Tag: analysis

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Things aren’t so Past Tense

Plot:

“Past Tense” is a two-part episode of Star Trek Deep Space Nine that aired in January 1995. It is noteworthy because it was set now, late August / early September 2024. This was another time travel episode where an accident or alien force teleports the crew into the past. For those of you unfamiliar with the Star Trek franchise, Deep Space Nine is set over 300 years in the future, in a nearly utopian era where humans have overcome tribalism, materialism, ignorance, and all forms of injustice, and reap the benefits of radically advanced technologies. Most people dedicate themselves to the arts, science, family, or the exploration of space.

According to Star Trek’s back story, this condition was only achieved after a series of disasters in the late 20th and 21st centuries convinced humanity that war, capitalism, nationalism, and injustice would lead to extinction. One of those events was the “Bell Riots” of 2024, named after the pivotal figure “Gabriel Bell.” By 2024, the U.S. had become a very unequal and callous society, and it was a matter of federal government policy to imprison unemployed people in walled-off urban ghettoes called “sanctuary districts.”

The San Francisco “sanctuary district”

Whatever initial hopes there were for the sanctuary districts to rehabilitate the underclass were dashed due to underfunding and government ineptitude. The sanctuary districts swelled with people, including criminals and the mentally ill, and the promises to provide them with jobs, medical care and other forms of support were broken. The districts effectively became open-air prisons where undesirable people could be dumped, out of sight and out of mind, so the rest of society could live unbothered. The bad conditions inside the ghettoes were not widely known in the rest of America because people just didn’t care.

In “Past Tense,” three Star Trek crewmen from the year 2371 are visiting San Francisco, which is an idyllic and highly advanced city in their time. However, one of their machines malfunctions and sends them back in time to the San Francisco of 2024. As if that isn’t enough of a problem, they materialize on the eve of a massive riot in one of the city’s sanctuary districts. The two male crewman–“Sisko” and “Bashir”–are mistaken for homeless people, immediately arrested by the police for vagrancy, and imprisoned in that sanctuary district. The female crewman, “Jadzia,” has the luck to run into a tech tycoon who takes her to his penthouse. This way, the viewer sees the extremes of 2024 American society.

Rude awakening

As Sisko and Bashir explore the sanctuary district, we see it’s essentially a big homeless encampment where the residents have been given free reign over several square blocks of the city. Residential townhouses are crowded with people sleeping in the rooms, hallways and stairwells, and the streets are full of tents and crude shelters. The public spaces are full of crowds of people of all ages and types. Everyone looks unhappy, poor and dirty. Stern policemen with shotguns patrol the streets while muggings happen in the alleys. The long breadlines, overloaded government waiting rooms, and mentally ill residents going without medicine attest to the state’s failure to serve the sanctuary district’s needs.

As Sisko remembers from history class, the sanctuary district would soon erupt in a mass riot over these problems. During the mayhem, one group of armed residents seized control of a small government office and took the staff hostage, refusing to release them until all the sanctuary districts were dismantled. One of the hostage-takers, “Gabriel Bell,” used savvy and force of personality to prevent his comrades from killing the hostages at crucial moments during the ordeal. During the heavyhanded government response, National Guard troops raid the office, shooting Bell and several other hostage-takers dead. Hundreds more, many of them unarmed poor people caught in the crossfire, are also killed elsewhere. The high death toll (Sisko describes it as “One of the most violent civil disturbances in American history”) and Bell’s martyrdom shift public opinion in the U.S., and the sanctuary districts are dismantled nationwide.

While Sisko and Bashir initially plan to lay low, stay out of the way, and await rescue during this pivotal event, they are forced into action when Gabriel Bell is stabbed dead while trying to save them from muggers. When the riots start the next day, Sisko–who bears a resemblance to Bell–impersonates him to ensure historical events proceed correctly. Sisko succeeds, though he manages to narrowly escape death because the police gunshot proves nonfatal. Though Star Trek has always avoided explicitly describing how today’s world evolved into a techno-utopia, it’s clear that the Bell Riots was a key event that spurred the U.S. to adopt democratic socialism.

On the occasion of this episodes’ set date arriving, there have been a flurry of internet articles praising its prescience. After rewatching the episodes, I’m skeptical of that, and think they’re getting undue credit from people who like anything that highlight America’s problems. In fact, most of the elements in the show’s fictitious 2024 turned out wrong or depict the same reality that existed in 1995 when the episode aired.

Analysis:

Poor people are forced to live in government-run ghettoes in America. As noted, the sanctuary districts are essentially prisons. The police can force people into them at gunpoint for legal infractions common to the homeless (e.g. – public sleeping, no ID), as Sisko and Bashir were. Another character says some residents willingly agreed to move into the sanctuary districts after the government promised to get them jobs, but when the latter reneged, the people discovered it was impossible to leave. This prediction has failed to pass, and everyone still enjoys freedom of movement within America.

Yes, there is enormous wealth inequality in America. Yes, people geographically sort themselves by income, race and ethnicity (as they do in all countries). Yes, this has led to the formation of impoverished ghettoes in most U.S. cities, where conditions are no better than in the fictious sanctuary districts. However, the crucial difference is no one is stopping anyone from moving out of those ghettoes.

“There’s a law against sleeping in the streets.” The older policeman says this right after waking up Sisko and Bashir at gunpoint. Most cities and states have laws against camping in public places, though the enforcement of them has always varied. A 2018 ruling by the Ninth Circuit Court, which has legal authority over the whole U.S. West Coast, cited humanitarian concerns to forbid any authorities in that zone from enforcing such laws. Unsurprisingly, this led to a visible increase in the number of homeless people and their tents in places like San Francisco, and widespread complaints about their behavior.

In June of 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court overrode that ruling, and city and town level police have resumed ticketing and arresting the homeless. In San Francisco since then, the police have typically been respectful when evicting homeless people from sidewalks and public parks, giving them warnings to leave and then maybe a written citation if they refuse. They don’t deal with the issue by pressing loaded guns to heads of sleeping homeless people to wake them up. Efforts to roll back the homeless presence in West Coast towns and cities are only gradually going into effect, and in many places have not started at all.

Not carrying an ID card is a crime. The other legal violation that lands Sisko and Bashir in the sanctuary district is their failure to produce ID cards. Contrary to myth, it is not actually a crime in any part of America to be in a public area without an ID card. I think this was put in the episode to illustrate how draconian the legal system had become in the alternate 2024.

San Francisco is a very unequal place. Having visited San Francisco recently, I think the episode correctly predicted the level of wealth inequality it has today. Moreover, the best estimate is that there are 8,323 homeless people in the city, which is close to the sanctuary district’s population of 10,000. If you add in people who are not homeless but chronically unemployed and living in squalid conditions, the number of San Franciscans whose lives are comparable to the sanctuary district dwellers is some multiple of 8,323.

At the same time, the city boasts a sizeable upper-class, disproportionately comprised of tech sector workers (the tech tycoon who rescues Jadzia personifies San Francisco’s rich). Twenty percent of the city’s households have annual incomes over $200,000, and millionaires are common. The city is home to the super rich and the super poor.

But before we applaud Star Trek’s ability to predict this state of affairs, keep in mind things were essentially the same in 1994 when the episode’s script was written. For many decades, San Francisco has been an unequal city with an unusually large homeless population due to fair weather, lenient laws, and liberal politics. The share of the city’s population that is homeless might even be the same as it was in 1994 (the statistics are imprecise due to methodological problems counting homeless people). And while it wasn’t as large or as powerful as it is today, San Francisco’s economy had a large tech sector back then. Hewlett-Packard, Intel, and Apple were massively profitable companies whose principal facilities were just outside the city in Silicon Valley.

Unemployment is high. The sanctuary district partly exists because there are so many unemployed people. The female case manager also confirms to Sisko and Bashir that not enough jobs are available for the district’s inhabitants. After taking the Processing Center staff hostage, one of the hostage-takers demands is the reinstatement of the “Federal employment Act.” The episode clearly envisioned a 2024 bedeviled by rampant joblessness. This is wrong: the U.S. unemployment rate is only 4.2% and has been below 5% (widely considered the healthy level) for three years. If you ignore the 18 month spike due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the sub-5% era started in December 2015.

Computers are built into desks. Thankfully, no. Also, did the people who made the episode think about why anyone would want such a setup? Upgrading to a new monitor or PC would be harder if the devices were integrated into a piece of furniture. I don’t even see how this is more ergonomic or space-saving than having your monitor on top of your desk and your PC underneath it, like on a special shelf designed just for that purpose.

There are no cell phones. I didn’t see one in either episode. This is obviously completely wrong. If someone from 1995 stepped through a time portal into San Francisco today, they’d surely be struck by how many people were staring at little screens held a few inches in front of their faces.

City governments are full of incompetence. After the police take Sisko and Bashir to the Processing Center, they sit in a crowded waiting room for three hours before seeing a case manager. Used to the highly competent and well-resourced bureaucracies of the distant future, Bashir becomes outraged. I don’t need to do any kind of research to conclude that incompetence and delays are common features of municipal and local governments. That said, things weren’t much better in 1995, so this depiction of 2024 wasn’t much of a prediction, it was just more of the same.

America uses the Metric system. Wrong.

Cashless payments are common. In the sanctuary district, a government worker gives Sisko and Bashir “ration cards,” which they can use to get free food. They look like credit cards that are scanned or swiped. Jadzia also speaks of receiving “credit chips” after tricking the local authorities into believing she’s someone else and merely lost her ID. We never see paper money in the episodes or hear people speak of it. This depiction of 2024 is mostly accurate.

Sisko receives his ration card

Though America has not gone fully cashless, electronic forms of payment are used for most in-person transactions, and many people can go weeks without having to use cash. Forms of “contactless” electronic payment that use near-field communication (NFC) are common now, and bear no resemblance to anything from 1994. I’m old enough to remember that year and the heavy use of cash and even credit card imprinters, and can say things are definitely different now.

There’s a housing shortage in California. The sanctuary district is visibly overcrowded and Sisko and Bashir have to spend hours walking around the first night looking for a townhome with free space for them. Ultimately, they give up and sleep in an outdoor stairwell. Housing has definitely become unaffordable in 2024, and government housing programs have ridiculously long waiting lists. The problems are particularly bad in California, and San Francisco is now one of the least affordable cities on Earth.

This problem is mostly due to a basic imbalance between supply and demand: the number of dwellings has not increased proportionately with U.S. population growth. Contrary to what you might think after watching “Past Tense,” cruel tycoons and the capitalist system have nothing to do with this: average people and government policy do. Overly restrictive laws and grassroots NIMBY activists have stymied the construction of new dwellings across the country, and the government’s decision to basically open the border has led to a recent surge in the illegal immigrant population, and their presence has helped drive up rents.

There’s a cure for schizophrenia. While wandering the sanctuary district, Bashir spots a man on the street who is clearly in the throes of a schizophrenic episode. Bashir is a doctor and says that a cure for the disease exists in 2024, and the fact that it has not been administered to the man is more proof of how callous American society is. Unfortunately, there still is no cure for schizophrenia. The best we can do is to ease and manage the symptoms with medicines and counseling and to keep schizophrenics surveilled as much as possible. Money is certainly a factor in determining the quality of care a sufferer receives, but because the receptivity to treatments varies across the schizophrenic population, some of them barely improve with even the best treatment.

A party among rich San Franciscans. “Jadzia” is at far left.

There is a new polity in the Caribbean. While rubbing elbows with San Francisco’s rich at a party, courtesy of her rich patron, Jadzia overhears them talking about “the Pan Caribbean government.” It’s unclear whether this is a nation-state or some kind of federation of nation-states. No new countries have been created in the Caribbean since 1994, nor have the borders of any preexisting countries there shifted. During the same period, no new trade blocs or supranational political bodies have formed in the region.

Seafloor mining is about to begin. At the same party, another rich guys says his company has received permission from the Pan Caribbean government to start seafloor mining under their waters soon. This prediction is accurate, so long as the word “soon” is strictly adhered to. Across the world, potential seafloor mining projects are being held up by environmental challenges, but it looks like some of them are finally poised to start.

Europe is falling apart. Star Trek got one thing right: Rich people sure do get around in 2024! At the party they also talk about Europe’s implosion thanks to social and economic disorder. The continent is definitely less stable and more under threat today than it was in the 1990s thanks to demographic decline, mass illegal immigration, Brexit, the rise of far-right, the decline of the strongest economy (Germany), and renewed Russian aggression. However, it goes too far to say “Europe is falling apart.” The E.U. is still the world’s second largest economy, living standards remain high in most ways and are rapidly improving in Eastern Europe, and NATO is still intact and now strengthening to confront Russia.

“The Net” is still a common term. In the episodes, the internet is called “the Net.” Only those of us who remember the 90s will remember this archaic term and fully appreciate how cringey saying it is in 2024.

Videoconferencing is common. While pretending to be Gabriel Bell, Sisko uses a computer inside the Processing Center for a videoconference negotiation with the police chief. This prediction is correct, and video calls are very common in 2024. In fact, the technology we have is more advanced since such calls can be made using handheld devices instead of through large computers built into desks.

Links:

  1. San Francisco has only recently started clearing out its large homeless encampments.
    https://www.kqed.org/news/12006541/sfs-homeless-sweeps-have-cleared-over-1200-tents-where-are-people-going
    https://abc7news.com/post/san-francisco-tenderloin-1-month-after-homeless-encampment-crackdown/15291543/
  2. The 2024 homeless count in San Francisco was 8,323.
    https://hsh.sfgov.org/about/research-and-reports/pit/
  3. Counting homeless people is notoriously error-prone, and there’s reason to believe the homeless share of San Francisco’s population is the same in 2024 as it was in 1994.
    https://darrellowens.substack.com/p/san-francisco-40-years-of-failure
  4. Cash is now used in only 12% of in-store transactions in America.
    https://capitaloneshopping.com/research/cash-vs-credit-card-spending-statistics/
  5. In 2022, 41% of Americans said they routinely went more than a week without using cash.
    https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/10/05/more-americans-are-joining-the-cashless-economy/
  6. In 2024, San Francisco was ranked as the eighth least affordable city on Earth.
    https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2024/06/26/impossibly-unaffordable-housing-cities/74195450007/
  7. Schizophrenia still has no cure.
    https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/4568-schizophrenia
  8. After years of false starts, seafloor mining now looks poised to start.
    https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/deep-sea-mining-could-begin-soon-regulated-or-not
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“Frontlines: Fuel of War” review

Plot:

It’s the summer of 2024, and the world is in crisis. Twenty years of rising international tensions and competition for dwindling oil have split the strongest countries into two blocs: the Euro-American “Coalition” and the Sino-Russo “Red Star Alliance.” You are the leader of an elite American special forces squad fighting under the banner of the Coalition, and over the course of the video game, you’ll lead your men from the oil fields of Turkmenistan all the way to the heart of Moscow as your side fights to capture the remaining oil reserves and end the Russian threat once and for all. In your missions, you use futuristic guns and drones, and command weapons of war like jeeps, tanks, and helicopters to destroy the enemy. Not even nuclear strikes can stop you. It’s victory…or nothing!

THAT is the awesomest recap of the 2008 first person shooter game Frontlines: Fuel of War that I can muster, and I hope it grabbed your attention because the game actually wasn’t so epic. Putting aside the scarily evocative storyline, it was a paint-by-the-numbers FPS game with generic weapons, the occasional combat vehicle for you to commandeer, and mediocre AI enemies. Anyone who played Halo 2, which was released four years before this, will recognize all the same game elements.

Frontline’s missions are not imaginative and you don’t need any real tactics to beat them: Rely on your ability to absorb inhuman amounts of lead and keep blasting until all the bad guys are dead. The game has Black Hawk Down / Iraq War vibes, which is understandable given the time when it was made. I don’t have a good memory for this, but the graphics were probably above average for 2008. 

Of course, I’m not reviewing Frontlines for its qualities as a video game; instead, I want to examine how well it predicted the future–which is now our present time–16 years ago. For better or worse, video games are a hugely popular medium that shapes global culture and how even our views of what the future will be like. The game is a work of science fiction since it’s set in the then-future and features technologies that didn’t exist yet, and like a typical work of this sort, it’s a time capsule that shows what the anxieties of its moment in history were.

The game was released in February 2008, near the height of an alarming, multi-year spike in the price of oil and only a year after the Iraq War–which some claimed was a secret oil grab perpetrated by U.S. leaders who had insider knowledge that Peak Oil was nigh–hit its bloody climax. Fears were widespread that oil would just keep getting more expensive and that the root cause was a global shortage. In fact, it proved to be a temporary problem caused by Saudi Arabia’s failure to pump more oil out of the ground to keep pace with rising global demand (particularly from China). This led to a temporary imbalance between supply and demand, which caused the 2004-08 global price spike. The U.S. occupation of Iraq also ended without the latter turning into an oil-producing colony of the former. 

It’s important to keep the failures of works like Frontlines: Fuel of War in mind when contemplating how today’s science fiction films, books, TV shows, and games depict the future. The common themes in such recent works are American decline and internal strife (Civil War, The Forever Purge), rise of a fascistic American dictatorship (The Handmaid’s Tale, The Creator), the masses suffering under the cruel yoke of megacorporations and the rich (Snowpiercer), and disastrous climate change (also Snowpiercer). If you take anything away from this essay, let it be a strong skepticism of whatever future doomsday movie or book makes the rounds next.

Analysis:

The world is nearly out of oil. In the game, the world hit “Peak Oil” shortly after 2008 and oil production collapsed over the next few years. By around 2020, oil had become so expensive due to its scarcity that even rich countries like the U.S. were afflicted with chronic electricity, food and water shortages. The in-game reporter character who accompanies the Coalition unit even says at one point that mass riots had become common in U.S. cities, and hundreds would die in the disorder in one night. By 2024, the only remaining oil wells on Earth are in Central Asia, and the world’s major powers are so desperate to control it that they start WWIII over it. Obviously, none of this happened. 

What saved us? Hydraulic fracking, an advanced method of recovering oil from underground deposits, which was pioneered in the U.S. It sharply increased the country’s oil output over the 2010s. By 2018, America was the world’s biggest oil producer, and it has held that title ever since. More than any other factor, the advent of fracking has kept oil cheap globally since 2008. The biggest pie in Frontline’s face is the fact that oil prices are actually much LOWER in 2024 than they were when the game was released, and that Peak Oil DEMAND could happen as early as 2030 thanks to the rise of electric cars and solar power.

But even if global oil production had peaked in 2008, output levels never would have fell as sharply as they did in the game: the collapse was so total that just 16 years later, Turkmenistan was the only country with oil left (in fact, it is actually not even one of the top 10 oil producers in the world today). In reality, the decline would have been much more gradual, and the world would have largely compensated by using more coal and natural gas (and in some countries, greater use of nuclear power). Instead of mass blackouts and nightly, murderous mayhem, America would be swept by mass complaining and people having to make do with slightly smaller houses and cars. Likewise, the world’s major nations wouldn’t be so desperate for energy that they’d be willing to start WWIII with each other to get it.

A pandemic happened in recent memory. Though only spoken of briefly in the game, an avian flu pandemic swept the world in 2009. The game’s narrator was a youth at that time, and he mentions that his parents withdrew him from school because they couldn’t get him a vaccine. This was partly accurate: the COVID-19 virus outbreak started in 2019 and, among its many ill effects, forced closures of schools across the world.

Hospital ward full of people sick with bird flu in 2009

Russia and China have formed a military alliance. The bad guys in the game are the “Red Star Alliance,” a military pact between Russia, China and a few smaller countries that border them. While Russia and China have closer relations than they did in 2008, it owes to shared hostility towards and exclusion by the West and not to any fondness of each other, and there is no mutual defense component to it. 

A Red Star Alliance soldier and the organization’s emblem

China views Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a mistake and a potential flashpoint for a larger war that China would gain nothing from. As such, China has refused to sell Russia weapons for use in Ukraine, though it has provided large amounts of other goods (microchips, jet engines, etc.) that Russia used to build weapons of its own. Given the different temperaments and strategic priorities of the countries’ leaders, it is highly unlikely they will form a mutual defense arrangement unless there’s a major change to the global order. They don’t want to get dragged into the other’s wars: Russia doesn’t want to fight against Taiwan and China doesn’t want to fight against Ukraine. 

U.S. troops don’t use the M-16 series rifle anymore. The Coalition troops that we see all have American accents and use a smoothly contoured, plasticky rifle that resembles the aborted “XM-8.” This means the U.S. military has abandoned the M-16 series as its standard rifle. This hasn’t happened, and the XM-8 was canceled before entering service because, though it was slightly better than the M-16 series in some ways, the advantage was not so great that it justified the cost of replacing millions of the older rifles. 

An American soldier circa 2024, with futuristic rifle, holographic eyepiece, but strangely no e-cigarette.

There are now plans to replace the M-16 series with a heavier, more powerful rifle called the “XM-7,” but I’m skeptical the plan will be carried to completion and instead expect it will find a role as a specialist weapon. 

All infantrymen, including the Russians and Chinese, have holographic eyepieces. Every soldier seen in the game has a square, holographic eyepiece jutting down from the bottom of his helmet rim and over one eye. Coalition eyepieces glow blue while Red Star eyepieces glow red, presumably because the two sides have an agreement to differentiate themselves according to who is good or evil. It’s unclear what the eyepieces display over their wearers’ fields of vision, though a fair guess would be the overhead battlefield map with objectives and enemy positions highlighted that the player sees at the top of the screen.  

A U.S. Army unit testing Microsoft Hololens augmented reality goggles meant for soldiering tasks in late 2023
A Ukrainian drone operator, 2024

While augmented reality eyewear keeps making appearances at military trade shows across the world, and all modern militaries have some program dedicated to evaluating them, they are not in common field use. A notable exception to this is short-range drone pilots, many of whom wear virtual reality goggles to remotely fly their craft. However, they don’t wear those goggles when engaged in rifle combat with the enemy like in the game. 

View through a U.S. military-standard EO Tech red dot rifle scope

Rifle scopes are much more common and more advanced than they were in 2008, and duplicate one aspect of the game’s eyepieces: when looked through, the scopes show glowing reticles over the shooter’s field of view, indicating where their bullets will hit. This makes target acquisition faster and more accurate, and the scopes have become standard equipment in several major militaries. In that sense, “augmented” or “holographic” visioning devices are common on the battlefield in 2024.

There are hand-launched attack drones. In the game, you can launch handheld, hovering drones that you then remotely pilot to enemy targets whereupon you detonate them. They are small enough to fly through open windows and hallways and are best suited for attacking fortified positions like machine gun pillboxes. A drone’s explosive load is about the same a grenade. This is probably the game’s most important and prescient prediction about 2024.

The Ukraine War has seen mass use of drones by both sides. This includes countless, small quadcopter drones that closely resemble those in the game. Some are kamikazes that are sacrificed upon use while others are reusable and drop mini-bombs. They’re so effective and cheap that they’re commonly used to hunt down lone infantrymen and don’t have to be reserved just for valuable targets like tanks. If anything, the game UNDERestimated how pervasive and transformative aerial drones would be on the 2024 battlefield.

There are small ground drones. However, the game’s prediction that small ground drones would be in common use has failed for several reasons. First, small vehicles with little wheels and low ground clearances can’t negotiate the uneven terrain found on typical battlefields: a barbed wire fence, log, or pile of rubble that a human could easily step over could be an impassable barrier to mini-tank the size of a coffee table. Sizing them up to overcome these issues results in them no longer being small enough for infantrymen to carry into the field. Second, since ground vehicles move slowly and basically in just two dimensions, they’re easy targets for enemy troops (contrast this with aerial drones, which can move fast and in three dimensions). This means they’re less survivable and might need some kind of armor, adding to their cost and bulk. Third, small ground drones are expensive because they require more material for their manufacture than flying drones. Above a certain unit price point, it doesn’t make sense to use them sacrificially like you can with aerial drones.

