One man’s ‘magic’ is another man’s engineering. ‘Supernatural’ is a null word.
Robert Heinlein
Last month I traveled to Annapolis to attend the 40th reunion of the Naval Academy Class of 1981. This visit to my alma mater gave me an unexpected perspective on the modern life of a midshipman. As I headed up Stribling Walk to Bancroft Hall, I came upon a plebe (Navy slang describing a first-year midshipman) sitting by the Mexican Monument. She was engaged in a video chat with her mother. What struck me was the ways in which midshipmen stay in touch with family had changed over the forty years since I left the Academy. While a student, I had to wait in line at a phone bank in Bancroft Hall, feeding Ma Bell quarters for my turn on the static-filled line. Smartphones are as common to us today as the bulky telephone receiver was 1981. Now turn the nostalgic clock back another forty years and ask yourself what a 1941 grad would say?
He may think the iPhone was a miracle of telecommunications. As the science fiction titan, Arthur C. Clarke, famously said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” We do live in magical times.
Since the golden age of science fiction, writers have served as the oracles of future shock. One of this genre’s most famous authors, Isaac Asimov, made startlingly accurate predictions about how the world would look today, in his essay for the 1964 World’s Fair. They included flatscreen TVs, movies projected in 3D, worldwide videoconferences, video phones, self-driving cars, and robots that would “neither be common nor very good in 2014.” Within the forty years after graduation, I have seen all these come into existence. Asimov went on to predict that processed yeast and algae products would be available as “mock-turkey” and “pseudo-steak”. Today soy-based veggie burgers stock grocery shelves; however, I still prefer the real bison burger.
In the 1930s, H. G. Wells wrote an anthology featuring a concept of a “world brain.” Wells wrote:
This World Encyclopaedia would be the mental background of every intelligent man in the world. It would be alive and growing and changing continually under revision, extension and replacement from the original thinkers in the world everywhere. Every university and research institution should be feeding it. Every fresh mind should be brought into contact with its standing editorial organisation. And on the other hand, its contents would be the standard source of material for the instructional side of school and college work, for the verification of facts and the testing of statements—everywhere in the world. [1]
His prescient idea of a universally accessible compendium of world knowledge became the internet. Midshipmen no longer trudge through snow or rain to the Nimitz Library. They have the world’s knowledge base on their laptops.
The advent of computer simulations for everything from weather forecasting to nuclear weapons testing demands ever-increasing computer power. In 1981, the brilliant and irreverent physicist Richard Feynman urged the world to build a quantum computer, a machine capable of simulating the world on the quantum level. At a joint MIT and IBM computer science symposium, he said “Nature isn’t classical, dammit, and if you want to make a simulation of nature, you’d better make it quantum mechanical, and by golly it’s a wonderful problem, because it doesn’t look so easy.”[2] Now in the 21st century, we have a revolution in computer science, making possible the kinds of computing and communication unforeseen by the founders of the information age.
In my coming-of-age years, I saw science fiction’s quirky backwater of cinema grow from surreal movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey. As the age of Aquarius melted away in the disco inferno of the late 1970s, I watched science fiction films whose theme songs landed on the billboard list.
In the summer of 1977, Hollywood launched the shining age of the space opera with Star Wars: A New Hope, the premier film of the most successful sci-fi movie franchise. Even after 40 years of critical acclaim, it’s hard to overestimate the cultural significance of this hero’s journey created by George Lucas. I fondly recall the Star Wars themed floats we made for the Army-Navy pep rally, how Dahlgren Hall became an off-world cantina, and X-Wing starfighters replaced naval jet fighters throughout the Yard. Midshipmen marched to John William’s theme music at noon formation. That we still watch new films based on characters first introduced in 1977 certainly speaks to the enduring appeal of Star Wars.
Some of the characters in the film aren’t human. Skywalker’s two sidekicks, R2D2 and 3CPO, represent robotic technology that has become reality since the movie’s release. The DARPA Robotics Challenge, an international technology development competition, was a catalyst for droid development. The Atlas robot by Boston Dynamics is agile enough to do human-like backflips. The android uses computer vision to walk, run, and climb over obstacles.[i] He could be a serious O-course contender in plebe summer Sea Trials. Toyota’s T-HR3 is capable of flexible movements that mimic the actions of its remote human operator.
