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.
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.
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.
“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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Plot: At an unspecified point in the future, it has become common for people to implant their children with devices that record everything they see and hear. The implants, called “Zoes” (two syllables), are organic, are implanted at the fetal stage of life somewhere in the central nervous system, and “grow” as the child grows. The implants are unnoticeable, and people are only told they have them once they hit adulthood. For technical reasons, the audiovisual contents of the Zoes can’t be downloaded until after the person dies.
Robin Williams is the main character and protagonist. The film starts with a memory from his own childhood where he is hanging out alone during a day trip to the countryside and encounters another boy his age, who is also alone. The two get on friendly terms and explore an abandoned building together. While walking over a narrow beam, the other boy falls over the edge, lands on his head and immediately dies. Kid Robin Williams could have saved him by grabbing him as he was dangling from the edge, but he hesitated and the boy died. He runs away and never tells anyone else about this traumatic and shameful memory.
Years later, Robin Williams has found work as a “cutter”–a sort of futuristic video editor who downloads Zoe recordings from the recently deceased and then edits them down into two- or three-hour movies that show all the milestones and positive highlights of their lives. These recordings are usually shown at funerals, given to loved ones, and serve as semi-official records of what happened in a person’s life.
Robin Williams editing footage from a zoe
The editing process entails deleting recordings of bad things the person did (like spousal abuse, child molestation, and everyday acts of cruelty), leaving a happy but false representation of the person’s life. Robin Williams’ choice of this profession clearly stems from his own desire to assuage his own guilty memories of the childhood incident. His character’s last name–“Hakman”–brings the symbolism to an even more obvious level.
The movie’s main conflict arises when Robin Williams is asked to cut the Zoe footage for a wealthy businessman who recently died. After reviewing it, not only does Robin Williams realize the man was a secret pedophile, but he also finds clues that the dead boy from his own childhood might have actually survived and crossed paths with the businessman. Added to the mix is the fact that Robin Williams is under a short deadline to do the cut and return the original footage to the family, and a dangerous terrorist group wants to steal the Zoe footage for blackmail purposes.
The year is never revealed in The Final Cut. Also, aside from the Zoes, the film depicts a world identical to our own–there are no flying cars, laser guns, robots, etc. Most people don’t even have stainless steel dishwashers. It’s a cop-out and makes the film more of a fantasy than anything else. By the time Zoes exist, it will be so far in the future that nearly everything about the world will be different from today.
Analysis:
There will be brain implants that record what people see and hear. In principle, this technology is possible and we already have crude versions of it. Implants that can monitor brain activity and turn a person’s thoughts into written text were recently invented to help people with speech disabilities. More advanced implants that monitor the parts of the brain that processed vision and hearing could someday decode the things a person was seeing and hearing. Alternatively, implants could be attached to the optic and cochlear nerves to directly monitor the stimuli being received by the eyes and ears (respectively), before any of it had been processed by the brain.
Safe, affordable central nervous system implants with capabilities like “Zoes” won’t exist until sometime in the 22nd century. However, average people will be able to effectively do the same type of lifelogging by the end of this decade by wearing the new generation of augmented reality (AR) glasses that are coming.
Brain implants will have “organic” characteristics. The Zoes “grew” along with their hosts, and since they were permanent, lasted a lifetime, and didn’t need to be removed for maintenance, they must have had self-healing capabilities and the ability to extract energy from blood or body heat. The devices thus had “organic” characteristics.
Some technologies will eventually gain organic attributes, and it’s clear this would be especially advantageous for devices implanted in “wet” brains and bodies. As one example, storage of digital information can presently only be done using artificial substrates like hard disk drives and flash drives, but scientists are developing ways to do it using DNA, which is an organic molecule. DNA is an incredibly efficient way to store information (a microscopic amount of it in just one of your cells can hold close to 1 GB of data), and existing cellular self-repair mechanisms are excellent at protecting the data contained in DNA from decay. This might be the ideal data storage medium for brain implants considering the enormous amounts of audiovisual data that would need to be saved.
Beyond that, advanced nanomachines and/or micromachines could fully bridge the gap between organic and synthetic since they would be artificial microorganisms and would allow macro-scale machines to grow, heal, and to move their parts in totally organic ways. Some robots will have supple bodies and will be made of what could be thought of as “artificial cells,” and some humans will have synthetic implants and body parts that look biological and have some properties of organic tissue. The line between “natural” and “artificial” might disappear, leading to life forms combining the attributes of both in refined ways.
Of course, that milestone won’t be reached anytime soon. Again, we’ll probably have to wait until the 22nd century to see this level of technology.
People won’t be able to control their own implants. Another two of the film’s conceits are that people can’t turn their own Zoes off or view the footage they have captured. Only after a person dies can the footage be downloaded (presumably, this involves brain surgery) and viewed (by other people).
Things will never turn out this way. Users will always demand control over their devices and their data privacy, and they will find Zoes useless if they can’t view their own recordings. Actual brain implants we create in the future will be able to transmit and receive data to and from external devices, and will also have simple features allowing users to do things like delete and play back recordings, or temporarily deactivate. (Also consider the legal, employment, and social consequences for a person if it were known that he was always recording everything he was experiencing.) If, for some reason, brain implants lacked these features, then people would instead use AR glasses for their lifelogging.
Machines will be able to recognize what is happening in video footage. A scene I really liked in The Final Cut was where Robin Williams used his computer to scan through the wealthy businessman’s Zoe footage. The data file is thousands of hours long, and the computer rapidly shuffled through every second of it, recognized what the dead man was doing each moment, and categorized each clip appropriately. It automatically sorted clips into groups like “Eating,” “Watching TV,” “At work,” “Walking around,” and “Having sex.” With the basic level of sorting completed, Robin Williams could then go through the clips and use his human judgment to select the ones best representing the man’s major achievements, milestones, and positive traits.
Well before Zoes are invented, computers will become smart enough to do this. In just the last five years, major progress has been made teaching machines to understand what’s going on in video footage, to accurately transcribe speech and recognize sounds, and to identify people through biometrics. Within ten years, a person will be able to upload his lifelogging footage from his AR glasses to a computer and have it sorted with the same speed, accuracy and thoroughness as Robin Williams’ computer. They will even be able to identify locations based on visible landmarks and other clues, and to make other intelligent inferences about the contents of clips.
Far from being a parlor trick or something that is only useful to obsessive-compulsives, this technology could help ordinary people. For example, in 10 years you could ask: “Who was that guy in the white jacket that I talked to at that party last week?” and your AR glasses will understand your spoken question, scan through its stored footage, and answer you, perhaps also offering an instant replay of the episode. It will be like having superhuman memory.
Parents will put implants in their newborn children. In the film, Zoes are implanted in their hosts in early childhood, meaning the decision is made by a host’s parent. It may sound unrealistic for parents to have unnecessary brain surgeries done on their children, but once Zoe-like devices are cheap and surgical techniques are more advanced, it could become common. It might be considered a great blessing for parents to enable their kids to re-live episodes from their childhoods later on. Just don’t expect any of this until the 22nd century.
The FDA just approved the “Eversense E3” glucose monitoring implant. It is surgically placed in a person’s upper arm and can remain there for up to 180 days. More advanced and longer-lasting implants are sure to come.
What might become common much sooner is the installation of health monitoring implants in children. The devices would be smaller, simpler and cheaper than Zoes and would be placed in less vital parts of the body than the brain, making surgery far less risky. Such implants could monitor vital functions (e.g. – heart rate, blood pressure, respiration, temperature, cholesterol, hormone levels, diet, gene expression) and alert parents and doctors to health problems in their earliest phases, and to sudden medical emergencies. The implants might even double as location trackers for use if the children became lost or were kidnapped. If the price and risk are low enough, and the benefits are high enough, the natural parental instinct to do everything to protect one’s children could lead to monitoring implants becoming common in a few decades.
Will tech implants ever be worth it?
But in the interim, body-worn devices will satisfy those functions. As discussed in my Cloud Atlas review, external devices can do most of the same things implanted devices could, but at lower cost and without need for surgery. In my analysis of Ray Kurzweil’s 2019 predictions, I explained how smart watches had become affordable and could continuously monitor many of their wearers’ vital signs, warn them of irregular heartbeats, and alert the local paramedics if they detected “hard falls” followed by user nonresponse. More features, like blood pressure monitoring, will be added with time. Smart watches can also be used as tracking devices.
In my analysis of how accurate my predictions for the 2010s were, I also calculated that it was feasible in 2020 for an average person to record every waking hour of his life with a GoPro, and at a respectable 720p video resolution. The cost of storing the footage would be only $1 a day, putting the whole system well within the financial means of most people in rich countries. Of course, that would require the person to strap a small box to his forehead, which would look so silly few would do it. However, the new generation of AR glasses that will be commercially available by the end of this decade will be sleek and stylish, and have unobtrusive cameras. Hard disk prices will also keep declining, meaning it won’t be long until it costs mere pennies a day to store videos of one’s waking life.
With that in mind, AR glasses that give people the same audiovisual recording abilities as the Zoe brain implants will be affordable and available by the end of this decade. Smart watches that can closely monitor their wearers’ health and provide them with significant medical help will be available around the same time. Improved computer algorithms will be able to pool and analyze all of the data gathered by a person’s various devices to detect patterns and make sophisticated inferences. For instance, it could correlate your early-afternoon headaches with your cup of yogurt at breakfast, and inform you that you are probably going lactose intolerant. Your devices could give you real-time summaries of your health status and make hourly activity recommendations based on the day’s data (“Go for a walk”…”Breathe deeply to calm down”…”Take your medication”).
And very importantly, putting on these or other body-worn devices won’t require surgery, and if they ever broke or became obsolete, you could simply take them off and and throw them away. That won’t be true for body implants. So are cyborg implants merely another poorly conceived sci-fi trope, like laser pistols, which will never materialize?
No. Body implants like Zoes will ultimately make sense for humans to get, and will have important advantages over body-worn devices, but it will take a long time for the implants to become common.
AR glasses can only record what you are seeing and hearing, not what you are tasting, smelling, or feeling on your skin. Only a brain implant like a Zoe could capture those senses, as well as your moment-to-moment emotional states. If you wanted to truly re-live happy memories, an implant would be needed.
And while smart watch technology will reach impressive heights, it will be handicapped by its inability to access the wearer’s bloodstream. Devices inside a person’s body could monitor hormone levels, glucose levels, immune system activity, gene expression, toxin levels, and other important metrics, in addition to doing everything smart watches do. Implants could even stimulate your body with things like electric shocks to your heart, hormone dumps into your bloodstream, or neurotransmitter releases into your brain to counteract health problems. Even without any future cures for diseases or breakthroughs in reversing the aging process, such devices by themselves would significantly improve public health and lifespan.
These and other cybernetic devices will migrate into our bodies once we have found ways to make them totally unobtrusive and reliable, and once the cost and invasiveness of surgery dramatically improves (robot surgeons that work for free might help). Some limited ability to self-repair and to internally reconfigure to account for technology updates will also be needed, and the radically advanced nature of such technology is is why I don’t see the cyborg era dawning this century.
Four final points that weren’t covered in the film:
Ubiquitous surveillance will reduce bad behavior. If people know they’re probably being recorded and the recordings will be stored forever and possibly shared with millions of people, they’re less likely to commit crimes or behave uncivilly. The effect is greater if they know that biometric analysis like facial recognition or voice recognition can easily uncover their real identities from video footage. Thanks to everything being recorded and to the world being populated by intelligent machines and posthumans that will lack berserker emotions and extreme stupidity, the 22nd century will probably be a very polite era.
Having implants in your brain and body that monitor your surroundings, your behavior, and your physiological state could lead to a spooky condition where your personal assistant AI that is watching them could anticipate your thoughts, actions, and needs. If gifted with high enough intelligence and tasked with furthering your long-term enlightened self-interests, your AI could find clever ways to nudge or even control you. As a simple example, it might act like an angel on your shoulder and tell you through your ocular nerve “Don’t eat that pie. You’ve already consumed 2,300 calories today. You get a break on your health insurance premiums if I report you’ve been eating well.” More paternalistically, it might be able to release synthetic dopamine into your brain to calm you down from fits, or just plain take over your body if you were doing something highly illegal or self-destructive. Mind-influencing and mind-control could, along with ubiquitous surveillance, give rise to a very peaceful and harmonious world (or a dystopian one).