There’s a particularly unrealistic moment in the game where you use a skateboard-sized, remote controlled suicide drone to drive under an enemy tank and blow it up. Again, this would only work if the route to the tank were over flat, hard ground with no debris in the way, which you would never count on being the case in combat. The real 2024 solution would be to use a shoulder-launched missile or a small aerial kamikaze drone loaded with a shaped charge explosive. Those missiles and drones can also target the thin armor on the top sides of tanks, which is almost as vulnerable as the belly armor that a skateboard drone’s explosion would tear into.

A legged robot with the same speed, agility, size, and balance as a dog could be a potent weapon of war

That said, future advances in robotics will eventually fix the problem: small ground robots with legs instead of wheels would be able to quickly negotiate difficult terrain and attack other ground targets. This draws inspiration from history: during WWII, both sides experimented with bomb-laden dogs that were trained to run across the battlefield, dive under enemy tanks and then explode. While the dogs were fast and nimble enough to do it, problems like the animals being spooked by gunfire foiled its viability. It will surely take decades, but dog-like robots will become a reality, and I’m sure they’ll have combat niches, but can’t say whether they will be preferred to other kinds of futuristic weapons for specific tasks like destroying tanks.

Russian troops are bad at fighting. From the start of the game, in every mission where you fight Russia, you do nothing but drive them back. For a country with such a fearsome reputation, this seems paradoxical, but it actually isn’t: The ongoing Ukraine War, the first Chechen War, the first year of WWII, and the Russo-Finnish War bear out the fact that the Red Army fights poorly (sometimes disastrously so) when the stars align in the wrong way. Though Russians are more courageous and brutal than average on the battlefield and have great skill improvising, poor training, bad leadership, and supply shortages perennially undermine their overall performance. The problem gets worse when the war involves a place and an objective that average Russians don’t care about. 

Russian POWs in Ukraine, 2022

Russia’s military reputation has taken a major hit due to its poor performance in Ukraine since 2022: appalling losses have forced it to fall back on antiquated weapons drawn from Soviet stockpiles and on convict troops and paid foreign mercenaries. The Russians have made strategic blunders, and on the battlefield rely on uncreative tactics (mostly wearing down the Ukrainians with mass artillery strikes and frontal attacks with infantry). Aside from their tenacity, there’s little to be impressed with, and in a direct conventional war with U.S. troops like the “Coalition” team you lead in the game, the Russians would badly lose in peripheral places like Central Asia. However, they would fight much harder inside Russia itself, as it is their sacred homeland. 

Russia used nuclear weapons to defend itself from land invasion. After beating up the Russians in Central Asia, the Coalition decides to keep going with a land invasion across the Kazakhstan border into Russia itself, with the objective of conquering the latter. This makes little sense since the Coalition had already accomplished its goal of capturing the last remaining oil well in the world, and since an organization composed of democratic Western governments would never behave so recklessly. The response is predictable: Russia launches nuclear missiles against the Coalition armored force, causing major damage to it. (That mission is the most stunning in the game as it involves you fighting a tank battle punctuated by nearby nuclear explosions)

Thankfully, no one has tried invading Russia since 1941, so it has never used nuclear weapons in self-defense. And let there be no doubt they would: Russia clearly states in its defense doctrine that it will use nuclear weapons if its territory is threatened. The game’s depiction of how this would play out is accurate: Instead of launching an all-out nuclear attack against all Coalition’s cities, Russia started by only using smaller, tactical nuclear weapons against the Coalition’s military forces that were crossing the border, and in a remote area with few or no civilians. This wasn’t mentioned in the game, but it would surely be preceded by top-level warnings from Russia to the Coalition governments about what was coming. 

I think Russia, the U.S., and China are the world’s three “unconquerable countries” because of their sheer size and nuclear arsenals. The armies of other countries might be able to defeat them on foreign soil, but it would be hopeless to invade any of the three in an attempt to take them over since too many troops would be needed and they have enough nuclear weapons to annihilate any attacker. The final mission of the game is the storming of downtown Moscow, and in it, mushroom clouds are visible in the distance, meaning Russia has been using nuclear weapons against Coalition troop concentrations during their travels through its territory. I can’t fathom how any army could survive repeated nuclear attacks like that, nor do I see how the home fronts in the Coalition countries would avoid falling into chaos over widespread panic that Russia would nuke them at any moment as well.

Big tank battles are happening in Europe. As mentioned, the Coalition invasion of Russia is spearheaded by a large number of tanks. In the first invasion mission and subsequent ones set deeper in Russia, there are instances where your character must command a tank and fight with Russian tanks. To the surprise of people in 2008, this turned out to be accurate. 

The Ukraine War has seen many tank battles since 2022, with a series of particularly large ones happening in early 2024 for control of the town of Avdiivka. Up to this point in the War, 17,168 of Russia’s armored vehicles have been destroyed and 2,925 captured by Ukraine.

China has conquered Taiwan. The game focuses on the European theater of the war, so almost all of the combat is against Russian troops. Midway through the game, it is mentioned that China invaded and quickly took over Taiwan. Thankfully, this didn’t happen, so Frontlines: Fuel of War can be added to the enormous trash heap of sources that have wrongly predicted such an invasion since at least the 1980s. Additionally, the insinuation that Chinese ground troops could easily take over the island is almost certainly wrong: while China’s army is massive, its amphibious forces are small, which creates a major bottleneck for getting its troops across the Taiwan Strait and providing them with supplies.

U.S. attack subs lurking underwater and long-range antiship missiles fired from Taiwan and by U.S. warplanes might fatally damage a Chinese landing fleet before it reached the beaches. More generally, marshalling a naval fleet for a D-Day scale invasion is sure to be an extremely risky and high-casualty endeavor in today’s age of 24/7 spy satellite surveillance and long-range precision missiles. While the world has been primed to expect a future Chinese invasion of Taiwan to be an inevitable and unstoppable juggernaut, it could actually be the most legendary naval defeat since the loss of the Spanish Armada.

Links:

  1. Fracking sharply boosted U.S. oil production starting in the 2000s.
    https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=25372
  2. Thanks to fracking, the U.S. has been the world’s biggest oil producer since 2018.
    https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=37053
  3. Peak Oil Demand could come as early as 2030.
    https://www.iea.org/news/slowing-demand-growth-and-surging-supply-put-global-oil-markets-on-course-for-major-surplus-this-decade
  4. In WWII, both sides experimented with using bomb-laden dogs to blow up enemy tanks.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-tank_dog
  5. In the Ukraine War, ground drones have proven far less effective than flying drones.
    https://www.rferl.org/a/ground-drones-war-russia-invasion-ukraine/32911118.html
  6. The U.S. Army is experimenting with battlefield applications of augmented reality goggles, but the devices aren’t close to being approved for common use.
    https://www.gizchina.com/2023/09/14/us-army-orders-more-microsoft-ar-glasses-as-new-version-works-well/
  7. ‘In One Brutal Tank Battle Outside Avdiivka, The Russians Lost As Many As 21 Tanks. The Ukrainians Lost Two.’
    https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2023/12/28/in-one-massive-tank-battle-outside-avdiivka-the-russians-lost-as-many-as-21-tanks-the-ukrainians-lost-two/
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Review: “Terminator Genisys”

Plot:

In this fifth and worst (so far) movie in the Terminator franchise, familiar ground is trod again, but the viewer’s expectations are also upended. The movie opens in 2029, as a strike team led by rebel leader John Connor and his aide Kyle Reese attacks Skynet’s main base. As in past films, the attack succeeds, but not before a Terminator uses a time machine to go to 1984 to kill Sarah Connor. Kyle Reese is sent through the machine to protect her, but here the plotline twists: while John Connor and his men are watching Reese teleport into the past, a Terminator emerges from the back of the room, runs up behind John Connor and infects him with a nanomachine “disease” that transforms him into an advanced Terminator.

From that point on, the Terminator Genisys manages to have a story that is overly complicated but very stupid at the same time (just like too many action films made in the last 10 years). I won’t waste my time describing every contrivance and every side-plot that exists only for fan service. Suffice it to say Sarah Connor, Kyle Reese, and a friendly T-800 played by elderly Arnold Schwarzenegger team up to destroy Skynet, and evil robot John Connor goes back in time to stop them. He’s so advanced that it’s doubtful whether the other three can stop him.

The rehashing of scenes, events (2029 final attack on Skynet, Reese and Terminator teleporting into 1984 from the future), and characters from earlier movies is a testament to how unoriginal it is, and how hard it banks on fan service to have any appeal. But even that appeal is minimal: While Kyle Reese and Sarah Connor were relatable characters with depth of personality in the first film, they are one-dimensional caricatures in Genisys. The development of a romance between the two in the first film was believable and tragic, whereas in this remake, the lack of personal chemistry between the actors playing them is striking.

Schwarzenegger’s performance in the first movie was so stolid and intimidating that it became iconic. Now, he seems like an aging father that is reduced to being a background character in his high-strung teen daughter’s chaotic life. Having the homey and vaguely comical name “Pops” encapsulates his diminishment. The terrifyingly relentless and resilient T-1000 from Terminator 2 makes a guest appearance and is easily destroyed this time around. In summary, all the same notes from the better, earlier films are struck, but they ring hollow.

Terminator Genisys is the worst film in the Terminator franchise, and I understand why the next movie, Terminator Dark Fate, canceled it out by pretending like its events never happened. If there ever was a cash-grab devoid of any creativity or passion, this is it. Don’t watch it.

Analysis:

First, bear in mind I’m skipping any futuristic elements of this film that I discussed in my reviews of the other Terminator movies. You can read those here:

Robots will have superhuman reflexes. During the introductory combat scene where the humans raid Skynet’s base, the machine forces consist of humanoid T-800s, tilt-engine “Hunter-Killer” aircraft, and “Spider Tanks.” While the first two of those have been in every previous Terminator film, the last is new. Spider Tanks are quadrupedal fighting machines with plasma guns for arms. Overall, they’re about the size of small tanks. Each Hunter-Killer aircraft carries a Spider Tank attached to its belly, and they are air-dropped into the middle of the base within minutes of the human attack. One of the Spider Tanks starts delivering accurate fire at the human infantrymen while it is still in free-fall, and it continues shooting after hitting the ground at high speed.

A Spider Tank

This depiction of future robots having superhuman reflexes will prove accurate. In fact, the fire control systems in modern tanks and naval guns might already have the same capabilities as the Spider Tank aiming systems (able to hit moving targets with bullets while the tank or ship is also moving). If not, incremental improvements will surely close the gap. More generally, physical feats demanding fine dexterity, flexibility and bodily coordination that only the most skilled and highly trained humans can do today, like hitting a moving target with a bullet while you are also moving, throwing a dart onto a tiny bullseye from eight feet away, or doing a gymnastics performance that would win an Olympic gold medal, will be easy for multipurpose, human-sized robots by the end of this century. We will be surpassed in every way.

Machines will learn a lot about you from a single glance. At the start of the fight scene between Pops and the younger T-800 that has just emerged from the time portal, there’s a shot showing things from the latter’s perspective. We see the usual red tinting and text overlaid across its field of view. Simple graphics also show the T-800 scan Pops, identifying him as a fellow android and also identifying his gun (a Remington shotgun) along with its range.

This is accurate. Today’s best neural networks can already describe what they see in an image (a task called “visual question answering”) with over 80% accuracy. The multi-year trend has been one of steady improvement, leaving no doubt they will be as good as we are (presumably, 99% accurate) in the near future. Machine abilities to understand what they see in videos (“video question answering”) are less advanced, but also steadily improving. Again, there’s every reason to expect them to ultimately reach human levels of competency.

Machines could also potentially have much better eyesight than humans thanks to a variety of technologies like telephoto lenses and digital sensors that are more light-sensitive than human eyes, able to capture light from wavelengths that are invisible to us, and able to see finer details. Things that look blurry to us, either due to long distance or because the object is moving, would look clear to a machine that could be built with today’s technology.

Additionally, computers have the potential to process and analyze the contents of what they see faster than the human brain can. As a result, a machine could comfortably watch a movie at 10 times the normal speed–which would look like a disorienting blur of motion and shapes to us–and accurately answer whatever questions you had about it at the end. In a split second, it could notice levels of detail that most humans would need several minutes of staring at a still image to absorb.

These abilities will have many uses for machines in the future, a subset of which will involve combat. Yes, like the T-800 in the film, a fighting machine in just 20 years will be able to visually recognize humans, even at long distances and under poor light conditions, as well as the weapons and other gear they were carrying. At a glance, it would know what your weapon’s capabilities were, along with how much ammunition you were carrying. It could use that information to its advantage by doing things like keeping track of how many bullets you fired so it would know the exact instant you ran out and needed to switch magazines. From its initial glance at you, the fighting machine would also know how much body armor you were wearing, allowing it to jump out and target your unprotected areas during that brief pause in your ability to fire.

Robots will be able to detach parts of themselves to perform specific functions. Unlike in Terminator 2, this film’s T-1000 detaches parts of his own body when it is useful to his mission. At one point, as Kyle, Sarah and Pops are speeding away in a van, part of the T-1000’s hand separates so it can stick to the back of the vehicle and serve as a tracking device. When it catches up to them, the T-1000 turns its arm into a javelin, which it then throws at Pops, impaling him against a wall.

The T-1000 preparing to throw a spear made of metal from his own body

Being able to detach body parts will be a very useful attribute for many types of future robots. At the very least, it would let them replace their damaged or worn-out parts easily. The ability could also make them more survivable. For example, imagine a robot butler falling down a deep well and getting trapped because the walls were too slick for it to climb out and they also blocked the radio distress signals it sent out. Rather than wait to run out of power and rust away, the robot could detach one of its arms and throw it up and out of the well. After landing on the ground outside, the arm would send its own distress signal and/or use its fingers to crawl towards help.

That of course requires the robot’s systems to be distributed throughout its body, with the head (if it has one), torso, and each limb having a computer, a battery, sensors, and a wireless chip for communicating with the rest of the robot if physically severed from it. The redundancy, survivability, and functional flexibility of such a layout will be especially valuable for combat robots, which are expected to take damage but to also to complete critical tasks. If a combat robot like a T-800 were cut in half at the waist, the bottom half could still run towards and kick the enemy while the upper half used its arms to crawl towards him and attack. If blown to bits, the T-800 body parts that were still functional could still perceive their surroundings, communicate with each other, and try to put themselves back together again or to complete the mission to the best of their abilities separately. Fighting with machines like this would be very hard and demoralizing since every part of one of them would need to be neutralized before it was safe.

There will also be advantages to some robots carrying smaller, task-specific robots inside of themselves to be released when needed. Imagine an android carrying a small quadcopter drone in an empty space in its chest cavity. It could open a small hatch on its chest to release the drone or even spit it out of its mouth. The flying drone could transmit live aerial footage to give the android an overhead view of the area, letting it see things it couldn’t from ground level. A combat machine like a T-800 might carry flying drones that were fast enough to chase down cars and blow them up with a bomb, or inject their occupants with lethal toxins from a stinger.

Very advanced machines that won’t exist until the distant future could have organic qualities letting them “assemble” smaller robots internally and then expel them to complete tasks.

Getting back to the point, the movie’s depiction of an advanced robot being able to detach parts of its body and then throw them at people and things to accomplish various ends is accurate. The robots won’t be made of liquid metal, so the projected objects will be of fixed forms, but the end result will be the same. A future combat machine could detach its hand and throw it at the back of a van that was speeding away, the hand would grab onto something on the back door, and it would turn on its location-finding system to effectively turn itself into a tracking device. Alternatively, the combat machine could release from its body a small flying drone that could overtake the van and latch onto it, or at least follow it in the air.

Gradual replacement of human cells with synthetic matter could turn people into machines. A major plot twist is that John Connor has been “converted” into a Terminator through a process in which a swarm of microscopic machines rapidly took over all his cells, one at a time. Within a few minutes, he transformed from the hero of the human resistance to a minion of Skynet. Important details about the conversion process are never explained (including whether the machines are micro- or nanoscale), but the persistence of John’s memories and personality even after being turned into a robot indicates the machines mapped the fine details of his brain structure. It stands to reason that the same information was gathered about all the other cells in his body before they were all transformed into synthetic tissue.

John Connor having his body taken over by microscopic machines

Something like this could work, though it will require extremely advanced technology and the conversion would take longer than it did in the film. The process would involve injecting the person with trillions of nanomachines, which would migrate through their body until one was inside of or attached to each cell (a typical human cell is 100 micrometers in diameter whereas a ribosome–the quintessential organic nanomachine–is 30 nanometers wide, a size difference of 1 : 3,333). The nanomachines would spend time studying their assigned cells and how they related to the cells around them. Large scanning machines outside of the person’s body would probably be needed to guide the nanomachines, send them instructions, collect their data, and maybe provide them with energy.

After the necessary data on the locations and activities of all the person’s cells were gathered, the conversion process could start. The nanomachines already in the person’s body might be able to do this, or a new wave of specialized “construction” nanomachines might need to be introduced. Every cell would be broken down and the molecules reassembled to make a synthetic cell or some other type of structure of equal size. For example, if a person wanted ultra-strong bones, nanomachines would break down each bone cell and reuse its carbon molecules to make matrices of carbon nanotubules.

A typical human cell is much larger than microorganisms like viruses and some bacteria. A nanomachine could be as small as the latter.

The utmost care would be taken to control the speed of the conversion and to monitor the person’s life signs to make sure it wasn’t getting out of control and killing them. As each original cell was replaced, its successor would be tested again and again to ensure it mimicked the important qualities of its predecessor.

The conversion of the brain would, by far, be the most important part of the process, and hence the part done with the greatest care and oversight. Our memories, personalities, and consciousness directly arise from the microscopic structures of our brain cells and their intricate patterns of physical connections to each other. Even small mistakes transforming those cells into synthetic analogs would effectively “kill” the person by destroying their mind and replacing it with a stranger’s. For that reason, the procedure will bear no resemblance to what happened in the film, where Kyle Reese was apparently jabbed with a needle full of microscopic machines and then spent some time kicking and screaming as he felt them take over his cells. Instead, it will happen in a hospital room, with the patient surrounded by medical machines of all kinds that were monitoring and guiding the nanomachines and equipped to pause their work if necessary and to render lifesaving aid. And instead of minutes, it will take days or weeks. Multiple sessions might be needed.

What would be the point of this? Reengineering the human body at the cellular level would let us transcend the limitations of biology in countless ways. We could use electricity for energy, be bulletproof, directly merge our minds and bodies with machines, and achieve a level of substrate plasticity that would set us up for further iterations of radical augmentation that we can’t imagine.

Microscopic machines will be able to rapidly phase-change. In the final fight between John Connor and Pops, John’s technological abilities are fully utilized. While they are grappling, John’s body rapidly dissolves into a cloud of his constituent microscopic machines, which flow around Pops in pulses, delivering several concussive blows to the front of his body. The particles then rapidly reassemble into John’s body behind Pops, and John’s right arm hardens into a sword which he uses to chop off Pops’ arm. This means John’s microscopic machines managed to transform from a vapor cloud into a solid object as hard as high-grade steel in one or two seconds.

Pops getting popped by a robot dust cloud

I think it’s possible to create microscopic machines that can form into swarms and then work together to change the phase (solid, liquid, vapor) and macro-shape of the swarm, I doubt the swarms will be able to move around or switch phases that fast.

A foglet

In the 32 years since Terminator 2 came out and introduced the world to the idea of a shapeshifting robot, scientists and engineers have made pitifully little progress developing the enabling technologies. It only exists in the realm of theory, and the theoretical technology that is the best candidate is the “foglet” (also called “utility fog”). Scientist J. Storrs Hall conceived of it in 1993:

In essence, the utility fog would be a polymorphic material comprised of trillions of interlinked microscopic ‘foglets’, each equipped with a tiny computer. These nanobots would be capable of exerting force in all three dimensions, thus enabling the larger emergent object to take on various shapes and textures. So, instead of building an object atom by atom, these tiny robots would link their contractible arms together to form objects with varying properties, such as a fluid or solid mass.

To make this work, each foglet would have to serve as a kind of pixel. They’d measure about 10 microns in diameter (about the size of a human cell), be powered by electricity, and have twelve arms that extrude outwards in the formation of a dodecahedron. The arms themselves would be 50 microns long and retractable. Each foglet would have a tiny computer inside to control its actions. “When two foglets link up they’ll form a circuit between each them so that there will be a physical electrical network,” said Hall, “that way they can distribute power and communications.”

The arms themselves will swivel on a universal joint at the base, and feature a three-fingered gripper at the ends capable of rotating around the arm’s axis. Each gripper will grasp the hands of another foglet to create an interleaved six-finger grip — what will be a rigid connection where forces can only be transmitted axially.

The foglets themselves will not float like water fog, but will instead form a lattice by holding hands in 12 directions — what’s called an octet truss (conceived by Buckminster Fuller in 1956). Because each foglet has a small body compared to its armspread, the telescoping action will provide the dynamics required for the entire fleet to give objects their shape and consistency.

https://gizmodo.com/why-utility-fogs-could-be-the-technology-that-changes-5932880

A swarm of foglets could coalesce into something that looked like Kyle Reese and felt solid to the touch. They could then transform into something like a fluid or dense gas and “flow” around a person standing nearby, though I don’t know if the foglets could exert enough force against that person’s body to hurt them. The swarm could then re-form into Kyle Reese behind them. However, they wouldn’t be able to create a sharp, hard sword that could cut off a T-800’s metal arm: Hall calculated that foglets could only form into objects that are “as tough as balsa wood.” So while foglets could mimic solid objects, they will lack hardness and durability.

Even if foglets can’t “punch” you or turn into swords that can stab you, they’ll still be able to hurt you. Imagine a swarm of foglets in a vapor state enveloping you and then coalescing into a net ensnaring your body. What if they waited for you to breathe some of them in and then those foglets transformed into solids to clog up your lungs? Likewise, they could clog up the internal moving parts of any guns you had, rendering you defenseless.

Links:

  1. Progress in “visual question answering”
    https://paperswithcode.com/task/visual-question-answering
  2. Progress in “video question answering”
    https://paperswithcode.com/task/video-question-answering
  3. An interview with J. Storrs Hall about his “foglets”
    https://gizmodo.com/why-utility-fogs-could-be-the-technology-that-changes-5932880
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Review: “Event Horizon”

Plot:

In 2040, a large space ship named Event Horizon is built, incorporating a new propulsion system that allows instantaneous travel between any two points in the universe. The new technology will revolutionize space travel and free humans from our Solar System. Immediately after activating the new engine to do a test run to Proxima Centauri, the ship vanishes and is presumed destroyed.

Seven years later, the Event Horizon reappears in orbit of Neptune and emits an automated distress beacon. A team of U.S. military salvage astronauts goes to the ship to figure out what happened. Immediately upon boarding it, the rescue team realizes something very bad happened. Almost all of its systems are offline, and all that is left of the original crew is a mutilated corpse in the bridge along with bloody flesh smeared on the window panes. The team members also start having disturbing hallucinations and violent outbursts towards each other.

They discover that the experimental engine accidentally transported the Event Horizon to a different universe “of pure chaos and evil” where the indigenous life forms and laws of physics made the original crew go violently insane and murder each other, and then infused the ship itself with an evil, psychic life force that persisted even once it returned to our universe. The ship itself is therefore alive and is causing the rescue team members to go insane. It wants them to reactivate the special engine to take them all back to the crazy universe so the beings there can have fun torturing them.

Even though most people hate this movie, it’s been a guilty pleasure of mine for years. When I saw this in the theater at age 13, I think it was the scariest film I’d ever watched up to that point except maybe Alien.

