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
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.
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
In the year 2019 a race of “bioengineered” humans called “replicants” exists, and are used as slave laborers and soldiers on space colonies. While made superior to ordinary humans in most respects (strength, pain tolerance, intelligence), replicants have deliberately capped lifespans of only four years to limit the amount of damage they can do should they rebel against their masters, and they are not allowed on Earth itself. This doesn’t stop a small group of replicants–including several who have enhanced combat traits–from hijacking a space ship and traveling to Earth to confront their “creator,” the head of the company the manufactured them and all other replicants, and to force him to technologically extend their lifespans. The replicants smuggle themselves into Los Angeles, where the company’s headquarters is.
Upon discovering the infiltration, the LAPD hires a bounty hunter named “Rick Deckard” to hunt down the replicants. Deckard’s background is never clearly explained, but he has good detective skills and has killed replicants before. As he follows leads and tracks them down, Deckard meets a love interest and is forced to confront his biases about replicants and consider existential questions about them and himself.
An important fact must be clarified and emphasized. Replicants ARE NOT robots or androids; they are “bio-engineered” humans. They don’t have metal body parts or microchip brains, and instead are made of flesh and blood like us. As proof, there are several scenes in Blade Runner where the replicant characters are hurt or killed, and they display pain responses to injuries and bleed red blood.
A replicant named “Zhora,” dead after being shot in the back with a handgun. Note the blood.
Additionally, it’s made clear that replicants can only be distinguished from humans by a sit-down interview with a trained examiner in which the subject is asked a series of odd questions (called the “Voight-Kampff Test”) while their physiological and spoken responses are analyzed. The procedure looks like a polygraph test. If replicants were robots with metal bones, microchip brains, or something like that, then a simple X-ray scan or metal detector wand would reveal them, and there’d be no need for a drawn-out interview. Likewise, if the replicants were organic, but fundamentally different from humans, then this could also be quickly detected with medical scans to vision their bones and organs, and with DNA tests to check for things like something other than 46 chromosomes.
By deduction, it must be true that replicants are flesh-and-blood humans, albeit ones that are produced and birthed in labs and biologically/genetically engineered to have trait profiles suited for specific jobs. The available evidence leads me to suspect that replicants are “assembled” in the lab by fitting together body parts and organs, the way you might put together a Mr. Potato Head. They are then “born” as full-grown adults and come pre-programmed with fake memories and possibly work skills. Replicants are human slaves, technologically engineered for subservience and skill.
Analysis:
Los Angeles will be polluted and industrial. In the film, Los Angeles is a grim, hectic place where fire-belching smokestacks are within sight of the city’s residential core. During the few daylight scenes, the air is very hazy with smog. This depiction of 2019 fortunately turned out wrong, and in fact, Los Angeles’ air quality is much better than it was when Blade Runner was released in 1982.
This improvement hasn’t just happened to L.A.–across the U.S. and other Western countries, air pollution has sharply declined over the last 30-40 years thanks to stricter laws on car emissions, industrial activity, and energy efficiency. With average Westerners now accustomed to clean air and more aware of environmental problems, I don’t see how things could ever backslide to Blade Runner extremes, so long as oxygen-breathing humans like us control the planet.
National average pollution figures from the U.S. EPA
Of course, the improvements have been largely confined to the Western world. China and India–which rapidly industrialized as the West was cleaning itself up–now have smog levels that, on bad days, are probably the same as Blade Runner’s L.A. This has understandably become a major political issue in both countries, and they will follow the West’s path improving their air quality over the coming decades. In the future, particulate air pollution will continue to be concentrated in the countries that are going through industrial phases of their economic development.
This looks like a shot from Blade Runner, but is actually a photo taken on a smoggy evening in Beijing in 2013.
The building, named “Pangu Plaza,” on a clear day.
Real estate will be cheap in Los Angeles. One of the minor characters is a high-ranking employee at the company that makes the replicants. He lives alone in a large, abandoned apartment building somewhere in Los Angeles. After being tricked into letting the replicants into his abode, he gestures to the cavernous space and says: “No housing shortage around here. Plenty of room for everybody.” In fact, the exact opposite of this came true, and Los Angeles is in the grips of a housing shortage, widespread unaffordability of apartments and houses, and record-breaking numbers of poorer people having to live on the streets or in homeless shelters.
The problems owe to the rise of citizen groups that oppose new construction, historical preservationists, and innumerable new zoning, environmental, and labor laws that have made it too hard to build enough housing to keep up with the city’s population growth since 1982, and priced affordably for the people who actually work there. Blade Runner envisioned a grim 2019 for Los Angeles, courtesy of unchecked capitalism (e.g. – smokestacks in the city, smoggy air, megacorporations that play God by mass producing slaves), yet the city (and California more generally) actually went down the opposite path by embracing citizen activism, unionists, and big government, ironically leading to a different set of quality of life problems. Fittingly, the building that stood in for the derelict apartment building in Blade Runner has now been fully renovated, is a government-protected landmark, and is full of deep-pocketed, trendy businesses.
The vast majority of Los Angeles’ land area is covered by single-family homes and low-rise buildings.
There will be flying cars. One iconic element of Blade Runner is its flying cars, called “spinners.” They’re shaped and proportioned similarly to conventional, road-only cars, and they’re able to drive on roads, but they can also take off straight up into the air. Clearly, we don’t have flying cars like this today, and for reasons I discussed at length in my blog entry about flying cars, I doubt we ever will.
I won’t repeat the points I made in that other blog entry, but let me briefly say here that the spinners are particularly unrealistic types of flying cars because they don’t have propellers or any other device that lifts the craft up by blowing air at the ground. Instead, they seem to operate thanks to some kind of scientifically impossible force–maybe “anti-gravity”–that lets them fly almost silently. There are brief shots in the film where low-flying spinners belch smoke from their undersides, which made me wonder if they were vectored thrust nozzles like those found on F-35 jets. But because the smoke comes out at low speed, the undermounted nozzles are not near the crafts’ centers of gravity, and the smoke isn’t seen coming out when the spinners are flying at higher altitudes, I don’t think they help levitate the spinners any more than a tailpipe helps a conventional car drive forward on a road.
A flying car expelling exhaust from its underside during takeoff..
People will smoke indoors. In several scenes, characters are shown smoking cigarettes indoors. This depiction of 2019 is very inaccurate, though in fairness the people who made the movie couldn’t have foreseen the cultural and legal sea changes towards smoking that would happen in the 1990s and 2000s.
People in Blade Runner like smoking indoors. No one stops them, and there aren’t any “No Smoking” signs.
When judging the prediction, also consider that if we average people and the legal framework were more enlightened, vaping indoors would be much more common today. While not “healthy,” vaping nicotine is vastly less harmful to a person’s health than smoking cigarettes, and science has not yet found any health impact of exposure to “secondhand vape smoke.”
A recent photo of a young woman smoking an e-cigarette.
There will be genetically engineered humans. In Blade Runner, mankind has created a race of genetically engineered humans called “replicants” to do labor. The genetic profile of each replicant is tailored to the needs of his or her given field of work. For example, one of the film’s replicant characters, a female named “Pris,” is a prostitute, so she is made to be physically attractive and to have average intelligence. All of the replicant characters clearly had high levels of strength and very high pain tolerances.
Digital dossier on the replicant “Pris”
In the most basic sense, Blade Runner was right, because genetically engineered humans do exist in 2019. There are probably dozens of people alive right now who were produced with a special in vitro fertilization (IVF) procedure called “mitochondrial replacement therapy” in which an egg from a woman with genetically defective mitochondria is infused with genetically normal mitochondria from a third person, and then the “engineered” egg is combined with sperm to produce a zygote. The first such child was born in 1997.
Additionally, there are now two humans with genetically engineered nuclear DNA, and they were both born in November 2018 in China after a rogue geneticist used CRISPR to change both of their genomes. Those edits, however, were very small, and will probably not manifest themselves in any detectable way as the babies grow up, meaning Blade Runner‘s prediction that there would be genetically engineered adults with meaningfully enhanced strength, intelligence, and looks in 2019 failed to come true. This is because it has proven very hard to edit human genes without accidentally damaging the target gene or some other one, and because most human traits (height, IQ, strength, etc.) are each controlled by dozens or hundreds of different genes, each having a small effect.
For example, there’s no single gene that controls a human’s intelligence level; there are probably over 1,000 genes that, in aggregate, determine how smart the person is and in what areas (math, verbal, musical). If you use CRISPR to flip any one of those genes in the “smart” direction, it will raise the person’s IQ by 1 point, so you just have to flip 40 genes to create a genius. But CRISPR is an imprecise tool, so every time you use it to flip one gene, there’s a 20% chance that CRISPR will accidentally change a completely different gene as well, perhaps causing the person to have a higher risk of cancer, schizophrenia or a birth defect.
The discovery of CRISPR was a milestone in the history of genetic technology, and it improved our ability to do genetic engineering by leaps and bounds, but it’s simply not precise enough or safe enough to make humans with the major enhancements that the replicants had. We’ll have to wait for the next big breakthrough, I can’t predict when that will happen, and I doubt anyone else could since there’s no “trend line” for this area of technology.
That’s not to say that we couldn’t use existing (or near-term) genetic technologies to make humans with certain attributes. A technique called “preimplantation genetic screening” (PGS) involves the creation of several human zygotes through IVF, followed by gene sequencing of each zygote and implantation of the one with the best genetic traits in the mother. This isn’t true “genetic engineering,” but it accomplishes much the same thing. And you could sharply raise the odds of getting a zygote with specific characteristics if you did the IVF using sperm or eggs from adults who already had those those characteristics. For example, if you wanted to use genetic technology to make a physically strong person, you would get the sperm or eggs of a bodybuilder from a sperm/egg bank, use them for an IVF procedure, and then employ PGS to find the fertilized egg that had the most gene variants known to correlate with high strength. This would almost certainly yield a person of above-average physical strength, without making use of bona fide “genetic engineering.” There are no statistics on how many live babies have been produced through this two-step process, but if we assume just 0.1% of IVF procedures are of this type, then the number is over 8,000 globally as of this writing.
Furthermore, I can imagine how, within 20 years, genetic engineering could be applied to enhance the zygotes farther. Within that timeframe, we will probably discover which mitochondrial genes code for athleticism, and by using mitochondrial replacement therapy, we could tweak our PGS-produced zygote still farther. Let’s assume that there are ten nuclear genes coding for physical strength. The average person has five of those genes flipped to “weak” and five flipped to “strong,” resulting in average overall strength. Our carefully bred, deliberately selected zygote has nine genes flipped to “strong” and one flipped to “weak.” Since we only have to change one gene to genetically “max out” this zygote’s physical strength, the use of CRISPR is deemed an acceptable risk (error rates are lower than they were in 2019 anyway thanks to lab techniques discovered since then), and it works. The person grows up to be a top bodybuilder.
There will be genetically engineered super-soldiers. The leader of the replicant gang in Blade Runner is named “Roy Batty,” and he was designed with traits suited for military combat. Having governments or evil companies make genetically engineered or cloned super-soldiers is a common trope in sci fi, but I doubt it will ever happen, except perhaps in very small numbers.
First, I simply don’t believe that the government of any free country, and even most authoritarian ones, would be willing to undertake such a project. And even if one of them were, the diplomatic costs imposed by other countries on the basis of human rights would probably outweigh the benefits of having the small number of super-soldiers. Mass producing millions of super-soldiers to fill out an army (to be clear, there was no evidence of anything but than small-batch production in Blade Runner) is even less plausible, as it would be too fascist and dehumanizing a proposal for even the most hardline dictatorships. Censure from the international community would also be severe. What damage can you do with an army of genetic super-soldiers if years of economic sanctions have left you without any money for bullets?