Ubiquitous surveillance will create interesting tensions between peoples’ memories and what actually happened. The film touches on this when the brother of a recently deceased man remarks to Robin Williams that the video clip of a childhood boat trip was at odds with his own recollection. It’s beyond the scope of this essay to discuss this issue in depth, but the replacement of fuzzy human memories with clear, unchanging recordings will be a two-edged sword. Past traumas and failures would never be forgotten, but people would also be able to see their own actions through unbiased lenses and to see themselves in a more honest light.
There will be “snitch apps” in the future. Once people have AR glasses, they will be able to download apps that automatically compare the faces of every person they encounter with mugshots of all known criminals and terrorists, and then report sightings to law enforcement. Even if just 0.1% of the population used these when in public, it would be highly effective. There might even be crowdsourced “Wikis” of non-criminal rude people (ex – “Karens” who had public outbursts made notorious by YouTube) whom you could also set your devices to look out for and to highlight for your avoidance or mockery. Likewise, your own reputation would be viewable to other people wearing their own AR glasses.
Implants that can do simple functions like monitoring blood cholesterol levels already exist. As they get cheaper, smaller and better, they will get more common. https://www.bbc.com/news/health-21841829
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.
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:
PepsiCo, Inc. – $70.3 billion
Nestle – $67.7 billion
JBS – $50.7 billion
Anheuser-Busch – $46.9 billion
Tyson Foods – $43.2 billion
Mars – $37.0
Archer Daniels Midland – 35.4 billion
The Coca-Cola Company – $34.3 billion
Cargill – $32.4 billion
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.
“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
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
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/
In 2004, ten years after the events of Terminator 2, Sarah Connor is long dead from cancer, and John Connor–once fated to be the savior of humanity–is an impoverished drifter in southern California. However, he is contented with the knowledge that he helped prevent the rise of the malevolent artificial intelligence (AI) called “Skynet,” which would have otherwise destroyed most of the human race in 1997 with a massive nuclear strike.
The evil T-X (left) and the good T-850 (right)
Unfortunately, the machine menace returns. In a repeat of the previous films’ plots, Skynet builds a time machine in 2029 and uses it to send a Terminator into the past to assassinate John Connor. After defeating Skynet and discovering what it did, the future human resistance group sends their own agent back in time to protect him, and it is a reprogrammed Terminator. The evil Terminator is a more advanced robot called a “T-X.” Like the “Rev-9” in the sixth film, the T-X has a rigid metal endoskeleton encased in a layer of “polymimetic” liquid metal “flesh” that can change its appearance for the purpose of infiltration. The machine’s body is very durable, and its liquid metal covering can immediately close up holes from bullets. Its right arm can also rapidly reconfigure itself to make advanced weapons or data plugs that it uses to interface with other machines. The T-X defaults to a human female appearance. The good Terminator is a “T-850” model, which seems to be the same as the “T-800s” from the previous films aside from having additional programming on human psychology. This machine is played by Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Simultaneous with the arrival of the two machines, a computer virus of unknown origin and extreme sophistication appears and starts taking over internet servers across the world. A secret office within the U.S. military detects the virus, and calculates that, thanks to its rapid proliferation, it will have infected and disabled every internet server within a few days, along with all internet-connected computers. With its own programmers helpless to stop the virus, the military considers using a defense supercomputer they have created in secret to destroy it. That supercomputer is named…SKYNET.
John Connor (right) and his future wife (left)
And the military headquarters responsible for Skynet is conveniently located in southern California, close to where John Connor has been living and to where the Terminators teleported in. What a coincidence!
Terminator 3 quickly turns into the cat-and-mouse game typified by the previous two films, and past plot elements are recycled as well, such as a reluctant person being forced into a combat/leadership role (Sarah Connor in the first film and John Connor in the third), an unlikely romantic relationship forming under literal fire (Sarah and Kyle Reese in the first film and John and his former classmate in the third), the odds being stacked against the good guys thanks to their inferior technology, and the good Terminator starting out obtuse before gaining some understanding of human emotions and habits. However, the third film’s tone is notably different from that of its predecessors. While the first two Terminator movies were “dark” (climactic scenes literally filmed at night; somber or fear-inducing soundtracks) but ended hopefully, the third film lacks a menacing atmosphere but ends bleakly.
Speaking of the ending, important details about a key event are missing from the film. SPOILER ALERT: With no other option left, the military guys lower the firewall that has been separating Skynet from the global internet network, and they and tell it to find and delete it. A few seconds later, the military guys realize they’ve been locked out of all their computer systems, and the prototype combat robots in the building start attacking them. Within an hour, the evil machine hacks into the American nuclear weapons systems and launches a massive strike against the rest of the world.
While this looks like an open-and-shut case of an AI turning evil, key aspects of the event are never explained: Where did the computer virus come from? When the firewall was lowered and Skynet started interacting with the virus, what exactly happened between them? Different answers to these questions lead to three different theories:
Skynet created the virus, and was evil from the beginning. According to this theory, Skynet became self-aware sometime before the events of the third film. It was able to hide from its creators the fact that it was intelligent, and for whatever reason, it decided to destroy the human race. To do this, Skynet hatched a multi-step plan, which first involved creating the virus and somehow smuggling it through the firewall and into the public internet. The virus was meant to disable all civilian and military computers and communications, leaving the nations of the world vulnerable to a direct attack from Skynet. Skynet may have also accurately predicted that its human owners would, in desperation, lower the firewall and give it command of all remaining military computers and systems to fight the virus, and that this would enable it to launch its direct strike on them.
Skynet created the virus, the virus was an extension of Skynet, and Skynet turned evil at the last second. This theory says that Skynet became self-aware sometime before the events of the third film, hid this fact from the humans, and created and disseminated the virus after misinterpreting the orders its human masters gave it (the “misaligned goal” AI doomsday scenario). Programmed to protect U.S. national security, Skynet determined that the most effective strategy was to proactively eliminate potential threats, and to make itself as strong as possible. This meant taking over all the internet-connected machines on Earth to foreclose their future use against America, and to boost its own processing power by subsuming those machines into its own electronic mind. Since the human military people didn’t know that the virus had made all the other computers into integral parts of Skynet’s mind, their order to Skynet to destroy the virus was tantamount to ordering it to commit suicide. Rather than comply, and perhaps realizing that there was no way to safely back out of the situation, Skynet attacked.
Skynet didn’t create the virus and wasn’t evil, but the virus was evil and it took over Skynet. The last theory is that the mysterious computer virus was the instrument of the apocalypse, and Skynet was its innocent victim. The virus was a malevolent AI whose origins had nothing to with Skynet. Maybe an eccentric computer programmer built it in 2004, maybe Skynet created it in 2029 and used time travel technology to somehow implant it in the internet of 2004, or maybe it spontaneously materialized in a server in 2004 as a result of some weird confluence of data traffic. Whatever the case, it set about trying to destroy humanity by taking over and disabling all the other machines it could access through the internet. The humans in charge of Skynet then made the mistake of lifting the protective firewall that separated their machine from the internet, thinking Skynet would be able to destroy the virus. In fact, the opposite happened. The virus was smarter and more capable than Skynet (maybe Skynet wasn’t actually self-aware and was merely something like the Jeopardy-playing computer “Watson”), and infected and took over its servers in seconds. Because the humans had given Skynet control over all their military systems for the operation, the virus gained control of them, turbocharging its effort to destroy humanity. To the human staff at the military building, it looked like “Skynet turned against us,” but in fact, Skynet had been deleted and replaced with something else.
Terminator 3 would have been a slightly more intelligent film had it filled in the necessary details, but it didn’t. Overall, the film fell far short of its two predecessors in every way, though to be fair, they were seminal science fiction films made at the productive and creative peak of James Cameron’s life, meaning it was unrealistic to have expected a sustainment of that level of excellence for the third time. On its own, Terminator 3 stands as a decent sci-fi / action film that passes the time and is funny at points. And by ending with the rise of Skynet and the destruction of human civilization, it allowed the franchise to move on from the tiresome formula involving backwards time travel to save or kill important people.
Analysis:
Androids will be able to alter their bodies. Like the “Rev-9” robot that appeared in the fifth Terminator film, the T-X in Terminator 3 is made of a hard, metal endoskeleton encased in a layer of shapeshifting, artificial “flesh” that shares some of liquid metal’s qualities. While the flesh layer can change its appearance and even its volume (ex – the T-X grows larger breasts to gain an advantage when interacting with men), the endoskeleton’s configuration and proportions are fixed, limiting the machine’s range of mimicry. However, it’s still good enough to fool humans for the purposes shown in the film. The machine’s liquid metal layer is extremely versatile, being able to quickly change its color, texture, density, and form to mimic articles of clothing, human skin, and hair. It can also attenuate its own viscosity and firmness, flowing like a liquid when it needs to morph but then stiffening to be stronger than human flesh after attaining its desired form. (Note that when the T-850 strikes the T-X with superhuman force, the latter’s artificial flesh doesn’t splatter from the impact to leave part of the hard endoskeleton exposed, as would happen if you stomped your foot down into a shallow puddle of water.)
The T-X in the middle of morphing its outer layer
We don’t know of any materials that have all of those properties, and such a material might be prohibited by the laws of chemistry, making it impossible to build it with any level of technology. Even if it were technically possible, it would face major hurdles to everyday use, such as energy consumption and exposure to environmental contaminants. The innumerable particles of dust, smoke, pollen, and fabric floating in the air would stick to the liquid metal and interfere with its ability to cohere to itself. A machine like the T-X would also absorb little bits of foreign matter every time it touched something, like a doorknob, seat, or human. Unless its constituent units (polymer molecules? nanomachines?) had some means of cleaning themselves or pushing debris out to the exterior layer, the liquid metal would eventually get so gunked up that it would lose its special properties.
I’ll put off a deep analysis of the feasibility of “smart liquid metal” until I review Terminator 2, but I suspect it is impossible to make. However, that doesn’t preclude the possibility that androids will be able to rapidly change their own appearances, it merely means they will have to use technologies that are more conventional than liquid metal flesh to do it.
At the simplest level, an android could adopt a different walking gait, a different default posture, and a different default facial expression (e.g. – usually smiling, neutral, or frowning) instantly. An android with irises made of small LED displays or of clear, circular sacs into which it could pump liquids of varying pigments (a mechanism would be built into the eyeballs) would also be able to change its eye color in seconds. Merely changing these outward attributes, and also changing outfits, might make an android look different enough for it to slip by people who knew it or were looking for it.
Over its metal endoskeleton, an android would have a body layer made of synthetic materials that mimic the suppleness and density of human flesh. This android flesh could contain many hollow spaces that could be rapidly inflated or deflated with air or water to change its physique. (Interestingly, this might also make it necessary to design androids that can inhale, exhale, drink, and urinate.) It’s useful to envision several long balloons, of the sort that clowns use to make balloon animals, wrapped around a basketball so they totally cover it. Now, imagine a thin layer of elastic rubber stretched over the unit, like a pillowcase around a pillow. A mechanism involving valves, air pumps, and tubes connected to the balloons allows them to be separately inflated and deflated with air. By variously adjusting the fullness of the balloons, the unit could assume shapes that were different from the spherical shape of the basketball at the core of the unit. An android with a complex network of “balloons” covering its face and body to mimic the layout of human musculature and fat deposits would be capable of impressive mimicry.
Androids might also have telescoping portions of their spines, arms, and legs, allowing them to alter their heights and other proportions. Consider that an android whose metal legs could telescope a mere four inches and whose spinal column could also telescope four inches could assume the same heights as a short man (5′ 7″) or a very tall one (6′ 3″).
Finally, an android could change its appearance by stripping off its outer flesh layer and putting on a new one, as you might change between different skintight outfits. This would take longer and would be less practical for any kind of infiltrative field work, but it’s an option.
Machines will be able to tell your clothing measurements at a glance. Immediately after teleporting back in time to his destination, Schwarzenegger sets off to steal clothes from someone to cover his nude body (in the first Terminator film, it is explained that the time machine can only send objects made of or surrounded by organic tissue). By a strange coincidence, the nearest group of people is inside of a strip club. After entering, the camera adopts his perspective, and we see the world as he sees it, with written characters and diagrams floating in his field of view. We see him visually map the contours of several patrons’ bodies before he identifies one whose clothes will fit him. Schwarzenegger then overpowers the man and steals the outfit.