Analysis:

In 2015 there will be a permanent human presence on the Moon. When the film starts, text appears describing 21st century milestones in space exploration. The film was released in 1997, so at that time, these events were in the future. One milestone was the establishment of a manned Moon base in 2015. That never happened in real life, and generally speaking, space exploration and space technology have proceeded much slower than it did in the film universe.

I predict a manned base will be built on the Moon in as little as 20 years, though it will have a tiny crew. It will be probably be the product of a broader space race between the U.S. and China, and that it will be a money loser that exists for prestige and scientific research. After an initial surge of attention, the public’s interest in the base will wane, just as happened with the International Space Station (ISS).

Profitable Moon bases might come decades later, and will probably center around the extraction of Helium-3 from the surface soil for use as fuel in future nuclear fusion reactors. While it’s tempting to think this would mean an enlarged human presence on the Moon to operate the mining equipment, A.I. and robots might be so advanced by then that humans would be unnecessary. As I’ve written before, I predict our machine creations will beat us into deep space, and humans like us might never even leave the Solar System. I’d be impressed if the off-world human population surpasses just 1,000 by the end of this century.

In 2032, commercial mining will start on Mars. The film’s opening text also says this. This prediction will fail, and I doubt the first humans will even land on Mars until the end of the 2030s at the earliest. Elon Musk has repeatedly predicted that his SpaceX company would take people to Mars by 2029, and his “Starship” rocket has the ability to get there and is now being tested, but other critical technologies haven’t even started development, like the crew vehicle that will house the astronauts for months long journey between Earth and Mars, and the landing capsule that will take them to and from Mars’ surface. By 2032, the best we could hope for is an unmanned mission to Mars meant to test out some of the technologies meant for a future human landing, and maybe meant to drop supplies or cargo capsules on the planet’s surface to form the genesis of a human base.

It won’t make sense to do commercial mining on Mars until well after 2032 since the planet’s gravity will impose prohibitively high launch costs for any mined ores a company is trying to export to Earth or other space colonies. It would make more sense to mine the Moon or the asteroid belt because gravity will be much weaker. Even launching stuff from Earth would probably be cheaper considering the infrastructure advantage there will be here vs. on Mars for many decades if not centuries.

The first commercial mining operation on Mars will be meant to service the Martian economy and not send anything off planet. It would only become economically justified once a significant population of humans or, more likely, intelligent machines were present on the planet. The mining operations would be focused on extracting basic materials like iron and aluminum to make mundane things like buildings and vehicles. 

In 2040–only 17 years from now–a massive space ship like the Event Horizon will be built. Aside from its teleportation drive, the Event Horizon is remarkable for its sheer size: it is about a mile long, dwarfing today’s biggest surface ships and tallest buildings in length.

There’s no chance something of this scale will be built until the 22nd century. The biggest spaceship in 2040 will probably be one that is designed to transport astronauts from Earth orbit to Mars orbit. The internal area that is accessible to the human crew will be comparable in volume to a large RV or an American house.

By 2047 there will be a large space station orbiting the Earth. This is shown at the start of the movie and appears to be a general purpose space station. The rescue ship docks with it to pick up its crew before heading on to the Event Horizon. The station looks cuboidal in overall shape and consists of a scaffold structural frame studded with function-specific modules (e.g. – maneuvering thrusters, fuel tanks, crew compartments, tunnels linking modules). Its size is impossible to judge accurately, but the length of any side can be measured in hundreds of feet. The ISS is 356 long along its longest axis, so the movie space station’s size is within an order of magnitude of something that already exists.

Unfortunately, nothing approaching the size or complexity of the fictitious station will exist by 2047. The ISS, which costs billions of dollars a year to operate, is scheduled to crash back to Earth in 2031. Even if it gets a life extension to 2047, it’s highly unlikely it will be significantly expanded in size by then. No space agency or private company has credible plans to build new space stations that will be nearly as big as the ISS for the foreseeable future. Keep in mind the political decision to build the ISS was made in the mid-80s, it took another ten years for construction to start, and the station wasn’t fully assembled in space for another 15 years. 2047 is 24 years in the future, so if we expect to have something even bigger than the ISS in orbit by then, the agreement between several space agencies to start work should be getting signed about now if the ISS’ developmental timeline is any guide.

No international deal has been made, and we shouldn’t expect serious space cooperation between the U.S., China and Russia to happen anytime soon thanks to worsened diplomatic relations, so in 2047, manned ships intended for interplanetary missions will dock with space stations that are SMALLER than what we have today.

Future space ships will have weird, utilitarian designs. The Event Horizon is shaped like a…well…just look at it and decide for yourself! While I don’t think future space ships will look exactly like this, I’m sure they’ll look just as weird, but in different ways. For one, since there’s no air in space, nothing needs to be streamlined (look at satellites). A space ship’s front could be a flat slab, instead of a pointy cone like an airplane nose or an arrow like a ship’s bow. However, the minimize the risk of collision with space debris, it would still be a good idea to make space ships oblong in overall layouts, with their narrowest ends facing the direction of travel, so a gross design similarity with ships and cars would remain.

Since there’s also almost no gravity, a compact and robust layout is less important, so major sections of a space ship could be connected to each other with flimsy little tunnels or braced steel frames.

Giant arrays of solar panels dwarfing the ship like a parachute dwarfs its occupant could be common. Huge fins meant to radiate waste heat from the ship’s engine and other systems might also be present.

Ships designed for long, manned missions will probably need gravity for the health and comfort of their crews. The only way to generate it is to have the ships rotate so centrifugal force pushes people objects outwards from the ship’s central axis. Shaping the habitat module of such a ship like hollow cylinder would take maximum advantage of the artificial gravity.

Put all of these design considerations together, and you do indeed get space ships that look as weird as the Event Horizon. In 2047, the basic scenario of a weird-looking space ship docking with a space station orbiting Earth before it heads out to another planet will probably be a reality. However, both crafts will be much smaller than those shown in the film, and ship’s range will be limited to Earth’s nearest neighbors (Venus or Mars) and won’t extend to Neptune.

Future space ships will have dark, gothic interiors. The inside of the Event Horizon consists of dimly-lit, menacing rooms, and some of the walls are dark colors. Long duration space missions are already stressful enough, so there’s no way real space ships will be like this. A good deal of research goes into making spacecraft psychologically pleasant, and future space ships will, to the greatest extent practical, feel warm, comfortable, and remind humans of Earth.

However, rarely-used parts of the ship might not obey such rules. The Nostromo from the movie Alien is closer to the mark–the part of the ship where the crew sleep, eat and do recreation is light-colored, well-lit, and inviting, whereas the parts reserved for machinery and cargo storage are industrial-looking and darker.

Future astronauts will have black space suits. This makes no sense. In space there’s a gigantic black background. If you were working outside the ship, would you want to be camouflaged against that background if your tether broke loose and your crewmen had to find you? And why would a military rescue crew whose members spend most of their time going into broken-down space ships with all the interior lights disabled wear black suits? It would make it harder for them to see each other.

I can’t think of a single benefit to black space suits. White is the ideal color, which is probably why the American and Russian suits designed for extravehicular use are white.

Artificial gravity will be generated from the floors of space ships. The Event Horizon and the rescue ship both have this form of artificial gravity. As I’ve discussed in other reviews, the laws of physics don’t allow for the existence of this kind of technology, and gravity can only be simulated by spinning a space ship so the centrifugal force pushes the astronauts and objects down into the deck.

The tablet computers of 2047 will be big, chunky and will have thick frames. A tablet computer is shown in one scene, and it is clearly inferior to one from five years ago (the film was released in 1997, and the first iPad was not sold until 2010). The prediction has thus already failed. By 2047, we’ll be able to make tablets that are only a few millimeters thick and whose displays go to their edges, meaning they won’t have frames.

This raises an interesting question: If you COULD make a tablet like that, would it make sense to do so? If your tablet is almost as thin as paper, it can easily be damaged by creasing or being poked too hard by a stylus. If you make it strong like metal to resist damage and still keep it as thin as a sheet of paper, then it turns into a sharp and potentially deadly object. Excessive thinness will also make the device hard to hold and grip in some ways, and every time you pushed a button on it, the whole thing would wobble.

So even if you COULD make a tablet as thin as paper, I think you’d still want to put it in a protective case, which would give it a depth and a border frame similar to a modern iPad. Extra thickness will also mean longer battery life no matter what.

These considerations also apply to smartphones–just imagine how hard it would be if your phone were a 3″ x 5″ note card made of rigid metal.

Suspended animation technology will exist by 2047. The crewmen use suspended animation pods during the multi-month journey between Earth and Neptune. It’s vanishingly unlikely the technology will exist by then. I don’t think we’ll be able to cryonically freeze humans and revive them until the end of this century or later. A milder alternative to that process, which involves keeping a person in a deep, drugged sleep like a hibernating bear while they’re drip-fed nutrients for months, could be developed sooner, though I question whether it would be wise to use it on astronauts. Yes, it would reduce their consumption of calories and oxygen and would lower the odds of certain types of mission problems, but it could jeopardize the mission by damaging their health before reaching the destination.

In 2047, astronauts on interplanetary space missions will bide their time in transit just as the Apollo astronauts did and workers in Antarctic bases do: mostly in boredom, staring at the same four walls.

We will invent a space ship engine that can exceed the speed of light. Our current understanding of physics holds that this is impossible. It’s unwise to stake any expectations about the future on fundamental laws of science being overturned. Moreover, even if it were theoretically possible to exceed light speed, the next show-stopper will probably be finding a way to generate the impossibly high amounts of energy needed to do it.

The space ships of 2047 will still be using conventional means of propulsion, like chemical fueled rockets and ion thrusters.

Under the light speed constraint, it would literally take hundreds, perhaps thousands of years for us to colonize our nearest stars, by which time A.I.’s will be running Earth’s civilization, with obvious implications for who gets chosen for the missions. Furthermore, any future space empire we created would be impossible to hold together since it would take years for simple communications to transit between the different star systems. People and intelligent machines would take orders of magnitude longer to traverse the gulfs, so the isolation would lead to unique cultures and perhaps political identities developing in each system.

Wars with aliens at the edge of space would be very hard to deal with since the rest of our civilization wouldn’t hear about it until years after it started, by which time the situation in the warzone would have totally changed. A coordinated military response drawing upon the resources of the other star systems would be almost impossible. It would be a mess.

The space ships of 2040 will still use CDs for data storage. There’s a brief shot on the Event Horizon’s bridge where we see an astronaut removing a CD from the main computer’s disc drive. Storage discs are already obsolescent and rare to see today. By 2040, only people interested in deliberately indulging in nostalgia will use them.

That said, removable storage devices will still exist in 2040, but they won’t be rotating. Sometimes it’s more hassle than it’s worth to transfer or store data in the cloud, and it’s preferable having your data on a physical device you can put in your pocket. This is especially true for anything you want to keep private.

Astronauts will use magnetic boots. When the rescue crew first enters the Event Horizon, its gravity is not working because the power is disabled. To get around, they use magnetic boots, which stick to the metal floors. NASA developed these in the 1960s, so there’s no technological barrier to equipping astronauts with them in the 2040s. However, they’ve never been used in space because spacecraft are built of aluminum and titanium, which magnets are not attracted to. The space ships of that era will still need to be very lightweight, meaning they will still be made of non-magnetic materials, and the boots will be useless.

Moreover, walking is an inefficient way to move around in a weightless environment, as you’ll discover if you try to walk across the bottom of a swimming pool. It’s much better to aim your body at your destination and to use one or two of your limbs to push off from a nearby surface so you float towards it. There’s a scene where the rescue ship’s captain does something like that to quickly move along the outside of the Event Horizon to reach a comrade who is about to be ejected from an airlock.

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Review: “The 6th Day”

Plot:

“In the near future,” a man named “Drucker” (played by Tony Goldwyn) has become the world’s richest person by founding a biotech company that clones animals and human organs. The company has also invented a brain scanning device that can map the minds of recently deceased animals and then implant their memories and personality traits into the brains of newly created clones. One of Drucker’s businesses, called “Re-Pet,” pulls those technologies together as a walk-in retail chain where bereaved people bring in their dead cats and dogs and walk out with healthy clones of them. Cloning only takes two hours.

Using the same technology and facilities, Drucker also runs a secret and illegal human cloning operation. He makes human clones for friends and for powerful people who can’t cope with the deaths of loved ones, or who have a vested financial interest in not letting someone else die. For example, at the beginning of the movie, a star football player breaks his neck during a game and the team’s owner secretly pays Drucker to make a clone and dispose of the disabled, comatose player. The guy wakes up in the hospital not realizing he’s a clone, and the devastating on-field accident is explained to the public as miraculously not as bad as it looked on TV. The clone returns to his job and the team keeps winning.

Left: Drucker...Right: His chief cloning scientist (played by Robert Duvall)
Left: Drucker…Right: His chief cloning scientist (played by Robert Duvall)

Though Drucker’s illegal human cloning operation is only known to a handful of people, his legal cloning businesses have still made him a target for religious extremists and environmentalists who believe the technology is unethical and lets humans “Play God.” Some of these opponents also fear that Drucker’s ultimate goal is to use his money and growing influence with politicians to overturn the ban on human cloning, which will bolster his wealth and power even more. Over the course of the movie, it becomes clear that Drucker is indeed unfit to wield such power and that he’s a charismatic sociopath who doesn’t value human life.

Partly because he fears assassination, Drucker routinely makes “backups” of his mind using a brain scanning device, and he has instructed his inner circle of geneticists and gun-toting henchmen to secretly clone him if he ever dies. That way, his companies and his long-term plans will keep going forward no matter what. Unfortunately for Drucker, he does get murdered, and his living will so to speak is enacted. And unfortunately for Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character, Adam, he gets mixed up in the whole thing and becomes a target for assassination.

Adam is a middle-aged family man who runs a small helicopter business ferrying people from the city to the mountains where they can do things like snowboard or hike. Adam also employs a co-pilot named “Hank.” One day, Drucker’s people call Adam and hire him to take Drucker to the mountains for a brief ski trip. Before they depart, one of Drucker’s goons makes Adam and Hank use the brain scanning machine and submit DNA samples, lying to them that the brain scanner is a vision test machine and that a drop of blood is needed to make sure they aren’t on drugs. After all, this is the richest guy in the world they’re going to be carrying on their helicopter, and special precautions need to be taken.

At the last minute, Adam pulls out of the job and he tells his co-pilot Hank to fly Drucker for him. Hank does it, and right after they land on the mountain, a Christian extremist who somehow knew in advance Drucker was going there shoots them both dead and runs away. Drucker is able to make an emergency phone call to his goons right before he dies, and they scramble to enact his living will instructions. The film doesn’t show this, but they recover the two dead bodies from the mountain and use the secret cloning lab and brain scan data to clone them in two hours. Unfortunately, a major foul-up happens when they mistakenly clone Adam instead of Hank. Instead of looking at the pilot’s corpse, realizing it was Hank, and then cloning Hank, they just looked at the paperwork, saw Adam listed as the pilot for that day, and cloned him. Gross incompetence is a recurring trait among Drucker’s henchmen and it ultimately proves his undoing.

The henchmen program Adam’s newly made clone with Adam’s brain scan, and then dump him, unconscious, in a taxi and send it to the mall. When he wakes up, he doesn’t realize he’s a clone and just brushes off the fact that he can’t remember the last several hours of his day. No matter. Clone Adam goes shopping. The Original Adam is running errands elsewhere in the city and doesn’t realize he now has a clone. Both Adams are planning to go home to their family house that night.

Don’t ever hire these idiots to do your killing for you

Meanwhile, Drucker’s clone is having a meeting with his goons at his company headquarters building, surely upset over “his” murder a few hours before, when he realizes his henchmen mistakenly cloned the wrong pilot. He quickly grasps how disastrous this is, since Clone Adam will bump into the Original Adam, they will realize one of them is a clone, they will go to the cops, the media will announce that a human has been illegally cloned, and Drucker will be implicated since he runs a cloning business and hung out with Original Adam the same day the latter was cloned.

Drucker orders his henchmen to intercept Clone Adam before he gets home from the mall and kill him. During the confrontation, Clone Adam kills two of them and gets away. In spite of making two catastrophic mistakes in less than 12 hours, Drucker has these incompetent, dead henchmen cloned to serve him again. It’s stunningly poor judgement for the richest man in the world. I won’t go over every plot point after that, but the incompetence of Drucker’s henchmen and Adam’s ability to out-think and kill them gets inadvertently funny.

At the end of the film, one of Drucker’s henchmen accidentally shoots him in the stomach, fatally wounding him. Drucker then shoots the henchman in revenge, and with his dying breaths, Drucker starts making a clone of himself. One of Drucker’s other henchmen then accidentally shoots the cloning machine, causing Drucker’s clone to come out deformed and incomplete, and rendering it impossible to make any more clones to fix the problem. The exploding cloning machine also kills a third henchman by accident. Drucker’s deformed clone lives a few minutes before dying from something else.

In this film universe, people also die from being punched in the face or from the stereotypical “headlock movie neck snap” (if it were really that easy to break someone’s neck, wouldn’t it be happening all the time in real life?). It’s really silly, and The 6th Day got bad reviews for a reason.

Cloning’s centrality to the movie’s plot was clearly inspired by cloning of Dolly the Sheep, which happened just four years before the film’s release. While there are brief moments in The 6th Day when the ethics of cloning were discussed somewhat evenhandedly, in the end it degenerates into an action flick full of black-and-white Good Guys and Bad Guys. The pro-cloning people are all murderous sociopaths, and we cheer when Adam kills them all and blows up the secret cloning lab in the end. The preexisting biases of the audience–that human cloning is unethical, dying is a good and noble thing, and using technology to live forever is evil–are just confirmed, and no one is pushed from their comfort zone. The building full of bad people just explodes in a fireball.

I think The 6th Day was a forgettable film with a convoluted plot, overly simplistic characters, and unrealistic plot developments. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s salary clearly gobbled up a huge chunk of the movie’s budget, forcing corners to be cut in every other aspect of the film: The rest of the cast was B-list or worse (except for Robert Duvall, who was clearly not engaged in his role), and the cinematography was little better than a made-for-TV movie.

Analysis:

The 6th Day was released in 2000, and in the opening text crawl, the timeframe is ambiguously described as “The near future.” However, in a DVD featurette, Arnold Schwarzenegger supposedly says it takes place in 2015. The movie contains an assortment of technologies, some of which already exist, some of which we won’t have for 20 to 50 years, and some of which we may never create. As such, I think it’s safe to say it doesn’t accurately depict any specific moment in the future or past, so it will be no use for me to compare it to a particular year of reality (and it’s arguable whether the canon material provides a specific year, anyway), so instead, I’ll judge when (or if) the different technologies are likely to come into existence.

People will clone their dead pets. The film’s chief antagonist–Mr. Drucker–runs several large businesses that make use of cloning technology. One of them is called “Re-Pet,” and is a national chain store where people get their dead pets cloned. This prediction basically came true in 2007 when a South Korean company called “Sooam Biotech” cloned its first pet dog for a customer (the very first dog clone was made in 2005, but was made for scientific rather than commercial purposes). Since then, they’ve cloned around 600 more dogs, including a police rescue dog that searched for survivors at the Twin Towers wreckage. Other pet cloning companies have also been founded, though Sooam seems to be getting most of the global business.

Of course, I say the movie’s prediction has “basically” come to fruition because some aspects of it have yet to be realized. In The 6th Day, pet cloning was a mainstream practice that was cheap enough for upper-middle-class people like Adam (he owned a successful small business and had a nice house and antique car) to afford. Today, it costs $50,000, which is too high for anyone but a multimillionaire to casually pay for as Adam did. It should be said that the high cost of pet cloning is surely thanks in part to the low demand–if there are few orders for a product, then the firm supplying it won’t be able to take advantage of economies of scale, and low profit potential will discourage other firms from entering the market and driving down prices through competition.

The cost-performance curve of cloning procedures is surely sloping downward over time, but I can’t find any good data that I can graph and use to extrapolate a future year when cloning a dog will cost, say, $5,000 in today’s money so that average guys like Adam could afford it. For sure, the price isn’t dropping at Moore’s Law rates, since if it were, it would already be that cheap by now. This poses a major problem for me in assessing when this prediction and the movie’s other predictions about other aspects of cloning will be feasible.

I actually emailed two animal cloning companies asking for cost data, but got no response. In lieu of that, I’ll have to do my own crude estimates based on internet research. (BTW, if you can come up with better data than this, PLEASE feel free to send it to me)

The first cloned dog was created in 2005. While the company didn’t discuss its expenses, an outside expert estimated it cost more than $1 million. Much of the money was spent doing trail-and-error experiments until, after many failures, they found a cloning technique that worked. (Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/04/science/beating-hurdles-scientists-clone-a-dog-for-a-first.html) For that reason, it’s a cost outlier.

In 2009, an American company called “BioArts” cloned a dog for $155,000. (Source: http://www.cnn.com/2009/LIVING/01/29/cloned.dog/index.html)

By 2012, the cost of cloning a dog was $100,000, though cloning companies were willing to give steep discounts to some clients who agreed to do TV interviews to generate publicity. (Source: https://www.today.com/news/woman-laid-3-years-ago-pays-50k-have-dog-cloned-wbna46030252 )

By 2018, the cost of cloning a dog was $50,000. (Source: https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2018/08/dog-cloning-animal-sooam-hwang) As of this writing in 2023, the price has not dropped.

If we plug those three cost figures into a data chart and fit an exponential regression line to it, we get this:

If the rate of cost-performance improvement continues, it will cost $5,000 to clone a dog in the late 2040s. Again, I stress the coarseness of this estimate and the scarcity of data. However, I think that the sentiment is correct, in that pet cloning won’t get cheap enough for most people to afford until the distant future.

People will clone organs to replace their damaged original organs. Drucker’s human organ cloning business is only briefly mentioned in the film, which is sad since it stands out as an application of cloning that few would consider unethical. About 8,000 Americans die each year waiting for organ transplants, and others die after their bodies reject organ transplants because they have different DNA. Had the life saving value of this for people in need of new organs been explored more, the film would have been more intelligent and Drucker could have been a more sympathetic character.

As with pet cloning, technically this prediction came true in 2006 when the first human organs (urinary bladders) were made from cloned tissue. However, that was only doable because bladders are so simple (basically just elastic bags), and therapeutic cloning still isn’t good enough to make complex human organs like kidneys and hearts. I think it we’ll have to wait until the end of this century for that.

Refrigerators will monitor their contents and help you order new products as the old ones run out. Early in the film, before Schwarzenegger gets into all this trouble with sociopaths and clones and whatnot, we see the start of a normal day for him. He wakes up, goes downstairs to the kitchen for breakfast, and the display built into the door of the refrigerator warns him that it’s running low on milk, and asks him to push a “Yes” button if he wants to order more. That means the refrigerator is smart enough to know what’s inside of it, and is connected to the Internet so it can order things from retailers. This could be built today with existing technology.

Refrigerator door display

“Smart refrigerators” with built-in interactive displays and WiFi are already commercially available, and we already have push-button instant online ordering. If the refrigerators had computers and cameras inside of them, pattern recognition algorithms could let the refrigerators accurately identify their contents, along with the freshness of those contents and how full their containers were. I don’t see how identifying a jug of milk should be a harder visual problem for computers than identifying any number of other objects they’re already able to identify with high accuracy, like letters of the alphabet, human faces, or common animals. If anything, food and beverages should be easier to recognize since there’s a more limited universe of things people put in their refrigerators, and because the packaging usually has writing on it describing what it is. This gets super easy when the packaging has a barcode.

If used the right way, this technology could significantly reduce food waste and improve peoples’ lives by serving as a sort of “automatic grocery list” whenever they went to the store, and by suggesting meals based on what ingredients were available and what was nearing its Use-By Date.