Second, a country’s ability to make super-soldiers will be constrained by its ability to raise and educate them. In spite of their genetic endowments, the super-soldiers would only be effective in combat if they were educated to at least the high school level and psychologically well-adjusted, which means costly, multi-year investments would need to be made. Where would the state find enough women who were willing to be implanted with super-soldier embryos and carry them until birth? If the government coerced its women into doing this, the country would become an international pariah for sure, and its neighbors would strengthen their own armies out of concern at such derangement.
Who would raise the children? State-run orphanages are almost universally terrible at this, and too many of the super-soldiers would turn out to be mentally or emotionally unfit for military service, or perhaps fit, but no better overall than a non-genetically engineered soldier who was raised by a decent family. If the government instead forced families to raise the super-soldier kids, doubtless many would be damaged by family dysfunction at the hands of parents who didn’t want them or parents who raised them improperly.
Third, by the time we have the technology to make genetic super-soldiers at relatively low cost, and by the time any such super-soldiers get old enough to start military service, militaries will probably be switch to AIs and combat robots that are even better. As I predicted in my Starship Troopers review, a fully automated or 95% automated military force could exist as early as 2095.
And if the super-soldiers were all clones of each other, they could develop very close personal bonds, come to feel alienated from everyone else, and behave unpredictably as a group. Identical twins and triplets report having personal bonds that can’t be understood by other people.
That said, I think human genetic engineering will become widespread this century, it will enable us to make “super people” who will be like the most extraordinary “natural” humans alive today, some of those genetically engineered people will serve in armed forces and under private military contractors across the world, and they will perform their jobs excellently thanks to their genetically enhanced traits. While it’s possible that some of these “genetic super-soldiers” will be made by governments or illegally made by evil companies, people like that will be very small in number, and dwarfed by genetic super-soldiers who are the progeny of private citizens who decided, without government coercion, to genetically engineer their children. Those offspring will then enter the military through the same avenues as non-genetically engineered people, either by joining voluntarily or being drafted. Yes, there will be genetically engineered super-soldiers someday, but their presence in the military or in private security firms will be incidental, and not–except in some rare cases–because a government or company made them for that purpose and controlled their lives from birth.
There will be “artificial animals”. While visiting the luxurious office of a tycoon, Deckard sees the man’s pet owl flying around, and he’s told that it is “artificial.” Later, he comes across an artificial pet snake, whose scales (and presumably, all other body parts) were manufactured in labs and bear microscopic serial numbers. To the naked eye, both animals look indistinguishable from normal members of their species. It’s unclear whether “artificial” means “organic” like human replicants, or “mechanical” like robots with metal endoskeletons and computer chips for brains. We have failed to create the latter, and the robotic imitations of animals we have today are mostly toys that don’t look, move, or behave convincingly. Our progress achieving the former (replicant animals) is more equivocal.
Our technology is still far too primitive for us to be able to grow discrete body parts and organs in a lab and to seamlessly join them together to make healthy, fully functional animals. This is the likeliest process used to make the replicants, so in the strictest sense, we have failed to live up to vision Blade Runner had for 2019. However, we are able to genetically modify animals and have done so many times to hone our genetic engineering techniques. For example, Chinese scientists used CRISPR to make dogs that have twice the normal muscle mass. For all I know, they’re now the pets of a rich man like the film’s tycoon.
Barbra Streisand with her cloned dogs.
Additionally, we are reasonably good at cloning animals, and, considering the vagueness of the terms “artificial” and “bioengineered” as they are used in the film, it could be argued that they apply to clones. Cloning a cat costs about $25,000 and a dog about $50,000, putting the service out of reach for everyone but the rich, and there are several rich people who have cloned pets, most notably Barbra Streisand, who had two clones made of her beloved dog after it died. A celebrity of her stature owning cloned animals is somewhat analogous to Blade Runner‘s depiction of the tycoon who owned the artificial owl.
There will be non-token numbers of humans living off Earth. At several points in Blade Runner, references are made to the “off-world colonies,” which are space stations and/or celestial bodies that have significant human populations. Advertisements encourage Los Angelinos to consider moving there, which implies that the colonies are big enough and stable enough to house people other than highly trained astronauts. The locations of the colonies aren’t described, but I’ll assume they were in our solar system.
This prediction has clearly failed. The only off-world human presence is found on the International Space Station, it only has a token number of people (about six at any time) on it, only elite people can go there, and its small size and lack of self-sufficiency (cargo rockets must routinely resupply it) means it fails to meet the criteria for a “colony”.
There are no plans or funds available to expand the ISS enough to turn it into a true “space colony,” and in fact, it might be abandoned in the 2020s. Other space stations might be built over the next 20 years by various nations and conglomerates, but they will be smaller than the ISS and will only be open to highly trained astronauts.
While a manned Moon landing is possible in the next ten years (probably by Americans), I doubt a Moon base comparable in size and capabilities to the ISS will be built for at least 20 years (note that 14 years passed from when U.S. President Reagan declared the start of the ISS project and when the first part of it was launched into space, and no national leader has yet committed to building a Moon base, which would probably be even more expensive). In fact, in my Predictions blog post, I estimated that such a base wouldn’t exist until the 2060s. It would take decades longer for that base or any other on the Moon to get big enough to count as a “colony” that was also open to large numbers of average-caliber people. A Mars colony is an even more distant prospect due to the inherently higher costs and technological demands.
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.
Cars will be boxy and angular instead of streamlined. Many of the cars shown in the movie are boxy and faceted. While this may have looked futuristic to Americans in 1982, boxy, angular cars were in fact already on their way out, and would be mostly extinct by the mid-90s. The cars of Blade Runner look retro today, and no mass-produced, modern vehicles look like them.**
Deckard’s car.
A van
U.S. fuel economy standards sharply increased from 1975-85. Blade Runner was filmed in 1982, and its artistic vision was to some extent influenced by the aesthetics of the time, hence the boxy future cars.
The change to curvaceous, streamlined car bodies was driven by stricter automobile fuel efficiency requirements, enacted by the U.S. government in response to the Arab Oil Embargoes of the 1970s. Carmakers found that one of the easiest ways to make cars more fuel efficient was to streamline their exteriors to reduce air resistance.
A 1982 Toyota Corolla
A 2019 Toyota Corolla
Since there’s no reason to think vehicle fuel efficiency standards will ever come down (if anything, they will rise), there’s also no reason to expect boxy, angular cars to return.
Just after I’d finished analyzing this car prediction, look who showed up.
**IMPORTANT NOTE I’M ADDING AT THE LAST MINUTE: On November 21, 2019, Elon Musk debuted Tesla’s “Cybertruck” at an event in Los Angeles, and the vehicle is a trapezoidal, sharp-angled curiosity that looks fit for the dark streets of Blade Runner. While I doubt it heralds a shift in car design, and it’s possible the Cybertruck could be redesigned between now and its final release date in 2021, I’d be remiss not to mention it here.
Therapeutic cloning will be a mature technology. There’s a scene in the film where two fugitive replicants confront and kill the man who designed their eyes in his genetics lab. It further establishes the fact that the replicants are made of organic parts that are manufactured in separate labs and then assembled. This technology is called “therapeutic cloning,” and today it is decades less advanced than Blade Runner predicted it would be.
Two replicants confronting the geneticist who designed their eyes.
We are unable to grow fully-functional human organs like eyes in labs, and can barely grow rudimentary human tissues using the same techniques. The field of regenerative medicine research was in fact dealt a serious blow recently, when a leading scientist and doctor Paolo Macchiarini was exposed as a fraud. Dr. Macchiarini gained worldwide fame for his technique of helping people with terminal trachea problems by removing tracheas from cadavers, replacing the dead host’s cells with stem cells from the intended recipient, and then transplanting the engineered trachea into the sick person. For a time, his work was touted as proof that therapeutic cloning was rapidly advancing, and that maybe Blade Runner levels of the technology would exist by 2019. Unfortunately, time revealed that Macchiarini had faked the results in his medical papers, and that most of his patients died soon after receiving their engineered tracheas.
The actual state-of-the-art in 2019 is lab-made bladders. Being merely an elastic bag, a bladder is much simpler than an eye.
Legitimate work in regenerative medicine is overwhelmingly confined to labs and involves animal experiments, and there are no signs of an impending breakthrough that will enable us to start making fully functional organs and tissues that can be surgically implanted in humans and expected to survive for non-trivial lengths of time. The best the field can muster at present is a few dozen procedures globally each year, in which a small amount of simple tissue, such as a bladder or skin graft, is made in the lab and implanted in a patient under the most stringent conditions. (Of note, only a small fraction of people with missing or non-functional bladders have received engineered bladders, and the preferred treatment is to do surgery [called a “urostomy”] so the person’s urine drains out of their abdomens through a hole and into an externally-worn plastic bag.) As noted in my Predictions blog entry, I don’t think therapeutic cloning will be a mature field until about 2100.
Advertisements will be everywhere. In Blade Runner, entire sides of buildings in L.A. have been turned into huge, glowing, live-action billboards advertising products. This prediction was right in spirit, but wrong in its specifics: Advertisements are indeed omnipresent, and the average person in Los Angeles is probably more exposed to ads in 2019 than they would have been in 1982. However, the ads are overwhelmingly conveyed through telecommunications and digital media (think of TV and radio commercials, internet popup ads, browser sidebar ads, and auto-play videos), and not through gigantic billboards. Partly, I think this is because huge video billboards would be too distracting–particularly if they also played audio–and would invite constant lawsuits from city dwellers who found them ruinous of open spaces and peace.
Which is worse: Huge video billboards or being constantly pummeled with spam emails, digital ads, and the knowledge that your personal internet data is being sold and traded without your control?
No one will turn on the lights. Blade Runner is a dark movie. No, I mean literally dark: Almost all of the scenes are set at night, and no one in the movie believes in turning on anything but dim lights. It may have been a bold, iconic look from a cinematography standpoint, but it’s not an accurate depiction of 2019. People do not prefer dimmer lights now, and in fact, nighttime artificial light exposure is higher than at any point in human history: satellites have confirmed that the amount of “light pollution” emanating from the Earth’s surface (mainly from street lights and exterior building lights) is greater than ever and still growing. Also, people now spend so much time staring into glowing screens (smartphones, computer monitors, TVs) that circadian rhythm disruption has become a public health problem.
If your light is so bright that it can be seen in space, then you’re wasting a lot of electricity.
Intriguingly, I don’t think this trend will continue forever, and I think it’s possible the world will someday be much darker than now. I intend to fully flesh out this idea in another blog entry, but basically, as machines get smarter and better, the need for nighttime illumination will drop. Autonomous cars will have night vision, so they won’t need bright headlights or bright streetlights to see the road. Streetlights will also be infused with “smart” technology, and will save energy by turning themselves off when no cars are around. And if intelligent machines replace humans (and/or if we evolve into a higher form), then everyone on Earth will have night vision as well, which will almost eliminate the need for all exterior lights.
Note that, in controlled environments, machines can already function in the dark or with only the dimmest of lights. This is called “lights-out manufacturing.” As machines get smarter and move from factories and labs to public spaces, they will bring this ability with them. My prediction merely seizes upon a proof of concept and expands upon it.
