themiscyra1983:

keyofjetwolf:

thehubby:

Specific dates provided in movies–especially those that pass within our lifetimes–are always interesting to me. Today is one such date. While watching Blade Runner on Saturday, I overheard the replicant Leon mention his inception (activation) date, April 10, 2017. That’s today. (Notably, the more advanced replicants such as Roy have earlier activation dates, in 2016.) It makes Blade Runner another one of those movies that hilariously overestimated the advancement of technology. Like with many others of the time, it’s hard to fault the conclusion; in 1982 we were exploring space, had personal computers in peoples’ homes, and the (somewhat affluent) common man was capable of recording their own video broadcasts. Looking 35 years ahead, it was ambitious, but not completely unreasonable to assume that we would have the kind of quantum advancement we had seen since 35 years earlier, in 1947.

Blade Runner is one of my favorite movies, mostly for the visual artistry. In an era long before CGI as we know it today, Los Angeles is somehow depicted with breathtaking beauty. The lighting and shot compositions blends film noir of the old with a futuristic view of humanity. It’s easy to see how much my favorite anime, Bubblegum Crisis, borrows from the setting. I’m not as completely sold on the film’s story, which bears its fair share of oddities (and I’m really not fond of the interactions between Deckard and Rachael in his apartment.) But overall it’s something I think everyone should try.

I love when real life overtakes movie life like this.

What I find interesting is not so much the overestimation but how bad pop culture can be at guessing which AREAS of science and technology will advance. Blade Runner has ‘replicants’ and space colonies and flying cars; it doesn’t have smartphones. Countless stories and series and movies had routine interstellar travel and computers that still needed punch cards, or printed answers out on film, or generally just displayed text and primitive graphics. Isaac Asimov’s Elijah Bailey books had androids that looked perfectly human, intelligent robots, and interstellar starships, and still, in one novel, had the protagonist taking a flight in which essentially a scrolling newspaper was displayed on a piece of physical film on the seatback in front of him!

We don’t have spaceships or extrasolar colonies or flying cars, but we do have devices in that fit in the palms of our hands and have access to almost literally the entire sum of human knowledge, and more processing power than all but perhaps the most advanced supercomputers of the 80s. We may not have tricorders or long-range sensors that match what you’ll see on Star Trek, but we can display images and information in incredibly high definition. This is not the future we expected, but it would certainly have seemed just as fanciful 50, 40, even 30 years ago.

Mind you, I still want starships and extrasolar colonies, so get on that, everybody.