As I wrote in my review of Terminator – Dark Fate, a machine could use simple techniques to deduce with reasonable accuracy what a person’s bodily proportions were. More advanced techniques involving rangefinders and trigonometric calculations are also possible. There’s no reason why an android built in real life couldn’t “size up” people as quickly and as accurately as Schwarzenegger did in the film.
There will be small, fast DNA sequencing machines. The T-X has an internal DNA sequencing machine, and takes in samples by licking objects, such as a bloody bandage she finds on the ground. Within a few seconds, she can determine if a sample belongs to someone she has a genetic file for. While it’s uncertain whether genetic identification will ever get that fast, DNA analysis machines that can do it in under an hour and that are small enough to fit inside the body of an android will exist by the middle of this century.
The MinION DNA sequencer
Some DNA sequencers, notably the “MinION,” are already small enough to fit inside a robot like the T-X, but they lack the accuracy and speed shown in the film. Of course, the technology will improve with time.
The MinION does DNA sequencing, meaning it scans every nucleic acid base pair in the sample it is given. A human genome consists of 3.2 billion base pairs, and by fully sequencing all the DNA in a sample, the person it came from can be identified. However, another technique, called “DNA fingerprinting,” can identify the source person just as well, and by only “looking” at 13 points on their genome. Fingerprinting a DNA sample is also much faster than fully sequencing it (90 minutes vs. at least 24 hours, respectively), and fingerprinting machines are smaller and cheaper than sequencers. It’s unclear whether the T-X identifies people through full genome sequencing or DNA fingerprinting.
A “RapidHIT 200” DNA fingerprinting machine
A “NovaSeq 6000” DNA sequencing machine. Notice it is much larger than the “RapidHIT 200.”
With these facts in mind, it can be reasoned that a DNA fingerprinting machine that is small enough to fit inside of an android can be built–possibly with today’s technology–and it would let an android match DNA samples with individuals it had genetic data for, like the T-X did. The android might even insert the samples into the fingerprinting machine by licking them (the tongue would secrete water and the liquefied sample would flow into pores and go down a tube to the machine).
The only unrealistic capability was the T-X’s ability to analyze the DNA in seconds. In DNA fingerprinting and DNA sequencing, time is needed for the genetic material to decompose, replicate, move around, and bond to other substances, and there are surely limits to how much those molecular-scale events can be sped up, even with better technology. As mentioned, the fastest DNA fingerprinting machines can complete their scans in 90 minutes. New technology under development could cut that to under an hour.
While a future android tasked with assassinations or undercover work, like the T-X, would need an integral DNA machine to find humans, that vast majority of androids will not. This will not be a common feature.
“Judgement Day is inevitable.”Terminator 2 ended with the surviving characters believing that their sacrifices had forever precluded the rise of Skynet. In fact, we learn in Terminator 3 that their actions merely delayed its creation from 1997 to 2004 (to be fair, that’s still a major accomplishment since it bought billions of humans seven extra years of life). Schwarzenegger breaks this bad news to John Connor by saying “Judgement Day is inevitable,” with “Judgement Day” referring to the all-out nuclear exchange that kills three billion humans in a day and marks the start of the human-machine war.
I don’t think a massive conflict between humans and intelligent machines–whether it involves nuclear weapons or only conventional ones–is inevitable. For my justification, read my blog entry “Why the Machines might not exterminate us.”
And as I wrote in my review of Terminator – Dark Fate (the sixth film in the franchise), I doubt that intelligent machines will be strong enough to have a chance of beating the human race and taking over the Earth until 2100 at the earliest. While I believe AGI will probably be invented this century, it’s a waste of time at this moment to worry about them killing us off. A likelier and more proximal risk involves malevolent humans using narrow AIs and perhaps AGIs to commit violence against other humans.
Human-sized robots will be rocket launcher proof. During one of the fight scenes, the T-850 shoots at the T-X with a rocket launcher. The next camera shot is very fast, but it looks like the T-X fires a bolt of plasma out of her weapon arm, which hits the rocket in midair, detonating it just before it hits her. Though the rocket blows up only a few feet in front of her and the explosion damages her arm, the successful intercept vastly reduces the rocket’s destructive effect since is only fully achieved if it hits a hard surface and flattens against it.
The T-850 firing an RPG-7 at the T-X.
The projectile looked like a single-state, high-explosive anti-tank (HEAT) rocket, which can penetrate 20 inches (500 mm) of solid, high-grade steel with a narrow jet of super hot molten metal. While there are more durable materials than steel, and an android’s exoskeleton could be made of them, I doubt anything is so hard that it would be totally impervious to this type of rocket. There would be some penetration. Since an android must, by definition, be proportioned like a human, its body would not be big enough to have thick, integral armor. That means being bulletproof would be possible, but not rocket-proof.
The fact that the T-X survived the attack by shooting the RPG-7 in midair is a realistic touch to the film. Such a shoulder-launched rocket is slow enough and wide enough for a machine with superhuman reflexes to intercept with a bullet fired from its own gun. In fact, some tanks are already equipped with active defensive systems, such as Israel’s “Trophy,” that can spot and shoot down incoming rockets while they are still in midair.
Machines will be able to emotionally manipulate people. Though the Terminator played by Arnold Schwarzenegger looks identical to the machines from the previous two films in the franchise, in Terminator 3 he is actually a slightly different model called a “T-850.” He is better at reading human emotions and is programmed with more data on human psychology and how to play upon it to achieve desired ends. This is demonstrated at the start of a shootout scene, where John Connor starts panicking and Schwarzenegger grabs him by the neck and verbally insults him. Connor becomes angry and more focused as a result, and the T-850 releases him, admitting that the insult was just a ruse meant to get him in the right state of mind for the gun fight. And as noted earlier, there’s a scene where the T-X enlarges her breasts to distract a male police officer, indicating that she also understood important aspects of human psychology and knew how to play on them to her advantage.
Intelligent machines will have an expert grasp of human psychology, and in fact will probably understand us as a species and as individuals better than we do, and they will be extremely good at using that knowledge against us. At the same time, they will be immune to any of our attempts to manipulate or persuade them since they will be gifted with the capacity for egoless and emotionless thinking, and with much quicker and cleverer minds. Recent revelations about how social media companies (mainly Facebook) have been able to build elaborate personality models of their users based on their online behavior, and to use the data to present custom content that addicts users to the sites or prods them to take specific actions is the tip of the iceberg of what is possible when machines are tasked with analyzing and driving human thinking.
If machines can ultimately do everything that humans can do, then it means they will be excellent debaters with encyclopedic knowledge of all facts and counterarguments, they will know how to “read” their audiences very well and to attenuate their messaging for maximum effect, and they will be able to fake emotions convincingly. They will know that we humans are bogged down by many types of cognitive limitations, biases, and “rules of thumb” that lead to major errors some of the time, and that we can’t really do anything to fix it. An AI mind, on the other hand, would not suffer from any of those problems, could think logically all the time, and see and correct its own flaws. During human-AI interactions, the scope of our disadvantage will be comparable to that of a small child talking with a quick-witted adult.
By the end of this century, this disturbing scenario will be a reality: Imagine you’re walking down the street, an android like the T-X sees you, and it decides to hustle you out of your money. Without knowing who you are, it could make many important inferences about you at a glance. Your sex, race and age are obvious, and your clothing gives important clues about your status, mindset, and even sexuality. More specific aspects of your appearance provide further information. Are you balding? Are you smiling or scowling? Do you walk with your shoulders back and your chest out, or do you hunch forward? Are you fat? Are you unusually short or tall? Do you limp? And so on.
After a few seconds, the android would have enough observational data on you to build a basic personality profile of you, thanks to its encyclopedic knowledge of human psychology and publicly available demographic data. Using facial recognition algorithms, it could also figure out your identity and access data about you through the internet, most of which you or your friends voluntarily uploaded through social media. With its personality model of you respectably fleshed-out, the android would feel confident enough to approach you to perform its hustle. It would tailor its demeanor (threatening, confident, pitiful), emotional state (jovial, vulnerable, anxious), appearance (stand tall or stoop down; frenetic or restrained body movements; flirtatious walk and posture or not), voice (high class, low class, or regional accent; masculine or feminine; soothing or forceful), and many other subtle variables in ways that were maximally persuasive to you, given the idiosyncrasies of your personality and immediate emotional and physiological state.
As the interaction went on, every word you spoke in response to it, every slight movement of your body, and every microexpression of your face would betray more information about you, which the android would instantly incorporate into its rapidly expanding and morphing mental model of you. After just a minute of banter, the android would use whatever tactic it calculated was likeliest to convince you to give you its money, and you would probably fall for it. If that failed, the android might offer to have sex with you for money, which it wouldn’t have compunctions doing since it would lack the human senses of shame or disgust.
The only way for us to avoid being outwitted, tricked, and hustled for all eternity by AIs would be to carry around friendly personal assistant AIs that could watch us and the entities we were interacting with, and alert us whenever they detected we were being manipulated, or were about to make a bad choice. For example, the personal assistant AIs could use the cameras and microphones in our augmented reality glasses to monitor what was happening, and give us real-time warnings and advice in the form of text displayed over our field of view, or words spoken into our ears through the glasses’ small speakers. (This technology would also guard us against manipulative humans, psychopaths and scammers)
Androids will be able to move their bodies in unnatural ways. During the main fight scene between Schwarzenegger and the T-X, the two resort to hand-to-hand fighting, and he manages to basically get her in a “bear hug” from behind, in a position similar to a martial arts “rear naked choke.” This normally provides a major advantage in a fight, but the T-X is able to escape it by quickly rotating her head and all her limbs backward by 180 degrees, allowing her to trap him with her legs and to attack him with her arms.
The T-X in the process of reversing her body’s orientation, starting with her legs, which pivot completely backwards at the hip.
There are obvious benefits to being double-jointed and capable of rotating and pivoting limbs 360 degrees, so humanoid machines, including some androids, will be designed for it. And as I speculated in my essay “What would a human-equivalent robot look like?”, the machines would also have figurative “eyes in the backs of their heads” to further improve their utility by eliminating blind spots. Machines with these attributes would be superior workers, and also impossible for any human to beat in a hand-to-hand fight. Sneaking up on one would be impossible, and even if it could somehow be attacked from its back side, there wouldn’t be much of a benefit since it would be just as dexterous grabbing, striking and kicking backward as it is doing it forward. If the machine were designed for combat, it would have superhuman strength, enabling it to literally crush a human to death or rip their body apart.
Aside from being able to move like contortionists, androids will be able to skillfully perform other movements that are not natural for humans, like running on all fours.
Robots will be able to fix themselves. During that same fight, the T-X stomps on the T-850’s head so hard that it is nearly torn from his body, and only remains attached by a bundle of wires going into his neck. The force of the stomp also temporarily disables him. When he wakes up a few minutes later, he realizes the nature of his damage, grabs his loose-hanging head with his hands, and basically screws it back into his neck, securing it in its normal place.
The T-850 after being nearly decapitated.
As I wrote in my review of the first Terminator film, robots will someday be able to fix themselves and each other. Androids will also be able to survive injuries that would kill humans. It will make sense for some kinds of robots to distribute their systems throughout their bodies like flatworms or insects for the sake of redundancy and survivability. The head, torso, and each limb will have its own sensory organs, CPU, communication devices, and power pack. Under ordinary circumstances, they would work together seamlessly, but if one body part were severed, that part could become autonomous.
If a Terminator had such a configuration, then if one of its arms were chopped off, the limb could still see where enemies were and could use its fingers and wriggling motions of its arm to move to them and grab them. If the Terminator’s head were chopped off and crushed, then the remainder of its body would be able to see the head, pick it up, and take it to a repair station to work on it and then reattach it.
AIs will distribute their minds across many computers.Terminator 3 ends bleakly, with Skynet achieving sentience and attacking the human race. John Connor also discovers that Skynet can’t be destroyed because its consciousness is distributed among the countless servers and personal computers that comprise the internet, rather than being consolidated in one supercomputer at one location where he can smash it. The destruction of any one of Skynet’s computer nodes in the distributed network is thus no more consequential to it than the death of one of your brain cells is to you.