The year 1977 also saw Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Forty years after Orson Welles filled the radio waves with warnings of raiding Martians, Spielberg gave us a widely different alien first contact. These friendly aliens rocked us with their melodic keyboard-based attempts at communicating. After decades of movies grinding out tattered tropes of alien visitations, it looks like we finally found the real thing. In June 2021, the Navy officially published videos showing Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP). Naval aviators reported more than 120 incidents over the past two decades that did not originate from any American military or government technology. In one encounter, strange objects — one of them appeared as a spinning top moving at supersonic speed — appeared almost daily from the summer of 2014 to March 2015, high in the skies over the East Coast. Navy pilots reported that the objects had no visible engine or infrared exhaust plumes, but that they could reach 30,000 feet and hypersonic speeds. Lt. Ryan Graves, an F/A-18 Super Hornet pilot, told The New York Times in an interview, “These things would be out there all day.” With the speeds he and other pilots observed, he said, “12 hours in the air is 11 hours longer than we’d expect.”[3] Former President Barack Obama also weighed in on recent UAP sightings when he appeared on The Late Show with James Corden on CBS. “What is true, and I’m actually being serious here,” Mr. Obama said, “is that there is footage and records of objects in the skies that we don’t know exactly what they are.” [4]
Close Encounters gave us a first contact filled with curiosity, wonderment, and adventure. The aliens came in peace. In one scene, a UFO watcher on the side of the road holds up the sign reading “Stop And Be Friendly.” In 1979, we met a different type of alien with a Howard Lovecraft vibe. Ridley Scott’s Alien gave us a deep reservoir for our nightmares, a place where no one could hear us scream. No matter how many times I’ve seen the alien’s violent, onstage appearance (from Kane’s stomach), it remains visceral and profoundly disturbing.
The film Alien is essentially a submarine thriller set among the stars, then morphs into unrelenting tension from the setting’s close quarters aboard the commercial space tug Nostromo. The opening scene shows the crew waking up from their deep sleep after a long journey through space. Here, Ridley Scott took a science-based approach to solve the perennial problem in sci-fi plots that involve travelling vast distances in space. Rather than rely on the “waving of the hands” approach with faster-than-light technology, he chose cryogenic stasis (suspended animation), the pressing pause on our biological functions. I always thought Warrant Officer Ripley, played by Sigourney Weaver, had ice in her veins.
Forty years after Alien hit the silver screen, scientists developed Emergency Preservation and Resuscitation (EPR), an experimental treatment where an emergency trauma patient is cooled into suspended animation for an hour to prevent death from the blood loss following a shooting or stabbing. In 2019, Samuel Tisherman, of the University of Maryland School of Medicine, successfully put a human being in suspended animation, removing the patient’s blood and replaced with ice-cold saline solution. The patient was removed from the cooling system and underwent a two-hour surgical procedure before having their blood restored and being warmed to the normal body temperature.[5]
In 1979, the USS Enterprise (NCC-1701) took her maiden voyage on the big screen in Star Trek. The movie came out from one of the most popular and influential television series of all time.[6] Over the past 65 years, Gene Roddenberry’s creation has offered fans a vision of the future, filled with fictional technological marvels, some of which have influenced real-world scientific developments, discoveries, and inventions. These include flip cellphones, tablet computers, universal translators, replicators in the form of 3-D printers, and telepresence video conferences.[7]
Medical technologies envisioned in Star Trek have come to fruition. The tricorder is a multifunctional handheld gadget used to sensor scan an environment or an individual and record data for analysis. Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy often uses it to diagnose and cure patients. Several recent diagnostic devices mimic the tricorder’s capabilities of the Star Trek device. For example, the QuantuMDx DNA Lab can scan a patient and deliver a diagnosis in 15 minutes.[8] NASA’s Lab-on-a-Chip Applications Development (LOCAD) performed microbial monitoring at the International Space Station (Expeditions 14–16).[9] The Enterprise medical team also employed the Hypospray to inject vaccine through the skin using non-invasive injection. Although syringes still provide the bulk of vaccines, jet injectors have been in existence for years.
