The future is now: 10 ideas from past SF applied in present

SF writers have often succeeded in imagining the technology we use today.

Over the years, SFs, whether we're talking about books, comics, serials or movies here, have managed to show us what the technology we will use in the future might look like. This genre has given birth to many important names in literature, among them, Jules Verne managing to combine an easy-to-read style of writing with a boundless imagination; he managed to foresee even aselenization in his book "From the Earth to the Moon".

The development of radio and television has given many writers and writers the opportunity to share their ideas with the general public and even give us a clear picture of how the technology we use will look. Space has created a list of 10 ideas from SF that, in the meantime, have become reality.


1. Star Trek Mobile Phone: The Original Series

The first mobile phone was invented by Motorola in 1973 and weighed 1.1 kilograms; Over time, scientists have been able to consistently reduce the weight of these devices and, more importantly, increase their number of functions.

H&I | The Star Trek prop that predicted the flip phone is back

If the first mobile phone, Motorola DynaTAC, only gave you 35 minutes for calls, the preset phones can work even for a few days without being charged, and some of them can even download in a few seconds a lot of information that initially mobile telephony would have seemed astronomical.


2. Universal Translator, Star Trek: The Original Series

The characters in Star Trek used a device to communicate with the various alien species. Currently, the idea of a device has been replaced by an algorithm, such as the one offered by Skype that allows the translation of the voice from one language to another. Obviously, the current technology does not meet SF standards, but it alone represents solid steps in the right direction.

Star Trek's Universal Translator Version 1.0 Shelly Palmer

Fans of Star Trek (The Original Series) will fondly remember the “Universal Translator.” While Gene Roddenberry’s epic saga was both inspirational and aspirational for some, it set goals for others. How much wireless bandwidth would you need on the Starship Enterprise? How would a medical tricorder work? What kind of storage would you need on Memory Alpha? How did the noise-cancelling for communicators work? Every engineer I know can tell you a story about how he or she was inspired by this amazing 1960s television show.


3. Teleportation, Star Trek: The Original Series

Quantum teleportation moves into the third dimension – Physics World Physics World

The idea behind the teleportation in this series is that a person could be "decomposed" into energy and "recomposed" once they reach their destination. Unfortunately, our scientists have not been able to teleport people, but they have been able to teleport photons, the smallest forms of matter, on the boundary between energy and matter.

Physicists in China and Austria have shown for the first time they can teleport multi-dimensional states of photons. Carrying out experiments using photons encoded via three spatial states, they say their scheme can be extended to arbitrarily high numbers of dimensions and is a vital step in teleporting the entire quantum state of a particle. The work could also improve technology used in quantum communications and quantum computing.

Quantum mechanics forbids the quantum state of one particle from being copied precisely to another particle. But teleportation – the instantaneous transfer of a state between particles separated by a long distance – offers an alternative. The process involves no physical transfer of matter and erases the state of the particle to be copied.


4. 3D Holograms, Star Wars

In the Star Wars universe, some of the communication is done with the help of three-dimensional holograms, such a transmission being the one that removes Obi-Wan Kenobi from his isolation on the desert planet Tatooine.

In real life, in 2018, researchers at Brigham Young University, United States of America managed to create such a hologram, their technology uses fast particles.


5. Bionic members, Star Wars

Star Wars fans know over the course of the nine films many people lose their limbs; however, the confrontation between Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader of Cloud City gave us the first picture of how an artificial hand could look and function.

Cybernetics Wookieepedia - Fandom

This scenario seems to be closer to reality now than it was in the 1970s when the series was launched; researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology, USA, have managed to produce an arm that can be controlled with the help of sensors by people whose arms have been amputated.


6. Digital panels, Blade Runner

In this movie, viewers can see a possible version of a Los Angees from the not too distant future; on some of the buildings of this city are a series of giant billboards that would be digital. In 2013, the company Digital Out Of Home (DOOH) was created which develops a similar technology.

7. Artificial intelligence

Currently, artificial intelligence has a variety of applications, starting from art and even to medicine and pharmacology; we can say that researchers in most people do their best to adapt the algorithms to help them in their work, and this is due to their almost unlimited potential.

In the movie Blade Runner, we are presented with the idea of synthetic people who need artificial intelligence to function; the existence of these algorithms tends to play an important role in the unfolding of the film.


8. Space Stations, 2001: A Space Odyssey

In the 1968 film, we are presented with the idea of ​​a space station, located on the Earth's low orbit, where astronauts experience microgravity. Starting with 1998, this idea began to take shape and in reality, with the construction of the International Space Station, a laboratory dedicated to microgravity studies.

Washington, DC, April 2, 1968.  The Uptown Theater.  Opening night.  The world eagerly awaits the premiere of Stanley Kubrick’s latest epic film.  Four years in the making with noted science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, the film has been delayed and is over budget.  Two days later, 2001: A Space Odyssey opens in New York and Los Angeles, and in other US cities the following week.  Anticipation runs high, given the talent involved and the near total secrecy surrounding the film during production and editing, which Kubrick was still finishing just a few days before opening day.  Even Clarke didn’t see the finished product until the premiere.


9. Tablets, 2001: A Space Odyssey

The tablets we use today appeared in 2010, however in 1964, in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the creators introduced the concept of "newspads". These devices were used by the scientists in the movie and, like Samsung, these were the first true tablets and not the iPads.


10. Cars without driver, Total Recall

This 1984 film presents a concept that scientists from a multitude of research institutions and private companies are actively working on: creating an algorithm that allows cars to travel safely, without the need for a driver at steering wheel. NASA seems to be interested in this property, and that would allow it to build more efficient robots that explore space.

The futuristic cars of Total Recall, behind the scenes hemmings.com

A long time ago (in a galaxy far, far away? No, wrong movie), reader Greg Allen caught our post on the Boonie Bug and sent in some screengrabs from the classic Arnold Schwarzenegger film Total Recall guessing that the Johnnycab was based on a Boonie Bug. It wasn’t, but that post did inspire James Belohovek to get in touch with us. James did some work on the Johnny in the Johnnycab and had a chance to take plenty of pictures on set during the filming of the movie.

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