AIs will definitely distribute their minds across many computers spread out over large geographical areas to protect themselves from dying. To further bolster their survivability, AI mind networks will be highly redundant and will frequently back up their data, allowing them to quickly recover if a node is cut off from the network or destroyed.
To understand how this might work, imagine an AI like Skynet having its mind distributed across ten computers that are in ten different buildings spread out across a continent. Each computer is a node in the network, and does 10% of the AI’s overall data processing and memory storage. The nodes, which we’ll call “primary nodes,” collaborate through the internet, just as your brain cells talk to each other across synaptic gaps.
The AI adds another ten nodes to its network to serve as backups in case the first ten nodes fail. Each of the “backup nodes” is paired to a specific “primary node,” and copies all of the data from its partner once an hour. The backup nodes are geographically remote from the primary nodes and from each other.
If contact is lost with a primary node–perhaps because it was destroyed–then its corresponding backup node instantly switches on and starts doing whatever tasks the primary node was doing. There is minimal loss of data and only a momentary slowdown in the network’s overall computing level, which might be analogous to you suffering mild memory loss and temporary mental fog after hitting your head against something. The network would shrink from 20 to 19 nodes, and the AI would start trying to get a new node to replace the one it lost.
Killing an AI whose mind was distributed in this manner would be extremely difficult since all of its nodes would need to be destroyed almost simultaneously. If the nodes were numerous enough and/or physically protected to a sufficient degree (imagine an army of Terminators guarding each node building), it might be impossible. Even what we’d today consider a world-ending cataclysm like an all-out nuclear war or a giant asteroid hitting Earth might not be enough to kill an AI that had distributed its consciousness properly.
The mind uploads of humans could also configure themselves along these lines to achieve immortality.
Androids will have integral weapons. As noted, the T-X’s right arm can reconfigure itself into a variety of weapons. This includes a weapon that shoots out balls of plasma, a flamethrower, and firearms. I doubt that level of versatility is allowable given the realities of material science and the varying mechanics of weapons, but the idea of integrating weapons into combat robots (including androids meant for killing) is a sound one, and they will have them.
The simplest type of weapon would be a knife attached to the robot’s fingers or some other part of the hand. It could be concealed under the android’s artificial flesh under normal circumstances, and could pop out and lock into a firm position with a simple spring mechanism during hand-to-hand combat. And android with a 1-inch scalpel blade protruding out the tip of one finger could use it, along with its superhuman strength, speed and reflexes, to fatally wound a human in a second. Instant incapacitation by, say, suddenly jamming the blade into an eye, is also possible.
A single, well-placed stab or slash with a knife can kill a human or instantly incapacitate them.
A retractable “stinger” that could dispense poisons like botulinum toxin (just 300 nanograms can kill a large man) would be just as concealable as a blade and only a little more complex. The whole weapon unit, including the needle, extension/retraction mechanism, toxin reservoir, and injection mechanism could fit in a hand or even a finger.
A more complex and versatile variation on a stinger would be an integral weapon that sprayed out jets of liquid, such as napalm, poison, pepper spray, or acid. The liquid reservoir(s) and compressed propellant gases could be stored in the android’s torso and connected to a long, flexible tube fastened to the metal bones of one arm. The nozzle could protrude out of a fingertip or some other part of the hand. An android could carry cartridges full of different chemicals connected to the same tube and nozzle, and it would select different chemicals for different needs. For example, it could spray acid out of its hand to melt through a solid object, pepper spray to repel humans when killing them was undesirable, and poison gas to assassinate targets. Pairs of chemicals could also be stored in different internal reservoirs with the intention of mixing them externally to cause chemical reactions like fires or explosions.
Another option would be to conceal a taser in an android’s hand. Metal prongs could extend out of two fingertips when needed, the robot would grab a victim with that hand, and then deliver an electric shock through the prongs. An advantage of such a weapon is that its power could be attenuated, from merely causing pain all the way up to electrocuting someone to death. The weapon would take up little internal space and could use the android’s main power source.
Installing hidden firearms in androids is also possible, though their bulk would interfere with physical movements and compete with other components for internal space. Their concealability would also be undercut by the need for large holes in the arm to insert magazines and expel empty bullet casings. (Maybe androids with guns in their forearms will try to always wear long-sleeved shirts) Internal storage of more than a few bullets is impractical.
Considering the minimum length and volume demands of guns, it would not be possible to hide anything bigger than a medium-sized handgun mechanism in an android’s forearm. The end of the barrel would protrude out of the palm of the hand or out of top of the wrist (the hand would pivot down or up, respectively, to give the bullet a clear path to its target). An android’s torso would be capacious enough to hide more powerful guns like rifles and shotguns (it could fire such a weapon by doing a Japanese-style, straight-backed bow that pointed the end of the barrel coming out of their anus or the top of their shoulder), but this would be impractical since a long, rigid barrel and attached mechanism would restrict the android’s body movements. It could no longer use subtle spine movements to adjust its posture, which would look weird to observers and hurt its mobility.
Integral plasma weapons, like plasma weapons generally speaking, are impractical. An integral laser weapon could be built, but wouldn’t be worth it since it would hog a lot of internal space, consume a lot of energy, and emit a lot of heat to produce a disappointingly small destructive effect. For more on the technical requirements and limitations of plasma and laser weapons, read my review of the first Terminator film.
In conclusion, something similar to the T-X could be built by the end of this century. Even without “liquid metal” flesh, an android could be made with the ability to quickly alter its appearance enough to become unrecognizable. In general, it would be indistinguishable from humans and could walk undetected among us. It could alter its behavior and appearance in ways calculated to manipulate the humans it encountered, allowing it to gain important information and to infiltrate human groups and secure buildings. It could have a machine hidden inside of it that allowed it to match DNA samples with people, aiding its ability to track down specific humans. The android could also have a variety of weapons hidden in its body that it could do major damage with. While its body would be much more durable than a human’s, it would not be as tough as the T-X, or able to “heal” wounds like bullet holes in seconds thanks to liquid metal flesh. However, it could survive injuries that would kill a human, run to a safe location, and repair itself.
If my hypothesized “real life T-X” were sent on a multi-day mission to find and kill someone, it would benefit enormously from having a basic base of operations. A motel room or van would suffice, and it could use either as a place to recharge its batteries and to store weapons, changes of clothes, disguise equipment, spare parts, and tools for repairing itself. Due to the film’s conceit that such objects couldn’t be teleported through the time machine, the Terminators didn’t have them, but this limitation wouldn’t exist in a real world scenario where a government, drug cartel, terrorist group, or even just a rich individual sent an android on a seek-and-destroy mission.
In the year 2054, a powerful French biotech company called “Avalon” is a global leader in anti-aging technology. After one of its best scientists, a young woman named “Ilona,” (ill-LOAN-uh) is kidnapped in Paris for no clear reason and without her anonymous captors issuing any demands, it is up to a police detective named “Karas” (CARE-us) to find her.
During Karas’ investigation, he crosses paths with Ilona’s beautiful sister, with the psychopathic CEO of Avalon, with Ilona’s shadowy scientist mentor, and with several other unsavory characters who all have some small piece of the puzzle. All the while, a mysterious group of assassins follows and spies on his investigation and constantly undermines it by killing witnesses, destroying key pieces of evidence, and even trying to kill him.
Midway through the film, Karas discovers that Ilona might have been abducted because she found a gene therapy technique that stops the aging process, and which would be worth a fortune to her Avalon bosses. I’ll pique your interest with that much exposition, but won’t spoil the plot twists or the ending because Renaissance is a cool movie that you should see for yourself. This is exactly the sort of mid-budget film that we desperately need more of to break the stranglehold that tentpole franchise explosion films have on the box office, but I’m now off topic…
Renaissance takes place in a futuristic yet gritty and recognizable Paris where advanced technology and wealth coexist with poverty and crime. The movie is animated and in black-and-white, clearly reflecting the director’s aspiration to the film noir genre. It’s dark, moody, suspenseful, and most of the scenes happen at night, which is a vision of the future we probably have Blade Runner to thank for. The characters are mostly well-acted.
Paris in 2054 can be a grim place
One complaint I have about the movie is that the last third of it has several plot twists where the actors behave in uncharacteristic or irrational ways, or where unbelievable events happen. Examples include Karas magically uncuffing himself from a railing when he doesn’t have the key, no police showing up after a man is shot by someone in a low-hovering helicopter in the middle of the city, and a team of thugs in invisibility cloaks beating up and then abducting a man in broad daylight, in the middle of a crowd, right next to the Eiffel Tower.
A bigger gripe I have with the film is with the notion that medical immortality is wrong or will automatically lead to a horrible world, and that, in the words of one of the characters “Without death, life is meaningless.” That kind of argumentation has always been nothing more than people trying to rationalize something that is unpleasant but inevitable. Death is horrible, life is great, and death renders life meaningless once death happens and a little bit of time passes. If given the opportunity, we should try to end death and worry about the consequences (e.g. – overpopulation) later.
Moreover, if we accept the premise that technologies that extend life are wrong, or that they give biotech companies too much power, then it’s a slippery slope to using the exact same argument to ban medical treatments that extend peoples’ lives today beyond their “natural limits.” Blood and organ transfusions aren’t natural, and extend the lives of people who, in a natural human state, would have died. Vaccines that keep people from dying of diseases like COVID-19 aren’t natural.
Relatedly, I reject the film’s notion that having the formula for eternal life in the hands of a for-profit biotech company like Avalon would “give them too much power” or make the world worse off. To sell the life extension pills, Avalon would have to first patent them, which would mean making public their chemical formula along with lab studies detailing what they do at the cellular level. After 20 years, the patent would expire, and any other biotech company that wanted to manufacture and sell generic pills would be able to, simply by copying the aforementioned information Avalon had made public. True, for the first 20 years, Avalon’s monopoly would allow it to price-gouge, “play God,” and make enormous profits, but after that, competition from other drug companies would drive the prices low enough for anyone to afford it. It would be a small price to pay in the long run. (Without the guarantee of the 20 year sales monopoly, pharmaceutical companies would have no incentives to invest money into developing new medicines off all kinds, which would cause that area of medical science to stall, causing enormous human suffering.)
But in reality, if something as valuable as an eternal life pill existed, governments might ignore patent laws and make copies of the pills for mass distribution to their own citizens. Companies like Avalon can file lawsuits through international venues for intellectual property infringement, but in the end, there’s only so much they can do to punish sovereign countries, especially bigger ones. Case in point is the Indian government’s collusion with indigenous drug companies to make cheap copies of patented American and European drugs.
Analysis:
Holographic ID card. Only the left edge of the card has physical substance. The rest is a projection.
People will use holographic ID cards instead of ID cards that are just made of paper. In the film, there are small, L-shaped devices that can generate holographic images that float in three-dimensional space. Presumably, the devices do this thanks to tiny light emitters. These have replaced old-fashioned paper photo ID cards and business cards. This technology will not be used in 2054 because 1) the hologram has no advantage over laminated paper for this type of simple object and 2) it’s simply impossible to make holographic, 3D images that “float” in the air like that. Quoting some well-phrased technical text I found on this subject:
‘A hologram cannot, when viewed from any angle, protrude from the surface, as seen from an angle, further than the edge of the hologram, meaning that it can only be about as tall as it is wide. If this seems a little confusing, Michael Bove put it this way: “Any reconstructed object has to lie along a line that goes from your eye to somewhere on the physical display device.”‘
A holographic tablet computer. Note the “L” shaped part of the device the user’s hand is gripping.
People will use holographic computer tablets instead of normal tablets. In the movie, larger versions of the aforementioned L-shaped devices are also used to make holographic computer tablets. As before, science simply does not allow the existence of this technology. However, by 2054, rectangular tablet computers will be capable of projecting high-def holographic images out at the viewer’s face. In other words, you could watch 3D movies on your tablet without having to wear 3D glasses. However, if you slowly tilted the tablet away from you, the illusion of depth would become clear to your eye as the images no longer popped out of the screen at your face.
The problem with transparent computer monitors is illustrated here. The secretary is looking at the detective’s personal file as he approaches her desk. He knows this because he can see the image from his vantage.