In the same year as Star Trek’smovie release, another film predicted later events in an eerie fashion. The film Plague depicts an ambitious lab technician who carries out a forbidden experiment and accidentally creates a deadly pathogen. The government orders a curtain of secrecy and imposes a national lockdown while epidemiologists search for a cure. Enough said about this example.
The year 1980 began with the triumphant return of Darth Vader in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. Before the Lord of the Dark Side declares to Luke Skywalker, “I am your father,” he caps this intimate father-son moment by slicing off Luke’s hand. Skywalker later receives a bionic version that has all the functions of a normal hand. Electromyogram sensors attached to his muscles control his prosthesis by the flexing or contracting of his muscles.
Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology developed a device for amputees to move their prosthetic fingers using an ultrasonic sensor. The prosthesis used machine learning and ultrasound signals to detect fine finger-by-finger movement. The first amputee to use it, a musician who lost part of his right arm, played the piano for the first time since his accident. In a tip of the hat to its progenitor, he performed the Star Wars theme song during the demonstration.[10]
It would be easy to conclude from these numerous examples that science fiction writers are gifted oracles who use their clairvoyant powers to predict the future. The impetus for their intuition may be more practical. Any good science fiction premise is based on real science. The most famous and prolific writers were scientists and engineers who carried out deep research into their topics to add verisimilitude to their world-building. Arthur C. Clarke studied physics at King’s College London and later served as president of the British Interplanetary Society. Isaac Asimov was a professor of biochemistry at Boston University School of Medicine. And Robert Heinlein (USNA ’29) was a naval officer and aeronautical engineer. He famously said, “One man’s ‘magic’ is another man’s engineering.”[11] So, the next time you reach for a crystal ball, you might first ask a scientist for their forecast of the future.
[1] Wells, H.G. World Brain. London: Methuen & Co., Ltd.; New York., Doubleday, Doran & Co., Inc., 1938.
[ii] Nielsen, Michael A. and Isaac L. Chuang, Quantum Computation and Quantum Information: 10th Anniversary Edition (10th ed.)., Cambridge University Press, 2011.
[i] Boston Robotics has a video that demonstrates Alas’ agility. https://youtu.be/LikxFZZO2sk
[ii] Barnes, Julian E. Barnes and Helene Cooper. “U.S. Finds No Evidence of Alien Technology in Flying Objects, but Can’t Rule It Out, Either.” New York Times, 03 June 2021.
[iii] Guzman, Joseph. “Obama on UFOs.” The Hill. 18 May 2021.
[iv] Tisherman, Samuel A. MD; Alam, Hasan B. MD; Rhee, Peter M. MD. “Development of the emergency preservation and resuscitation for cardiac arrest from trauma clinical trial.” Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery: November 2017 – Volume 83 – Issue 5 – p 803-809.
[v] Asherman, Allan. The Star Trek Compendium. New York, Simon & Schuster, 1981.
[vi] Hadhazy, Adam (May 6, 2009). “The Final Frontier: The Science of Star Trek”. Scientific American, 06 May 2009.
[vii] See the QuantuMDx Q-POC product page: https://www.quantumdx.com/products/
[viii] J. Maule, N. Wainwright, A. Steele, L. Monaco, H. Morris, D. Gunter, M. Damon and M. Wells. “Rapid Culture-Independent Microbial Analysis aboard the International Space Station (ISS)”. Astrobiology, 09 Oct, 2009 :759-75.
[ix] Maderer, Jason. “The Force is Strong: Amputee Controls Individual Prosthetic Fingers.” Georgia Tech Research Horizons: December 11, 2017 Watch the demo at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjW1kIt5iQg
[x] Heinlein, Robert. Time Enough for Love. New York: Putnam & Sons, 1973