ones that are
either really famous or just super fun examples. So I
may very well skip over some of your favorites. For that,

(03:43):
I apologize I cannot cover them. All, but let's get
to it um And also before I get into the
twenty first century, let's have a couple of honorable mentions
in here. For example, George Orwell's Four is a phenomenal novel.
It describes the world as being governed by giant, totalitarian

(04:05):
authorities who essentially have divvied up the world. And it's
a world that's constantly under surveillance, like the government is
looking at everything that's going on, and the government tries
to regulate not just what people are allowed to do,
but even so much as how people are allowed to think.

(04:25):
It's a pretty terrifying story, and it's one I think
we can still recognize as being relevant today, whether it's
in the form of authoritarian governments. I mean, you can
look at some of China's initiatives and say, like, oh,
I see some similarities there. You can also arguably look
at the U k. And the United States and say
there's some elements there too. We also have seen the

(04:48):
rise of mega powerful corporations, which in some ways have
taken on some of the aspects that Orwell had attributed
to governments, Like we're seeing companies take on that kind
of of role and take on that kind of power.
We're almost four decades decades out from the setting of

(05:08):
that novel, and you know, we haven't quite reached the
level of dystopia described in the book, but you can
make a decent argument that a lot of the elements
that were or well described have kind of crept into
our actual world today. And granted, you know, some of
those were things that he was observing at the time
he wrote it, which was well before. Another honorable mention

(05:29):
I have to add in here is the Star Trek
original series episode Space Seed. The episode first aired in
nineteen sixty seven, and the year in which the episode
happens is supposed to be twenty two sixty seven. Uh,
but it references something that should have happened in our past.

(05:51):
It would have happened between those two years. This is
the episode that introduced the iconic character con Nunioning. So
in Star Trek lore, the world plunged into a global
conflict in the nineteen nineties called the Eugenics Wars, and
Cohn was one of several people who are part of

(06:11):
a long term experiment that was focused on selective breeding
of humans, and the idea being that this is a
process that would eventually produce exceptional human beings. Eugenics is
a real horrifying thing. It's also an incredibly racist thing.

(06:31):
It's it's it's bad, y'all. But anyway, this was sort
of the thing that Star Trek was pitching it as.
So con is supposed to be stronger and more intelligent
than your average person. In later Star Trek properties, his
backstory gets tweaked a little bit, so he's actually the
result not just of selective breeding, but of genetic engineering,

(06:52):
because people recognize that any sort of selective breeding process
would not progress to a point that you would have,
you know, people with obviously superior human qualities within a
couple of generations. That would take a very long time
to really do. And again, eugenics is horrifying lee awful. Anyway.

(07:12):
Within Star Trek lore, Kahn and his genetically superior colleagues
managed to conquer about a third of the Earth before
they were defeated, and then Kahn's crew escaped Earth. Most
of the genetically engineered humans were captured and sentenced to
death in the nineties, but Cohn and his crew escape

(07:33):
on a ship called the Botany Bay, and they go
into suspended animation and just go on a trip out
into space to escape their capture, and then a couple
hundred years later, the enterprise happens across them. Now, obviously
a lot of the stuff that was predicted back in
nineteen sixty seven never happened. There have been no eugenics wars. Thankfully,

(07:56):
we don't have the ability to genetically modify humans to
the point of guaranteeing that they are going to be
stronger and more intelligent. But there are ongoing discussions and
scientific circles about the ethics of genetic modification in general. Like,
obviously we've been doing a lot of work in genetic modification.
The development of crisper is a great example, but we're

(08:18):
still very much at the early stages of science when
it comes to genetically modifying things. And more than that, uh,
we still have these big ethical debates on at what
point do you say this is too far? Is it
okay to do genetic modification if you are trying to
make certain that someone is not born with a condition

(08:41):
that would otherwise inhibit them or or negatively impact their
quality of life? Is it okay if you go beyond that,
if you say, well, let's make sure that they have
certain qualities like blue eyes, or you go even further
than that and say, let's make them stronger and more intelligent.
This is an area that is thoroughly investigated by science

(09:03):
fiction and it's one where we have real discussions going
on today. Uh As for other science stuff that happens
in that that story, obviously we don't have a way
to put people in suspended animation, certainly not with any
way of halting aging completely and yet still being able
to revive the person with no adverse effects. We don't

(09:24):
have that capability. Uh. This is also an area of
intense interest. I mean, cryonics is a real thing in
the sense that there are people who are working on it.
Often the push for chronics comes from rich people who
are terrified of dying. But yeah, we haven't cracked that
one yet either. Beyond all that, we don't actually have