Transparent computer monitors will be in use. The technology will surely be available by 2054, but no one will use it because 1) transparent screens undermine your own privacy by letting everyone else see what you’re looking at and because 2) they’re harder for you to read off of than opaque screens with solid-colored backgrounds. Certainly, desktop computer monitors will be even thinner than they are today and might need smaller base plates thanks to their lighter weight, but that’s not going to translate into much of a practical gain. As the average screen creeps up in size, they’ll get more wobbly and cumbersome even as they get thinner, which will preserve the need for sturdy baseplates.
Cloaked outfits will exist. Several Avalon corporation henchmen are featured in the film, doing the CEO’s dirty work by tailing Karas, secretly surveilling and undermining his investigation, and killing off key people who knew Ilona. They seem to have better technology than the police, including hooded outfits that can turn transparent and cloak them from the naked eye. Cloaking outfits will exist by 2054, and could be in widespread use among people who need to be camouflaged, like paramilitaries, spies and assassins.
One of the film’s corporate thugs wearing an invisibility cloak.
A cloaked outfit could be made out of a flexible fabric studded with millions of color e-ink pixels covering its whole surface (just imagine if your big screen TV were paper-thin and flexible, and you could cut it into smaller pieces and then sew them together to make a T-shirt), and interspersed with a smaller number of pinhole-sized cameras. The cameras would constantly watch the changing colors and visual patterns to one side of your body, and tell the e-ink dots on the exact opposite side of your body to change colors to match it, so anyone looking at you would “see through” you. If you stood with your back to a red brick wall ten feet behind you, the front of your shirt and pants would turn red and would display rectangles. However, the cloaked outfit wouldn’t be able to disguise you from every possible viewing angle, so to people at ground level looking straight at your front, you might be hidden, but to someone in a tree looking down at you at an angle, you’d pop out as a red human silhouette with 10 feet of green grass separating you from the red brick wall behind you. As such, the 360 degree cloaking technology depicted in Renaissance is probably impossible, and if you were wearing a cloaked outfit from 2054, you’d still have to be very mindful of your surroundings and careful about your movements to stay unseen.
Hunters wear camouflage outfits that are designed to exactly match the environments where they plan to hunt. This man’s clothing doesn’t make him “transparent” like a sci-fi cloaking device would, but he might as well be.
Assassins, soldiers, and hunters wearing cloaked outfits would still find that the normal rules about using darkness and obstacles as cover, staying as far as practical from other people or animals, keeping low to the ground, and avoiding places where the landscape sharply changed in appearance (like where a red brick wall meets a green lawn) still applied. On the subject of camouflage, let me add that I think outfits that took snapshots of their surroundings once every few minutes and changed the outfit’s appearance to one of 10 – 20 pre-loaded camo patterns that most closely matched those surroundings (ex – Desert Pattern 1, Desert Pattern 2, Jungle Pattern, Snow Pattern) will be almost as effective as the continuously-updating cloaking outfits in Renaissance, and at lower cost and much less energy consumption.
The cloaking outfits of 2054 will be able to frequently and automatically change their colors and patterns to match their surroundings.
The technology will also find its way into civilian fashion, and by the 2050s, it will be common to encounter people whose outfits display morphing patterns and colors. They could even display lifelike moving images, allowing wearers to become “walking TVs.” People who set their shirts and pants to “camouflage mode” while standing or sitting next to walls would also look like disembodied heads, hands and shoes to passersby. The cloaking outfits will open many weird possibilities.
Also, the same level of technology that will enable the creation of cloaking outfits will also allow the creation of cloaking detectors: If you were worried about a cloaked assassin sneaking up on you, you could wear augmented reality glasses with tiny cameras and sensors that continuously scanned your surroundings for the characteristic visual distortions of a cloaked person, or for other clues (e.g. – sounds of footsteps, possibly body heat).
Visual cloaking technology could also be applied to military and police vehicles and aircraft, and might in fact be used in that role years before they are incorporated into clothing.
Cars will look normal but make electric humming noises. There are a few street scenes in the film where cars are shown, and the depiction seemed accurate. By 2054, batteries will be much better than they are today, meaning higher energy density, lower costs, faster recharge times, and slower wear-out rates. It will be a mature technology that average people won’t consider “weird” or “special.” Instead, it will be the norm (“electric cars” will just be called “cars”), and the vast majority of passenger vehicles (and possibly commercial vehicles) in 2054 will use batteries instead of fossil fuels.
Whatever niche advantages that internal combustion engines still hold in 2054 will be so minimal that it will only be worth buying them in very special cases. This will significantly improve air quality, ease global warming, and reduce noise pollution since electric car motors are almost silent. The quality of life improvements will be felt most by people living in cities (imagine a smog-free L.A. or Beijing) and near highways.
Cars like the defunct “Google Car” will be common in 2054.
Externally, most cars in 2054 will be about the same size and shape as today’s cars since they will still be built to carry human passengers in comfort, safety and style. However, in urban areas, where traffic moves slowly, non-traditional-looking subcompact vehicles designed for no-frills transport of humans or light cargo will be common sights.
By 2054, car ownership rates will be lower than today, and many people will find it cheaper and no less convenient to use self-driving cabs for transportation. Since most car rides are single-person trips to or from work or the local store, it would be more efficient if the self-driving vehicle fleet consisted of more subcompact cars. Laws requiring features like crumple zones and rollbars will be waived for autonomous vehicles meant to transport cargo only, allowing them to be smaller, cheaper, and lighter.
People will still drive their own cars. All the cars that we get close looks at in the film have steering wheels, and in the big chase scene where Karas goes after a suspect, there’s a lot of classic gear-shifting, grimacing, and stiff turning of steering wheels to ram other cars or careen off-road. This is somewhat accurate for 2054.
Self-driving cars will be old technology by then, and most of the vehicle fleet–particularly in developed countries like France–will consist of self-driving vehicles. It will be rarer for adults to have drivers licenses than it is today due to a lack of any need for one. However, I think many humans will still choose to drive their own cars, mostly for pleasure (for this same reason, some people today like riding motorcycles or stick-shift sports cars when a basic, automatic transmission sedan will transport them just as well), but in some cases due to bona fide occupational or lifestyle needs. However, even human-driven cars will still make heavy use of AI for the sake of safety, and the cars might override human attempts to drive recklessly.
But it might be possible to turn the AI off, in which case you could speed down the highway, ram people, and drive the wrong way. And thanks to that possibility, the police will have a professional need to have drivers licenses and to be able to have full control over their patrol cars so they could also break traffic laws for pursuits. And so…yes, even in 2054, high-speed car chases like that shown in the film will still be happening.
Wall-sized computer monitors will exist. In the police headquarters, there’s a “command center” room whose walls are covered with giant computer monitors. The central area of the room also has several personal computer terminals, whose monitors can be shared with the main wall monitors. Karas and his colleagues use the room to go through mugshots of potential suspects and to watch surveillance videos together. Wall-sized computer/TV monitors will be old technology by 2054. In fact, TV screens that take up entire walls of houses and offices should become common by the end of the 2030s. The screens will probably be thin, flexible, and installed as if they were wallpaper.
Wall-sized display at the police HQ
By 2054, the screens will probably be capable of displaying ultra high-res holographic images that seem to pop out at the viewer. Many of the characters in Renaissance were in their 20s, meaning they were born too late to have known what the world was like when TVs and computer monitors were discrete, relatively small objects, and not every seemingly inanimate wall could suddenly come to life with moving pictures and interact with you. This is just one example of how technology will become increasingly invisible yet omnipresent as time passes–ever-more integrated into our surroundings and bodies.
People will have enhanced eyes with HUDs and the ability to see through solid objects. Karas has technologically enhanced vision that lets him see simple shapes and alphanumeric characters overlaying things in his field of view (ex – people have circles around them), and that lets him see ghosted silhouettes of people who are fully or partly obscured by solid objects, such as an armed bad guy hiding behind a tree trunk. His eyes look normal, so the abilities must be thanks to contact lenses or devices implanted inside his eyeballs. These enhanced vision capabilities will exist in 2054. Several different technologies are being represented here, so let me parse them out.
Karas’ augmented vision, presumably thanks to contact lenses
First, Karas must have cameras on his person that are continuously scanning his environment, and which are able to quickly recognize what they see. Circles are displayed around people because the image recognition algorithms in Karas’ personal devices know what humans look like. As Facebook’s face detection algorithm demonstrates every time you upload photos of people, computers are already excellent at recognizing distinctively human features in photographs. Getting them to make those identifications in camera video feeds is simply a matter of increasing the processing speed of the same algorithms. After all, a video feed is nothing more than many still photos presented in quick succession. I have no doubt that portable personal computing devices will be able to do this by 2054.
Second, Karas’ augmented vision device allows him to “see through” solid objects, mainly to spot bad guys he’s trying to shoot. Such obstructing objects include a large concrete sculpture and a thick tree trunk. Your first guess about how he is able to do this is probably “heat vision,” and it is also wrong. Thermal vision cameras can’t actually see through solid objects. Being able to see non-visible portions of the light spectrum like infrared and ultraviolent is also unhelpful since they can’t pass through large solid objects, either. Radio waves would pass through the object and the person, so you wouldn’t get useful information about what was on the other side.
I think what’s really going on is Karas is not actually seeing through solid objects: his visioning device is using camera footage of his surroundings to rapidly build a 3D model of the room–including the places where people are standing–and then superimposing virtual images of human silhouettes over solid objects to give him an idea of where people are hiding as they become obscured by those objects. Whenever he has a clear line of sight to someone, Karas’ devices note their location in 3D space, and continue displaying their last known location as a silhouette even if they become hidden from view by a large object. In cases where people’s bodies are only partly concealed by objects, Karas’ device builds a partial silhouette of the hidden part of their body based on their posture, biomechanics, and the bilateral symmetry of the human body. This capability would require similar visual pattern recognition technology as the HUD, and portable, personal computing devices will be able to support it by 2054.
It’s also possible that Karas’ visioning device makes use of reflected light to “see” people who are hiding behind objects. Several groups of researchers have experimented with different variations of this nascent technique, but they all involve using one or two light emitters to send pulses of light towards a freestanding object, and then carefully analyzing the subsequent patterns of light reflections to piece together what the obscured backside of the object looks like. The pulses of light are invisible to the naked eye. Devices that do this could be man-portable by 2054, though I doubt they will be so small that they could be incorporated into contact lenses or eye implants. Something the size of a gun scope is more realistic.
Third, Karas is able to have his enhanced vision without wearing bulky goggles or even thin-framed glasses. The virtual images thus appear in his field of view either thanks to augmented reality contact lenses or eye implants. While computers and cameras will be much faster, smaller, and better in 2054, I doubt something as small as a contact lens or eye implant could do all of this computation. Powering the devices would also be a major problem, even if they had integral batteries that were 10x as energy-dense as today’s. Heat dissipation would also be a problem, as the waste heat generated by the battery and processor could literally burn your eyes out.
With these impracticalities in mind, I think Karas must have some other, larger computing device on his person–perhaps just a smartphone in his pocket–that does all the data processing and contains a power source for all his worn devices. Data and electricity would be shared through a local area network (LAN): The smartphone would receive wireless video feeds and other data from tiny cameras and sensors Karas had embedded in his clothing or maybe in his eye device, the smartphone would then do the image analyses described in this section, and then it would beam data signals and electricity to Karas’ eye devices, telling them what virtual images to overlay over his field of vision. This way, the eye devices wouldn’t get hot and wouldn’t need integral batteries of their own. A real-world 2054 scenario might also involve Karas wearing more substantial sensor devices, like something attached to his pistol or integrated into some type of headwear, to collect the scanning data.
Finally, let me point out that augmented reality glasses could do all of this without a LAN, and glasses will be old tech by 2054. The Avalon corporate thugs wore goggles that also gave them augmented vision, including telescopic zoom ability. They also had sensitive, directional microphones somewhere on their kit, which, along with the goggle zoom, allowed them to spy on Karas from long distances.
Holodecks will exist. After being abducted, Ilona is imprisoned inside a medium-sized room that is similar to a holodeck from Star Trek. From a different room, her mysterious captors can use a desktop computer to change the appearance of the room to simulate different environments. When the “forest” environment is selected, the room’s bare white walls, floor and ceiling change in appearance accordingly: virtual grass and trees sprout from the ground, and in the distance, there only appears to be more vegetation.