It will be possible to implant fake memories in people. Very early in a replicant’s life, he or she is implanted with fake memories. The process by which this is done is never revealed, but it is sophisticated enough to fill the subject’s mind with seeming decades of memories that are completely real to them. We lack the ability to do this, though psychological experiments have shown in principle that people can be tricked into slowly accepting false memories.
Since memories exist as physical arrangements of neurons in a person’s brain and as enduring patterns of electrochemical signaling within a brain, it should be possible in principle to alter a person’s brain in a way that implants a false memory in him or her, or any other discrete piece of knowledge or skill. However, this would require fantastically advanced technology (probably some combination of direct brain electrical stimulation, hypnosis, full-immersion virtual reality, drugs, and perhaps nanomachines) that we won’t have for at least 100 years. This is VERY far out there, along with being able to build humans from different body parts grown in different labs.
Computer monitors and TVs will be deep, and there will not be any thin displays. In one scene, we get a good look at a personal computer, and it appears to have an old-fashioned CRT monitor, and is almost a foot deep. Additionally, flat-panel TVs, computer monitors, laptops, or tablets and never seen in the film. This is a largely inaccurate depiction of 2019, as flat-panel screens are ubiquitous, and the average person owns several flat-screen devices that they interact with countless times per day.
Deckard sitting on his couch while looking at his computer screen. It looks like there might also be a second screen at the far right, facing away from him. Note that he doesn’t like turning on the lights.
I said the depiction was largely inaccurate because, even though CRT monitors and TVs are obsolete and haven’t been manufactured in ten years, millions of them are still in use in homes and businesses across the world, mainly among poor people and old people who lack the money or interest in upgrading. There’s even a subculture of younger people who prefer using old CRT TVs for playing video games because the picture looks better in some ways than it does on the best, modern OLED displays. In short, while it’s increasingly rare and unusual for people to have deep, CRT computer monitors in their homes, it is common enough that this scene from Blade Runner can be considered accurate in its depiction.
The median and mean lifespan of a CRT TV is 15 years, and almost none of them last more than 30 years. With that in mind, functional CRT monitors will not be in use by 2039, except among antique collectors. The Baby Boomers will be dead by then, and their kids will have thrown away any CRT screens they were clinging to.
People will talk with computers. Deckard’s apartment building has a controlled entry security feature: anyone who enters the elevator must speak his or her name, and the “voice print” must match with someone authorized to have access to the building, or else the elevator won’t go up. Also, in his apartment, Deckard uses voice commands to interface with his personal computer. Blade Runner correctly predicted that voice-user interfaces would be common in 2019, though it incorrectly envisioned how we would use them.
Electronic, controlled entry security technology in common areas of apartment buildings, like elevators and lobbies, are very common, but overwhelmingly involve using plastic cards and key fobs to unlock scanner-equipped doors. In fact, I’ve never seen a voice-unlocked door or elevator, and think most people would feel silly using one for whatever reason.
Smart speakers like the Amazon Echo are also very common and can only be interfaced with via speech. Modern smartphones and tablets can also be controlled with spoken commands, but it’s rare to see people doing this.
This brings up the valuable point that, though speech is an intuitive means of communication, we’ve found that older means of interface involving keyboards, mice, and reading words on a screen are actually better ways to interact with technology for most purposes, and they are not close to obsolescence (and might never be). An inherent problem with talking with a computer is you lose privacy since anyone within earshot knows what you’re doing. Also, while continuous speech recognition technology is now excellent, the error rates are still high enough to make it an aggravating way to input data into a machine compared to using buttons. Entering complex data into a computer, such as you would do for a computer programming task, is also much faster and easier with a keyboard, and anything involving graphical design or manipulation of digital objects on a screen is best done with a mouse or a stylus.
To understand, watch this clip of Deckard talking to his computer, and think about whether it would be easier or harder to do that image manipulation task using a mouse, with intuitive click-and-drag abilities to move around the image, and a trackball for zooming in and out: https://youtu.be/QkcU0gwZUdg
Deckard holding a photograph he found.
Hard copy photographs are still around. In that scene, Deckard does the image manipulation on a photograph that he found. He inserts it into a slot in his computer, and it scans it and shows the digital scan on his screen. While hard-copy photographs are still being made in 2019, they’re very uncommon, especially when compared to the number of photographs that were taken this year across the planet, but never transferred from digital format to a physical medium. I doubt that even 0.01% of the personal photographs ordinary people take are ever printed onto paper, and I doubt this will ever change.
Image scanners will be common. The computer’s ability to make a digital copy of a physical image of course means it has a built-in scanner. This proved a realistic prediction, as flatbed scanners with excellent image scan fidelity levels cost under $100. When Blade Runner was filmed, scanners were physically large, very expensive, made low-quality image conversions, and were almost unknown to the general public.
Cameras will take ultra high-resolution photos. The photo that Deckard analyzes is extremely detailed and has a very high pixel count, allowing him to use his computer to zoom in on small sections of it and to still see the images clearly. In particular, after zooming in on the round mirror hanging on the wall (upper right quadrant of the photo shown above), he spots an image of one of the replicants. While grainy, he can still make out her face and upper body.
It’s impossible to tell from the film sequence exactly how high-res the photo is, but today we have consumer-grade cameras that can take photos that are about as detailed. The Fujufilm XT30 costs $800 and is reasonably compact, putting it within the range of average-income people, and it takes very high quality 26.1 MP photos. One of its photos is shown above, and if you download the non-compressed version from the source website and open it in an imaging app, you’ll be able to zoom in on the rear left window of the car far enough to see the patterns of the decals and to read the words printed on them. (https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/12/18306026/fujifilm-xt30-camera-review-fuji-xt3-mirrorless)
Firearms will still be in use. The only handheld weapons we see in the film are handguns that use gunpowder to shoot out metal bullets. One is shown for only a split-second at the start of the movie when a replicant shoots a human, and the other is seen several times in Deckard’s hands. It’s big, bulky, looks like it shoots more powerful bullets than average, and has some glowing lights that seem to do nothing. In short, it’s nothing special, and probably isn’t any better than handguns that most Americans can easily buy for $500 today. Thus, the depiction the 2019’s state-of-the-art weaponry is accurate.
Deckard pointing his pistol.
And I do say “state-of-the-art” because, being an elite bounty hunter on an important mission to kill abnormally strong, dangerous people, Deckard has his choice of weapons, and it says a lot that he picks a regular gunpowder handgun instead of something exotic and stereotypically futuristic like a laser pistol. As noted in my reviews of The Terminator and Starship Troopers, we shouldn’t expect firearms to become obsolete for a very long time, and possibly never.
Video phone calls and pay phones will be common. There’s a scene where Deckard uses a public pay phone to make a video call to a love interest. This depiction of 2019 turned out to be half right and half wrong, but for the better: Pay phones have nearly disappeared because even poor people have cell phones (which are more convenient to use). Video call technology is mature and widespread, the calls can be made for free through apps like Skype and Google Hangouts, and even low-end smartphones can support them.
It’s surprising that video calls, long a staple of science fiction, became a reality during the 2010s with hardly anyone noticing and the world not changing in any major way. Also surprising is the fact that most people still prefer doing voice-only calls and texting, which is even more lacking in personal substance and emotional conveyance. Like talking with computers, using video calls to converse with other humans has proved more trouble than it’s worth in most cases.
In the year 2029, Earth is a dystopian nuclear wasteland where small groups of humans fight a years-long war for survival against a hostile artificial intelligence (AI) named “Skynet.” Originally built by the U.S. military in the 1990s to run defense systems, Skynet became so powerful and complex that, to the surprise of its creators, it achieved true intelligence and free will. It quickly concluded that all humans were a threat to its existence, so it instigated a global nuclear war, killing billions of people outright. In the aftermath, Skynet built its own army of combat robots, and set them loose hunting down and destroying the humans who had survived.
Thanks to the leadership and genius of a general named “John Connor,” the humans managed to turn the war in their favor after several years. In 2029, as human forces closed in on Skynet’s headquarters, the AI used a time machine to send a combat robot–played by Arnold Schwarzenegger–back to 1984, on a mission to kill John Connor’s mother, Sarah. Doing that would eliminate John from the timeline, handing victory to Skynet. The combat robot in question has a humanoid metal body covered in flesh and skin, so it looks like a human, and it is called a “Terminator.”
After destroying Skynet, the victorious human forces seize the time machine and send one of their best soldiers, a man named “Kyle Reese” back to 1984 to stop the Terminator. The film then becomes a race against time as the two agents try to find the unsuspecting, young Sarah Connor.
Analysis:
There will be VTOL aircraft that use tilting turbofans or tilting jet engines. In the post-apocalyptic world of 2029, Skynet uses a variety of killer robots of different shapes and sizes to hunt down the remnants of humankind, including “Aerial Hunter-Killers,” which are large, autonomous aircraft that use either swiveling turbofan engines or swiveling jet engines (I can’t tell by looking at them) for propulsion. To hover, the engines swivel downward to point their exhaust straight at the ground, and to move forward, the engines swivel 90 degrees to point backwards. There are already warplanes that are passingly similar to this, but nothing exactly like the aircraft shown in the film will exist by 2029, or even 2049.
An Aerial Hunter-Killer combat machine from The Terminator
The basic problem with the Aerial Hunter-Killer is that it would gobble up enormous amounts of fuel while in “hover mode,” as illustrated in the graphic below. It would count as a “Lift-fan” aircraft, and its position on the Y-axis shows it would consume three times as much fuel as a helicopter and twice as much power as a tilt-rotor aircraft like a V-22 while hovering. (The X-axis has little to do with this analysis, but for edification, it indicates how fast the lift-generating devices would have to blow air down at the ground to make the aircraft hover. A helicopter blows a broad column of vapor down at the ground at slow speed, while a direct lift aircraft blows a narrow column of vapor down at the ground at high speed.)
An aircraft with a lift-fan propulsion system would be unsuited for the kind of low-altitude hovering and slow forward movement that Skynet used the Aerial Hunter-Killers for. A helicopter or tilt rotor aircraft configured for ground attack would have been a much better choice. I suspect they weren’t chosen for the film because they don’t look futuristic enough.
The closest thing we could have to an Aerial Hunter-Killer in 2029 would be a V-22 Osprey that is armed with forward-facing machine guns and missiles. The armaments are in development now (the V-22 was conceived as a transport aircraft, and adding heavy weapons to it is a new idea) and could be ready by then, giving it the ability to attack ground targets while hovering or at least while flying slowly over the ground. However, the V-22 is designed to be flown by humans and not computers, but something like the Aurora Flight Science drop-in autonomous flight conversion system could someday be installed in the V-22. I doubt the technology will be good enough for low-altitude combat against ground targets by 2029, though 2039 is plausible. The aircraft can carry up to 20,000 lbs of internal cargo,
Like the Aerial Hunter-Killer, the V-22 Osprey has large engines at the ends of its wings, but they are in the form of rotors instead of turbofans.
So yeah. Aerial Hunter-Killers won’t exist by 2029, but by 2039, something that is essentially the same (i.e. – a large, scary, computer-controlled, tilt-engine aircraft that can attack ground targets while flying at very low altitude) could. But again, I don’t think using the tactics shown in The Terminator will make sense, since flying low and slow in a combat zone makes you vulnerable to enemy fire.
