[snowwrestler]

I guess I was watching a different movie, because I saw:

- advanced handheld medical scanners and treatments

- a genetically engineered human with super strength, health, and intelligence

- suspended animation that keeps humans alive for centuries

- artificial gravity

- faster than light communication and travel

- materials strong enough to maintain structural integrity after falling from space and plowing through a city

- matter transference across light years

I think the issue here is that author only paid attention to the elements that seem familiar, and dismissed the rest as fantasy. Of course handheld communicators and tablet computers were once fantasy too.

[ChuckMcM]

The discussion here demonstrates the problem.

So lets take a moment and think about what we see vs what we do.

So if you take the Internet and extend it to its logical next step we've got 20 - 40gbits of bandwidth between everyone and everyone else.

We've got parallel rendering pipelines and physics simulation such that you can render a scene that is indistinguishable from reality to our poor brains, and then you can project all the moving pieces between any group of people.

So in a plausible future everyone is sitting inside a brain jar experiencing a 'shared world' in what is not unlike a giant World of Warcraft type experience, including the ability to do magic, conjure things out of thin air. While nutrients feed what's left of our bodies.

Is that exciting? Does that make for dramatic movies? No. But sadly it is the current path we are on.

[gutnor]

Well, more likely the technology will get to the point where we download ourself in a machine or virtual VM - no need for keeping the brain in a jar.

That leads to plenty of interesting Asimov like thinking, except instead of AI and Robot, it would be us vs virtual us.

Also what happens with buffer copies, backup. How do you define being human at all ? Or even more basically the very concept of time become weird.

It is not necessary that a virtualised human would not have access to the external world. Maybe you can upload yourself, control animal, why not culturing special type of synthetic bodies for recreation ?

To me that does not look so bad at all, and there is definitively non-boring science-fiction material in there.

[hosh]

Much of the above are depicted in depth by Peter F. Hamilton's books, such as the Pandora's Star or Fallen Dragon.

[erifneerg]

I was thinking of Daniel Suarez's Freedom (TM) book when I read this thread.

[gee_totes]

Greg Bear's Eon trilogy also touches on People-as-VM issues

[nazgulnarsil]

sadly?

[jamesaguilar]

Man, I hope we get there before I buy a farm. Not that I think it's likely, but if I could experience for forever . . . or, instead, if I could just turn of my desire to experience for forever. Either alternative is better than the fate humans meet today.

[tadfisher]

What makes you think this isn't our present?

[ChuckMcM]

That isn't the question though, once you know you are living in a simulation what happens? This was a very interesting question that was raised in the TV show Caprica (a Battlestar Galactica prequel series). If you know it is a simulation then you can just do what ever the heck you want, reboot/restart when necessary. Doesn't make for interesting cinema or literature as the question of future value / future outcome vs present action / inaction is what creates tension.

[DanBC]

The tension could come from others not knowing they're in a simulation. Oh, The Matrix.

As always, Gren Egan has done this stuff too.

[scotty79]

You still could suffer lasting psychological damage.

[jerf]

Probably the best argument there is Occam's Razor. A heuristic it may be, but it has proved useful many times. Though I've often wondered if it truly has that much cosmic power, or if it becomes useless at that scale.

[dennisgorelik]

Why "sadly"?

[jherdman]

You saw the same movie, but you missed his point: this is the same future that folks in the 70's were predicting, and not one as his own generation sees it.

[saurik]

If it wasn't the same future as predicted in the 70's, it wouldn't have been Star Trek: they may have thrown away all of the later canon, but they couldn't just start over... it wouldn't be the same universe.

[peterhajas]

(Hi, saurik!)

Even TNG reimagined the technology of the future through the lens of the 80's and 90's, though. Holodecks, the Borg, Geordi's visor, Data. I think this movie could have been more forward-thinking.

[mhurron]

It wouldn't be Star Trek (TOS), not that it really was. TNG took place over 80 years after the events of TOS, of course it looked more advanced.

This is Kirk, Spock and McCoy, their place and point in time in Star Trek history is basically set in stone now. To change it would mean you are not making Star Trek any more.

[gnaritas]

TNG had to, they're the future; the current movie is the time-line of the original Trek; they can't do that, it wouldn't make sense.

[Steko]

The new movies were backward thinking by design. Into Darkness takes place 5 years before TOS and 100 years before TNG. Any radically new federation technology inserted there but not shown in TOS/TNG would just look out of place and be held against it.

[randallsquared]

New technology like transwarp beaming? :/

[saurik]

(I suggest you re-watch the 2009 movie.)

[froo]

They couldn't create tech that was TOO forward thinking, IE creating tech that might be seen around the time of TNG - given that as a franchise they could still mine a reboot of TNG if the well for Kirk-era Star Trek runs dry.

I wasn't disappointed by the tech. To be frank, I think that they're simply giving themselves room to continue making money with rebooting other Star Trek franchises in the future

[olivier1664]

Ok for Star Trek, keep the universe. But the point is still valid: movies (and science fiction) do not propose up to date prediction of the futures.

[leeoniya]

I came to say something similar. Much of the tech like light-speed travel and other advances will not be around for a very long time, perhaps never. There's a fine line between sci-fi and fantasy. Lots of ideas have been done in other movies, like The Matrix, with instant learning through brain programming, lifelike VR simulations. Men in Black, Thor, Contact, Aliens go from sci-fi to unrealistic fantasy.

I think Star Trek tries to maintain a balance that still looks attainable. Also, perhaps there's a shortage of grandiose discoveries lately. We know the Higgs exists, the universe is flat from WMAP, quantum entanglement is gaining practical use. But this isnt as useable for movies as say discovering that we live in a universe with other galaxies, etc...

[joshuak]

I think the point was that we've already seen all of those things. These ideas are the future of a writer making TV in the late 60s. Where are the new ideas of our future?

I'd agree the space race inspired amazing science fiction that mostly dried up by the end of the 80s in popular culture. Since then it's been super heroes, robots, and reboots.

[numbsafari]

It was a prequel. If he wanted something new, he shouldn't have gone to see a movie that was set in a time period between the original TV show and the present day.

I think the real issue is that Hollywood isn't interested in developing new franchises, or even stand-alone projects.

Instead, they are content to recycle the same characters, plot lines and assumptions.

Just like Silicon Valley isn't interested in investing in risky technology anymore, Hollywood isn't interested in investing in risky new ideas.

This, more than anything else, is a sure sign that the front-line of history and our collective future is happening somewhere else.

[kapilkaisare]

I haven't seen the movie, but weren't all the items in your list pretty standard fare for dreamers 30-40 years ago? I mean, the Star Trek TOS series introduced most of those ideas, and the series that followed expanded on them, philosophically or aesthetically.

It's difficult to deny, IMO, that human imagination as far as the future is concerned has not dreamed up anything beyond what was conceived by the early grandmasters of science fiction literature and television.

[Florin_Andrei]

I guess the author was lamenting the absence of things such as the 3D user interfaces from Minority Report.