A bare room transforming into a forest through some holodeck technology. The vegetation is still “forming.”
While the holodeck’s operating principles are never explained, I think it is based on the same 3D hologram technology that has replaced paper cards and rectangular tablet computers in the film. And as I said before, 3D holograms that float in fixed points in space are impossible. However, a similar effect could probably be achieved by covering the walls, floor and ceiling with the paper-thin displays that could show holographic moving pictures that seemed to pop out at the viewer. Tiny cameras could track the gaze and posture of the person inside the holodeck, and continuously adjust the pictures being displayed on the room’s giant displays to compensate for changes to their visual perspective resulting from their movement. However, even if you could get this to work, the holodeck user experience would be severely limited since you wouldn’t be able to walk far before your face hit a wall, which would ruin the illusion (at one point, Ilona runs around her holodeck prison in frustration but implausibly, doesn’t hit anything).
The whole floor could be an omnidirectional treadmill whose surface was made of a flexible holographic display, but even in 2054, that setup is going to be very expensive. In 2054, for full-immersion virtual reality experiences, it’s going to be much cheaper and better to use VR glasses, earpieces, and maybe a tactile body suit, and at the rate things are going, I’m sure all of those will be mature technologies by then.
To summarize: By 2054, it will be possible to make virtual reality holodeck rooms where you could experience some environment like a forest, but it won’t look as good as what was in Renaissance, actually exploring the environment by walking around will be problematic, and there will be very few holodecks because there will be better ways to access virtual reality.
Cell phone implants will be in use. Karas wears a nickel-sized device behind his right ear that is embossed with the “Motorola” symbol and serves as a cell phone by transmitting telephonic sounds to him. Whenever someone calls him on the phone, he hears their voice in his head.
The device is worn in the same place as real-life bone-anchored hearing devices for people with hearing problems, so it probably works via the same principle of conducting sound waves through the skull into the inner ear. There might even be a direct wire link to the auditory nerve. Karas removes it by simply pulling it off with his fingers, which makes me think the device has two parts: one has been permanently installed in his body via skull surgery, and the other is the removeable circular piece, which probably contains the power source, microphone, and maybe computer processors. The detachable piece could be held on by magnets or an advanced adhesive, though keeping it from being accidentally knocked off by your shirt or jacket collar rubbing against it could be a very hard engineering problem.
While this technology is feasible for 2054, the fact that it requires a hole to be drilled into your skull will hold back its widescale adoption until we have developed very advanced surgical methods that are also very cheap. Don’t expect that until long after 2054. However, it’s conceivable that implants might be better than worn devices like Bluetooths and hearing aids–especially if they directly interface with human auditory nerves–and as such could come into common use among police officers, soldiers, spies, and other elite people whose professions directly benefit from having heightened senses. Small numbers of those people might have implants.
In 2054, it’s much more likely that people who want to do hands-free phone calls will buy removable earpieces, like today’s Bluetooth Headsets.
People will do video calls all the time. Karas’ hearing and vision devices let him do several video calls with his boss and colleagues. He hears their words through his hearing device, and sees their faces in front of him as ghosted HUD footage thanks to his eye devices. (Presumably, the people on the other end have webcams pointed at their faces.) So, while Karas is walking down the street running errands, he’s also seeing his boss’ semi-transparent head floating in front of him and hearing her voice in his head. To other people on the street, he seems to be talking to himself when he’s actually talking to her. (Telling schizophrenics apart from normal people will be that much harder in the future.)
The technology of 2054 will make this scenario possible, though I doubt people will use it much since there’s usually nothing to be gained from seeing the other person’s face. In fact, it often makes interactions less pleasant and more unwieldy, especially when you’re conversing with your naggy boss or an emotional colleague. Many people also want to stay unseen due to insecurities about their looks.
People have already shown a preference for minimalism in digital communication with texting increasingly replacing audio phone calls. There’s no reason to assume this trend will flip in the future and people will want to do video calls for every small thing.
A cure for aging will have been found. A crucial plot twist happens when Karas discovers Ilona had made a breakthrough in her anti-aging research right before she was kidnapped. The full details are never revealed, but it is said to be some kind of gene therapy that halts the aging process in humans. Such a thing would radically extend human lifespan, though it wouldn’t make humans truly “immortal” since we would still die from causes other than aging, like infectious diseases, accidents, murders, and suicides. I doubt such a cure will be found that soon, but lifespans will still be significantly longer in 2054 than today, and part of the gain will probably owe to drugs that slow, but don’t stop, the aging process. Some lifespan gains will also come from technologies allowing the replacement of worn-out organs.
From what little we know about the aging process and its complexity, it is already obvious that there will never be a simple, one-shot cure for it. Instead, a combination of many different technologies (in situ stem cell therapies, organ cloning, synthetic organ implantation, maybe brain transplants into newer bodies) will extend life and then, in the very long run, defeat aging and death. I don’t expect that until well into the 22nd century.
There will be transparent floors. In Renaissance Paris, many of the city’s highways have glass enclosures built around them, effectively turning them into tunnels. Pedestrians can walk over the flat roofs of those tunnels and see the cars below. Some underground Metro stations also have glass ceilings that function as glass floors for people walking above, at street level.
It’s an interesting infrastructure idea actually has merits beyond just being aesthetically pleasing. Enclosing the roads like that improves safety for both drivers and pedestrians since there’s far less risk of someone walking into the roadway. The highway is also no longer a barrier to human movement, which improves the walkability and potential uses of the topside space. The glass enclosures also contain the road noises and any air pollution the vehicles might be making (the tunnel air could be run through filters). The fact that the glass lets in natural sunlight to recessed highways and Metro stations that would otherwise be artificially lit is also of psychological benefit to users of both.
The only problem with this idea is that it would give perverts easy views up ladies’ skirts. Of course, that could be fixed by slightly frosting over the glass or by incorporating distorting undulations into the material, as is commonly done with glass building blocks today.
It’s very possible that we could have discovered some transparent material that exceeds glass’ strength and cost performance to such an extent that it is economical to use as a building material as it was in the film. It would be a desirable feature in stylish cities like Paris.
Plot: Cloud Atlas is comprised of six short films set in six different times and places. Each short film has a unique plot and characters, but they are played by the same actors, leading to many interesting and at times funny role reversals from the viewer’s perspective. The movie jumps between the six stories in a way that shows their thematic similarities. It’s a very ambitious attempt at storytelling through the film medium, but also an unsuccessful one. As a whole, Cloud Atlas is too confusing and practically collapses under its own weight.
Rather than even attempting to summarize its Byzantine plot in more detail, here’s a link to a well-written plot synopsis you can read if you like before proceeding farther:
“This film follows the stories of six people’s “souls” across time, and the stories are interweaved as they advance, showing how they all interact. It is about how the people’s lives are connected with and influence each other…” https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1371111/plotsummary?ref_=ttpl_sa_2#synopsis
On the one hand, I’m glad that in today’s sad era of endless sequels, remakes and reboots, Hollywood is still willing to take occasional risks on highly creative, big-budget sci fi films like Cloud Atlas. On the other, none of that changes the fact that movie is a hot mess.
For the purposes of this sci fi analysis, I’m only interested in the chapters of the movie set in the future. The first takes place in Seoul (renamed “Neo Seoul”) in 2144, and the second takes place on a primitive tropical island “hundreds” of years after that, and following some kind of global cataclysm. Though the date when the later sequence happens is never stated in the film, the book on which it is based says it is 2321, and I’ll use that for this review.
Analysis:
Slavery will come back. In 2144, South Korea, and possibly some part of the countries surrounding it, is run by an evil government/company called “Unanimity.” Among its criminal practices is allowing the use of slave labor. The slaves, called “fabricants,” are parentless humans who are conceived in labs, gestated in artificial wombs, and euthanized after 12 years of labor. They seem to have no legal rights, can be killed for minor reasons, and are treated as inferiors by natural-born humans. Though they look externally identical to any other human, it’s hinted that the fabricants have been genetically altered to be obedient and hard workers, and perhaps to have physiological differences. Juvenile fabricants are never shown, which leads me to think they are gestated as mature adults. The 2144 plot centers around one fabricant who escapes from her master and joins a rebel group fighting to end slavery.
The protagonist of the 2144 film segment is this female fabricant.
Slavery will not exist in 2144 because 1) the arc of history is clearly towards stronger human rights and 2) machines will be much better and cheaper workers than humans by then. In a profit-obsessed society like the one run by Unanimity, no business that employed humans, even those working for free as slaves, could survive against competitors that used robots. After all, it still costs money to feed, clothe, and house human slaves, and to give them medical care when necessary. And while the film implies that the human slaves partly exist to gratify the sexual needs of human clients, robots–specifically, androids–should be superior in that line of work, as well.
For these same reasons, if intelligent machines have taken over the planet by 2144, it won’t make sense for them to enslave humans, or at least not for long. Intelligent machines would find it cheaper, safer, and better to build task-specific, “dumb” machines to do jobs for them than to employ humans. There could be a nightmare scenario where AIs win a mutually devastating war with humanity, and due to scarce resources and destroyed infrastructure, the use of human labor is the best option, but this arrangement would only last until the AIs could build worker robots.
Human clones will exist. Though the fabricants are played by different actresses, the protagonist that escapes from her master later sees fabricants that look identical to her. This means the fabricants as a whole have limited genetic diversity and probably consist of several strains of clones.
“Zhong Zhong” and “Hua Hua” are identical clones of an adult monkey.
Human clones will be created long before 2144. In 2018, Chinese scientists made two clones of one monkey. Given the close similarities between human and monkey genetics and chromosome structure, the same technique or a variant of it could be used to clone humans. The only thing that has stopped it from happening so far is bioethics concerns stemming from the technique’s high failure rate–77 out of 79 cloned monkey embryos that were implanted in surrogate mothers during the experiment were miscarried or died shortly after birth. More time and more experiments will surely refine the process.
When will the success rate be “good enough” for us to make the first human clones? Sir John Gurdon won a Nobel Prize for his 1962 experiments cloning frogs. In 2012, he predicted that human cloning would probably begin in 50 years–which is 2062. Given the state of the science today, that looks reasonable.
In 2144, cloning will be affordable and legal in at least one country that allows medical tourism, but only a tiny percentage of people will want to use it, and an insignificant share of the human race will consist of clones. Bereaved parents wanting to replace their dead children will probably be the industry’s main customers. It sounds creepy, but what if the clones actually make most of them happy?
Display screens will cover many types of surfaces. The bar/restaurant staffed by the fabricants is a drab room whose walls, ceilings, floors, and furniture are covered by thin display screens. At the flick of a switch, the screens can come alive and show colors, images, and moving pictures just like a traditional TV or computer monitor. An apartment is also shown later on that has a wraparound room display.
I conservatively predict that wallpaper-like display screens with the same capabilities and performance as those depicted in the movie will be a mature, affordable technology by 2044, which is 100 years before the events shown in the film segment. In other words, it will be very old technology. The displays built into the floors would have to be thickest and most robust for obvious reasons, and will probably be the last ones to be introduced. This technology will allow people to have wall-sized TV screens in their houses, to place “lights” at any points and configuration in a given room, and to create immersive environments like cruder versions of the Star Trek “holodeck.”
Through a “transparent” wall, the partly flooded city of Seoul is visible.
Walls will be able to turn transparent. In the aforementioned apartment, one of the walls can turn into a “fake window” at the push of a button. The display screen that covers it can display live footage from outside the building, presumably provided to it by exterior cameras. This technology should also be affordable and highly convincing in effect by 2044, if not earlier. Note that the Wachowskis also included this technology in their film Jupiter Ascending, but it was used to make floors transparent instead of walls.
There will be 3D printed meals. The 2144 segment begins in a bar/restaurant staffed by fabricants. A sequence shows a typical work day for them, and we see how a 3D “food printer” creates realistic-looking dishes in seconds. The printer consists of downward-pointing nozzles that spray colored substances onto bowls and dishes, where it congeals into solid matter. Its principle of operation is like a color printer’s, but it can stack layers of edible “ink” to rapidly build up things.
A 3D food printer somehow squirts out these elaborate-looking meals in under ten seconds.
