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Back To The Future 2 Day
10 years ago
Okay. BTTF2 checklist:
What we DO have:
1. We have hoverboards...sorta. They use decades old supercooled superconductor tech, so you need a goodly supply of liquid nitrogen and a metal-surfaced skate park. The tech is more accurately described as maglev, but you know, potato...
2. We DO have drones with cameras that have been used to take pictures for "news" organizations. These drones are quite different from what's depicted in the film, in that they are usually not autonomous, are propeller driven, and currently have some serious limitations as to how they can legally be used. Also, the reason I have put quotation marks around the "news" in "news organizations" is that, so far, the first to use them have mostly been paparazzi...
3. 80s nostalgia IS a thing, and HOW. Witness how the media over the last 10 years has been strip mining that decade's pop culture for "reboots" of everything from Transformers, to GI Joe, to 21 Jump Street. Shows set in the era are all the rage (Halt and Catch Fire, The Goldbergs, The Americans, and the upcoming Wicked City).
There are even barcades that are essentially the same as the establishment in the film, complete with 80s music and authentic era arcade machines. No semi-sentient robots, with the digitized personalities of former world leaders, trying to take your order though, sadly...
4. We DO have video conferencing and video calls as a semi-normal occurrence, either via Skype on webcams, or Skype/Facetime on cell phones. We also DO multitask multiple channels of information, but it's not multiple TV stations at once. It's on the internet. Oh, and in many cases your boss CAN monitor your work communications (work email).
5. We have holograms...sorta. The technology is rather limited currently, and is really a bit of an optical illusion, not fitting the dictionary definition of "hologram", at least not the one demonstrated in the movie.
As anyone who's seen Hologram Tupac or Hologram Michael Jackson can attest, the illusion is somewhat convincing, but has a limited field of view (usually straight in front of the projection). In fact it's not a real hologram at all.
The image is two dimensional but is projected onto a milar screen at a 45% angle to give the impression of depth. This one is really sort of a cheat, to be honest. In point of fact we haven't really cracked true projected holography just yet...
What we DON'T have:
1. No self lacing shoes. No auto-drying jackets either.
2. NO FLYING CARS! Now this is either a positive or a negative, depending on your point of view. There is much to be said for the concept. Traffic as we experience it now is mainly an issue owing to the two dimensional nature of most land travel by car. Three dimensions, with cars travelling at different altitudes, opens up a whole new level of possibilities. If you were to take all the traffic currently on the ground and put it up in the air, you could conceivably have as much as half a mile to a mile between every car on the planet. Traffic jams would essentially be a thing of the past.
Of course you've got the obvious issue of "People are idiots on the ground, do we really want them flying into each other in the air?" Most air car solutions that are being worked on are push-button or touchscreen affairs, where the passenger does none of the actual flying. That job is instead handled by a complex autopilot, an extension of technology that already exists in modern aircraft. Many commercial aircraft in point of fact are already completely capable of takeoff, flight, and landing, all via autopilot systems with little or no input from a pilot.
The reason we keep a pilot there still is multifaceted, partly to deal with situations created by human error by say an air traffic controller on the ground, that an auto pilot system would not be able to anticipate, and also due to the fact that most of us have the inaccurate belief that we are more reliable than automation. Statistics do not bare this out. Rather the opposite.
There IS however the concern about vehicle fitness. If our cars are going up in the air, that safety sticker we get is probably going to have to be gotten a bit more often than once every couple of years or so, and the standards for what state of disrepair is allowable would also be a bit more stringent. The last thing we'd want is for someone's car to come falling down on somebody's house because they broke down...
Conclusion:
Surprisingly, the movie got more right than it got wrong. At least more than it would seem at first glance on the surface. The gritty details are a little different, but with just a slight re-write to change some of the details, you could conceivably have Marty and Old Doc Brown show up in our 2015 and go through all the motions of the major plot points of that film, and still have it all be reasonably believable...
What we DO have:
1. We have hoverboards...sorta. They use decades old supercooled superconductor tech, so you need a goodly supply of liquid nitrogen and a metal-surfaced skate park. The tech is more accurately described as maglev, but you know, potato...
2. We DO have drones with cameras that have been used to take pictures for "news" organizations. These drones are quite different from what's depicted in the film, in that they are usually not autonomous, are propeller driven, and currently have some serious limitations as to how they can legally be used. Also, the reason I have put quotation marks around the "news" in "news organizations" is that, so far, the first to use them have mostly been paparazzi...
3. 80s nostalgia IS a thing, and HOW. Witness how the media over the last 10 years has been strip mining that decade's pop culture for "reboots" of everything from Transformers, to GI Joe, to 21 Jump Street. Shows set in the era are all the rage (Halt and Catch Fire, The Goldbergs, The Americans, and the upcoming Wicked City).
There are even barcades that are essentially the same as the establishment in the film, complete with 80s music and authentic era arcade machines. No semi-sentient robots, with the digitized personalities of former world leaders, trying to take your order though, sadly...
4. We DO have video conferencing and video calls as a semi-normal occurrence, either via Skype on webcams, or Skype/Facetime on cell phones. We also DO multitask multiple channels of information, but it's not multiple TV stations at once. It's on the internet. Oh, and in many cases your boss CAN monitor your work communications (work email).
5. We have holograms...sorta. The technology is rather limited currently, and is really a bit of an optical illusion, not fitting the dictionary definition of "hologram", at least not the one demonstrated in the movie.
As anyone who's seen Hologram Tupac or Hologram Michael Jackson can attest, the illusion is somewhat convincing, but has a limited field of view (usually straight in front of the projection). In fact it's not a real hologram at all.
The image is two dimensional but is projected onto a milar screen at a 45% angle to give the impression of depth. This one is really sort of a cheat, to be honest. In point of fact we haven't really cracked true projected holography just yet...
What we DON'T have:
1. No self lacing shoes. No auto-drying jackets either.
2. NO FLYING CARS! Now this is either a positive or a negative, depending on your point of view. There is much to be said for the concept. Traffic as we experience it now is mainly an issue owing to the two dimensional nature of most land travel by car. Three dimensions, with cars travelling at different altitudes, opens up a whole new level of possibilities. If you were to take all the traffic currently on the ground and put it up in the air, you could conceivably have as much as half a mile to a mile between every car on the planet. Traffic jams would essentially be a thing of the past.
Of course you've got the obvious issue of "People are idiots on the ground, do we really want them flying into each other in the air?" Most air car solutions that are being worked on are push-button or touchscreen affairs, where the passenger does none of the actual flying. That job is instead handled by a complex autopilot, an extension of technology that already exists in modern aircraft. Many commercial aircraft in point of fact are already completely capable of takeoff, flight, and landing, all via autopilot systems with little or no input from a pilot.
The reason we keep a pilot there still is multifaceted, partly to deal with situations created by human error by say an air traffic controller on the ground, that an auto pilot system would not be able to anticipate, and also due to the fact that most of us have the inaccurate belief that we are more reliable than automation. Statistics do not bare this out. Rather the opposite.
There IS however the concern about vehicle fitness. If our cars are going up in the air, that safety sticker we get is probably going to have to be gotten a bit more often than once every couple of years or so, and the standards for what state of disrepair is allowable would also be a bit more stringent. The last thing we'd want is for someone's car to come falling down on somebody's house because they broke down...
Conclusion:
Surprisingly, the movie got more right than it got wrong. At least more than it would seem at first glance on the surface. The gritty details are a little different, but with just a slight re-write to change some of the details, you could conceivably have Marty and Old Doc Brown show up in our 2015 and go through all the motions of the major plot points of that film, and still have it all be reasonably believable...