(09:45):
a spacecraft that humans could crew that is meant to
escape our solar system, let alone just wander the galaxy.
So yes, space Seeds plot depends upon stuff that just
didn't happen, and much of it couldn't have happened. Clearly
the writer's didn't you know they needed to have CON's
backstory happened sometime between the present day of nineteen sixty
seven and the Star Trek date of twenty two sixty seven,

(10:09):
plus it needed to be far enough back in the
history of Star Trek's world so that the average person
in Star Trek wouldn't immediately recognize the name of con
and know who that is just on the face of it.
So I get it. But it's a great example of
predictions made in science fiction that just didn't happen. All right,
let's talk about some of the stuff that was predicted

(10:30):
to happen within the last twenty one years, And for
the year two thousand, I would like to submit the
film Death Race two thousand. This one was made back
in nineteen seventy five. This was a Roger Corman production.
And Corman is one of those folks in Hollywood who
really was able to stretch a dollar as far as
it could go. Typically his films are really low budget affairs,

(10:53):
but he's been behind some pretty fun movies. Like Roger
Corman film is probably gonna be super low budget, but
it doesn't mean that it's not going to be good
or at least entertaining. I consider Death Race two thousand
to be a pretty entertaining movie. There's a nasty satirical
edge to the movie, a really nasty one, but I
find it fascinating. So in the lore of the movie,

(11:17):
the world went through a massive economic crash in nineteen
seventy nine, remember this film came out in seventy That
economic crash then made the United States unstable and at
some point the military overthrew the government and replace the
democratically elected representatives with a totalitarian military regime. The government

(11:37):
also co opted religion, so the state and the church
are united. This was an effort to consolidate power and
to keep the huddled masses distracted. Uh. The government has
this incredibly violent coast to coast race called the Annual
Transcontinental Road Race. It's meant to entertain people and redirect

(11:58):
their attention so they, you know, they don't realize how
bad things are and they don't get smart ideas like
demanding rights and stuff. So the race has this brutal
scoring system. Not only do you get points for you know,
being fast, you also get points for killing innocent people
along the way, like if you run down a pedestrian,

(12:19):
those are extra points. So this is a way for
an authoritarian government to retain control of a population, and also,
you know, is a message saying no one is safe.
This is a really common theme in stories that feature
dystopian futures. I'm sure you can think of some examples yourself,
but you can find it in movies like Rollerball, Uh,

(12:39):
The Hunger Games, Battle Royal, The Running Man, and many more. Um.
One of the drivers in the Death Race two thousand
movie is the government backed Frankenstein, who is said to
at least be part machine due to having sustained numerous
injuries and past competitions, and that he's while he's you

(13:01):
at least partly machine, he's also practically unkillable. So we've
got some cyborg stuff going on here. Except spoiler alert,
if you've not watched Death Rays two thousand and you
really want to, you probably want to skip this next bit.
But it turns out that Frankenstein isn't just one man. Instead,
the government finds someone to pose as Frankenstein for each race,

(13:26):
and should one of them die, they just get another
person to pose as Frankenstein for the next one. So
Frankenstein's outfit is a disguise in other words, and it
creates the illusion that the government has access to indestructible agents.
It's another way of sending the message of we're more
powerful than you are, so don't bother resisting. Now. I
won't spoil how the film ends except to say there

(13:49):
are a lot of kind of double and triple crosses
going on and stuff. It's kind of bonkers. But the
tech and death rays two thousand isn't particularly outlandish. It's
more about how society has devolved into this bloodthirsty and
yet suppressed mob. And I'm sure depending upon your own
you know, ideology, you might see some parallels in the

(14:12):
real world. Moving on to two thousand one, we have Hey, look,
it's two thousand one, a space odyssey. The novel and
the movie are both considered classics, but they also project
the level of technological sophistication that we have not yet reached,
not even in twenty twenty one. Uh. We could probably
forgive some of that because the stories that influenced two

(14:33):
thousand one came out of the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties.
The movie version premiered in nineteen sixty eight, so at
that time we were still just on the verge of
going to the moon for the first time, it probably
seemed inevitable that we would continue to make incredible progress,
right Like, we were already within the span of a

(14:54):
decade making incredible strides towards the stars, so I guess
like it seemed kind of natural that we would continue
that momentum. So in the story of two thousand one,
there's a lunar base, and that's something we obviously don't
have yet. NASA's Artemis program, in which the agency plans