Biological tissue scaffolds will be used to quickly make clones. Drucker’s companies are able to make human and animal clones in only two hours because they keep full-body, DNA-free “tissue scaffolds” ready for use, floating in pools of preservative liquid. These generic bodies are called “blanks,” and when a clone is to be made, one of the blanks is infused with the original human or animal’s DNA, and rapid tissue growth is then stimulated.  This is an idea that makes some sense, but because each human has unique body proportions (skeleton, musculature, organ shapes), there’s no way a single “blank” human body could be used to clone anyone and everyone.

“Blanks” floating in the secret human cloning vat

Also, a human body contains tens of trillions of cells, and rapidly implanting the donor’s DNA into each of those in a blank would require technology that is several paradigm shifts ahead of what we have now. Additionally, the DNA would have to be migrated without damaging any of it in the process, unless you wanted lots of the clone’s cells to quickly die or become cancerous. I’m not even sure if this is possible with ANY level of technology. Pulling off this feat might require Star Trek levels of technology, and in that case, you probably wouldn’t need blank bodies since you could just quickly construct custom-made bodies using raw materials (like powder) in a vat full of bubbling liquid.

Using tissue scaffolds to help grow an adult human clone over the course of two months instead of two hours might be doable by the end of this century. A slower process like that would allow the DNA replication and tissue differentiation to happen with a much lower risk of error. A smaller number of stem cells that had been carefully injected with the donor’s DNA, and then tested to ensure no errors had occurred, could be implanted on something like a full-body organic scaffold and stimulated to rapidly grow and multiply. As I said in my 5th Element review, the subsequent growth process would have to be very closely monitored and regulated by machines.

Ultimately, it will probably be faster and easier to dispense with organic bodies, and to manufacture robotic “clone bodies” and then just implant the original person’s brain into them. The robotic bodies could be made to look outwardly identical to the person’s original, human body, but underneath, the bones, muscles and organs would be made of synthetic materials. The only organic components might be the nervous system, which would interface with the person’s brain. The squishy androids from the Aliens movies and the semi-organic T-800s from the Terminator movies should give you some idea of the hybridization I’m imagining.

We might actually invent ways to make robotic, adult clone bodies before we invent ways to rapidly make organic, adult clone bodies. Synthetic materials are just much easier to work with. 

We will be able to read and copy people’s minds using technology. In the film, Drucker’s companies have an advanced tabletop device called a “syncorder” (SIN-cord-ur) that is able to scan a person’s brain in a few seconds and capture all of their memories and personality traits as digital data. Users stick their faces close to the machine and the scan is done through two lens-like protrusions that interface with the eyes. This type of technology won’t exist for a hundred years, and possibly never.

He thinks he’s just getting a vision test, but the machine is actually copying his brain’s connectome

The things that truly make you “you” are indeed contained in your brain, in the form of neural structures and synaptic connections that form your memories and personality traits. Appropriately, this unique brain network is called the “connectome.” However, we’re incredibly far away from understanding the physical mechanics of this (e.g. which brain structure corresponds to which type of memory), let alone being able to make a brain scanner with good enough resolution to see the relevant cell-sized (or smaller?) physical features.

If it is possible to read someone’s mind, it will be much more invasive and time-consuming than the five-second syncording process shown in the film. Imagine something more along the lines of having to stick your head into a hole in a giant scanning machine for several, multi-hour sessions while you are guided through different thought exercises designed to evoke certain emotions, memories and cognitive operations while your brain activity is monitored. Or, if nanomachines can ever be built (another big “if” that we’re still not sure the laws of physics allow), having billions of them injected into your brain to map the shape of each cell. It might just be impossible.

However, while brain scans might prove impossible or possible only in the distant future, I think within two decades, we’ll be able to make very accurate digital “copies” of people that mimic their personalities. Mass surveillance will also effectively mean that many of your life experiences will be recorded, and hence, your memories could be mostly deduced by machines. I say “mostly” because human memories are frail and subject to all forms of manipulation, so your unique set of memories aren’t an accurate catalog of your life experiences. Machines would have to, by observing you and your brain activity, figure out where your mental distortions and gaps were.

An interesting consequence will be the rise of immortal, digital avatars of all humans. Long after a particular person died, a computer program or lookalike robot that faithfully mimicked their behaviors, personality, speech, and that could describe the same memories would like on. Far from being an automaton, such a machine could be endowed with artificial intelligence, contoured to reflect the intelligence and psyche of the original human. This would raise new questions for us about the nature of death and individual identity that I can’t explore here.

We will be able to implant memories and personalities into cloned humans. In the film, the syncorder machines are like CD burners: they can copy memory files from people and also implant memories into people. In both cases, you just need to look into two appendages and push a button. When Drucker’s goons clone Adam, then implant his unconscious clone with Original Adam’s memories using the machine. Since Original Adam was only syncode-scanned a few hours before, Clone Adam doesn’t have enough missing time in his short term memory to make him suspicious anything strange happened aside from an afternoon nap. I doubt we’ll be able to implant memories in people for 100 years, possibly never. Doing so would require the ability to physically alter the brain at the cellular and possibly intracellular levels. The only technology I can think of that might be able to do that is nanomachines, and progress making those is going at a snail’s pace. Some scientists believe that just can’t be made.

The standard sidearm will be a laser/plasma pistol. In the movie, all the bad guys carry energy pistols that fire glowing bolts of some sort instead of bullets. They also don’t make the standard “pop” or “crack” sounds of firearms, and instead make indescribable “Zhweee” noises. When fired, the guns produce very large muzzle blasts, and they cause burn damage to the humans and hard objects that they hit. The bolts are more damaging than handgun bullets, but the energy pistols also seem to have slower rates of fire than gunpowder handguns. Almost every time someone shoots a person or object with an energy pistol, I can’t see how gunpowder handguns like Glocks wouldn’t have done the job adequately. The only exception is when two henchmen use their energy pistols to shoot down one of Adam’s charter aircraft.

I don’t think directed energy pistols like this are technologically feasible, so they won’t ever be common, and even energy weapons as big as large rifles will forever be rare. For why, read my Terminator review.

Bans on human cloning will be enforceable. Drucker has to keep his human cloning lab secret because human cloning is illegal. A few brief lines of dialog explain that the ban has existed for a few years, and was put in place because the first human cloning attempt failed in some grotesque way.

National bans on cloning could be sidestepped by going to other countries where it was legal, and enacting an international ban is unlikely since there is profit to be made by providing the service. For this reason, people evade national-level restrictions on abortion, sperm donation and IVF today. The 6th Day correctly shows that elected politicians will help bring down anti-cloning laws once they realize they can personally benefit from it.

And as the global drug war clearly shows, even if an international ban existed, the procedure would still be available at underworld labs and clinics, particularly in countries with weaker rule of law. This problem would only worsen with the passage of time as cloning equipment got cheaper and the technical know-how got more common.

To stop human cloning, laws will criminalize the clones themselves, and government forces will kill clones upon discovery. Several times in the movie, it is mentioned that the original cloned human was “destroyed,” and that the law against human cloning also directs the government to kill clones. And after discovering that an impostor (actually Original Adam) is at his house, Clone Adam (who at that point in the film doesn’t yet realize HE is the clone) plots to kill him, since “There’s no law against it” and “He’s not human.”

I can’t see how a law authorizing the murder of cloned humans would ever be enacted in a country that respected human rights. The 6th Day was filmed in Vancouver, and while the location of the fictional setting was kept ambiguous, it was clearly set in the U.S. or Canada. Legally and culturally, neither country would ever let adult humans be killed merely because they were clones. National bans on human cloning procedures are entirely realistic, as are harsh punishments for doctors who do the procedure, but the clones themselves would be held blameless.

People will know what it’s like to die. For comical effect, there are several instances where Drucker’s cloned henchmen talk about their bad memories of Adam killing their previous selves. One henchman who gets his torso run over while trying to kill Adam in a car chase complains of phantom chest pains, even though his body bears no injuries since it is a healthy clone of the dead original. He also seems psychologically scarred by the implanted memories of his traumatic death. At another point, a different henchman says to the group: “Knock it off, we’ve all been killed before.” I think humans and machines will someday be able to speak of death in the past tense like this.

It hurts where his predecessor’s chest was run over by a car

Once human cryonics and other forms of induced stasis become possible, people will medically die and then be brought back to life years later. In every sense of the word, they will have experienced death, and might have memories right up to the moment of expiration.

Also, if the sort of brain implant technology analyzed in my Aeon Flux review is ever invented, then people in the process of dying will be able to directly share their sensations with other humans and with machines, so you could know what death feels like remotely.

In addition, because machines are more resilient and more easily repaired than biological life forms, I think it will be common for intelligent machines that have been “killed” to be brought back to life in repair shops. It would be little different from removing your hard drive from your wrecked PC and installing it in a new PC.

Let me make a few predictions about this: Death will be so traumatic that it will be common for revived humans not to remember the actual event or the moments leading up to it. Humans who experience it remotely through brain implants will by turns be horrified (ten times worse than watching an internet gore video) or find that it feels no different than falling asleep. Machines will most likely have crystal clear memories leading up to the moment of death, with unpredictable effects on their psyches. Death itself will literally feel like nothing. Everyone will understand it is just a state of nothingness, like a dreamless sleep or the same way things were for you before you were born. The notion of there being an afterlife will become even less credible as the number of “formerly dead” people grows and they all describe the same nothingness.

The moods and actions of animals will be controllable with technology. In one scene, Drucker’s henchmen abduct Adam’s wife and daughter in order to blackmail him. They make use of remote-controlled Doberman dogs for this. One of the henchmen uses something like a smartphone app to remotely issue commands to the dogs, which they receive through high-tech collars. Glancing at the smartphone screen for a second, the henchman appears to have push-button options to grossly control the dogs’ behavior, for instance telling them to “Stop” or to “Attack.” The dogs corral Adam’s family into a corner, and then the henchmen arrest them.

This is already possible using existing technology found in dog training “shock collars.” Using electric shocks of varying intensity, vibrations, and sounds (some of which are outside human hearing ranges), the collars can help humans to train dogs and to control their behavior.

The long-term implications of this technology are interesting to ponder. At some point, it will be possible to cheaply manufacture shock collars embedded with hi-res cameras, microphones, GPS trackers, and other sensors that monitor the animal’s surroundings and physiological status. At minimal cost, it will become possible for humans to attach collars to all pets and even millions of wild animals. Highly accurate estimates of animal populations, health, and migration patterns would become possible. Encounters between humans and dangerous animals like alligators and bears could be headed off in advance if the animals’ GPS coordinates were known and all humans within a certain radius were warned of their presence via automated texts to their smartphones. Poaching would become much harder if any large wild animal had cameras on it. 

The collars themselves will also shrink in size and weight, as is generally the trend for all types of electronic devices. Eventually, they could very well evolve into implants that the animals wouldn’t even be aware of, and might directly interface with their nervous systems.

Robots and AIs will eventually provide us with practically free and almost unlimited amounts of labor (see my I, Robot review), meaning it will become feasible to tag billions of animals at low cost, to continuously monitor them, and to issue gross commands to them. This seemingly crazy vision of a “tamed wilderness” is just an extension of two other broad, long-term technology trends: 1) the rise of mass surveillance and 2) the fusion of organic life with technology. I think it’s also a clear stepping stone to a technological “hive mind” or single consciousness.

While most people would be quick to point out potential misuses of this technology, the potential good uses are very compelling. If every animal on the planet could be continuously monitored and controlled, we could end or at least sharply reduce animal suffering by ending predation and singling out unhealthy animals for veterinary treatment. Violent encounters between humans and animals could also be eliminated. Animal reproduction rates could also be carefully controlled, keeping ecosystems in balance. Humans, the species that has caused the most suffering and damage on this planet, could repay their debt by inaugurating a new age of empathy and harmony. Only we can make technology, so only we can do this.

Finally, I’ll take the next logical step here and get myself into trouble by suggesting this same technology might someday find wide scale use among human beings, and it might actually make the world better. Like animals, humans sometimes get out of control and need various forms of “help”, and, if things could be managed responsibly, I could see how prods from a brain implant or something could help people behave civilly and avoid self-destructive behaviors and thinking.

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Review: “Elysium”

Plot:

By the late 21st century, Earth had become an overpopulated,  diseased, polluted nightmare. The small number of super wealthy people escaped by building a large space station  in Earth orbit and moving there. The station, called “Elysium,” is a bucolic paradise where everyone lives in a mansion, is protected by robot police, and has a personal  rejuvenation pod that fixes any illness or injury when they lie down in  it.

The Elysium space station

The film’s events take place in 2154. Elysium’s only problem is illegal immigration: poor people with major health problems smuggle themselves onto Elysium, and in the few minutes they have from the time their beat-up space ship dumps them onto the grass to the time they get arrested by robot cops, they try to break into a mansion and use one of  the rejuvenation pods. Even though Elysium’s government seems to have a handle on the problem since they quickly arrest and deport them all, a government official played by Jodie Foster doesn’t think they’re doing enough, so she has a mercenary named “Kruger” do the dirty work of blowing up illegal immigrant space ships, killing dozens of people at once. After a verbal reprimand from Elysium’s president, Jodie Foster decides to do a military coup.

Matt Damon exists on the opposite end of the spectrum, living in a Los Angeles slum and working a horrible factory job where his boss yells at him all the time and he has no rights. One day, the machine he is in charge of breaks and he has to go inside to fix it.  The door accidentally closes behind him and it turns on, zapping him with a dose of radiation that will kill him within five days.

Because Earth hospitals are so poor, his only hope is to illegally immigrate to Elysium to use a rejuvenation pod. He doesn’t have any money, so he can only get a ticket by agreeing to help an underworld crime boss kidnap a rich guy at gunpoint so they can basically steal his ATM pin number by hacking his electronic brain implant (rich people have these). Before Matt Damon goes on this criminal mission, he lets the crime boss upgrade his body with a screw-in  exoskeleton kit that gives Damon superhuman strength and his own brain  implant.

The job goes bad–Damon’s criminal compatriots accidentally shoot the rich guy in the chest. Instead of trying to  render medical assistance, they connect a wire into the rich guy’s head and download his data into Damon’s brain implant. The rich guy dies, it turns out the data is encrypted so the criminals can’t  make sense of it, and Kruger shows up and kills them all except Damon, who escapes into the slum.

Matt Damon then becomes the world’s most wanted man because it turns out he has the rich guy’s access codes to the Elysium mainframe, which are super important because they let the user reboot the system and make all humans Elysium citizens. Jodie Foster also wants the codes for her coup.

I won’t spoil the ending, but it’s exactly what you’d  expect from Hollywood. I disliked Elysium for its clumsy, excessive moralizing, rushed pacing, and poorly thought out plot. Matt Damon, one of the greatest American actors of his generation, was disengaged in his role and almost looked like he didn’t want to be there. And while some futuristic elements in the movie will probably prove accurate by 2154, like humanoid  robots, overall it was totally unrealistic and nonsensical. For example, if rejuvenation pods are the catalyst for illegal immigration, why doesn’t Elysium just give some pods to Earth so the poor people won’t need to go to space and bother them? Why isn’t there a single  enterprising rich person on Elysium who sells some pods to Earth to make money for himself? If the people on Earth know that pods exist and know what they do, why can’t they pool their resources to copy the technology and make their own?

Also, before watching this anti-rich people movie, ask yourself how the world got that messed up to begin with. Did it become overpopulated thanks to rich people having huge numbers of kids? Diseased from rich people doing IV drugs and spreading AIDS? Polluted from rich people driving around all X billion cars there are in the world? Did rich people spray paint the buildings in Matt Damon’s slum and throw trash all over it? Absolutely not. If the world ends up as bad as it was in the film, it will be thanks to the bad decisions of billions of people, 99% of whom aren’t rich. In summary, in trying to make a commentary about the present, Neill Blomkamp (ironically, a multimillionaire) sacrifices accuracy depicting the future, and leaves us with a cool-looking but hollow and forgettable film.

Analysis:

Downtown L.A.

The world will be ruined. In the film, Los Angeles was a gigantic slum, and these scenes were shot in the real-life slums of Mexico City. Aside from advanced flying vehicles, military exoskeletons and robot police, Earth’s technological state appears inferior to what it is today. This is unrealistic. By 2154, cities like L.A. will probably be much nicer than today, and extreme poverty will probably be eliminated. The historical record shows that living conditions have been improving across the planet as a whole since the Enlightenment, and the trend is unlikely to change.

There will barely be any white people in Los Angeles. Aside from Matt Damon and a few colleagues at his factory job, no white people are shown living in L.A. This will prove an accurate depiction. Whites became minorities in L.A. and California in the 2010s, and nationally will be minorities around 2045. Their share of the L.A. county population is forecast to keep declining for the foreseeable future.

By 2154, nonwhites, including mixed race people, will comprise the overwhelming majority of the U.S. population. By that point in the future, medical immortality, decreased fertility among all races, and lessened need for immigration thanks to machines doing all the work will cause the racial makeup of the planet to stabilize (this is why I don’t think white people will ever “go extinct” as racist alarmists contend). 

People with mixes of traits from different races will be much more common in the future.

Well before 2154, the large population of mixed race people and widespread use of genetic engineering to give people stereotypically “white” traits (light-colored eyes, hair and skin) will seriously scramble our future concept of race. Genetic engineering will also be used to add unnatural traits to the genepool, like orange hair and purple eyes, resulting in significant numbers of humans not resembling any race. Some human beings will have also upgraded themselves and fused with their technology so radically that they won’t belong to any race, and will find the concept irrelevant to their self-identities.

The rich elites will still be overwhelmingly white. Elysium is 90% white, in contrast to the impoverished Earth. While disproportionate wealth and power will stay in the hands of white Americans for generations even after they become minorities, and Europe will also retain its outsized wealth for some time, a lot will happen over the next 141 years to level the playing field. At the very least, all East Asian countries will attain Western standards of living and income. More likely the whole world will have caught up, and in no small part thanks to machines becoming common everywhere and taking over work from humans. In making almost all the Elysium residents white, director Neill Bloomkamp again tried to make a social statement in terms we are familiar with today, but at the expense of realism.

A robot doctor treats Matt Damon after his irradiation.

Robots will be  everywhere. The film featured robots cops, parole officers, doctors, and  emergency workers that were just as capable as humans. This will come to pass well before 2154. However, I disagree with the movie’s depiction of these robots all being mechanical-looking, with all their gears and metal surfaces exposed, and I don’t think they’ll have  stereotypically machine-sounding voices. They will be more refined,  and some will be indistinguishable from humans (androids). Even today’s technology allows machine voices to sound almost the same as natural human voices, and before 2040, they will be indistinguishable.

Humans will still work in factories. Aside from that fact that it makes a futuristic product (robots), Matt Damon’s workplace is the same as a modern-day factory: Human workers in overalls show up every morning and work on the crowded shop floor, pushing buttons, pulling levers and pushing carts full of parts around. The absurdity of this is striking: If the factory is making intelligent, dexterous, humanoid robots, why don’t the managers replace the human workers with some of their own robots?

Labor-intensive factory jobs like those in the film will disappear in developed countries around the middle of this  century. Small numbers of highly trained human workers will remain in the factories to oversee machines, but they won’t do grunt work like Matt Damon.

By the end of  this century, no one on planet Earth will do labor-intensive factory work, and  most factories will be 100% automated. If you think this can’t happen because humans will always be needed to fix the machines, you are wrong. As I said in my review of Terminator, there’s no reason machines won’t eventually be able to build and fully repair each other.

Medical technology will be able to fix almost every problem. To fix any ailment, the rich people need only lie down in a rejuvenation pod and wait for its mechanical “arms” to wave  back and forth over them. In this way, even deadly conditions like cancer are fixed in a few seconds. Kruger’s horribly destroyed face is thus reconstructed  after a battle with Matt Damon. Curiously though, the machines can’t correct the cellular-level damage that causes old age, and there are some old-looking people walking around Elysium.

This level of technology will exist by 2154, though most health problems will still take much longer than one minute to fix. Massive trauma like having your skull crushed will be impossible to fix, as will reviving people who have been dead and rotting for more than a couple hours. However, diligent use of future medical technologies will be able to keep people young and reverse the aging process.

People will still die of leukemia. A subplot of the film involves the daughter of Matt Damon’s ex-girlfriend. The daughter is about to die from leukemia unless she gets advanced treatment in Elysium. Even though the ex-girlfriend is a nurse and presumably has access to superior medical services since she works in a hospital and has doctor friends, Earth is just so poor and backwards that they can’t cure the daughter. Even though Elysium is hoarding the rejuvenation pods, there’s little reason to assume conventional leukemia treatments wouldn’t be able to cure the disease with over 100 more years of research.

There will be a space station miles in length/diameter orbiting the Earth that can be plainly seen in the sky. Elysium is 37.3 miles wide and orbits 4,000 miles above the Earth. Even in the daytime, the station is visible from the planet’s surface, and its circular shape can be made out. According to other calculations, an object only one mile wide could also be clearly seen if its orbit were the same as the International Space Station, which is a mere 254 miles up.

Kruger cursing Elysium from his bedroom window

While the technology and money to build such space objects will be available by 2154, I’m unsure if the investment will actually be made. For one, while it would make sense to build some types of massive objects in space like solar panel arrays and sunshades (to ease global warming), they would be positioned so far from Earth that people on the ground wouldn’t be able to see them.

We’ll be assembling space ships in space by 2154, but I’m not sure if we’ll be doing it in low Earth orbit. The LaGrange Points probably make more sense. Even if we did build them in LEO, I don’t see why any of them would need to be a mile or more in length (for what purpose), nor would any “space factories” that built them need to be that large.

I don’t think the rich will ever move to a giant space station because they decide Earth sucks, but I do think there will be at least one “space hotel” in low Earth orbit by 2154 that caters to rich people. Even that far in the future, rocketing enough material into space to make a mile-wide space hotel will be too expensive, and there won’t be enough customer demand to fill all the rooms anyway.

And while I wouldn’t be surprised if there were one or more “space hotels” in low Earth orbit that catered to rich tourists by 2154, they wouldn’t have enough clientele to justify being a mile or more in diameter. However, I can see a workaround: Massive sheets of Mylar.

Imagine a luxury space hotel that’s similar in size to a cruise ship. It’s basically an elongated box measuring 1,000 ft x 200 ft x 150 ft, which is in the same size range as a real cruise ship. Even in low Earth orbit, it’s still too small to see from the ground. To fix that problem and hence boost the station’s publicity, huge “wings” or “sails” are attached to its sides. Made of Mylar, the sails are very lightweight and compact, meaning it’s affordable to rocket them into space. Once attached to the sides of the station, they’re unrolled and oriented to face Earth, making the station look much bigger. It would kind of resemble a butterfly, with an elongated, relatively compact “core” with very thin, flat accessory protrusions on either side.

The station’s wings/sails would have no functional purpose. While many people would protest plans to mar the sky with such an object, it might be built anyway. NIMBY’s don’t always win.

Robot exoskeletons will exist and will give wearers superhuman strength and endurance. Matt Damon has one of these “grafted” to his body, and it proves invaluable in the many fistfights he has with killer robots and mercenaries, and in the self-extrications he does  freeing himself from crashed vehicles and prying apart heavy metal doors that are trying to close on him. These will definitely exist by 2154, but they will not be crudely screwed into wearer’s bodies (during the  “operation” where this is done, they don’t even take Damon’s  clothes off, so he’s wearing a ridiculous bloody T-shirt UNDER his exoskeletion for the rest of the movie). As I concluded in my review of Edge of Tomorrow, the first combat exoskeletons could make their debut in the 2050s, 100 years before the film is set to happen. With an extra century of development time, they should be significantly better than what Matt Damon had.