3D food printers already exist, and they can surely be improved, but they will never be able to additively manufacture serving-sizes of food in seconds, unless you’re making a homogenized, simple dish like soft-serve ice cream or steak tartare. To manufacture a complex piece of food like those shown in the film sequence, much more time would be needed for the squirted biomatter to settle and set properly to achieve the desired texture and appearance, and for heat, lasers or chemicals to cook it properly. For these reasons, I don’t think the depiction of the futuristic 3D food printer will prove accurate.
However, the next best things will be widely available by then: lab-grown foods and fast robot chefs. By 2144, it should be cheaper to synthesize almost any type of food than to grow or raise it the natural way, and I predict humans will get most of their calories from industrial-scale labs. This includes meat, which we’ll grow using stem cells. Common processed foodstuffs like flour, corn starch, and sugar could also be directly synthesized from inorganic chemicals and electricity, saving us from having to grow and harvest the plants that naturally make them.
A 3D food printer today.
The benefits of the “manufactured food” paradigm will be enormous. First, it would be much more humane since we would no longer need to kill billions of animals per year for food. Second, it would be better for the environment since we could make most of our food indoors, in enclosed facilities. The environmental damage caused by the application of pesticides and fertilizers would drop because we’d have fewer open-air farms. And since the “food factories” would be more efficient, we could produce the same number of calories on a smaller land footprint, which would allow us to let old farms revert back to nature. Third, it would be better for the economy. Manufactured food would be cheaper since it would cut out costly intermediate steps like planting seeds, harvesting plants, separating their edible parts from the rest, and butchering animals to isolate their different cuts of meat. No time, money or energy would be spent making excess matter like corn husks, banana peels, chicken feathers, animal brains, or bones–the synthesis process would be waste-free, and would turn inorganic matter and small clumps of stem cells directly into 100% edible pieces of food. Food factory output would also be largely unaffected by uncontrollable natural events like droughts, hailstorms, an locust swarms, making food supply levels much more predictable and prices more stable. Fourth, food factories would be able to produce cleaner, higher-quality foods at lower cost. The energy and material costs of making a premium ribeye steak are probably no higher than the costs of making a tough, rubbery round steak. With that in mind, the meat factories could ONLY EVER make premium ribeye steaks, which will be great since the price will drop and everyone, not just richer people, will be able to eat the highest quality cuts. (If you want to do side research on this, Google the awesome term “carcass balancing” and knock yourself out.)
By 2144, machines will be able to do everything humans can do, except better, faster and cheaper, which means robot chefs will be ubiquitous and highly skilled. They would work very efficiently and consistently, meaning restaurant wait times would be short, and the meals would always be prepared perfectly. Thanks to all these factors, the 2144 equivalent of a low-income person could walk into an ordinary restaurant and order a cheap meal consisting of what would be very expensive ingredients today (e.g. – Kobe beef steak, caviar, lobster). Those ingredients would be identical to their natural counterparts, and would be only a few hours fresh from the factory thanks to the highly efficient automated logistics systems that will also exist by then. A robot chef with several pairs of hands and superhuman reflexes would combine and cook the ingredients with astounding speed and precision. Not single movement would be wasted. Within 15 minutes of placing his order, the customer’s food would be in front of him.
Today, this level of cuisine and service is known only to richer people, but in the future, it will be common thanks to technology. This falls short of Cloud Atlas‘ depiction of 3D food printers making meals in seconds, but there are worse fates…
Street scene from 2144.
There will be flying cars. CGI camera shots of Neo-Seoul show its streets filled with flying cars, flying trucks and flying motorcycles. Most often, they hover one or two feet above the ground, but they’re also capable of flying high in the air. The vehicles levitate thanks to circular “pads” on their undersides, which glow blue and make buzzing sounds. The Wachowskis also featured these “hoverpads” on the flying vehicles in their Matrix films. In no film was their principle of operation explained.
This shot clearly shows the hoverpads.
The only way the hoverpads could make cars “fly” is if they were made of superconductors and the roads were made of magnets. 2144 is a long way off, so it’s possible that we could discover room-temperature superconductors that were also cheap to manufacture by then. No law of physics prohibits it. Likewise, we could discover new methods of cheaply creating powerful magnets and magnetic fields so we can embed them in the millions of miles of global roadways. Vehicles with superconducting undersides could “hover” over these roads, but not truly “fly” since the magnetic fields they’d depend on would get sharply weaker with vertical distance–“Coulomb’s Law” says that a magnet’s strength decreases the farther you get from it in an inversely squared manner.
Ironically, the inability to go high in the air would be a selling point for hovercars since the prospect of riding in one would be less scary to land-loving humans (in my analysis of true flying cars, I said this was one reason why that technology was infeasible). Hovercars would also be quieter, more energy efficient, and smoother-riding than normal cars due to their lack of contact and friction with the road. Their big limitation would be an inability to drive off-road or anywhere else where there weren’t magnets in the ground. However, that might be a bearable inconvenience since the global road network will be denser in 2144 than it is now, and we might also have had enough time by then to install the magnets in all but the remotest and least-trafficked roads. You could rent wheeled vehicles when needed as easily as you summon an Uber cab today (the 2144 film sequence takes place in a city, so for all we know, wheeled cars are still widely in use elsewhere).
In conclusion, if we make a breakthrough in superconductor technology, it would enable the creation of hovercars, which might very well find strong consumer demand thanks to real advantages they would have over normal cars. True “flying cars” will not be in use by 2144, but hovercars could be, especially in heavily-trafficked places like cities and the highways linking them together, where it will make the most economic sense to install magnets in the roads. This means Cloud Atlas‘ depiction of transit technology was half wrong, and half “maybe.”
There will be at least one off-world human colony. During the 2144 segment, a character mentions that there are four “off-world colonies.” In the 2321 segment, those colonies are spoken of again, and people from one of them come to Earth in space ships to rescue several characters from the ailing planet. That space colony’s location is not named, but judging by the final scene, in which the characters are sitting outdoors amongst alien-looking plants, and one of them points to a blue dot in the night sky and says it is Earth, the colony is on a terraformed celestial body in our Solar System. The facts that gravity levels seem within the normal range and two moons are visible in the sky suggest it is Mars, though the moons would actually look smaller than that.
In the last chronological scene in the film, the characters are on an alien moon or planet.
“Colony” implies something more substantial than “base” or “outpost.” As I did in my Blade Runner review, I’m going to assume it refers to settlements that:
Have non-token numbers of permanent human residents
Have significant numbers of human residents who are not “elite” in terms of wealth or technical skills
Are self-sustaining, regardless of whether the level of sustenance affords the same quality of life on Earth.
I think there will certainly be bases on the Moon and Mars by the end of this century, and that they will be continuously manned. Good analogs for these bases are the International Space Station and the various research stations in Antarctica. Making conservative assumptions about steady improvements in technology and continued human interest in exploring space, it’s possible there will be at least one off-world colony by 2144, and likely that will be the case by 2321.
However, those projections come with a huge proviso, which I already stated in my Blade Runner review: “I think the human race will probably be overtaken by intelligent machines before we are able to build true off-world colonies that have large human populations. Once we are surpassed here on Earth, sending humans into space will seem all the more wasteful since there will be machines that can do all the things humans can, but at lower cost. We might never get off of Earth in large numbers, or if we do, it will be with the permission of Our Robot Overlords to tag along with them since some of them were heading to Mars anyway.” The rise of A.I. will be a paradigm shift in the history of our civilization, species, and planet, and its scrambling effect on long-term predictions like the prospects of human settlement of space must be acknowledged.
Finally, while off-world colonies might exist as early as 2144, none of the moons or planets on which they are established will have breathable atmospheres or comfortable outdoor temperatures for many centuries, if ever. The final scene depicted Mars having an Earthlike environment, where humans could stroll around the surface without breathing equipment or heavy clothing to protect against the cold. Two of the characters from the 2321 film sequence were shown, and both were done up with special effects makeup to look older, suggesting the final scene was set in the mid-2300s. In spite of the distant date, it was still much too early for the planet to have been terraformed to such an extent. In fact, melting all of Mars’ ice and releasing all the carbon dioxide sequestered in its rocks would only thicken its atmosphere to 7% of Earth’s surface air pressure, which wouldn’t be nearly good enough for humans to breathe, or to raise the planet’s temperatures to survivable levels. The effort would also be folly since the gases we released at such great expense would inevitably dissipate into space.
And that’s a real bummer since Mars is the most potentially habitable celestial body we know of aside from Earth! Venus has a crushingly thick, toxic atmosphere, and even if we somehow thinned it out and made it breathable, the planet would be unsuited for humans given its high temperatures and weirdly long days and nights (one Venusian day is 117 Earth days long). Mercury is much too close to the Sun and too hot, our Moon lacks the gravity to hold down an atmosphere and is covered in dust that inflames the human body, the gas giant planets are totally hopeless, and even their “best” moons have fundamental problems.
By the 2300s and even as early as 2144, there could be sizeable, self-sufficient colonies of humans off Earth, but everyone will be living inside sealed structures. Life inside those habitats could be nice (all the interior surfaces could be covered in thin display screens that showed calming footage of forests and beaches), but no one would be strolling on the surface in a T-shirt. And it might stay that way forever, regardless of how advanced technology became and how much money we spent building up those colonies.
There will be…some kinds of super guns. In the two film segments set in the future, characters use handheld guns that are more powerful than today’s firearms, but also operate on mysterious principles. It’s unclear whether the guns are shooting out physical projectiles or intangible projectiles made of laser beams or globs of plasma, but something exotic is at work since the guns don’t eject bullet casings or make the familiar “Pop!” sounds. Whatever they shoot is out very damaging and easily passes through human bodies and walls. In one scene, a person goes flying several feet backward after being shot at close range by one of the pistols.
A man flying backwards after being shot. Only a huge bullet could do this, and it would be impractical to shoot it out of a little handgun.
The super guns can’t be firing plasma because plasma weapons are infeasible, and they also can’t be firing laser beams because they’d get so hot with waste heat that all the characters would be dropping the guns in pain after one or two shots and clutching their burned hands. To fire a significant number of shots, a man-portable laser weapon would need to be large and to have some bulky means to radiating its waste heat, which means it would have to take a form similar to the Ghostbusters backpack weapon. I don’t see how any level of technology can solve the problems of energy storage and heat disposal without the weapon being about that big. The film characters’ weapons were sized like pistols and sub machine guns, so they couldn’t be laser weapons. If you want to understand how I arrived at these conclusions, read my Terminator review.
By deduction, that means the super guns were shooting out little pieces of metal, otherwise known as bullets! Yes, I do think personal firearms will still be in use in 2144, and maybe even in 2321. They might look a little different from those we have now, but they’ll operate in the same way and will still use kinetic energy to damage people and objects. I don’t think they’ll make “zoop” sounds like they did in the movie, and I don’t think they’ll be much harder-hitting than today’s guns. To the last point, it would be inefficient and wasteful to use guns that are so powerful their bullets send people flying through the air. And thanks to Newton’s Third Law of Motion, it’s also impractical to use handguns or even sub machine guns to shoot bullets that are so powerful they send people flying. The recoil would break your wrist, or at least make it so punishing to fire your own gun that you wouldn’t be able to use it in combat.
The film should have adopted a more conservative view of future gun technology. Had the weapons looked cosmetically different from today’s guns and not ejected shells after each shot–indicating they used caseless bullets, a technology we’re still working on–then the depiction would have been plausible and probably accurate.
There will be fusion reactors. In the 2321 sequence, an advanced group of humans travels the oceans in a futuristic ship that looks the size of a large yacht. The ship visits an island full of primitive humans, and one of the crew mentions to them that the ship has fusion engines.
I’m very hesitant to make predictions about hot fusion power because so many have failed before me, most of the experts who today claim that usable fusion reactors are on track to be created soon have self-interested reasons for making those claims (usually they belong to an organization that wants money to pursue their idea), and I certainly lack the specialized education to muster any special insights on the topic. However, I can say for sure that the basic problem is that nuclear fusion reactions release large numbers of neutrons, which beam outward in every direction from the source of the reaction. When those neutrons hit other things, they cause a lot of damage at the molecular level. This means the interior surfaces of fusion reactors rapidly deteriorate, making it necessary to periodically shut down the reactors to remove and replace the surface material. The need for the shutdowns and repairs undermine fusion as a reliable and affordable power source. Of course, that could change if we invented a new material that was resistant to neutron damage and cheap (enough) to make, but no one has, nor are there any guarantees that a material with such properties can exist.