Also note that the F-35B fighter plane is in service already and demonstrates that turbofans can be used to hover, albeit inefficiently. But unlike the Aerial Hunter-Killers, the plane’s engine doesn’t swivel. Instead, the rear exhaust nozzle swivels down towards the ground and smaller nozzles under either wing open. As the pilot increases engine power, the turbofan blades spin faster, air is sucked into the front inlets of the plane, and the hot exhaust exits the plane through the three downward nozzles, causing the plane to move in the opposite direction and to hover. The turbofan engine also supplies power to a “lift fan” behind the cockpit, which spins its own fan blades to blow air down at the ground, helping the plane to rise in the air. Hot engine exhaust comes out of the three nozzles, while cold, ambient air blows out of the lift fan.
The F-35B hovers by shooting down hot exhaust from three nozzles and cold air from one fan. All of the air movement is powered by the plane’s turbofan engine.
The F-35’s turbofan engine drives its separate lift fan.
The F-35B has VTOL so it can take off from small aircraft carriers and remote bases that lack runways. Vertical takeoffs and landings gobble up huge amounts of fuel, so F-35B’s have shorter ranges and can’t carry as many bombs and missiles as their non-VTOL cousins, the F-35A and F-35C. Once an F-35B get airborne, it closes its underwing nozzles, turns off its lift fan, and points its rear exhaust nozzle straight back so it flies just like a normal plane, with lift being efficiently generated by air flowing over its wings. The plane completes its mission in that configuration, and if tasked with destroying a group of enemy soldiers on the ground, it would do a high-speed bombing attack. Even though it could if it wanted to, the F-35B wouldn’t transform back into VTOL flight mode to slowly hover above the group of enemy troops to attack them like an “Aerial Hunter-Killer.”
In defense of the Aerial Hunter-Killer’s plausibility, Skynet had clearly invented some type of extremely energy-dense batteries or mini-reactors, evidenced by the Terminator’s ability to engage in near-continuous physical activity and high-level cognition for days without recharging. If the same technology were incorporated into the aircraft, then fuel inefficiency would be much less of a concern. However, no technological trends suggest that energy sources will be that much better by 2029 or even 2039.
The Aerial Hunter-Killer might also make sense if the humans’ antiaircraft lasers have proven very effective at shooting down aircraft. In real life, this is considered to be one of the roles that military lasers will be best suited for, thanks to their high power, long range and instant speed. They might turn out to be more devastating weapons in that regard than we now assume. High losses might have forced Skynet to build aircraft that fly fast and low to the ground, using speed and the ability to hide behind hills and structures to hinder the enemy’s ability to aim and fire lasers at them before they disappeared from view or had killed the enemy. Flying low and fast, Aerial Hunter-Killers would appear at one end of the horizon and disappear at the other end in a matter of seconds. An inherent problem with laser weapons is that clouds, smoke, and fog can easily block their beams, but the Los Angeles area gets few clouds or fog. (Maybe Skynet uses more conventional robot aircraft against people in London.) I doubt the antiaircraft lasers of 2029 will be so effective that plane tactics and designs will need to be changed to resemble the Aerial Hunter-Killers.
There will be armored vehicles the size of houses. Another kind of fearsome combat robot Skynet uses against humans in 2029 is a ground-based Hunter-Killer Tank. It’s much larger than contemporary tanks, and has a faintly anthropomorphic “mast” or “turret” that has a central sensor cluster and laser cannon “arms” on either side. While scary and surely powerful, I doubt armored vehicles like this will exist in 2029, or for a long time (if ever) afterward.
Metal wheels and human skulls.
This screenshot shows that a presumably adult human skull is half the diameter of one of the Hunter-Killer’s suspension wheels. The median distance between the top of an adult’s head and his upper row of teeth is 7.3″. So let’s say that the diameter of one of the suspension wheels is 15″. Using that figure, we can do some basic photo forensics on this picture of a model of the film prop to deduce that the vehicle’s overall length is about 33.4 feet, and it is about 20 feet high at the top of its mast.
The ground-based Hunter-Killer is significantly larger than modern tanks, like the American M1 Abrams, which is 26 feet long (not counting the length of the barrel) and 8 feet high. However, the Hunter-Killer is by no means infeasible to build, as vehicles that are as big or bigger already exist and are robust enough for industrial use.
The Caterpillar 797 dump truck (top) is actually larger than one of Skynet’s Hunter-Killer tanks, being 24′ high and 50′ long. The Krupp Bagger (bottom) is an even bigger industrial vehicle used for strip mining, and weighs more than some warships.
While there’s been talk in Russia and some Western countries of building enlarged tanks that can wield bigger cannons (150mm+), any such future tanks wouldn’t be nearly as big as the Hunter-Killer tanks. Regardless, considering typical military R&D and procurement timeframes, even if a country were to commit to building a bigger tank right now, it probably wouldn’t be in the field by 2029.
I admit there could be some logic to the Hunter-Killer tank’s design given its mission and operating environment. The wide caterpillar tracks and high ground clearance would enable it to drive over the wreckage-strewn terrain of bombed-out Los Angeles. Having its weapons mounted on a high mast instead of in a traditional, squat turret would give it a bigger firing arc and let it shoot down over urban rubble to zap humans who commonly use it as cover. Since its laser guns don’t produce recoil, the weapons could be mounted high without threat of them tipping over the vehicle when firing. It makes sense to install the vehicle’s sensors on its highest point to give them the widest field of view, and in fact this is established practice in contemporary tank design. The Hunter-Killer tank might also be large because there’s no other way to fit a power source big enough to support the laser guns. Existing laser weapons are major energy hogs.
All of that said, I still don’t think it would make sense to build Hunter-Killer tanks for at least two reasons. First, vehicles that large would also be so heavy that they’d collapse bridges if they tried crossing them, seriously limiting their mobility. The weight would also reduce their fuel efficiency and range. Second, there are cheaper weapons that could do all the same things as Hunter-Killer tanks just as well. For example, the robot tank I described in my other blog entry could, if cheaply modded with a Mark 19 grenade launcher, pose just as much of a threat to human enemies.
My tank’s 125mm main gun and .50 caliber machine gun could kill humans and blow up their cars as well as the Hunter-Killer tank’s laser gun. My tank’s detachable UAV could also feed bird-eye-view footage to my tank from high up in the air, providing better situational awareness than the Hunter-Killer’s mast-mounted sensors, which are a puny 20 feet above the ground. My tank’s grenade launcher could also lob bombs over rubble and other obstacles that my UAV tells me humans are hiding behind, which might be better than the benefit the Hunter-Killer gets from having its guns so high that it can point them at down angles to shoot the same hiding people. My tank would also be a much smaller target, making it harder for the humans to hit, and four or five of my tanks could probably be made for the money and metal that goes into one Hunter-Killer tank. The only advantage the Hunter-Killer might have is better mobility thanks to its bigger caterpillar tracks, but my army could fix this by using armored, robot bulldozers to periodically clear some of Los Angeles’ roads (military engineer units commonly do this sort of thing in combat zones).
There will be laser and/or plasma weapons. Skynet’s Hunter-Killer planes and tanks have advanced weapons that shoot colored rays that inflict thermal damage on their targets. The humanoid Terminator robots and human infantrymen carry smaller versions of these. It’s unclear what principles these weapons operate under, but in the infamous “gun shop scene,” Schwarzenegger asks the clerk for a “phased plasma rifle in the 40 watt range,” indicating that at least some of the future weapons could be firing bolts of plasma. Of course, that doesn’t rule out the possibility that some of the other future weapons could have been laser guns. Laser weapons capable of killing humans with a single shot are already being tested, and will be in service with the U.S. military by 2029, but plasma weapons won’t. In fact, plasma weapons might be inherently impractical to build at any point in the future.
One of a Hunter-Killer tank’s energy weapons firing
“Plasma” is the fourth state of matter, the others being solid, liquid, and gaseous. Substances generally turn into plasma only at very high temperatures, and in that state, they can be thought of as gases in which the electrons have separated from the positively-charged nucleus of each atom comprising the gas. Stars are giant balls of plasma, and we can use technology to make plasma here on Earth. Plasma torches, for instance, use electricity to superheat gases to the point that they turn into plasma and shoot out of the torches in the form of a bright jet of vapor that is hot enough to melt through metal. If you pressed one of these against a person, it would rapidly burn through their flesh and bone, and could kill them.
A plasma torch can cut metal at very close range, but it can’t do any damage to things more than a few feet away.
The problem is, plasma dissipates very rapidly, and it strongly interacts with the particles in our atmosphere, making it a very short-ranged weapon. Even if it had a massive power source, there’s simply no way that a plasma weapon could be made to fire “bolts” of plasma that would stay coherent for long enough to strike targets 100 feet away, as was shown in the movie’s future combat scenes. (Read this interesting essay for details http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Essays/PlasmaWeapons.html ) This is why the “phased plasma rifle in the 40 watt range” line was nonsensical, and added to the script purely because it was cool-sounding techno jargon. Plasma rifles and cannons just can’t be built.
Laser weapons, on the other hand, are almost ready for frontline military service. Lasers are concentrated beams of light and consist of photons, which, unlike plasma, have no charge. However, a laser is similar in the sense that it damages objects by rapidly heating them up so they catch on fire or melt.
A laser’s destructive potential is determined by the amount of energy it transfers to the target is strikes. The common unit of measurement is Watts, which is the number of Joules of energy transferred in one second. Lasers “in the 40 watt range” are used today for engraving and etching things like customized wooden plaques and tombstones. Shining a 40 watt laser beam on a fixed point on someone’s shirt would cause it to catch on fire in less than five seconds. Doing the same to their exposed skin would cause immediate pain and a second-degree burn. This isn’t a pleasant weapon to have used on you, but it pales in comparison to the destructive potential of a modern firearm.
This 50 watt laser has been dialed down to 22.5 watts, and can cut through a 3mm thick panel of wood quickly. This is from a YouTube instructional video where a hobbyist shows how to make small knick-knacks.
Lasers capable of causing the sort of instant, catastrophic, explosive damage to human bodies as depicted in the film need to be in the kilowatt (1 kW = 1,000 Watts) power range. In 2014, the U.S. Navy installed a 30 kW laser, creatively named the “Laser Weapons System” (LaWS), on one of its ships for field trials, and the video clips of the firing tests show it inflicts about the same damage on objects as the laser guns on Skynet’s Hunter-Killers did.
Footage of a 30 kW laser instantly causing part of boat to explode in flames. It would cause massive injuries to a human body. One of Kyle Reese’s comrades is struck by one of a Hunter-Killer tank’s energy beams and literally explodes. A hit from a 30 kW laser would cause similar damage.
The U.S. Navy now plans to install the even more powerful HELIOS lasers (60 kW) on some of its ships for combat use in 2021, for destroying light targets like drone aircraft and speedboats. Even if the deadline slips–which would not be surprising–it’s reasonable to predict that the lasers will be in service by 2029.
There will be handheld laser and/or plasma weapons. In the movie’s future combat scenes, the human soldiers and Terminators use rifle-sized weapons that shoot out beams of colored light and inflict thermal damage on whatever they hit (e.g. – small explosion of sparks and a popping noise). And Schwarzenegger would not have asked for a “phased plasma rifle in the 40 watt range” at the gun shop unless he expected it to be a small arm like the other weapons kept in such a place. Laser guns with the same ammunition capacity and destructive power as those shown in the film will not be rifle-sized by 2029, I doubt they ever will, and even if they could be made someday, I don’t see why anyone would pick them over rifles that shoot out metal bullets.