Highly refined brain-computer interfaces will exist. In the film, the rich people have small devices sticking out of their heads resembling cochlear implants which allow them to interface their brains with computers. Files can thus be directly transferred between the two. Devices like these will be common by 2154, though they will probably be completely  internal, meaning they won’t have parts sticking out from the person’s skin.

Old guns will use new ammo. Matt Damon uses a normal pump-action shotgun to fire a tiny sticky bomb onto a rich guy’s flying car. After the car takes off, Damon remotely detonates it and the car crashes. During the ensuing battle with the rich guy’s two robot guards, Damon kills one of them using a 200-year-old AK-47 firing proximity-fused explosive  bullets that are linked to a control computer in a small gun sight.

Matt Damon with a heavily modified AK-47

The concept is clearly borrowed from the XM-25 and shows where the technology will be once refined. I really liked this as it shows high technology being seamlessly incorporated with low technology in a realistic way,  and it nods to the fact that the basic gun designs we have today are optimal or close to optimal, so further performance improvements will have to come from peripheral things like better ammo and sights.

The XM-25 smart grenade launcher

By 2154, gun sights will provide a composite picture that intelligently overlays images from several parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. They will have computers that can recognize objects and humans, and visually highlight them for the shooter’s benefit. The scope computers will also have ballistic calculators that move the target reticle based on factors like distance, inclination/declination, wind velocity, air pressure, humidity, and temperature of barrel.

The guns themselves might have self-aiming mechanisms like the Smartgun from Aliens had. A rifle would have a sort of metal “frame” around it, and at several different points, levers and metal cables would connect the rifle to the inside of the frame. By telling those levers and cables to tighten or slacken, the scope could quickly make fine adjustments to where the barrel was pointed, compensating for flaws in the shooter’s aim.

Routine use of highly advanced ammunition incorporating better propellants and features like timed airburst, tandem warheads, steering fins, and mini guided rockets will also make guns more accurate and deadlier against a greater range of targets. The guns of 2154 will also have computers built into them that will link with the user’s brain computer, allowing the person to instantly “know” where to point the weapon to hit the desired target without having to look through a sight.

Combining all of these technologies, the mechanical “guts” of a 200-year-old AK-47 could be used to make a future rifle with incredible capabilities. A better aiming system would double the maximum range at which it is lethal against humans, and make it possible to rapidly shoot the weapon from the chest with the same accuracy as today’s careful sniper shots from bolt-action rifles. The weapon could even shoot down low-flying aircraft, cripple vehicles from long distances with bullets through their vital components like tires and gas tanks, or even disable tanks by destroying their fragile external sensors or sending bullets directly down the barrels of their main guns to hit the shells loaded in them.

Small homing weapons will kill people. During Matt Damon’s botched kidnap attempt on the rich guy, Kruger arrives and kills one of Damon’s accomplices with hand-sized, frisbee-like flying objects that home in on targets that Kruger marks with a small laser. Once they reach their targets, they latch onto them and explode.

Smart weapons like these will be old technology by 2154, and in fact will probably exist within 20 years and take the form of tiny quadcopter drones. Since it might be too hard for them to latch onto targets, especially if the targets are moving or able to swat the drones down, they will probably be programmed to blow up once they get within a few feet from the target, or upon colliding with any part of it.

Facial recognition software will be in common use, even among robots. Throughout the film, surveillance cameras with facial recognition software are used to identify people in public places. Quadcopter drones with cameras also do this when looking for Matt Damon. These will also be old technologies by 2154.

Facial recognition software is already quite reliable, and is sometimes paired with fixed-position surveillance cameras, particularly in higher-tech authoritarian countries like China. However, the software’s accuracy gets worse as the angle at which the camera is placed gets steeper. In other words, a camera six feet off the ground, pointed straight at a person’s face will be able to recognize them easily, but the same camera installed 20 feet off the ground on top of a pole, looking sharply down at the same person so it mostly just sees their hair, will struggle to tell who they are.

For this reason, aerial drones are currently unsuited for autonomously tracking down specific humans. However, that will surely change once more biometric data on people becomes available. Future robots that walk around at ground level with us will recognize us easily thanks to having unobstructed views of our faces and bodies. In the future, you’ll never be a stranger to a  robot, or to a human with access to facial recognition software.

Super guns will exist. During the final battle on the Elysium station, Matt Damon finds an advanced automatic rifle with “CHEMRAIL” written on the side and he uses it to kill a bad guy. The gun makes electronic noises when “charging up” and firing, and the bullets are propelled with such force that they easily pass through a wall and literally tear his opponent apart. Canon Elysium literature states that the gun uses electromagnetic forces instead of exploding gunpowder to propel the bullets, and that the bullets leave the gun with 18,000 Joules of energy. That’s powerful, but no unfathomably so: A .50 caliber bullet (used in some sniper rifles and heavy machine guns) has 15,000 Joules.

Small arms with this level of power will be more common in the future because robots and augmented humans that are strong enough to carry and shoot them will exist. A human wearing an exoskeleton could fire such a weapon on full auto like Matt Damon did, but an average person could not. There was a  major error in the battle scene since Matt Damon had the CHEMRAIL gun pressed against his shoulder and was holding the handle with his bare hand. His exoskeleton didn’t bear the recoil of the weapon at all. So in real life, had he fired it, the gun’s recoil would have broken his shoulder and wrist. However, had the weapon been directly braced against his exoskeleton, the force would have been transmitted directly into it, and not his body.

There will still be text-based computer interfaces. Throughout the film, characters eschew GUI’s and instead use simple, text-based computer interfaces that resemble MS-DOS. For certain applications, these will still be used in 2154 since they’re optimal. However, reading characters off screens will be unnecessary in most cases since brain implants will let humans instantly “feel” and “know” what the computer wants to tell them, and vice versa. Intelligent machines themselves will be able to wirelessly interface with technology even more directly and easily.

Kruger’s smart watch displaying a text message

Text-on-screens will, along with devices that operate on purely mechanical principles, probably exist as backups to more sophisticated technology. For example, imagine a wristwatch that can wirelessly transmit the time to your brain implant so you can know with a single thought what time it is. The wristwatch would still have a face with a small LED screen, which you could look at to see what time it was in case the wireless chip in the watch broke.

Shoulder-launched missiles launched from Earth will be able to fly thousands of miles into  space. There’s a scene early in the film where a group of illegal immigrants gets into small space ships and flies from L.A. to Elysium. Inexplicably, Elysium lacks the weapons to blow up the ships or at least disable them before reaching the station, so the only way to stop them is to have Kruger shoot them down with surface-to-air missiles. Using a shoulder launcher, he fires several missiles that have enough power to exit the Earth’s atmosphere, overtake the space ships and destroy them. Since the station orbits about 4,000 miles above Earth, the ships were also thousands of miles up when they were destroyed.

No chemical fuel can contain enough energy to propel a small missile that far and fast. The only way such a thing MIGHT be possible is if the missiles had mini nuclear fusion engines, which may or may not be feasible, even with the highest possible level of technology. By 2154, I doubt such weapons will exist.

Helicopter-sized craft will be able to fly back and forth between the Earth’s surface and space. It takes an enormous amount of energy to defeat gravity and to put something into space. Case in point: A 300 foot tall rocket is needed just to put something the size of a large van into orbit. In the film, the van-sized object doesn’t need the huge rocket anymore–four small  engines and a small fuel tank can do it.

A small space ship from the film. Most of its interior is hollow, leaving little room for fuel.

I think this is probably impossible. The closest we might get is passenger jet-sized craft flying into space with four or five people inside. For a more detailed discussion, see my Starship Troopers review.

Today’s guns will still be in use. At several points in the film, people are shown carrying contemporary guns like AK-47’s and M-16’s. These are used in gun battles with cutting-edge soldier robots and expert mercenaries. By 2154, few of the firearms existing today will still be in use since they will have all long worn-out and been shredded for scrap metal. Guns, like anything else, gradually wear out with use and at some point become dangerous to fire and not worth fixing.

However, the basic DESIGNS for guns are timeless. From a mechanical engineering standpoint, guns like the AK-47 and M-16 are optimized for what they do, and there’s no way to significantly improve upon them. So in 2154, newly manufactured AK and M-16 descendants could still represent the cutting edge of small arms technology.

Certainly they’ll still be effective at killing humans since our skin isn’t evolving to become bulletproof, and even armored machines could still be killed with enlarged versions of those guns designed to fire stronger bullets. However, while the internal mechanics will be conserved, future guns will look at least a little different on the outside. 

Personal energy shields that can stop bullets will exist. Kruger has a pocket-sized device that, when activated, creates a semi-transparent, circular shield in front of him. It only lasts a few seconds, but it can block a hail of bullets, even from the super-powerful CHEMRAIL gun.

This is scientifically implausible. There’s no intangible force that could be harnessed to make moving objects with large amounts of kinetic energy instantly stop in midair, as if they’d hit a solid object.

Links:

  1. By 2045, most Americans won’t be white.
    https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2018/03/14/the-us-will-become-minority-white-in-2045-census-projects/
  2. An object needs to be about 1 mile in diameter to be clearly seen from low Earth orbit. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_structures_visible_from_space
  3. Calculations about how big an Elysium-sized object would look from Earth based on how far it was from Earth.
    https://blog.wolframalpha.com/2013/08/16/elysium/
  4. The “Tyranny of the Rocket Equation” means its impossible for helicopter-sized craft that are mostly full of empty space to fly up into orbit. https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/expeditions/expedition30/tryanny.html
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Review: “Dark Side of the Moon”

Plot:

In the year 2022, Earth is encircled by satellites armed with nuclear missiles. Manned, private spaceships rendezvous with them for regular maintenance and repair. The film centers around one such ship, named Spacecore 1, as its mission takes it around the dark side of the Moon. 

A mysterious malfunction cripples Spacecore 1’s systems, leaving it adrift and with only enough oxygen for 24 hours. Unable to summon help with distress calls, the crew faces certain death. Luckily, the vintage Space Shuttle Endeavor appears from nowhere and docks itself with Spacecore 1, sharing its power and oxygen. Though the Shuttle’s behavior shows it is under intelligent control, it is strangely uncommunicative. 

Exploring the Shuttle

After docking, two of Spacecore 1′s crewmen enter Endeavor to find out who is piloting it. The craft is disheveled and is carrying rock samples mined from the dark side of the Moon. Chillingly, they discover the mutilated corpse of an astronaut, which they bring back to Spacecore 1’s infirmary for examination. This proves to be a terrible mistake, as it turns out the dead astronaut’s body hosts an evil force that can attack other people and transfer its essence to them. One by one, the crew are corrupted and killed. 

An astronaut infested with the evil force

Dark Side of the Moon was a bad, low-budget movie that clearly tried to copy better sci-fi films that came in the decade before it (Alien and The Thing). The acting and dialog were wooden, and the second half of the film went in circles as members of the crew were infested with the evil spirit, died, and became paranoid of each other, repeat, repeat. The special effects and set design were unimpressive, and many scenes were so dimly lit that it was hard to tell what was going on. 

This cross-sectional drawing shows the Shuttle’s scale. Its interior wouldn’t take long to search, and it lacks room for hiding places.

The movie also had some ridiculous elements, like people smoking cigarettes inside spaceships, the crew having several assault rifles even though their mission only involved fixing unmanned satellites, egregious sexual harassment, and the interior of the Endeavor being several times larger than it is in real life (secret rooms, very high ceiling, takes a long time to search). 

The film’s premise, that a mysterious evil force is stalking the crew of a stranded spaceship and making them paranoid, was interesting and thus its only bright spot. It was executed vastly better seven years later in the movie Event Horizon. 

If you value your scarce time on Earth even a little bit, then reading this review should be the closest you ever get to watching Dark Side of the Moon. 

Analysis:

There are large, manned spaceships. Spacecore 1 is, by our standards, an enormous spaceship. None of the characters ever mention its dimensions, but in special effects shots where it is docked with the Shuttle Discovery, it looks roughly ten times bigger than the latter. That would make Spacecore 1 significantly larger than even the International Space Station, which is the largest object humans have so far put into space. 

This illustration shows how big a space shuttle is compared to the ISS and past space stations.

Spacecore 1‘s exterior is also not streamlined, suggesting it is not designed to land on Earth or any other planet with an atmosphere. It was assembled in space and is meant to stay there. Again, the ISS and the Chinese space station are the only two craft in existence that meet those criteria. However, because they can’t leave Earth’s low orbit, they don’t qualify as “spaceships.”

Spaceships like Spacecore 1 haven’t been built yet, though our failure to do so owes to a lack of political will rather than technology falling short. If the U.S. or a group of advanced countries had dedicated itself towards building something like Spacecore 1 starting in the 1990s, it could be flying out to lunar orbit by now. 

I predict the first relatively large, manned spaceship that is designed to stay in space could exist as early as the 2030s, in the form of a reusable ferry that moves people between Earth and Mars. At both ends of its repeating journey, smaller craft designed to transfer passengers and cargo from orbit to the surface and vice versa would dock with the spaceship. 

The Hubble Space Telescope is, aside from the two manned space stations, the largest manmade object orbiting Earth. It is as big as a bus. Coincidentally, the shuttle Discovery ferried the Telescope into orbit.

Also, if we ever built a spaceship meant to repair and refuel satellites, it wouldn’t need to be nearly as big as Spacecore 1, and probably wouldn’t need a human crew. Our largest unmanned satellites orbiting Earth are about as big as buses, so a craft designed to refuel one of them and even replace several of its components would need even less interior space of its own to store the necessary cargo. There’s no reason a repair ship needs to be bigger than the thing it is meant to repair.

The people and pickup trucks in this photo give a sense of the X-37’s size.

The new X-37 space plane is said to be able to service satellites in orbit. It is much smaller than even the Space Shuttles, is unmanned and remotely controlled from Earth. 

There are satellites that launch nuclear missiles. Spacecore 1′s mission is to fix and maintain military satellites that are armed with nuclear missiles. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 banned all countries from putting nuclear weapons in space, and to the best of our knowledge, no one has ever violated it. This largely owes to the fact that, in spite of how menacing the idea of a nuclear missile in space is, it’s impractical and brings little military benefit. Missiles stationed on the Earth’s surface are much cheaper, can hit any target on the planet, and can be hidden from enemies.

Space-based nuclear missiles would cost a fortune to put into orbit, would not be able to strike targets that ground-based missiles couldn’t, and would be impossible to hide from any enemy nation that had telescopes. Expensive nuclear weapon satellites could be destroyed by much cheaper space rockets designed to enter their well-known orbital paths and collide with them.

Manned spaceships travel beyond the orbit of the Moon. As the film’s title implies, it is set on the dark side of the Moon, or more precisely, on two spaceships that are several hundred or thousand miles above the dark side of the Moon. The last time humans ever went that far into space was 50 years ago when the astronauts of Apollo 17 orbited the Moon. At that moment, they were about 200,000 miles from Earth. Since the end of the Apollo Program, no human has ventured more than a few hundred miles into space. 

NASA just released this “selfie” of an unmanned Orion space capsule as it was above the dark side of the Moon

Humans will probably match our old distance record this decade when astronauts return to the Moon. Fittingly, at this moment, NASA’s first “Orion” space capsule is orbiting the Moon as the first step in a multi-year plan to send humans back in one of the capsules. NASA’s program for accomplishing this has suffered years of delays, and in an alternate universe where the agency worked more efficiently, got more money, or somehow got a little lucky, the program’s timetable could be more advanced, and in 2022, an Orion capsule carrying the first humans would be going around the dark side of the Moon now (right now, the target date for that is in 2024).

Moreover, as early as the 2030s, we could shatter our space distance record by sending people to Mars. Depending on where the two planets are in their orbital cycles, the distance between them varies from 33.9 million to 249 million miles. 

That said, I don’t think manned space ships will ever be needed to fix and maintain nuclear-armed satellites or ANY kind of satellites that are as far from the Earth as the Moon. This is because nearly all satellites are within 36,000 miles of Earth, while the Moon is 200,000 miles away. Satellites intended to fire nuclear missiles at Earth would also need to be close to strike targets in a timely fashion–if a satellite at Moon’s distance fired a nuclear missile at Earth, it might take days to reach its target (the Apollo spacecraft took three days), giving the enemy time to see the launch, determine its trajectory, and send its own intercept rockets into space. 

There are androids that can carry on conversations. Spacecore 1’s main computer is embodied by a female android called “Lesli.” She is always seated in a chair in a special room, and she can answer questions about the ship’s systems and many other subjects. As is typical of sci fi films, she speaks in an emotionless voice. This level of AI technology exists: chatbots using GPT-3 technology can converse almost as intelligently and as fluidly with people as Lesli, and speech synthesizer technology exemplified by Amazon Alexa sounds as realistic as Lesli’s voice. 

Lesli the android

Moreover, we can build androids that are almost as lifelike as Lesli. “Ameca” is a crude android with “Smooth, lifelike motion and advanced facial expression capabilities” as well as the ability to move its arms to make human-like gestures. In this demonstration video, Ameca is paired with GPT-3 and a high-quality speech synthesizer to carry on conversations with humans surprisingly well:

“Sophia” is another android, but with artificial skin and colored eyes to make it look more lifelike than Ameca:

Combining Ameca’s superior range of physical movement and facial expression with Sophia’s human-like skin and eyes would result in an android that approximated a human’s appearance reasonably well. It wouldn’t look as real as Lesli from the film, but that’s an unfair comparison since the android was played by a real human actress, and either due to the filmmakers lacking imagination or lacking money, they didn’t give her any makeup or costuming to make her look more robotic. 

Our androids also match Lesli’s level of mobility, which is to say they have none. Lesli has legs, but as stated, she never gets up from her chair, even during a film scene where the evil being attacks and presumably kills her. This indicates that Lesli’s legs are non-functional and are probably just there for show. Ameca also has non-working legs, and Sophia has nothing. 

Though the movie’s depiction of the state of android technology is 2022 is accurate, there are no androids inside any of our spacecraft. This is because space mission budgets don’t allow for wasting money on several hundred pounds of dead weight in the form of a human-sized robot that stays fixed to a chair. Whenever astronauts need to talk to their craft’s central computer, they do so through keyboards and screen displays. All the same intelligence is still embodied in the ship, but without need to a bulky physical manifestation of itself.

There will be artificial gravity. There’s no scene in the film where anyone is weightless (again, this is surely due to a lack of money during production), and Spacecore 1 and Discovery have gravity. In special effects shots of the ships, we never see them rotating, so they weren’t using centrifugal force to create gravity, meaning it was being “generated” from some device in the floor. As I’ve said in previous reviews, this technology is impossible since the laws of physics don’t allow for the creation of gravity this way.  

Astronauts smoke cigarettes inside spaceships. In several scenes, crewmen smoke cigarettes inside Spacecore 1. In reality, this has always been forbidden due to safety concerns (for one, spacecraft have more oxygen-rich atmosphere mixtures than Earth’s, so a lit cigarette is a much worse fire hazard), and there is no record of any person smoking inside any spaceship or space station. Even the Soviets, who were known to be more risk-taking than anyone else, never smoked in space. 

However, in the far future, there will be spaceships that are larger, more advanced, and more luxurious than even Spacecore 1, and they could have small “smoking lounges” that would be sealed off from the rest of the vessel and have design features to filter the smoke from the air and prevent lit cigarettes from sparking fires. At some point in the future, people will smoke cigarettes in space.  

There are guns in space ships for astronauts to use. In the film, there’s a gun rack on Spacecore 1 full of five or six assault rifles. Once things take a turn for the worse, the weapons are distributed and the crewmen start spraying bullets at each other. Ridiculously, the ship’s hull is never punctured. 

There actually have long been guns in space. Soviet/Russian Soyuz space capsules have emergency kits for the cosmonauts to use if they accidentally land in remote parts of Earth and have to wait for rescue. The kits contain semi-auto pistols for defense against wild animals. A Soyuz is permanently docked at the ISS, so there is a gun in space right now that any crewman could grab and use against the others. 

Part of the reason why there has never been a shooting incident in space is that it might be suicidal for the attacker since the bullet could put a hole in the hull, causing the oxygen to leak out, or it could destroy an important system like a pressurized fuel tank or central computer. The more powerful the gun, the higher the risk of such a disaster gets, making an assault rifle a particularly bad choice to put in a spaceship. Even if the shooter hits his human target, a rifle bullet could pass through them and drill through whatever is behind them. 

A small pistol is actually the best choice for any conceivable type of space combat. Its small size makes it ideal for the tight confines of a spaceship or space station, and its weaker bullets 1) minimize recoil forces on the shooter, which is important in the weightlessness of space, 2) are well-suited against people since no one has body armor, and 3) carry less risk of causing collateral damage like hull punctures.  

The Space Shuttles are retired. In the film, it is said that the Space Shuttles were retired in 1992 after the Endeavor’s disappearance. They were actually retired in 2011, due to high operating costs and safety problems. 

In conclusion, as bad as Dark Side of the Moon was, it depicted several aspects of 2022 technology accurately. And where reality did fall short of the filmmakers’ expectations, it was mostly due to us choosing to allocate our money in more sensible directions, and not due to the technology staying fundamentally out of reach for us. We COULD HAVE put nuclear-armed satellites in orbit. We COULD HAVE built a large, manned spaceship to service those satellites. We COULD HAVE put an immobile android in the spaceship to interact with the astronauts. We COULD HAVE also put assault rifles in the ship. 

Thank God we didn’t.

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Review: “Almost Human”

Plot:

Almost Human is a “buddy cop” TV series with a twist: It’s set in 2048, and one of the partners in an android. It is set in an unnamed American city where futuristic technologies deliver both great promise and peril for its citizens–some have lives of luxury, others are impoverished and have been left behind, and criminals have been empowered by the new tools at their disposal.

Detective John Kennex (played by Karl Urban) is a classic, hardboiled cop. He’s hotheaded, traumatized by violent experiences in his past, and struggles to form social bonds with others. Due to a change in police procedures, he’s paired with Dorian (played by Michael Ealy), an android with human emotions and a more balanced personality than Kennex.

Android cop Dorian (left) and his human partner John Kennex (right)

The series follows their unlikely partnership and the evolution of their bond, as well as of their unique personal stories, as they investigate crimes together. Every episode pits them against a new criminal or group of criminals who use a different kind of advanced technology.

I thought Almost Human was respectably thought-out and entertaining. Kennex and Dorian had an interesting and often funny personal chemistry, and the other recurring police characters were well-acted. The fictional universe in which it was set showed a high attention to detail in fleshing out the advanced technologies that would be available, as well as their social effects, though as my analysis will show, it wasn’t perfect.

I think the show failed to adequately explore how being an android and living among humans shaped Dorian’s inner world, which would have posed questions of greater intellectual substance to the viewer. At times, he seemed too much like a funny human who could do advanced calculations in his head. The plots also got more convoluted and, frankly, worse as the series went on, probably because the writers were running out of material. Almost Human was cancelled after only 13 episodes. While the show wasn’t spectacular, it would have been nice to see the additional character development and exploration of future technologies that would have happened had it been allowed a full season of 22 – 26 episodes.

Analysis:

Episode 1

Fully convincing androids will exist. During scenes set in the police station and in field missions, androids are almost always present. Aside from their mechanical way of talking and emotionless faces, they are indistinguishable from humans. Dorian is the only android at that precinct who has emotions and a warm personality. While androids will be very impressive by 2048, they won’t be able to mimic humans as exactly as they could in the show.

In my big list of future predictions, I wrote that this would be the case by the end of the 2030s: Combining all the best AI and robotics technologies, it will be possible to create general-purpose androids that could function better in the real world (e.g. – perform in the workplace, learn new things, interact with humans, navigate public spaces, manage personal affairs) than the bottom 10% of humans (e.g. – elderly people, the disabled, criminals, the mentally ill, people with poor language abilities or low IQs), and in some narrow domains, the androids will be superhuman (e.g. – physical strength, memory, math abilities). Note that businesses will still find it better to employ task-specific, non-human-looking robots instead of general purpose androids.

