Well, during recent experimental brain surgery they were able to improve memory. So is it possible that surgical techniques could improve our natural intuition (interpreting and responding to stimuli that typically only registers at a subconscious level)? Maybe. Neurosurgery to improve eye-hand coordination? Possible. Post-hypnotic suggestions and subliminal education in combat? It could happen. Telepathy? I’m a little skeptical on that.
“The next step in evolution” only doesn’t make sense when we are talking about unguided evolution, the kind we have now. In 2001 evolution was, at least partially, guided. Therefore it makes sense to talk about a “next step.”
They have artificial gravity, but I don’t recall any shields.
That sounds like the set-up to a Schrodinger’s cat joke.
Depending on your interpretation of the end of Contact, that movie is very hard science. The whole discovery sequence, including a message encoded with multiple layers that allow for the recipient to learn how to decode it based on first mathematical principles is all very much like you might expect an intelligent alien presence to communicate. It is, IIRC, how we have attempted to communicate with potentially intelligent aliens in our limited foray into sending messages out into the universe.
I’m pretty sure that we see some around some Alliance ships as they’re taking a beating from the Reavers.
Oh, and River Tam isn’t the #1 geek babe, that’d be Kaylee.
-Joe
But if a movie is disqualified from being hard science on that basis, you simply can’t have one set in the future. Who knows what any future tech will be like exactly? As long as the future tech is basically plausible based on what we know now, the writer has done as good a job as can be expected.
I recall no violations of scientific plausibility in Gattaca. (Dramatic plausibility is another matter.)
The key mischaracterization of my posts in the quote above has been changed to bold.
It is my understanding that hard sci-fi is sci-fi which attempts to extrapolate possibilities from presently understood technological principles. But you can not extract any possibilities about androids (esp Blade Runner androids) from any present technological principles, other than the simple extrapolation “there probably will be androids.” Therefore, I conclude, science fiction which includes androids (esp. androids physically indistinguishable from human beings) can not count as hard sci fi.
Having said that, I’m starting to doubt the basis for this conversation. I characterzed the replicants as “androids” but the more I think about it, it seems they are better characterized simply as bioengineered human organisms. As far as I can remember, they differ from normal humans in that they are “programmed” to die at a specific time, and in that their minds work slightly different than our own. (I say “slightly” because the difference is subtle enough to require a psychophysiological test to suss out.) I think there are animals that die at after a fairly specifically set interval from their birth, so that seems plausible. And it doesn’t seem implausible that we might be able to tweak the brain development of bioengineered humans if even only through a sort of breeding process such that they are, what, more subservient? (I don’t know exactly how replicants minds are supposed to differ from our own.)
Present day technologies are clearly laying the basis for the modification of physical and psychological characteristics through genetic engineering, so it seems the blade runner “androids” (as I (now think I mistakenly) called the replicants) can count as hard(ish) sci fi after all. (I say “ish” because my impression is that hard sci fi generally tries to at least say something about how the future techs work.
-FrL-
Oh that’s very different! Never mind![/Litella]
Though… it seems the movie implied that Rachael had memories implanted into her from a real human being. I confess I really don’t think that would ever be possible. But who knows?
Certainly nothing in present technological understanding gives us any idea how this could be done.
-FrL-
Other than the very last part Kubrick-Speilberg’s AI was mostly plausible hardware-wise as an extension of current technology.
They’ve got that personnel vehicle that hovers on a shimmery field of something or other.
Oh, also, they’ve got volumetric hologram displays projected into thin air.
Sure, but it was projected basically in a specific field - more plausible than just having it freeform absolutely anywhere.
Unless there’s a hologram besides the one in ‘Serenity’.
-Joe
If you had good enough nanotechnology, you could probably construct a person as an adult, including the brain structures that compose memory, instead of growing them from babyhood. On the other hand, if you had that kind of technology, it’s questionable that you’d bother with anything as crude as a roughly human equivalent android.
Not that far out; from Youtube : display floating in air.
How about Brazil ? It was set in the “future” but in a dystopia. The science was intentionally backwards – typewriter interfaces on computers, fresnel lenses to enlarge tiny CRTs. Cyberpunk, I guess. But it was all plausible, if entertainingly unlikely.
My post wasn’t a mischaracterisation of your post. You said that a movie that portrays androids in any detail counts as implausible and therefore not hard SF. But you can’t have a movie with an android without providing that detail: you can’t just have a fuzzy blob in the movie with a caption saying “an android which we are not displaying in detail as we don’t know quite what one would look like”. You have to show it, exactly. And once you do, according to the your post that I was responding to, it’s not hard SF.
You said
This implies that I said we must know exactly how a future tech would work in order to be able to include it in a work of hard science fiction. But I said no such thing.
I said: If we have no idea how it would work, its not hard sci fi.
But you paraphrased me as saying: If we don’t know exactly how it would work, it’s not hard sci fi.
The two sentences have completely different meanings.
Anyway the rest of my post was more interesting and relevant than this topic.
-FrL-
Not really. Evolution isn’t step-wise. If aliens are doing wholesale manipulation, then that’s manufacturing, not evolution. If they’re merely “guiding”, by giving an intellectual nudge here and there, then evolution is still going to proceed in a non-step-wise fashion.
Which still doesn’t address the problem that evolution is a population-level phenomenon, not an individual one. Individuals don’t evolve. Which means no matter what the aliens might have done to Bowman, it doesn’t represent evolution in any meaningful sense.
I like your thinking, and tend to agree with you. It is certainly a more plausible idea than robotic androids. If what is desired is a human being who thinks and acts a certain way, it makes more sense to use human material to begin with (i.e., flesh) than to try and reinvent the wheel with metal and electricity. As I recall, in the movie the replicants even bled when shot, further supporting this version of what they were. A shorter lifespan would dovetail with their enhanced strength in some way as well; their systems burn hot and strongly, but their bodies wear out sooner as a result. Physical strength is probably one of the easiest traits to design.