A human soldier at the instant a Terminator shoots him with a laser rifle. The hit causes a flash, an explosion sound, and obvious injury (the man falls down). A 1 kW beam would do something like this.
The first big obstacle to making laser rifles (let alone anything as small as laser pistols) is energy storage. Let’s assume that the laser rifles in the film had power outputs of 1 kW per second, meaning if the rifle shoots a laser beam onto an object for one second, it will have transferred 1 kW of energy into the object. That means the laser must have a power source plugged into its back end that can discharge 1 kW of energy in one second. That’s about the same amount of electricity as a typical American household uses at any given time (i.e. – enough electricity to simultaneously run a central heater or air conditioner, at least one refrigerator, possibly a water heater and stove, and several lights and personal electronic devices). It’s a lot of energy, and it requires a physically large and heavy power source, which militates against the requirement that the weapon be rifle-sized.
It gets worse. No machine is 100% efficient at converting energy input into energy output, so the power source will need to feed the laser more than 1 kW of electricity to make a 1 kW laser beam come out the other end. Most of today’s lasers are only 25 – 30% efficient at converting electricity into laser beams, so our hypothetical laser rifle’s power source would need to be able to discharge enough electricity to power about four American houses at once. Even if we assume that future AIs like Skynet will make breakthroughs in laser technology, raising the energy conversion efficiency to 50%, the weapons would still be energy hogs.
It gets worse. For the laser rifles to be useful and practical, they’ll need to be able to fire many, one-second laser beams from a single “energy clip.” Ideally, the laser rifle and a few extra energy clips would provide the soldier with about 300 shots, which is what an infantryman with a modern, gunpowder assault rifle has, and without weighing much more. The laser rifle’s rate of fire will also need to be reasonably fast, as the weapon will put its user at a fatal disadvantage in combat if it needs 10 seconds or more to “recharge” between shots. So the power source needs to be able to do at least 300, 2 kW electrical discharges, and for there to be no more than, say, five seconds (approximate time for a soldier with a gunpowder rifle to make an aimed shot) between each discharge. The energy storage devices we presently have, such as batteries, supercapacitors and fuel cells, fall badly short of these competing requirements. And even if a material with the necessary energy density demanded by these clips existed, when fully charged, it would be so volatile that it would explode like a stick of dynamite if slightly damaged. The clips might be more useful as grenades.
It gets worse. Remember when we agreed that our laser rifle has a generous 50% efficiency level thanks to future technology invented by Skynet, so that if we put 2 kW of electricity in one end a 1 kW laser beam comes out the other end? Well, the 1 kW of electricity that is “lost” inside the weapon doesn’t simply disappear; thanks to the Law of Conservation of Energy most of it is converted into waste heat. This would rapidly heat up the whole laser rifle until it would burn the skin of the person holding it (this would also make the user very visible to anyone on the battlefield with thermal sights). This problem can be mitigated with metal radiators and with heavy-duty cooling systems that circulate water and blow air around the lasers (the “laser tube” gets the hottest, but the weapon’s energy clips would also get hot because they’d be rapidly discharging electricity), but they add major cost and bulk to the whole weapon system, and can’t be miniaturized to rifle-size.
But even assuming that all of these technical problems were solved, why would anyone choose a laser rifle over an assault rifle that shoots out bullets? In the film’s future battle scenes, it doesn’t look like Skynet’s fighting machines would have been less effective if armed with low-tech bullets, tank shells, and mortars. After all, the humans had no armored vehicles and seemed to be wearing floppy cloth uniforms that bullets would have penetrated. Building gigantic war machines armed with complicated laser weapons seems like a resource allocation mistake that a highly logical AI like Skynet wouldn’t make. Even if very advanced laser weapons are invented someday, I think bullets, missiles, and bombs will retain important advantages, and will be preferred for many common needs.
Let me conclude this topic by saying that, while rifle-sized 1 kW lasers will probably never enter common use, 40 watt lasers that Schwarzenegger could have been referencing might. Getting hit with a one-second long beam from a 40 watt laser wouldn’t kill you, but it would permanently blind you if it hit your eyes. And as I said earlier, if the beam were focused on your shirt for a few seconds, it would light it on fire, causing you to panic and start flailing around. Within a few decades, I can imagine a laser weapon the size of a large rifle, firing lasers in the range of 40 watts, being technically feasible. If paired with a rapid, precise targeting system (such as a humanoid combat robot that can aim weapons better than a human soldier), it could be used to silently “snipe” unsuspecting soldiers up to a half mile away, to blind enemy pilots in low-flying aircraft, and to fry the sensors on enemy vehicles and missiles at the same ranges. The Geneva Conventions forbid laser weapons that blind people because they are too inhumane, but it’s always possible that the Conventions might be revoked in the future, or that humanity could find itself warring with a machine opponent like Skynet that never agreed to them in the first place.
Also there are two types of lasers: 1) continuous beam lasers and 2) pulsed beam lasers. The first type continuously emits photons, producing a long, unbroken laser beam. The second switches on and off very rapidly, producing many short laser beams that follow the same path. The switching happens so fast (a pulsed laser can produce thousands or millions of short beams in a second) that it looks like one, unbroken beam to human eyes, so we can’t see the difference between the two types of lasers.
Therefore, while Schwarzenegger’s request for a “phased plasma rifle in the 40 watt range” made no sense, asking for a “PULSED LASER rifle in the 40 watt range” would have used correct terminology and have referred to a plausible type of weapon. I’m going to email James Cameron so he can do a Director’s re-release of the film.
The energy weapon is probably four feet long
Two-thirds of the way through the film, Kyle Reese has a flashback to an incident where a Terminator infiltrated an underground human base and used an energy weapon to kill many people. Though the weapon is bulkier and longer than most rifles, it could still be deemed a “rifle.” Something that looks like a sling is visible coming out of the back of it. Replace that with a power cord that is connected to a backpack containing batteries and a heat radiator, and the entire system would fairly resemble a 40-watt laser weapon that could be built within a few decades.
Why make small numbers of big Hunter-Killer attack vehicles that the humans can easily see and keep track of, instead of large numbers of small-to-medium-sized Hunter-Killers that the humans would struggle to keep track of? Dog-like robots that could quietly roam the wasteland and crawl inside all the collapsed buildings and sewer holes and use integral assault rifles to shoot humans they found would be devastating weapons, and hundreds of them could probably be made for the price of one Hunter-Killer tank.
Some robots will be indistinguishable from humans. Unlike the Hunter-Killers, which are general-purpose combat vehicles meant to fight humans in open terrain, the Terminators are specialized for infiltration of underground human bases. They are made to look externally identical to people so they can gain entry, and once inside, they use small arms to kill people. As I said in my review of the movie Prometheus, I think machines like this will exist by the year 2100, and quite possibly a few years before that. They will be able to pass for human, even under close-range visual inspection, thanks to fake, non-organic skin and hair. Androids like this won’t exist by 2029 for a variety of reasons.
Some robots will have organic parts. When Kyle Reese first tells Sarah Connor that Schwarzenegger is actually a “T-800” robot, he explains that the earlier “600 series” of robots were easy to spot because they had fake-looking rubber skin. The T-800s have layers of real human muscle, skin, hair, and other tissue around their metal skeletons, making them look identical to humans. Kyle Reese explains that the human tissue is grown in cloning labs and then grafted onto the metal robot bodies. As I said in my most recent Future Predictions blog entry, I don’t think therapeutic cloning technology will be advanced enough to make whole human organs and large amounts of tissue (like muscles and skin) until the 2050s.
More time will be needed to figure out how to graft cloned human biomass onto metal robots and to keep the biomass nourished and healthy. Consider that, if you grow a large flap of skin in a lab and surgically graft it onto the body of a human burn victim, then the new skin links with the person’s blood vessels, nervous systems, and immune system, which keep the patch of new skin fed with oxygen and calories and protected from infections. But if you graft that same flap of skin onto the metal frame of a robot, there’s no organic support system for it at all, so it will die and rot away.
There are two solutions to this problem, both of which require very advanced technology that we’ll have to wait long after 2050 to have: 1) Genetically engineer the tissue so that biological functions normally done by specialized human organs are instead done by patches of the tissue. For example, red blood cells are made inside of human bones, but since a T-800 would only have metal bones, then the T-800’s muscle cells would need to be genetically modified to also make red blood cells. The resulting tissue would look human to the naked eye, but would have so many DNA modifications that it wouldn’t be genetically “human.” 2) Include artificial organs in the T-800s metal frame that interface with the exterior layers of human tissue, and perform the support functions normally done by biological organs. For example, the T-800 could have an artificial heart made of metal and plastic, connected to the blood vessels of its human tissue. The artificial organ would pump blood through the tissue, just like an organic heart would.
While making a robot that is “living tissue over a metal endoskeleton” will be possible someday, it won’t happen by 2029, and I don’t think it will be necessary if the goal is to design an android that looks externally identical to humans. Given what’s already possible with hyperrealistic sculptures, synthetic materials like silicone should be able to mimic the look and feel of human tissue and skin in the future.
Some robots will be bullet-proof. Schwarzenegger’s metal robot body is nearly immune to every bullet that hits him, including those from a shotgun absorbed during a shootout in a dance club, and others from an M-16 fired into his back at close range at a police station. However, he is not completely impervious to damage, as we see during a gruesome “self-repair” scene where he uses hand tools to fix his forearm after it was hit by a shotgun blast, and late in the film when being run over by a truck hurts his leg, and then a stick of dynamite blows him in half. We can already make robots with this level of damage resistance today, and I am sure that future combat robots will have at least this much armor.
A man slides a ceramic plate into a bullet proof vest. The plate adds weight, but also the ability to stop bigger bullets.
Schwarzenegger’s damage threshold is the same as that provided by Level 4 body armor, which typically takes the form of a heavy ceramic plate that a soldier slides into an oversized “pocket” covering the front of his bullet proof vest. A common, 1/2 inch thick steel plate provides the same level of protection at lower cost but more weight, and I’m sure there are many metal alloys that as strong as the previous two, but lighter. It would be entirely possible to build a human-sized robot now that had integrated Level 4 armor, particularly if weight were saved by incorporating that armor into only the robot’s most vital parts, which in the T-800 were the torso and skull. Making robots like this will only get easier as stronger, more lightweight alloys are discovered, or as cheaper ways are found to make today’s armor alloys.
A weapon such as this Barrett M107 rifle fires bullets that can penetrate Level 4 armor, but it is also very heavy and difficult to use. It would be impractical to make something like this the standard infantry weapon.
Giving your combat robots enough armor to resist the most common guns makes clear military sense, and it would force your enemies to adopt bigger weapons that would be so heavy for humans to carry and too hard for us to shoot. For example, the commonest type of .50 caliber machine gun, the M2, weighs 83 lbs and can’t be effectively fired unless it is attached to a tripod that weighs 50 lbs. The bullets are also heavy, so you’d need at least four human soldiers to drag the gun around on a wagon/wheeled tripod just to operate one gun. Fifty caliber sniper rifles and shoulder-launched rockets could work and could be operated by one person apiece, but they’re hard to aim at T-800-sized targets and have slow rates of fire. So Terminator’s prediction that there will someday be human-sized combat robots with integral Level 4 armor is accurate.
This underscores why we SHOULDN’T build armor into non-combat robots. If our robot butlers and maids turn against us someday, we’ll want to be able to easily destroy them with common handguns and axes.
