Coronavirus Pandemic Effect on Movie Plots in the Future?

[Kenneth Wuepper]

There was an automobile/airplane manufactured here in Michigan. It was never popular but it did fly and you could remove the wings and drive it down the highway. I will look into finding the history of it and get back to you. It was housed at the James Clements Airport in Bay City, Michigan.

[Randy Stankey]

What? Like the flying AMC Matador in The Man With the Golden Gun?

Flying-007-car.jpg

I always thought that car was just a mock-up. They made real flying cars with detachable wings?

Kind of impractical. Don't you think?

For the price of a full fledged flying car you could buy a cheap-ass car like a Matador and a single engine plane like a Cessna and you would probably have a fair amount of money left over. Instead of spending hours attaching or detaching wings then making or breaking connections from the control surfaces to the drivers seat you could simply drive your AMC to the airstrip, hop out and take off in your airplane.

Even if you take the movie for what it is, Scaramanga would need to have dozens of mechanics and technicians standing by, waiting for him to drive his car into the hangar. It would have been much easier if Scaramanga had called ahead and told his henchmen to have his airplane gassed up and ready to go.

BTW: I'm with Bobby. We'll never have flying cars because there are too many assholes on the road in two dimensions. I can't even begin to imagine the idiocy we would see if we had three dimensions!

Flying-Jetson-car.png

[Marcel Birgelen]

I agree with Bobby and Randy... flying cars is probably not what we want right now, at least not the kind that will be piloted like we drive our cars today. Of all the tools humanity has given itself, the car is probably one of the more lethal. It's probably one of the most useful tools too, but I doubt we want to see a future, where everybody can pilot their own flying car.

According to the Back to the Future franchise, we would've been flying cars for quite a few years now, but it's clear something stopped that from happening. Like Mike pointed out, we don't have any magical anti-gravity devices, so everything that flies still requires a lot of kinetic energy to get off the ground. Large propellers, long runways and jets aren't practical or in any sense economic.

But there has been another small revolution ongoing and that's the one with drone technology. Just a few decades ago, the technology needed to control a drone would've been too expensive and too heavy to fit on something like a drone. I think that instead of flying cars and jetpacks, we'll see drones conquer the sky in the near future for all kinds of applications, including delivery services.

The concept of teleportation seems very cool, not to mention very convenient for sci-fi plots. But I think teleportation deserves to be tucked into the same drawer with "magic." I don't think it's something we'll ever see reproduced outside of a science fiction movie. Just like time travel. Honestly it just fundamentally defies the laws of physics.

A living creature, like a human being, is made up of a staggering number of cells. Everyone one of those cells contains a staggering number of molecules, atoms and sub-atomic particles. Not only that, but many of those tiny pieces are in various stages of chemical or electrical reaction with each other. There's countless billions of those active processes happening at any given instant. That's a hell of a lot of material and chemical/electrical reactions for a computer to merely catalog. It's another monumental challenge for the computer to encode all of it, break it apart, move invisibly to another location and then re-assemble successfully. When you think about it the concept of teleporting a living person is just as ridiculous as accurately teleporting a hand grenade while it's in the process of exploding. Might as well try teleporting a bolt of lightning.

To teleport any object, much less anything living, the device not only has to teleport all the object's matter, but all of its energy too. A "dead" object, such as a baseball has kinetic energy in all its atomic particles. An organic living thing has all of that plus its chemical processes to preserve. Even if you could successfully teleport all the matter of a human being how do you teleport all of its living energy? You might have a live person go in one end of the teleporter and have an effectively dead department store mannequin come out the other side.

I've been quite a fan of the original Star Trek and even more so of the "TNG" series, primarily because they based many of their predictions on "extrapolated science" rather than just pure fantasy. As Randy pointed out, many of their predictions actually made it into our everyday life. I think there is some kind of interaction between good Sci-Fi and reality. If someone comes up with a good or worthwhile idea in Science Fiction, you'll see that we'll eventually will try to emulate it in real-life. In such, good Sci-Fi can be to some extend, a self-fulfilling prophecy, both for the better and worse aspects of it.

But the transporter, as it has been depicted, indeed has been more of a fantasy device, than something we can expect to become reality any time soon. As a lot of people noticed, the whole concept alone would fail on Heisenberg's "uncertainty principle". As for a transporter to work, you would need to know both the position and motion vectors of all particles of the subject to be transported, which is simply impossible, due to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. Michael Okuda, one of the brains behind many of the stuff behind TNG and "modern" Star Trek was once asked for a Time interview: "How do the Heisenberg compensators work?". His answer was: "They work just fine, thank you."

What I remember from one of those specials that the transporter was actually invented, because it simply wasn't realistic for them to land with such a big ship on a planet. Somehow this contradicts the usage of shuttles, which they had at their disposal from the very beginning.

But there's still a lot of unexplored stuff out there, maybe there is another way to transport matter across "time and space" that doesn't involve slicing it into atoms and converting it into energy first.

[Randy Stankey]

I think that the use of transporters in Star Trek is a form of time compression, used to speed up the script.