(15:14):
to return and send cruise to the Moon for the
first time since the early nineteen seventies, has hit some snags. Currently,
the agency says that a lunar landing will now take
place in twenty five at the earliest. The original plan
was to get there by four, but delays in various
aspects of the mission have made that impossible. So no

(15:37):
lunar base for us just yet. And there are those
who question whether a lunar base is even a logical
stepping stone, but it exists in the film anyway. There's
also a space station in the movie. This is obviously
something that we have achieved, but the story also has
astronauts traveling to Jupiter via spaceship with some passengers in

(15:57):
suspended animation. And we've already covered the suspended animation thing,
but we obviously also haven't made any missions to go
further out than our own Moon, and we haven't done
that since the nineteen seventies, at least not with humans
on board. We have sent, you know, unmanned spacecraft much
further out, but not with a human crew. In some

(16:21):
sections of two thousand one, the Jupiter mission section. UH,
spacecraft generate artificial gravity by spinning. So the spacecraft acts
like a centrifuge, and when you've got a rotating mass,
there's this pseudo force that we call centrifugal force, even
though it's not a quote unquote real force. UH. This
is directed radially outwards from the axis of rotation. So

(16:45):
if you imagine a bicycle wheel that has a pole
that goes right through the middle of the wheel and
it spins around the pole, the centrifugal force pushes outward
along the circumference of the wheel, as this is ninety
degrees out from the axis of rotation. So if you
had a spacecraft shaped like a wheel and it's rotating,

(17:07):
people could walk along the uh the well inner part
of the wheel, but on the outer edge of it
if you If that makes sense, like if you were
inside a bicycle wheel, your feet would be on the
rubber that would be on the outside, and you could
walk around that way like you would have artificial gravity

(17:28):
that way. The amount of artificial gravity would be dependent
upon the speed of rotation as well as how large
the spacecraft was. Uh. There are some problems doing this, however,
because the magnitude of centrifugal force depends partly upon the
distance from that axis of rotation, and that would mean

(17:49):
that our heads, which are clearly a little closer to
the axis, would be experiencing a different amount of force
than our feet would. So it would work from a
physics standpoint, but you might not feel so great if
you were to actually try it out in practice. The
primary antagonist for two thousand one is an artificially intelligent

(18:10):
computer system called How, which is everyone points out means
that each letter is just off by one from IBM.
Arthur C. Clarke, who wrote this, says that's a coincidence.
The system develops its own motivation and experiences something akin
to fear as it pleads with a character not to

(18:31):
deactivate it. So How goes eighte and kills nearly all
the crew before it is deactivated, But as it's being deactivated,
it's it's essentially pleading for its own life. While the
discipline of artificial intelligence has advanced dramatically since the nineteen sixties,
you know, we are still as of yet not able
to do anything close to what how could do, And

(18:53):
there's an ongoing debate on whether things like consciousness and
emotional motivation can even emerge out of technological systems, or
if they can, what level of complexity we would first
need to achieve in order for that to happen. There
are other technologies in two thousand one that have come true.
There's a sort of tablet computer device that you can

(19:14):
see in a couple of scenes, and obviously that's a
tech that we have today, though it would be a
little bit after two thousand one before we got one
that was really practical and you know, something that would
work in the mainstream consumer market. Voice activation is in
the movie. That's come a long way, and we've got
numerous systems that work with that. Also, a lot of

(19:34):
the stuff shown in two thousand one is pretty darn
accurate from a technical perspective. For example, there's no sound
in space, right because you don't have enough particles out
there to allow vibrations to carry in space. So Kubrick
made sure that shots that were in outer space, like
in the exteriors, were silent. That was a good touch.

(19:55):
When we come back, we'll continue our journey through futuristic
stories that were off by us the hair. But first,
let's listen to these messages, all right. Before the break,
we talked about two thousand one, which is widely considered
to be a cinematic masterpiece, and it's also a pretty

(20:16):
divisive film. Some folks don't like it so much that
I think it's a little boring, like watching paint dry.
I might be in that camp. I appreciate the movie
for what it is, but I do not find it
very entertaining. I find it hard to stay awake watching it.
That's on me, that's not on the movie anyway. Our
next film is definitely not a classic. It's a movie
that did not do well critically or commercially, and I

(20:39):
am talking about Bicentennial Man. The film is about a
household robot, one that is bipedal. It has a human
like body, and over time, this robot develops emotions and
motivations of its own. So it's kind of like How
in that regard. Only while How became a homicidal maniac
determined to complete a mission, the robot character of Andrew