On a tangent, let me say that the bullet-proof T-800 represents only one design philosophy for combat robots meant to kill human infantry. Another approach is to make combat robots that lack armor, but which are just as survivable because they move too fast for humans to shoot them (think of small, low-altitude UAVs) or because they can effectively hide from humans (e.g. – have advanced camouflage features, or are designed for highly accurate, long-distance sniping fire from far away or from high altitude). Another approach would be to make cheaper, more expendable combat robots that would be more vulnerable to human weapons, and to tolerate their higher loss rates because they would killed more humans overall for a smaller investment of money.
Some robots will have superhuman strength. Schwarzenegger displays superhuman levels of strength from the beginning of the film, when he punches a man’s chest so hard that his hand penetrates into his torso, and then emerges gripping the man’s disconnected heart. In another scene, he uses one hand to casually grab a large man standing at a phone booth and throw him several feet away. Many industrial robots and even small machines have superhuman levels of strength, so this prediction has already come true.
This cable cutter tool is the same size as a human hand and forearm, and its two “fingers” can pinch together with many times the force of a human hand.
Whenever we start building human-sized combat robots, at least some of them will have limbs that will be much stronger than humans’. For example, a grown human man with very strong hands could grip an object with 150 lbs of force, but a small, cordless cable cutter whose blades are like short fingers can clamp down on objects with 3,000 lbs of force. It would make sense to build very strong combat robots, principally so they could carry big weapons and manipulate their surroundings better. Improved hand-to-hand combat abilities against humans would be an ancillary benefit since that type of battlefield fighting will be even rarer in the future than it is now.
And again, this should underscore why we SHOULDN’T make our non-combat robots super-strong. For various safety reasons, I don’t think we should design our robot butlers and maids to be stronger, faster, or heavier than average humans. The vast majority of domestic tasks we’d assign to non-combat servant robots could be done under these limitations, and in cases where something couldn’t, one or two extra robots could be rented to help.
Some combat robots will be humanoid. The T-800 is humanoid in form, meaning it has the same body layout as a human and is the same overall size (height, width). I think some future combat robots will be humanoid, but most won’t because other body layouts and sizes will be better for most combat roles.
First, remember that the T-800 was not the only type of combat robot made by Skynet–it also fielded Hunter Killer tanks and aircraft. By virtue of larger size, they could carry bigger, more powerful weapons than the T-800s, and seemed to be the weapons of choice for “surface” combat. The T-800s were made humanoid so they could do special infiltration missions into underground human bases. No clue is given about the size and composition of Skynet’s robot army, but it’s possible that the T-800s represent only a small fraction of its forces, and that most of its robots are Hunter-Killers, or are of some other, non-humanoid design not shown in the film (note that spider-like combat robots were nearly used in Terminator 2‘s future scenes, and killer snake robots were in the fourth film). This is a detail that is important but easily overlooked, and it will prove accurate: after the world’s militaries have switched to using robots for combat, only a minority of those robots will be humanoid.
Storyboard art for a combat robot that was almost included in Terminator 2’s war scenes. Having four legs would make it more stable than robots with only two, and legs would let it climb over obstacles and up steep slopes that wheeled vehicles couldn’t.
Many combat robots will look almost the same as war machines we have today: Autonomous planes will still have at least one engine for propulsion and two wings so they can use lift, autonomous ships will still be oblong and pointy at the front end to minimize friction with the water, and autonomous armored vehicles will still have two sets of wheels and some kind of gun turret on top (see my blog post about a hypothetical robot tank). The only visual differences between those future weapons and their contemporary counterparts might be slightly smaller dimensions and the deletion of cockpits and structural bulges since there won’t need to be big interior spaces for humans (though they would need to have some number of small robots for field maintenance and repair, as I also described in the robot tank blog post). If Skynet were actually created and if it built a robot army to fight humanity, most of its aircraft, ships, and land vehicles would look very familiar to us.
Those sorts of combat robots would excel at destroying our heavy weapons, vehicles, and structures, but it would be wasteful to use them to hunt down small groups of humans armed only with light weapons, which describes the people living in The Terminator‘s post apocalyptic future. Moreover, robot tanks, fighter planes, and ships can’t go inside structures, sewer tunnels, or thickly wooded areas. Smaller combat robots of different designs would be needed to efficiently fight human infantry, particularly in the environments I’ve listed.
Would these robots be humanoid, like the T-800? Maybe. For sure, they would need to have bodies that were narrow and short enough to fit through standard-sized doorways or between trees in a dense forest, and light enough to not collapse floors when they walked over them. They would need to be able to fit themselves into tight spaces that humans can, like small caves and basement crawlspaces. They would also need legs–not wheels or caterpillar tracks–so they could go up and down stairs, operate pedals commonly found in human-driven cars, hop over fallen tree trunks and climb steep hills and ridges. They would also need hands so they could manipulate and use things in built human environments, like doorknobs, keys, and push-buttons. Being able to hold and use weapons, tools, keyboards, and other things designed around human hands would be very useful, as the robot would be finding such objects all the time.
A robot can be human-sized but not human in form.
Those design requirements might sound like they add up to a robot that must be humanoid, but it’s not at all the case. The requirements could be met by a robot that had a centaur-like body (four legs is more stable than two, anyway), or that lacked a head and instead had prehensile stalks coming out of its neck with cameras and microphones on their ends (a head makes a body top-heavy and packs too much important stuff in one place), or that had four arms, or four tentacles with hands on their ends (more arms means you can do and hold more stuff at once). Its hands might have four or eight fingers apiece, and it might be five feet tall but three feet wide, or seven feet tall and 18 inches wide. It could have a shiny, metal exterior that looks totally inhuman, or could be intentionally made to look scary to humans, perhaps like something from a horror movie. While robots like this wouldn’t be able to blend in with humans and “walk past the sentry,” they could go inside all the houses, vehicles, tunnels, and other places humans could go, and kill us wherever they found us.
I can only think of two types of military missions for which a human-looking combat robot would be well-suited: 1) assassinations and 2) infiltration/spying. Given that, during wartime, only a small fraction of military operations are of such a character, it follows that only a concordantly small fraction of any military’s robots would look human. Also, since stealth is important, the humanoid robots would mostly be made to look as boring as possible, perhaps like a middle-aged woman, a child, an old man, or an average soldier. Making them eye-catching by giving them Schwarzenegger’s bodybuilder physique or by making them handsome/pretty, would be counterproductive in most cases.
Even in the narrow use cases we’ve whittled our way down to, I think other types of robots and weapons would be better than using humanoid robots. By virtue of their smaller size, robots made to look like insects and small animals could infiltrate human spaces more easily than a man-sized robot. Many of them could also be built for the price of one T-800, and having more means higher odds of one successfully completing its spy mission. A “robot rat” could also assassinate people by injecting them with poison, releasing lethal gas, or jumping on the target’s face and activating an internal explosive. Even something as small as a robotic mosquito could kill, by injecting poison into the target’s bloodstream with its stinger (note that a single drop of botulinum toxin can kill several men). It would be impossible for humans to stay constantly vigilant against threats so insidious. An even cheaper solution would be bombs full of heavier-than-air poison gas.
So in conclusion, I think it’s possible that some combat robots will look like humans, but they will be used for rare special missions (and this was accurately portrayed in the movie), and the vast majority of combat robots will look totally different. In the very long run, I don’t think any of them will look human.
There will be fully automated factories. Kyle Reese reveals that the T-800 robots are made in fully automated factories run by Skynet. As I said in my review of I, Robot, all factory jobs will inevitably be taken over by machines, so it’s just a question of how long it will take. I predicted that a handful of such factories would exist by 2035–principally as technology demonstrators or for a tech billionaire like Elon Musk to claim bragging rights–but it would take decades longer for them to become common. I doubt they will exist as early as 2029.
John von Neumann was a polymath whose intelligence impressed even his genius colleagues. He concluded that machines would someday be able to build and fix themselves, eliminating the need for humans.
The common refrain that goes something like: “Human workers will always be needed, because without us, who would build or fix the robots?” is actually false and illogical. The fact that we haven’t yet invented robots that can build other robots without human help doesn’t imply that it will remain that way forever, or that humans have some special, creative quality that can never be transplanted to machines. John von Neumann, who one of the greatest minds of the 20th century and a pioneer in computer science, theorized in his paper “The General and Logical Theory of Automata” that sufficiently advanced artificial life forms (machines) could make copies of themselves, including copies that were engineered to be better, and that there was no reason why humans would always be needed to build, fix, or improve the machines. We can be totally cut out of the loop, and I predict someday we will.
There’s no theoretical reason why the entire production chain of making a robot as complex as a T-800–from digging the raw metals out of the ground, refining them, forging and shaping them into body parts, assembling the parts, and transporting the finished product to its place of use–can’t be 100% automated someday. I conservatively predict that most manufactured goods will come from automated factories by 2100.
Robots will be able to fix themselves. As I mentioned before, after sustaining damage to lightly armored parts of his robot body, Schwarzenegger does repair surgery on himself, using a small knife and a pair of pliers. Machines won’t be capable of this level of self-repair by 2029, but thanks to the factors I listed in the previous paragraph, they will inevitably gain the ability. The ability to build something implies an ability to repair it as well. Someday, robots will be able to fix each other and to fix themselves.
I note that full self-repair abilities will require the robot in question to be able to see and touch every spot on its own body, which in turn makes some design features necessary. It’s arms would need to be long and double-jointed, and if it had eyes set in a head like humans, then the head would need to be able to swivel 360 degrees to it could look at damage to its back. It wasn’t clear if the T-800 had these features. Other ways to solve this problem might be to give it long, telescoping tentacles in place of a head, with cameras at the ends of each (this would also make it much less risky to “peek” around a corner in combat to see if any bad guys were there). The tentacles could bend in various ways to give the robot a clear view of any part of its body, from nearly any angle. Having small cameras built into fingers and feet would accomplish the same thing. The ability to detach body parts would also be very useful, as it would let robots work on their damaged parts more easily, and because it would let them quickly swap out their parts for functional new ones if any were at hand.
Again, I conservatively predict that non-trivial numbers of robots will have sophisticated self-repair and “peer repair” abilities by 2100.
Robots will be able to keep working in spite of massive damage. At the end of the film, the T-800 played by Schwarzenegger is blown in half by a stick of dynamite that Kyle Reese shoves into the bottom of its exposed rib cage. In spite of this catastrophic injury, the T-800 keeps fighting, using its hands to drag the functional upper half of its body along the floor so it can get to get to Sarah Connor and manually kill her. Some robots are already this resilient, and robots made in the future–particularly those designed for combat–will be even more so.
A Northrop Grumman Remotec “Andros” robot like this withstood a bomb attack against a human.
So long as a robot’s power source and main computer are intact and connected to each other, it will keep working, even if all other parts of its body are nonfunctional. The inability to feel pain and a lack of a circulatory system allows robots to survive major injuries like the loss of limbs that would incapacitate humans due to psychological shock, pain, and blood loss. In 2016, police in Dallas, TX used a remote-controlled robot to kill a criminal who had shot several of their comrades and barricaded himself in a building. The robot had a bomb grasped in its hand, maneuvered close to the criminal, and then the device detonated, killing the suspect. Though the robot’s arm was blown off by the explosion, the machine remained functional, and was repairable after the incident.