To elaborate, I predict that those kinds of androids will be very few in number by the end of 2039, and will be technology demonstrators and prototypes that get a lot of media coverage at carefully controlled tech company demo events. They won’t be available for any person to purchase, won’t roam around public spaces, and won’t have important jobs like working as police officers.

By 2048, the androids will be better, and aspects of their physiques, intelligence, and capabilities will overlap even more with humans, but they still won’t be able to pass as one of us in normal situations. Their body movements will be clumsier and more limited than the average human’s, probably leaving them with the same overall reflexes, nimbleness, balance, and speed as an elderly human. They will also lack the battery life to function for a whole work day in a physically demanding occupation like street cop. Also, if you could examine one at very close distance, you would see that its skin and other external features were less detailed than those of real humans.

A plausible role for an android in a police station of 2048 would be working at the reception desk. It would be tasked with talking to members of the public who came in, could answer most of their questions correctly, and could summon a human officer with the relevant expertise to deal with questions and issues it couldn’t handle alone. The android would be able to walk around the police station and to physically interact with most things it encountered (e.g. – operate door handle), but it would not be as fast or as coordinated as the average human. It would not have a gun and wouldn’t know how to fight criminals. It’s purpose would be to free up a human police officer for duties more crucial for public safety.

Androids and many other machines will be able to pass the Turing Test and to carry on long conversations with humans and to recognize human emotions and to simulate their own. Their personalities will probably rank somewhere between Dorian’s and the “stiffer” androids assigned to the police precinct.

Shooting an android in the head will kill it. There a scene where a police android is shot in the head and instantly dies. This is unrealistic because it will make the most sense to put androids’ CPUs in their torsos instead of in their heads. Doing such would improve their balance by lowering their centers of gravity, and would make them more robust since their “brains” would have more protection around them since a torso is wider than a skull. Their lack of lungs, hearts, and digestive systems will leave them with extra space in their torsos anyway. For more details, read my blog post What would a human-equivalent robot look like?

To look like humans, androids will still need heads, though their CPUs and other critical hardware won’t be in them.

Episode 2

Criminals will use “DNA bombs” to mask forensic evidence. After a pair of professional hitmen murder a man in a hotel room, one of them leaves a small canister behind that explodes after they leave. It is a “DNA bomb,” and it releases a mist composed of innumerable DNA particles, which attach themselves to all the surfaces in the hotel room, masking whatever genuine DNA evidence anyone left behind. Thanks to this, the police detectives are unable to extract useful genetic evidence from the scene.

This is a creative and probably plausible idea. Mass producing random but complete human genomes and packing them into cell-sized particles that could be sprayed out of a can is probably impossible now, but by 2048, the technical challenges might be overcome. Instead of exploding like a grenade, a DNA bomb might work better if it slowly released its load as an aerosol, like a modern “bug bomb.”

There will be sex androids. One of the “people” involved in the aforementioned murder is a female android built for prostitution. By 2048, I’ve predicted androids will be “adequate” in terms of physicality and duplication of the human body and its movements to perform sex acts on real people, though I doubt the experience will be that satisfying. However, if your senses were impaired by alcohol and the darkness of a closed bedroom, it will be good enough.

Machines will be able to monitor your vital statistics at a glance. In one scene, Dorian the android sees that his human partner’s heart rate has increased, indicating he is feeling sexual attraction to a nearby sex robot. Dorian mentions this to tease his partner. Androids and other machines will have this ability by 2048, as well as the ability to detect other vital information from nearby humans, giving them insights into many things the humans are unconsciously revealing, and perhaps trying to hide.

The Cardiocam mirror

Machines can already “see” human heartbeats: In 2011, a group of MIT students built a device styled after a bathroom mirror that had a built-in camera capable of seeing “the minute changes in skin tone that occur as facial capillaries fill and empty with the beating of a heart.” The mirror contained a display, which showed a numerical readout indicating the heart rate of the person standing in front of it. By 2048, the technology will be even more advanced. By then, expect some machines to have the ability to monitor multiple vitals at once, including voice stress, pupil dilation, blinking rate, and body language, to create real-time, composite profiles of people’s emotional states, honesty, and healthy. They will be the ultimate lie detectors and empaths.

Episode 3

Androids will have more durable bodies than humans. During a gun battle, a bullet ricochets and hits Dorian in the head. While he is damaged, he stays mostly functional and doesn’t lose consciousness. The wound looks bad enough that it probably would have instantly killed a human had the bullet struck them in the same place.

Androids certainly have the potential to be much more durable than humans, and with 2048 levels of technology, we could build androids that had bulletproof skulls and flesh (at least against pistol and lighter rifle bullets). However, I think fears of robots going haywire and attacking humans will wisely dissuade us from doing that, and the androids that do exist will be no faster, stronger, or damage-resistant than average humans.

In the far future, the sky will be the limit for robot design, however.

Episode 4

Human chemists will be needed to make illegal drugs. This episode focuses on a new synthetic drug being sold in the city. The police try to infiltrate the gang that is peddling it by disguising their forensic scientist as a rogue chemist and having him offer them his services. The gang gives him a chance by taking him to their secret lab and letting him synthesize the drug from base ingredients.

By 2048, fully automated labs will exist, and they will be able to make drugs of any kind without human help. The notion that a talented human’s “special touch” is needed to complete the process will be obsolete. That said, the machinery will still be expensive and the lab setups complex, so only pharmaceutical companies, government agencies, and perhaps well-resourced drug cartels will have them. A lower-level drug gang that only spanned one or a handful of cities would still need humans to do the lab work.

However, in the farther future, automation will create major problems by making it easy for ordinary people to synthesize drugs, or to engage in other illegal activities like building machine guns, committing thefts, or even murders. Remotely killing someone might become as simple as verbally telling a quadcopter drone to find the target, shoot him, and then fly to a distant location and self-destruct to erase the evidence.

Robots will be used as shields. In one gun battle between the police and the drug gang, the gang’s android deliberately steps in front of its boss, and uses its bulletproof body to block incoming fire. The injuries don’t appear to affect the android, and it then physically fights with the police. This was creative, and is also a realistic depiction of how androids could be used in combat situations in 2048 (I also saw this in the movie Chappie, when a humanoid robot was placed in the front of a line of police breaking through the front door of a criminal’s house). While we still won’t trust machines to make life-or-death decisions and won’t give them guns, we’ll have no problem using them as bullet shields, distractors, or medics to carry away injured humans.

Episode 5

Machines won’t be able to perfectly imitate human voices. The police find an audio recording of a recent murder. In it, a man utters a few words before shooting the victim. The forensic scientist matches the voice to that of a man who has been in prison the whole time, which seems to exculpate him since he could not have been physically present at the crime scene (it turns out his clone committed the murder). The forensic scientist then says that the man’s voice could not have been faked at scene by a machine since no technology can mimic a person’s voice so accurately.

While this is the case today, I don’t think it will be true by 2048. Given recent progress in machines mimicking human styles of musical composition and artistry, I think it’s certain that they will figure out how to perfectly imitate individual human voices within the next 26 years.

Episode 6

Each android model will consist of many, identical individuals. In this episode, Dorian meets an android of his same model, and they look identical. This will be the case for reasons of economy: It is cheaper for companies to make long runs of identical products than it is to make each on unique. While there will be one-off, bespoke androids in 2048, most of them will be mass-produced products that come off assembly lines.

The most common police android model in the show.

That said, robotics companies will make efforts to vary the appearances of their androids in the same way that today’s car makers sell the same model in different colors and option/trim packages. Customers will have choices over hair, eye and skin color, and maybe other biometrics (today’s sex doll industry probably offers insights into what physical parameters will be selectable). However, it’s still common for car owners to encounter vehicles identical to their own on the roads, and so it will be for androids in 2048.

Episode 7

Androids will be able to yell really loudly. During a car chase, Dorian communicates with the criminal vehicle by yelling at it with the same volume that a human could only achieve with the help of a bullhorn. We already have tiny, simple devices like smoke alarms that can generate noises louder than human vocal cords can produce, so there should be no technological or financial hurdle to gifting androids in 2048 with the same capabilities. It might be a useful, nonlethal defensive feature that they could use to repel bad humans (perhaps in defense of their human owners) or to summon help in emergency situations.

If we ever get into a war with intelligent machines, they will probably make use of sound warfare during engagements. Loud, startling noises distract and scare humans and make it harder for us to communicate with each other. Machines, on the other hand, would be little affected.

There will be tiny, disposable cameras. In the episode, a perverted criminal paralyzes a victim, locks and explosive collar around his necks, places thumbtack-sized cameras in the victim’s car, and then leaves the scene. When the victim awakens, his panicked, final ordeal is filmed by the cameras and the footage streamed to the internet for people to watch, before the criminal remotely detonates the bomb, killing the man.

With the rate at which electronics are shrinking and dropping in cost, cameras like this will be available by 2048. As in the episode, they will be cheap, single-use devices with adhesive sides, allowing them to be stuck to surfaces, and they will have wireless transmission capabilities and enough battery life to function for a few hours.

Episode 8

There will be guided bullets. In this episode, a team of assassins is using an advanced military rifle that fires guided bullets to kill people in the city. I think guided bullets will be reliable, affordable, and effective by the 2050s, though they won’t be able to perform the sharp turns or to linger in the air like the ones in the show could. One or two degrees of course change per 100 meters of bullet travel is more like it. The shooter would still need a clear line of sight to his target, and would still need to carefully aim the weapon at it. The guided bullets would turn near-misses and off-center hits to nonvital areas into consistent headshots, making average shooters as effective as today’s trained snipers.

That said, small, aerial drones armed with off-the-shelf guns or small explosives could let assassins in 2048 do remote, autonomous killings of people, like those depicted in the episode. By then, a variety of technologies that only big companies and government agencies have now will be more advanced and available to the public. It will be relatively easy to equip a drone with sensors, including cameras loaded with facial recognition algorithms, that allow it to track down specific humans and kill them. In other words, by 2048, assassins will be able to use high-tech weapons to remotely kill people as happened in the episode, but the weapons won’t be guided bullets.

There will be a technology that lets people erase specific memories. A woman who learns that she is the assassins’ next target hatches a plan to make them leave her alone. They want her dead because she knows their identities, so she visits a black market doctor to have him use a machine to delete her memories of them. She plans to videotape the procedure and send it to the assassins as proof.

Our understanding of how the brain stores memories is poor, and while it will surely be better in 2048, I doubt there will be medical procedures that can erase specific memories. Part of the reason is that individual memories are not stored in discrete locations within the brain–any one memory is spread out among neural pathways distributed throughout a brain. Moreover, even if you could somehow erase one memory, the changes it would make to the pathways would probably erase or diminish memories of other things.

Current research into treating PTSD could lead to therapies where people take drugs in controlled clinical settings, while focusing on bad memories, to diminish them. None of the drugs have proven successful yet, but by 2048, it’s plausible at least one could be approved. However, I doubt it will be anywhere near as effective as the memory-erasing machine featured in the episode.

Episode 9

Combat robots will play dead sometimes. Hoping to gain access to the police station’s heavily guarded evidence room, an evil android kills a random woman in public, knowing that the police will quickly arrive. Once they do, the android tries attacking them, provoking their gunfire. The evil android collapses after the first bullet impact and pretends to be dead. The ruse fools the police, who then take the android to the evidence room for later examination to determine why it killed the woman. After a few minutes, the evil android reactivates itself and starts running around the room.

This kind of ingenuity is something we should generally expect from AGIs. “Playing dead” is a specific tactic that will probably become common among combat robots. Unlike humans, machines will be able to totally shut down their life functions for temporary periods, making it impossible for observers to tell if they were actually dead. Feigning death would be a valuable tactic since it would let them do surprise attacks on unsuspecting enemies (i.e. – it jumps up and attacks you from behind right after you walk by it), or to escape after the enemies left the area. Moreover, the fact that robots are capable of playing dead will force enemies to totally destroy hostile combat robots before proceeding, slowing them down and forcing them to expend more munitions.

Episode 10

Advanced human genetic engineering will start in the 2020s. In this episode, it’s revealed that a small but highly visible minority of people are genetically engineered. Several young adult characters, including one of the police detectives, were engineered at conception to have ideal combinations of looks, intelligence, and health. These highly modified people are nicknamed “Chromes.” Based on their ages and the fact that the show is set in 2048, we can conclude that human genetic engineering became routine for rich people in the 2020s. This won’t happen.

The shockingly beautiful actress Minka Kelly plays the genetically engineered detective “Valerie Stahl.”

The first genetically engineered humans (both female) were created in China in 2018. Instead of being genetic supergirls full of hundreds of DNA tweaks, the twins only had alterations to one gene called “CCR5.” The changes were meant to confer enhanced natural resistance to HIV infection, which was especially useful for them since their father has the virus. Though the geneticist’s intervention did alter their genomes, it’s unclear whether the targeted gene was changed in the desired way. One or both of them might actually have not benefitted from the procedure, or might even be worse off thanks to unwanted alterations to other genes. Only time will tell.

This struggle to change just one gene in a human embryo shows how behind schedule our technology is in creating highly engineered people like the Chromes. Moreover, there’s still a huge social stigma in Western countries about genetically modifying humans.

It’s more realistic that, by 2048, human genetic engineering will start becoming common among rich people. Instead of being able to customize your offspring in every respect and to make them the “total package” of looks, smarts, and athleticism, you might be able to change ten genes, which would only give them slight advantages over naturally born people. It won’t count as “advanced” genetic engineering. In fact, in 2048, IVF embryo selection might actually provide more benefits than genetic engineering.

Professional advice will be available anywhere. While investigating a suspicious death, the police question a man at his home. Concerned about his legal rights, the man summons his lawyer via telepresence to mediate. The lawyer appears as a hologram in the middle of the room, and repeatedly interrupts the conversation between the other parties in ways meant to protect his client.

I doubt 3D holograms like that will exist by 2048, but I’m sure that other forms of telepresence will let lawyers and other people like doctors, therapists, and personal trainers interact with and help us in the real world almost anytime. Additionally, even if true AGIs don’t exist by then, narrow AIs will be advanced enough and good enough at natural language to accurately mimic other humans, and to render useful professional advice as a human with those skills would. This kind of access to professional advice will partly level the playing field between people with different personal resources, and change society in many other ways we can’t imagine now.

That means the police questioning scene will be fundamentally accurate for 2048, though the lawyer would only be visible on a video display in the room, or as a 3D rendering that could only be seen with the aid of augmented reality glasses.

Episode 11

It will be legal for machines to kill people. In this episode, hackers remotely take over a home security system belonging to a rich couple. As a result, an automated machine gun turret shoots the husband to death. It is later revealed that this was retaliation against the family because the same computer-controlled machine gun had killed a harmless teenager who had trespassed on the yard a year earlier.

By 2048, the technology will exist to build a home security system that could tell trespassers apart from residents and then shoot them. However, it will be illegal to possess, and only people like dictators and crime bosses will have them. Humans will strongly resist the idea of giving machines the right or ability to kill other people without human input (this is also why android cops won’t have guns), which is also why armed police, jurors, and judges will be among the last jobs to be automated.

The big exception to this will be in the military sphere. By 2048, at least one major military will be using some type of combat robot (whether it is airborne, seaborne, or terrestrial) that is empowered to fire on human enemies autonomously. While I expect there will be a global ban on autonomous killer drones, it will ultimately be discarded once the technology gets good enough and cheap enough. The potential military advantages will be too great to resist, and enforcement of any ban will be nearly impossible since killer robot factories will be much easier to hide than, say, nuclear weapons facilities.

Episode 12

Nanomachines will change human bodies from the inside. In this episode, a deranged man who hates his own appearance kills people so he can get their DNA samples and then alter his own genes so he gains specific, desirable physical features from them. A black market surgeon helps him with this by performing an experimental procedure in which nanomachines programmed with the victims’ DNA are injected into the criminal’s face. The nanomachines then alter the tissue in the criminal’s face so they match the facial features specified in the victims’ DNA.

First, if you wanted to steal another person’s DNA in 2048 or today, you wouldn’t need to kill them; you would only need to grab a discarded plastic cup they drank out of, or a tissue they blew their nose into, or something like that. People shed their DNA constantly.

Second, in the longer run, we’ll understand what every part of the human genome does, leading to the creation of something like a huge catalog of outward human features (like nose shapes and eye colors) matched with the combinations of genes that produced them. If you wanted a nose job, you could just look at the catalog to find one you liked instead of walking all around a city staring at strangers’ noses until you found a good one. Then you could alter your nose genes accordingly.

Third, there’s virtually no chance that nanomachines will be advanced enough to do plastic surgery on people by 2048. Progress developing nanomachines has happened at a snail’s pace, and the few that do exist have no useful capabilities. In theory, nanomachines will these advanced functions could exist someday. After all, the existence of flesh-eating bacteria and of bacteria that stimulate other cells’ growth show that nanoscale organic machines can alter how much tissue there is in part of an animal. A big and unsolved problem is controlling the behavior of the nanomachines once they’re injected into a person’s body.

By the end of this century, a plausible nanotech-based plastic nose job would involve the patent having his head held tightly in place with restraints while nanomachines (either of fully synthetic construction or highly modified bacteria) were injected into his nose with very fine needles. Some kind of external device, maybe using radio waves, pulses of light, or magnets, would activate the nanomachines, carefully control their activities, and keep them in very specific parts of the nose. One square millimeter at a time, the cartilage and bone in the patient’s nose would be destroyed or built up, slowly changing its overall shape.

Due to safety concerns and probably also to the limitations of the technology, the nanomachines would either be removed or would stop working after a short time and disintegrate. Multiple sessions involving the technique, spread out over weeks so the plastic surgeon could observe the intermediate results and deal with any complications, would probably be needed to achieve the desired nose shape. A procedure like the one depicted in the show, involving a vial of nanomachines injected into your arm, and then them migrating through your body on their own to a specific place where they alter your tissue as you scream in pain and watch your appearance change in a matter of seconds, will never be a reality.

Episode 13

There will be invisible force fields. In this episode, the police go to speak with an imprisoned man, and we see that good old fashioned steel bars have been replaced with invisible force fields. This is another ubiquitous sci fi trope that makes no sense. There is no force that we could harness through any type of technology that would block physical objects in the way that fictional force fields do. The only device that can approximate its effects is a “plasma window,” which is comprised of a flat plane electromagnetic field that is pumped full of super hot charged particles. It would burn any person or thing that passed through it, though it wouldn’t physically “push back” against them. If you had a running start and were willing to suffer injuries, you could get through one.

A plasma window

While it’s likely that plasma window technology will get cheaper and better, the fact that they require large amounts of power and injure anyone who touches them will curtail their use. In 2048 and beyond, jails will have metal bars like they do now.

3D bioprinters will be able to make whole human bodies. This episode’s villain is another disturbed criminal with access to advanced technology. He kidnaps people and takes them back to his lab for illegal medical experiments that last for days or weeks. To cover up their disappearances, he uses a large 3D bioprinter and their DNA to make dead, whole-body copies of them and then dumps the manufactured corpses in public places at night. The discoveries of the fake corpses are meant to lead the police astray, since they’ll never assume the victims are actually alive and being experimented on.

Ultimately, it will be possible to “manufacture” whole adult human bodies in labs (Blade Runner’s Replicants were examples of this), though 2048 will be way too early. By then, the best that 3D bioprinters and related technologies will probably be able to muster is manufacturing some types of tissue (skin, cartilage) and simple organs like bladders and tracheas. We can technically already do this, but the results are usually of poor quality.

Links:

  1. The “Cardiocam” mirror can measure the heartrate of anyone who stands in front of it. https://www.livescience.com/15469-cardiocam-mirror-mit-siggraph.html
  2. Cheap, tiny cameras like the Himax HM01B0 are already available. The technology will be even better by 2048.
    https://petewarden.com/2022/06/15/why-cameras-are-soon-going-to-be-everywhere/
  3. Research is ongoing on drug/therapy combinations that could fade traumatic memories away.
    https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/a-mind-without-fear-could-this-potential-drug-treat-ptsd-and-anxiety#New-drugs-necessary
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Is this the 2022 we were promised?

On May 7, 1922, an article titled “What the world will be like in a hundred years” appeared in the (now defunct) New York Herald. Its author, W.L. George, was a well-known English novelist. Since we’ve reached George’s deadline, it’s worth analyzing his accuracy by comparing the world as we see it to how he predicted it would be.

Therefore it is without anxiety, that I suggest a picture of this world a hundred years hence, and venture as my first guess that the world at that time would be remarkable to one of our ghosts, not so much because it was so different as because it was so similar.

In the main the changes which we may expect must be brought about by science. It is easier to bring about a revolutionary scientific discovery such as that of the X-ray than to alter in the least degree the quality of emotion that arises between a man and a maid. There will probably be many new rays in 2022, but the people whom they illumine will be much the same.

Correct. X-ray imaging technology was invented in 1895, was a revolutionary medical advance, and was still relatively new in 1922. Since then, many other medical imaging technologies that make use of phenomena other than X-rays have been discovered, including ultrasounds, CAT scans, PET scans, MRIs, and fMRIs. On the other hand, human nature and fundamental interpersonal dynamics have not changed. Our technology changes infinitely faster than we as a species can evolve.

I am convinced that in 2022 the advancement of science will be amazing, but it will be nothing like so amazing as is the present day in relation to a hundred years ago. A sight of the world today would surprise President Jefferson much more, I suspect, than the world of 2022 would surprise the little girl who sells candies at Grand Central Station. For Jefferson knew nothing of railroads, telegraphs, telephones, automobiles, aeroplanes, gramophones, movies, radium, &c.; he did not even know hot and cold bathrooms. The little girl at Grand Central is a blase child; to her these things are commonplace; the year 2022 would have to
produce something very startling to interest her ghost.

Debatable. Today there are many innovations that a person from 1922 would struggle to conceptually understand, like the internet, autonomous cars, space rockets, space stations, video calls, access to a million songs and almost all other human-generated content and knowledge from a pocket-sized device, nuclear weapons, machines that can carry on simple conversations about most topics.

The sad thing about discovery is that it works toward its own extinction, and that the more- we discover the less there is left. 

This is an observation, not a prediction, but it could stand analysis. Whether there is a finite amount that can be known is a question we still haven’t answered. Even if potential knowledge is finite and science has boundaries, it might take us thousands or millions of years to run out of things to discover. Just this month, data from the Hubble Space Telescope indicated that astronomers’ long-standing estimate of how fast the universe is expanding is wrong, suggesting that there is a basic and important error in our understanding of physics. Moreover, if the recent, high-profile UFO sightings are to be believed, it is possible to build space ships that can violate the known laws of physics and materials science.

I suspect that commercial flying will have become entirely commonplace. The passenger steamer will survive on the coasts, but it will have disappeared on the main routes, and will have been replaced by flying convoys, which should cover the distance between London and New York in about twelve hours. As I am anxious that the reader should not look upon me as a visionary, I would point out that in an airplane collision which happened recently
a British passenger plane was traveling at 180 miles an hour, which speed would have brought it across the Atlantic in eighteen hours. It is therefore quite conceivable that America may become separated from Europe by only eight hours.

Correct. It takes about seven hours to directly fly from New York City to London, and about eight hours to do the reverse (times are different due to the Earth’s rotation). Common passenger planes like the Boeing 787 have cruising speeds of 550 – 600 mph. Air travel between Europe and North America is indeed very common.

“Passenger steamers,” which refers to passenger ships of any size that have steam engines for propulsion, are obsolete, and steam engines are little used among all types of ships (they still make sense for some niches). Planes have replaced ships for transoceanic transport, and in rich countries, cars and commuter trains are much more common modes of transport up and down riverine routes than boats. An important exception is short ferry trips, which remain the most sensible ways to travel in some locales.