(21:01):
and Bicentennial Man becomes so sweet he'll end up giving
you cavities. It's Robin Williams as schmaltziest. But if we
distill the movie down to the basics, we could say
that it's about a robot with artificial intelligence that gains sentience,
self awareness, and consciousness. And then how would humanity perceive

(21:22):
that kind of a machine. How would humans react? Would
they extend the idea of personhood to encompass an artificial being,
or would humans dismiss that as unthinkable and refuse to
acknowledge that a robot's humanlike qualities make it a person.
These are questions that folks are actually asking right now.
I mean, in the EU, there are committees that are

(21:45):
dedicated into looking into the idea of granting personhood for
robots and artificial intelligence. Should they reach a level of
sophistication that would necessitate such a thing. Bi Centennial Man
starts off in two thousand five, and I'm sure I
do not need to point out to you we did
not get intelligent bipedal helper robots in two thousand five.

(22:06):
We don't have them now, and there are lots of
reasons for that will put the AI side apart because
we already talked about that with how so there's no
need to tread over that again. But let's talk about
bipedal robots. So we don't have a ton of these because,
as it turns out, it's very hard to engineer a
bipedal robot. Getting the robot to move so that it's

(22:30):
not you know, just falling all over the place is
a non trivial problem. Balance is tough, maneuverability is tough.
We do have some robots that are bipedal, and they
are even some famous examples like Asimo, but um, you know,
they they're still very limited. I mean, Asimo could actually run.
It was a little hoppy run and made it look
like Asimo really needed to get to the Little Robots

(22:52):
Room pretty quickly, but it had its own limitations and restrictions.
It was largely under you know, annual control or very
very limited autonomous control. That's part of the reason we
typically see robots that depend upon wheels or treads to
move around because those components are far less complicated than

(23:13):
legs from an engineering perspective, they work on a simpler principle,
and they're easier to repair if things go wrong. If
you're looking at ways to simplify your robot design, getting
rid of legs is a no brainer. However, a lot
of human environments work best if you have legs. By
the way, this is a big problem, not just for robots.

(23:34):
I'm talking about accessibility in general. It's why we have
laws that are meant to guarantee accessibility, because otherwise people
who depend upon tech like wheelchairs to get around would
find themselves locked out of a lot of experiences. I mean,
they already do, but it would be even worse. And
while we've had some progress on making the world more accessible,

(23:55):
the fact is that the default design choice tends to
favor people who can walk around. The stairs are just
a simple example of that. Well, that's a pretty tough
challenge for robots to One of darpast robotics challenges was
for groups to design a bipedal robot that could complete
several tasks autonomously, including doing such things as operating a

(24:19):
vehicle opening a door, walking through a doorway, picking up
a power tool, using the power tool appropriately, and so on,
and even things like opening a door, which would be
a pretty trivial task for many people, became a big
engineering challenge, and walking through the door was another big one.
There are actually lots of videos of several robots just

(24:40):
playing tipping right over at that point. This challenge happened
a decade after two thousand five, after the the setting
of the beginning of Bicentennial Man, so from a basic
robotics standard, we're far off from having that become a reality.
I'm not going to comment on the quality of the movie,
but the argument on whether or not robots should be

(25:01):
granted personhood is a really interesting one, and it's also
an idea that pops up in the film AI And
as I mentioned, it's kind of an ongoing discussion here
in the real world today. Now we're going to jump
ahead to twenty mostly because very few well known futuristic
stories were set between two thousand five and twenty But

(25:22):
that means now we have to talk about the year
we make contact. This is actually the sequel to two
thousand one Space Odyssey. The film twenty ten came out
in the book came out two years earlier. And yes,
I know this sounds confusing because I'm using lots of
years here, but it was a nineteen eighties version of

(25:43):
what twenty ten would look like. Anyway, nine years have
gone by since the events of the first film, and
there are a lot of questions that are left back
on Earth, and the big ones are what the heck
happened out there? All those astronauts died, what happened to them?
And then one of them might not have died but
definitely disappeared. What happened to that guy? So twenty ten

(26:04):
obviously has some of the same issues when it comes
to the predicted tech that we saw in two thousand one,
so we're not going to go over all that again. Interestingly,
it also assumes that in the Soviet Union is still
a thing. In the film, the U S and the
U s s are are entering into essentially another kind
of Cold War space race, in this case a mission

(26:26):
to find out what the heck happened in the events
of two thousand one. Of course, the real Soviet Union
dissolved in the early nineteen nineties. It did not exist
by the movie answers the question about why How went
bonkers in the first film, and it turns out that
the crew were unknowingly on a secret miss mission, and