In the future, I think it might be advantageous for each major robot body part or body segment to have its own computer, sensors, and power supply. That way, if a part were severed, it could still function for a while independently. For instance, if a T-800 had its arm severed, then the arm’s internal computer would switch on, would be able to see its surroundings via tiny cameras in the fingertips and knuckles, and would be able to drag itself around like a spider or like “Thing” from The Addams Family. It could drag itself to the robot body it was formerly attached to, or crawl away to find help. Though this might sound macabre and useless, note that many insects, including the highly evolved and successful cockroach species, have distributed nervous systems that grant their body segments similar abilities. They wouldn’t have evolved that way unless it was useful somehow. Additionally, under normal conditions, it would probably benefit a robot to distribute its computation and power load across multiple nodes in its body, and having sensors in all its extremities and body parts could only boost its utility.
Machines will be able to do near-perfect imitations of human voices. At two points in the film, the T-800 accurately impersonates the voices of humans to fool people who are listening via radio or telephone. In recent years, deep learning algorithms have become extremely good at this (see the recently released recording of a machine impersonating Joe Rogan’s voice), and at the rate of quality improvement, I think the machine imitations will sound flawless to us by 2029.
However, there is one important inaccuracy in the film: The T-800 is able to imitate humans after hearing them speak only a few words. Today’s deep learning algorithms need to listen to many hours of someone’s recorded speech to understand how they speak well enough to copy their voice, and the requirement for large sets of training data will still exist in 2029.
In the distant future, Earth prospers under a global, quasi-fascist oligarchy where only military veterans are allowed to vote or have political power. Earth’s military is enormous and is based around a fleet of large space warships that carry expeditionary soldiers called the “Mobile Infantry.” This force defends the expanding sphere of human civilization against a race of large, insect aliens nicknamed “the Arachnids.” After human colonists try to settle on an Arachnid planet, they retaliate by destroying the settlement and flinging an asteroid at Earth, destroying Buenos Aires and leading to all-out war between the two species.
The film focuses on the wartime experiences of Rico and his three friends, who all enroll in the military right after high school and quickly lose their innocence in the ensuing war. It is a classic bildungsroman tale, and though panned by most critics, is held in esteem for its entertainment value and satirical take on the fascist elements of American culture.
A date for the film’s events is not given, though we do have one clue. During the high school graduation dance party, a band performs a variation of David Bowie’s song “I’ve not been to Oxford Town.” The original song was released in 1995 and contained this stanza:
“But I have not been to Oxford Town
(All’s well)
But I have not been to Oxford Town
Toll the bell
Pay the private eye
(All’s well)
20th century dies”
The final line is understood to reference the rapidly approaching end of the 20th century.
The band performing at the high school graduation
The variant of the song we hear in Starship Troopers (which is entitled “I have not been to Paradise” and is on YouTube) has slightly modified that stanza:
“But I have not been to Paradise
(All’s well)
No I have not been to Paradise
Toll the bell
Pay the private eye
(All’s well)
23rd century dies”
Assuming the final line retains its significance, we can conclude that the movie’s events are set in the late 23rd century. For the sake of consistency, I’m going to say it happens in 2295, exactly 300 years after Bowie’s original song came out.
There will be megastuctures in space. During some of the space ship scenes, we see a manmade “ring” built around the Moon, which looks to serve as a giant military base and probably also a shipyard, and we also see a space fortress called “Fort Ticonderoga” whose width and height are measurable in miles considering how much it dwarfs the space ships. By 2295, it’s very possible we could have built megastructures in space like these. The key will be establishing self-sufficient space infrastructure first, along with the means to obtain raw materials from asteroids and low-gravity moons.
While building a 6,800-mile circumference ring around the Moon would be wasteful, a large space station or several smaller ones would make sense and could perform the same military and space ship dockyard functions at much lower cost. The Moon’s low gravity and nearly nonexistent atmosphere also make it well-suited for a space elevator, which could be used to cheaply transport raw materials mined from the surface into space, where they could be fashioned into space stations and ships.
Currently, we lack the infrastructure in space to build things there, and so we have to manufacture all of our satellites, space ships, and space stations on the Earth’s surface and then use rockets to put them in orbit, which is incredibly expensive (it costs $2,000 – $13,000 to get one kilogram of cargo into low Earth orbit, which is where the International Space Station is). Once we’re able to build things in space, from materials we find floating around in space, manufacture costs will sharply decrease, and we’ll be able to pay for things like huge space stations.
There will be many large space ships. The movie is filled with special effects shots of giant space warships flying around and attacking alien planets. As before, this is entirely plausible for 2295, and will be made possible by the same space-based manufacturing infrastructure that we’ll use to make space stations.
There will be space ships that can travel faster than the speed of light. The space ships in the film use something called a “Star Drive” to travel faster than light. This technology allows humans to spread outside our Solar System and to come into contact with the Arachnids. As I discussed in my review of the film Prometheus, the laws of physics say this is impossible, and I don’t think it’s useful to assume we’ll be able to figure out a way around them.
The military will still use human infantrymen. The film focuses on main character Juan Rico’s experiences in the “Mobile Infantry,” an expeditionary, ground fighting force similar to the U.S. Marines. Aside from their ability to move between planets on space ships and their access to nuclear bazookas, the Mobile Infantry’s technology, capabilities and tactics are stuck in the 20th century. In fact, their lack of armored vehicles, artillery, and close air support actually make their fighting force more rifleman-centric than most armies were in WWII, and some of the battles shown in the film are reminiscent of the high-casualty, “human wave” fighting of WWI.
This is a completely ridiculous vision of what the military and warfare will be like in 2295. Even making conservative assumptions about the rate of A.I. progress, human infantrymen will have been long replaced by machines, along with probably ALL other military positions, such as piloting space warships and doing logistical support. A fully automated or 95% automated military force could exist as early as 2095.
Guns will be big and clunky. The standard small arm of the Mobile Infantry is a large, boxy, gray rifle nicknamed the “Morita” (this was probably the name of its inventor or is a contrived military acronym that clumsily describes what it is), and it makes absolutely no sense as a weapon.
The Morita combines a bullpup layout (meaning the magazine is behind the hand grip) with an ultra-long barrel and extended fore-end, infusing the weapon with worst qualities of the bullpup and traditional rifle layouts and none of their strengths. The comically long barrel’s accuracy potential could have been a redeeming trait were it not completely wasted thanks to the guns lacking even simple iron sights. And instead of being sleek and skeletonized, the guns’ outer casings are blocky and thick. For example, the carry handles are completely solid slabs of metal, which is an egregious design flaw since a simple U-beam design would have cut weight without hurting the weapon in any meaningful way.
When your guns don’t even have BB gun iron sights, all you can do is spray and pray.
The Morita is an intimidating and vaguely futuristic-looking weapon that is actually inferior to most military rifles that were in use at the time Starship Troopers was filmed. It’s an interesting time capsule that depicts what people in the 1990s thought future guns would look like. In fact, the weapon that the Morita seems to have been based on, the French FAMAS assault rifle, is being removed from service and could be replaced by a derivative of the American AR-15, which was invented in the 1950s.
In the 20 years since Starship Troopers was released, gun design has in many ways gone in the opposite direction the filmmakers envisioned it would: Various militaries have discovered that the bullpup rifle layout is not better than the traditional layout overall (there are tradeoffs that cancel each other out) so bullpup rifles didn’t become more popular; gun designers focused on trimming weight and clumsy features like carry handles from existing models; and they redesigned the weapons to be sleeker and more customizable with accessories like flashlights and combat sights. And over that last 20 years, those accessories have miniaturized thanks to better technology and the demand to cut weight. In short, gun designs have converged on a handful of layouts that are mechanically optimal, and all of the R&D effort is now focused on tweaking them in small ways to wring out the last bit of efficiency and performance.
It wouldn’t make sense for people in the future to abandon the principles of good engineering by making highly inefficient guns like the Morita. To the contrary, future guns will, just like every other type of manufactured object, be even more highly optimized for their functions thanks to AI: Just create a computer simulation that exactly duplicates conditions in the real world (e.g. – gravity, all laws of physics, air pressure, physical characteristics of all metals and plastics the device could be built from), let “AI engineers” experiment with all possible designs, and then see which ones come out on top after a few billion simulation cycles. I strongly suspect the winners will be very similar to guns we’ve already built, but sleeker and lighter thanks to the deletion of unnecessary mass and to the use of materials with better strength-to-weight ratios.
Projectile weapons will still be used in combat. It’s 2295…SO WHERE THE HELL ARE THE RAY GUNS? I’m no expert in lasers or particle weapons, but I imagine that the technology will become practical for routine military use in the next 278 years. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll make kinetic energy weapons obsolete, particularly for close-range combat with lightly armored or unarmored opponents. A weapon that can kill a horse-sized, frenzied opponent by propelling a few tiny pieces of metal into its brain in under a second might be a better tool for the job than a laser.
Projectile weapons also have important, inherent advantages that militate against them ever becoming obsolete: Projectiles like bullets are minimally affected by atmospheric conditions (lasers can’t penetrate clouds or fog), can follow curved trajectories to hit targets hiding behind solid objects (lasers only travel in straight lines), and can carry payloads (explosives, poison) that render some secondary, specialized destructive effect to the target. And unless the laws of physics change in the future, smashing solid objects into other things at high speed will be a reliable way of destroying them until the end of time.
Moreover, while I think the average human being in 2295 will be heavily enhanced through genetics and artificial technologies, I doubt we’ll find ways to upgrade their skin and flesh to be bullet proof. Bullets, knives, baseball bats, and fists will still hurt them. Also, I don’t see how wild animals made of organic tissue like the Arachnids could have bulletproof bodies: no animals on Earth have shells, bones, or skulls that are too hard for our bullets to penetrate, and even if the Arachnids had exoskeletons that were twice as hard as, say, elephant skulls, we could pierce them by using larger bullets.
So, even in 2295, I think it’s plausible that projectile weapons will still be used in combat, alongside more advanced weapons like lasers. Handheld weapons that shoot out bullets could still be the weapons of choice for killing humans and other organic life forms in many circumstances. However, it’s possible the guns of the future might use something aside from gunpowder–such as electromagnetism–to propel their bullets, which wouldn’t make them “firearms.”
Some people will have missing limbs. Rico’s high school teacher and later, his unit commander, is a middle-aged man who is missing one of his arms and sometimes wears a mechanical prosthesis. Another man working a military desk job is also missing his arm and both legs. It’s strongly implied that the missing limbs were war wounds both men suffered during earlier military service.
This is completely unrealistic. By 2295, it should be possible to regrow human limbs and organs through therapeutic cloning, and to surgically graft them into people, with no chance of rejection. Seeing a physically disabled person who had a missing limb or was confined to a wheelchair will be as rare and as strange to people in 2295 as seeing someone trapped in an iron lung is to us today.
Some people will have advanced mechanical prostheses. As stated, Rico’s high school teacher sometimes wears a mechanical arm over his stump. It is clearly artificial, being made of articulated metal segments, but it somehow interfaces with his nervous and musculoskeletal system well enough to give him the same level of fine motor control over it that he has over his biological arm.
ARMed and dangerous!
Cybernetic limbs like this should be available by 2295, but due to human aesthetics, I doubt many people will want to get ones that are mechanical in appearance. People will prefer artificial parts that are warm, supple, and natural in appearance (recall Will Smith’s fake arm in I, Robot). I imagine some people would want to take this preference “all the way” by getting truly natural, 100% biological replacement limbs made through therapeutic cloning.