As a means of everyday human transportation, ships have sharply declined since 1922, but they’ve found new life serving the leisure demands of people. The cruise ship industry is booming, and the boat tour industry is healthy.

The same cause will affect the railroads, which at that time will probably have ceased to carry passengers except for suburban traffic. Railroads may continue to handle freight, but it may be that even this will be taken from them by road traffic, because the automobile does not have to carry the enormous overhead charges of tracks. Certainly food, mails and all light goods will be taken over from the railroads by road trucks. 

Half right, half wrong. In developed countries, trains are used much less for long-distance passenger traffic than they were in 1922, but they are still a primary means of daily transportation for people who live in cities or who commute into them for work. Railroads also remain the backbone of freight transportation. It’s still cheaper to move many types of cargoes by rail instead of by truck, and as the above chart shows, trains moved almost as much cargo in the U.S. as trucks did in 2018. Moreover, the total volume of material moved by rail in the U.S. increased from 1980 – 2018, showing that it’s not dying out.

The people of the year 2022 will probably never see a wire outlined against the sky: it Is practically certain that wireless telegraphy and wireless telephones will have crushed the cable system long before the century is done. Possibly, too, power may travel through the air when means are found to prevent enormous voltages being suddenly discharged in the wrong place.

Mostly wrong. Power lines are underground in most parts of American cities, but they are still above ground almost everywhere else due to cost and ease of maintenance. Wireless telephones (cell phones) are indeed common, but the failure to find a safe, economical way to wirelessly transmit electricity means that power lines are still common sights.

Coal will not be exhausted, but our reserves will be seriously depleted, and so will those of oil. One of the world dangers a century hence will be a shortage of fuel, but it is likely that by that time a great deal of power will be obtained from tides, from the sun, probably from radium and other forms of radial energy, while it may also be that atomic energy will be harnessed. If It is true that matter is kept together by forces known as electrons. It is possible that we shall know how to disperse matter so as to release the electron
as a force. This force would last as long as matter, therefore as long as the earth itself.

This was half right, half wrong. We have used enormous amounts of fossil fuels over the last 100 years, but they are not near depletion. Coal reserves remain highest of all, and BP estimates the world has over 100 years of it remaining, at present usage rates. Oil is not close to running out, and fracking has substantially boosted the size of the global reserve.

Tidal power never became widespread because the technology proved too finicky in practice to be useful outside of a small number of places with ideal geography.

In 1922, when these predictions were made, science supported the notion that sunlight and radioactive metals could be used to generate electricity, so the author’s prescience about the rise of solar and nuclear energy was not thanks to clairvoyance–he was well-read on physics literature. That said, it took decades for the first commercial designs to be invented.

The movies will be more attractive, as long before 2022 they will have been replaced by the kinephone, which now exists only in the laboratory. That is the figures on the screen will not only move, but they will have their natural colors and speak with ordinary voices. Thus, the
stage as we know it to-day may entirely disappear, which does not mean the doom of art, since the movie actress of 2022 will not only not need to know how to smile but also how to talk.

Correct. Movies started looking and sounding lifelike long before 2022. However, “the stage” did not entirely disappear. Live theatre plays are still held, though attending them is a marker of higher status (or pretensions to be such), whereas in 1922 it was a common venue of entertainment. This inversion also happened with horse ownership over the same period.

One might extend indefinitely on the number of inventions which ought to exist
and will exist, but the reader can think of them for himself, and it is more interesting to ask ourselves what will be the appearance of our cities a hundred years hence. To my mind they will offer a mixed outlook, because mankind never tears anything down completely to build
up something else; it erects the new while retaining the old; thus, many buildings now standing will be preserved. It is conceivable that the Capitol at Washington, many of the universities and churches will be standing a hundred years hence, and that they will, almost unaltered, be preserved by tradition.

Correct. It’s hard to think of a government capitol building in the U.S. that has been torn down since 1922, and it’s common to come across university buildings, churches and monuments that are over 100 years old today. If anything, we are taking historical building preservation too far, preventing valuable real estate from being used for new purposes. This is particularly bad in older cities like New York and San Francisco, where the inability to tear down smaller buildings and houses made in 1922 or earlier, or to even build contemporary structures next to them for fear of damaging the historic authenticity of the neighborhood, has produced affordable housing shortages and high commercial space rents.

Also, many private dwellings will survive and will be inhabited by individual families. I think that they will have passed through the cooperative stage, which may be expected fifty or sixty years hence, when the servant problem has become completely unmanageable and when private dwellings organize themselves to engage staffs to cook, clean, and mend for the groups. That cooperative stage will be the last kick of the private mistress who wants to retain in her household some sort of slave. In 2022 she will have been bent by circumstances, but she will have recovered her private dwelling, being served for seven hours a day by an orderly. The woman who becomes an orderly will be as well paid as if she were a stenographer, will wear her own clothes, be called “Miss,” belong to her trade union and work under union rules.

Wrong. This prediction touches on some peculiarities of life in 1922 that are almost forgotten today. Widespread poverty and sexism created a large number of women who were desperate for work, but could only find it in a handful of career fields that men eschewed. In 1922, it was much more common for women to work as domestic servants, and each day they would go to the houses of richer people to do cleaning, cooking, and other household tasks. Additionally, it was normal for even lower-middle-class households to employ domestic servants.

In 1922, labor-saving machines like dishwashers, clothes washers, and vacuum cleaners were not yet common, and because the average family was larger than today’s, it produced more of a daily mess. Most households simply lacked the time to meet their own cleaning and cooking needs, making domestic servants essential, or close to it.

At the same time, few people were willing to pay maids, cooks, and cleaners decent wages, making domestic servitude an unpopular and low-status line of work. There were never enough of them. The “servant problem” mentioned in the prediction was a common term in 1922 that described the shortfall of domestic servants in America. W.L. George predicted that the shortfall would keep growing until families would be forced to take advantage of economies of scale and get their domestic work done at an affordable cost by sharing servants. However, that “cooperative” arrangement would ultimately fail as the domestic servants unionized and forced households to give them high wages and reasonable workloads.

Things didn’t turn out that way. Labor-saving household innovations like the machines listed earlier, and like microwaveable and pre-packaged meals became widespread shortly after WWII, reducing the need for home servants. Clothing styles also became less formal, reducing the need to launder and iron clothes. Also, as laws and social norms changed, better types of careers opened for women, steadily thinning the ranks of domestic servants. By the 1970s, they had become rarities seldom encountered outside of rich households.

Naturally the work of the household, which is being reduced day by day, will in 2022 be a great deal lighter. I believe that most of the cleaning required to-day in a house will have been done away with. In the first place, through the disappearance of coal in all places where electricity is not made there will be no more smoke, perhaps not even that of tobacco. In the second place I have a vision of walls, furniture and hangings made of more or less compressed papier mache, bound with brass or taping along the edges. Thus, instead of scrubbing its floors, the year 2022 will unscrew the brass edges or unstitch
the tapes and peel off the dirty surface of the floor or curtains. Then every year a new floor board will be laid. One may hope that standard chairs, tables, carpets, will be peeled in the same way.

Half right and half wrong. Thanks to environmental laws enacted starting in the 1950s, levels of soot and other industrial toxins in the air are much lower than they were in 1922, and there are few places in the developed world where people have to scrub residue films off their houses and cars. W.L. George was right that this partly owes to changes in coal use: coal-burning stoves and boilers are no longer common in homes, buildings and factories, and the remaining coal consumption overwhelmingly occurs at large power plants. Those plants also have much better technology for filtering particulates out of their waste gas before it is released into the atmosphere.

W.L. George was also right that it would be much less common in 2022 for people to smoke indoors, leading to a further improvement in air quality and decreased need for cleaning since brownish nicotine stains no longer build up on walls and other surfaces.

However, his weird prediction that people would cover their floors and furniture in giant stickers that they could peel off and replace to avoid doing any cleaning didn’t come true. The impracticality of such a thing should have been obvious even in 1922, as getting a sticker that is the exact shape and size of the floor in a particular room of your house, removing all the objects from the room, peeling off the old sticker, applying the new sticker, and then putting the objects back in the room costs a lot of time and trouble. (Additionally, applying the new floor sticker without trapping any visible air bubbles under it or creating creases in it would probably be a frustrating effort) It’s easier to sweep or vacuum the bare floor as needed.

Similar reforms apply to cooking, a great deal of which will survive among old fashioned people, but a great deal more of which will probably be avoided by the use of synthetic foods. It is conceivable, though not certain, that in 2022 a complete meal may be taken in the shape of four pills. This is not entirely visionary; I am convinced that corned beef hash and pumpkin pie will still exist, but the pill lunch will–roll by their side.

Wrong. While culinary competence has declined in most countries, people still eat regular food, and “meal pills” don’t exist. This is because it’s impractical to cram enough calories into a swallowable pill to substitute for a full meal.

You’d have to swallow about this many large pills full of saturated fat to equal what you consume during a typical meal.

Saturated fat is the most calorie-dense substance, and “tallow” is the food product made of it and nothing else. One-hundred grams of tallow contains 902 calories, so obtaining a full day’s worth of 2,000 calories would require the consumption of 222 grams (nearly 8 ounces) of it. Divided equally between three meals, you’d have to swallow a literal cupped handful of tallow pills each time. It wouldn’t be convenient, it might take longer than expected to down them all, and the sudden dumping of fat into your body would cause havoc in your digestive system and damage your health over time if you subsisted on the pills. It wouldn’t be possible to pack 667 calories of tallow into four pills that would still be small enough for you to swallow, as W.L. George predicted.

Anyway, I doubt we missed out on anything. Eating food is one of the great pleasures in life.

But at that time few private dwellings will be built: in their stead will rise the community dwellings, where the majority of mankind will be living. They will probably be located in garden spaces and rise to forty or fifty floors, housing easily four or five thousand families. This is not exaggerated, since in one New York hotel to-day three thousand people sleep every night. It would mean also that each block would have a local authority of its own. I imagine these dwellings as affording one room to each adult of the family and one room for common use. Such cooking as then exists will be conducted by the local authority of the block, which will also undertake laundry, mending, cleaning and will provide a complete nursery for the children of the tenants.

Wrong. Most people in the world do not live in high-rise co-op apartments. Moreover, residential skyscrapers that are over 40 stories high are rare outside of major cities, and they tend to be prestige locations where richer people live.

While the share of humans that live in urban areas has greatly increased since 1922–and in fact, more people now live there than in rural areas–they mostly live in low-rise apartment buildings, rowhomes, detached homes, and slum shacks that would be recognizable in proportions and style to W.L. George. Services like meals, laundry, and childcare are rarely provided by landlords, and most people today either provide them for themselves or obtain them through the private market and pay out-of-pocket.

Perhaps at that time we shall have attained a dream which I often nurse, namely, the city roofed with glass. That city would be a complete unit, with accommodations for houses, offices, factories and open spaces, all this carefully allocated. The roof would completely do away with weather and would maintain an even temperature to be fixed by the taste of the
period. Artificial ventilation would suppress wind. As for the open spaces, if the temperature were warm they would exhibit a continual show of flowers, which would be emancipated from winter and summer; In other words, winter would not come however long the descendants of Mr. Hutchinson might wait.

Wrong. This quote explains why:

The construction of the Montreal Biosphère, a 250-foot diameter climate controlled World Expo attraction, proved incredibly difficult. And when people built domed houses and other buildings, they tended to leak, requiring frequent and expensive maintenance. Would a domed city really result in energy savings, given the enormous volume of air conditioned, largely unused, space? Decades later, we may have a solid answer: No…[Buckminster] Fuller long promised that domes would be essential to the occupation of the Arctic, Antarctic, and other planets, but there too, reality has fallen short. From 1975-2003 the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Scientific Station was encased inside a 160-feet-wide dome, but reviews were mixed. The dome could keep snow off the buildings inside, but not off of the dome itself, where it accumulated. Eventually, the entire station found itself buried in snow and, by 1988, the dome’s foundation was cracking spectacularly under the pressure. Today, the gold standard for Antarctic architecture is not domes, but modular units that can be elevated to escape an icy burial.

https://www.inverse.com/article/15868-the-domed-city-is-dead-on-arrival-and-sorry-buckminster-fuller-was-always-dumb

The family would still exist, even though it is not doing very well to-day. It is inconceivable that some sort of feeling between parents and children should not persist, though I am of course unable to tell what that feeling will be. I imagine that the link will be thinner than it is to-day, because the child is likely to be taken over by the State, not only schooled but fed and clad, and at the end of its training placed in a post suitable to its abilities.

Part right, part wrong. The traditional family has certainly declined over the last 100 years: divorce, single-parent households, and children born out of wedlock are many times more common now, with most deleterious effects on everyone (a good roundup of statistics is here: https://lanekenworthy.net/families/). However, things have fortunately not gotten so bad that the government raises children in orphanages as a matter of course. The only country I know of that tried such a policy was communist Romania, which banned abortion in 1967 in a deliberate attempt to spur population growth and increase the number of workers. The result was a humanitarian tragedy, as hundreds of thousands of unwanted children were born each year, many of whom ended up in the country’s state-run orphanages. Lack of resources, neglect, and abuse left them permanently traumatized and stunted. It was a disaster that showed the government is totally unsuited for the child-rearing role W.L. George envisioned.

This may be affected by birth control, which In 2022 will be legal all over the world. There will be stages: the first results of birth control will be to reduce the birth rate; then the State will step in as it does in France, and make it worth people’s while to have more children; then the State will discover that it has made things too easy and that people are having children recklessly; finally some sort of balance will establish itself between the State demand for children and the national supply.

The map shows abortion rights by country

Unclear! First, what does “legal all over the world” mean? Legal in every country, or in a group of countries encompassing most of the human population, or something else? And what counts as “legal”? Countries that let women get abortions at any stage of pregnancy and for any reason, or would W.L. George be satisfied with countries that still applied significant restrictions on abortion, like a ban on doing it in the third trimester (a common limitation in Europe)?

Globally, abortion access has decreased the fertility rate, but so have other major factors like greater career opportunities for women, higher costs of raising children, and a diminished cultural emphasis on having children. As a result, many rich and even middle-income countries have such low birthrates that their populations are shrinking or will soon start doing so. W.L. George was right to foresee that some governments would recognize the problem and enact policies to incent their citizens to have more children (China’s abandonment of its One Child policy, and the generous welfare programs in Western Europe for mothers are the most notable examples), though at best these have merely slowed the rate of population decline. Encouragement of immigration has become the preferred policy response, though East Asian countries seem resigned to accepting decline.

A “balance” to the population growth rate has not been achieved in any country as of 2022, unless by pure luck and not through focused government policy and the compliant behavior of citizens. Globally, the rate and distribution of human population change is uncoordinated and unbalanced: Most of the population growth is happening in places that are the least able accommodate more people, economically and environmentally.

Largely the condition of the family will be governed by the position of woman, because woman is the family, while man is merely its supporter. It is practically certain that in 2022 nearly all women will have discarded the idea that they are primarily “makers of men.” Most fit women will then be following an individual career. All positions will be open to them and a great many women will have risen high. The year 2022 will probably see a large number of women in Congress, a great many on the judicial bench, many in civil service posts and perhaps some in the President’s Cabinet.

Correct, so long as we exclude large parts of the world where conservative religious values still dominate. Focusing on the U.S., it is true that “most fit women,” which is probably another way of saying “most healthy women of working age,” have jobs. The figure is 76%, much higher than it was 100 years ago. The law prohibits hiring on the basis of sex and other demographic factors, so all jobs are technically open to women.

In Congress, 27% of the House consists of female Representatives, and in the Senate, 24% of its membership is female. It would be fair to call those a “large number” of women, and in fact, female representation in Congress is at a record high in 2022. Three of the nine Supreme Court Justices are women, and their number will grow to four once Stephen Breyer retires and is replaced by Ketanji Brown Jackson. Half of the members of President Biden’s cabinet are female, including its most important member, Vice President Harris.

But it is unlikely that women will have achieved equality with men. Cautious feminists such as myself realize that things go slowly and that a brief hundred years will not wipe out the effects on women of 30,000 years of slavery. Women will work, partly because they want to and partly because they will be able to. Thus women will pay their share in the upkeep of home and family. The above suggestion of community buildings, where all the household work will be done by professionals, will liberate the average wife and enable her out of her wages to pay her share of the household work which she dislikes.

This is partly correct. Even in countries with progressive values, women have yet to achieve full equality with men in a number of important areas, mainly related to money and educational achievement. Contrary to the author’s view, motherhood has not been rendered obsolete by communal childrearing, and in fact it remains as probably the biggest impediment to sex equality. Women still do the lion’s share of household labor, even if they also have full-time jobs outside the home, and mothers are much likelier to drop out of the workforce to raise their children or to eschew more demanding jobs for the same reason.

Marriage will still exist much as it is to-day, for mankind has an inveterate taste for the institution, but divorce will probably be as easy everywhere as it is in Nevada. In view, however, of the improved position of woman and her earning power, she will not only cease to be entitled to alimony, but she will be expected, after the divorce, to pay her share of the maintenance of her children. 

The author’s predictions are wrong for being both too conservative and too liberal! In 1922, Nevada had the most lax divorce laws in America, and couples could be granted a divorce for almost any reason. However, doing so required at least one of them to first establish legal residency, which required them to live in Nevada for at least six months. This created a strange, churning diaspora of people who were biding their time in the state for half a year to obtain divorce decrees. It disappeared later in the 20th century as other states made their own divorce laws less strict, removing the need for anyone to visit Nevada. In 2022, it’s much easier to get a divorce in America.

On the other hand, alimony laws have not changed nearly as much, and it’s the norm for women to be awarded sizeable alimonies from their ex-husbands upon divorce. Income and net worth determine the size and direction of alimony payments, and since men are likelier to make more money than their wives, most of the divorcees who receive alimony payments are women.

As regards the politics of 2022, I should expect the form of the State to be much the same. A few rearrangements may have taken place on the lines of self-determination; for instance, Austria may have united with Germany, the South American republics may have federated, &c, but I do not believe that there will be a superstate. There will still be republics and monarchies; possibly, in 2022, the Spanish, Italian, Dutch and Norwegian kings may have fallen, but for a variety of reasons, either lack of advancement or practical convenience, we may expect still to find kings in Sweden, Jugo-Slavia, Greece, Rumania and Great Britain.

This prediction was mostly correct. When the author says the basic “form of the State” will not have changed by 2022, it’s unclear whether “form” refers to the shapes and boundaries of countries or to the status of countries as the essential political units of the world. As the 1922 political map below shows, some borders have radically changed (Africa and Asia) while many others have not shifted at all (the Americas).

In spite of a lot of hoopla about transnational corporations becoming stronger than countries, terrorist groups and drug cartels carving out territories for themselves, and globalization erasing borders, the nation-state system still reigns supreme. For better or worse, central governments matter, national identity matters, and borders matter. Indeed, there is no global superstate, we are not poised to create one, and the continent that is closest to transforming into one, Europe, might have already reached the limits of how much integration its people will allow.

The author was right that the nation-states of 2022 would be governed by a mix of republics and monarchies, though his specific guesses of which European monarchies would survive were wrong: the Spanish, Dutch and Norwegian royal families HAVE NOT fallen from power, but the Yugoslavian, Greek, and Romanian royal families HAVE fallen.

Overall, monarchies have weakened over the last 100 years: the number of countries with monarchical governments has declined, the fraction of the human population living under monarchies has declined, and the amount of political power held by the remaining monarchs is generally less than their ancestors had in 1922.

On the inside, these States may have slightly changed, for there prevails a tendency to socialization which has nothing to do with socialism. Most of the European governments are unconsciously nationalizing a number of industries, and this will go on. One may therefore presume that in 2022 most States will have nationalized railways, telegraphs, telephones, canals, docks, water supply, gas (if any) and electricity. Other industries will exist much as they do to-day, but it is likely that the State will be inclined to control them, to limit their profits, and to arbitrate between them and the workers. We find a hint of this in America in the anti-trust acts; a hundred years hence the tendency will be much stronger. It is worth noting as an international factor that by that time purely national industries will almost have disappeared, and that the work of the world will be in the hands of controlled combines governing the supply of a commodity from China to Peru.

Across the Western world, people were still adjusting to the dislocations of the Industrial Age, and laws and social attitudes lagged behind economic realities. Cities were overcrowded with people seeking work in factories, there were few laws pertaining to labor rights or building standards, and a huge wealth gap existed between the capitalists who owned the factories and land, and the people who worked in and lived on them. The Bolshevik Revolution had just happened in Russia, Vladimir Lenin was still alive, and Communist forces worldwide had not yet killed or let starve millions of people. Communist ideology had not yet been discredited, and its leaders and adherents could still have reason to believe it was a superior and even inevitable alternative to capitalism.

https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/statistical-review-of-world-energy/coal.html

How America Tried (and Failed) to Solve Its “Servant Problem”

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/09/decline-domestic-help-maid/406798/

https://www.medindia.net/nutrition-data/fat-beef-tallow.htm

https://www.brookings.edu/essay/the-history-of-womens-work-and-wages-and-how-it-has-created-success-for-us-all/
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/01/15/a-record-number-of-women-are-serving-in-the-117th-congress/
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Review: “Soylent Green”

Plot: Welcome to 2022. Welcome to a grotesquely overpopulated, resource-depleted, polluted, and impoverished world. It’s a place where practically every tree has been cut down and every person herded into cities to make room for farms that nevertheless barely make enough food for everyone, where the air is sticky and thick with toxic smog and the stench of unwashed bodies and corpses, and where the hungry masses are perpetually on the brink of rioting. There’s no joy, hope, jobs, or even real food anymore–just little processed crackers rationed to the population. It’s a place where corrupt politicians and the executives of corporations collude to protect their own power and privileges at any cost, even if it means forcing the ultimate sacrilege on humanity.

Manhattan, 2022

Welcome to New York City. It’s a decaying and crime-ridden cauldron that is so crowded it’s literally standing room only in many of its apartments and streets. Charlton Heston knows this city well, and keeps busy in it. He’s a homicide detective, and of such esteem that he enjoys the privilege of having his own, small apartment, which he shares with only one other person: his elderly assistant named “Sol.” Their dreary routine is interrupted one day when they are assigned to investigate the murder of one of New York’s richest people–a man named “Simonson” who was a Board member at the “Soylent” corporation.

Soylent is an enormous food processing company that controls half the world’s food supply. Their “Red” and “Yellow” products are derived from plants, and are formed into crackers or loaves. Their latest product, “Green,” is said to be derived from plankton harvested from the ocean. Soylent Red, Yellow and Green are staple foods for New Yorkers, and probably billions of people beyond.

Soylent foods for sale at a New York market

As the investigation proceeds, Heston quickly realizes Simonson’s murder was no robbery gone bad, as it appeared at first glance. As he and Sol follow the clues, it leads them to mortal danger, a conspiracy involving some of the world’s most powerful men, and to a profoundly disturbing secret about the food supply.

Soylent Green was a laugh-out-loud inaccurate portrayal of the world in 2022. Yeah, I know we have our problems, but they don’t compare to the film’s dystopia. The fact that it was so far off the mark should be FOOD FOR THOUGHT for anyone who takes the current crop of doomsday global warming movies set in the future (e.g. – Geostorm, Snowpiercer, Interstellar) seriously.

That said, I still liked Soylent Green and think it’s worth watching so long as it isn’t taken seriously. The movie is well-paced and manages to depict a grim future without overdoing it to the point of being depressing. It’s both entertaining and serious, and at times genuinely tense. The acting is great all around, especially on the part of Charlton Heston, who is less cocky and has a slightly broader emotional range in this than in most of his other roles.