(26:47):
that mission had not been laid out to them, so
they didn't have any awareness of it. How however, was
aware of the secret mission, but was supposed to keep
that under wraps while appearing to facilitate the covers story mission,
the one that the astronauts thought they were on. But
that meant that there was a conflict with How's programming
because it was supposed to be a transparent and honest system,

(27:10):
and that brought How into an irreconcilable quandary. The computer
system was obligated to follow its mission, but that mission
included parameters that would violate the systems programming, so How snapped. Now,
setting aside the AI issues that we've already discussed, this
touches on another common element in speculative fiction, that of

(27:31):
artificial intelligence encountering some sort of problem or scenario that
subsequently causes it to harm people. Uh. One of the
basic ideas in Western science fiction goes to the three
major laws of robotics, as defined by Isaac Asimov. They
state that, first, a robot cannot harm a human or

(27:52):
allow a human to come to harm by failing to
prevent it. Second, a robot must obey any order given
to it by a human, provided that it doesn't violate
the first law. And Third, the robot must protect itself
as long as it doesn't conflict with the first two laws.
But science fiction is full of scenarios in which AI

(28:13):
causes harm or even leads to extinction level events. The classic,
perhaps most cliche example of this is the idea that
you create a supercomputer, and you your hope is that
the supercomputer, which is far more intelligent than any human being,
will be able to solve massive real world problems, so
it will be able to do things that humans can't

(28:34):
do the humans aren't smart enough to do. And then
you tell it to bring about world peace, and then
the supercomputer comes to the conclusion that the only way
to guarantee world peace is to wipe out all of humanity.
That way, there's no one left to declare war on
anyone else. That classic sci fi cliche. The other stuff
that happens in ten goes more into the realm of

(28:56):
fantasy than science fiction, So I'm not going to get
into the rest here yere. Uh. It's definitely a very
different movie than two thousand one. It's less poetic, it's
a little more narrative. I don't think it's a better
film than two thousand one. I do think it's one
I can watch more easily than two thousand one. All Right,
but let's move up to I thought about including I

(29:18):
Am Legend in this lineup that actually came out in
two thousand seven but was set in twelve. However, there's
not really any tech to speak of in I Am Legend,
and we're currently living through a global pandemic, so I
don't think we really need to talk about a fictional version.
So instead we're gonna talk about and I can't believe
I'm following up like with this, but John Carpenter's film

(29:42):
Escape from l A. It hurts me to talk about
this movie. I would have much preferred to talk about
Escape from New York. I know that Carpenter thinks Escape
from l A is a superior film to Escape from
New York. I respectfully disagree. The film Escape from New
York was set in the late nineties, so it's outside

(30:03):
the window for this episode. But Escape from l A
is a lot like Escape from New York, but not
as entertaining in my opinion. It was made in which
actually was the year before the setting of Escape from
New York. The basic premises that over several years, Los
Angeles descends into crime and chaos. It's a lost cause.

(30:26):
Then there's an earthquake and that causes Los Angeles to
effectively become an island separate from the California mainland. And
then there is a dictator who declares himself President of
the US for life, who then seizes control and he
uh declares that Los Angeles is effectively a prison. He
has walls built around the city, and if you break

(30:48):
any laws in the United States, well you're gonna get
sent to l a where you have to just kind
of try and survive anyway. The main character is Snake Bliskin,
who's a former military man. He's been come a nihilist.
He doesn't really believe in anything. He detests the world
as it has turned out to be. And he's also
a criminal and he's going to be sentenced to Los Angeles,

(31:10):
but he's offered a part pardon if he can retrieve
a remote control that controls a satellite based weapons system,
and this weapon can blast targeted regions with an electromagnetic
pulse that's strong enough to disable you know, electrical systems.
The dictator of the United States plans on using the
weapon on his various enemies around the world, essentially kind

(31:33):
of sending him on a path for world domination. And
to make sure that Pliskin plays ball, the government injects
what they say is a virus that will kill him
within ten hours unless he gets an antidote. This blot,
by the way, is almost identical to Escape from New York.
The particulars are different, but the idea is is virtually

(31:54):
the same. Some of the technologies shown in the film
include that satellite based e MP or electromagnetic pulse weapon.
E m p s are real. In fact, they really
happen in nature, and a sufficiently powerful electromagnetic pulse can
cause electronics to overload and fail. Uh. If it's powerful enough,

(32:15):
it can damage electronics to the point where they won't
work anymore. You'll have to repair them or replace them.
So lightning is one type of an electromagnetic pulse. A
coronal mass ejection or CMME from a star like the
Sun can create a magnetic field strong enough to be
an e m P. That's why you'll hear about times