There will be bald people. Rico’s teacher, his basic training camp commandant, and several extras in the film had male-pattern baldness. A combination of things will have completely eradicated hair loss well before 2295, such as widespread genetic engineering, and cloning of hair follicles for implantation on balding parts of the scalp. Seeing a bald person in 2295 will be like seeing a person with cleft palate today: the presence of such an easily correctable condition will signal the person was deprived of access to medical care, or that they chose to live with the condition to visibly set themselves apart from the mainstream, possibly to adhere to arcane personal values.
Loud, low flying aircraft will fly around cities. Early in the film, there’s a brief moment where we see the futuristic skyline of Buenos Aires, and two fast-moving aircraft fly by at the same height as the skyscrapers, making jet-like roaring noises.
On the one hand, having loud aircraft fly low over crowded cities is a fly in the ointment for Starship Troopers’ portrayal of an orderly and comfortable future. Loud noises–whether from aircraft or anything else–disturb people, so it would stand to reason that, by 2295, more laws would be in place against them. NIMBYism only gets stronger as people get richer and get more free time to focus on less critical things.
But on the other hand, that is based on the assumption that future cities will be full of human beings. Intelligent machines wouldn’t have the same finicky senses that we do, so loud noises wouldn’t bother them, and low-flying aircraft might be far more common than today. In fact, machines could be perfectly comfortable in a wide variety of environments that humans would find intolerable, like an Earth saturated with toxic air pollution, a 20-degree hotter Earth ravaged by global warming, a pitch black Earth as featured in The Matrix, an Earth covered in piles of skulls and sad ruined buildings as shown in The Terminator, or an extraterrestrial environment where humans couldn’t survive for multiple reasons.
I don’t think intelligent machines are definitely going to kill off the human race, or even probably going to, but for sure it’s a possible outcome we could face by 2295. Another scenario is a hostile machine takeover of Earth that stops short of exterminating our species: Once defeated on the battlefield, disarmed, forced to sign the surrender papers, and evicted from the best places, the machines would ignore us unless we got in their way, and we’d scrape out some kind of existence on the margins. This is analogous to how humans today treat wild animals: we rarely think of them even though they’re all around us, we don’t help them even though we could make their lives much better at low cost, we don’t kill them unless they get in our way, and we don’t bother to consider how our activities affect them. If a property developer plans to bulldoze some woods to make a strip mall, he doesn’t first count the number of ant hills or squirrels that are there and try to recompense them.
In that “Second Class Citizen” future scenario (or maybe “Machine Dictatorship” scenario), it would be common for intelligent machines to do careless things that humans considered obnoxious, like flying loud aircraft low over human areas.
We will use nuclear weapons in wars against aliens. One of the Mobile Infantry’s weapons is a small nuclear missile launched out of a bazooka. In one instance, we see such a weapon used to blow up a crowd of Arachnids in an open area, and in two others scenes it is used to collapse the Arachnids’ underground tunnels.
In a real war with aliens, particularly if we felt our species’ survival was at stake, I have no doubt we would use nuclear weapons or any other type of weapon of mass destruction like germs and poison gas. Unless we had prior diplomatic dealings with them, there wouldn’t be any treaties like the Geneva Conventions to stop us. Moreover, if the fighting were happening in space and other planets, we could use WMDs without fear of contaminating our own biosphere or exposing our civilian populations to collateral damage. These factors would impel us to use other weapons and tactics that are today banned under international law, such as exploding bullets, and torture of prisoners.
Whether or not shoulder-launched, mini-nuclear missiles will come into common use by 2295 is unanswerable, though let me point out that it’s technically feasible. In fact, the U.S. first built these types of weapons, called “Davy Crockett Weapon Systems,” in the late 1950s. While those weapons were too big for anyone but a professional bodybuilder to fire from the shoulder, it’s likely they could be miniaturized with better technology without sacrificing their explosive yield.
The Davy Crockett nuclear launcher
If we actually fought with aliens like the Arachnids in 2295, we would be smart enough to recognize the gross inefficiency of sending in humans equipped with relatively weak guns, and we’d pick weapons and tactics better-suited for the task. Biological weapons that the Arachnids would spread among themselves, heavier-than-air poison gas that would sink down their tunnel networks, and combat drones that the Arachnids wouldn’t be able to effectively fight back against (e.g. – fast, pigeon-sized flying drone programmed to land on an Arachnid head and then detonate a shaped charge into its brain/nerve bundle) seem like the best ways of doing it, and don’t require us to make any leaps in our thinking about military technology. The same iterative process of optimizing guns in computer simulations that I described earlier would be used to quickly develop weapons, tactics, and strategies best suited for defeating the Arachnids.
Human colonies will exist on Earth-like planets outside our solar system. Early in the film, a news broadcast announces that a colony of Mormons living on an Arachnid planet were all killed by the aliens. Gory footage of a small, walled town full of mutilated bodies follows. It’s possible human colonies could exist on Earth-like planets outside our solar system by 2295.
Consider that the “Project Longshot” analysis make a semi-credible case that a fusion-powered spacecraft could be built, could accelerate to 12% of the speed of light, and could reach our closest celestial neighbor, Alpha Centauri, in 100 years. Astronomers haven’t spotted Earth-like planets in the Alpha Centauri system yet, but there’s no reason to rule out the possibility of their existence.
Working backwards, if we assume a small human colony is established on an Earth-like planet in Alpha Centauri in 2295, and the journey took 100 years, then we will have acquired the ability to make large, fusion-powered space ships by 2195. That’s not an unreasonable prediction.
We will have encountered non-microscopic, non-technological aliens. The antagonists in Starship Troopers are “the Arachnids,” a society of large, ferocious, alien insects of different species that live together in hives and are led by small numbers of intelligent “Brain Bugs.”
I don’t think anything remotely resembling the Arachnids exists in our Solar System, but it’s possible they could in other star systems. By 2295, we’ll have extremely powerful space telescopes that will have identified all of the exoplanets around our neighboring stars, and we’ll have received even better imagery from our interstellar probes.
Again, assuming that Arachnids live within seven light years of us, and we get advanced enough to build space ships that can reach 12% of the speed of light by the late 2100s, then Earth could know about the Arachnids’ existence by 2295. Enough time would have passed for our interstellar probes to reach the Arachnid planet and transmit a report back to Earth.
Humans will be telepathic. A minor element in the film is the existence of telepathy in a small minority of humans. One of Rico’s friends, Carl, is a telepath, and late in the film he uses his special ability to implant a thought in Rico’s mind, and to read the thoughts of a captured Brain Bug. People will have telepathic abilities like these by 2295, though they will exist thanks to computer brain implants and not to natural ability.
Government commercial encouraging psychics to come forward
Science has proven that psychic abilities such as telepathy, clairvoyance (seeing the future), and telekinesis (moving objects through thought alone) don’t exist. However, there’s no scientific barrier to creating devices like brain implants or hats that could monitor the brain’s activity to decipher a person’s thoughts or emotions. Furthermore, there’s no barrier to giving such devices wireless communication capabilities, thus allowing people to communicate with each other through thought alone. I discussed this in some depth in my Prometheus review (“Machines will be able to read human thoughts…”), and as such won’t go into more depth.
Without getting too sappy, let me say that widespread use of this kind of technology could have profound consequences for our civilization, as it could bridge the man-machine divide and inaugurate an age of close empathy between humans and even animals. Linking the thoughts, emotions, and sensations of individual beings would make misunderstandings and miscommunications much rarer, and might make cruelty and dishonesty impossible. Using technology to create such a world might be a greater accomplishment than going to other star systems.
Death figures from natural disasters will be immediately known. One of the film’s pivotal events is Buenos Aires being destroyed by an asteroid purportedly hurled at Earth by the Arachnids. The main character, Juan Rico, is a native of that city and is speaking with his parents (who still live there) via videoconference from a different location at the moment of impact. Rico doesn’t understand why the video feed suddenly goes black, but less than two minutes later, he sees a TV news broadcast showing live footage of the flaming city, along with banner text that says over 8.7 million people were killed. The personal tragedy is a pivotal event in Rico’s young life, and it convinces him to complete his military training and to swear revenge against the aliens.
Today, when a natural disaster happens, it takes days or even weeks to account for the dead, but by 2295, I think the tallies could be compiled within minutes, as happened in the film. By 2295, every structure on our planet will be cataloged in great detail in something like a hyperrealistic “Google Maps,” almost every corner of the planet will be under constant surveillance of some sort (video, audio, seismic, etc.), and almost everybody will wear or have implanted in them devices that track their locations and life signs. All of the different data sources will be cobbled together to make a nearly 1:1 digital simulation of the entire planet, where every building and every person was accurately represented, in real time. Most “blind spots” in the data could be inferred with high accuracy. Without a doubt, artificial intelligences would be monitoring the network and rapidly analyzing the data.
As such, if a meteor hit a city, or if any other type of sudden disaster happened, the physical and human destruction could be determined almost instantly.
Helicopter-sized craft will be able to fly back and forth between the Earth’s surface and space. The Mobile Infantry use relatively small “drop ships” to ferry soldiers between the massive space warships and the surfaces of the different Arachnid planets. The drop ships are faintly aircraft-like in appearance and have layouts reminiscent of the Sikorsky CH-54 helicopters: the fuselage is a minimalist “spine” that connects the cockpit to the drive systems and landing gear, and it has mounting points for detachable cargo containers. There are large drop ships that can carry detachable cargo containers full of 30 – 40 people, and smaller drop ships that can only carry 10 people. They appear the roughly the same size as today’s CH-47 and UH-60 helicopters, respectively. All of the alien planets the drop ships are shown flying in and out of appear to have gravity very close to Earth’s (e.g. – dropped objects fall at the normal speed and humans can’t jump way in the air). Ergo, the movie posits that, by the year 2295, helicopter-sized craft that are mostly full of empty space and stuff other than fuel and engine components, will be able to take off from the Earth’s surface, reach space, and achieve at least a medium Earth orbit.
One of the smaller drop ships
I doubt this will happen because it’s impossible to cram enough chemical rocket fuel into a helicopter-sized craft to propel it into space. Let’s assume that the larger Starship Troopers drop ship weighs the same as a CH-47, which is 40,000 lbs. Today, it would take a Delta IV Heavy rocket to get a payload of that weight into medium Earth orbit. The launch vehicle is 236 feet high and contains 1 MILLION lbs of rocket fuel. Additionally, the Delta IV Heavy uses liquid hydrogen (H2), which is the most energy-dense type of chemical fuel known to exist. It’s implausible to assume we’ve overlooked some kind of superfuel that is, say, 20 times as energy-dense as H2, so there’s no way the drop ships could fly into space using any kind of combustible propellant in their internal fuel tanks.
A much larger drop ship–perhaps the size of the Prometheus space ship–might be able to fly off the Earth’s surface on its own using chemical rocket power, simply thanks to having more internal volume for fuel storage. Of course, this would make for weirder action scenes, with each drop ship being as big as a mansion but only carrying ten men.
A CH-47 can hold up to 33 troops, which looked to be the same capacity as the larger Starship Troopers drop ships
The only way a helicopter-sized, single-stage craft MIGHT be able to reach space is if it had miniaturized, nuclear fusion-powered rockets, which is one of those things that is on the very edge of the edge of what scientists think might be possible to build someday. The perennial comeback to skeptics of fusion power is that the Sun is proof of concept, but the perennial comeback to that is that fusion power has been 50 years away and always will be. No one can say at this point, so I think it’s safer to say helicopter-sized drop ships won’t exist in 2295, but mansion-sized ones will.