Analysis:

The world will be grossly overpopulated. At the beginning of Soylent Green, we’re told that New York City’s population has grown from roughly 8 million the year the film was released (1973) to 40 million in 2022. Population figures for other parts of the U.S. or for other countries are never given, but at one point Heston says other cities are “all like this,” implying the rest of the world is similarly overpopulated.

The U.S. population in 1973 was about 205 million, and the world population that year was 3.7 billion. If they quintupled like New York City, then in the film, the U.S. population in 2022 was 1 billion, and the world population was 18.5 billion.

Mercifully, the real figures are much lower: New York City has 8.8 million residents, the U.S. has 330 million, and the world has 7.9 billion. Soylent Green‘s prediction that Earth would be grossly overpopulated by 2022 was wrong, and the city in which it is set, New York, has only 11% more inhabitants now than it did in 1973. Instead of it being “standing room only,” the city is but marginally denser.

Outside of the tropical countries and Muslim world, population is growing very little and is even shrinking

Ironically, a growing number of thinkers and journalists today are worried about the opposite problem: population decline. The populations of rich countries are mostly shrinking, or are only slowly expanding thanks to immigration and immigrants having kids. Even middle income countries like China, Thailand and Brazil have seen sharp drops in birthrates and have almost stopped growing. While shrinking a shrinking population has benefits (more space per person, cheaper real estate, less traffic, less pollution created), they are probably outweighed by the downsides of economic decline.

That said, it would be a mistake to simply extrapolate current demographic trends into the future indefinitely and to conclude that the human race is doomed to extinction because people will refuse to have kids. A slew of technologies that will come into existence this century will raise birthrates in various ways: Existing assisted reproductive technologies like in vitro fertilization (IVF) will get cheaper, putting them within reach of lower income people. New reproduction technologies will be invented, allowing more people with fertility problems to have healthy kids. For example, post-menopausal women with no eggs will be able to have fertility labs synthesize ova for them that contain their DNA, and to insert it into themselves, younger surrogate mothers or, in the far future, artificial wombs. Robot servants will also ease household workloads, giving parents more time for child-rearing and making parenthood more appealing.

Along with raising birthrates, future technologies will let us grow the human population through the opposite mechanism, which is lowering mortality rates. Disease cures, therapeutic cloning of human organs, cybernetic replacements for organs and limbs, stem cell therapies that regenerate ageing tissues and organs inside the patient’s body, and many other medical advances, will slowly raise lifespans, and to such an extent that “medical immortality” will probably be available to well-resourced people by the end of this century. If people don’t die, then even a very low birthrate among them will lead to Soylent Green levels of overpopulation, though it might take centuries.

The environment will be devastated by pollution. The other aspect of Soylent Green‘s dystopian reality is severe pollution and concomitant environmental devastation. The outdoor scenes–which are already bleak-looking since they are full of derelict buildings, trash-strewn streets and crowds of poor people–are shrouded in a sickly greenish haze, which is certainly smog. New York City is devoid of trees, except a few saplings in a small, sealed arboretum (presumably necessary to protect them from air toxins) that only privileged people can enter.

A sealed arboretum containing NYC’s only trees

The oceans are also so poisoned and overfished that plankton are the only remaining edible sea life. The Soylent company processes harvested plankton into green crackers for human consumption, and the film’s big reveal is that it has been secretly transitioning their content to human flesh because even plankton is dying out. In other words, “SOYLENT GREEN IS PEOPLE!”

Manhattan in 2021

This depiction of 2022 is almost totally wrong. New York City still has trees growing outdoors–notably in the massive Central Park. Additionally, the U.S. actually had more trees in 2021 than it did in 1921! The amount of global tree cover also increased by 8% from 1982 to 2016.

Instead of disappearing, global seafood harvests have risen since Soylent Green was in theaters, and there are no signs of an impending collapse of wild fisheries, though fish catches have been flat since the 1990s, suggesting we’ve reached the limit of how many wild calories the seas can sustainably provide us. Fortunately, the human race has proven itself more competent at surmounting this barrier than it was in the movie, and a large and growing share of fish are now “farmed” instead of caught wild.

Though the oceans still supply us with plenty of calories, a large and growing share of seafood comes from “fish farms,” labeled “aquaculture” in this graph.

New York City’s air is not full of smog, and its air quality is in fact substantially better than it was when the film was released. As just one example, sulfur dioxide (SO2) concentrations in the City’s air have sharply dropped, from an average of 155 μg/m3 from 1970-72, to a mere 6.8 μg/m3 today (January 24, 2022). (SO2 is the main component of “smog,” and has an opaque appearance. It causes respiratory problems and acid rain.) Every other type of air pollution (i.e. – PM 2.5, ozone, lead, nitrogen dioxide (NO2)) has sharply dropped in New York City, the rest of America, and the rest of the developed world over the same timeframe, meaning they breathe cleaner air today than people did when Soylent Green was in theaters. This is due to a slew of environmental laws being enacted, including the U.S. Clean Air Act of 1963 and the Clean Water Act of 1972. (U.S. air and water pollution levels had actually been trending down for a short time before Soylent Green‘s 1973 release.)

Delhi, India during its November 2021 smog emergency

Unfortunately, those things aren’t true for the poorer half of the global population, and hundreds of millions of people in India and China endure toxic air, mostly due to weak air pollution laws or to lax enforcement of relevant laws. In fact, in November 2021, Delhi had a smog emergency lasting several days, during which the air became so poisonous that the government shut down the city’s schools. The news images of opaque air, crowded streets, poverty, and decay bear striking similarities to the dystopian New York of Soylent Green. The suffering of people in polluted places like northern India is why I judged “This depiction of 2022 is almost totally wrong.”

Winters in temperate areas will be warm thanks to global warming. Though the movie indicates it is set in the year 2022, no clues are given about the exact dates of its events. Based on the facts that most of the characters wear light clothing, and there are several scenes where they are visibly sweating, it would seem it is set in the summer. However, that assumption is upended by a remark Heston makes when contemplating whether to turn on an air conditioner (a rare luxury): “All the way up. We’ll make it cold. Like winter used to be.”

Evidently, global warming has gotten so severe that even in places with slightly cold climates like New York City are hot in the winter!

Fortunately, this prediction about 2022 also fell flat. Global warming has only had a tiny effect on the city’s temperature. According to NOAA data taken from a weather station that has been operating in Central Park since 1869, NYC’s average temperature for all of 1973 (the year Soylent Green was released) was 56.1°F, and the average for that December was 39.0°F. The average temperature for 2020 (the last year for which full data have been published) was 57.3°F, and that December’s average temperature was 39.2°F.

And on the day I analyzed this prediction (January 26, 2022), New York City’s high temperature was 29°F, and it was bracing for a major snowstorm.

There will be tablet computers. Though we never get a good look at them or see how they work, there appear to be simple tablet computers and PDAs in the film. Heston keeps one of them in his apartment, and in the film’s first scene, Sol reads notes about criminal cases off of it. The device is a piece of transparent plastic, about the size and shape of a magazine, with an opaque layer embedded within it bearing written characters.

Heston’s tablet computer, displaying Sol’s suicide note

It is strongly reminiscent of an actual tablet computer that lets users handwrite digital notes on its screen by using metal styluses. This prediction about 2022 was right.

The “ReMarkable 2” tablet, displaying something more cheerful than a suicide note. It is new for 2022.

People will have computer game machines in their homes. Early in the film, there’s a scene set in Simonson’s luxury condo suite. There we see an arcade-style video game. To be exact, it is “Computer Space,” which was the first commercially successful video game in history, and only made its debut two years before Soylent Green was released.

A privately-owned computer arcade game

In 2022, it is very common for people to have video game consoles in their homes and to play games on their computing devices. If anything, the film’s prediction is too conservative since it depicts video games as being only available to rich people, whereas in reality, even a teenager working a part-time job today could afford a quality console and several games.

The government will ration essential goods. Due to dwindling natural resources, an excessive population, and widespread poverty that leaves most people unable to afford anything, the government rations essential goods, notably food and water. Citizens visit government offices where clerks give them their allotments of money or ration cards, which they exchange with other people in New York to get essential goods. In other scenes, we see private merchants selling Soylent food products in an open-air market, and men in official uniforms using an outdoor water tap to fill the jugs belonging to people who need their daily water rations. The film also implies that other basics, like soap, writing paper, and pencils, are also very hard to get.

A rationing office run by the government

For the U.S. and the developed world more broadly, this is inaccurate. Staple foods, potable water, and everyday items like soap are very cheap. For example, by cooking their own meals at home, an adult could easily get their food budget under $10 per day, and by drinking only tap water or some type of beverage mix like “Tang,” get their daily drink budget below $1. A bar of personal soap cost $1.50, and will last a person for weeks.

A visit to a typical American grocery store in 2022, even in poorer parts of the country, will reveal a cornucopia of food and merchandise at low prices. Additionally, thrift stores are practically everywhere, and are bursting with wide varieties of decent-quality secondhand goods at very low prices. Electronic resources like Craigslist.org, Facebook Marketplace, and Freecycle are also major sources of cheap or even free items available locally. If anything, most of the world is now contending with a surfeit of essential goods, which too often are wasted, thrown out, or allowed to accumulate as unused clutter. Growth of the self-storage industry bears further testimony to this reality. People, Americans in particular, have too much stuff, not too little.

Prostitution will be legal. One of Soylent Green’s main characters is “Shirl” (pronounced almost the same as “Cheryl”), a young woman prostitute who is compensated with free housing and amenities in Mr. Simonson’s luxury condo. The arrangement is legal and accepted as normal, and it is later revealed that the condo building has several other prostitutes, euphemistically termed “furniture,” living in other units. Having a live-in prostitute is an expensive marker of high status, and Heston’s suspicions are raised when, while investigating Simonson’s death, he discovers the latter’s bodyguard has “furniture” in his own apartment in spite of a salary that should be insufficient.

Prostitutes having a party

In real life, prostitution is illegal in New York City, and in the rest of the U.S. except Nevada. There, it is confined to a small number of heavily regulated brothel houses. With varying restrictions, prostitution is legal in about 15 countries, mostly in Europe. Nevertheless, as the revelations about Jeffrey Epstein’s high-end prostitution ring–which included sex parties at his luxury Manhattan townhouse–show, it’s still easy for rich men to buy sex in New York.

A small number of industrial food companies will control the global food supply. “Soylent” is clearly the dominant food producer in the U.S., and perhaps the world. As Sol says after researching it: “Soylent controls the food supply for half the world.” It’s unclear who produces the other half, but other big companies and government agricultural agencies probably dominate it.

A small number of food processing companies own many common food and beverage brands. But does that mean they “control the global food supply”?

The world is certainly full of large, highly profitable food processing companies, but none is so big that it controls anywhere near half of the global food supply. Consider the top ten food and drink companies of 2020, along with their food sales for that year:

  1. PepsiCo, Inc. – $70.3 billion
  2. Nestle – $67.7 billion
  3. JBS – $50.7 billion
  4. Anheuser-Busch – $46.9 billion
  5. Tyson Foods – $43.2 billion
  6. Mars – $37.0
  7. Archer Daniels Midland – 35.4 billion
  8. The Coca-Cola Company – $34.3 billion
  9. Cargill – $32.4 billion
  10. Danone – $26.9 billion

If we assume that these ten companies produced all the calories consumed by all humans in 2020, and use revenues as a proxy for calories each produced, then the largest, PepsiCo, only controls 15.8% of the food supply.

Of course, the top 10 food processing companies aren’t really the only ones in existence. The source from which I got the above data actually lists revenue figures for the top 100 companies in the sector. If we include them in the calculation (BTW, rank #100 goes to the “Kewpie Corporation,” which made $3.6 billion in 2020 selling mostly mayonnaise, salad dressing, and baby food in Japan), then big companies sold $1,316 billion of food and beverages in 2020, and the biggest one, PepsiCo, only controls 5.3% of the global market. The top ten combined only control 33.8%.

The darkness of the country indicates what share of its population is engaged in sustenance farming.

Additionally, sustenance farming and the consumption of food made by small, local farms still provides most of the calories for large fractions of the population in Africa and southern Asia. These people eat little or nothing made by the big food processing companies, meaning PepsiCo’s control over global calories should be even lower than the paltry 5.3%.

In rich countries with declining culinary traditions, like the U.S., it is probably common for people to get most of their daily calories from processed foods. However, the foods are still made by several different, competing food processing companies, so there is no monopoly and hence no real-world equivalent to “Soylent.” Even if the biggest one of those companies decided to start secretly blending calories derived from corpses into its food products, only a minority of the U.S. population would end up eating it.

New York City’s population will be 90% white. All of Soylent Green‘s main characters and seemingly 90% of its extras are white. This includes rich, working-class, and poor people.

The reality is very different. The U.S. Census estimated that, in 2021, only 32.1% of New Yorkers were both white and non-Hispanic. Blacks were 24.3%, Asians were 14.1%, and multiracial people were 3.6%. It is surely one of the most racially diverse cities on Earth.

There will be mass unemployment. In the first scene, Heston remarks “There are 20 million guys out of work in Manhattan alone.” Even if this is exaggerated and the real number is only half that figure, and even if “guys” refers to both sexes, it would indicate a staggeringly high unemployment rate.

To be generous, let’s assume that Soylent Green‘s New York had an excellent dependency ratio of 80, meaning 80% of its population was in good health and able to work (children, old people, and disabled people comprise the other 20%). For comparison, NYC’s actual dependency ratio in 2021 was 54.7, and dependency ratios in the 80s have only happened after periods of extraordinary population growth, such as when the post-WWII baby boom generations in India and South Korea hit adulthood.

Eighty percent of 40 million is 32 million, meaning there were 32 million potential adult workers in the city. If 10 million of them (half of Heston’s figure) couldn’t find jobs, that equates to a 31.25% unemployment rate. To put that into perspective, during the Great Depression, the U.S. national unemployment rate peaked at 24.9%. Remarkably, even with optimistic assumptions, the job picture was worse than it had ever been in real life!

What happens if we adjust the calculations to be more bleak? For example what if we lower the dependency ratio to 65 (many of the New Yorkers looked unhealthy and seemed to have motivation problems, both of which would leave them unable to work) and accept Heston’s “20 million guys out of work” figure?

We get a 76.9% unemployment rate, which is unheard of. I can’t imagine a situation where that many willing people wouldn’t be able to find jobs, except maybe the first few weeks following a massive nuclear war. That said, I foresee a day when 76.9% of healthy adults won’t have gainful jobs due to machines doing the work for them, but most of those people won’t be “unemployed” since they’ll embrace (or at least, deal with) the new reality by devoting their time to things other than work, like socializing, video gaming, doing drugs, traveling, or indulging in personal hobbies and niche interests. You don’t count as “unemployed” if you’re not interested in working.

Oh, and what’s New York City’s actual unemployment rate? In December 2021, it was 8.8%, which is high by real-world U.S. standards, but absolutely stellar by Soylent Green‘s.

There will be mass homelessness. Along with lacking jobs, most of the people in the film seem to lack homes. Every morning, Heston has to literally jump over poor people who sleep on the staircase of his apartment. Many of New York’s streets are clogged with broken-down cars that people live in, and sleeping people literally cover the whole floor of his local church at night. Most of the city’s population might be chronically homeless.

Heston jumping over poor people

In reality, no more than 1% of New York City’s population is truly homeless, meaning they either sleep in public spaces or in homeless shelters. And unlike in Soylent Green, most of them only go without proper housing for brief lengths of time, and aren’t “chronically” homeless.

New York City will have epidemic levels of violent crime. Soylent Green begins with a murder, later in the film there’s a street riot where several police officers are attacked and people are shot, and in one scene, the police chief says there were 137 murders in the city over the previous 24 hours. In short, New York City is extremely violent. How accurate was this depiction?

If we assume 137 murders a day is typical, that’s equivalent to 50,005 per year, and a homicide rate of 125 per 100,000 residents. In reality, New York City had 485 murders for all of 2021, meaning its homicide rate is a mere 5.5 per 100,000 residents.

Among big American cities, the most murderous is Louisville, Kentucky, which had 188 murders in 2021, equating to a homicide rate of 30 per 100,000. That means no major urban area in the U.S. comes close to being as violent as Soylent Green‘s New York was.

That said, there are cities outside the U.S. that approach its heights of murder. In 2020, three Mexican cities–Celaya, Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez–had the highest murder rates in the world, at 109, 105, and 103 murders per 100,000 residents, respectively. So if the movie had been Soylent Verde and set just one country away, it would have been grimly accurate in this regard.

People will have battery banks in their homes. The small apartment that Heston and Sol share has a bank of what look like car batteries for storing electricity. A stationary bicycle connected to the batteries can be pedaled to recharge them. It’s unclear whether the battery bank is their sole source of electricity, or if it’s merely a backup power source in case of grid failures, and it’s also unclear how common the batteries are in other homes.

The battery bank

Batteries are much cheaper and more energy-dense today than they were when Soylent Green was in theaters. However, home battery banks remain uncommon due to the reliability of the electric grid and because the batteries are still too expensive to be worth it.

For example, a typical American home consumes 30 kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity per day. A person who valued efficiency could reasonably reduce that to 24 kWh / day by buying high-efficiency appliances and by doing things like wearing sweaters instead of turning the heat up so high in the winter. A typical home storage battery such as the “Growatt 6 KW,” costs $4,490 and can only store 6 kWh of electricity, so four of the batteries would be needed to store just one day’s worth of power, for a total cost of $17,960, plus installation costs. The batteries’ storage capacities also degrade with time, meaning they usually need to be replaced after 10-15 years.

The “Growatt 6KW” residential battery

A better option for backup power is a gas-powered generator. While portable generators with wheels are the most familiar versions of the machines, the types generally used for residential backup power are stationary and look like large boxes right outside the houses they provide power to. One high-quality standby generator capable of meeting the 24 kWh / day requirement is the “Generac 72101,” and it costs $5,997 plus more for installation. It is connected to the house’s natural gas plumbing and automatically turns on whenever it detects an electrical grid outage. Best of all, if properly maintained and not overused, such a generator can last 20 years or more before needing replacement.

A Generac 24 kW backup generator installed outside a home

This means a home battery backup system costs three times more than an equivalent backup gas generator. Battery prices will need to drop by 66% to achieve parity. Such an improvement might be possible: Between 2010 and 2019, lithium-ion battery pack prices dropped 87%. However, the rate of yearly cost-improvement declined over that period and continues to do so, suggesting we’ve picked the low-hanging fruits for improving battery cost-performance, so don’t expect another 87% decline over the next 10 years. To get our 66% improvement, which might cause battery banks to become common in houses and apartments, I think 20 years or more of research and industrial efficiencies will be needed.

Assisted suicide will be legal. Discovering the awful truth about Soylent Green pushes Sol–already an old and world-weary man–over the edge, so he signs up for assisted suicide, which is euphemistically called “Going home.” Not only is it legal, it is barely regulated, and Sol merely has to walk into the nearest euthanasia clinic and sign a form to have it done. There’s no wait time, no “cool down period,” and no requirement for suicide requests to be vetted by a court, doctors, mental health specialists, or the applicant’s family.

Sol committing assisted suicide

This depiction of 2022 was partly accurate. Physician-assisted suicide is legal in 10 American states and Washington, DC. While the laws only allow their residents the right of suicide, it is easy for people from other parts of America to satisfy the requirement by moving in and living there for a short period of time.

Additionally, in those 10 states and DC, the applicant must provide medical evidence that he probably has six months or less to live thanks to poor health, and there are processes for adjudicating that evidence. (In effect, legal doctor-assisted suicide is available to anyone in the U.S. who can prove he has six months or less to live.) Professing that one is sick of living–even if the person can prove they are sincere–is insufficient. This means Sol, were he alive in the real world of 2022, would not be able to commit assisted suicide.

The procedure is also not legal in New York, though it is in neighboring New Jersey, and it’s possible the euthanasia clinic in the film was in the latter state. Less than a mile of water separates Manhattan from Jersey City, and Sol could have easily made the journey.

Cannibalism will be widespread. Like “Luke, I am your father,” the line “Soylent Green is people” has long been in our cultural consciousness, and is known even to those who haven’t seen the latter film. With that in mind, I feel no guilt exposing the movie’s climactic reveal: the Soylent company has been secretly turning corpses into crackers that millions (possibly billions) of unsuspecting people have been eating.

Soylent Green crackers been scooped into a bag at a food market

Again, and very fortunately, this prediction was wrong. Cannibalism is not widespread in 2022, or even practiced by anything but a miniscule number of disturbed people. It is probably as culturally taboo as it was in 1973, and even in rare cases where a person voluntarily allows themselves to be killed and eaten by a cannibal, the latter is arrested and charged with a crime.

However, as I’ve predicted, in vitro meat technology should be advanced enough by 2100 to let us grow human flesh and organs in labs, which would provide people a legal way to indulge in “cannibalism” without breaking laws related to murder or desecration of a corpse. As a result, a small number of people will eat human flesh, mostly for novelty, like how people try weird meats like alligator today, but some will eat it routinely because they like the taste or have a cannibal fetish.

Links:

  1. U.S. tree cover was higher in 2021 than it was in 1921.
    https://www.treehugger.com/more-trees-than-there-were-years-ago-its-true-4864115
  2. Globally, tree cover rose by 8% from 1982 to 2016.
    https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0411-9
  3. New York City had several smog crises during the mid 20th century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1966_New_York_City_smog
  4. “The Relation of Air Pollution to Mortality” (1976) determined that New York City’s average SO2 concentration from 1970-72 was 155 μg/m3.
    https://www.jstor.org/stable/45002384
  5. Delhi’s 2021 smog emergency
    https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/delhi/delhi-smog-high-levels-of-so2-no2-ozone-7618922/
  6. NOAA webpage featuring data from the weather station in Central Park, which has been operating since 1869. It shows how little average temperatures have risen in NYC since 1972.
    https://www.weather.gov/okx/CentralParkHistorical
  7. In the U.S., the self-storage industry has been growing at a healthy rate.
    https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/21/business/self-storage-roars-back.html
  8. The top 100 food processing companies of 2020 by revenue
    https://www.foodengineeringmag.com/2021-top-100-food-beverage-companies
  9. The FAO’s “World Food and Agriculture Statistical Pocketbook” for 2018 contains data on sustenance farming.
    https://www.globalagriculture.org/fileadmin/files/weltagrarbericht/Weltagrarbericht/10B%C3%A4uerlicheIndustrielleLW/Pocketbook2018.pdf
  10. South Korea’s dependency ratio was 83.3 in 1970, and India’s was 81.2 in 1965.
    https://www.livemint.com/Opinion/3aGTvnsOvqfu22cfQbS4KN/Making-Indias-demography-its-destiny.html
  11. On any given day, about 1% of New Yorkers are homeless, meaning they spent the night sleeping in public or in a homeless shelter.
    https://www.bowery.org/homelessness/
  12. New York City had 485 murders in 2021.
    https://nypost.com/2022/01/01/nyc-recorded-485-murders-in-2021/
  13. Rankings of most murderous cities, 2020
    https://www.eluniversal.com.mx/nacion/mexico-con-el-top-6-en-el-ranking-de-ciudades-mas-violentas-del-mundo-informe
  14. In 2019, the typical American home used 30 kWh of electricity per day.
    https://blog.constellation.com/2021/02/25/average-home-power-usage/
  15. Residential backup batteries typically wear out after 10 – 15 years.
    https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/09/23/how-long-do-residential-storage-batteries-last/
  16. Between 2010 and 2019, lithium-ion battery pack prices dropped 87%.
    https://www.dropbox.com/s/l6qr9x1zhvc4yq7/Naam%20Clean%20Energy%20Revolution%20-%20Chinese%20Edition%20-%20Shareable%20-%20Jan%202022.pdf?dl=0
  17. Doctor-assisted suicide is legal in 10 states and Washington, DC.
    https://euthanasia.procon.org/states-with-legal-physician-assisted-suicide/