(32:35):
where there's a lot of solar activity potentially interfering with electronics.
Here on Earth, nuclear explosions generate e m P s uh.
A really powerful pulse could cause power lines to snap.
You would have an excess of electrical current and voltage
in the power lines. They wouldn't be able to handle it,
and they can snap right then and there. Computer systems

(32:56):
are particularly vulnerable to electromagnetic pulses. So an e MP
weapon is not just possible, it's something that exists, and
it's a lot of a lot of militaries around the
world have worked on refining them over the years, because
if you have a weapon that can destroy communication infrastructure
without actually causing physical destruction to the region itself, that's

(33:17):
a super high value weapon. That being said, I am
not aware of any system that could produce a powerful
e MP blast that you could base on a satellite platform.
Um it essentially just becomes a laser gun weapon in
the movie, And I can't think of a way where
you would be able to do this unless you had

(33:37):
like nuclear explosives in orbit. Even then you would have
to really find a way to direct that pulse to
have maximum effectiveness. The movie also features a personal holographic
projector that's capable of producing a three dimensional hologram that's
convincing enough to fool people who are standing in the

(33:58):
same area. Right Like, if you were in a room
and someone were using this, you would think that that
was actually a person there, not a hologram. That's all
effective it is within the movie. It even casts a
shadow behind it in the scene where it plays a
big part in the film. Obviously, we have not developed
that kind of technology. There are some pretty nifty effects

(34:19):
that we can create to simulate holograms under very specific conditions,
but generally speaking, this is way beyond our capabilities. Oh also,
one of the actors in the movie would later go
on to become the Countess of Devon. True story, it
really did happen. All right, We got a few more
stories we want to talk about, but first let's take

(34:40):
another quick break. Okay, we're up to two thousand and fifteen,
and it's time to talk about flying cars. In fact,
those pop up a couple of times, but this is
the first one, and you knew we were going to
have to get around to it, because is when about

(35:03):
half of Back to the Future Part two takes place.
If you've never seen the movie, well, first you got
the first Back to the Future, which follows a character
named Marty McFly as he accidentally travels back from nineteen
eighty five to nineteen fifty five and then, through some misadventures,
has to figure out a way to make his parents
fall in love with each other or else he'll never

(35:24):
have existed. So it's your classic temporal paradox scenario. But
in the sequel, which came out in nineteen eighty nine,
Marty's friend and mentor, Doc brown Uh, convinces Marty five
Marty that he has to travel to the far off
future of in order to help Marty's kids. At least

(35:46):
that's the first section of Back to the Future Part two,
so we get to visit and things are a little
different from our real world version of They are a
lot more day glow for one thing, a lot of
like fluorescent colors, and in the Back to the Future
two version also homes come standard with fax machines. In

(36:08):
that version of now maybe in the late eighties, that
seem like it was a realistic outcome, but Obviously it's
not what are would be in our most homes today.
I mean, there's no need for them because we have
plenty of electronic systems that don't require paper or toner.
But email was not something that people were really thinking
about in Hollywood at levels. Restaurants in the movie have

(36:33):
a robo wait staff, and there's a There are a
few novelty places around the world, a lot of them
in Japan, that use computers and robots in order to
serve food, but they are really a novelty and an exception,
not the rule. I will say, however, that wait staff
is one of those roles that robots and automated systems
could potentially thrive in. And I say that because we're

(36:56):
talking about an environment that has a limited set of
variable Like if you can only order from a menu,
that means you can't just walk into the restaurant and
order anything. Right, you couldn't walk into like a Mexican
restaurant that didn't have pizza on the menu and say
I want a pizza. You typically have to order off
the menu. Now you might be able to order something

(37:16):
off menu if the staff like you and the chefs
in the back don't mind, but only if the restaurant
actually has the necessary ingredients on hand. So robots work
well in environments that have a limited number of varia variables,
like if they have restrictions on variability, robots do better.
It's when you start adding more variables then it becomes

(37:38):
more complicated for a robot to operate. Whether folks would
ever see robots as being useful or you know, pleasant
to interact with on that level, or whether they would
even make economic sense compared to say, hiring human weight staff,
those are other matters like technologically it's probably not the
most difficult thing in the world to do. The question

(37:59):
is that makes sense financially and socially. Like Escape from
l A, we see holograms and Back to the Future too.
There's a film Marquee for Jaws film that has a
holographic shark emerged from the screen to seemingly attack Marty,
which startles him. It's a pretty cool effect, and it
is possible to create a three D effect with a

(38:22):
screen without the need for three D glasses. Lenticular displays
can do this. However, this is a pretty limited effect
and typically you need to be positioned in a sweet
spot in order to experience it, if you move a
little bit to the left or to the right, the
effect changes. You don't get the proper images that are
directed towards your eyes, and it will look all messy.