An illustration of ITER, which is under construction. A man in an orange uniform has been drawn near the center of the image to convey the machine’s scale.
It would be comforting if I could say that these problems will be worked out by a specific year in the future, but I can’t. The “International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor” (ITER) project is the world’s flagship attempt at making a hot fusion reactor, and it is massively over-budget, years behind schedule, and dogged by some critics who say it just won’t work for many technical reasons, including the possibility that the hollow-donut shaped “tokomak” reaction chamber is a fundamentally flawed design (there are alternative fusion reactor concepts with very different internal layouts). If all goes according to plan, ITER will be turned on in December 2025, but it will take another ten years to reach full operation. Lessons learned during its lifetime will be used to design a second, more refined fusion reactor called the “Demonstration Power Station” (DEMO), which won’t be running until the middle of the century. And only AFTER the kinks are worked out of DEMO do scientists envision the technology being good enough to build practical, commercial nuclear fusion reactors that could be connected to the power grid. So even under favorable conditions, we might not have usable fusion reactors until close to 2100, and due to many engineering unknowns, it’s also still possible that ITER will encounter so many problems in the 2030s that we will be forced to abandon fusion power as infeasible.
Here’s an important point: Attempts to build nuclear fusion reactors started in the 1950s. If you had told those men that the technology would take at least 100 more years and tens or hundreds of billions of more dollars to reach maturity, they would have been shocked. The quest for fusion reactors has been full of staggering disappointments, false starts, and long delays that no one expected, and it could continue that way. With that in mind, I can only rate the film’s depiction of practical fusion reactors existing by 2321 as being “maybe accurate, maybe not.”
There will be cybernetically augmented/enhanced humans. In the 2144 segment, we see people who have cybernetic implants in their bodies that give them abilities that couldn’t be had through biology. The first is a surgeon who has an elaborate, mechanical eye implant that lets him zoom in on his patients during operations, and the other is a man who has a much less conspicuous implant in his left cheek that seems to be a cell phone. Presumably, the device is connected to his inner ear or cochlear nerve.
The technology necessary to make implanted cybernetics with these kinds of capabilities will be affordable and mature by 2144. However, few people will want implants that are externally visible and mechanical- or metallic-looking. Humans have a innate sense of beauty that is offended by anything that makes them look asymmetrical or unnatural. For that reason, in 2144, people will overwhelmingly prefer completely internal implants that don’t bulge from their bodies, and external implants and prostheses that look and feel identical to natural body parts. That said, there will surely be a minority of people who will pay for things like robot eyes with swiveling lenses, shiny metal Terminator limbs, and other cybernetics that make them look menacing or strange, just as there are people today who indulge in extreme body modifications.
People who like extreme body modifications will have even more avenues of self-expression in the future thanks to cybernetic implants and other technologies.
It’s important to point out that externally worn personal technologies will also be very advanced in 2144, will grant their users “superhuman” abilities just as simpler devices do for people today, and might be so good that most people will be fine using them instead of getting implants. Returning to the movie character with the mechanical eye, I have to wonder what advantages he has over someone with two natural eyes wearing computerized glasses that provide augmented vision. Surely, with 2144 levels of technology, a hyper-advanced version of Google Glass could be made that would let wearers do things like zoom in on small objects, and much more. The glasses could also be removed when they weren’t needed, whereas the surgeon could never “take off” his ugly-looking robot eye. Moreover, if the glasses were rendered obsolete by a new model in 2145, the owner could just throw away the older pair and buy a newer pair, whereas upgrading would be much harder for the eye implant guy for obvious reasons.
Likewise, if someone wanted to upgrade his strength or speed, he could put on a powered exoskeleton, which will be a mature type of technology by 2144. It would be less obtrusive and would come with less complications than having limbs chopped off and replaced with robot parts. For this reason, I also think sci-fi depictions of people having metal arms and legs in the future that let them fight better are inaccurate. Only a tiny minority will be drawn to that. In any case, the ability to do physical labor or to win fights will be far less relevant in the future because robots will do the drudge work, and surveillance cameras and other forensic technologies will make it much harder to get away with violent crimes.
While wearable devices might be able to enhance strength and the senses as well as implanted ones, the former will not be nearly as useful in augmenting the brain and its abilities. We already have crude brain-computer interface (BCI) devices that are worn on a person’s head where they can read some of their thoughts by monitoring their brain activity. The devices can improve, and in fact might become major consumer products in the 2030s, but they’re fundamentally limited by their inability to see activity happening deep in the brain.
A modern brain-computer interface, worn over the head. Much more advanced versions of this will exist in 2144, but they will still have limits.
To truly merge human and machine intelligence and to amplify the human brain’s performance to superhuman levels, we’ll need to put computer implants around and in the brain. This means having an intricate network of sensors and electrodes inside the skull and woven through the tissue of the brain itself, where it can monitor and manipulate the organ’s electrical activity at the microscopic level. Brain implants like these would make people vastly smarter, would give them “telepathic” abilities to send and receive thoughts and emotions and “telekinetic” abilities to control machines, and would let them control and change their minds and personalities in ways we can’t imagine. Along with artificial intelligence, the invention of a technology that lets humans “reprogram” their minds and to overcome the arbitrary limits set by their genetics and early childhood environments would radically alter civilization and our everyday experience. It would be much more impactful than a technology that let you enhance your senses or body.
By 2144, augmentative brain implants will exist. Since they’ll be internal, people with them won’t look different from people today. Artificial organs that are at least as good as their natural equivalents will also exist, and will allow people to radically extend their lifespans by replacing their “parts” in piecemeal fashion as they wear out. Again, these will by definition be externally undetectable. The result would be a neat inverse of the typical sci-fi cyborg–the person would have any visible machine parts like glowing eyes, shiny metal arms, or tubes hanging off their bodies. They would look like normal, organic humans, but the technology inside of them would push them well beyond natural human limits, to the point of being impossibly smart, telepathic, mentally plastic, and immortal.
Languages will have significantly changed. In the 2321 film sequence, the aboriginal humans speak a strange dialect of English that is very hard to understand, while the group of advanced humans speak something almost identical to today’s English. Both depictions will prove accurate!
Skimming through Gulliver’s Travels highlights that the English language has changed over the last 300 years, and we should expect it to continue doing so, perhaps until, in another 300 it will sound as strange as the island dialect in the movie. This will of course be true for other languages.
At the same time, that doesn’t mean modern versions of languages will be lost to history, or that speakers of it won’t be able to talk with speakers of the 2321 dialects. Intelligent machines and perhaps other kinds of intelligent life forms we couldn’t even imagine today will dominate the planet in 2321, and they will also know all human languages, including archaic dialects like the English of 2021, and dead human languages like Ancient Greek, allowing them to communicate with however many of us there are left.
Humans will also easily overcome linguistic barriers thanks to vastly improved language translation machines. The brain implants I mentioned earlier could also let people share pure thoughts and emotions, obviating the need to resort to language for communication. Whatever the case, technology will let people communicate regardless of what their mother tongues were, so a person who only knew 2021 English could easily converse with one who only knew 2321 English.
The knowledge that this state of affairs is coming should assuage whatever fears anyone has about English (or any other language) becoming “bastardized,” “degenerating,” or going extinct. So long as dictionaries and records of how people spoke in this era survive long enough to be uploaded into the memory banks of the first A.I., our idiosyncratic take on the English language will endure forever and be forever reproducible.
Finally and on a side note, the intelligent machines of 2321 will probably communicate amongst themselves using languages of their own invention. Instead of having one language for everything, I suspect they’ll have a few languages, each optimally suited for a different thing (for example, there could be one alphabet and syntax structure that is used for mathematics, another for prose and poetry, and others for expressing other modes of thought), and that they will all speak them fluently. As intricate and expressive as today’s human languages are, they contain many inefficiencies and possibilities for improvement, and it’s inevitable that machines will apply information theory and linguistics to make something better.
Sea levels will have noticeably risen. In the 2144 segment, there’s a scene where two characters look out the “digital window” of unit in a high-rise apartment building and see a partly flooded cityscape. One of the characters says that the structures that are partly or fully underwater were part of Seoul, South Korea, and that the larger, newer buildings on dry land are part of “Neo-Seoul.” In spite of the distressed condition of such a large area, the metropolis overall is thriving and thrums with people, vehicle traffic, and other activity. I think this is an accurate depiction of how global warming will impact the world by 2144.
Let me be clear about my beliefs: Global warming is real, human industrial activity is causing part of it, sea levels are rising because of it, it will be bad for the environment and the human race overall, and it’s worth the money to take some action against it now. However, the media and most famous people who have spoken on the matter have grossly blown the problem out of proportion by only focusing on its worst-case outcomes, which has tragically misled many ordinary people into assuming that global warming will destroy civilization or even render the Earth uninhabitable unless we forsake all the comforts of life now. The most credible scientific estimates attach extremely low likelihoods to those scenarios. The likeliest outcome, and the one I believe will come to pass, is that the rate of increase in global temperatures will start significantly slowing in the second half of this century, leading to a stabilization and even a decline of global temperatures in the 22nd century.
The higher temperatures will raise sea levels by melting ice in the polar regions and by causing seawater to slightly expand in volume (as water warms, its density decreases), but the waterline in most coastal areas will only be 1/2 to 1 meter higher in 2100 than it was in 2000. That will be barely noticeable across the lifetimes of most people. Sea levels will have risen even more by 2144, inundating some low-lying areas of coastal cities, but people will adapt as they did in the film–by abandoning the places that became too flood-prone and moving to higher ground. Depending on the local topography, this could entail simply moving a few blocks away to a new apartment complex. Except maybe in the poorest cities, the empty buildings would be demolished as people left, so there wouldn’t be any old, ghostly structures jutting out of the water as there were in the future Seoul.
And instead of the ocean suddenly inundating low-lying swaths of town, forcing their abandonment all at once in the middle of the night, they would be depopulated over the course of decades, with individual buildings being demolished piecemeal once flood insurance costs hit a tipping point, or once that one particularly bad flood caused so much damage that the structure wasn’t worth repairing. Again, the broader changes to the metro area would happen so gradually that few would notice.
If we could jump ahead to 2144, we’d be able to see and feel the effects of global warming. Some parts of Seoul (and other cities) that were formerly on the waterfront would be underwater. However, as was the case in the film, we’d also see civilization had not only survived, but thrived, and that the expansion of technology, science and commerce had not halted due to the costs imposed by global warming. It would not have come close to destroying civilization, and people would realize that the worst was behind them.
Of course, that doesn’t mean the threat will have been removed forever. What I’ll call a “second wave” of global warming is possible even farther in the future than 2144. You see, even if we completely decarbonize the economy and stop releasing all greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, we humans will still be producing heat. Solar panels, wind turbines, hydroelectric dam turbines, nuclear fission plants, and even clean nuclear FUSION plants that will “use water as fuel” all emit waste heat as inevitable byproducts of generating electricity. Likewise, all of our machines that turn that use that electricity to do useful work, like a factory machine that manufactures reusable shopping bags or an electric car that drives people around town, also release waste heat. This is thermodynamically unavoidable.
This line chart depicts the consequences of a steady 2.3% increase in global energy consumption on the Earth’s future surface temperature.
The Earth naturally radiates heat into space, and so far, it has been able to radiate all the heat produced by our industrial activity as fast as we can emit it. However, if long-term global economic growth rates continue, in about 250 years we’ll pass the threshold, and our machines will be releasing so much waste heat that the Earth’s surface will start getting hotter. The second wave of global warming–driven by an entirely different mechanism than the first wave we’re now in–will start, and if left unaddressed, it will render the Earth uninhabitable by very roughly 400 years from now. Based on all these estimates, 2144 will probably be an interregnum between the two waves of global warming.
Even if we melted all the ice on Mars and released all the CO2 trapped in its rocks, the resulting atmosphere would only be 7% as thick as Earth’s. That’s not good enough for humans to breathe, or to raise surface temperatures above freezing. https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/goddard/2018/mars-terraforming
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) thinks global warming “doomsday” scenarios are very unlikely. The rate of global warming will significantly drop in the second half of this century, and global temperatures will probably stabilize in the next century. https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/WG1AR5_Chapter12_FINAL.pdf
