A Time of Magic

Not so long ago science fiction was placed firmly in the 21st century and it was a wonderous world with flying cars, spaceships flitting around the stars, robots to do your housework and so on.

Yet, we’re well into the 21st century now and none of that flashy stuff is available yet. OK, so we’ve got a space station up there but we’ve not even set foot on Mars yet never mind taken flight to the stars. Robots are pretty boring pieces of equipment too and certainly don’t walk around like they did in the films.

Actually, we have quite a lot of the 23rd century technology knocking around: the mobile phone was a communicator in Star Trek, the talking computers appeared in the early 1980s and disappeared soon after, the memory chips that Mr Spock always seemed to be shuffling are our SD RAM cards. It’s just that we don’t have the really interesting stuff.

For various reasons, we’ve been discussing the “time traveller” John Titor around the house over the last couple of days and the posts he made at the end of 2000 make interesting reading and particularly the responses that those replying made to various comments that he made back then.

If you’ve not come across him before, have a read of the summary here or perhaps the analysis here.

One thing to note is that, whether or not he was a genuine time-traveller, it seemed to be impossible to prove one way or the other at the time. After all, you can’t really expect a real-life time traveller to know the result of the lottery next week, can you? Neither can you realistically expect them to have intimate knowledge of small events such as happen day to day but whilst you could expect them to know about significant events. However, aside from World War 3 breaking out next Tuesday you can’t really rely on what’s significant for us now to be equally significant for them in, say, 100 years and vice versa.

For example, if our time traveller were to go back to 1908 who would believe him when he said a civil servant would make the first theoretical breakthrough that proved that time travel was possible? And, yet, that’s exactly what Albert Einstein went on to do.

Likewise, whilst we consider 9/11 very significant, who can say if that will still be the case 100 years from now?

Even inconsistencies in the John Titor dialogues mean little. For example, say you went back to 1938. You could say that people still sat around the modern radio (ie TV) listening to it as people did in 1938 but equally you could also say that people didn’t listen to the radio much anymore. Seemingly inconsistent in 1938 terms but entirely consistent from our viewpoint in 2008.

Finally, there’s the problem that a time traveller could affect future events. What if you went back to 1999 and started talking about the events of 9/11? Would the events of 9/11 still happen? Certainly if the authorities believed the predictions, but perhaps also if those predictions were widely enough distributed and nobody fully believed them it might be enough to simply suspect that they could be true.

I’m sure that all little boys have ran around playing “spacemen” at one time or another, but aside from the laser rifles and whatnot, have you ever thought about when it would be possible to buy the futuristic technology that you’ve seen in one science fiction programme or film?

It turns out that the time from it being in science fiction and the genuine article being available in the shops is under 20 years. The computer tablet that Captain Kirk used in 1969 was available in the shops by 1991 and the communicators (ie mobile phones) were around even sooner than that as indeed were talking computers (which ironically were launched by the early 1980s and considered obselete less than 10 years later!).

In fact, aside from the warp drive (theoretically possible, if somewhat beyond our current capabilities) and the transporter (sadly, probably not possible), every single piece of technology on the original Star Trek series is available in the shops today in some form.

So, when you’re next watching some piece of science fiction set in the far distant future don’t be too surprised if you find all that technology that they used in the shops a decade or two later.