But while it's easy to imagine watching the hopeful utopia of Star Trek and saying, "Let's make that real!" it's a little stranger to think the same after watching Blade Runner or Gattaca. Yet ...
#5. A Lab Is Brewing Apocalyptic Superdiseases
Movies about a worldwide superplague seem to come along every few years (see: last year's Contagion), but within that genre is the more cynical and outlandish "Lab creates and accidentally releases a pandemic" subgenre, like Rise of the Planet of the Apes and Stephen King's The Stand.
The premise is flawed from the start, as is typical of apocalyptic movies. Why in the hell would the government allow a top-secret lab to create a world-killing microbe in the first place? In terms of movie logic, it falls right into the category of "Hey, let's turn our nuclear arsenal over to Skynet" and "We should absolutely take this huge, destructive monkey back to New York."
Getty"Tyrannosaurs are the new house cats!"
And thankfully, for once, we're right! There's no top-secret lab creating an apocalyptic disease. Because the lab is not secret at all, and it's located in Rotterdam.
Getty"It's down past the open-air asbestos dump. If you see the puppy slaughterhouse, you've gone too far."
The details of Fouchier's work remain unclear, mainly because the voice of reason that is America's National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity has said, "Hey, guys? What you're doing is cool and all, but couldn't terrorists get hold of this and kill basically everyone?" Even if they couldn't break into the lab, there's already evidence that groups like al-Qaida are trying to recruit college-educated members who majored in mad science with a minor in playing with deadly viruses -- so what can't be stolen can still be replicated.
Fouchier's work hasn't been published, mainly to prevent someone from copying it and using it less in the pursuit of science and more in the pursuit of the end of the world as we know it. Meanwhile, we hope they've got some amazing locks on that place.
Getty"Eh, that should be good."
#4. The U.S. Military Is Paying to Re-Create Avatar, Only With Deadly Killbots
James Cameron's obscenely successful film Avatar involves soldiers traveling to a distant world in search of a valuable resource. The environment and the natives are hostile, however, so they train soldiers to remotely operate avatars: They hook their brains up to a machine and effectively become the artificial person on the other end (you may also remember a similar "humans control avatars with their minds" scenario in the Bruce Willis movie Surrogates, except you probably don't, because who the hell saw Surrogates?).
However, you might have been too caught up in the 3-D and fighting cat people to stop and realize what an amazingly useful (if creepy) technology this would be for a military that wants to keep its "real" soldiers out of harm's way.
"Careful. Last week, I thought I was playing Warcraft and accidentally wiped out half of Russia."
But the Pentagon sure as hell realized it, as evidenced by their aptly named Project Avatar. That's the thing about having R&D budgets in the billions: If you see a movie you like, you can just call up a few scientists and say, "Make all the badass parts actually happen." Thus DARPA, the hive of batshit insane supervillainy that develops cutting-edge tech for America's armies, has budgeted $7 million to fund robots that work just like avatars.
Getty"Also, we'll all need Fast & Furious cars."
"Bipedal" is the key word there. That means they want a walking humanoid robot to do all of the things a soldier would do if he or she were there. And no, it doesn't sound like they're talking about handing the soldier a control pad and letting him play his robot like a video game. They refer to developing the technology of "telepresence" and letting the robot act as a "surrogate" body (damn it, Bruce Willis, if your movie had only grossed more you could have gotten this whole thing named for you).
GettyFor some reason, they only want it to say "Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker."
While we're on Avatar, we should probably bring up ...
#3. Investors Are Already Funding Off-World Mining
The idea of mining other planets/moons/asteroids for minerals not found on Earth wasn't invented by Avatar -- that's what the robots in Blade Runner were built for, after all. But it's never good news -- these movies are always about a dying Earth sending astronauts to go exploit space rocks for the resources we've drained from our own planet. It's what the ship in Alien was doing before the aliens arrived, and it's the backdrop for the video game franchise Dead Space.
Note that it always ends in a horrific massacre at the hands of otherworldly monsters.
The Reality:
James Cameron, not content to get his hands on just one Ridley Scott sci-fi franchise, has partnered with several other mega-rich investors to bring Blade Runner's dystopia one step closer to reality. Planetary Resources -- a company that was founded two years ago but kept secret until very recently (because that's completely normal and shouldn't creep you out in the slightest) -- plans to make up for our severe shortage of unobtainium here on Earth by sending robots to mine nearby asteroids.
Steve JurvetsonSeriously, Jim, a $237 million budget and "unobtainium" was the best you could come up with?
And no, this isn't just a case of bajillionaires not realizing when they can't accomplish something just by tossing cash around: The company was co-founded by Peter Diamandis, who helped start the X-Prize competition to spur nongovernmental space flight -- remember how that turned out? And MIT Professor of Planetary Science Richard Binzel agrees that seeking out things like water and metals on asteroids is a step that humanity must take sooner or later, especially if we want to stake our claim to more of the cosmos. A trip to Mars, for example, might be made possible by stopping at the occasional asteroid to refuel the ship and pick up a latte at Starbucks (come on, you know it'll happen).
On Mars, Apple Stores already outnumber the aliens 3 to 1.
But don't worry, it'll probably be at least a few years before we have to worry about the robots that they send up to live on our new pet asteroid going all psycho when they discover their own mortality. We'll have accidentally opened the portal to hell long before then.