In normal, terrestrial shows, a person gets from place to place by car, airplane or some other form of "regular" transportation but they don't often show the whole process. They might show a person leaving one place and arriving at another but not necessarily show the person actually getting there. The viewer assumes that they drove a car or something else. If the characters travel a long distance, they might be shown going to the airport or getting onto a ship but not the actual traveling. It's time compression. We don't really need to know what happened in the "between time." We all "know" what happened. It would waste time to show all the details unless something happened that was important to the plot.

Transporters are just an extension of that. The characters just step onto the transporter pad and, the next thing we know, they are in another place. The process of getting from place to place is just assumed.

I'd say that transporters are necessary to the plot of many sci-fi scripts because of the huge distances that need to be traveled and the time compression necessary to move the script along in a reasonable fashion. It's basically just a way to plug a hole in the plot.

As such, I don't think teleportation will ever be developed in a practical way in real life. It's just too complicated.

[Marcel Birgelen]

I agree with you that transporters are convenient "plot compression devices" and it's a good excuse for transporters.
But what you say about people taking the car, bus, train, plane and then conveniently skipping over showing us the details of that trip, because it wasn't relevant for the plot could also involve a trip with a shuttle from the ship to the surface of the planet or from one ship to the other. I mean, we regularly join the Enterprise crew being months away from Earth or weeks away from their previous mission, without getting to know all the details of what happened to all those light-years in between. Heck, we don't even know if they still use toilet paper in the future.

[Carl Martin]

we don't even know if they still use toilet paper in the future.

you forget! that question was answered in demolition man.

[Marcel Birgelen]

So, Carl, explain to me, how do the three shells work? :P

[Frank Cox]

Quite well, thank you.

[Bobby Henderson]

But there's still a lot of unexplored stuff out there, maybe there is another way to transport matter across "time and space" that doesn't involve slicing it into atoms and converting it into energy first.

If teleportation was ever to be made possible I think it would have to be an "analog" process of warping space to send an object or living thing invisibly from one point to another in an instant. The Star Trek methodology implies people are being disintegrated and then reintegrated in the transporter process. I just don't see how that can work. Folding space around someone without altering them could work in theory, but it would probably consume a stupendous amount of energy and involve solving math equations no one has fathomed yet.

[Frank Cox]

I remember reading a science fiction story or novel some years back where the premise was whether the transporter device was a duplication device and the person being sent was killed as the new one was being assembled at the destination.

[Randy Stankey]

It was an episode of Outer Limits called "Think like a Dinosaur."

Season: 7 - Episode: 8

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0667991/

One of their best stories, IMO!

[Marcel Birgelen]

There is a Star Trek TNG episode called "Second Chances", where a transporter accident creates two Rikers, one at the destined location and the other back on the planet. The "second Riker" is stuck on the planet for years, because nobody back on the ship knows about the incident.

Also, the plot of the Prestige contains a transportation device that duplicates people, invented by a fictional Nikola Tesla.

If teleportation was ever to be made possible I think it would have to be an "analog" process of warping space to send an object or living thing invisibly from one point to another in an instant. The Star Trek methodology implies people are being disintegrated and then reintegrated in the transporter process. I just don't see how that can work. Folding space around someone without altering them could work in theory, but it would probably consume a stupendous amount of energy and involve solving math equations no one has fathomed yet.

While I can somewhat "warp my mind" around the concept of a space-ship like thing "folding space" in front of it and "folding it back" behind it and therefore effectively traveling at speeds greater than the speed of light, it's hard to imagine how this would ever work for a single person. Maybe you could implement it in some kind of "transporter capsule", but this capsule would require to sustain the unbelievable amount of energy needed during the transition period. Essentially, you have some power source which is probably higher than all our current combined electrical output within a few inches of your body. What could go wrong?

Another interesting concept is quantum entanglement, which has already being used to "teleport" specific properties of sub-atomic particles across arbitrary distances. While I have no clue how you could scale this to sizes where you could transport a human being, the interesting thing is that such a transporter would probably end up being a "duplication device", rather than a real transporter.

It's all obviously in the realms of Science Fiction, yet nevertheless interesting stuff to fantasize about sometimes. :P

Quite well, thank you

So, they work like the Heisenberg Compensator? :P

The franchise-corrected answer should've been: Haha, he doesn't know how the three seashells work.

[Randy Stankey]

Well... If Star Trek's transporters were real it would be possible to use their "bio-filter" feature to eliminate this virus pandemic. Wouldn't it?

[Mitchell Dvoskin]

In regards to Star Trek, I have bigger problem with the food replicators than the transporter. If it is possible to create something, including complex organics like food, from essentially nothing, that changes the whole dynamic of a civilization. Most employment will disappear and everything that drives our economy would disappear. Not everybody can be a scientist, explorer, etc. Knowledge for knowledge sake only goes so far.

[Kenneth Wuepper]

Frank,
I think you might have seen a movie as the story you describe was in a film. The magician did kill the original and therefore kept the duplicate. He was found out when he duplicated a hat and the original was found in a nearby field. Ran that film but can't remember the title.