(38:44):
From personal experience, I can tell you that looking at
three D glasses, or rather three D displays that are
glasses free, it's not fun. It can actually bring on
some eye strain. It is just it's possible to do.
It just wouldn't happen the way it does in the movie.
There's also the hydrator oven in the movie that turns
like a hockey puck sized pizza into a full sized

(39:05):
cooked pizza in just a matter of moments. The movie
doesn't bother to explain how this works. But I mean,
the name hydrator suggests that you're adding water to something
in order to make it expand to the appropriate size,
and simultaneously it's somehow heating up the pizza at the
same time. Not sure how that works. Heat transfer isn't

(39:25):
magically instantaneous, so I don't know. But they don't bother
to explain it because it's just it's just a fun
little accent. It's not it's not meant to be analyzed
the way I'm doing it. I'm the jerk here. Then
there are all the flying machines like hoverboards and flying cars.
There's again not a lot of explanation about how these

(39:46):
things work. Presumably the hoverboards are generating some sort of
electromagnetic field that counteracts gravity somehow, although I can't even
begin to imagine how you can make that be a thing. Now,
you could use something like super conductivity to magnetically lock
something into a specific position over a magnetic track, but

(40:08):
that would require cooling the the something down to levels
of around absolute zero to get it super conductive. It's
not really practical. It's really hard to do, and you
would be limited to the magnetic surface itself. So in
other words, like you could have a track and you
could have a super conductive magnetic hoverboard over that track,

(40:34):
and it would hover, and you could push it and
it would just effortlessly slide all the way to the
end of the track. But it couldn't go off track
because it has to have that magnetic base to work,
and it has to be locked into a magnetic field.
If you go outside of that, you lose the effect.
And obviously we don't have those magical flying cars today,
let alone back in we do have some cars that

(40:57):
can fly, though the word cars being a little bit generous.
The most common variations I see are quad copter like designs.
So think of like a quad copter drone that is
a drone that has the four propellers that are you know,
kind of like the four corners around the drone, only
you know, supersize it, make it big enough so that

(41:17):
you could have a compartment where a person could sit
inside of it in the middle. Um. There are tons
of companies working on making flying cars reality, mostly with
the goal of creating a ride hailing service similar to
like Uber or lift, in which customers pay to fly
across town without having to deal with street traffic. But

(41:38):
that technology is going to hinge not just on making
the stuff safe and reliable, but also creating the regulations
that will guide how the tech can interoperate with you know,
the rest of the environment, like a city. You're gonna
have to have rules for that otherwise the potential for
disaster is just way too high. Uh. And to me,

(41:59):
the biggest p of technology from Back to the Future too,
and really the end of the first Back to the
Future is Mr fusion. This device presumably uses fusion to
generate electricity, and it's enough to provide the one point
twenty one jiggawatts of power for the Delorean's time circuits.
Fusion involves fusing atoms together. It's the process that the

(42:23):
Sun goes through where it uh it fuses hydrogen atoms
into helium at a temperature of millions of degrees. The
process requires a lot of energy to get started. Like
you know, with the Sun, you've got this intense gravitational pull.
You've got really dense system there, uh and incredible temperatures.
So it's got this amazing amount of energy that can

(42:46):
sustain this process. But here on Earth, I mean, it
requires a lot of of energy and pressure to get
this thing started. And yeah, the output is potentially even
more energy, but sustaining that reaction is very challenging to do.
Scientists around the world are working on developing practical fusion reactors.

(43:11):
So far, the amount of energy needed to start and
sustain a fusion reaction is greater than what we get
out of it, Like we can have a net positive
outcome on an individual reaction, but sustaining it so that
we can do something useful with it. That's a different matter.
If we can get through that, that will be a

(43:32):
transformational change for the world. I don't think, however, we're
ever going to see fusion reactors that can be small
enough to be incorporated into the electrical system of a vehicle,
nor can I imagine a need to do that. And
to be fair, the techa back to the Future too
was always intended to be whimsical, and some of the
stuff we've seen in the movie has kind of come

(43:55):
to pass, just not necessarily in the way that it
showed up on screen. Alright, let's close out this list
with the movie Blade Runner. Blade Runner came out in
nineteen eight two, but it's set in the year twenty nineteen.
It's a science fiction film noir kind of movie. Now,
if you've never seen it, you should totally watch it.

