X-Message-Number: 29699
Date: Thu, 02 Aug 2007 00:02:52 +0100
From: Andrew Clifford <>
Subject: Science Fiction and the future

Very few science fiction movies deal with probable futures in 
anything like a realistic way.

Most Sci-Fi is just the 20th Century writ large across the galaxy. 
This is as big a mistake as someone in 1860 imagining today's world 
as an extension of 19th Century westerns but bigger and better with 
100x more cowboys, Indians and steam trains. Consider Star Trek 
communicators. These devices are completely laughable compared to 
cell-phones of today. One manufacturer was even talking of making a 
"retro" communicator-style phone just for trekkie fans.

Completely speculative thinking like "warp-drives" do remain as true 
science fiction / future unknowns.

The reason most science fiction films are clueless about the future 
is that film directors and screen-writers are clueless about 
exponential trends in technology. Trends which are persistent and 
evident over recorded history. For hundreds of years the story of our 
civilization has been the multiplication of human muscle-power by 
machinery, and the magnification of hearing, vision and touch by 
instrumentation. Now we are in the "knee of the curve" of 
exponentially improving technology. So next, human intelligence is 
likely to be multiplied many-fold through embedded bio-computers or 
even uploading. All bets are off when this happens.

Only in some films do you get realistic dramatizations of future 
scenarios. Even then it is in fragments. I would list Bladerunner, AI 
and Solaris as three of the best for making people think about the 
fluidity of what it means to be human when intelligence meets 
advanced technology. Forbidden Planet was way ahead of its time. The 
first movie ever to be set elsewhere than Earth. And it still makes 
you think hard about its message.
I haven't seen Diamond Age yet - sounds promising.

And, yes, Star Wars doesn't make the grade. It is more "science 
comic" than science fiction. The first one is 30 years old now. I 
have made several attempts to watch it in that time and found all 
episodes mind-numbingly childish. Even Futurama has more to going for it.

Regards,
Andrew Clifford

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