(44:18):
It is an amazing movie. I will warn you. There
are some very slowly paced moments in that film, Like
there might be some bits where you find yourself saying,
get on with it as you watch people very slowly
walk around a building for what feels like an eternity,
But the premise is really neat. So in this version

(44:41):
of two thousand nineteen, you are in a densely populated
and dystopian Los Angeles, and there's this big social problem.
So humanity has developed a way to bio engineer synthetic humans.
So they're kind of like androids, but they're not robots.
They're made out of gooey, fleshy stuff. I mean, I

(45:04):
guess you could call them robots in the sense that
they are more like the robots of the original Roslum's
Universal Robots, which was the Czechoslovakian play from the early
twentieth century. They have a lot more in common with
those than with the danger Will Robinson style robots that
we think of today. But yeah, we call them replicants

(45:25):
in the movie. Uh. And the reason that humans even
made replicants is the same reason that we typically make robots.
It's so that we have something to take care of
the work that is one of the three ds that
is dull, dirty, and dangerous. So these synthetics, these replicants
are meant to take on jobs that traditionally humans would

(45:48):
have to do. But it's not very fulfilling work, and
it can be very dangerous and both physically and mentally,
and have a negative impact on the people who do
the work, so the ideas you offload that work to
a machine. So in this case, the machine is a
synthetic human, and they are not considered to be quote
unquote real. The replicants are meant to be used off world,

(46:12):
not on Earth, in other words, but four of them
have escaped and made it to Earth in order to
experience Earth, and a former police officer who specializes in
identifying and tracking down replicants, which is a specific job
called a blade runner, is essentially extorted into eliminating these
four replicants. Now, I'm not gonna ruin the story. It

(46:34):
is worth seeing and it has some of the most
beautiful imagery in early nine science fiction. Also has one
of the most famous speeches in science fiction films of
all time. But let's talk about the tech. Clearly, we
can't create synthetic human beings right now, there's been some
amazing research and development in synthetic organs, or replicated and

(46:56):
three D printed organs. That stuff is a slutely amazing.
Scientists are creating bio friendly scaffolds, and on the scaffolds
they can then print tissue structure, so that research could
potentially lead to a future in which we use stuff
like a patient's stem cells to create three D printed

(47:17):
synthetic organs and use that for stuff like transplants. So
if that panned out, it would revolutionize transplant surgery. You
potentially you could cut way down on the risk of
the recipient's body rejecting the new organ, because if the
organ is created using essentially tissue from the donor like

(47:38):
the actual patient, then the body is at least the
thought goes more likely to accept the new organ. Yeah,
we're not able to make a fully synthetic human being.
The replicants on the run in the film are classified
as Nexus six replicants. Google got a little cheeky when
through its Motorola Mobility division it no longer has that ada.

(48:00):
At the time, it developed an Android phone and it
was codenamed Shamu, but when they released it they called
it the Nexus six. Cute reference and Blade Runner also
features flying cars just like Back to the Future too,
and like Back to the Future Too, how they fly
isn't important, so I can't really comment on the proposed
methods except to say, obviously we don't have it in

(48:20):
real life. The film feature stuff that would be out
of place in the real Two thousand nineteen. For instance,
the main character looks through tons of polaroid photographs, so
today he would more likely be looking through a folder
of digital images. He also uses a machine called an esper,
which can analyze a two dimensional photograph and then produce

(48:41):
views of stuff that are in that photograph that are
from other angles. Like imagine you've taken a still photo
of a table, So you're you're standing on one side
of the table. You take a picture, you use this thing,
you could theory theoretically look at the table from a
one degree change in view, like you were standing on
the opposite side. Now, computers can do some pretty cool stuff,

(49:03):
but doing that in real time isn't something we can
easily manage. And also, you know, we would really just
be looking at a best guest scenario, like the computer
would be guessing what the other side looked like. It
wouldn't really be useful. All right. That is just a
quick rundown of some science fiction movies, the main predictions
that have not quite turned out the way people envisioned.

(49:26):
I hope you enjoyed this rambling discussion of science fiction.
I like doing episodes about sci fi occasionally. It's always
fun if you have any movies specifically you would like
me to really dive into and talk about from a
technical level, like the tech that's either went into making
the movie or the tech that's displayed within the movie itself,

(49:47):
let me know, or any other topics. I'm eager to
hear your thoughts. The best way to get in touch
is with Twitter. The handle for the show is tech
Stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Yeah.
Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more

(50:07):
podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.